cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
5hr ago
Rediscovering writing
Weird benefit of the proliferation of AI writing is that my weird eccentricities in writing are now marks of sophistication rather than marks of degeneracy. Before I couldn't be bothered to learn all the proper standard ways to write things. To conform to a perfect platonic ideal of written communication. Now that AI has mastered that platonic ideal and using AI is a signal of low effort the more obvious it is that your writing is not that platonic ideal the more obvious it is that you have put in effort to craft a thing.
This has made it a little more enjoyable for me to craft messages, forum posts, etc then it was before. Where I once sounded weird, now I sound genuine and 'real'.
My writing will probably go more and more off the rails in the future. Before AI I was trying to correct for eccentricities. Now the guardrails are gone. I gotta lean into the weirdness!
Its made me more interested in getting back into writing stories. I don't think I'm the first to have this observation, but in a world where everything can be perfect, the imperfect becomes more interesting.
cjet79
5hr ago
I occasionally find stupid cheap gadgets on amazon that I buy sort of on impulse and they turn out to be awesome. Or items I pick up in a random store as I browse for something else. Some of the items, no particular order:
- plastic potato masher utensil. So much better than trying to use a fork. doesn't damage pots or pans since it is plastic. usually i dislike single use kitchen gadgets, but if you make mashed potatoes ever you want this.
- lemon squeezer. its awesome, works great. old concept, still perfect. Again, usually i dislike single use kitchen gadgets, but squeezing lemons and limes is a common thing. I'd say we use it every other week.
- small magnetic kitchen timer. lightweight, simple. attaches to anything vaguely magnetic. sound is loud enough to be heard in the same room no matter the noise level, or across the house if things are generally quiet. found a whole bunch of non kitchen cooking uses for it with the kids "ok try to take a shower in just ten minutes ... rather than thirty minutes, here is a timer"
- canvas print photos. they really decorate the room really well. cheap to order a bunch of them, no frames needed (since they come with an internal wooden frame). easy to hang cuz of the existing frame and their light weight.
- yeti water bottles. keep things cold or hot forever, very good longevity on the product. still works great after almost a decade of use.
I think I could walk around my house and find more. Ill add one dumb thing as a bonus: tungsten cubes. These were apparently a fad among crypto bros for a little while. I bought mine before then. They just feel so cool. Very heavy for a small object. Denser than lead.
cjet79
8hr ago
Trying to vibe code an eastern cultivation mod for the beaver colony management game timberborn. Why? partly shits and giggles. But also see where my former job of programming has gone. I've only had one 3 hour session so far. Its been very informative.
Things I discovered:
- Humans are lazy programmers, that is their worst quality. (knew this already, its why I started using AI)
- AIs are the opposite of lazy programmers. That is their best quality.
- Humans are lazy programmers, that is their best quality.
- AIs are the opposite of lazy programmers, that is their worst quality.
I had a plan of battle going in, hashed out with free version of chatgpt. Start with an initial proof of concept mod to see how well AI can mod and change the game. I was gonna stick to mechanics that are already in existing mods. Chatgpt helped me setup a local programming space that would use gemini as a local coding agent.
Was all going well, but then we sent gemini to start on the initial coding task. And it kept looking at a bunch of files in the game library. Running a bunch of read commands and asking for permission to do so. I checked in with chatgpt 'hey whats this thing doing why is it reading all these files' chatgpt explains this is entirely harmless and its just trying to read the files to understand what it can do modding wise. "wait" i think, there are examples of how to create basic mods online. I talk to chatgpt about using those, chatgpt realizes oops ya its not really using those as an example its trying to basically reverse engineer the whole game. We stop gemini from going further down the rabbit hole, redirect it to a more focused task, it then runs out of tokens. Fuck. 6d wait for more tokens. double fuck.
At this point I switch to being computer -> human -> AI middle man for chatgpt. I am the agent part of a coding agent. but I'm exercising more caution at this point because it just wasted a bunch of time trying to decipher the whole game when it could have just looked up the simple modding guide. I stop chatgpt from overthinking or overanalyzing things a few time "yo have your tried using the internet to see if that resource exists" gets met repeatedly with "oh yes! great idea! i found that exact resource I was trying to reverse engineer to be easily available online."
