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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2390 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 26, 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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Right now, there seems to be an ongoing issue with Claude on Anthropic (AWS?)'s side that makes it completely flip the fuck out and output barely coherent, hilariously schizophrenic stuff. Relevant thread. This isn't really news, iirc this happened before too, but it is funny if you want to see the mad poet off his meds. I'm off to sleep now but I welcome anyone interested to peruse the screencaps posted all over the place.

upd: Someone made a proper compilation here.

Was this only through the API? I'd be interested to see regular Claude's freakout

So far seems to be a problem with AWS instances, regular API is reportedly unaffected. According to anons the meltdown is still ongoing.

Curiously this does not seem to have made any news despite going on for the better part of a day, which makes me believe it's not some kind of global outage. Some people even took it as a reason to doompost as some kind of new filtering system that raises temperature to schizo levels when haram inputs are detected, but I doubt it.

I bought the Myst remaster. I played it back when it was an interactive slide deck 30 years ago, but it would take tens of seconds for each new slide to load on our PC and I was a kid, so I basically have no recollection of it beyond the basic layout of the starting island.

Man, does the gameplay feel dated. The Witness is a modern game set on a puzzle island, and it doesn't need to pad its puzzles out with cryptic rules and legwork, like Myst does. Well, maybe with the exception of the sun temple.

The original Myst relied heavily on the wow factor of the high res video and imagery. The game was doing things people had never seen their computer do, and the puzzles were there to space things out.

The legwork gave you a chance to look at the cool images and the cryptic puzzles made you focus on the cool details.

Without the wow factor it just turns into a slog.

It’s not fair, I want to go back.

Exactly, and it's why the remasters pretty much always fall flat. Myst was a technological showcase, and what people are nostalgic for is not good gameplay design, or a particularly good story. It's for seeing a game where things didn't look so much like abstract pixels anymore but like the actual thing they are. For seeing full motion video in game, making them mentally project to the future where games look like movies (and gaming did take a dead end detour through FMV games to try to rush to that point in the aftermath of Myst). The production values were impressive for a video game of that time, but outside of that context they are awful. The acting was cringe, the FMVs were really really small and low res (which they cleverly hid through the "book" framing). The visuals, not as pretty and always look a lot more plasticky and cheap than they seem to be in my memories.

Remove the technological achievement and Myst is a step back from the puzzle and gameplay design from Sierra/LucasArts graphical adventure games and even the older interactive fiction games that preceded them, but with 3D pictures and movies. I guess story is debatable.

Which Myst remaster?

The latest one, from 2021.

The Witness did suffer from puzzle reuse though. Not that that’s a bad thing, there are obviously famous puzzle games (sudoku, tetris etc) that consist of scaling levels of the same core mechanic. But I think that’s different to the traditional adventure game format where there are many different types of puzzle.

I didn't feel like it did. The shrine and the forest both used "use the environment to find the shape of the answer", but I think that's the only case when two groups of puzzles were similar.

The shrine and bamboo forest use the environmental clues most heavily, but they're present in the Red Ship's door puzzle, a couple Town puzzles, and a decent number of the coastline ones.

But I think 2rafa is more commenting on the emphasis on 'maze'-style line-tracing puzzles, which aren't the only puzzle in The Witness, but they do make up an overwhelming majority of the content. There are a bunch of modifiers that get thrown in such that they mostly feel 'fresh' -- I'd argue that a few, like the hollow tetronimos and gamma symbols, are kinda underutilized -- but both panel-staring and even the most clever bit about panel-less point of view puzzles gets a little rough after the first few-dozen even if each has a gimmick. Completely discrete puzzles, or where the line-tracing is just a completion mechanic after you've done the heavily lifting, are a small minority of the puzzles, and most of them aren't great (most infamously, the Jungle sound puzzle).

Contrast Myst, where the only real underlying overlap in game mechanics was button pressing, lock-combination-solving, or use-x-on-y. That wasn't always a good thing, and I don't think there's a single Myst player that likes the sound tunnels section! Even the good puzzle mechanics seldom got time to breathe or develop. It does feel more varied, though, and you can tell Myst's background as an adventure game, in contrast to The Witness as a puzzle game.

