Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
There are guys in the various successors to DOGE working on, shall we say, more prosocial variations of this. The red-teaming is definitely going to happen in the legal field, but it's not going to work unless you have hard-nosed legal realists actually taking those arguments before a court (i.e. deciding which arguments will actually work and which courts will be friendly to them).
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Every time I meet an intelligent person who cares deeply about a particular policy area, I tell them the same thing: go to the right and become their guy. The left (and the GOPe/Tories/etc.) are just not interested - $bad_policy is that way for a reason and many people's jobs depend on it staying that way - but the populist right probably has no idea what they want in $policy_area, and if you can come in, be the man with a plan on $policy_area, and be a team player otherwise, you have a chance utterly unprecedented in living memory to make a change actually happen.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
If you see me at Butterworth's wearing the secret Mottizen symbol, tap me on the shoulder and I'll get you a drink.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Google needs to keep acquiring hungry talent and keep it away from the warm, suffocating embrace of their internal bureaucracy - not an easy problem to solve. Cash and compute are the table stakes to compete, but they don't win you the competition.
I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."
Edit: as if to reward me for making this poast, this just crossed my feed - tl;dr the Admin changed the definition of "harm" in the Endangered Species Act such that you're allowed to build things even if it might disturb some rare fruitbat or gecko.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Google having more money than God is part of their problem. It's like asking why a fat old guy is losing a footrace.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
It doesn't appear to be in the wikipedia article, so my favourite anecdote about this is that, a while after the establishment of Israel, a Japanese delegation visited the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and brought as a gift a beautiful, hand-bound Japanese translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I don't know what exact comments he's been making, but the example you give isn't worrying at all. Bar workers absolutely do take dislikes to people all the time, and maybe your friend was an annoying drunk one night. Now, "this bartender is out to get me" would be worrying, but complaining to your friends about a bartender who's probably complaining to his coworkers about you is normal, if petty.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Give 'em the hemlock!
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
"We had to change some of the details to avoid invoking harmful stereotypes, so now the Jew is a werewolf and the Nazi is a vampire"
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Your comment plus username makes me chuckle at the idea of setting loose a bot account trained to imitate Scott Alexander as closely as possible (mods, this is a joke)
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I rather doubt it as well, given the effects of the original trench warfare, but given that it's a common talking point I'd like to disprove the theory for myself.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I would explain your situation and the outlines of your personal knowledge to Claude, ask it to write you a CLAUDE.md based on that, and then keep asking that 'new' Claude questions about the basics as you go along. Hey Claude, what's a harness, should I be using one for my project, and what are the trade-offs?
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I'll restrict myself to one point of historical autism (leaving aside things like "slave patrols", where you need to do more serious work to get out of nonsense 2020-history, or LLMs' obsession with easy contrasts): your AI has gotten the role of the Anglo-Saxon sheriff wildly wrong, and has essentially read the later Normans back into it. Anglo-Saxon sheriffs did not preside over a shire court, where shires existed, and accounting for the incredible legal variety of what a "shire" was and how it operated - they were intended as functionary stewards, junior to the (supposed) legal representative, the ealdorman, with minor input into the local lord's justice. Posse comitatus is also a hell of an anachronism even for the Normans. If you mean the levy, the sheriff had no power to summon it except as instructed by his lord, and if you mean the hue and cry, that could be raised by any figure of sufficient local standing.
If you're interested in looking further into the subject, I found in my younger years that the origins of state prosecution are actually the more interesting thread running through early English law. My LLM expands:
Before the twelfth century, prosecuting a wrong in England was the victim's own business: homicide, wounding, and theft were pursued by the injured party or his kin through the appeal, a formal private accusation brought in the shire or hundred court, and liability was discharged through compensation — wergild and bot to the victim, wite to the king — so that the Crown's stake in crime was fiscal before it was jurisdictional. It is precisely that fiscal stake, John Hudson argues in The Formation of the English Common Law, that generated state prosecution, rather than any prior theory of public justice. The Norman kings had already made the community collectively answerable to the Crown for unexplained death through the murdrum fine, and the Leges Henrici Primi (c. 1115) enumerate the placita coronae, pleas reserved to the king's jurisdiction alone, whose profits — amercements, forfeited chattels — belonged to him; but a revenue stream contingent on private appellants was a revenue stream full of holes, since kin might settle, be bought off, be intimidated, or simply not exist. The Assize of Clarendon (1166) plugged the holes: twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every vill were sworn to present anyone reputed a robber, murderer, or thief, and the presented were tried — by ordeal of water, before the king's itinerant justices — whether or not any complainant came forward. This is the decisive step, because it created, for the first time, criminal proceedings that ran entirely at the king's suit: the offender identified by the community's oath rather than a victim's appeal, tried in the king's forum, his chattels forfeit to the king on conviction, and, by the Assize of Northampton (1176), mutilated or exiled even on acquittal if his repute was foul enough. The machinery built to secure the Crown's judicial revenue thus became, almost as a by-product, the machinery of public prosecution: the doctrine that crime is a breach of the king's peace, contra pacem domini regis, answerable to the Crown regardless of the victim's wishes, arrived riding on the Pipe Rolls.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Also the focus of the tender embraces of its richest native son. One could also chart the rise of right-populism in Eastern Europe as a metric of the advances of a hostile postmodernity to which they're reacting.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
