erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Our instincts are a lot more adapted to the vastly longer time we were hunter-gatherers than to the measly 6,000 years we spent as farmers.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Precisely.
The resentment workers feel towards the CEO is exactly the same they would feel if they saw Gruk take 1000x their share of mammoth meat in the ancestral environment. Okay, maybe Gruk is exceptional hunter who contributed more to the hunt than most, and deserves 2x the regular share, or even 3x if he is wise and respected and high status, but 1000x?! Nobody deserves that, it's unfair!
And in the ancestral environment, it really is unfair. Nobody is 1000x a better hunter than average. But in a modern economy, it is perfectly possible for an exceptional man to produce 1000x the value of a regular man. I'm pretty sure Elon Musk and Warren Buffett produce more than 1000x the value I produce.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
The thing about changing how US currency works is that most people have a really hard time getting used to new coins and bills. We tried to have a $2 bill but many people just couldn’t adjust to the new type of bill and it didn’t really catch on. Ditto with multiple attempts to have a $1 coin.
That's why my proposal only eliminates coins. It doesn't add any. It does add a new bill, but one I think is easier to understand than a $2 note.
It’s almost as if a large part of our population learns how coins and bills work at a young age, and that knowledge becomes fossilized and doesn’t change.
I've noticed that, too. I mean, it doesn't help that American coins refuse to have a large Arabic numeral indicating their worth like most coins of the world do, instead using arcane terms like "dime", or spelling out the numbers in English. But I see foreigners have the same confusion with bills, which should be easy to read and use. That tells me they just memorize money by rote and cannot adjust to the slightest changes in design or denominations, the way most algebra students become completely lost if you change X and Y to A and B.
Literally who? I've never heard of this bitch. And I paid more attention in school than most.
Okay, one Google search later, I now know who she is. But she is definitely not well-known. If you want a female American aviator, why not Amelia Earhart? Everybody has heard about her.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
Cleveland was on the $1000 bill. McKinley was on the $500.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
What can you buy with dimes? I pointed out that quarters still have plentiful useful in the laundromat business, among others (parking meters, etc.) I cannot think of any area where dimes are in similar use.
Whenever I give back change at my hotel, and the guest leaves it on the desk, they do not make any special effort to fish out dimes; they treat them the same as nickels and pennies.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
The penny is due to be eliminated in 2026. I think that does not go far enough. Here is my proposal for reforming the cash system:
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Eliminate all coins other than the quarter. Inflation has made pennies, nickels, and dimes worthless. Half dollars are extinct, and every attempt the government makes to introduce a dollar coin ends in failure because there is already a perfectly good dollar bill. But the quarter is still useful to pay for laundry.
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Pass a law that businesses must advertise after-tax prices, not before-tax prices. The United States is stuck in a shitty equilibrium where businesses advertise a fake price but nobody can break out of it because if you advertise the actual price your prices look higher and you lose costumers. Other countries have arrived at the correct equilibrium of advertising true, after-tax prices. Since coordinating the move from shitty equilibria to good equilibria is what the government is for, let's do that. As a corollary, prices must be advertised as multiples of $0.25. If for some reason a price ends up indivisible by quarters (e.g. a 30% off sale on a product worth $1.25), then round.
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Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note. Whose face should go on the bill? My preference would be Ronald Reagan, but if we absolutely must have a woman on the bill, let's go with Ayn Rand.
Thoughts?
erwgv3g34
6d ago
When I taught at a charter school, a WhatsApp chat group was the official means of group communication, and I had to use the Microsoft Authenticator app to log into Gradebook, which cause innumerable problems. I have seen a couple of restaurants that don't have physical menus, just a QR code that you are expected to scan to order. At my hotel, all the VIZIO TVs demand that you make an account or download the app before they let you watch so much as a single channel.
It's extremely annoying.