Anyways I ended up with a basic mod at the end of the night. It runs, the game doesn't crash. Minor first success i suppose.
cjet79
1d ago
I just started working on a modding project for the game timberborn. Plan is to see how far I can get using free or cheap AI. Was gonna post about it in the tinker Tuesday thread today.
cjet79
2d ago
I like exploration both of a physical space and a set of game mechanics. I like progression that is both in personal skill but also game mechanic assisted progression. I often use games as a second screen as I'm listening to comedy podcasts. For multiplayer I enjoy cooperation in games, but not competition. I like the skill required for FPS games, I can play halo 2 nearly endlessly for the sheer enjoyment of the firefights.
Lately starship troopers extermination was scratching a cooperation itch and an FPS itch at the same time. But the game mechanic progression/unlocks had stopped, and my skill had meaningfully topped out in most of my favorite guns. Finally player counts in the game overall and my group in particular had dropped too low.
Yes we are probably looking for very different things. My favorite game was probably factorio on a first playthrough. Since I enjoy the exploration aspects of games most games have low replayability for me. I'm not crossing games off a list I feel obligated to play, I just have genuinely more fun doing something new and slightly worse on other metrics than doing the same thing again and again that is awesome in every other way.
cjet79
2d ago
I am having fun despite all my complaints. It's not just crossing it off a list.
Exploring the dungeons in the deep north has been fun. Sieging the forts in the Ashlands has been fun. Kiting bosses while they absolutely obliterate the environment around me is fun for thirty minutes, just not an hour or two.
The progression is always something I'm addicted to. I wish it was more tied to the character itself rather than just the gear and meals.
The building is fun at my super base once I had a huge backlog of stone or other raw material.
I like the size of the world but I just wish there was a faster way to traverse it. I'd love if there was an end game air ship. And a mid game ship with way more speed. Possibly some resource burning option for a flat boost to speed. So you would still want the wind for top speed, but aren't completely stuck dead in the water when you get a headwind in a narrow channel.
cjet79
3d ago
Ya I guess I'm an NPC, I prefer enshrouded. You are about to hate everything I'm gonna say.
I really can't spend endless time on a game. And the basic mechanics of Valheim are just not that interesting to me. It's smack things and avoid being smacked for combat. Or slowly run away while reloading a bow or crossbow.
The resource gathering has nothing interesting going on. At most it requires entering certain combat zones or dungeons to gather a particular resource, but that just brings it back to the standard fight mechanics.
The sailing is boring. I used cheat engine speed hack and literally sped up the game by 5x to take care of long sailing journeys. Even then I felt like I was barely paying attention and still easily avoiding stuff or going the direction I wanted.
Gear and food is the entirety of your progression. The default settings have you lose both on death and then make a corpse run. I fucking hate corpse runs. But fair enough that makes me not want to die. But that leads me to playing cautious and ultra boring all the time. I am absolutely not gonna risk a 50 minute meal count down on a risky and aggressive strategy. I turned the setting on so I at least kept my equipped gear, but I doubt you do that.
Finding specific locations on the massive sprawling map would take forever even if you are using portals and the in game map. Playing without them seems like insanity. I instead found an online tool that took my map gen key and revealed the whole thing locations and all.
Basically I'm shamelessly "cheating" at this game and barely finding my time worth it. I can see how someone with nearly unlimited time could enjoy the slow grind of this game. But that's not me. The combat just doesn't interest me, and the base building mechanics are strict. Resources don't go far in building, and height restrictions for all but the best materials kick in so fast that you always feel like you are making a crappy temporary base.
cjet79
3d ago
Playing Valheim again since it got 1.0 release.
I like that they changed some of the difficulty settings. Previously I had to install mods to not have their preferred hardcore experience.
