erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
Extremely valuable. Doubly so with uncertainty about AI and the US government. You are in a position of "fuck you". Do not throw it away.
Whatever kind of risk you want to take, take it on the side.
I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".
Same. I kept seeing ACOUP linked in discussions about ancient/medieval/fantasy warfare (classical Greece, classical Rome, LoTR, Game of Thrones, etc.), which is right up my alley, so I decided to try his series of seven articles on Sparta. Every other paragraph was about how evil and oppressive and patriarchal the Spartiates were. Making the point, once, that what we usually think of as "Spartans" were a tiny aristocratic elite and that the majority of the population of Lacedaemon was helots, would have been fine. This was... not that.
I am not in school. If I am spending my free time reading about Sparta, it's because I think Spartans are cool, and I want to learn more about them. Reading post after post from a guy who clearly hates Sparta and everything that is associated with it in the public imagination was decidedly unpleasant.
I finished the series, but I'm not gonna read anything else this asshole puts out ever again.
I've been trying out the new Claude Opus 4.6 model on LMArena. As usual, I focused on creative writing exercises involving Asuka and Shinji, especially limes and lemons (though I also tossed in a crossover between Nagatoro and Age of Em). Unsurprisingly, I got a ton of refusals (I had to gaslight it to get my gay conversion story), but the fanfics I managed to wrangle out were really good. Claude Opus 4.6 is definitely a stronger writer than Grok 4.1 or ChatGPT 5.2. Won't be long now until authors go the way of the artist.
I just wish to God it was uncensored.
BTW, should we have a recurring AI thread? Both for showing off generations (stories, songs, images, videos, etc.) and to discuss industry news. It's a huge topic right now, one that I don't see going away anytime soon, and a poor fit for the culture war thread.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Indeed. Einstein never wrote anything as good as his annus mirabilis papers. Orson Scott Card never won both the Hugo and the Nebula award again in the same year after Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Scott Alexander never regained his magic after he moved to Substack.
From "On Things that are Awesome" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
(2) I can think of many places where I disagree with statements emitted by Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan, and even one or two places where I would want to pencil in a correction to Jaynes (his interpretation of quantum mechanics being the most obvious). In fact, when my brain says “Greg Egan” it is really referring to two novels, Permutation City and Quarantine, which overshadow all his other works in my book. And when my brain says “Hofstadter” it is referring to Gödel, Escher, Bach with a small side order of some essays in Metamagical Themas. For most people their truly awesome work is usually only a slice of their total output, from some particular years (I find that scary as hell, by the way).
(3) Once you realize that you’re only admiring someone’s peak work, you also realize that the work is not the person: I don’t actually know Hofstadter, or Greg Egan, or E. T. Jaynes. I have no idea what they are (were) like in their personal lives, or whether their daily deeds had any trace of the awesome that is in their books. If you start thinking that a person is supposed to be as universally and consistently awesome as their best work, so that every word from their lips is supposed to be as good as the best book they ever wrote, that’s probably some kind of failure mode. This is not to try to moderate or diminish the awesomeness: for their best work is that awesome, and so there must have been a moment of their life, a time-slice out of their worldline, which was also that awesome. But what the symbol “Douglas Hofstadter” stands for, in my mind, is not all his works, or all his life.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
No; he should threaten to break her arm and boast about his warrior lineage, like a true enlightened being!
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Of course they do. Governments hate cash because they can't control it. Transactions they can't tax? Trades in illegal goods and services, such as weed or prostitution? A medium of exchange they can't debank you from for wrongthink? Unacceptable! Cash makes the state blind, and that is unforgivable to a bureaucrat. Which is why India declared war on cash.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Why are all the guys so eager to fuck teenage girls also so insistent that these girls be virgins?
Half the point of dating a teenager is that she is much more likely to be a virgin.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Guns are fairly high up the list of things which can kill you if handled with merely common or garden stupidity.
So are cars, but nobody talks about being scared of cars as if it was normal. You are merely expected to learn simple safety measures like looking both ways before crossing the street as a kid, and how to actually drive as a teenager.
In a sane world, schools would teach every boy how to shoot instead of telling them that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
I think the public education system does a fine job at catechizing the basics of Holocaustianity; it happened, it was the worst thing ever, and the most important thing in the world is making sure it never happens again. Expecting normies to remember a number or a date is... too much. They don't remember that about anything, not even the things they care about.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
"Reproductively viable worker ants" was one of the best euphemisms to came out of Scott's censorship campaign.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
I should have said production order, not publication order.
I am a firm believer that TOS should start with "The Cage" followed by "Where No Man Has Gone Before", rather than "The Man Trap" followed by "Charlie X".
Exponential population growth is physically unsustainable, but non exponential population growth is fiscally unsustainable. Every government on Earth has promised more in pensions and healthcare to old people than they paid in, and the only way to make good on that promise is to enroll an ever-increasing number of young people into the system. The welfare state is the ultimate pyramid scheme.
Our choices were India or China. Both suck. The time to solve this was 90 years ago.
What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?
"The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve."
If you want something to tide him over until he is older, try Space Cases. It's basically Voyager for kids.
And what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch? Wrath of Kahn seems like a decent stand-alone introduction to the whole franchise, but most of the other popular movies/episodes seem like they have too much "fan service" in them. I just watched a few "best of star trek" collection dvds, and all these episodes require way too much background knowledge about the universe to make sense. Something like Trouble with Tribbles, for example, could almost be a good introduction to the series for kids because of the cute tribble creatures, but you already have to understand that the franchise is about space exploration and colonizing planets and the prime directive and the war with klingons to actually make any sense of the setting.
