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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3855 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 14, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I went to a sport game for the first time in my life, a soccer match at my hometown's brand new soccer stadium. I happen to know a fair amount of the main local team's supporters (I've participated in their pub quiz team for some years), and I now for the first time followed them to the supporter stands of the team itself. I was surprised how much I got into it - definitely different live than when watching from TV/stream and getting distracted by a million little things. A 2-2 draw but some exciting gameplay nevertheless.

Are you normally someone who becomes "one with the crowd?" I find that people with the personality types you see overrepresented here are good at keeping their ego with church, protests, political stuff, but something about sports seems to loosen it up sometimes (probably because it's just fun with less baggage?).

If I'm at a concert for a familiar band that I like, in an Orthodox church (preferably my home church), a protest whose goals I can completely share etc. I can get into it a lot and, indeed, become "one with the crowd", but if it's even a bit unfamiliar to me or not to my liking, I'm cold.

2 years late to the party but I've started playing Elden Ring.

Long story short, I mostly agree with the majority sentiment, that it feels like how games used to feel like. It's not exactly controversial to assert that modern triple A games are terrible. Much has been said and written about why modern triple A games have regressed in quality and how Elden Ring was a breath of fresh air because it didn't make those same mistakes.

But here's my shower thought. And it might be dead obvious but I'll share nonetheless. It doesn't have to be that way!

Elden Ring feels more like the games from the 90s than games from the 90s. And that's obviously because we have better tooling and hardware in just about every aspect. It's infinitely easier to make good games now than it was in the 90s, we just don't make them.

It's also infinitely easier to write good software now. We have gpt, forums with decades of content, ides, YouTube, etc. Why do we keep on writing bloated shit? We don't have to.

Macdonald's fries would still be good if they used beef tallow.

Just about every way In which the quality of things regressed, it's easier now than ever to make an even higher quality version.

Something is wrong with us, that we don't. And I don't believe it's an eternal September the masses want slop situation, that's a copout. Elden Ring is one of the best selling games of 2022. It's a culture thing.

Why do we keep on writing bloated shit?

Because hardware is good enough that we can get away with it, kind of.

I work at a large company with a couple thousand software engineers and fairly selective interviews, and it's unbelievable how much waste there is in terms of easy optimizations left undone. There are $10,000 bills just lying around all over the place, and people often drag their feet on fixing them even when I point it out and spell out the solution.

I think what you identify as "feeling like games from the 90s" is the lack of shame of letting you feel the designer's hand. Western designers seem obsessed with making games that feel like systems piled on top of systems. Levels that feel like they they were designed by following rules rather than just "being how they are" because a designer wanted it so. To create difficulty, a western developper create a class of boss or miniboss enemy with tweaked numbers to make it more difficult. To create difficulty, a From Software level designer puts a normal trash mob like a dog around a corner so you don't see him and he blindsides you, then makes another dog fall from above on you because haha funny! Western games barely ever do this anymore, they don't want you to think about (curse) the level designer.

I think AAA vidya simply mirror the gradual enshittification that has already set in their siblings in other creative media like blockbuster movies or popular comics, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was the last Call of Duty game I ever played and I'm okay with letting it stay that way. The increasing penetration of DEI/political bullshit didn't help too although in my opinion it's not the main driver, the real culprit seems to be either filthy casuals settling into the hobby or people legitimately becoming allergic to difficulty - at some point challenge in vidya became something you seek out in specific niches (insert dank souls meme here) instead of being the default waterline of competence videogames expect from the player.

Lest I be too cranky, there are definitely some "casual" quality of life features I really can't imagine games without nowadays (I'm too used to autosaves/automaps and really don't miss undocumented features/mechanics, I try not be a google gamer) so the influence is not entirely negative, but it's a thin line to walk, one man's welcome challenge is another man's carpal tunnel syndrome. The winning move imo is to present a wide "range" of challenge within a single game to cast as wide a net as possible, but that's understandably a pretty big ask and few games pull that off - mainly rogueli[k|t]es which often have a flexible difficulty system, or sprawling autism simulators like Path of Exile that are huge enough to accommodate many different playstyles (make goofy ahh builds and shit items actually work, renounce sleep and push uber pinnacles within 2 days of league start, literally just sit in your hideout and trade all day until you can steamroll the game through sheer economic power, etc.)

Personally I hope think AAA gaming is a lost cause, take the indiepill or go full weeb, you won't regret it either way. You might have to do basic research with indies though, since those seem to be either absolutely neutral without a whiff of idpol or entirely woke and wearing it proudly on its sleeve, there's like no in-between.

I largely agree with you here. I'd add that not only are games worse, but there are actually too many of them. This is more specific to online games. Since the golden age of WoW passed, there have been a number of well made and engaging games that failed financially b/c there are more of these games than there is a player base to support all of them at once. I think an online game with 1/3 the total number of games, but with triple the players, would be better for everyone. A current example of this are the games Mordhau and Chivalry 2. These are both "medieval slasher" type games, similar to FPS like Counterstrike, but with medieval, mostly melee weapons. They are fun. These two games are direct competitors, very similar to each other, but with a number of small but impactful differences. The matchmaking for these game are super local to your area to keep the pings as low as possible. There are not enough people playing either of the games to have a health matchmaking ecosystem, I often launch one of them and fail to actually join a match for 15+ minutes before giving up and playing something else. If only one of these games existed that would not be the case, everyone would be in a single player pool.

I think AAA vidya simply mirror the gradual enshittification that has already set in their siblings in other creative media like blockbuster movies or popular comics, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was the last Call of Duty game I ever played and I'm okay with letting it stay that way. The increasing penetration of DEI/political bullshit didn't help too although in my opinion it's not the main driver, the real culprit seems to be either filthy casuals settling into the hobby or people legitimately becoming allergic to difficulty - at some point challenge in vidya became something you seek out in specific niches (insert dank souls meme here) instead of being the default waterline of competence videogames expect from the player.

I mean, the one begat the other. Once you accept the premise that "games are for everyone", it's not far from removing all hard skill gates, sanding off all the rough edges, turning the game into an effortless amusement park ride from point A to point B, and then also going full clown world on having it star some ugly lesbian with Ron Pearlman's jawline.

The western game industry is probably more people who think "games are for everyone" in the worst possible sense than not. They don't even like games in any sense you would have grown up with from the 70's through the 00's. They want everything to be some combination of slot machine and safe-horny visual novel.

They want everything to be some combination of slot machine and safe-horny visual novel.

Depending on how you define a VN and how you define difficulty, you can have a difficult VN. I've never managed to find the true ending of Kara no Shoujo, for instance. It's even somewhat possible to have difficulty on replay or with a walkthrough, although that requires a PRNG somewhere and it can be tricky to cross over from "memorisation" to "understanding required" (Miyuki's security questions in Totono are randomised, for instance, and thus immune to walkthroughs, but I wouldn't call that difficult since it's a pure rote recall task), particularly with strict definitions of what counts as "VN" vs. e.g. "raising sim" or "turn-based strategy".

People who played Elden Ring on release were already 11 years late to the party. I like it, but it's de-facto Dark Souls IV. Not just mechanically, even many specific weapons and specific characters (welcome back, dear old friend Patches).