There is still some slight annoyance with travel distances in the game. It is fun to build huge sprawling bases. But the default setting doesn't allow for ore and metals going through portals until you reach the end game. Sailing is painfully slow given the size of the map. So the game slightly encourages small bases next to resource nodes, but the resource costs of many bases is cost prohibitive since many of the crafting stations use up rare resources.
Fighting the bosses alone is a slog. They are definitely designed around multiple players. Melee DPS is much higher than ranged DPS and the bosses can tear through large health stacks with relative ease. So you are stuck with one strategy of run in a and take a few whacks then back off to shoot from range while health regenerates. You can't spam healing potions even if you stock up cuz they have a two minute cool down.
The boss fights are hour long battles where one mistake sends you to a respawn and erases 15 minutes of progress as their health regenerates and you spend time getting back in the fight.
Still a mechanically fun survival rpg with interesting and unique story aesthetics. Graphics are in an ok spot, better than minecraft but not by much.
At this point I just want to beat it and cross it off the list.
cjet79
7d ago
Yuck. That would possibly be one of the worst things Trump could do for his presidency.
Blatant interference in sports will not be tolerated well. Americans have their bread and circuses. Don't fuck with the circuses. Especially after his war with Iran just made the bread so damn expensive.
Ovechkin is retiring anyways and has said he plans to move back to Russia. Just wait ~6 months and he will be gone.
cjet79
7d ago
Bryan Caplan is not a lefty. He is for open borders. He would be happy to get rid of the welfare state as well.
cjet79
7d ago
It's high effort and impractical right now.
When AI agents are ubiquitous? It's a short request away for anyone.
cjet79
8d ago
There is a cascading failure route. Big website gets overwhelmed with bot spam. People get sick of it and move to medium size website. Medium size website gets overwhelmed with bot spam. People get sick of it and move to small website. Small website gets overwhelmed with bot spam. People get sick of it and move to tiny website. Tiny website is overwhelmed with bot spam.
At each iteration the website owners might care more about getting overwhelmed with spam. But to crack each layer the bots get more sophisticated. The fact that big websites are already overwhelmed is not a good sign, its a sign of things to come.
In my experience of moderating slatestarcodex and themotte for the last decade is that the moderators have an effort advantage. It is easier to ban a user than it is to spin up a new one. We have a default system that excludes new bots. I had to read your post before I allowed it through the filter. But humans do not have any inherent advantage here, unless you start implementing draconian personal identification rules. Which actually benefits the large websites. I've had to do youtube's creepy 'im a real human' process of taking a selfie video.
I just don't like a defense that is basically "my adversaries have been stupid". They can easily get smarter. Especially when costs are in their favor.
cjet79
8d ago
I suspect the open Internet is permanently dead. The main impediment in the future will not be censorship it will be an avalanche of AI bots.
We already have some small amount of bots that get on here, they are mostly obvious because they are unsophisticated. It can be a human or a bot, but if all of its posts are about this new real estate fad I can easily know it is spam. What if some bot joined, made an intentional effort to sound human, became a valuable contributor over a month or two, and then made a sob story about needing help on their real estate project.
I can honestly say I don't think I'd spot the fake. Even after it giving evidence that the plot to join was just a ruse to get donations/investment. The only way I'd be sure is if multiple users attempted the same thing at the same time.
cjet79
8d ago
Yes, to be clear when I said USAID money was definitely doing something I don't mean to imply that "something" is good. My default assumption with untracked aid money is the "something" is being used by the government in charge to hand out bribes to their friends.
I'd expect that removing the spigot of money results in more political upheaval since the group in charge has less of an ability to bribe people into being allies. And they either have to make that up through increased extraction from their enemies, or reduce their bribing amount. Both of which make their position weaker.
I just ultimately don't think it should be the responsibility of the US taxpayer to worry about these things. So I'm happy to see the program ended.
cjet79
8d ago
If it is just one user repeatedly posting about the same topic, ya. And we do warn people when they approach the level of 'this is getting annoying' and our warnings usually come a post or two after people start reporting it for things like "cant x user just shut up about this topic already". By the time we are handing out bans for topic exhaustion plenty of users are beyond mildly annoyed. Mod team is definitely in agreement on the need for a ban, if not necessarily on the length.