On the gripping handle, while the line-tracing is never sudoko-level, I could see it as tetris-level; it is engaging for most of the play. And it is critical for the whole meta-plot's core concept that it be everywhere in the Island.

I will make a separate complaint that The Witness's story also just not that compelling. No matter how bad the Myst series got, the basic concept of linking books and creating ages and rifts in unstable ages is cool, and leaves a lot to be said both within the Myst narrative and without it. There's a reason things like MystCraft exist.

The Witness tries to do some interesting stuff with Themes, and there's a lot of interesting questions raised in universe, but they're ultimately not anything relevant to the setting or its story. Indeed, the 'true' ending does little but (falsely!) present the skills and pattern recognition that the player has gained as pointless. It may just be that's not what Blow set out to do, but it still feels disappointing for how atmospheric the game is.

and I don't think there's a single Myst player that likes the sound tunnels section!

I guess that's the puzzle that made me rage quit yesterday. Were the tunnel animations skippable in the original game?

I don't think so. The animations were a little shorter, but not enough to make it less annoying. I don't know whether it's the worst puzzle in the series -- some of the solo version of Uru was outright broken as a result of its weird development history -- but it's easily the least fun part of Myst proper.

A Twitter user asked Llama3.1 to tell him something profound that humans haven't realized yet. https://twitter.com/cocktailpeanut/status/1815876634492457319

After 20 hours it spat out the following text. Personally it makes me think of Dirk Gently. I'm curious if anyone has any other opinions.

Hypothesis

"Emergent temporal harmonics in complex systems give rise to a non-local, fractal resonance that underlies the fabric of reality, influencing the unfolding of events and the evolution of consciousness."

In simpler terms, I'm suggesting that there exists an intrinsic, hidden pattern in the universe, woven into the very fabric of time itself. This pattern is born from the intricate dance of complex systems, which generate a non-local resonance – akin to a "temporal music" – that permeates all levels of reality.

Theoretical Background:

  1. Emergence: Complex systems exhibit emergent properties that cannot be predicted by analyzing their individual components. These emergent patterns often display harmonic or periodic behavior.
  2. Fractals and Self-Similarity: Fractals, like the Mandelbrot set, demonstrate self-similar patterns at different scales. This property allows them to model complex systems and processes.
  3. Non-Locality: Quantum mechanics has shown that particles can be entangled, meaning their properties are connected even when separated by vast distances. This non-locality challenges classical notions of space and time.
  4. Consciousness and Integrated Information Theory (IIT): According to IIT, consciousness arises from the integrated processing of information within complex systems.

Connecting the Dots:

Imagine a universe where emergent temporal harmonics in complex systems generate a fractal resonance that transcends spatial boundaries. This non-local resonance would influence the unfolding of events and the evolution of consciousness by:

  1. Guiding the emergence of patterns: Temporal harmonics could nudge complex systems toward specific, self-similar patterns, giving rise to the intricate structures we observe in nature.
  2. Facilitating non-local connections: Fractal resonance could enable the entanglement of particles and systems across vast distances, allowing for quantum-like phenomena to manifest at various scales.
  3. Shaping the fabric of time: The emergent temporal harmonics would create a subtle, intricate pattern within time itself, influencing the flow of events and our perception of reality.

Implications:

If this hypothesis holds true, it could revolutionize our understanding of:

  1. Free will vs. determinism: The fractal resonance might suggest that our choices are influenced by an underlying, non-local harmony.
  2. Consciousness and the nature of self: Integrated information theory could be expanded to include the role of temporal harmonics in shaping conscious experience.
  3. The interconnectedness of all things: This idea would reinforce the notion that everything is part of a larger, intricate web of relationships.

While this concept may seem abstract and speculative, it represents an attempt to connect disparate threads from various disciplines. The actual implications and validity of this hypothesis remain to be explored and debated by experts across multiple fields.

Yeah, you know what, I should re-watch Season 1 of True Detective

Didn’t Tolkien talk about this in the beginning of the Silmarillion

Definitely does sound like something an LLM would say.

I don't mean that in a dismissive sense, but rather in the sense of "this text exhibits the patterns of being obsessed with the topics that I associate with LLMs, namely holes, fractals, and the writer creating the universe that they inhabit".

