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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2686 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 27, 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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Article from Foreign Policy: Israel's Seven-Front War.

Unrelated.

Just over a year ago, Eric Adams presented P. Diddy with a key to the city of New York.

A completion model called gpt4t-lu-test just appeared in OpenAI's API Playground (and presumably the OpenAI API generally), and it's not documented anywhere (including in Pricing), and ~nobody seems to have noticed yet. It doesn't seem to even be instruction-tuned, and will gladly complete a meth recipe etc.

As far as I know, OpenAI has never allowed any public access before to a GPT-4 base model, but that seems like what this is.

What is this, and what does the lu there stand for?

update: gpt4t-lu-test is no longer available as a completion model, but now as a chat model, that seems at very shallow first glance to just be a normal GPT-4 chat model (guardrails and all). I guess I caught a brief misconfiguration.

update: Now gone entirely.

Employee claims misconfig, and nothing special. I buy that because it seemed unlikely they would be doing something interesting off of Turbo at this point.

I visited Georgia (the country), and loved it.

It's an affordable and quick (3 hr flight) destination from my home base of Dubai. It has all the things Dubai is missing in spades. Nature, history, booze, European "vibes" and many more. It's no surprise that it's such a common tourist destination from here, you will see "AED" being sold at almost all exchange houses. The entire week-long trip cost me around 700 USD, end to end. I know people who have done it for even as low as 450USD by using budget airlines and living in hostels.

The city of Tbilisi is beautiful. > 500-year-old fortresses and churches are plentiful and around almost every corner. I didn't even realize there was a literal 1000-year-old fortress above my hotel room in the hills until my host pointed it out to me. Little surprises like wine cellars below manhole covers and pomegranates and grapes growing along the streets are abundant. Its also quite hilly and you get all the nice views that come with a hilly city with rivers flowing through it. The food/booze is cheap and good. Aesthetically it looks and feels like any modern European city, the infrastructure is good, and the architecture is unique. Even though it is becoming and bracing for a lot of tourism, it still feels authentic, unpretentious and real in a way many other cities I've been to don't. The pace of life is significantly slower than where I'm from. I can't pinpoint the vibe, but its maybe Slavic, maybe Mediterranean, IDK, it's its own thing.

I spent 3/7 of my days in "Stepantsminda/Kazbegi". A small town on the foothills of the Caucasus, a 15-minute drive away from Russia. The nature there was out of this world, it wasn't good for Georgia, it was good period, it would have been good in Japan or Switzerland too. Alpine landscapes with snow-capped mountains over 16000ft high. The weather was a nice escape from the heat there too. It's already below 10C (50F) there in Septemeber and is reminiscent of Fall weather in a temperate country, the trees are going brown and its cold and foggy. For me being in this kind of alpine landscape was a first, and it almost moved me, we barely have any rivers, lakes, mountains or even flowers growing next to the streets in Dubai.....

I also met groups of hikers from Israel, Slovakia, and Vietnam, in a small restaurant run by a babuskha in the mountains. Seems to be a popular mountaineering/hiking destination.

The people of Georgia are capable, stoic and friendly, men and women alike. The hosts of our accommodations treated us well, checked up on us, made conversation, and went out of their way to make sure our stay was comfortable. Even though it's business, I think it was real. They are also seemingly quite proud of being Georgian and quite neutral about the rest of the world (including "Ruzzia", all things considered), you will not have to ask to learn about their history or culture.

Overall, I will definitely go back not only given how ffordable it is, but plainly because of how good it is, it's not value for money, it's value.

Do you smoke? I couldn’t stand the attitudes towards smoking there, and I couldn’t wait to get out. The only place in the world that was worse was Montenegro. Beautiful country, though, once you get away from the people.

I'm indifferent to smoking. Smoking is just a way of life in Eastern EU.

I know. It sounds awful.

I’ve spent a year there. They have fantastic toasting parties! I liked just about every person I met, and it is beautiful.

What made you spend a year in Georgia? AFAIK its a really random country and not on most peoples radars. And it pops up on mine because it's a cheap tourist destination in our backyard.

They had a volunteer English program to boost English exposure a decade or so, and I was young and unattached, so I cotaught at an elementary school for room and board. I enjoyed it a lot (less so the teaching, but the class load was pretty light), and am Orthodox Christian, so they took me to a bunch of feast days for the various churches, and I ended up at a lot of supras.

This might read as CW, but it's not!

What are The Motte's thoughts on:

Women asking out men, or proposing is.. icky?

To me, it's finnnneeeee. I see no issues or implications to it. I've been explicitly asked out by girls thrice before, and I agreed for two of them. I didn't think of them as lesser "women" or feel emasculated by it, if anything, I thought of them more highly for doing that.

But talking/reading around, it seems to me a lot of people find the idea of a girl asking out a guy, or even more so a girl proposing a guy really icky. They can't explain what's icky about it, but I think it's something like the lines of the girl being a man and the man being a girl. I know their reaction is visceral, but I find it puzzling.

It seems to be a 50:50 split of men and women hating it with, 50% of the people hating it.

A man who doesn't pay for dates is a woman

Okay, read the comments on this insta reel: https://instagram.com/p/C9u0_gqxGRo/

Holy cow, women really hate the idea! Really really hate it.