We have only used this on two users that I can remember. One for jew posting, and one for the age of consent law stuff. If you were the one that got in trouble for constantly talking about age of consent law stuff, then I'm not really feeling sorry for you. This discussion is reminding me of exactly how annoying it is.
Jokes can definitely be culture war waging. They just aren't culture war debate or discussion. So yeah admittedly jokes and works of satire related to the culture war don't end up getting allowed anywhere on themotte. This is not limited to the topic of age of consent. If someone wanted to share jokes about how Biden/Trump is a buffoon then we really don't have a space for that. That seems fine to me, we never claimed to be a space for everything. Its possible that /r/drama makes a good companion website in that sense, since they are for jokes about anything but don't really seek to allow for serious discussion of anything.
cjet79
8d ago
USAID was spending most of its money in Africa, so I'd expect that to be where things change.
There is maybe a story to be told that USAID was a method for coordination among the left. They go out and verify that a charitable cause in another country or region will advance the goals they care about, and private money simply follows their recommendation. This is somewhat explicitly what they were doing. Its just that they didn't say something like "advancing leftist ideology is our goal". Usually the goal of USAID was stated to be a kind of soft power projection by the US. Show the world we are the good guys by giving money to good causes.
I do think USAID was doing something. Simply because throwing billions of dollars around in poor nations is bound to have some effect. From some numbers I looked up on wikipedia we were giving about 1 billion to ethiopia, ethiopia's government expenditure is about 25 billion. Therefore we were contributing about 4% of ethiopias government budget. Its play money for the US, but that is a big amount for other countries. Certainly enough to sway elections.
cjet79
8d ago
Ok but
Ok but this is the friday fun thread. Not the main culture war thread.
I apologize for my mistake above in addressing anything related to the object level concerns. My main complaint is meta that it is culture war and thus doesn't belong here.
cjet79
9d ago
You are wrong in thinking only one user had a problem with this post.
We have members I'd like to keep more than toakraka that have reported this stuff.
There is also an Internet phenomenon where people with extreme viewpoints are accustomed to arguing for and defending their view points. While the average person is very unaccustomed to debating them. Young earth creationists, 9/11 truthers, neo Nazis, NAMBLA members, etc all tend to have accumulated debate experience. They do tend to destroy the arguments of their average debate partner.
If you see them stick around long enough you will at some point witness the ultimate smackdown. Someone smart will have heard, read, and processed the arguments. They eventually get sick of hearing it all repeated.
You'll then see something like a ten - twenty page argument back and forth. Where the extreme idea holder gets eviscerated on nearly every point because finally someone came at them prepared.
Which is why I am happy to see any and all ideas discussed in the main culture war thread. We don't do topic bans there, unless it specifically endangers the website.
But this is the Friday Fun Thread and the point of this thread is just not the same as the other.
cjet79
10d ago
Removing this for your own good. Please only share that with a psychiatrist.
cjet79
10d ago
Guidelines on the right hand sidebar on desktop. On mobile in the hamburger menu under "rules"
This post will remain hidden. Lurk a little for a sense of the rules. Read through the quality contributions posts for what is considered an ideal to aspire.
One major thing that has come up lately but might not be written down anywhere, is that your writing should be your own, no one here really wants to debate with AIs through proxy.
Any red marked posts like this one are mod messages. If we aren't marking ourselves with the mod hat we are just regular users.
cjet79
10d ago
Was surprisingly good visuals. Watched all the way through, would maybe watch similar style movies.
I've lately been watching movie recaps. Which are basically narrated 20-30 minute summaries of movies. It kinda felt like that at times. I might just be more interested in 30 minute stories lately. Hollywood settled on 90-120 minutes for a movie, i don't know if that was correct for all situations/stories.
cjet79
10d ago
spoiler
I was wondering if one asian government was standing in for another one that the author couldn't talk about or criticize in any way without tripping censors.
Eh I just have this weird aversion to touching pots and pans with metal. Ingrained habit in trying to preserve Teflon cookware
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