octopus_eats_platypus
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User ID: 334
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
This isn't true. Zero-sum means the overall effect of the peers is zero-sum - we have a number of children, and some offer bonuses and others maluses to the performance of their peers. This is the traditional argument for removing ability-streamed classes, incidentally, that we need to put the smarter kids in with the dumber ones in order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to get the adjacency bonus from the smart kids.
I'm not sure things function that way in reality - it runs up against obvious limitations like 'putting a mentally disabled kid in the accelerated class is going to badly screw someone over, or possibly everyone involved depending on how you run things' but the peer effects being zero-sum means your peers do have an effect on performance, but the positive externalities are strongly connected to better students who in turn yield said positive externalities themselves.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Hollywood hates Slavery, not slavery. The latter, 'slavery' is the institution that probably precedes writing and came into existence with agriculture. The 'Slavery' Hollywood cares about is specifically the portion of the transatlantic slave trade that ended up enslaved in America.
There's no big movies about slavery in Brazil from Hollywood, and that's because Americans care about American slavery, not Roman or Brazilian or even Australian blackbirding overmuch. They don't openly support it or anything, but there's one big key thing that's cared about, and the others have only have salience insofar as they're linked to American slavery.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
So I was ranting to myself, as I watched another review video, about the poverty of imagination that Payne and McKay show, the way they imagine they have to dumb down the message of Tolkien for a modern-day audience
Even if later episodes drive me into a fit of apoplexy
I don't get the latter part. If I watch something and it's bad, I stop watching. Sure, it was a bad show for the first few episodes so I tuned out. Lotta cringe moments and honestly painful to watch stuff. Lot of money spent on the visuals to be sure, but that video game jump-off-the-sword thing is still so bad it's actually funny.
Being mad that a big corporation is milking a beloved franchise of every dollar it can get seems pretty naive, though. Disney was doing awful direct-to-VHS sequels to beloved kids movies before half of us here were born. I didn't watch the Lion King 2: Lion Boogaloo, despite loving the original as a kid. When a corporation does a big shitty sequel, it's not anything new under the sun, it's just a sign to stop watching and go do something else.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I live in a subtropical area and have an AC. My house is also insulated about as well as a tent (and is of an age and height where replacing this is very difficult and expensive) so I have a lot of solar panels and just run the AC/heat pump at need. Each year we get about a month of winter where I use a heater - because of the aforementioned lack of insulation. Anecdotally, my electricity bill for that month (July) dropped by about 50% as I'm using a heat pump rather than an electric heater.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
This is more-or-less where I stand. I'll give something a chance, but this isn't the 90s/00s. There are infinite options. If I don't like the Rings of Power, there are probably thousands (certainly hundreds) of other fanfics out there that are substantially better. I don't feel the need to complain about Wheel of Time 'ruining' a beloved childhood series, because that series is done. If someone wants to try and dust off the name and put it on some clumsy fanfiction for the sake of money - that's half of all sequels ever.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I managed to make it to the troll fight the first time I tried watching it which made me cringe so hard I turned it off. I gave it another go and got a few episodes in, but sits firmly in the 'wavers from making me cringe to making me bored' territory.
I think part of the disappointment with Rings of Power is... well, take me. I read Lord of the Rings, which is a fantastic series of books. I actually read it when staying on a friend's property, so far out in the bush they only ran the generator for part of the day. I had a lantern in a bedroom I lit with a match and I read the Lord of the Rings by the light of that lantern, staying up later than I had before in my eight years of life to devour these novels. Absolutely enthralling stuff, and just a really good series of books. I reread them at twenty, and then at thirty-one. They're still great.
Then I watched the movies, which were by no means perfect adaptions but were just amazing movies. The sorts that you look back on and quote and talk about again and again. They hold up to the test of time well (crazy that Fellowship is now over twenty years old!), and even if you weren't a Lord of the Rings fan, the movies were just superb. At eleven I complained about them because they didn't seem to emphasise what the books did, but I think as a production designed to capture the magic of the books and make an entertaining spectacle to watch on-screen they hit the mark as well as was actually possible.
The Rings of Powers just aren't very good. Part of the problem with grand, sweeping declarations and weird philosophy and so on is that there's not a huge amount of middle ground. If these things aren't good, they're cringe. Mediocre fantasy is just cringe fantasy. You can have mediocre comedy where the occasional good joke saves the boring ones, mediocre action films where the gunfights save the awful dialogue, but mediocre fantasy is in the same unfortunately realm as mediocre sci-fi. You're not just trying to sell a story, you're trying to sell a world, and if you can't do that the story falls apart. If you fuck it up enough the whole world falls apart and you're done. It's weird and stupid and feels like someone's 16-year old fanfic. It's cringe.
