sohois
17d ago
I didn't claim that China lacked historical sites, rather that the cities themselves were somewhat lacking. The issue is that all the sites are dispersed throughout a continent-sized nation, making it very difficult to plan a trip - as you've discovered. Personally Suzhou, Luoyang, and Chengdu did not stand out as markedly different from the tier 1 cities in being composed of vast sprawls of communist blocks and a small handful of proper history. At least everyone likes Xi'an, but that seems to be the exception to the rule.
I lived in Harbin for a short period, so it's more that I passed through while the ice festival happened than I visited. Certainly it's very unique, and Harbin isn't a bad city as some of the Russian influences have still remained. But I recommended it more because much of China is quite grim to visit in December, particularly further south: I moved from Harbin to Shanghai in January, and found it worse in the 0-5C of Shanghai to the -20C of Harbin just because so many places lacked proper heating.
sohois
18d ago
Don't focus too much on the cities. The cultural revolution destroyed a ton of history all across the nation, and the development boom finished the job on a lot more. They all have a lot less to see than equivalent cities of their size and history in other nations. You can go to one big city - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. - and you'll have seen them all.
Since you're going in December, how much does weather matter to you? You might be able to catch Harbin Ice Festival if you're willing to bear -20 or lower temperatures.
sohois
20d ago
For the ones I've played:
3 - Only played the DS remake; it was ok. I kind of agree with your description, it wasn't terrible to play, but really felt like it had been left behind
4 - This the good shit
5 - Meh, didn't grab me much. Another one where I probably left it too late like 3
6 - Yeah pretty goated
7 - Same
8 - I appreciate a game that tries new stuff but it was just fucking weird
10 - personal favourite
12 - As I posted below, yawn
13 - Can't believe I actually beat this piece of shit instead of giving up
15 - Really a lot like 8, they threw all kinds of shit at the wall but forget to bring it together into a cohesive product. Some of the stuff in here is my favourite in all of the games, but it feels like the designers spent all their time deciding on new foods to carefully render and making fishing minigames instead of completing what they set out for.
16 - Story reminds me of 15, they do a lot of setup then about 2/3rds in I guess they ran out of time so they throw it all away and just rush to the end. Otherwise competent.
FFT - Not as good as tactics ogre
sohois
20d ago
I did find I was constantly tweaking my gambits, most on account of status effects. Another difference I remember was that with the OG license board, I could give all my characters some low level spells, like Protect or Shell, so the whole party would work together to keep those protection spells up. In Zodiac Age, you tell your single white mage in the part to keep everyone protected, it's virtually all they do it takes so long to cast 3 times in a row, and then it's nearly worn off! Meanwhile they aren't healing or curing status effects.
This was what really put me off the game back when I played the original. IIRC, I had every character basically playing as a red mage, never bothered with skills, and just unlocked the strongest weapons available whenever I found new ones.
sohois
21d ago
FFXII was such an incredible disappointment after X. Starts off really well, but after 10 hours you realize the only gambits you need are low health > heal and attack, and there is absolutely nothing of interest when it comes to building a character. The licence board was entirely pointless. All that was left was the story, which as you say became incomprehensible very quickly
sohois
1mo ago
Covid was exceptionally deadly when compared to the common flu
I don't want to get into a debate about what "exceptionally deadly" means, but I don't think this is true. Spanish Flu was exceptionally deadly, COVID was largely on par with the Hong Kong and Asian Flu epidemics of the 60s, but in a much more globalised world.
I'm not really sure what prompted this article from Scott, but it does kind of follow the path the lockdown skeptical have been saying, that of the Iraq war. You start with enthusiastic support from all sides. Later you get "with the evidence at the time, support made sense" ( we are here). Then it's "I didn't support it, but I understand those who did". And finally you get to "No I never supported it and all those who did were clearly in the wrong/outright evil".
sohois
2mo ago
I've been switching between o3 and 2.5 pro to vibe code a project, and it definitely matches the impressions of others regarding o3's hyperactivity. It feels like o3 was designed to be used by already experienced engineers - it races ahead, giving the next 10 steps all at once, but only in sparse detail. There seems to be an assumption that the user can just fill in the rest. Gemini is a lot more patient, easy to follow for the less experienced
sohois
2mo ago
I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.
You're skipping a generation there. While a lot of current addictive internet creations are millennial, the earliest examples are Gen X. Google, Youtube, and Myspace/Friendster were all Gen X. Ditto some of the early hyper-addictive video games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, and of course the smart phones themselves.
sohois
2mo ago
Didn't Sam Altman suggest that in Yudkowsky's efforts to inoculate against paperclipping AI he basically hyperstitioned the field into existence? The anti-human branches of AI researchers are almost certainly a rationalist-descended cult-like phenomenon.
I've certainly seen similar thoughts suggested in places. You can certainly question whether Musk would have helped create OpenAI without having encountered Yudkowsky's ideas, but it's hard to reason on how much OpenAI particularly pushed forwards the current AI paradigms. Would they have been discovered elsewhere? It's worth remembering that machine learning models had a renaissance several years before LLMs, with self-driving cars being the initial ignition factor. This was back when LessWrong and associated platforms were still super niche.
There's also the question for AI doomers of what the cost/benefit would be. Let's say that Yudkowsky's writing brought forward AGI by 10 years. However, what would be the state of AI safety if he never started writing? Having an extra 10 years for a far smaller AI safety movement could easily be a worse outcome.
