KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
12hr ago
I am beginning to think that retrospectively de-canonizing the Star Wars EU was actually one of the best things Disney ever did for that universe. Because it's now non-canon, they don't have the incentive to go back and inject this sort of nonsense into it all.
KingOfTheBailey
1d ago
I think you have to inculcate a sense of duty and noblesse oblige in whomever you enfranchise. Doing this for a smaller number of people is obviously easier, and then the system can gain legitimacy if the fruits of good governance are visible to the people. A benevolent and enlightened ruler is then simplest, so why expand that power at all? Expanding the franchise is defense in depth against an one idiot or tyrant wielding power irresponsibly or ineffectively. But at some point the expected value of the marginal additional voter becomes negative; I think this is least controversially demonstrated by proposals to lower the voting age.
KingOfTheBailey
2d ago
Sounds like the world of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I would like to know more. The problem I have with it is that it is vulnerable to gerrymandering in a way that universal suffrage is not. Example: If you want right-wing governments forever you increase the difficulty of the community service or exam options.
KingOfTheBailey
2d ago
Old-school LoL? Don't tell me such dangerous things!
KingOfTheBailey
2d ago
KingOfTheBailey
2d ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general
Some interesting commentary on this point, from the GPT-2 era.
Robin Hanson’s post Better Babblers is very relevant here. He claims, and I don’t think he’s exaggerating, that a lot of human speech is simply generated by “low order correlations”, that is, generating sentences or paragraphs that are statistically likely to come after previous sentences or paragraphs:
After eighteen years of being a professor, I’ve graded many student essays. And while I usually try to teach a deep structure of concepts, what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on. But if you ask an exam question where the deep structure answer differs from answer you’d guess looking at low order correlations, most students usually give the wrong answer.
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
No Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?
KingOfTheBailey
9d ago
https://bash-org-archive.com/?43
I would've thought someone would've done something with the "Tupac Shakuras" pun by now.
KingOfTheBailey
9d ago
Also, in the locally-hosted ~1-2 graphics card space, their Gemma 4 local models have been quite good for general-purpose use, even if its tool use was a bit broken. (Qwen3.6, or the really big Qwen 3.5 is still the practical frontier for coding AFAICT.)
KingOfTheBailey
10d ago
Also if you tranq someone out, they're often considered "dead" with a different label.
KingOfTheBailey
10d ago
I don't think I ever levelled up pistol in many of my playthroughs. One reason is that too many useful weapons use the rifle skill, including the shotguns, and the other is that if you unspend the points on pistol at character creation, the game gives you the skill anyway.
I think both your weapons: low-tech skill and your level of combat strength affect how easily you can break things.
KingOfTheBailey
11d ago
You are making many of the same choices I do.
Not sure if you want advice on cheesing the skill system, but
KingOfTheBailey
14d ago
It depends. Singular "they" is a motte-and-bailey among lefty groups that support custom pronouns, where the motte is "singular they has been around since the 14th century, you chud" and the bailey is "people should be able to identify themselves with 'they' as a nonbinary gendered pronoun".
I think I'm fairly close to this also. There's the Hunter Biden Laptop Story, where the NY Post's reporting was suppressed before the election, and it's even documented on Wikipedia. There's also the suspicious timing of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial results, which in a pre-mandate world would have handed a massive win to Trump just before the election, via Operation Warp Speed; I've seen it argued that it was political, that there was "no evidence" it was political, and that changes to the assessment schedule could plausibly have been done for scientifically justified reasons. I can't find a smoking gun document either way; interested people can probably argue forever about that one without ever making progress. TIME Magazine also came out in Feb 2021 and laid out how they "fortified" the election result to make it all-but-impossible to contest, revealing significant command-and-control capabilities among those who wanted to see a Biden presidency.
Do I believe they did anything so crude as to manipulate the count or the voting machines themselves? Not really; I think isolated manipulation is almost certain and uncoordinated widespread manipulation plausible, but I don't think anyone will be able to meet the standard of proof to convince anyone who has already chosen a side. I do think the environment in 2020 was stacked to favor D as much as possible as the country went to the polls. On top of that, vote-by-mail is always less secure than in-person-only elections, and there's a fair amount of means/motive/opportunity to harvest and submit ballots.
