erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
5hr ago
erwgv3g34
20hr ago
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Dang, that beats my candidate: "The far-right statement isn't: 'It's okay to be white', it is you tearing it down."
erwgv3g34
6d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(ant)
We had to use "reproductively viable worker ants" as a euphemism after Scott banned the term from Slate Star Codex (much like we had to call neoreactionaries "death eaters", and HBD "muggle realism", and... actually, now that I think about it, Scott was kind of a dick).
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Trump's ego is the only reason this is even in the Overton window. Governments hate large bills, because cash is outside their control. No other politician has a reason to advocate for this, because they don't benefit from it. Trump benefits from it.
If having Trump's face on the bill is what it takes to make a $250 note, then all praise the God Emperor (though I still think Ronald Reagan or Ayn Rand would have been better choices).
I think the education issue is part of the story as well. A teenager in 1600 could just start adulting at 14-15 and be just fine. You didn’t need to be able to read or do high level math, or even geometry. You just became a blacksmith, or a farmer by following dad around. Modern people need an almost absurdly long education in highly complex skills that massively cut into prime boot knocking years that happen in the teenage years.
You only "need" that education in the sense that credentialing inflation and an unwillingness to let people (or, more accurately, racial groups) fail has made all degrees before the bachelor's worthless (and is currently in the process of destroying that signal, too). The vast majority of jobs can be done with a few weeks, or at most months, of training, assuming the worker already knows how to read and write and do arithmetic, which most kids can do by the time they graduate middle school (and, for the ones that don't, an extra four years of remedial classes are not going to help).
The Amish demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to be economically productive with an eight grade education. We just make it illegal to drop out until 16, strongly encourage people to remain in school until 18 by making it free and putting all sorts of limits on working while underage, and then pipeline people into college while making it illegal for employers to just give applicants IQ tests and gatekeeping lots of jobs under the legal requirements of a bachelor's degree.
The notion that four years of Shakespeare, algebra, chemistry, and history, followed by another four years of specialized study, are in any way necessary or useful to do a modern job is mental.
For a natalist subculture to exist, it needs an alternative to the evils of the education system. We need a path for kids to skip college, and a cultural narrative that says this is good and proper rather than making you a low status loser.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
I watched that one in high school (our AP Physics teacher put it on). Didn't like it as much; I Am Legend has a gloomier, more somber tone, but lacks the substance to make it work. Plus the infected (vampires? zombies?) looked goofy; this was around the time when CGI was replacing practical effects, and it shows.
Still, the shots of New York City deserted were amazing. The first half of the movie (before all the plot happens, when it's just running on aesthetics) is the best part.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Just finished Independence Day on Netflix.
I loved it. Despite its two and a half hour runtime, the pacing is great, and the movie goes by very quickly; it only feels like it drags at a couple of points, such as the first alien dogfight over the desert, which lasts a little too long, or the ending, which goes on for about fifteen minutes after the climax.
The movie is a model of 90's racial colorblindness; you have the white hero (President Whitmore), the black hero (Captain Hiller), and the jewish hero (David Levinson) working together to save the Earth, with nobody ever noticing or remarking upon this fact.
Despite the scale of destruction (dozens of cities wiped out, millions dead), the film has a fun, swashbuckly atmosphere. I particularly enjoyed the president's speech, and the way he personally leads the counterattack against the aliens.
Negatives? The Will Smith dialogue can get annoying ("I got to get me one of these!", "Elvis has left the building!", etc.), but thankfully he only gets a third of the screen time. I'm not sure the little boy or (especially) the dog contributed anything to the movie. And why the hell is that officer waving a gun around while looking at a map?
An excellent summer blockbuster. Highly recommended.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
Doesn't fit. Birth rates did not collapse until after the baby boom (by definition), but the only contraceptive method which is that recent is the pill. Birth control has been around for a very long time. Condoms and natural family planning date to the 1800s. Ancient cultures like the Greeks and the Romans practiced infanticide. And anyone who understands how babies are made can make use of sodomy, fellatio, and coitus interruptus.