I can see the defense if it were along the lines of, 'the initiator pays' and since the man is the initiator most of the time, the man pays de facto. Other than not being a fan of unclear messaging, (why describe the inference and not the model?), I don't think most of the pressed women actually mean that. They literally believe the man has to pay.

Once again... I don't see the big deal! Sometimes she can pay, sometimes I can pay. I probably won't bring this up in the future given some women are sooo vehemently against it, I can't make heads or tails of it.

Like I don't get it, if the man is actually a man, his manliness or whatever will be so overwhelming that something as simple as splitting the bill on a date wouldn't even make a dent to it.

Seems like a 90:10 split of f:m hating it with almost all of the haters being female.

I feel like I am peering into some kind of lower class bubble where displays of masculinity and femininity need to be that much more in your face because there isn't that much of it to begin with? IDK, I feel like these people are operating at a more animalistic level than me. And this stresses the fuck out of me because I am evidently in the minority and can't model other humans.

I'm not a progressive or liberal by any stretch, but I really don't see what the "conservatives" are on about here.

Back in my single days, I would pay for the first round of drinks, for the mating ritual.

80% of the time, she would offer to pay for the next round, which I was fine with. I don't think it was a political thing (it was too common for that). Rather, I think she was trying to avoid me thinking worse of her, which I may do if I thought she was a gold-digger or whatever.

Interestingly, if she didn't offer to pay for the next round, that was a pretty reliable signal that she'd say no to a second date.

I haven't been single in over a decade. I remember the norm being to split the bill, I'd sometimes pick it up as the guy. If I picked it up though there was more of an expectation that something physical was happening later. I also tended to date professional working women. It was a point of pride for them that they did not need me to pay for their date.

The other thing I remember was going on "reverse dates" basically one of us went to the other's place first, did some fun activities, then we went out to dinner. I might have picked up those checks more often, but I can't say with any certainty.

In terms of who asks out who, generally it was just men because they had more interest. I don't see anything wrong with a woman asking someone out.

A woman doing a marriage proposal feels very wrong. But I suppose in some specific circumstances it could make sense. Typically men are the more reluctant ones to get married. For the sake of both involved its better if the reluctant party enthusiastically signals that they are over their reluctance and ready to get married. Maybe if a man asks a woman to marry him, and the woman says no, but they continue dating then the ball should be in her court to ask him to get married. Describing and thinking of that kind of scenario doesn't feel nearly as icky as a woman just proposing first.

For the record, I agree with you, but there is some irony in saying that when it comes to asking someone out for dates, the more interested party should do so, but when asking someone for marriage, the more reluctant party should instead.

Asking someone out potentially will benefit both parties and neither risks very much, so it isn't strange to me for either sex to do this. Marriage, however, is generally one-sided in terms of which party stands to gain and which stands to lose, so it is off-putting for women to be doing the proposing. I only really think this because of who is typically the breadwinner. If a young broke guy were with a wealthy woman, I'd also find it off-putting if the broke guy were pushing for marriage.

I feel like I am peering into some kind of lower class bubble where displays of masculinity and femininity need to be that much more in your face because there isn't that much of it to begin with?

I think it might be worse than that. Sites like TikTok and Instagram take the worst tendencies of the extremely-online typifified by Twitter, 4chan, Tumblr, Et Al and market them to the masses.

They aren't looking for influencers they're looking for influencees

I’d be more than down for a chick asking me out for a change. I wouldn’t feel emasculated either but rather flattered. I’d also feel relieved that for once, I don’t have to do a hard-carry through the entire process (only most of it).

I don’t think it’s happened a single time to me after high school, though. Even when it did (seldomly) happen back in those days, it was in the form of “teehee we should hang out some time 😊”, where I’d then have to take the reins and drive the interaction forward to make any actual hanging out occur.

I can see the defense if it were along the lines of, 'the initiator pays' and since the man is the initiator most of the time, the man pays de facto.

“The initiator pays” is but some retconned excuse for women to justify why men should pay while trying to preserve their Wonderfulness under a lipstick feminist framework, since almost always the initiator is the man. The rule might as well be “the taller one pays.”

That being said, especially nowadays I generally pay for women on dates. Usually for first dates, this just consists of sending her a taxi or rideshare to pick her up to bring her to my place, and one to send her back after or the next day. If we order food later, it’d be through a delivery account of mine and I’m not exactly going to send her an invoice for her half.

If we do go out later to a bar or club or something, I’ll pay as it makes for a better, smoother experience. Having to pause to split a check interrupts the momentum and her feeling of “omg one thing led to another and it just like happened.” Even beyond the first date, it risks offending her princess complex and/or triggering the ick.

Doing the asking out and/or proposing takes a level of agency, courage, and initiative that women generally lack. Bumble requiring women to message first just mostly resulted in women messaging “hi” or “hi :)” such that the men would need to take the wheel and lead the conversation. And even that was too much for women, hence Bumble exploring other avenues beyond women messaging first.

Getting proposed to indulges the aforementioned princess complexes of women. It’s her special moment where her man bends the knee to present her with a shiny expensive trinket that she can wear and showoff around acquaintances, friends, family. In contrast, the thought of doing the asking out or proposing is insulting. She is the prize, why should she need to grovel? Ugh, gross. Romance and courtship should be something that just happens to her.