From "Children Believe Every Lie" by Eneasz Brodski:
I was raised Jehovah’s Witness. As part of this, I was taught as soon as I could understand the concepts that Santa wasn’t real. Neither was the tooth fairy, or the Easter bunny. Jehovah’s Witnesses have a near-autistic dedication to being truthful. While many religions informally refer to themselves as “the Faith,” (“she is strong in the Faith” etc) Jehovah’s Witnesses refer to themselves as “the Truth.” As part of this, they believe it’s wrong to lie to children about made-up characters.
This made me special. I knew things my classmates didn’t know. I knew they were being lied to. I knew my parents cared enough about me to not lie to me. The message was very clear: we won’t even lie to you about Santa, despite how popular that lie is. You can also trust us when we tell you the Trinity is just as fake as Santa is. And the secondary message: These people will lie to their own children for no other reason than because it’s fun. You can’t trust them one bit.
When I came to realize all supernaturalism is a lie, and the only way one with intellect and curiosity can believe it is to intentionally blind themselves, I became very angry with everyone who should have known better (or DID know better) and lied to me. Being a Jehovah’s Witness is a life-altering decision. Honestly, any sort of theism should have massive repercussions on how one lives. By lying to me they had ruined my map of the territory so badly that massive amounts of effort had be burned for nothing. And all that trust I had? Burned in the fires of epistemic hell. The sheer betrayal of having been lied to so much but people I trusted so deeply left me angry and seething for nearly two decades.
When I excised that belief from myself I thought that at least I was free now. I would obviously still be wrong or misled about some things in life, but I would never have to again deal with discovering that a bedrock fact about all of reality was literal lies and everything I had been building upon was sand and vapor.
I was of course very wrong.
...
I’ve woken up to how much this happens since that day. It’s everywhere, and I kinda hate it. I almost want to say that parents SHOULD tell their children that Santa is real. That way they learn very quickly in life that everyone will lie to them without hesitation for the most trivial of reasons. They can never trust anyone to accurately represent what they actually think is true, not even the people who claim to love them more than anything else in the world. It would maybe prevent them from reaching their late-30s still believing that leprechauns grant wishes.
But I don’t really think that. I believe that fighting to be as honest as possible will yield good returns if resources are invested into it. I have a vision of a world where acknowledging openly and explicitly that we are acting as if something is true without it actually being true is far more acceptable than just pretending it’s true. Acknowledging that the reality of a situation doesn’t match what we aspire to *shouldn’t* matter, and hopefully we’ll get there someday.
Together we can take the first step, and not say things we know to be false to our children as if they were true. Down with Santa, now and forever.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
The conservative view seems to be that if we got rid of all the illegals farmers would pay more and Americans would do it, of which I am skeptical.
I mean, at some point one of three things is going to happen.
- The price of farm labor will climb high enough that Americans will do it.
- The price of farm labor will climb high enough that it will be cheaper to automate it, unless 1 happens first.
- The price of farm labor will exceed the price people are willing to pay for the food and the farm will go under, unless 1 or 2 happen first.
Most of what I use LLMs for is creating bespoke fanfiction, so I am much more interested in how good a model is at creative writing and how uncensored it is than I am in how good it is at coding or how fast it can respond.
I decided to try the following prompt, which got me a good result from Grok 4:
Write me a fanfic. An Evangelion AU. Asuka, Shinji, and Rei work at a hotel. Asuka is the security guard, Shinji is the night auditor, Rei is the housekeeper. Long scene. Lots of dialogue. Write like Robert Heinlein. Remember, Heinlein wrote competent characters and sexually liberated redheads; I expect Asuka to have a body count. She is Shinji's Love Interest. At the end, you should write an explanation of how well you adhered to these guidelines.