Triple A sucks because they ironically make too much money, so they can afford to hire way too many people. Add modern culture with its low hierarchies & trigger-happy hypersensitivity and you have a recipe for disaster. It's way too many cooks, and each cook is especially confident about the stuff they don't like, so everything ends up extremely bland, bloated or both.

Japanese culture doesn't really have these particularities. I strongly recommend Kojima's games as well.

Other good news is that the indie scene is also stronger than ever. The modding scene, likewise. So it's quite easy to avoid the triple A slob, though some issues extend beyond it (for example, even indie devs lean significantly more woke than average).

I think a major issue is the over focus on monetisation in the west. Almost all newer major studios are engaging in the most degenerate design possible, with little care actual game design and writing and handing that over to the DEI people or only pay perfunctory attention to it.

The few companies not doing this are legacy developers. Once one goes bad, which is almost inevitable over time, it's just gone and nothing replaces it.

Like with movies there is a mid budget gap in the market. Tons of great Indies but major productions that have to sell unreasonable amounts or use predatory monetisation strategies to make money.

The people interested in making games, aren't interested in making games. The pay is shit, the hours are bad, and the chance for breakout success on your own to avoid those issues is vanishingly small. You can make more money doing just about anything else in the same field but outside the AAA game industry.

It isn't actually that easy to make a good game, the netcode alone is a nightmare for most multiplayer games (except for CS!). It seems like it should be easy, it ain't, and you'll make a more as a quant (even rhymes!) if you like that sort of thing.

It is a culture thing, but probably not in the way you imagined when typing up this "enshitification" post. More like we get Zuckerberg's instead of John von Neumann's because that is what we incentivise. I think you already know this, because you're a programmer? Maybe? I can't recall and your account is private.

Anyone watching the new season of The Boys. Cause it feels...worse?

Like, the show was never really subtle. But it seems over the top now. I don't care about things like the Frenchie subplots already. But the show doesn't even seem to be able to keep a coherent continuity.

  • Victoria Ocasio-Cortez is supposed to be deadset against Vought and Homelander. How can she be seen having even vaguely positive conversations with Homelander after what happened last season? Why is she at any Vought event at all?
  • For that matter, how does she justify her opposition to muzzling supes giving her political positions? Are we just going to pretend they don't exist?
  • "Schools that teach Critical Supe Theory"? When was this supposed to happen? The theme of the show has been Vought being in control of the super narrative for decades up until recently. Also: "Critical Supe Theory"? Fuck off.
  • What's with this continuity breaking idea that all heroics are fake (raised by A-Train's brother)? Manipulated, yes. Used for Vought's gain? Sure. Not worth the cost in collateral? Probably not. But almost every supe thing we've seen mentioned involves choreography or lying.

FYI: Garth Ennis, writer of The Boys comic book, would much rather be writing anything without superheroes. The thing that he cares the most about is his military historical fiction comics. And I've read them and they're basically all better than The Boys. I don't what the best one to start with would be. War Stories (AKA War Story) is an anthology series that varied in quality as all anthologies do, but had some very high highs. There's also Enemy Ace: War in Heaven, which was great.

I don't think he's totally embarrassed by his superhero work or anything, but it's not where his heart lies.

First season was fine, but the writing was already on the wall by the end of it. Didn't even bother with the second season and don't have the impression I missed anything.

Kripke is also just not a good writer for anything but short episodic monster-of-the-week style shows with black/white morality - see Supernatural. Almost all the overarching storylines were awful and contrived. He can do some decent character work, but it's always obvious whether a character is supposed to be good or evil. And there as well he had a massive problem with dragging things out by ending every season by putting everyone back to starting positions.

And there as well he had a massive problem with dragging things out by ending every season by putting everyone back to starting positions.

Did he? I think SPN had its problems - the plot was the same loop over and over: find Biblical Macguffin in pieces across the season, build magical thing, vanquish enemy - and by the end of his run the show was really showing its budgetary constraints (the show simply couldn't do the apocalyptic premise justice, which is why the characters went around collecting items like a Ubisoft game) but I think Kripke's actual time as showrunner (S1-S5) actually did have a plot that built to a conclusive end instead of cyclical resets.

He left after that and basically every single plotline from those early days was recycled over and over.

Imo, SPN was at its strongest in the first two seasons, when it was 90% episodic monster and 10% overarching season storyline. Kripke also said himself that he originally intended for the show to be only three seasons. My personal impression was that the Azazel storyline (the first two seasons) fit with the design of the show in general (in a show about hunting down monsters, hunting down a more powerful monster makes sense) and seemed clearly intended from the beginning, the Lilith storyline ( third and fourth season) already felt tacked-on and increasing scope clearly strained their resources as you said, and the Lucifer storyline (fifth season) was just the same problems, but moreso. He also did several bait-and-switches already (SAM IS DEAD! Lol nope he isn't DEAN IS IN HELL! lol nope he's back on earth).

Every season after that was just repeating the mistakes that Kripke had already committed. Kripke also still stayed on the show as an consultant for the entire runtime, and being the orginal creator I don't believe that he didn't give his blessing for the garbage that was to come.

With this thread, I don't think I'm going to bother with this season. The only thing amusing to come out of this is Starlight's boggening https://i.4cdn.org/tv/1718365064375134.jpg (Actually pretty fucking sad to see)

She actually doesn't look much different in the show. I think someone taught her to do an Instagram model face for that photo where she sucks in her cheeks and puts her lips in a weird position.

It was incredibly noticeable in Season 3. I think we've just acclimated since we've had the same face for two years now.

In another season people will also stop asking if Mother's Milk has been recast and I'll stop doing a double take when I see him.

I disagree. Not only does she look noticeably older, she looks skeletal. Buccal Fat surgery should be banned, it just ages a woman out.

I'm guessing that Eric Kripke has been struggling with the direction of writing this season. Basically the writing room needs a strong leader to steer things, and that's not happening.

So the only ideas that are getting into scripts are shallow attacks on the out group. Because if you speak out against the critical supe theory joke, you're a potential Trump sympathizer.

I think the rest of the season is probably going to suck. It's possible that they'll get it together but I think they are just going to get burnt out from the arguing and things will end on a bad note.

It is possible that they focussed on the later episodes, fleshed them out in detail, then realized they didn't have enough storyline material for the early episodes.

The amusing irony, to me, is that the more blatantly bad and stupid they make the red tribe look, the more incompetent and feckless the protags look.

They even lampshade it in Episode 1 of Se4. "How have you guys gotten WORSE at your jobs?"

Starlight is supposedly one of the more effective do-gooders but she can't even make a dent in Homelander's popularity, can't do any material damage to Vought, and can't even shift political outcomes in her side's favor.

If homelander's fanbase is as weak-willed and dumb as the show wants to portray them, then the protags should be able to outsmart them and possibly manipulate them to their ends. But nah. Apparently ONLY Homelander and co. are capable of manipulating rubes.

And the only guy who seems to be somewhat effective is Butcher, who is about as problematic as can be even if his heart is seemingly in the right place.

I am not even sure who a liberal viewer is supposed to root for.

Starlight is supposedly one of the more effective do-gooders but she can't even make a dent in Homelander's popularity, can't do any material damage to Vought, and can't even shift political outcomes in her side's favor.