It’s always funny to see threads in the AIO, AITA, relationship advice type subreddits that involve a female OP complaining about her boyfriend not proposing. Sometimes, buried in Controversial, someone asks “Sounds like you want to get married more than he does; why don’t you propose?” The way female Redditors try to square this circle is by saying that women are Socialized to be proposed to rather than doing the proposing, thus the boyfriend should do the Bare Minimum and propose to her if he cares about her. If not for the oppressive effects of the patriarchy, of course, women would be just as agentic as men.

Mann unprivate ur profile I wanna read ur other comments, always a comedy show

No comment on the bulk of your post, but regarding reddit I'm not convinced the vast majority of the posts in any advice subreddit (in particular relationship subs or AITA ,[Am I The Asshole]) aren't just the same random people typing imaginary, usually wildly implausible scenarios for trolling purposes and/or to keep the subs active.

Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

I imagine that bots have begun to displace the trans-rights tumblr furries in the 6 years since that post was written but the principle holds.

At least one such troll keeps a list.

I don't think it qualifies as successful trolling if your post is removed by the moderators or people just tell you to seek professional help. The whole point of trolling is people taking the bait and getting riled up, that is, spending more time replying to you than you spent time writing the original message.

On the topic of going Dutch on dates, I don't know if the norms are different in India or if I had better luck than usual, but I'm pretty sure that's how I did it for the overwhelming majority of dates. I can think of only one date where she outright asked me to pay, and I would consider that a "vetting" date, because afterwards she offered to go Dutch. All the steady relationships I've had, we've split bills or at least alternated paying.

Personally, I'd be rather annoyed if someone expected me to foot the bill. I could potentially see myself doing it if there was a massive gulf between incomes, for example if they were a broke college student, but that would very much be the exception, not the norm. I'd consider someone who never veered from that approach tantamount to a gold digger, and give them the cold shoulder ASAP. I've never felt the need to impress women by flaunting my wealth either. Anyone who resorts to doing that loses esteem in my eyes.

Those are both really stupid ideas, and I lose a lot of respect for anyone who actually holds people to them. In particular, pressuring women into not asking men out is just making things worse for every man out there. Women already have a tendency to not say what they mean and give cryptic hints at things, much to the chagrin of men everywhere. Encouraging them to double down on it is the last thing we should be doing.

pressuring women into not asking men out is just making things worse for every man out there.

In fact, doing so continues to uphold sexist and patriarchal gender norms that stereotype men as active initiators and women birthing persons as passive receptors. All women who do not ask men out are in fact enabling patriarchy and lending tacit assent to the existing status quo.

Questioning such heteronormative cultural attitudes regarding traditional gender roles by requiring birthing persons to ask men out is therefore a civic and ethical duty for every birthing person to fulfill in the fight to smash the patriarchy.

Women already have a tendency to not say what they mean and give cryptic hints at things

As someone who identifies as a birthing person, I demand that you retract this blatantly misogynistic and hateful stereotype of birthing persons.

Not funny, didn't laugh.

If a man has not already asked a woman out, it's either because she has failed to entice him with visual signals and flirting, or he is too socially incompetent or low self esteem to be worthy.

If batting your eyes and saying, "You know, I like spending time with you," doesn't work, then best to cut losses then and there. Guy isn't going to know the first thing about building a good life together.

If batting your eyes and saying, "You know, I like spending time with you," doesn't work

This is clearly ‘asking a guy out’, though.

What is actually likely to happen is that he, in a literal sense, will conclude that she likes spending time with him - that's it. Nothing more.

Sure, if you swallow all the feminist propaganda about men being the same as women, and how just because a woman is sending [insert signal here] doesn't mean she's interested, that makes sense. Otherwise it's just failing the 'tism test.

Women vastly overestimate how clear their deliberate outward presentation is to observer's, much less thoughtless presentation. Leaning forward and pushing ones chest out may be an tremendous effort for a woman that is blindingly obvious to other girls who understand the effort made, but to guys we literally have no clue it could be happening.

Bearing in mind that our own lived experiences will feature a gigantic amount of inconsistent behaviors from different women, and any man who lacks mind reading and errs on the side of caution will find the mental effort of parsing microbehaviors too exhausting.

The alternative is to he a dweeb who thinks every friendly interaction with a woman is a sign of her wanting to fuck. These guys are the worst, mainly because their mechanistic approach to parsing sexual receptiveness captures the error bound of drunk/lonely/bored women who decide to catch some strange for the hell of it regardless of the womans actual effectiveness in displaying receptiveness. With a statistically high rate of success to expended effort for the shithead guys, this reinforces shitty behaviors of both men and women. The guys think their shitty pickup lines and NPC flirt phrases are actually good tools to get women, the women think their subtlest of subtle hints was sufficient to bag a dude without seeming desperate. Women are more likely to regret their choice of bedpartner after coitus, but till the deed is done women are as capable as men in deluding themselves that their chosen partner is a prize worthy of the expended effort.

Unlike others I won't disagree with you, though I'd suggest that what you say is true arguably only after he has reached a sufficient point in life that he accepts the notion that any girl might find him attractive. Many, many guys take a surprising number of years to figure this out, despite the eyelid batting or coquettish arm touching of whatever female has been pitilessly tasked by destiny with sharing space in time and a Buick with him. (Oh for the return of bench car seats).