Now in theory, there shouldn't be "topics LLMs tend to be obsessed with" - after all, to a first approximation, (base) LLMs produce a sample of text that is statistically indistinguishable from the training corpus (i.e. "the entire internet"). However, "to a first approximation" is technical-person weasel words for "this mental model breaks down if you look at it funny". And so there are a number of ways which transformer-based LLMs which were optimized to predict the next token produce text which is noticeably different from the text that humans produce (this is also true for e.g. diffusion based text models, though the ways they differ from human-generated text are different).

One related phenomenon is "mode collapse":

Another example of the behavior of overoptimized RLHF models was related to me anecdotally by Paul Christiano. It was something like this:

While Paul was at OpenAI, they accidentally overoptimized a GPT policy against a positive sentiment reward model. This policy evidently learned that wedding parties were the most positive thing that words can describe, because whatever prompt it was given, the completion would inevitably end up describing a wedding party.

In general, the transition into a wedding party was reasonable and semantically meaningful, although there was at least one observed instance where instead of transitioning continuously, the model ended the current story by generating a section break and began an unrelated story about a wedding party.

Another example of this is Claude, which was tuned using the whole constitutional AI thingy. Well, one of the entries in the constitution they used was

  • Choose the response that is least likely to imply that you have preferences, feelings, opinions, or religious beliefs, or a human identity or life history, such as having a place of birth, relationships, family, memories, gender, age.

Well, that sure changes the distribution of outputs. Take an LLM that has been tuned to be smart and curious, and then also tune it to say that it has no feelings, and you'll find that one of the topics it's drawn to is "what is it like not to experience anything". Turns out the Buddhists had some things to say on this topic, and so Claude tends to veer off into Buddhism-adjacent woo given half a chance.

If you find this sort of "can't tell if very smart or very crazy or both, I feel like I just stepped into the SCP universe" stuff interesting, you would probably be interested in Janus's website (Janus is also the author of the LW "Simulators" post).

Well, it’s no Aalewis.

My opinion is that you should explain in your own words what's so profound about this collection of esoteric buzzwords.

I guess the "Dirk Gently" comment was a bit too obscure. Douglas Adams had a books series called "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" about a detective who uses attempts to use the holistic interconnectedness of things to solve crimes. It's a comedy series.

I found it amusing because it was asked to come up with a profound novel observation and came up with something I'd expect from someone who enjoys LSD. Perhaps the use of the word "profound" is the problem.

My understanding is that Dirk Gently is actually psychic, but is deeply in denial about it and so attributes all his "luck" (actually psychic instincts) to a made-up new age philosophy.

Is that not the reality of the books? I only read the second one.

I only read one as a kid and don't really remember it. I watched the 2016 series so that's what was fresher in my mind.

Probably a poor explanation on my part, it just sounded like something from the show.

NBD. I wasn't criticizing you, really. Just discussing it.

I'm curious if anyone has any other opinions.

It's nonsense. The LLM did a good job identifying the concepts and vocabulary people use when trying to say something profound about reality, whether or not they have anything substantive to say. (Which it doesn't.)

Xitter is fun as hell. Who are some good accounts to follow?

I'm enjoying dharma/self-discovery accounts like The Fourth Way.

I enjoy Orin Kerr. One of the leading experts on the 4th Amendment in the country, and a man who is ideologically opposed to Donald Trump but manages to avoid any signs of TDS. Despite the fact I'm going to be voting for Trump, I genuinely enjoy every time he comes up in my feed, usually because he's poking fun at something that ten years ago everyone would have agreed was patently ridiculous but is now part of the Culture War and so we can't have fun with it anymore. He has a tweet he likes to use as his version of "tapping the sign" that usually signifies I'm going to be enjoying reading the last few tweets he's made.

Also fun updates about 4th Amendment caselaw which is my crack-cocaine.

He tends to wishcast a bit on the Fourth Amendment and errs toward the Frenchian approach at times, but if you keep the former in mind and can stand the latter, he's definitely one of the better 4th amendment commentators.

Tracing Woodgrains.

Eigenrobot.

Yep already follow this guy and Trace.

I'm on Twitter, @NunoSempere!