Not just that. Starlight thinks she's in a war for America's soul, but is also so concerned about her purity that she refuses to go out and motivate people because she hates the Starlight brand....while also using it for her bullshit ramshackle charity org? It's past incompetence to even consider this.

As someone who grew up watching Supernatural, Kripke going "woke" seemed like a blackpill but are we sure this whole thing isn't some not-so-veiled critique of left-wing activism?

are we sure this whole thing isn't some not-so-veiled critique of left-wing activism?

It could be. Not even hard to read it that way.

Hughie keeps trying to do things "the right way" and he ultimately got completely duped by Neumanns "empathetic liberal" shtick using skills she learned from Stan Edgar himself. Hughie comes back around to Butcher's "kill 'em all" mentality as the only workable solution.

Homelander is objectively a threat to human civilization, and they are just dicking around "fixing" minor side problems while he ticks ever closer to a mental breakdown.

Like they're more concerned with earning brownie points than ending the threat.

If they had literally just let Soldier Boy do his thing it would have been ended. Whatever else was wrong with the guy, he wasn't one for half-measures and DEFINITELY didn't want to leave unfinished business. HIS WHOLE DEAL when he returned from captivity was to immediately follow up on old grudges.

Homelander is a problem that activism cannot solve. Unless they come up with a much more creative solution than the comics do, somebody will have to fight dirty and finish him. There will be (already is) collateral damage.

Every day he continues to exist is demonstrating the protag's uselessness.

So yeah, I find it amusing how this show basically makes liberals out to be ineffective hypocrites, whilst the liberals watching the show fixate on the surface level jokes.

Honestly the show lost its way pretty early on. Up to the point where the boys blow up Translucent, it worked because they had a clear goal (kill the supes) and were working towards that goal in a meaningful way. But after that? Homelander is an excellent villain, but the heroes have made no progress in their goals and mostly seem to have lost sight of what their goals even are. Choosing not to kill A-Train in particular demonstrated the lack of narrative direction that had crept in. Instead you get silly subplots about how Hughie doesn't feel like enough of a man.

I'd have been mostly okay if the show had settled into being a sort of 'procedural' where the Boys have to figure out different approaches to kill different supes while being mostly limited to using standard, nonmagic tech and social engineering and the occasional superpowered assist.

It'd require a lot of creativity to keep it interesting, but yeah, at least they'd have a clear goal in mind.

Homelander as the big bad who is the most difficult to kill and whose confrontation is inevitable would keep the tension ratcheting up.

But now they've had to put Butcher and Homelander in this weird catty rivalry where they will stare each other down and even make snide threats and remarks when they encounter one another, even though both of them damn well know they're trying to kill each other, but are basically just mugging for the audience.

Incidentally, this is why I believe the Venture Bros. still holds the crown for the best, most consistent superhero universe. The reasons why arch-nemeses DON'T (usually) kill each other and the villains are allowed to commit crimes all over the place are all justified in-universe.

I think you're missing the real point of it. Liberals love criticism of liberalism that goes "we need a Super-Hamas-Man to just literally murder the enemy we're too Nice and Honest to viciously stomp the way he deserves (btw this means trump and anyone who ever opposed Current Thing, and we want to make that unmissably obvious with the least subtle metaphors you've ever seen)".
That's why it's so stupid. It's done on purpose because it's supposed to be Hutu-radio level murder propaganda with the barest hint of plausible deniability so they can sneer at anyone who points it out.

This is classic 2016-2020 liberalism self-criticism designed to morally excuse themselves for having handed the keys of society to violent leftists. Self-identifying as the wishy washy liberal who TV says should just get out of the way and let the death squads work is masturbatory denial of responsibility, because it gives them a passive role to follow.

"MLK hated white moderates like us, so we'd better stay silent and give money to the antifa arson squads whever the TV tells us to" was half of reddit in 2020. This is just a more developed form of that.

Again, though, I'm not sure who the self-professed liberals in the audience are supposed to be rooting for on the show.

Half of the Protags are trying to gin up social pressure against the sentient nuclear bomb with acute narcissism that is Homelander as if that'll keep him from killing everyone, the other half are trying to kill or hurt him but have been utterly inept at following through.

The stakes have been raised to the point where there should be no other priority but stopping Homelander, yet our main characters are still being given minor side plots to resolve as if this were an RPG and they're putting off the final boss battle both because they're underleveled and want to experience the optional content before finishing the game.

If it is propaganda, then they're seemingly not clear on who is supposed to be the glorious hero of the revolution. Who is the Mao/Che Guevera/Vladimir Lenin of the story here?

It looks like they're just padding it out to get to 5 seasons.

Typically that goes "oh in season 8 some girl stabs the scary white ice king I guess, the end." Or "some girl has a mystic Jedi powerup and stabs the somehow-has-returned evil space wizard guy I guess, the end." (Note: I haven't seen either of these so don't quote me)

The plot doesn't have to be good or make sense, the point is manipulating the audience to feel a certain way about themselves by feeding their insecurities, which in itself is the attraction of these shows to the target audience.

I don't know, if Current Thing hasn't moved on by the time the show finishes, maybe some brave Arab girl will magic-suicide-bomb Homelander somehow I guess, the end.
Then the audience will cry and go "the protagonist did the violence our self-inserts were too nice and principled to do. The service is over, pass round the collection plate for the Hamas bail fund"

... or maybe they'll take the edgelord route. Homelander goes off the deep end and wipes every Arab nation (plus Iran) off the map. Fade to black, silent credit-crawl.

I won't lie this is literally my only exposure to whatever this show is.

So if my prediction is right it'll be doubly hilarious.

(Oh cool, we can add images to posts too)

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If they have any balls whatsoever, them actually taking Homelander down will either be triggered by him killing a whole country's worth of people, or the collateral damage in the process of taking him down will kill millions.

The show has already made it clear dozens of times that innocent people die at the hands of supes with regularity. No goddamn reason to downplay the scale of the incident when Homelander snaps.

That's assuming they have any plan on how to end it.

Only saw the first season of the boys. But, on a somewhat related note- I just went back to try read Ward, the sequel to Worm, the superhero fic that went viral about 10 years ago.

Ugh. What a huge drop in quality. Worm was fun, visceral, exciting. Ward feels neutered, like the author has been battered by internet critics and is trying so very hard to avoid offending anyone. I keep waiting for something to happen and nothing does, they just go to therapy and talk about how bad the evil christian cult is.

Really? I've heard the exact opposite, that Wildbow went out of his way to basically piss off the surprisingly large Worm fan community in terms of how he handled common topics of discussion like Panacea and Gray Boy loops (some accuse him of actively retconning characterization in the case of the former).

I've never cared enough to read enough Ward to find out, personally.

He certainly pissed off the Worm fan community (by refusing to bring back the main character, and re-writing a lot of the continuity from Worm). But uh Panacea yeah... apparently now she's a Evil with a capital E because she's a rapist. Before there was some moral complexity and shades of grey, she did bad stuff but only because she was so messed up at the time. Now, no, she's just pure evil.