I suppose this doesn't even bear reiterating but I'll state it anyway: Boys need time to figure out their role in dating. This has always been true, and if it's never modeled for them by anyone (or is modeled, but with grave inaccuracy, in, for example media) the process runs the risk of turning them into man-boys or themselves feminine enough that they wait around for some luckless girl to brain them with a metaphorical steam iron of romantic know-how.

I recall my first prelude to actually having sexual intercourse (apologies if this is TMI but I won't get graphic) I was with a woman considerably older (or so it seemed at the time I was 22 and she was 31). We were sprawled on some church steps under the African night sky, having left our companions at some outdoor bar. Her exact words to my fumbling passivity: "Are you afraid to screw me?" Only the fact that she was clearly wanting me to pursue the matter (I didn't, not at that moment, that would occur another night, in a tent, largely by accident) kept me from having to excuse myself to step out into the bush (no pun. I mean actual bushveldt) from the shame of it. I felt like a boychild both rewarded and scolded at the same time. This rapidly accelerated my level of prowess however. I did not immediately become Rico Suavé (I probably never did) but through this moment and others like it I reached a level of sufficient competence that enabled me to function romantically. And though I eventually broke up with this same woman rather (unintentionally) cruelly, she taught me a lot.

Whenever I hear of a couple who hitched up young and with both having relatively little or no experience, I think they're either extraordinarily lucky or just blessed with great tolerance.

This is the perfect microcosm of the female vs the male view of reality.

Has a guy ever asked you out by saying that he likes spending time with you and leaving it at that?

The best way I've heard it explained is that it's not asking a guy (or anyone) out if there's plausible deniability. Batting your eyes and giving hints doesn't meet this threshold.

No. No it is not.

I feel your bewilderment too... I've had married women say shit like this to me and much worse, so they are willing to be homewrecked but not ask explicitly? But at the same time she a girl whos single and lives alone could say this just as a friend!!

Is the woman saying this while batting their eyes? Acting bashful or coy? Are her hands clasped behind her or is she leaning forward? She might actually want you to flirt back. But that doesn't mean she would accept a proposition. She might want a proposition, to stroke her ego, but she wouldn't accept it.

It's about posture and context. "I would like to spend more time alone with you" is way different from "I'm glad you were the one assigned to this task" or "I like to hang out with our group of friends, of which you are one." It's the woman's job to figure out how to get across "I would like to spend more time alone with you" without crossing the line of plausible deniability (because if she has to throw herself at a man, he's probably not invested in her.)

Is it fair that it's this way? Women have the more vulnerable role in continuing the species. She needs a man who will actually support her, and that is generally a man who seeks her out.

She needs a man who will actually support her, and that is generally a man who seeks her out.

This is not true at all. There are a lot of men who are good men and are going to support their woman, but aren't mind readers who can magically tell that a woman's statement of friendship was actually meant to be taken as a statement of romantic desire. If anything, choosing men who read into things is going to select against getting decent men, because jerks are more likely to not care about the woman's intent and just go for it.

It worked for me.

because jerks are more likely to not care about the woman's intent and just go for it.

That's one good reason to avoid being alone with a guy for the first several dates and to save sex for marriage. Helps weed out the jerks.

All the traditions work together, we can't just throw away one and expect it to work.

It worked for me.

Well, I met my wife online and she initiated contact. So that means waiting for women to ask you out is a winning strategy, right? ;)

My point wasn't that it's impossible to find a good man following your heuristic. My point was that a) many people ruled out by your heuristic are in fact good men, and b) your heuristic is more likely to rule in bad men. You're right that you can compensate for point B in other ways. And point A doesn't mean all good men are ruled out. But it's still a very flawed heuristic even if you can succeed while following it.

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Some of the split might be terminology then. For me, "asking out" means to set the time and venue for a date.

Unfortunately for the nerds out there - no it is not.

If batting your eyes and saying, "You know, I like spending time with you," doesn't work, then best to cut losses then and there. Guy isn't going to know the first thing about building a good life together.

Or he's young and literal minded ..

It's the same picture.

Furthermore, odds are that he's stringing you along.

Re the second point, it's been shown over and over and over that if someone likes someone they'll let them get away with vastly worse behaviour than splitting the bill. I think it's spoofed status signalling. Those women like to be seen on social media as so in demand that they can reject any man who doesn't cater to them.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was exactly the women who have previously failed to reject the worse behaviour who feel the need to make these counter signals.

I'm in Germany with the family. Visiting family and doing touristy stuff. This is the first time we've traveled with all the children. It's challenging when one of the four only eats french fries. Many museums and other attractions have family pricing that admits two adults and 4 children, though typically not places the children would choose to go.

It's also strange being back somewhere you've not really been in ~20 years. There's been plenty of culture war topic noticing. Some of this is seeing all the change at once that was paced over years for everyone else.

There are still many things Germany does better. The ubiquitous availability of beer, still being one. Food quality and price being another.

I really, really enjoyed German traffic culture and the laws that follow from it. I didn't even realize that Traffic Culture was a thing until I went there. The idea that you can lose your license for being a bad driver, not necessarily a dangerous one but one that thoughtlessly ruins the flow of traffic for dozens of other people, was incredibly impressive to me. The focus on maintaining vehicle-lengths between cars to prevent "accordion-ing" of traffic is incredible. Returning to the US felt like a third world country (in traffic) by comparison.

