KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
2d 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.
KingOfTheBailey
3d ago
On one of Drinker's recent vids he mentioned he was visiting a con and there'd be a break in uploads. He's previously pointed out good things in movies his audience expected him to dislike (e.g. one of the Wicked movies). Hopefully he's not too audience-captured to call things honestly here.
KingOfTheBailey
4d ago
If you're playing it for the first time, please keep posting your takes. Very interested to see how it's aged.
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
I like the idea of deliberately choosing and fostering new communities.
KingOfTheBailey
6d ago
- Cautious yes to expansion of
themotte.org. We need to bring in high-quality people to keep the site alive, without opening the floodgates to MOPs. - Yes to careful creation of subcommunities. Perhaps by using recurring threads on the main motte as test-runs and recruitment for communities? I don't mind the
lobste.rsinvite-tree approach to bringing users on-board, but it would have to be done in a way that doesn't cause a political monoculture like they have over there.- Strong Yes to community constitutions and renameable subcommunities.
- Strong Yes to having a way to get rid of hostile mod takeover, as well as "dormant mod wakes up and turfs everyone out".
- Concern: I think that some communities will attract a disproportionate number of people not aligned with the site's ethos, and I'm not sure how to manage that.
- Yes to "you can have private communities with your own rules and they're your responsibility; but public communities need a constitution compatible with the site constitution".
- Concern: does having the site Foundation affect public communities move you away from the s230 protections, because you're exercising some kind of editorial control?
- Cautious yes to alternative ways of presenting discussions. One big discussion subtree tree can squash everything else out of a thread, but the Culture War Threads have been unusually successful for how crude the mechanism is.
- Yes to alternate votes, maybe like modern LessWrong does?
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
You and @vorpa-glavo both make good points. Perhaps I have been too outrage-baited.
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
I have very mixed feelings about surrogacy. A friend of a friend offered to be surrogate for my friend and her husband, because my friend's medical conditions made it impossible for her to safely become pregnant. This strikes me as an incredibly selfless act and I don't have a moral problem with it, and I think the two main reasons are that the surrogate is known to the parents, and both parents' gametes are still involved in conception. But our society cannot keep anything "safe, legal, and rare", and I think it is realistic to worry about the moral risks of commercialized surrogacy, which I consider literally human trafficking. The "parents" are literally paying money to order a baby! And sadly for the ones who would be good fathers, I consider gay surrogacy to be way too high-risk to allow. There was the gay dads making content mocking their baby who was asking for "mama", Britain's first gay surrogate father getting charged with child sex offenses, the Australian gay couple who used a surrogate to purchase a child to abuse (archive of original article, journalist's "reflections"), and I'm sure I've seen more in the past.
KingOfTheBailey
8d ago
Very cool. The WiiU is a lovely little machine because you can emulate so much with it. Underappreciated in its day.
KingOfTheBailey
9d ago
ESR traces a lot of pre- and proto-rationalist influences here, but they're mostly works rather than communities: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalism-before-the-sequences
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/history-of-less-wrong covers the pre-2016 history, including the SL4 mailing list.
KingOfTheBailey
10d ago
I don't have a complete answer, but something like that. One alternative example, because I've been too busy to give this the thorough thought your question warrants (sorry): the attack on Kirk, and the failed attempts on Trump's life, seemed to me to come from individuals radicalized by constant fever-pitch online rhetoric, exactly the sort of "stochastic terrorism" the left has been complaining about for several years. So either we agree to call stochastic terrorism terrorism and say that nobody's allowed to use it (a view that's probably incompatible with the First Amendment) or get both sides to put that particular club away (instead of only allowing left to use it against the right). And, regardless of that, having feds in the Discord groups etc where these people are radicalized into action is probably worth doing.
KingOfTheBailey
11d ago
Picoboot is a RPi2040-based modchip, do I understand that right? And the main thing you can do with it is play burned games? Just thinking about whether I need to do this myself, or whether my softmodded WiiU is going to be enough to keep me busy.