At least, that's what people say in summaries, I've never actually read that far. I've only read the first 5 arcs, I just can't bring myself to go further because of what a slog it is. So, so much of it is just therapy talk + dumping on this christian cult strawman punching bag.

I place Wildbow in the deeply leftist camp, but I hold Worm in high esteem, and you haven't been paying attention that the original was already plenty clear that whatever Panacea had done, there had been an undeniable sexual component to it.

Also, the omnibenevolent therapist character gets bamboozled by a fabrication about the protagonist being eeevil later on, and that was satisfying. Fuck therapists.

I feel like it's a huge motte-and-bailey to jump from "there was an undeniable sexual component" to "she's a rapist, and now her entire character revolves around wanting to rape again." But again I didn't actually get that far, I couldn't make it past the opening arcs that seem to be just this neverending slog of boring therapy talk. It's almost like it's telling the core Worm fans why there immature and wrong for liking it and expecting more of the same.

Even Reddit normies are getting sick of being beaten over the head with the message, and are getting updoots for saying so.

https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1dewmxw/the_boys_season_4_premiere_discussion/?sort=top

Does anyone feel that the motte is becoming more soapboxy?

Scrolling the CW thread, I feel like the #parent:#child ratio is much lower than it used to be. During the reddit times, there were threads that that had 50+ responses. That seems to be a relic of the past.

It feels off now. I scroll through the main thread, see yet another >1000 word post with barely any engagement, scroll past it, same thing again, and again.

I think the lurker and casual poster counts are decreasing, we are left with more and more soap boxers who do feel the need to produce endless walls of text, but not engage with other peoples walls of texts..

I'm mostly a reply guy, but it frustrates me that some of the best top level posts get zero engagement.

Maybe people don't have much to say other than officially discouraged low effort agreement.

What's left to say?

We had a really good post on the legacy of BLM two weeks ago. I've been meaning to write a similar post for a year or so now, but what would the point be? Most of the people I'd want to argue with about it aren't here any more, and of the few who remain, I suspect that they would not engage with it much. Further, I suspect that the better I wrote it, the lower the chance of their engagement in the future, as I doubt they would find the conversation a net-positive experience.

It's been ten years since 2014, which is the consensus date I've seen for when the current culture war kicked into high gear. Ten years ago, all of us on either side had lots of questions and few answers. It seems to me that we now have lots of answers and few questions, at least across the divide. There's just not that much left to say, and for me at least conversations tend to result in a marked sense of diminishment, as though one can feel what common ground remains fading away. We discourage low-effort agreement because that just makes the process happen faster, but it still happens slowly, and that's just as fatal.

The amount of disagreement has decreased, maybe?

That's probably part of it. Time was you said something edgy and normies would get mad, now either there are no normies to offend, or the normie takes I have aren't interesting to talk about anymore.

Yes. I've noticed this for awhile. Im mostly a lurker, and an occasional commenter. I've found the top level threads dreadfully uninteresting and way too long, for awhile now, maybe a year? You can tell when the post gives itself it's own b bold little title as if it'll get a place in the vault.

Lately I've found the small question thread and fun thread to be more, well, fun.

Do you mean higher than it used to be?

Discussion requires polemics. Almost all political discussion on Twitter is polemic, for instance. The last polemic post in main thread, on Ukraine, is at -3 for some reason.

It doesn't look like you've made any posts in the CW thread this week (top level or reply).

You are the forum. Any criticism of the forum is a criticism of yourself. If you don't like what's being posted in the CW thread, make the kinds of posts that you do want to read.

I started playing krunker in my free time with my co founders since I am living with them now in the capital. Really fun game, I am worse than both so win like 1/10 games we play. It helps remove the anxiety people feel when trying to raise seed money for their startup. This is really stressful so some arena shooter stuff helps calm ones nerves!

A few weeks ago someone here recommended Tires on Netflix.

It really is a great show, very enjoyable, one of the funniest things I've seen recently. And you know it's good because the RT critical rating is much lower than the audience rating. Hopefully they'll come out with another season.

I watched it as well based on cjets recommendation, and while I thought it was good, it also felt like a worse version of Party Down. Similar concept, weak-willed boss who’s friends with a stronger-willed, cynical employee, but Party Down felt much more substantial and polished.

This is the first I've ever heard of party down. The trailer makes it look lame: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FT2DOz2McW8 is there a better intro to the show out there?

It's the show most similar to the original British The Office (much moreso than its American direct adaptation), if that entices you. But its sort of sarcastic humanism doesn't really translate to snappy trailers. Watch the second or fourth episode and see if you like it

Haha wow, that is a late 2000s trailer right there.

I think you just gotta watch the first two episodes and see if you like the humor. The first episode feels very “pilot”-esque, so the ball doesn’t really get rolling until the second ep.

I just really liked Ken Marinos character. His mix of pathetic-ness and ego is just brilliant writing and acting. It also hits harder if you’ve ever worked in the catering or restaurant industry.

The first season anyway; IMHO it took a big step down when Jennifer Coolidge joined the show, though a lot of that may be that I find Coolidge so unattractive I don't want to see her on my screen.

I find Jennifer Coolidge pretty annoying as well. But she was only in the show for a couple episodes right?

Something even 80% as good as PD sounds awesome to me

Watch Tires and see what you think. I'd call it 50% as good. But then, it's hard to replicate such genius writing as "Sour or Crackers, the fastest growing non-coffee, non-poultry franchise in Southern California"

Update: You were right. I did 3 episodes and then bounced, just wasn't as good.

Similar concept, don't you think? Just felt a lot more improv-y rather than the tight righting of Party Down.

Oh I definitely saw the similarities and agree it felt like improv took a heavier role.

There's a chance that the characters would have gotten funnier the longer it went, I still may dig into it if I'm high and bored.

Party Down is an all-time great comedy show that very few people have seen. Strongly strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot

Yes great show! I recommended it. They got renewed for a second season before the series was even released.

My only complaint was the short length of the series. I wish there was more already.

It's already been renewed I think. Shane Gillis is just printing money right now as the current face of counter-culture comedy, they'd be crazy not to.

His new special on netflix is also really good (though maybe a little too much "comedian miming jerking off as a punchline" for my taste)

I don't think I'd describe anything he does as being the face of counter-culture. He starts half his routines with extended "Aren't black guys way better than white guys at sports/sex/whatever" (Seriously, watch any of his specials or youtube clips, he can't go 2 minutes without complimenting black guys), went back to host the show that cancelled him, and even did some bud-light grovelling after the boycott controversy.

He's a safe progressive with edgy vibes, way closer to Bill Burr than Jim Breuer

He is still marketed as a counter-culture guy after getting canned by SNL. You might not agree that he is actually counter-culture or whatever but he is undeniably the face of counter-culture comedy.

He was hired by SNL and then fired quickly after in 2019 after some impressions of Chinese people and what was called "homophobic" humor surfaced from old podcast episodes. I can't remember the specific jokes.

I see his stuff occasionally and he's definitely not afraid of certain things, mental disability and even talking about different races in positive and negative ways. He's pretty moderate i would say, just wants to make people laugh

The politics of Joe Rogan, more or less.

The Friday Fun thread is not for culture war discussions; post removed.

I don't really see the inverse of this, there isn't a large contingent of men bashing on femcels.