The ubiquitous availability of beer

Say more? Only been to Germany once for short weekend in Berlin years ago. Have seen comfortable attitudes to alcohol in Europe (wine with meals France and Italy, small beer at 9am on a sunny day in France, gorgeous and strange beers in Belgium). Wondering what the situation is in Germany. I love beer but I hate drunks, and attitudes with and towards drink is off the charts in places like UK where the objective seems way more about getting pissed than actually enjoying oneself maturely.

Lego Land, Play Mobil Fun Park, the local trampoline park all serving beer in the food court / canteen. Most museum cafes too. Unlike the USA when you do find beer at these sorts of places it will be something mass market and expensive for a .33 l can, here it tends to be something local and cheap in a .5 l bottle.

The UK is just a very poor and depressing place outside of London and its extended suburbs (the South East) and a few other pockets (and the wealthy countryside, but very few people live there anymore). Drink is one of the only things they have. In Germany wealth is more distributed and outside the former DDR there are many good jobs supporting functioning and prosperous communities.

When I visited the UK I stayed in a little hamlet in Gloucestershire, about halfway between Bristol and Gloucester. I visited Bristol, Bath, Gloucester, Cardiff, and Salisbury. None of these places (with the exception of a particular section of Bristol) struck me as “depressingly poor”, although that might just be because I wasn’t living there everyday, or because things that seemed “quaint” to me were actually just signs of poverty. I’m sure things in the Midlands and up North are probably worse, but at least in the parts of the UK I saw, not much depressed me except for the demographics in Cardiff and the piss-poor adaptation of The Magic Flute I saw in Bristol. Maybe I just haven’t seen the high life in London so I don’t know what to compare things to.

Bath is probably not a great example as it is high-net worth. Cardiff, you need to look around a bit. It at one point was considered the drug capital of Wales, so you don't really have to look far.

It's challenging when one of the four only eats french fries.

I'm always curious how kids wind up being this sort of extreme picky eaters. At what age and how did the tendency start? Is it just that you don't normally see it as enough of a problem to force it out of it, or would the kid literally starve itself to death if you refused to make french fries available?

Father of a 15-year-old daughter. Our staple diet, and staple diet of everyone we know, is potatoes. At least 5 days a week, at least once a day – potatoes. Daughter spat them out the first time she tried them at six months old and has never got a single one down in all the years since. She can’t seem to eat cooked potatoes in any form. She’s picky, and has always been, and it just seems to be something in her DNA. Who knows.

Since beginning food. He'd refuse to eat and demand milk. He's 9 now.

He's unpleasant (more than usual) when he's not eaten, though so are many people. Longest he's gone recently is 36 hours or so, when he finally ate some toast. He's specific about the french fries too, no ketchup, only salt.

He's also complained and avoided the Fanta here in Germany saying it tastes different. Sprite has been less ubiquitous and he's not liked the alternative lemon / citrus soft drinks. Doesn't like the UHT milk.

Our other kids have not had any trouble finding things they like on menus or trying new things.

Sample of four kids, they tend to eat everything when they are under 2.5, then start to balk at things that they liked previously.

I have one kid who will skip every meal except breakfast if we don't offer at least a serving of bread/crackers/tortilla that has not been contaminated with anything.

For every other kid, I have one rule that works. Everything the grownups are eating goes on their plate. They have to smell the food at the least. It they want seconds on a food they like, they have to take one bite of the food they are avoiding.

For the kid this doesn't work with, she has a higher than average aversion to lots of things. Every floating object is a bee, every thing that touches her unexpectedly is slimey and disgusting, finger paints are a reason to screech.

I’ve heard from multiple people and personally seen one example where the following is true:

It’s basically just overly low risk tolerance around food safety, built in on an evolutionary level. The solution is having the whole family eat the same thing repeatedly (for like a week straight) and nothing else. That food will then be added to their ‘safe food’ registry and they’ll be fine with it forever. Rinse and repeat with each food.

It's probably a little difficult to eat e.g. spinach only for a week.

True. It was always unclear to me whether this worked for the whole food or included each component. I assumed the former (in the sense that after applied to spinach casserole, they will be fine with spinach casserole, but not with spinach by itself.) It’s not really applicable to when a kid just doesn’t like a particular food (in the case of spinach they might just have have really high taste sensitivity to bitterness) but specifically for the “will literally just eat one food and nothing else, potentially up to starvation if they don’t get french fries” type of kid

Also I understand not wanting to do this. Most people don’t like eating the same things repeatedly. I am not one of those people (my desire to eat a food grows ~linearly with the number of times in a row I’ve consumed it) but I wouldn’t blame anyone for not applying this info.

would the kid literally starve itself to death

For my one cousin, yes. Or at least to the point of fainting. IIRC, it started when she started eating food, and lasted pretty much to adulthood. I'm not sure if she even qualifies as "picky" anymore, given her improvement over the deacdes.

I have a "just so" evo explanation for that. It's that age at which kids are no longer constantly supervised or in safe areas but are still dumb as fuck. If they were eager and willing to try new things, they would've eaten some mushroom or berry and died.

Better than where?

USA

AI may invert the common wisdom that studying English is worthless and studying computer science is the wise decision. If AI takes off as anticipated, employers will look for word people who are trained in analyzing prompt replies, using specified and nuanced language, and consuming hundreds of pages of written text per day. English and history students would be great at this.

