HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
1d ago
I have to wonder if it only started running out of battery in that clip.
HalloweenSnarry
1d ago
This is a very fair point to raise, I'm just wanting to point out that the "what about the Ukrainians?" line of argument ignores all the ways that Russia can keep reducing the Ukrainian population even in the event of capitulation and surrender.
HalloweenSnarry
1d ago
Also my resume is mostly a bunch of crappy audio games that are not on Github.
Are they on Itch, at least?
HalloweenSnarry
2d ago
HalloweenSnarry
2d ago
...Ah.
HalloweenSnarry
3d ago
Worth also remembering that Zelensky became a Presidential candidate in the first place because he was caught on camera ranting about corrupt politicians, IIRC. His fashion choices are indeed most likely motivated by him wanting to distance himself from the politicians of yore.
HalloweenSnarry
5d ago
Was the rent truly so high that it cut into other necessities? He probably wasn't entirely wrong, and from the sound of it, he probably has other motivations for quitting drinking.
HalloweenSnarry
5d ago
I am one of those people against the treatment Matt Taylor was given in 2014, and even so, I don't think "reduce obnoxious wokeishness in science" is worth a lazily-indiscriminate defunding campaign.
HalloweenSnarry
5d ago
Yeah, and said monopoly was eventually broken (sort-of?) by the government itself. Maybe Nybbler could have used the example of the RCA labs (who did do a bunch of interesting fundamental science), but then again, the Labs division were often at loggerheads with management in the back half of the 20th Century, and this infighting led to RCA's demise.
HalloweenSnarry
5d ago
"If it don't make dollars it don't make sense" is an absolutely terrible heuristic for government spending.
This is pretty much the same argument made against things like trying to reform USPS. Yes, it loses money, but guess what? Life itself is inherently a money-losing enterprise. I think of Bostrom's phrase "a Disneyland with no children," and I feel like the spending-reform types are unconsciously drawn to trying to instantiate it.
HalloweenSnarry
5d ago
I want Manifest Destiny, not overseas entanglements.
Literally our own history showed that we did the Manifest Destiny as far as we could (even going so far as to conquer Hawai'i, which is over a sea), and then like a couple decades after that, we decided to help push the Spanish Empire into the dustbin of history. If anything, Manifest Destiny probably led to the Spanish-American War, and I could 50-Stalins you and claim that the American Empire should not have gone west of Oklahoma or Texas.
HalloweenSnarry
5d ago
"Option D: Apologise profusely to Russia and provide them with any support necessary to completely subjugate and annex Ukraine, in return for a promise that they will cooperate in containing China"
Why on earth does anyone think that a Russia hopped-up on revanchism is going to do a 180 and go "okay, bro, no problem, let's do this together" instead of being like "ha, fat chance, as if, Western imbeciles" if this were to come to pass? I don't care how synchronized the people are to the will of Putin or for whatever theory of Kremlinology you subscribe to, this sounds plain retarded spoken aloud, even putting aside how outside the Overton Window it is.
HalloweenSnarry
7d ago
Eh, I think irony and detachment was the thing that took over around 2010, though that too may be passing.
HalloweenSnarry
8d ago
I'd argue that Japan is already in a pretty good place in most respects. Trapped in a local maximum, perhaps, but it's not the worst local maximum to be in.
HalloweenSnarry
12d ago
If Haiti were French, is that terrible?
But Haiti was French, and Haiti being French is arguably the reason that Haiti is Haiti nowadays. If Haiti were never French (or Spanish either), then Haiti today might not be the Haiti we know. I imagine it's not like France just sheepishly gave up their colony for reasons of un-based-ness or whatever, there was a literal slave revolt. Perhaps the French thought they were slavedriving for the best interests of themselves and their slaves, but the Haitians/Taino clearly didn't see it that way.
HalloweenSnarry
12d ago
Yes, and while I don't want to bring them into these arguments because it might be seen as lazy, we have the Holodomor and Chernobyl to look at as prior examples of how Russian control ended up working out for Ukraine. Starving populations and irradiated no-go zones are probably pretty bad for GDP, you have to admit!
HalloweenSnarry
12d ago
Thing is, the problem with this view is that "trans women are not women" is not a universally-accepted truth--if anything, it is a matter of fundamental values conflict. To you, it is truth, but to trans women, it is the opposite. The only thing that points to objective reality is a trans person's birth identity--but the entire point of being transgender is to leave said identity behind as thoroughly and quickly as possible. You're not going to be able to do more than keep referring to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as just "Prince."
HalloweenSnarry
12d ago
Isn't one potential argument here that Ukraine was wanting to take the same route as Poland, but didn't have time to really do that before 2014? I think even Kulak made that argument early in the war, that Ukraine saw what happened to Poland and were like "Orthodox Jesus, I've seen what you done for the Poles and I want that for myself."
If the invasion were put off by like 5 years, maybe we'd see some actual progress towards EU-ification.
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
I won't consider video games saturated until developers can create faster than "content locusts" want to consume.
Some people might argue that we already quietly hit this point well before the current AI craze. The struggles of the modern gaming industry and the indie scene are partly because it's (perceived as) hard to peel chronic Minecraft/Fortnite/COD/etc. players away from their comfort games.
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
Gmails "Promotions" tab annihilated mass market email advertising well before LLMs.
I do still get a lot of ad-type emails in my main inbox, but then, I haven't "trained" Gmail to move some types to Promotions.
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
I think this perspective misses the concept that the criminal might just rob, rape, and kill you anyways, regardless of how much resistance/obedience one puts up. How does one determine if an adversary is an Anton Chigurh versus a Viktor Sayenko?
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
That's why the party hasn't moved left as much as the very-online contingent of progressives want it to. Those Black women are a lot more conservative (both in the "further right politics" sense and in the "less willing to shake up the status quo" sense).
This is news to me, I thought it would have been Black men who'd be the more conservative type.
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
I personally don't think "understanding," at least the way we humans understand (heh) it, is a necessary component of intelligence. I'm comfortable with calling the software that underlies the behavior of imps in Doom as "enemy artificial intelligence," even though I'm pretty sure there's no "understanding" going on in my 486 Thinkpad laptop that's causing the blobs of brown pixels to move on the screen in a certain way based on what my player character is doing, for instance. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck and is otherwise completely indistinguishable from a duck in every way that I can measure, then I'll call it a duck.
Yeah, to tie this back to the above thread about the ramifications of massively-increased automation, what the hell does it matter if an AI really understands anything, if it puts most of us out of a job anyways? Philosophy is for those who don't have to grind for their bread.
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
and given that “owning AI” doesn’t require you to be in the country at all, there’s nothing tying the guy who owns the company to the country the AI is in.
This may sound silly, but presuming we get superintelligent-but-completely-domesticated AI, a government could possibly just tax the AI itself. In this scenario, a government asks an AI to pay some tax based on the money it's earned from serving and working for people. Granted, this requires the AI to actually have meaningful access to the relevant pursestrings.
Having read that article, I'm beginning to think that the political thrust coming from Trump, Vance, Musk, and others is more about morals, values, and aesthetics rather than advancing some more coherent goal. The Vance quote seems to illustrate it, especially taken in light of his comments overseas during that security conference: this is about establishing and enforcing the superiority of a specific set of values, not just within America, but also among the West as well.
Which, sure, duh, "MAGA" has been Trump's slogan, but I think now the strategies, such as they are, make a lot more sense when not viewed at from a game theory perspective.
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