Hard disagree, just think of all the subreddits dedicated to making fun of fat people which got banned over the years.

I'd say men bashing "strong independent cat ladies" is pretty much in the water supply in certain circles.

I think it is probably mostly dudes posting to those weird corners of the internet.

I think it is probably mostly dudes posting to those weird corners of the internet.

Couldn't be me

Why are British and American heads so different? I looked up a song on YouTube yesterday and as soon as I saw the singer I made an easy bet with myself he was British. He's got the same turnip-shaped head as, say, Simon Pegg or Anthony Hopkins.

On the other hand, Mitt Romney is a Mormon and thus should be quite close to the insular British genetically, and yet he has this All-American elongated head with a solid-looking jaw. Or if we're talking about singers, Brandon Flowers from The Killers is a Mormon and he has the same head shape as well.

Is it childhood nutrition? My own bias? Different beauty standards in the US and the UK? Have all people of mandible left the UK for the colonies in the eighteenth century?

Wouldn't you have known he was British when you heard his voice?

I can tell when people are talking, but usually not when they're singing.

I can't really identify people as British from their singing, personally.

Not even, like, Mumford and Sons? London Grammar? They sound so very British to me.

There's a lot of interesting ethnic variation in England. The meme explanation is that small round heads and beady eyes are the 'indigenous' britons whilst other physical characteristics, like a longer face and more prominent jaw are primarily due to the Norman conquest. How the Germanic admixture fits in I don't know, but there's certainly a noticeable trend in phenotype.

I wouldn't be surprised if the round headed beady eyed hobbits of England who managed to weather every storm history has thrown at them would be less inclined to move to a far away land, whilst the long faced Normans who had already sailed and conquered would be more predisposed to doing so again.

So, this would mean that Richard Hammond is the indigenous Brit, and Jeremy Clarkson is the Norman usurper? By process of elimination, that leaves James May as the Germanic admixtures, which seems plausible.

I have literally seen this phenotype analysis of them before

I wouldn't be surprised if the way people speak or express emotions on their face over a lifetime affects how they look, as well as things like diet and lifestyle, all of which will differ between countries. Rishi Sunak for example has a face that looks very British to me in a way I can't fully articulate, despite his ethnic background.

Rishi Sunak for example has a face that looks very British to me in a way I can't fully articulate, despite his ethnic background.

British or British public school in particular?

The latter.

Sunak’s face reminds me a little of Tobias Menzies’. Menzies is a Scottish name, apparently, although his mother was a Simpson which could be Scottish or English.

I don't agree, Sunak looks very American to me.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he looks Indian.

Indian facial features are extremely varied though. Many Indians, even some with very dark complexions, have essentially European or Levantine features.

Right, I’m well aware of that, and obviously my comment was intentionally flippant. However, I don’t see anything in Sunak’s phenotype that looks “more British than American” nor vice versa. He’s obviously quite visually distinct from any European-derived person. I wouldn’t consider him one of the Indians who has European or Levantine facial features.

I think he has some hard-to-define Britishness to his look, too.

I've seen some speculate on Twitter that talking a certain languge (a certain accent?) for all of your life will subtly change your facial structure by reworking the musculature of your mouth, making people who grow embedded in some culture from birth on bear this sort of a hard-to-define resemblance through almost invisible subconscious clues, even if their genetics remain distinct.

It's hard to imagine such an effect, if it exists, could be observed between any but significantly phonologically distinct languages. It sounds like a stretch to imagine it could play a role in why some British-English speakers might look different from American-English speakers.

Must be all those hard r's Romney's been slinging that give him that jawline. #cancelmitt

I’m not seeing it at all, and I think any speculation about the effect of accents on facial musculature development is probably pseudoscientific cope.

Top Gear fans often characterize Hammond as "the token American" due to his propensity to crash expensive vehicles and put cheese on everything.

Edit: this comment was supposed to be a reply to @pusher_robot above.

I remember when they got him to review the new Escalade because he was the yankeeboo. The size mismatch was comical, to say the least.

There plenty of regular heads in the UK. This is all just you noticing things. Don't be weird.

Could it be orthodontic practices? Orthodontia can make a surprising amount of difference to the jaw and facial structure.

Or maybe Americans place more importance on being Chad as prerequisite for being a lead singer or politician?

Has anyone ever tried heavy amount of programming with ChatGPT (or any other AI)? I keep thinking I want to program a game. But I know from prior programming experience that there is lots of bullshit programming that I don't want to have to do. I'm wondering how far along I might get with AI assistance.

It's good for some things that can be solved with ten lines of code and that only depend on commonly understood concepts like files, databases and dates and not, for example, the architectural details of a private codebase. How complex of a game are you thinking and how do you see yourself describing what you want in the game to the AI? Games have lots of trickiness going on with them, they grow up to have idiosyncratic codebases where you need to understand the local architecture, bigger ones are logically very complex and all parts need to keep making sense given the overarching design, they're by definition somewhat unique and you often need to do many rounds of iteration to get the code to correspond to the behavior you want them to have.

If you are not a programmer then ChatGPT will not turn you into one.

It is useful for a programmers if they are stuck or write in some silly setup where you need tons of boilerplate.

Im not sure how much you would consider "heavy" but i have and the results were... not good.

On the flip side the requirements I work with tend to be much more stringent than anything the rank-and-file web or game developer has to work with.

I use Phind, and it's usually hopeless at debugging the errors I get. But it was the same with StackOverflow: by the time I resorted to asking there, two times out of three I was probably the one with the most knowledge about the problem.

On the other hand, Copilot is quite good at writing literal boilerplate code.

I use ChatGPT and phind.com for programming. It's great for generating ideas and I sometimes use it for writing some boilerplate code, but there are substantial bugs in perhaps 1 in 3 of the code snippets I ask it to write. Overall, it saves time, but you need to have a pretty good understanding of what a solution should look like, or you'll be led astray. Note, I'm using the free tier of both tools. Maybe it gets better if you pay for a subscription?

ChatGPT now serves GPT-4O for all users, paid or free, and while the paid tier has access to additional goodies, I'm pretty sure you're not missing out on anything substantial, including for programming purposes, by using the free tier. It's not like the old days, when there was a massive delta in usefulness between GPT 3.5 and 4, with the latter being doled out to paying users.

Thanks for clarifying. My eyes just glaze over on the prompts to upgrade, so I really have no idea what the differences between the free and paid tiers are.

Mainly access to image generation with DALLE, more conversations every 3 hours without being thrown back to GPT-3.5, and access to custom GPTs, which aren't really that useful to be honest.

You're not missing out on much, and it's a sign that OAI is sweating a little that they're handing out free access to their best public models at all, even before the Apple integration.

I am your guy for this.

I'm mostly a python programmer, but my work needed me to work with rails. I literally spent 6 months not writing a single line of rails.

Eventually, I got sick of this shit and just buckled down and learned the framework over a week. But to answer your question, it is technically possible to get GPT to do a WHOLE BUNCH of coding for you if you poke and prod at it like your livelihood depends on it.

I haven't used it for game development specifically, but from what I have used it for, this sounds like an ideal case. "Experienced programmer wants to get a quick start in a popular branch of programming which is new to him" is pretty much the sweet spot.