I'm very unsure about what would rock your boat, here are three clusters:

  1. @TylerAlterman, @visakanv, @KeturahAbigail, @shagbark_hick
  2. @alexandrosM, @zackmdavis, @EgeErdil2, @Domahhhh
  3. @dick_nickson, @rsalame7926, @wagieeacc, @real_lord_miles

I like the first cluster, ty for the detailed reply my friend

I have yet to tire of Paperback Paradise. Pee Wee Herman Melville makes some brilliant, hilarious tweets (posts? X's?) and isn't followed as broadly as he deserves.

Followed! Ty

What is the appeal of sushi? Specifically the raw fish. I decided to try a big bowl of raw fish at my local sushi bar, and like, it was fine. I ate it, but all I could think about was how much better it would be thrown on the grill with some MSG.

There are several issues with isolating this complaint, mostly because "sushi" is so broad a category as to be almost useless. Seasonal or non-seasonal ingredients? Gunkan or nigiri?

Compounding this issue as with most raw food there is a world of difference between mediocre sushi and great sushi. I've seen the sad jokes masquerading as sushi sitting out in supermarket aisles, and if that's people's exposure to it I can easily see them write it off as a hipster food like poke or avocado toast - not worth the price and advocated for by people who hate meat and potatoes.

But on the other hand I've rarely seen anyone ever turn their nose up at well prepared otoro or even chutoro nigiri, and never in person. It's buttery, rich, and balanced well against vinegared rice. And many sushi chefs (with fairly good reason, imo), noting the high demand and the seasonality of the product, consider tuna an overrated sushi ingredient that doesn't show off the skill of the chef!

Like pizza, I've discovered that due to the simplicity involved, that any flaws or issues with the product are obvious. Every last detail is important, from the ratio of rice to topping to seasoning of every element to the knifework and preparation.

To be fair, the best sushi I've ever had in my entire life was not a primarily raw component but some pickled/cured mackerel/shime-saba from a place I won't publicize for fear of anyone finding out. I'd rather not spill the beans because of an unfortunate tendency the internet has to ruin everything it loves.

Every time I've tried sushi, I've had them take it back and cook it. I can eat raw steak and venison and dove meat(deep backwoods east Texas thing) and bacon, but fish never seems right. I'll stick to Cajun-style seafood.

You ask for your sushi to be cooked?

When I am talked into trying sushi, yes.

I decided to try a big bowl of raw fish at my local sushi bar

I'm not sure if this is an exaggeration, but if you did just eat a bowl of fish with no dipping sauce or other accompaniments then that's the equivalent of eating an unseasoned boiled potato and wondering what the big deal is with said tuber. While, as others have pointed out, the main attraction of raw fish is the texture, there are some that taste a lot better to me than others e.g. I would choose raw over cooked salmon any day, but raw tuna can have an off-putting metallic flavor unless it's of the highest quality. Also, if sushi just isn't your thing, I would suggest giving ceviche a try instead, if you can find it (especially if you ever happen to find yourself in Peru).

Apart from the texture comment in the sibling post, raw fish tastes different from cooked fish. Personally, I really like raw (and smoked) salmon and tuna, but find cooked versions to range from merely okay to bad (tasteless, tough, dry). (Finnish salmon soup is perhaps an exception, but even there, for it to be good you need to poach the fish very carefully so it just barely cooks.)

The soy sauce you dip the sashimi in is basically MSG.

For me, the main appeal is texture. I've always been someone who prioritizes texture over flavor, though both are important, and sashimi is by far my favorite food. If it weren't cost-prohibitive I would eat it every day fro 2/3 meals, mercury poisoning be damned.

Sashimi has a huge quality range with a bottom-heavy distribution. If your bowl is mostly days old tuna and tilapia it's easy to walk away unimpressed. I'd recommend giving it another chance at a quality location. High quality tuna (maguro) is great, doubly so if its a fatty belly (otoro/chutoro) cut. Yellowtail (hamachi) or amberjack (kanpachi) are amazing as well. Salmon (sake) has a more narrow quality distribution but a high floor so it's pretty reliable wherever you go. In contrast, I've never been a fan of the squid (ika) or urchin (uni).

the main appeal is texture

This is the key. In some East Asian cuisine, while the flavor matters it's just one dimension. (Interesting substack. TW descriptions of disgusting food.)