It is disappointing that the result of the contested 2020 election was not a bipartisan effort to secure the elections to the satisfaction of both parties, and that Voter ID seems to be impossible to pass even now.
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
Her GiveSendGo pulled in $920k. There's enough bankroll there for her to appeal to make a point, if she's that way inclined. Her most recent post seems that she might:
We all know the verdict. We all know how unfair and unjust it is. This is why I will be appealing. Things are already in motion to do so. I will never stop fighting, and all of you give me so much strength and hope to keep my head in the battle.
I think the implication OP's worried about is: if she's 18 and hanging with the group now, then external people (including future potential players) will infer that she was intentionally courted to join the group before she turned 18. Or, that aside, given that she's so awkward, there's an element of "why can't she find friends her own age?" (a question that has many legitimate answers, I'm sure) and "are these older people taking advantage of a young woman who can't find friends her own age?". It's like the 40-year-old who never moved on from hanging around the college anime club: didn't you make friends while you were a student and shouldn't you be in a different phase of life?
You could build the group out to a less lopsided age distribution, which would make it feel better (and give her friends her own age to carpool with) but it seems like you're not interested in doing that. You're not morally required to do so, obviously, but if she's autistic and awkward you at least owe here an explanation. Especially since her situation doesn't seem the best.
Also: what is it about Blood on the Clocktower that seems to really suck in a certain kind of nerd? I see a fair amount of it these days.
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
I don't know his work in detail but I think you could call him a "prominent lefty".
KingOfTheBailey
16d ago
Yeah but there's no real intelligence in AI; it's just doing next cymbal prediction.
KingOfTheBailey
16d ago
What happened to Charlie Kirk is one of the worst things that has happened in American politics. My heart goes out to his family. FUCK WHOEVER DID THIS! Not only is it deeply tragic by itself, but we are now all in danger. Violence is always wrong and it's intellectual surrender.
KingOfTheBailey
16d ago
I missed out on an augmentation canister (aqualung/env. resistance) in the second mission of game.
Pretty sure you can get that elsewhere, and pretty sure neither aug is that good.
KingOfTheBailey
17d ago
Starbucks is a reliable place to get an outlet to plug into and not be bothered for a few hours. Their food and drink products are inexplicable.
KingOfTheBailey
21d ago
Unfortunately the readers seemed not to notice, tried to implement it as literally as possible, and the grouching comes from HPMOR!Harry and his big flashing BUY A CLOCK sign.
KingOfTheBailey
22d ago
All true. I think I just have a soft spot for the worldbuilding and the faction leaders, and how much depth there is in there if you want to chase up all the references.
Great list. Surprised not to see Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) on the list, given that you've listed a lot of strategy and some other Sid Meier.
If @samesies wants to catch up on recent gaming history, it's probably worth playing a couple of "modern military shooters" to get a sense of what Doom 2016 was a reaction against and return to. Maybe add a modern boomer shooter too.
There's also a bunch of good remakes out these days, which might be a good way to pick up games you missed that might not run as easily. Many of LucasArts' classic adventure games now have remastered editions that run on modern machines. I'd recommend Day of the Tentacle, Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, and Full Throttle from that set. I think System Shock 1 and 2 got decent remakes if you want to play through some pretty influential first-person horror.
Speculative not-necessarily-recommendations: Brutal Legend, Oni, maybe one of the Hitman games?
How well does Tron 2.0 run these days? I never could get my pirate version to launch on my machine when I was a broke student.
The reason it became a talking point (more among memers I think, more than the online right generally and certainly not the white/ethnats) was that he did a barrel roll, and when ATC suggested he might be able to get a piloting job after landing the plane, Richard replied "Nah, I'm a white guy". The fact that he was interested in seeing whales and crashing the plane away from people to hurt also meant his actions didn't get tainted by public safety or terrorism discussions like GP's hypothetical Tyrone example would have. Instead, he came across more like a sad guy with a screw loose rather than a resentful loser, a normal-ish guy ground down by life (and to at least some extent DEI), and a member of the lost generation Compact Magazine wrote about in its description of a different industry.
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