AI may invert the common wisdom that studying English is worthless and studying computer science is the wise decision. If AI takes off as anticipated, employers will look for word people who are trained in analyzing prompt replies

Look I'm one of the most strident defenders of the value of the humanities on TheMotte, but I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

If AI is actually generally intelligent then you won't need to "analyze" its replies. You won't need to do prompt engineering, you won't need to do any of that. You'll just tell it to do something and it'll do it. Like any ordinary human. STEM professionals aren't all walking around in an autistic haze where they're unable to have basic interactions with other people. They're quite capable of telling subordinates what to do and verifying that the task was completed, using natural language. Hell, if it really came down to it, you could get the AI to analyze its own replies and do prompt engineering for you! That's what general intelligence entails.

And to the extent that AI falls short of general intelligence, it will likely continue as it does today as essentially a tool for domain experts. In which case, the most important factor for a human will still be their domain expertise and their ability to actually do the job at hand, rather than their AI whispering skills.

Of course there is something to be said for the skill of people management in general, being able to motivate people and keep them on task, playing office politics, things like that - those are real skills that not everyone possesses. But if we're at the point where we have to wrangle our AIs because they're too moody/lazy/rebellious to fulfill your request, that's a bigger problem - one that is more appropriate for the engineers (or the military) to solve, not English majors.

You'll just tell it to do something and it'll do it. Like any ordinary human.

Have you ever actually worked with humans? :-)

You'll just tell it to do something and it'll do it

??? Whatis this supposed to mean?

You convey to the AI what you want to see using precision in language. There is no way for the AI to know what you want without you supplying information to it. Like, if you’re an architect telling the builder what to build, or a sketch artist with probing questions to a witness, or any other basic way in which humans use language to obtain what they want from other humans.

You convey to the AI what you want to see using precision in language. There is no way for the AI to know what you want without you supplying information to it.

Sure. And the limiting factor there is the person's technical domain expertise. Generic "communication" skills are of no help. A programmer can explain much better to another programmer how a piece of software should be constructed than an English major could.

invert the common wisdom that studying English is worthless and studying computer science is the wise decision.

employers will look for word people who are trained in analyzing prompt replies, using specified and nuanced language, [...]

This seems to presuppose that fluency with a language confers understanding of the concepts to which that language and its words can refer. Since you brought up computer science, I have doubts that an English major, without sufficient study of the prerequisites (formal logic, some calculus, basic algorithms, data structures, graph theory - i.e. "studying computer science") would be able to understand, let alone judge the veracity of a proof that an algorithm is correct and has certain performance characteristics. Complaints of "you never need that on the job" notwithstanding, an understanding of the actual problem domain under discussion in (for example) the English language is necessary to walk the AI through certain tradeoffs, designs, and eventually make decisions - or even know that they exist at all. Further, being able to supply a coherent rationale for why a particular decision was made beyond "God AI told me so" would also entail an understanding of those domain-specific complexities.

I suppose I can conceive of an AI so powerful that it will understand, weigh, measure, and decide upon all of these factors on your behalf, while simultaneously being able to discern your intent despite you not having a sufficient understanding of the vocabulary to express it, but in this case the English student would himself also become obsolete.

Phrasing your desired outcome and precisely specifying it requires not just a fluency in language and merely an acquaintance of a domain's vocabulary but also an understanding of the concepts to which that vocabulary refers and the relationships between those concepts. Moreover, in order to intelligibly and productively have a conversation with the AI - that is, to respond back to its replies with follow-up questions or redirections in case it gets off track - one must understand the semantics, or the meaning of those letters on your screen: the things to which they point, and the sense of the statement. Otherwise, you may as well be Searle's Chinese Room, "unintentionally" shunting around meaningless symbols without any understanding of what they mean, all the while maintaining the pretense that you are actually having a sensible dialogue and are capable of moving around and making decisions in the space of solutions and tradeoffs.

Language is merely the technology we use, the medium through which information is serialized and conveyed across minds (including past and future instances of my own brain). As a tool or "bicycle" of the mind it is a good multiplier of one's cognitive capacity, in the same way a pickaxe is a good multiplier of your ability to mine rocks. However, knowing how to swing one will not give you any expertise in prospecting or insight into where to mine for gold. Expertise with a language does not imply expertise with all the possible landscapes, concepts, and ideas that can be expressed within it.

This is how computers already work. English majors turned out to be pretty much the worst type of people at actually communicating clearly. Even now that AI knows some human language it's mostly CS types communicating successfully with it.

What makes you think this trend will reverse so drastically?

Will they? I can see some of those skills transferring, but the patterns of behavior and the quirks and nuances that AI have are going to differ from those that a traditional English student is going to be used to. I would think that a healthy amount of computer science would help understand the underlying mechanisms of AI and thus have a better idea of how and why it misbehaves when it does and how to adjust prompts to fix that.

I expect that the value of an English degree will go up, but not enough to surpass that of a CS degree, since the value of those will also go up. Probably the best case would be people who double majored in English and CS, but I believe those are rare.

using specified and nuanced language

This has always been useful, and is less so about studying English than preciseness of thought. Linguistics maybe. End of day, it's about writing crisp documents.

The best software architects write the best requirements. The best managers drive concise meetings. The best lawyers are linguistic magicians. Don't get me started on politicians, tv experts and the entertainment business. Even doctors have to be insanely precise in how they communicate the specifics of a disease.