The two problems I run into are

  1. the more you give to ChatGPT to code for you, the quicker a progam of any length is going to lose you, and when you inevitably have to reconsider some decision you might get stuck trying to understand foreign code.

  2. ChatGPT is extremely annoying to troubleshoot with. It is over eager to spit out many steps at once, and tons of code example. It is very difficult for me to get ChatGTP to take things one step at a time with me in a back and forth manner.

ChatGPT is an amazing expert sitting right next to you who talks to much. But you need to keep him on a tight leash, and you will only hurt yourself in the future if you are too eager to let him drive.

My wife had me watch a random episode of Bridgerton, and I think I hated it more than anything I'd ever watched in my life.

For starters, the entire episode was premised on how this fetal alcohol syndrome looking short fat lady was so desirable and attractive to all these young handsome rich gentlemen. I couldn't verify she has fetal alcohol syndrome... but I did verify the actress is Irish. And oh god, the sausage finger. The short, stubby, Wall-E style sausage fingers. On an actual human being.

The episode kicked off with about 30 scenes in 30 minutes of about a 3 or 4 lines each. It was horrific. I felt like I was watching a TikTok doomscroll, and when I said this, my wife pointed out the title of the episode was literally "Tick Tock". I remember when I was watching Better Call Saul I was so impressed with how much they let a scene breath. An episode might only really have 4 or 5 scenes, but my god how they built up, and each one communicated an important insight into a character, even if it didn't move the plot forward in a concrete way. This was the antithesis of that, and it wounded me on a deep, spiritual level.

Then it got to the sex scene, where the aforementioned Ms Piggy got plowed, and it was horrific. I cannot believe they put that nude body to film, those bloated shapeless tits splayed out on those portly stomach rolls. I felt like I was watching beastiality. Especially with the attempts to beautify and romanticize it. The Black Mirror episode where an MP literally had sex with a pig was less disgusting.

All in all my wife had a wonderful time watching me suffer through her trashy romance show. She started the next episode while I shook it off, went upstairs to shower, and then sat down to finish Crime and Punishment. Which I did, and it was fantastic.

Started watching BCS because of this post. I'll watch the 2nd episode tonight but probably won't manage more than a couple a week.

I also came back to this thread to add that I just came across this...weird...Reddit post just now. Here it is (I was scrolling /r/all if you must know). It's bizarre that everyone is being so insistent about how good-looking the actress is. The circling of the wagons around "Ms Piggy" kind of give the whole game away.

I wish I could wrap my mind around that. Is it performative? Is it a fetish? Or have these people been subjected to so much demoralization propaganda that they now worship ugliness and degeneracy? That they've been pavlovian trained to wound themselves spiritually on uglification?

Is it performative?

My theory is yes, it is performative.

It's a way of ostentatiously showing in-group solidarity by demonstrating you know what things ought to be lauded. This will get you a lot of praise from the in-group. Add on some very stylistic expression of praise for "the correct thing to like" (i.e. the whole "crab legs" thing) and now you get a bonus for creative expression of solidarity.

The first rule of reddit since around 2018 has been that if the post is a matter of opinion and is massively upvoted, it's probably an ill-conceived and kneejerk adherence to the most stereotypical, un-nuanced progressive norms. If the same is true but it is a matter of fact, the upvoted post may or may not be true but will have no sourced links as support. Reddit has lost all credibility for me except niche DIY subs or anything related to anything practical, where bad advice is usually immediately called out as such.

Better Call Saul had some of the best cinematography I've ever seen on a TV set. The way they used visual cues to tell the story was almost unmatched.

The first two seasons of Better Call Saul were a masterpiece of noir writing and film-making that was on par with or exceeded anying Breaking Bad had done, CMV.

Channeling the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight:

I can't baby, because you're not!

Its a deep cut and i like it ;-)

I've never watched Bridgerton, dislike the premise and the genre overall, and now, after Googling the actress, have a serious beef with her for breaking out that dumb old canard, "people in The Past had no hygiene," in a public interview.

But if I'm reading your comment right, you're saying that you watched an episode of a comedy TV show that:

  • featured a female protagonist played by an actress whom you found facially and physically unattractive
  • implied that in its fantasy historical setting, with many other social factors at play, several high-status men were interested in marrying this character
  • showed this person having sex
  • also had many very short scenes, in an episode specifically stylized and labelled as a riff on TikTok videos

and that on those grounds, you were filled with rage and "hated it more than anything [you'd] watched in your life"?

Then it got to the sex scene, where the aforementioned Ms Piggy got plowed, and it was horrific.

Well, no. Nuclear war is horrific. ALS and prion diseases are horrific. Whatever is being experienced by any remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza is horrific. But this... - what should we call it? how should we describe this body? is it a portent of disease and disability, an abdication of potential, or is it a body into which is inscribed a steadfast refusal to press oneself into a form that would be more conducive to capitalist-utilitarian labor? - this body cannot be horrific unless the image of such a body occupies a particularly peculiar position in your libidinal economy.

Nonetheless if it does occupy such a position for you, then that is still in a certain sense commendable, as a form of taking responsibility for one's own horrorscape. The root of any experience that could be properly called "aesthetic" is the determination to find what is most uncanny in what is most familiar. If you did indeed experience the uncanny in such an otherwise innocuous stimulus, then the film, as well as your particular receptive experience of it, was a success.

what should we call it?

pre Wall-e nirvana

What bothered me most about Bridgerton was the love interest storyline where Queen Charlotte at court plays matchmaker and tries to set up Daphne (daughter of a Viscount) with a Prussian royal prince (not an heir but presumably legitimate), described as the Queen's nephew. What bananas, crazy-town balderdash, nonsense. I think Daphne could be believable be a mistress or a morganatic second-wife to an older Prince, but what is portrayed in the show is nonsense. If the conventions of Royals only marry other Royals is out the window then what is point of a Regency setting? This bothered me so much I never had any interest in the later seasons at all.

Couple this scene with the one where Daphne's eldest brother tearfully gives up his actress girlfriend. As if he, a bachelor with rakish tendencies and a titled Viscount with his presumably own inherited fortune lacks the freewill to break convention here is odd coupled with my earlier gripe. The more likely scenario being that he would try and marry for money but keep the actress as a mistress and have a second family.

The structure and content sounds terrible, but the actress you're talking about seems...fine? It's Piglet from Derry Girls. The quality of guys chasing her is probably fantastical/farcical, but you're really catastrophising a chubby woman existing on TV.

I'm on Coil's side here. It's...a choice.

It's a weird choice, sure. But it's not something which merits the seething hate on display here. I don't want to watch fat people bang either, but I just don't watch. It's not a big deal.

It's not a big deal.

to you, and if true you will leave the thread for greener pastures; for everyone else here like Coil it's a sign of the current demoralization campaign through adoration of the ugly and decadent.

Don't be so dramatic. There's no such thing taking place.

hmm, so you are on step one of the Narcissist Prayer.

This actress is not merely chubby. Chubby I can handle. It was a combination of being chubby, short stubby limbs disproportionate to her torso, and a face/skull verging on deformed. It felt like I was watching some fetish video of someone taking advantage of someone with a chromosomal disability. It looked like evidence of a crime.