Conversely, if my friends drag me out to see the latest Marvelman movie, the premise is I'm here to see some explosions, some witty one-liners, some scenes that just look amazing on the big screen, and if I happen to miss or just not care about what's actually happening I'm not going to be too disadvantaged. You can fuck those up some, deliver a mediocre product and it's still fine. It's not great, but eh. It's not particularly good, but I can chew on my popcorn, see the explosions and the punches, snooze through the exposition and still have a fine dinner afterwards where I mention how cool the fire god fighting the evil prison lady was at the end.
It's not great, but I don't feel the need to cringe away from it. Rings of Power (and Wheel of Time as a side note) is cringe. The 'rock or boat', the troll fight, the 'tek our jerbs' moments, it's just a bad TV show. Sure, it does the standard 'wheel out the five most racist trolls, imply these are representative of the entire criticism of the show and then suppress any thoughts that you might be making a hunk of crap with the sweet knowledge that only bigots hate you' move every sub-par show does nowadays, but this is just people who can't make a good show shoehorning their politics in clumsily which annoys people, but people always want to put their worldview in their creations. It's just these people are making bad television to begun with, so why would you expect them to be good at adding in politics subtly?
I don't doubt the showrunners/writers/etc are huge Tolkien fans. Nothing about the Rings of Powers says 'we hate Tolkien and want to make him spin in his grave', it just says 'we're not very good at making television and so we keep fucking it up and creating cringeworthy moment after cringeworthy moment'.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I'm not American, but I do see this as a reasonable set of actions. In fact, it's almost what the right should've been doing from day one.
If someone else is saying 'we need to let in the migrants/refugees and care for them', but the burden of doing so falls entirely on you, it's more than reasonable to simply start moving them elsewhere. I think doing so makes you look unreasonable and unpleasant, but it's an unreasonableness and unpleasantness that forces the right people to put skin in the game.
I'm not sure about this particular move, to be fair, but overall? I think relocating migrants is fair and appropriate to the point of being effectively a win-win. If New York or Boston or wherever wants to functionally allow illegal immigration and Texas doesn't, New York and Boston should bear more of the costs associated.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I try never to invoke karmic irony by saying 'well, things can't get any worse' or 'at least we're finished with that problem', or so on. I'm sure it's coincidence, but in so many places my life has seemingly run on movie logic it's at the point where I don't believe it, but I alieve it very strongly.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
True, but this just takes the analysis a layer further. Someone is paying those caretakers - whether it be the immediate family or the State. If it's the former, the same applies, if it's the latter, there's diffusion of a downside across everyone who pays taxes.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
For my part, I'd given up on using Reddit, so the Motte moving offsite gained a user, rather than losing one. I don't think the problem was banning as such, it was an ever-constricting line around what you can say which was so unpleasant. Living under a censor where the rules are deliberately made opaque is probably one of the worst things that can happen to a community that so highly populated by autistic people.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
This is good for dramacoin - people getting mad and downvoting you is a good thing and so should give those beautiful golden marseys.
I don't think it works here due to differing aims.
The obvious answer is that ad-block block already exists. There are plenty of sites that simply do not work if you have an adblocker on, and you can't access them at all. I have no objection to adblocker-blocker - if you don't want me to consume your content on your terms, you can exclude the vast majority of adblock users (there are a small minority of a minority looking at things like adblocker-blocker-blocker but this is not a large number), and most people do not. Attention is still worth something even if it doesn't come with advertising attached, as it happens. That probably wouldn't be true if everyone used adblock, of course, but I'm not a Kantian to begin with. Your behaviour is worth examining in the context exists in more than it's worth examining under some hypothetical categorical imperative.
I accept this has vibes of 'well just because I'm not paying for security doesn't mean I can be stolen from', but I think it does reveal something about the victims of adblock. Most of them don't care enough to invest in anti-adblock technology, which makes me wonder how much harm is done, if any.
The other side of this is that why should it be up to me to examine every single content provider's advertisement policy and decide whether or not I'll read this piece of news based on whether Channel 5 in bumfuck Ohio has pop-unders? It's an unreasonable expectation in a world of content, especially in one where ads are sometimes malicious and often bloated to the point where they slow down my (admittedly older) laptop to a crawl. Why is it incumbent on me to wait for horrifically bloated ads to load and slow my computer down?