Of course, the fact that the US still limits alcohol consumption to 21+ is another quirk.
It's not just alcohol. It's also handguns, and tobacco, and we are now at the point where hotels refuse to check you in unless you are 21. Combine with the increasing expectation that everyone goes to college, and it seems like the modern age of adulthood has effectively become 21-22. If you do adult things at 18, like working full-time, getting married, having children, or serving in the military, you are considered low class.
It’s not completely wrong at all. In the choice between a handsome, confident, successful and ‘evil’ man (a cheater, neglectful or abusive parent, etc) and a handsome, confident, successful and nice man, most non-damaged women will pick the latter.
Strong disagree. Hybristophilia and a predilection for dark triad traits are well-known patterns of female attraction. There is a reason why the stereotypical romance novel love interest is a werewolf or a mafia boss who treats the protagonist like shit for 90% of the story.
Girls simp for Snape and Sasuke, not Harry and Naruto.
erwgv3g34
10d ago
Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips.
Disagree. I have noticed that even otherwise stunning MILFs tend to have veiny feet. In fact, that's my theory for why foot fetishism is so prevalent in men; pretty feet are a hard to fake signal of youth.
That being said, I think there's an important difference: So called "transitioning" is a dumb idea for anyone at any age. A strong argument can be made that nobody should be permitted to do it whatsoever.
Agreed. If a man went around thinking he was Napoleon and chopping off his legs to match his desired height, we would lock him up in the psych ward until he stopped being a danger to himself. Transitioning should be illegal.
However, there is a principle that in a free society, adults are given a lot of liberty and autonomy over their bodies. Therefore, at a minimum, "transitioning" can and should be banned for anyone under 18.
Arguments about personal liberty died in the fires of wokeness. It's clear now that someone's vision is going to rule society; liberalism is an unstable fantasy. We can have a culture that bans and shames transgenderism, or we can have a culture that encourages and celebrates transgenderism; there is no in-between. I know what I pick.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states.
We don't have a culture that encourages 16-year-old girls to marry. This is a holdover from an earlier (healthier) era; no congresscritter would vote for something like that today. All relevant changes to these kinds of laws in modern times have been to raise the age upwards.
By contrast, we do have a culture that encourages teenagers to transition. It's in media and schools and therapists and discord mods. I have never seen a married 16-year-old girl; I see trans people all the time (trans prostitutes are common at my hotel; I also saw a transwoman at an SSC meetup).
erwgv3g34
12d ago
Chatbot Arena ranks deepseek-v4-pro-thinking at 30th for text (1461 ELO) and 17th for coding (1459 ELO). By contrast, claude-sonnet-4-6 is 22nd for text (1468 ELO) and 6th for coding (1524 ELO); there is a definite gap. On the other hand, kimi-k2.6 is 29th for text (1462 ELO) and 7th for coding (1519 ELO), which is closer. And glm-5.1 is even better; 20th for text (1472 ELO) and 5th for coding (1532 ELO). So it looks like the strongest open source Chinese models are equal to or better than Sonnet.
Text Arena
| Rank | Model | License | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | glm-5.1 | MIT | 1472 |
| 22 | claude-sonnet-4-6 | Propietary | 1468 |
| 29 | kimi-k2.6 | Modified MIT | 1462 |
| 30 | deepseek-v4-pro-thinking | MIT | 1461 |
Code Arena
| Rank | Model | License | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | glm-5.1 | MIT | 1532 |
| 6 | claude-sonnet-4-6 | Propietary | 1524 |
| 7 | kimi-k2.6 | Modified MIT | 1519 |
| 17 | deepseek-v4-pro-thinking | MIT | 1459 |
erwgv3g34
12d ago
Have you ever tried to load page of Astral Codex Ten after it has had a week to accumulate comments? Running Crysis is easier.