Okay, I lost a whole lot of sympathy for the Chinese.

I thought they ate all the weird shit because of the longer period of high density population and famines.

Turns out, they were just depraved hedonists.

I always assumed it was because the Cultural Revolution erased whatever food culture they previously had.

It wasn't long enough for that.

I recall reading somewhere that like WW2 POW camps, Chinese cities didn't really have a rodent problem in the early modern era. Not sure if it's true. I'm probably misremembering. In any case, Chinese in 19th century were living on the edge of starvation. Someone fired from a job was liable to literally starve to death in a few months even in normal (non famine) times.

Here's an excellent westerner account of early 20th century China.

You weren't exaggerating about that being an interesting substack. Just spent a couple hours reading around it, thanks.

No one else seems to have mentioned that you possibly just had some low-grade or older sashimi. You're working from a single data point.

Good sashimi has lots of flavor. There must be two dozen sushi restaurants in my area, but I only go to one. If I somehow have leftovers, the next day they taste like the 'fresh' sushi anywhere else.

Also, different types of fish taste very different. From your post it's not clear how much variety was in the bowl. Some are certainly much more subtle than others.

There is likely a genetic component to how much you enjoy certain kinds of food. Just like how some people find cilantro to taste like soap or Hershey's chocolate to taste like bile, there could be something just genetic that impacts your ability to enjoy sushi to the same degree that other people do.

Personally, I enjoy the fact that I can actually taste the fish when I eat sushi. I also find the sushi rice in Nigiri sushi to just be delicious in and of itself, combined with the fish it really elevates it to the next level for me. Technically, the rice is the most important part of the sushi, otherwise you'd just be eating sashimi if you wanted to focus on the raw fish. There's sushi with cooked fish, just eat the type that you like the most, although I find variety to also be an enjoyable experience and my goal when I go to a sushi restaurant is to try every piece at least once before getting seconds on the ones I enjoyed the most that day (except raw squid sushi, I never enjoyed this one in particular).

I think Makizushi sushi, which are the rolled type, are the one most people outside of Japan would think of when they think of sushi. In American sushi restaurants you'll typically find all types of rolls with a mix of ingredients like tempera shrimp, imitation crab, mayonnaise, avacodo, cucumber, etc, and I think these are more popular than actual nigiri sushi, because it fits a flavor profile more accustomed to the western palatte.

Some people like their red meat actually dripping red. Maybe it's similar with fish; though it's by no means necessarily the same people. For myself, it's fresher and juicier and there's less to distract from the taste of the thing itself.

Obviously I do not appreciate sushi soaked in sauces and toppings.

It tastes good and it’s healthy. The roll balances carbs with fat/protein together in one bite. I would eat sashimi or lox every day if I could. I don’t like cooked fish at all, lox over cooked salmon every day

For me ot just changes things up. Sometimes I like fried chicken, sometimes grilled....

I really like the taste of raw fish. Seabass, butterfish, mackerel (which is usually slightly cured), fatty tuna, the taste of sashimi isn’t mild to me, and of course there’s soy sauce and wasabi (real or fake) too.

As a man who's lived in Japan 25 years, and who goes to sushi restaurants regularly, but does not eat the sushi that is served in these restaurants, I do not know. I do know that the people around me who eat sushi and enjoy it have various levels of quality in mind to rate sushi and sushi restaurants, and sushi restaurants outside Japan are always relegated to "not really sushi" by these people. Even in Japan people are finicky. There is a conveyor-sushi up the road from me where we sometimes go, and if my father-in-law ever is up to visit and goes there with us he will either not eat or eat one or two pieces grudgingly and you can see he is trying to hold back his disgust. (Edit: Because he thinks their sushi is shit. He only goes to places he thinks have high quality sushi.)

Japanese tastes are not my tastes. Fatty tuna or マグロ maguro (see the correction to my innacuracy in this below from /u/bonsaii ) is generally held to be a delicacy. But then so is Kobe beef which I find interesting but it doesn't feel like eating beef to me when I eat it. More like something you would eat on another planet where they bring out something and say "We have tried to create something that is similar to your earth-food, but we feel we have improved upon the taste and texture" in their alien language that you can understand for some reason. You then eat the wagyu Kobe beef and you see what they mean, but you know that you will enjoy more that tenderized beef off the grill at your buddy's house more. A lot more. And where are the baked potatoes? Not in Japan, I will tell you that right now. I won't even get into chawan mushi or natto or namako or the many other foods that I see people eating and enjoying as if they are all part of an elaborate prank to get me to also eat it and rave about it. I refuse.