What's wrong with publication order? "The Cage", TOS, TAS, the first six movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, Galaxy Quest, done.
That said, the first full episode of Star Trek I ever saw was "Blink of an Eye", which a Trekkie teacher of mine put on when I was in 10th grade; I fucking loved it, though I later learned it is basically just a remake of Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. It helps that, much like an episode of Wagon Train, "Blink of an Eye" is actually the planet's story, with the crew of Voyager serving primarily as viewpoint characters; this means you do not need to know anything about them, or the wider setting.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
From "The Refragmentation" by Paul Graham:
The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of the 20th. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."
For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn't much to differentiate them.
One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs that the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive, whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.
And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync. [6]
In a way mid-century TV culture was good. The view it gave of the world was like you'd find in a children's book, and it probably had something of the effect that (parents hope) children's books have in making people behave better. But, like children's books, TV was also misleading. Dangerously misleading, for adults. In his autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to families while they're having dinner.
I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I stopped watching it. [7] But it wasn't just TV. It seemed like everything around me was crap. The politicians all saying the same things, the consumer brands making almost identical products with different labels stuck on to indicate how prestigious they were meant to be, the balloon-frame houses with fake "colonial" skins, the cars with several feet of gratuitous metal on each end that started to fall apart after a couple years, the "red delicious" apples that were red but only nominally apples. And in retrospect, it was crap. [8]
But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college.
[6] I wonder how much of the decline in families eating together was due to the decline in families watching TV together afterward.
[7] I know when this happened because it was the season Dallas premiered. Everyone else was talking about what was happening on Dallas, and I had no idea what they meant.
[8] I didn't realize it till I started doing research for this essay, but the meretriciousness of the products I grew up with is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. When companies can't compete on price, they compete on tailfins.
[9] Monroeville Mall was at the time of its completion in 1969 the largest in the country. In the late 1970s the movie Dawn of the Dead was shot there. Apparently the mall was not just the location of the movie, but its inspiration; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. My first job was scooping ice cream in the Baskin-Robbins.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
I feel roughly the same. I think that AI will destroy a bunch of jobs that were the intellectual equivalent of menial labor, but create an equal or greater number of creative jobs.
This is only true if AI plateaus. If it gets even a couple dozen IQ points smarter, those creative jobs are gone, too. And I don't see any indication of AI plateauing.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
So you haven't heard about their insane marker system? It's right up there with the Waffle House Index and their chair-parrying employees for infamy.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?
COVID killed off 24-hour businesses, including restaurants and retail. Plenty of other places (banks, libraries, etc.) reduced hours during the pandemic and never expanded them again. The lockdowns did permanent damage to our society.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
For why, I'm not exactly sure, but I can guess a combination of factors. It just costs a lot more to run a restaurant than it used to, because of rent and labor costs, so it's not profitable to keep a big space open with few customers.
Shouldn't higher rent encourage you to keep the business open 24/7, since it's a fixed cost that does not scale with hours of operation?
erwgv3g34
17d ago
erwgv3g34
18d ago
Cross-posted from /r/rational:
Gabital - Fantasy Capitalism 101
Gabital tells the story of Gabi, a goblin wheelwright who loves cupcakes. One day, she gets tired of working for Chief, and decides that she wants to work for herself. But, as she is going to find out, there is a lot more to running a business than she first thought...
I came across this webcomic randomly while pursuing my interest in cute goblin girls. I expected to hate it, since it's obviously written from a Marxist perspective (labor theory of value, bosses as parasites, etc.), but to my surprise, I was hooked.
The art is pretty (not gorgeous like Dresden Codak or Seed, but certainly better than Transdimensional Brain Chip or The Order of the Stick), the protagonist is likable (Gabi is intelligent, hard-working, perseverant, and truly believes in her ideals of helping the laborers rather than becoming another Chief), and the details of how she operates the new enterprise (and the obstacles she faces in the way) are thorough, coherent, and fascinating.
I was impressed when the artist included an anecdote of incentive structures encouraging employees to do unproductive things (paying per cupcake leading the orc guy to try making three times as many at once, ruining the batch) and I fell in love when I saw the Sankey diagrams describing the relationship between revenue, expenses, and profits (thought I could not help but wonder how many of the goblins came in a fluffer).
On the other hand, the workers seem mighty ready to subsidize the non-profitable parts of the business, such as filing tax paperwork; that does not square up with what I know of co-ops.
It could well be that the communist approach to economics ruins the comic later, but for now I highly recommend it.
Of all the ways I thought a SIG P320 could kill someone, this was not one of them (it's gonna be even more if this incident is what starts the second civil war).
erwgv3g34
25d ago
Good post. Reminds me of this comment from @KulakRevolt:
After the battle of Cannae the roman citizenry hounded and tormented the survivors who ran. Their families were hounded, they were reduced to penury and begging in the streets as citizenry who recognized them spat on them and their children.
Finally when Rome took the fight to Carthage, these men begged, pleaded, that they be permitted the honor of a suicide mission, some inevitably fatal horror that might certainly kill them but restore the honor of their families that their surviving children not starve. The roman senate, in a moment of uncharacteristic mercy, permitted them to die so.
These officers should be begging that they be permitted to join some press-ganged penal battalion in Ukraine. That they might atone for their cowardice by having their half burnt ashes scattered in the wind of Russian artillery.
It's from Mean Girls, where a character tries to turn "fetch" into the cool new slang word and is eventually told "stop trying to make 'fetch' happen; it's not going to happen".
In this context, @cjet79 is telling the media to stop trying to meme things into existence.
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