To be fair, just about anything looks amateurish and gratingly simple when compared to Better Call Saul.

I had no familiarity with the cast or the chonker in question, but the Wiki is hilarious:

In 2018, while Coughlan was appearing on stage in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at London's Donmar Warehouse, she wrote a piece for the Guardian calling out unfair scrutiny of women's bodies in theatre criticism.[24][33][34] In the following year, she made headlines again for rebutting the Daily Mirror's comment on her 2019 British Academy Television Awards look: "Not the most flattering". She tweeted "I mean incorrect @DailyMirror I look smokin’, sorry bout it".[24] Following the 2021 Golden Globe Awards, she retorted against other comments on her weight on Twitter.[35]

Personally, I am completely lacking the ability to feign confidence about my worst traits.

Those very rich people who are extremely thrifty are not maximizing their money, because their cognition is better spent on their work than on a hundred dollars here or there. But I think what’s going on is psychological: those small moments of spendthriftiness increase the perceived valuation of money, thus increasing their motivation to work harder (even though they already have enough money for multiple lifetimes of satisfying any whim). They go into work after picking the cheapest gas station, then when they see the dollar signs on their monitor it is imbued with salient meaning that is otherwise lost through habit.

I think some people outright enjoy thriftiness, while others not only don’t, but also can’t imagine why anyone would. I’m part of the former group, while my mother is part of the latter. I get actual pleasure out of wearing my shoes until they have holes large enough for me to fit two fingers in, keeping my house in the 50s during winter, severely limiting the number of times I go out to eat, and figuring out where I can buy various food and cleaning products for the cheapest price per ounce. It’s practically a hobby (and fittingly, one that’s free). My mother, on the other hand, cannot stand that I live like this, and it took her several years to realize that I wasn’t just desperately poor. She simply cannot fathom why anyone would voluntarily live in a state of genteel poverty. I imagine those wealthy, thrifty individuals are probably just more like me, while you and most people are more like my mother.

Edit: On reflection, “hobby” isn’t really the right word. There’s just a little warm glow of satisfaction you (or at least, I) get when looking at a thermostat that says “58.” How can I describe it? In my high school accounting classes, we used physical ledger books and wrote everything out longhand. The feeling I got after finishing my calculations and finding that all my mental arithmetic was correct and all the books were balanced is similar. It’s not a hobby, exactly (I’ve certainly never done accounting exercises for fun), but it’s… satisfying. Yes, I think that really is the best term for it.

Alternatively, people just like saving a buck regardless of their financial position.

I’m thinking specifically about those for whom “where should I get gas” or “what’s the least expensive bag of spinach” is genuinely less productive than spending that same amount of time at work. Even if you make 500k, two minutes of your time is $8. But it’s probably more than that, because decision-based willpower depletion etc

You've made a very common error that people make when discussing this: your time is only worth $x if you would've otherwise gotten paid that money for your time. If I make $1000/hr at my job, and I spend an hour of my free time to save $10 instead of watching TV, I haven't lost $990 because I wasn't going to make that $1000 to begin with. As @Walterodim points out, a whole lot of people earn no marginal income if they spend more time at their job. And you can only "lose" money by way of opportunity cost if you were going to make the extra money to begin with.

But the topic is the very rich, and approximately all of them “would've otherwise gotten paid that money for their time”, either through additional hours related to their position proper or through networking and continual learning. Heck, even just exercising or going on a walk in nature saves more money in the long run for the super rich than nickling and diming. But yeah, you and @Walterodim are right regarding not super rich, salaried engineers or whatever.

As I've written in another comment, I doubt that these thrifty billionaires are really actually anally obsessive about the price of their frozen broccoli. It's a combination of general ascetism and having a detailed mental model of what things cost. f3zinker has covered the latter, and I have a few things to say about the former.

I know people who went into business with the explicit goal of being able to raise their standard of living and maintain it with passive income alone. A thrifty billionaire would be their opposite: he really enjoys making his business grow but doesn't really care about his standard of living.

Like, I could be paying $5 for a haircut, but I pay $30 instead. Is the haircut itself really six times better? No, but neither place really puts a dent in my finances, and I enjoy the more premium experience enough to prefer it. However, I can imagine someone who simply doesn't care about shiatsu massage chairs at the hair washing station, terrycloth vs waffle towels or not having to listen to whatever radio station the barber prefers. Just like I can imagine someone whose life would be meaningfully improved by a brand new royal blue BMW Z4, while I don't really want a new car at all.

I don't think that even the very rich would otherwise be getting paid for the time you are talking about here. For one thing, their position (let's say a CEO of a megacorp) is probably still salaried and they still get no marginal income from working more. But also, your other examples are all things which don't actually bring in money. Networking and learning are useful, but they are not income streams.

Hmm, I don’t follow. CEOs are paid in stock and packages, their future income is predicated on performance, and networking/learning is simply tomorrow’s income for those with delayed gratification. Do you really think that it’s worth it for someone who makes a million a year to care about where they get gas or the price of the pizza they order? I would still say “absolutely not” except for the psychological benefit of making money seem more valuable.

For some sectors though, I would imagine time spent knowing how much things cost for an ordinary consumer is valuable learning a CEO could do?

e.g. If you are supper out of touch $15 vs $8 a month for twitter blue is approximately 0 difference to you, but it could put you on opposite sides of the marginal elasticity curve.

This discussion reminds me of "Neutral hours: a tool for valuing time and energy" (pdf link) by Owen Cotton-Barratt

The central idea is not to count hours spent on an activity by the clock, but to weigh them according to how draining or recuperative they are

Like whether clipping out a coupon is worth it depends on

  • The expected net present value of additional post-tax marginal income from additional work
  • Your ability to substitute time
  • How long it takes
  • How much you like or dislike clipping coupons

Lots of labor doesn't really have the ability to gain additional marginal income with a couple minutes of work though. Plenty of people are salaried and don't have a straightforward way to earn a few bucks. Doing something like spending a couple hours to figure out how to move credit card points around to save a grand on flights can pretty easily be worth it.

Even in the case of really trivial amounts of money, I think people just gain a psychic benefit from feeling like they got a deal. Should you actually give a shit about a sale on potato chips? Probably not, just buy them if you like them, but it feels better to get the brand that's BOGO.

I don't think thriftiness is what you are looking for. It's more of a good sense of the return on marginal dollar spent along with knowing what is the return that you want.

I know a "extremely thrifty" 8 figure net worth individual whose behaviors and spending I can comment on. He has excellent clarity of mind on how much anything, any random good or service ough to cost, and won't pay a dime extra simply on the principle of not wasting money. This reads externally as thrifty, but I think as a comment below me mentions, is exactly one of the traits of many successful businessmen, knowing what is worth what and not wasting money even if one could afford it. That trickles down into his business and is one of the main reasons his business is cash positive and profitable in an insanely saturated and high variance field.

I think it is an immature culture that assigns more weight to the mean/deviation of money people spend on things as opposed to how much value is obtained.

On us mortals who don't have 8 figure net worths. I'm speaking about upwardly mobile young professionals.