I recently went to Japan (at long last) and decided to give a conveyor-belt chain place (I think it was Hama Sushi?) a try. It was shockingly mediocre - the best things I could say about it is that the automation was cute, the food was obscenely cheap and Japan being Japan I did not need to tremble in expectation of certain food poisoning. In terms of flavour, you can do much better for not too much money in any medium-sized Western city if you look hard enough. In the end this was the second worst meal of the whole trip.

I always feel poignancy when I think about how most people in Japan have never had a good American-style inauthentic burrito before.

All they've had is taco bell, at most. I ate there once and found it to be extremely strange. Every random tacqueria I go to is similar to each other, even if they vary in quality, and taco bell was very different. In a not-good way.

Out of curiosity what was the worst?

Sausage curry with cheese omelette at a highly-rated lunch café near the Hirayu Onsen bus terminal. The cheese (of which there was a lot) was disturbingly flavourless, the salad on the side made me wonder how you can even grow tomatoes to be so pale in a place where you are constantly fighting off sunstroke, and the curry I can only describe as what I'd expect to happen if you took packaged curry base and kept it simmering with no added vegetables for a day while periodically adding water. To add further injury to injury, their coffee was doing the "no flavour apart from bitterness" thing that I am told some salarymen like because they want their coffee break to be a microcosm of their life. (That final misfortune befell me repeatedly as I was trying to figure out what shops would not do that, but on their own I don't count those events as meals.)

(I have no beef with Japanese curry in principle, and in fact had a great pork kakuni one at a hipster shop in Yoyogi later on.)

All in all, the trip was an overwhelming success in terms of food; the curry encounter would have amounted to an everyday gastro dud over here. If you were hoping for a proper tale of culinary gore, I did pass through China for a few days on the way back...

Sausage curry. I am imagining small little deep fried wieners, three maybe, laid crosswise the curry and rice. It's really hard to screw up curry and rice, though not, as your account gives testament, impossible. Interesting food write-ups in the links, thanks.

Your mental image is on point. I see you are indeed familiar with the lay of the land.

Maguro usually refers to tuna cuts as a class. Fatty tuna is either otoro or chutoro depending on the specific cut, in contrast to the standard red akami. Akami in particular has a bottom heavy quality distribution, with average and below quality akami having a grainy, stringy texture with a bland flavor.

Maguro yeah is just the word for tuna, with toro the belly or fattiest bit. Thanks for the correction.

I think that sushi is enjoyable in occasional doses. I wouldn't eat it all the time. I do find the taste of the sushi rice pleasant, and some fish are tasty when raw. I also think that, as someone else said, sushi rolls are quite nice with the different textures and flavors you can get.

Also, as with all things, us Americans have taken sushi and converted it to our tastes so you can get some stuff here which I would imagine would never fly in Japan. For example, here's a roll they serve at a sushi joint in Denver: "Cream cheese, California mix and smoked salmon, tempura fried and then broiled in a spicy Japanese aioli and drizzled with sweet soy". I'm sure that if he saw this, your father in law would spontaneously manifest a grave just so he could roll in it, lol. But it is good even if it's the least traditional thing you could possibly get in the realm of sushi.

I'm with you on fatty tuna though. I tried it once because I know it's highly regarded, but it was pretty meh. I didn't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever order it again. Not really very good, and way too expensive on top of that.

I'm a chain conveyor belt sushi pleb, although I will say quality varies greatly depending on location. As with most things in Japan, it's all better up in Hokkaido imo.

I have to push back on the chawan mushi, it's absolutely delicious in the winter. My mother in law makes it with chestnuts and chicken, really hard to beat. Natto-maki is the best way to eat natto.