I think this argument proves too much. Imagine a counterfactual where some sites maxed out your computer mining bitcoin (wave away the technical problems for the moment) whenever you went onto them, lowering the lifespan of your machine and costing you some tiny amount more on your energy bill. Would that still be incumbent as a moral price of doing business for our hypothetical mining-supported sites? Would MineBlocker also be a moral negative? I feel intuitively that it wouldn't be and that impositions on your time and energy can be intuitively rejected (you have the right to request my browser load the ad, you don't have the right to make it actually load it) where this is no prior or implicit agreement between people.
Excellent discussion-provoking post by the way, it's frustrating to see it downvoted.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
To a degree, yes. People who have a high-level understanding of their field, however, are those best placed to use new AI tools. Likewise, statisticians didn't disappear because we built better tools for statistical analysis, rather the demand for statistical education has never been higher. The tools are still used by someone and we tend to see the lowest rung automated away and smaller numbers of usually better educated employees getting productivity increases. Usually what this looks like is a lot of the lowest-skill (or those with a very narrow skillset) employees lose their jobs - the invention of the mechanical (and later electronic) calculator removed the need for human calculators, but engineers and mathematicians are still a thing.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think sales will be offloaded on the lowest end - if you do direct marketing, yes. Phone calls, maybe. The interpersonal relationships people still work on in business-to-business sales I don't see being co-opted by AI at any point before AI co-opts all human roles. The role of 'maintain a relationship (partially in realspace) with a human being in order to understand them and sell them things' can certainly be facilitated by AI, but it seems implausible that role can be turned over to machines before we build something fully general and capable of replacing human beings entirely.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think this is misguided because it's the opposite of what currently happen, with theorem provers doing so much of the evaluation work relative to the 'creative' work. I can definitely see AI expanding the search space, though, with mathematicians working with the machine to find more novel or interesting results as a consequence. Much like art, I think AI are at the present time both a job-destroyer for the bottom end of the market (want your fursona fucking a famous politician? No longer do you have to pay $50, you can just get the machine to do it!) such as commissions but will ultimately enable people who understand art (colour, composition, etc, and consequently how to more reliably get the machine to do the work you want) to create more interesting and varied things at the top end.
Academic mathematicians are towards the top end of what you'd consider 'stem jobs' IQ-wise, so I'd anticipate a similar effect there.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
The obvious business use-case is meetings and the like. As technology advances I expect the ability to do in-person meetings virtually to be a huge draw (though adoption will be incredibly slow as dealmakers and salespeople are rarely first adopters of technology - if we reach the ability to do this in 2040 it's only going to be a major thing in 2060-2070 and will probably only reach the majority of first world people by 2080 at least) especially with WFH offices.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Edit: 2 posts in an someone's downvoting everything. Both of us are at zero. Please consider abandoning reddit voting. Having an option to downvote at all is too much for most.
Someone downvoting everything doesn't change the relative position of anything so it doesn't really matter.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I suppose that's true. Part of the problem is getting an ideal unhackable system is really hard, people optimize for whatever you put in front of them. I think it's the sort of thing that might deserve a trial, though. Even Reddit-style awards that have no impact purchased for upvotes I think would be neat - a way of translating 'the community likes me posts' into 'I am spending my literal social capital to say I like what you've done' I think can help build a community.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Trump received the second largest number of votes of any candidate, ever,
Is there any reason you shouldn't generally expect this to keep happening with each election as the population grows? Naively I would expect the winner from every election to have received the largest number of votes of any candidate ever for the most part.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Reddit is a good site with awful moderation policies.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Really what we need is an anthropomorphised castle
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
One thing rdrama does well is use upvotes/downvotes as actual currency.
I'd love to see an implementation of awards in a similar way if possible - not the actual awards themselves (we don't want Mottizens banning or ruining threads), but for instance reporting an AAQC costing, say, 50 or 100 upvotes would be a good idea in part because it'd . A community currency that lets long-established users spend their reputation to highlight things they find good or interesting is a great way to make standing in the community count for more.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
If you enjoyed Reverend Insanity, I think you might enjoy 40 Milleniums of Cultivation. Similar sort of guile and cunning-driven plot, but with a more altruistic main character concerned about the wellbeing and freedom of human beings - a definition he eventually expands to things that share human values, not just human DNA and bodies.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Been two years since I last posted on Reddit, but I came over under a new name. In fairness I deleted and recreated Reddit names on a quarterly basis back in the day so I doubt anyone would link my previous identities together.
I agree and think that's true - I was accelerated in high school, but then the program got shut down and I got put with the speds for a few months (on the basis that the special education teacher was trained in gifted education) until they decided to put me back into regular classes. Spending time with a guy who couldn't read did nothing for me, nor did it help him. I viewed him with contempt because I hated being sat with him, and he was barely aware of anyone's existence at all.
I'm just outlining the logic of 'something can be net zero-sum yet be bad for some and good for others'.
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