State repression of culture is not the same as the loss of culture. Imagine if in just about every place you find yourself in America, that isn't reserved to some newcoming minority or the hipsteriest of hipsters, there's still at least a drawlin' fella wearing a cowboy hat and spurs, a Southie with the broadest Bawston accent, and a Southern gentleman who says "huwhat" and "huwhy", and they all basically act as you expect. Britain's still got a fair bit of that.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I would say in my experience they are significantly less postmodernized, especially Albanians, though it's hard to connect that directly to the 1990s (I think the basic function is how rich a country is) and it's now been a long time since the war. Hungary is billed as reactionary, but it's actually well ahead of the rest of the Balkans in the process.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Quality post, may Allah curse Universal Culture. However, I have become painfully aware that this process is happening almost everywhere, at different rates; America is just ground zero for postmodernity. America has lost much of its Americanness, but Britain has lost an awful lot of its Britishness, Turkey has lost some of its Turkishness, even Africa has lost a bit of its character. I look forward to revisiting Ukraine sometime, to see if the antidote to postmodernity is in fact brutal trench warfare.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
There's no thrill of permadeath whatsoever in fighting a quokka, most derived undead, something you outlevel significantly, or whatever (a rule of thumb for me is "can I safely melee this as a caster? trash fight"). Though you always have to watch for anything walking onscreen while you're tabbing the quokka. What I don't like are the situations where, for instance, your character is at a point where you can mindlessly melee a komodo dragon or a troll one-on-one almost all the time, but suddenly a series of rolls go differently and now you're scrambling to escape this one scrub (early game is awful for this too but that's WAD I guess, early game is supposed to suck). Tying GDR to AC instead of body armour was a big improvement, and I suppose the converse is that characters can escape when they should absolutely die due to the enemy rolling low. My thinking on DCSS's design is that many enemies are meant to be unchallenging one-on-one, depending on your character, so that they can create interesting challenges when they show up in combination with each other, without those group fights being impossible to overcome without luring.
More generally, and I know I always bang this drum, I think a game which can accidentally double player damage without anyone noticing, during a tournament needs to take a long hard look at its philosophy around damage rolls. It also creates a pretty boring version of optimal play (and I say this as someone who can win pretty often, currently have an MDFW tearing up Zot), where you are focused on minimizing your exposure to 1% chances of death. Honestly I don't think you need to play like that to win regularly, just to play as well as the best players, but the devs seem obsessed with taking away boring tools for optimal play without ever asking "why does our design philosophy push players towards this path".
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Wow. A true Hegelian - you are quite literally the only person I have ever seen call it the Lord-Bondsman dialectic instead of the Master-Slave dialectic (following the translations of Kojeve, Lacan, etc.). Though I would say, that, at least through the prism of my Kojevean reading, any honest interpretation of this dialectic for the present has to put capitalists and workers on the same side (as the Slave) against the State.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
To be fair, lab ethanol probably will make you puke (eventually).
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
"He's a bastard, but he's our bastard, and he'll be a bastard to our enemies" is as old as time, and I can promise you it existed in the golden age of machine politics - probably more prevalent then. Physical harm of women and children is just a different ball-game and people react to it differently.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
This is what I find annoying about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: the incredibly swingy damage formulas mean that a trash fight can become a captcha fight and even a challenge real quick, so the optimal way to play is to treat encounters that 99% of the time are trash as if they are about to kill you. The trash/challenge fights both work well (autofight is very quick, and the challenges are good), and it's often the case that multiple trash monsters create combinations that you have to take seriously, but imo the game would be much better if the RNG variance was toned down so that the types were more clearly distinguished.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
The two are related. Almost every Big Guy soccer player is perennially injured - the torque that big muscles or even a big frame puts on your joints really adds up over the levels of sustained work that a soccer player's body is expected to put in just to be competitive. The only exception is the old-fashioned big striker who hangs out up front and doesn't run all that much except to try and score a goal, and those are only fielded by low-ranked teams.
When you are using an assumed name and trying not to get found out, it's good practice to pick something phonetically close to your original one - "Matt" becomes "Mike", etc. - so that you react more naturally when you hear people use it. Not sure you need that level of obfuscation, though.
I would also say try to steer clear of the most extreme names. You don't want to do the cowboy equivalent of naming yourself "Lilith"; it's not good for the soul.
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