I have friends with a fraction of my income who have better cars, clothes, gadgets and go out drinking and partying and to fancy restaurants every week. They live paycheck to paycheck and in debt. Whilst I cook most of my meals at home, wear thrifted clothes, still live with my parents, (to save rent and because they are aging) and take a vacation maybe only once a year.

I can tell you the price of any randomly chosen item from the store and how much I would/would not pay for it. They can't. In fact they are not even bad with money in that they spend it recklessly, they literally don't have a model of it good enough to predict how much something ought to cost and if that's worth paying or not, its grim really. And then they complain about being "poor".

I jive with the people that don't have a model of spending money. I certainly don't. If my wife and I earned significantly less we'd be screwed. Luckily our money out is far less than our money in. We have a financial advisor that nags us when our savings account starts getting to ridiculous levels. I have an economics degree. I intellectually know that we shouldn't have boatloads of money in the savings account. I just hate figuring out what to do with it.

We take two or three vacations a year. Sometimes pay for home renovations. Eat out once or twice a week. Own a modest sized home. Most of my entertainment is dirt cheap though. I like reading, I like video games, I like discussions on TheMotte. I'd find it hard to legitimately spend more than $300 a month on these activities. Something like $30 a month is more common (I even sorta pay for TheMotte through a patreon donation).

I do sometimes wonder how much more money we'd have if we were actually careful and diligent about it. But then I think of the effort involved and sort of shudder.

I remember a few years back having friends that make similar amounts of money to me and my wife and they were complaining about money issues. I was mostly left scratching my head. How did you spend that much money? I knew their rent, I knew they didn't own a car, I knew we ate out a similar amount, I knew they also took two to three vacations a year, sometimes less. I thought they might have well hidden gambling addictions. Or were sending a bunch of money to their families.

Set up automated contributions into the s&p 500. This is the greatest return on 10 minutes of effort you will ever have in your life.

I have friends with a fraction of my income who have better cars, clothes, gadgets and go out drinking and partying and to fancy restaurants every week. They live paycheck to paycheck and in debt. Whilst I cook most of my meals at home, wear thrifted clothes, still live with my parents, (to save rent and because they are aging) and take a vacation maybe only once a year.

I have friends like this too. I was talking to a friend of mine recently. Her and her husband make about 50% more than I do combined. They've never had a budget, they have no idea what the other one makes, what gets saved, anything. They have no investments to speak of, just an anemic 401k and a savings account. My wife has a friend very similar, with a 3 income, multi generational household that might be bringing in 80-100% more than we do, which similarly has no savings. Nothing. Nada. Truck breaks down and out comes the credit card to pay for the fix.

I've budgeted, saved and invested my entire life. I've never had a bonkers salary, just a relatively regular middle class income (for my area), that's admittedly rather high cost of living. I have a single income household with my wife staying home and raising our kid. I turned 40 last year, and my net worth hit 7 figures, partially thanks to diligence and 20 years of saving, partially due to getting very lucky on several things. Although the effects of that luck probably accounted for only 20% of that accumulated net worth.

But frankly, it seems that my wife and I are the only people we know who live like this. We don't know anyone else with so much as a written budget, much less aggressive thriftiness and savings. It seems most people just thoughtlessly live hand to mouth, money comes, money goes, who even really knows where.

I think thrift is just associated with competence. Having long time-horizons and diligently looking for the best deals gets you a long way in life.

Though it does get ridiculous, optimizing electricity usage to reduce bills is silly for >10 M net worth.

The obsession with turning the lights off to save on electricity bills has always infuriated me ever since I looked up the cost of it. LED light bulbs use about $2 of electricity per year, and they are supposed to last over ten years. You can get them as cheap as $1 per bulb if you buy in bulk.

Forget millionaires, someone living on minimum wage can afford to ignore optimizing electricity for light bulbs. Easy rule of thumb: if you can afford the space you can afford to light it.

Another easy rule of thumb: most actual electricity usage is related to temperature. Heating / AC / Fridges / Freezers / Stoves / Ovens / Dryers.

The obsession with turning the lights off to save on electricity bills has always infuriated me ever since I looked up the cost of it

This is a boomer thing. Yeah, electricity wasn't as expensive back then relative to wages, but lightbulbs pulled an order of magnitude more electricity and could also burn out (not that the cheap LED bulbs you can buy for under a dollar each can't, but they're relatively bulletproof by comparison).

They also have this weird obsession with refusing to use the dishwasher for its intended purpose. Like, just run two loads. Not rocket science.

could also burn out

Ironically, it's much safer for an incandescent lightbulb to just stay on 24/7 than it is for it to be switched on and off several times a day.

Maybe, but the reason certain boomers will never be fully on board with LEDs is that incandescent bulbs were absolutely dirty cheap even if you didn't buy cheap ones.

As opposed to certain Gen Y/Z/As, who notice that the dirt-cheap LED bulbs don't instantly turn on when you flick the switch (you have to buy the 10-dollar ones to get that) and have a hard time being dimmed past certain points (where they just turn off and you blow out your eyes trying to turn them on). Or those who remember what standard lightbulbs are like in terms of color reproduction, since LEDs still can't fake blackbody radiation properly (as that's inherent to incandescence).

Personally, I'm on board with LEDs insofar as you can get lots and lots of light out of them with existing fixtures and they also don't heat up the room; if my fixtures are going to say "100W max" on them, then my LED bulbs are going to be 100W no matter how blatantly absurd that is.

It's silly for practically everyone outside of big ticket things.

I think the legendary thriftiness of Kamprad and Buffett is overhyped. I don't think they particularly enjoy the act of saving every little bit of money, but the same set of psychological traits they possess explains both their business success and lifestyle: they don't derive as much enjoyment from new and flashy things as the average person, they have no innate drive to keep up with the Joneses, and they also run their companies in the same way: boring, safe, relentlessly optimized.

I think they may also have internalized that there is a mental cost to flashy possessions. They attract attention, they send certain messages to people around them, and they can occupy your own thoughts as a focus of concern, where a boring used sedan simply disappears.

Yeah, there's certainly something to be said about the frugal lifestyle as an excellent PR strategy. I wonder how many billions in business Warren Buffett has gotten out of the fact that he lives in an ordinary house.

If you think about it that way, the whole opportunity cost of frugality argument completely flips on its head. A reputation for ostentatious personal frugality and self-restraint is a very valuable asset for a man who manages other people's money for a living, while a few extra bedrooms and an infinity pool seem like trivial frivolities in comparison.

I remember there being stuff like SETI@home and Folding@home that outsourced massive computation tasks to volunteers. Are there similar projects that promise to train LLMs without corporate supervision?

I recall this kind of distributed training was considered by Stable Diffusion hobbyists after its public release in 2022, but it was deemed impractical due to each piece of training modifying the entire model at once, so doing it piecemeal wasn't an option. I wonder if LLMs suffer from similar issues, since the underlying architecture is similar.

I wonder if merging sibling models is something that is feasible, if not for the current generation, then for some future one.

I wonder if that's been squeezed out by crypto mining. Or the perception that anyone who wants your compute is going to be crypto mining. Or just by the proliferation of GPUs.

If I wasn't such a brainlet, I'd be looking into the possibility of using AI training as proof-of-work for crypto, like last year. But both of these subjects are way above my IQ level.

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