It's no surprise that Stanford's symbolic systems has produced a significant number of tech billionaires. It is a field studying exactly what you talk about.

End of day, it's about writing crisp documents.

Honestly I do yearn for a job where this is highly valued. Too often I’ve found myself in places where it’s just bull-in-china-shop stuff, doing things mindlessly and then gathering up the debris mindlessly. I wrote a 6-page memo recently to propose a project and outline its week to week operating mechanisms, medium/long term anticipated benefits and challenges foreseen. May as well have scratched my scrotum for 3 hours for all the good it did.

Gentlemen, I am pleased to announce I have finally found a decent pizza place near me. I have no earthly idea why, but this has been a remarkable weight off my mind.

Hey, glad to hear it. I've been pulling for you. I'll sleep just a little better tonight.

I have finally found a decent pizza place near me.

Keep your voice down. David Portnoy might hear you.

For various reasons I make our pizzas, and with some success. The usual pepperoni/Italian sausage (a facsimile I also make) but also a chicken ranch (half spicy, half not), a Mexican, once a cheeseburger pizza, and the meatless margherita.

Once you have a dough recipe and figure out your oven, the rest is fairly straightforward.

It's hard to do a good Neapolitan style pizza in a home oven.

Not if the oven has pyrolytic cleaning. It requires some tinkering with thermostats though.

Yes, but Sicilian/pan pizzas are very easy at home with no specialist equipment

I enjoy making my own, and it’s always a great hour with the kids rolling out their base and painstakingly preparing toppings and watching everything bubble and rise nicely.

That said, I am also on OP’s side in that there is a pure form of joy in finding a local place that does it consistently well. There’s a guy near me, Eastern European fella, he and his wife work flat out 8 hours a day 7 days a week and close the place for 2 weeks a year. They have 500+ 5-star Google reviews in a town where 50 would be in the top 3%. Unbelievable dedication to his craft. (He’s a bit of a pompous a-hole but every silver lining has a cloud.)

Have you tried digornio pizza?

I have not. I have tried a few other brands of frozen pizza though, and never had one better than "mid".

I have sampled a lot of them and I generally agree. The walmart sam's choice brand ones were mostly edible, the great value brand ones less so. Unfortunately I think they discontinued the former. Red baron is okay if you're already tipsy when you start eating it, which has usually been the case when I've had it. Digiorno was forgettable and not worth the expense over the cheaper ones. Some of the expensive ones can be pretty solid, but at that point you aren't really saving money over getting takeout and they only make sense as something to bring to a remote and isolated vacation rental or something like that.

The last one I had that I actually kinda liked was one of the latter, a $12(!) california pizza kitchen-branded frozen pepperoni and honey thing. Tasted pretty good but absolutely not worth $12 when I could pick up a substantially larger hot and freshly made one from $mid_tier_national_chain or a similarly sized hot and freshly made one from $local_good_pizzeria for the same price.

If you can afford it some of the options on Goldbelly are worth it. Much more upscale (but also more expensive) than traditional frozen pizza. You can also find some pretty prominent review/ranking places like OneBite that can give you some ideas for what frozen pizza is worth it.

Digornio is ass.

A nearby deli has Italian frozen pizzas that are already half baked in an actual pizza oven (such that they have that nice blackened crust / base going on) before they add the toppings and flash freeze them. Set the oven to 450f, let a metal tray heat up for a half hour and then put the frozen pizza in for 10 minutes and they come out pretty great. But they’re also quite small and cost like £8 ($11) and therefore come at a minimal discount to picking one up nearby.

Oh wow, even Red Baron?

Dude Red Baron is pretty mid. Also so is Little Caesars for that matter. I think you might just have low standards for pizza.

I always assumed RB was low tier. My parents only did Tombstone when I was a kid which is disgusting. However my in-laws have turned me onto the Classic Red Baron crust. For sometimes as low as $2.50/pizza (normally $3.50-$5.00) it's legitimately the most insane taste and calorie/$ ratio on the planet.

Home Run is too fatty for my taste, Screamin Sicilian is better than almost all of them but too expensive.

Yeah. It wasn't bad, but it didn't blow my socks off either.

What’s your definition of decent pizza?

To paraphrase Justice Stewart, I know it when I taste it.

He probably means something as good or at least a little better than Little Caesars

Every time I eat Little Caesars, I feel like I want to die. The pizza helps me here, because it makes me feel like I am actually going to die.

At first I start to sweat. I lose feeling in my limbs, my stomach aches in a concerningly numb way, and my eyelids become heavier than my crushing guilt. Actual ambrosia would not be worth the feelings it creates.

And yet I still crave the Caesar. Despite smoking many times throughout my life, I have never once failed to resist the cravings to do it more. Nicotine has nothing on that hellish pizza. An entire day’s worth of willpower is burnt if it ends up in my presence.

May Satan take that whole chain (but maybe I’ll have just one slice before he does.)

My man, surely you've visited a pizza joint that isn't an international chain?

Ya for sure, I don't think my school pizza was an international chain! Don't be ridiculous man.

I can’t tell if you’re being serious. Little Caesar’s is by far the most revolting pizza I’ve ever tasted. Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Domino’s, Sbarro—hell, even Great Value frozen pizzas—are all far superior, even though I wouldn’t rank of them as great pizza either.