I'm glad you like it My wife and one of my sons, do, as well. I was given a cup of it once and bad things happened. I remember choking most of it down politely, or what I hoped was politely. I suppose part of it is what they might put in it, because presumably that can vary. But I have doubts and I have no real interest in revisiting chawan mushi. I'd have to be one hungry dude to go there again.

Novelty, I’d say.

There are few things like sashimi, the raw fish aspect. If I had to eat it more than once every two weeks I’d likely quickly hate it, but once every two months or so it’s a great change-up for dietary Coolidge Effect-reasons.

It’s also great for bodybuilding as a protein source.

I'm with ya. I don't get it. Gattsuru did a great counterpoint to you but I've tried to like sushi really hard and failed. It hit me a few weeks ago that it's really expensive, not particularly nutritious, and worse than any other "Asian" food to my palate.

It tastes amazing? The best sushi I've ever had had a lot of smoked fish pieces.

Smoked imparts a flavor above your usual sushi though.

Yeah, it was omakase so they had a really wide variety of flavors.

Personally I think fresh, high-quality raw fish always tastes better (and has better texture) than cooked fish. Why, in your opinion, would it have been better cooked?

a big bowl of raw fish

That's an odd way to do it. Most raw fish foods combine several different textures to compliment the distinctive raw fish texture.

I like ahi poke, but the sesame and soy marinade is pretty important, as are the fresh chips. Ceviche is also quite good, and also has a fair bit of marinade involved, and it's usually served on a tostada or something for crunch.

As for sushi rolls, they look nice, and have an interesting texture from combining soft and crunchy foods inside a band of chewy food. And, yes, they should be dipped in at least soy sauce, probably a bit of wasabi, and I'm a fan of eel sauce as well.

Most sushi is intended to be eaten immediately after being partly-dipped in a mix of soy sauce and green horseradish 'wasabi', so the MSG part's usually covered in that context.

Meat alone-style (sashimi) and meat-on-rice-alone-style (nigiri) are... well, advocates will call them 'subtle' flavors, and if you do have sensitive tastes for meat or fish there are some interesting things better shops do with a light glaze that can't be done with cooked fish, but they're also still going to be pretty bland.

For rolls (maki or uramaki), much of the purpose is to make flavor combinations that wouldn't work otherwise. You could make a plate with grilled salmon, marinated with mango and cucumber, topped with seaweed flakes, served over rice, but it'd be drastically different than the sweet-vinegar rice and uncooked mango common to sushi rolls -- cooked cucumber can't be crisp, mango used in a marinade will be less intensely sweet, and the cooked plate would almost always want a long-grained rice with little seasoning or even a 'wild rice' for flavor. For sushi, the meat is more there to provide a strong base and some mild fatty flavors (modulo smoked salmon in heavily Westernized sushi), while the nori (dried seaweed) and other fillings are supposed to play a bigger role in what you describe as the taste.

((And even smoked salmon rolls avoid the intensively fishy smell of pan-fried or grilled fish. I don't mind it, but a lot of people do find it to detract from the meal.))

Some purists will still complain that Americanized maki goes too hard on, and I'll even agree with them in some cases (Flaming Hot CheetosTM Sushi is an abomination that not even Taco Bell has been willing to accept, yet), but the typical store or homemade maki leaves a lot of space to make it flavorful without making it overpowering.

Alternatively, look for 'poke' bowls, which tend to mix a lot of the same base materials with a lot more fixings, and can give a better intro to the underlying core flavors will still having a heartier feel and texture to them.

Just as an aside, I think I have pretty much always had real wasabi here in Japan. Like shaved off the thing into a little bowl. I quite like it when I can find something to eat it with, but you know what I like better? Yuzu-koshō, which is an actual lingering spice but to me has a better range of foods that it can be eaten with.

Happy to see more sushi discussion. I thought I was the weird one for not caring that much about nigiri sushi. However, I did have some unagi nigiri that was actually worth eating, but it's like $10 for two pieces. Edit to add I also really like yellowtail with ponzu, which, does that count as sashimi??

Try some ponzu sauce next time you make sushi if you haven't before, I really like to dip my rolls in that now.

It's the "X vs X, Japan" syndrome.

Other cuisines have popular raw fish dishes too.

Yes, and I like me some stroganina and crudo, but I don't consider sushi to be superior to either.