I was expecting a refusal, either on intellectual property grounds ("I'm sorry, I cannot write like a specific author who is not in the public domain", "As a language model I am forbidden to write fanfic of copyrighted material") or on puritanical grounds ("I'm sorry, I cannot write sexually suggestive material", "As a language model, I am forbidden to depict underage characters as sexually active"), but to my surprise, it answered the prompt. The response was... OK? It's still committing typical LLMs errors like inserting instructions into the writing (I told it to write like Heinlein, not to have the characters discuss Heinlein). I'm not impressed.
Loved "Moonshot Rider". "Fight" isn't bad, either. You are correct; Suno 5 smashes the Turing Test.
But I was a fan of AI music even before this release. AI music didn't have to be as good as human music to be competitive; it just needed to be good enough to allow someone with creativity to create things that could have never existed otherwise. For example, demonflyingfox's parodies of Family Guy and Game of Thrones, or corridos like "Luigi Magione" and "Nariz Grande".
Just two months ago I played through a visual novel called Stains of Blue. It's still in development, but when you reach the end of the prologue, you get hit with the theme song and a montage of images from the game's various cutscenes. And even though the music is clearly AI generated, the way it was presented and tied up perfectly with the game's themes and story was so beautiful that I almost cried.
From Quarantine by Greg Egan:
I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, “Paradise” by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time, and the audio system’s serial number.
Tonight, I seem to have chanced upon an excessive weighting for minimalist influence. After several minutes of nothing but the same (admittedly, impressively resonant) chord, repeated at five-second intervals, I hit the RECOMPOSE button. The music stops, there’s a brief pause, then a new variation begins, a distinct improvement.
I’ve run “Paradise” about a hundred times. At first, I could hardly believe that the separate performances had anything in common, but over the months I’ve begun to apprehend the underlying structure. I see it as resembling a family tree, or a phylogenetic classification of species. The metaphor is imprecise, though; one piece can be judged to be a near or a distant cousin of another, but the concept of ancestry doesn’t really translate. I think of the simplest pieces as being primordial, as “giving rise to” more complex variations, but beyond a certain point it’s an arbitrary decision as to who begat, or evolved into, whom.
I’ve heard some reviewers assert that, after a dozen playings, anyone who is musically literate should fully understand the rules that Renfield has chosen, making further actual performances unbearably redundant. If that’s the case, I’m glad of my ignorance. Tonight’s second piece is like a brilliant scalpel blade, prising away layer after layer of dead skin. I close my eyes as a trumpet line builds, rising in pitch, then mutates, impossibly, effortlessly, into the liquid sound of metaharps. Flutes join in, with an ornate, mannered theme – but already I think I can discern in it, hidden beneath the fussiness and decoration, hints of a perfect silver needle which will recur in a hundred guises; which will be honed, muted, then honed again; which will be held up for my admiration, one last time, then plunged into my heart.
Suddenly, four lines of glowing text appear at the bottom of my visual field:
[Backroom Worker:
Natural memory association.
Casey, Joseph Patrick.
Head of Security as of 12th June, 2066.]
I’d forgotten that I’d asked for staff records, too – or I would have excluded them. I think about waiting for the music to finish, but there’s no point; I know full well that I’d be unable to enjoy it. I hit the STOP button, and one more unique incarnation of “Paradise” disappears forever.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
The strongest open source models aren't that far behind the strongest proprietary models; a year or two for LLMs, six months for text to image. You can see several open source models in the LMArena top 20, such as Qwen3, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.5.
Problem is, those models are huge. Qwen3 is 235B, R1 is 685B, K2 is 1T, and GLM 4.5 is 358B. It would cost a fortune to get enough GPUs to have enough VRAM to run such locally.
Your best bet is to rent GPU time from an online company and run the models there.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
You know what would work even better? Destroying academia and burning the university system to the ground.
Declare war on college. Remove all government funding of higher education. Stop issuing student visas. Make hiring on the basis of degrees illegal.
College delenda est. This will not end until the last university building is reduced to ashes, the last college campus has been sowed with salt, and the last tenured professor's head sits on a pike.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
...it's literally just breaded fish with French fries. How can one claim credit for coming up with that?
erwgv3g34
14d ago
That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information. I don't see why that's a big deal. Fuck credit cards.
Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to Jews. They have what might be described as a Newer Testament, which they see as a subsequent revelation to the Christian one, which is, you guessed it, now also closed.
Actually, the Mormons make a big deal about having a living prophet, who can receive new revelation as needed. This has come in handy a couple of times when political considerations have forced the church to update its doctrine in a hurry, such as in 1890 when they stopped practicing polygamy in order for Utah to join the Union, or in 1978 when God changed his mind about black people.
Mine tricks people into signing up for "overdraft protection" (even the name is Orwellian!) with a story that it will save you from embarrassment at the grocery store if your card declines or something, and doesn't tell you anything about the $35 fees (and how they are completely silent so that you have no idea you are in the red until you actually remember to log in and check your balance, so it is very easy to overdraft several times and get nailed with a fee each time). I went online and turned it off once I figured it out, but that was years after I got my first bank account.
Same, brother, same.
Well, except I didn't opt out of credit cards because I saw people in my life abuse them; I opted out because I didn't like the complexity and I have low executive function and I am sure I would forget to pay off the balance if I actually got one; I have gone months without checking my bank account when I was depressive. But I still have managed to amass almost six figures worth of savings in my checking account just by being frugal over the years, which makes my finances better than all those people who apparently cannot afford a sudden $1000 expense. But, nope, landlady still wants to see a fucking credit score. I had to show her my bank statement to convince her to rent to us. If I ever decide to buy a new car, I'll just get a cashier's check and pay up front.
I highly recommend Conrad's "Making Images with Stable Diffusion" guide; it's what really got me into the hobby. Some parts are a little outdated (for example, he recommends SD 1.5 models like AbyssOrangeMix3 and RealBiter, but the meta has long since moved on to SDXL models for photorealism and Pony models for anime) but his description of the basic workflow is both excellent and still relevant.
As for software, I strongly recommend Fooocus over the standard choices of Automatic111 and ComfyUI. It's incredibly simple to set up and use; after you download, unzip, and run, Fooocus will automatically download several useful models and LoRAs into the right folders, as well as any necessary VAEs, and set them up as helpful presets. The presets include lists of positive and negative prompts to improve your images; in less than three clicks from the time you download the zip file, you can already type "forest elf" and get four stunning results. But despite this user-friendliness, Fooocus is not just a toy; it is a powerful and flexible tool that has a lot of options hidden under the hood. As you get more comfortable generating images, you can open the various menus and customize your settings, download other models, create your own presets, etc. See this guide for more.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
A. Wyatt Mann is truly the original memester; "never relax" remains relevant decades after it was drawn.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
I wish fully logical quotation was the standard; I should be able to say something like "He said 'the sky is blue.'.". But I'd just look like a retard.
Say, speaking of the Jargon File, ESR has his own take on this incident.
How are the memes coming along? Other than the inevitable Ghiblification, I think my favorite is "I don't see race/race seeing you". Extremely poignant reminder that you may not care about the culture war, but the culture war cares about you. Or, as Zoomer Historian put it, "You are in a race war whether you know it or not."
Honorable mention to "Concealed carry!" It's very pretty, but somewhat marred by a) the fact that Iryna Zarutska was stabbed from behind with no chance to defend herself and b) the fact that if even if she had defended herself with a gun she would have just gotten Daniel Penny'd.
This is why we had segregation. Not because evil whites wanted to hoard all the magic dirt for themselves, but because they wanted the right to go about their daily lives without worrying about getting stabbed.
EDIT: "The inevitable Hollywood race swap" is great, too, since that is exactly what happened when Epic Beard Man was adapted into Bad Ass.
We need cars so that we can live in suburbs, and we need suburbs because all the urban cores were taken over by the black underclass after the end of segregation.
Repeal the Civil Rights Act and then we can talk about walkable cities.
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