Not really? The most obvious AI tells (em dashes, negative parallelisms, didactic disclaimers, emojis as formatting, etc.) are things I have never used in my writing. AI is aiming for some combination of HR inoffensive, highbrow literary, and "how do you do fellow kids"; none of it matches my style.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
You can still use Opus for free in the Arena; it's just been gachafied. You have to keep doing battles and ranking assistants until you luck out and get an Opus. It's very addictive; I have lost entire days prompting the Arena to get high-level models.
erwgv3g34
20d ago
Usually between fifteen hundred and three thousand in the safe, plus another two or three hundred in my wallet. Enough to get me through a month or two of room and board, and also useful for unexpected expenses.
erwgv3g34
20d ago
From "The Struggle to Conceive with Frozen Eggs":
Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”
Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.
Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.
In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.
Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.
Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground.
“It was one of the worst days of my life. There were so many emotions. I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed,” she said. “I questioned, ‘Why me?’ ‘What did I do wrong?’ ”
This egg-freezing meme needs to die.
erwgv3g34
20d ago
The neurochemicals are just the causal mechanism behind love. There has to be one; what would it mean for there not to be? Your brain just started wanting to be with another person for literally no reason? But any other casual mechanism could be just as easily dismissed.
I am reminded of the argument that it is immoral to hold someone accountable for their low intelligence because intelligence is genetic and they didn't choose to get bad genes, and all I can think is, as opposed to what? If intelligence is instead caused by the environment, nobody chooses how they are raised. And if intelligence is caused by the soul, then nobody chooses what soul gets put into their bodies. And so on. The objection is not to genes, but to any casual mechanism which can be understood.
Falling in love was the single most important experience of my life, though it was 20 years ago. Knowing that the feeling was triggered by neurochemicals in my brain does not change that. Nor does knowing that my brain was executing an adaptation that was selected for in the ancestral environment because it made my ancestors pair-bond and therefore more likely to successfully raise offspring who would survive in turn to have offspring of their own. Chemicals and evolution explain love; they do not explain it away.
Finished The Rose of Versailles on Netflix
Well, that's not something you see every day; a musical anime film! For a moment, I felt like I was back in the 90s, watching Anastasia and The Road to El Dorado. Some of the songs are pretty good; "Anger and Pain" (which plays as the French Revolution starts) is outstanding, as is "Never Surrender" (which plays during the duel with Alain).
The movie is very pretty, specially compared to the original series. This is to be expected; the animation of a 1979 TV show cannot possibly compete with the animation of a 2025 theatrical film. The colors are vibrant, with red and blue uniforms popping out of the screen. The battle at Tuileries and the storming of the Bastille are particularly stunning.
Unfortunately, writing is the weak link in the movie. The script has a serious problem with "show, don't tell"; characters tell each other they are in love rather than being shown falling in love, or talk about hungry relatives that are never seen onscreen.
The film's pacing is ridiculous, moving so fast that it makes the speed of light look like a stoned turtle. It seemed like every time I blinked, the narrative skipped forward three years. I am not sure I would have been able to follow the plot had I not already been familiar with the story.
Entire subplots are reduced to three seconds of screen time during musical numbers, such as Madame du Barry and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, or excised entirely, such as the Black Knight or Saint-Just moonlighting as a masked vigilante noble killer (that last one was probably for the best; what the fuck, original series?). Everything is pared down to the core story of Lady Oscar and Marie Antoinette, but even then these characters are missing some serious development.
To some extent, this is understandable. The Rose of Versailles is an epic story, taking place over 33 years and 40 episodes; compressing it into a 2 hour movie is an impossible task. But then, they should not have attempted it. This should have been a trilogy.
The film feels like a highlight reel of the show's best moments, or perhaps a recap episode. Actually, someone on Reddit called it an advertisement for the manga, and perhaps that was its true purpose.
Overall, I'd recommend watching the 1979 anime instead, at least at first. It's free on YouTube!
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