Personally I think the question of what the purpose of rationalism is has been answered: it was to create the AI safety movement. Yudkowsky built up rationalism into a "big tent" to attract more interest and provide intellectual scaffolding. Over the years rationalism has splintered into various more effective sub groups, including AI safety but also EA and its associated movements. Rationalism was never coherent enough, but these smaller groups have accomplished important things.
Rationalism accomplished its job in creating these, and now the original husk still just soldiers on, oblivious to it's obsolescence.
sohois
2mo ago
As much as I hate journalists, they are quite good at writing. Some no-name journalist at AP has gone to school for writing and honed his craft for years. His writing is almost certainly in the top 99th percentile of writing skills, and certainly far better than yours or mine.
This is an absurd claim. We have to remember that at this point journalism has been a dying industry for decades. The aspiring novelist working on their book away from their day job at the paper is a relic of 50 years ago. Good and great writers nowadays will go to so many other places before they go to a paper.
There are only a tiny number of prestigious bylines at top newspapers. When was the last time you read a generic article at, say, some mid-tier US city paper? There are still plenty of positions rehashing whatever comes through from AP or Reuters, or working in industry publications or niche hobby stuff. And these are never noted for quality.
And even amongst good journalists, writing is not often a big selling point. How many people read Matt Yglesias for his quality prose compared to just finding his ideas interesting? Good investigative journalism can be performed independently of good writing.
sohois
2mo ago
Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output?
Alternative phrasing: are normie journalists, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of putting out articles better than even the most stinky smelly chatgpt output?
I mean, why is this a surprise development? Oh, the article has a bunch of made-up garbage, you mean unlike all the rest of journalism where everything is true and the media never truly lies?
Why should I give a shit if a journo "hand authors" his latest piece of crap or just pushes a prompt at an LLM? Text generation is their speciality, and at this point I'd be stunned if most of them weren't 90th percentile in general writing quality in comparison to humans. How many journalists do you even know of for their writing quality? Hunter S Thompson and ?? Hell, just prompt the LLM in the right way and I bet you could get to 99th percentile no problem.
Do you even have an argument here beyond just the words "aislop"? Can you articulate a point that taboos the phrase slop and similar terms?
sohois
2mo ago
From my experience (in the energy industry), Spain's reputation is fine for their admin competence.
Although maybe not so much anymore...
sohois
2mo ago
I got a similar score and have a similar ~1sigma lower estimate from correlated tests (although memory was my best individual score). At first I thought the whole test was just a bit biased towards higher scores as multiple posters got scores in 140-150 range, but there are a few lower scores so not sure
sohois
2mo ago
Don't buy anything new. I assume you'll probably have family and friends that will gift/loan you a lot, but even if not it's so easy nowadays to find second hand stuff for way cheaper, and it's probably been used liked 10 times total.
I don't have the link, but in some ACX comments a few months back someone linked a blog series on back sleeping for babies. The conclusion was that the evidence for the benefits re:SIDS was extremely weak, while there was some good evidence that back sleeping has quite negative effects in other domains. We've slept our child on front, back and side, but she falls asleep really easily everyway so for us it's been less important, but could be useful when yours arrives
sohois
2mo ago
Oblivion. Might be strange to mention one of the highest rated games of all time, but nothing else captures that bizarre terrible film feeling. The incredibly ugly characters, litany of bugs, weird system choices, and of course the Radiant AI system form a perfect storm.
I have little hope that a future Oblivion remake would be anywhere near as good because they will simply sand away all the interesting parts
sohois
2mo ago
Are you turned off simply because there is a scene with dancing in it, or that some "stupid SJW" shared it approvingly?
sohois
3mo ago
Not to put words into the OPs mouth, but that's not what I took from the post. Rather, tariffs are an example of a generalized anti-automation protest which will provide an example for future PMC types to follow when AGI or similar eventually arrives
Just look at this sentence:
If you're worried about how the PMC will eventually sabotage the progress
Not how the PMC are sabotaging progress, but will do so in future
sohois
3mo ago
German issues now are largely a product of the past few years of policy, not any long term failures.
They elected the Greens, who promptly exploded their nuclear power sources and left them entirely reliant on natural gas from Russia. Now they have the highest electricity prices on the continent and vast swathes of industry are completely unviable.
sohois
3mo ago
My newborn does not do this often, but she does take a while to accept moving from one of her parents to her bed when sleeping
sohois
3mo ago
Bioshock Infinite was a financial disaster because Ken Levine was completely unable to run an effective development team, it's really not any more complicated than that.
No publisher recoiled from failure; they were compelled to chase the live service riches all the way off a cliff.
sohois
3mo ago
I'd say it's not so much his libertarianism as the fact he is solely a libertarian, he's not really right-wing culturally at all. His aims have always aligned with right-wing voters so he's always courted them but it's pretty clear he doesn't care much about things like immigration
sohois
3mo ago
Mercantilism as it was pursued - and it did not improve prosperity or any metric you care to measure - relied somewhat on colonialism. The colonial nations could tariff away as long as they could go and directly secure the materials they needed from conquered nations.
Sadiq Khan is really more a typical Blairite Labour man than socialist. He's a lot more progressive on cultural matters, but that's par for the course for the wider Labour party these days.
He is also indescribably inept, but I'm not sure his chronic uselessness will open the door for an actual socialist to grab the mayorality of London. They already had that more than two decades ago, with full-blown Trotskyite Ken Livingstone.
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