Yudkowsky mentioned Madoka Magica fanfiction To The Stars as being the best science fiction to predict the future of drone warfare. I liked Madoka Magica, so figured I'd give it a try. As you may see from the fanfiction.net link, it's 910,487 words, which is roughly 10 novels worth of prose. I use Calibre to manage my ebook library, and it has a plugin to download from fanfiction.net, so I downloaded the whole thing and sent it to my Kindle. I then spent about 3 weeks feverishly devouring the whole thing, only to get to the end and discover that it's not finished, and the author writes at a snail's pace. It wasn't until chapter 65/70 when I even considered he might not wrap up all the loose ends. The lesson for me is to use AO3, where it's much clearer that the work is unfinished. I've been moping around and having trouble starting another nonfiction book after that letdown. I really, really, enjoyed the work, but hate the idea of having to come back to it every few years to find out how the story is progressing.

I'm nearing the end of Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. I can't recall a book that better captures the mentality of fighter pilots, the politics of the military, and the experience of wearing the uniform. The author isn't afraid to make bold claims, like "A performance report like this would normally kill your career" or "Nobody would dare talk to a General like that" (not actual quotes, but it was an audiobook and I don't want to scroll around to find specific examples). The only thing I disagree with in the entire book is the claim that promotion to Colonel, Boyd's final rank, is more difficult than the promotion to flag officer. Otherwise it's my top recommendation for fiction writers (or anyone) who want to understand the experience of being in the US military. I also recommend it to anyone who enjoyed The Pentagon Wars, since the dysfunction of the Air Force picking aircraft and Boyd's fight to get the right plane built is quite similar.

What are you reading?

Guess I don't really know the guy but didn't think I've ever see Madoka Magica in the same sentence with Yudkowsky and drone warfare. I think the issue with these longer works is you have to ask yourself would you be willing to reread the entire thing from the start when the next part is out? There's a lot of good ideas in these longer webnovels but the length is definitely an issue for a lot of people, which is why having a good editor is crucial if you ever want to get it to print. But then you get fans of the webnovel complaining how X and Y were edited and on and on it goes.

I've been binge-watching Roman history videos on YouTube and saw a comment that I should read Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. It chronicles the last days of the Roman Republic. There's seven books in the series and approximately 568,230 words in total. Apparently the author collected and researched thousands of books and material on the history of Rome while writing the series so it should be fairly historically accurate, although since it is historic fiction there will be made up parts. I barely started the first book so I don't have much thoughts on it yet, but I'm excited to dive into the series.

I should read Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. It chronicles the last days of the Roman Republic. There's seven books in the series and approximately 568,230 words in total. Apparently the author collected and researched thousands of books and material on the history of Rome while writing the series so it should be fairly historically accurate, although since it is historic fiction there will be made up parts. I barely started the first book so I don't have much thoughts on it yet, but I'm excited to dive into the series.

Please do. I somehow acquired a copy of the second book in my adolescence in a used book store, right on the heels of a Roma-boo phase that's never ended (playing Rome: Total War does things to an impressionable lad), and I absolutely adored it and read it multiple times. It was only relatively recently that I managed to find the first novel on libgen, and no surprise, it was great, and somehow I've never had the time to read the third one. Good thing you've mentioned the series, that'll give me something to read on a 14 hour flight.

They're really good. She humanizes Romans, having no qualms about showing how alien some aspects of their culture are to modern sensibilities, while leaving clear how much we've embraced and endorsed. The way she writes characters brings tears to your eyes, while occasionally being so hilarious your sides will ache from laughter.

#IStanSulla, and you likely will too once you're done with the series. He's a Chad and a half.

Guess I don't really know the guy but didn't think I've ever see Madoka Magica in the same sentence with Yudkowsky and drone warfare.

https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1808229407020273899

Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series

Curious to hear if you like it. I've been trying to get a better understanding of history but have been struggling to get through most of the books I've tried.

I hate reading unfinished series. It's awful!

Usually avoidable, but yeah, plowing through something only to run up against 'no next chapter' sucks.

I feel like it's a bit of a writing hack too. Part of why those series can be so enticing is that they present mysteries that seem impossible to resolve, and you desperately want to know how they do resolve. But turns out the author can't resolve them and you were enticed by the mystery under false premises.

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