Little Caesar's does have one notable advantage: it's cheap AF. Back when I was in college (20 years ago, eep) it was only $5 for a large pizza. And while the quality wasn't great, it was at least ok. When you're a broke college student, being able to get half a pizza for $2.50 is awesome.

I mean if you want to get all hoity toity about pizza. Sure you can go high end with Papa johns, but I didn't realize we were talking rich people pizza.

I put Master of Orion aside for a little while, and tried playing Nox. I played it for about an hour or two one night, and just couldn't muster a single fuck to give about it. I donno.

I saw Mechwarrior 5: Clans is coming out soon, which motivated me to try Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries again. I was so god damned excited about that game, preordered it and everything. But it was just so... blah when it came out. The radar system was just fucking useless. I think it was barely better than line of sight on release? And enemies could spawn anywhere you didn't have radar coverage. Which meant while I was stomping along at 20 kph in my Awesome, enemies were constantly appearing out of thin air directly behind me on the terrain I just traversed. There was a Better Spawns mod, but it would constantly get broken, and then fixed right in time for another fucking DLC to come out and break it again.

Anyways, the game is done, no more DLC, probably only maintenance patches, I think I can count on mods to work for a while. So I loaded up Battle Spawns 2.2, a UI mod that fixes things on 32:9 displays, and I edited the unreal engine ini file to be hor+ instead of vert-. And let me tell you, the game is finally good. It's finally a Mechwarrior title worthy of all the others. Radar is vastly more functional, enemy spawns are much more sensical, often from drop ships 400m away to give you some time to regroup. I'm all in this time. No more petering out and getting distracted. I might even bust out my HOTAS again and climb that skill cliff once more.

I heard about Nox via a breathless manifesto on its alleged perfect PvP balance. I can’t find it now, but it was one of those notepad docs, and it had strong opinions on most every spell and skill interaction between the classes. Depth! Mind games! Wizarding!

So I downloaded it, started the story, and found myself standing on a beach in a t-shirt, hitting crabs with a stick. Yeah, I’m with you on this one.

Yeah, the solo and story mode of the game were... pretty uninspired. There's probably some important role they played in building toward the modern action adventure RPG (and maybe even a bit of modern MMOs) as a step away from Diablo-likes, but at best it's extremely dated, and more often it's reason to get pushed to other better games of the same era.

Multiplayer was fun back at the time. I wouldn't exactly write a big paper drooling over it, because it did develop a lot of jank pretty quickly (and then EA killed the servers), but you could tell that it was actually trying for some level of good multiplayer play (contrast eg: Mechwarrior 3's PPC meta).

I had the most this entire week by literally doing nothing. All the nothing in the world. Wake up, grab coffee with other digital-nomad/traveler/expat friends, sit around the coffee shop next to the 7/11 in front of my apartment in chiang mai next to central festival and chat for hours.

I later went to the old city with that jacked middle aged Russian ex rust programmer friend d. It's insane seeing how influential Buddha has been. What's even funnier is that I'm one of the people from the same caste/lineage as him and funnily enough one of the first to revive the sacred thread. So it was surreal seeing sculptures of him wearing the sacred thread, the same one I wear. His physical descriptions match mine, alas hie had blue eyes whilst I don't.

It's so fun, just doing nothing, literally just sit around, talking, having random people drop by. I'll obviously be doing literally the opposite of this in a week or so since I'll be leaving. Past few weeks felt like I was back in high school in terms of how little worry I had about life. Partly because I knew that this was temporary stuff. My internet usage went down quite a bit where I only post stuff here and about the girls I'm meeting on reddit.

I'll probably read the mystery method and Geeta end to end this week. Chiang Mai is a nice town, you can sit in the sun here with your shirt off, something you can only do back home in the month of March. There's dragon flies around. I feel very content so just wanted to post about it.

Bro you gotta drop the red pill/PUA/game ideology. It will lead you nowhere good. Please trust me, I went down that road myself.

Nah, Red Pill stuff is a great antidote to the lies that everywhere else in culture is pushing: that women are wonderful and to put the pussy on a pedestal. It’s helpful for a class of guys who can’t figure out why being nice doesn’t get them a date or get them laid. The criticism I’d level against it is that the skills that get you laid are practically unrelated to the skills necessary to maintain relationships and build families. But you have to crawl before you run.

I agree that it's bad to put women on a pedestal. But that doesn't mean that the extreme cynicism of PUA thought is the right answer either. The key is to not put women on a pedestal while still treating them with respect and not turning it into some game.

Hard disagree. We have to “put pussy on a pedestal”. Just like women need to have their men on a pedestal too. This is literally the only way you can flourish over a timeframe of decades without ending up hating everyone and everything, no matter how much you own or how much pussy you plunge.

I would never have put those two books together conceptually.

Why in Mara's name are you reading Mystery Method? The path of the PUA leads to pathology and unhappiness. If no one else has told you this (they have) I am telling you now (again). If a PUA sits by the river long enough, he will see the body of the person he could have been float by.

I cannot comment on the sitting around doing nothing. If PUA has anything to offer it can improve one's motivation to be a more interesting, cleaner, more physically fit, less needy, healthier, better-dressed and groomed man. Leading hopefully to self-confidence based in legitimate accomplishment.

None of which are achieved by doing nothing. But you seem to be on vacation now. Have you checked out the waterfalls? Done a Thai cooking class?

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