Because the republican party controlled the presidency, congress, and senate.
EDIT: And because while Kirk was a bit of a "debate me" and a bit of a meme, he was also apparently quite an important node in the right's network and much more relatable to normies than someone like Fuentes. The fact that he was a node should have led to a vigorous prosecution of not only the shooter, but the environment that radicalized him; and the fact that he was so relatable to nromies would have given them much broader license to do so.
KingOfTheBailey
12d ago
On the other hand, his death did, I think, have a permanent and in my view highly salutory effect on intra-right wing discourse, creating large amounts of useful common knowledge within Red Tribe that move the conversation forward in a useful way.
Can you please make this more explicit? Specifically, what common knowledge was established and how things have moved forward? Because from where I stood, it seemed like the Right squandered a generational opportunity to actually root out the violence-promoters on the left, instead deciding to flounder and squabble thanks in part to conspiratorial nonsense peddled by people like Candace Owens.
KingOfTheBailey
14d ago
I could care less about people saying "I could care less", but I don't. I actually care quite a bit!
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
The most horrifying thing about this story is the cooking of Korean BBQ on an induction top instead of over burning gas.
KingOfTheBailey
16d ago
Expansion packs also used to have a substantial amount of additional content for that price, whereas modern stuff is shamelessly drip-fed out at an astonishing unit price.
KingOfTheBailey
26d ago
Civ IV is the best Civ.
KingOfTheBailey
28d ago
As you noted, Men are not allowed to organize around their own interests as a gender.
The example to prove the rule: https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/2068603499516989781
Rupert Lowe's candidate pulled <10% of the vote in Makersfield and I think Restore has similar numbers nationally. The only time I've seen a political candidate explicitly flag men's issues like this and it's the "call me racist, I do not care; they all have to go back" one.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Skills are essentially a pointer to a loadable chunk of context, a fuzzy program written as a .md file. "If you want to know how to do X, read this file first" sort of thing. The models get more confused as their context (message history) grows, and especially when the context window fills and the initial stuff gets cut off. Then they have no idea what they're doing. So a "skill" is detected by the harness (e.g. opencode) which injects the short summary into the prompt that goes to the model, which can then ask to read the full file if necessary.
Do we have many local LLM users here? I'm curious what people are doing: what models are people using? For what jobs? For what reason? On what hardware? With what runner?
As I mentioned to @WhiningCoil a few days ago, I mostly run a Qwen3.6-A3B-Q4_K_XL on llama.cpp's llama-server and connect to it from https://pi.dev/, using a Radeon 780M in my laptop. It's been decent for grinding through smaller coding jobs under close observation, though like any Chinese model it'll just give you the party line if you start asking it about Taiwan or Tiannemen Square. I've also been using a gemma4-26B-A4B for general questions about the world when I'm at session quotas. The other big reason I'm getting into this stuff is that I never want to be locked out by a subscription. Haven't looked at image or video generation at all.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
I've been lucky enough to stumble into a relationship with a nerdy girlfriend, but if I hadn't, I'd be asking if that company was hiring. I think you're right.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
decently-smart, decently-attractive, actually kind of geeky ladies
I don't think there are, and this unfortunate fact has been one of the driving engines of the sex-relations theater of the culture war going all the way back to Elevatorgate. It drives the differences in how many women get into STEM, it drives the "I'm sorry, but I'm just flat-out exhausted by the constant string of even decent suitors thinking I'm their last romantic shot" that women in STEM/atheism/whatever have been writing about for 25 years, and generally it's pretty hard to find natal women who are into any given nerdy thing.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Don't get me wrong, the people who say these local models are "almost-Claude-tier" are still too starry-eyed. The model I recommended you - Qwen3.6-A3B-Q4_K_XL - told me earlier that both the Linux kernel and Busybox used the autotools. It will confabulate as badly as a previous-gen frontier model but if you drop it in an established project where it can read stuff written by people with a clue, it can often be guided into doing useful things like push through refactors and updates where the compiler and tests can keep it on track.
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.
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