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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2478 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

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

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I just realized that the closer you get to New England, the more specific a background "Yankee" denotes. Overseas, it means an American. In the US it means someone from the Northeast. In the Northeast it specifically refers to someone from New England. I assume that this regresses further, and that in New England it refers to someone from Massachusetts, where it refers to someone from Boston, that within Boston it refers to a specific neighborhood, and that within that neighborhood resides the One True Yankee.

I'm agnostic as to whether it's a hereditary title or one that comes with the house.

I thought that New Englanders used it to mean someone from New York, and New Yorkers used it to mean the baseball team.

I haven't met anyone who favours a more specific definition than "New Englander".

That said, when talking to Americans, I have heard "Yankee" used to refer to a widely-hated baseball team playing in the Bronx and its fans far more often than I have heard it used to refer to New Englanders. Given that the Bronx is not part of New England, I suspect it makes "Northeasterner" the more correct meaning to a descriptivist.

Obnoxious issues that arise when you read Chinese Cultivation Novels:

At some point, when the chapter count is well past 4 digits and/or when there's a hiatus, human translators (usually unpaid fans) can drop out, and you run into MTL (machine translation).

This might not sound like a problem today, after all, LLMs are pretty good at the job. To test that myself, I've converted chapters from (translated) English to Chinese and back, and find near perfect fidelity.

No, dear reader, the issue is that the MTL can be old. And it's non-trivial to find the original Chinese sources.*

Cue me weeping in agony as the best translation of a favorite novel changes character gender and names every few paragraphs, and translates what was previously "Land of Sin" as "Naughty Land".

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

Fuck it, I'm going to do dig down the Chinese version and throw it into Google Gemini, a million token-wide context window can't hurt.

*Most places where you can read Xianxia in English use unauthorized or outright pirated translations. And these sites all steal from one another, so if a bad translation becomes the default, good luck finding a better one.

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

That's why I stopped reading Chinese novels. When I read them, even though I read "translated" novels(I started around 2017, and back then shitty translations were much worse than MTL/LLMs are now) my ability to read anything else became much worse. I speed-read them, because the faster I go through a story, the pacing and other things make up for the lacking in coherence. In the end I got to a point where I could almost skim past sentences if I didn't find them interesting.

Although I also just ran out of stuff to read. I drop things very quickly if I don't like them, and I dropped almost everything I tried, so I read novels on Royalroad and English web novels like Worm instead.

I wasn't sure how seriously to take the people claiming that reading MTL actually damaged their reading comprehension (the subreddit has a lot of LARPing and shitposting), but after hearing your account I'm glad I didn't give in to the temptation!

Finding good Xianxia can be a slog. I've read maybe 4 novels, and 3 of them were highly recommended by word of mouth. Not that it's much easier to find good stuff on RR either, but at least you can expect legible grammar most of the time.

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

Betcha Claude can grok the underlying intent and create a less-borked translation too, and any damage to its sanity would be isolated to only that chat. Care to provide a sample?

I've actually spent about 4 hours yesterday using Gemini 1206 to translate as I go, the 2 million token CW meant I can throw in dozens of chapters and have it produce perfectly pleasant text. There are a few stylistic quirks, or perhaps they were the original translator's quirks that aren't present anymore. It certainly doesn't garble gender and do anything too funky.

I'm sure Claude would be great at the task, but even the original GPT-4 would consider it trivial.

Here's the site I've been grabbing the raw text from if you want to take a look: https://www.piaotia.com/html/7/7095/6107291.html

The horrid "official" translation can be found on:

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

Can you give us a small sample of the better translation for comparison?

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2770-splitting-the-road-with-one-slash.html

That's the bad translation.

Here's a better one on pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/b4R2hWF7

The most obvious changes are that it very sensibly decides that "Land of Sin" is a better translation than "Naughty Land". A character doesn't mysteriously turn male partway through.

"Manjusaka", a type of plant with connections to the underworld, is a far more contextually and culturally appropriate translation for a location as opposed to "Red Spider Lily".

While a matter of taste, "Covenant Alliance" seems more elegant than "Sanctuary Alliance", and is what human translators initially opted for.

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

Wow you weren't kidding about that translation quality. And yeah probably any recent LLM can do it, but that 2M context limit is pretty sweet when you need it.

Lo and behold, after figuring out a way to find OG Chinese pirate sites, and then finding one that doesn't use JS nonsense to prevent copy and pasting, I can read the rest of the novel in peace. A tad-bit awkward, but absolutely better than what was the state of the art in 2017, with seemingly no attention from a human editor.

Anyone on the ground in LA? I remember when I asked about going there @Being , @Lazuli , @waffles answered. Anyone have the perpsective of a resident?

I'm quite far away from the fires, though the ash has drifted down to our area and the air quality has not been so good. On a clear day I can see Malibu/Pacific Palisades/Santa Monica from nearby, but smoke is clearly visible.

From a human perspective, most of us are going about our normal business. I haven't heard an official statistic of how many people have been displaced yet, but it's at the point where you hear about distant relations getting affected - nobody I know personally, but friends of friends having to evacuate, co-workers's wife's cousin lost their house - that sort of thing.

You were lucky with the timing of your trip, if the fires started two weeks prior you'd be wearing an N95 everywhere!

True about our timing, very true. I asked about local perspectives because other than one or two sources the focus in the mainstream news media is typically on multimillion dollar homes of the well-heeled. I don't mean to be callous but I don't care so much if a celebrity's third home in malibu was torched.

I am given pause by stories of people being caught actually lighting fires for whatever nefarious psychotic reasons of their own, right in the middle of the worst of it.

In any case, glad to hear you've been relatively insulated!

Question for the software engineers:

Is there anything uniquely innovative or difficult to reproduce about the software/codebase for any of the big social media platforms (particularly Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/TikTok/Youtube) or is their hold on the market mostly a result of network effects and their established large user bases?

Edit: Having clarified my thoughts after early responses, I think the core of what I want to understand is this: I know that there a many very intelligent people being paid handsomely as software engineers for these sites. Given the apparent simplicity and minimal improvement in the basic functions (from a user perspective) of many of these sites, what is it that these engineers are actually being paid to work on? Aside from server reliability, what other things do they need all these bigbrains for?

Aside from server reliability, what other things do they need all these bigbrains for?

I think asking the question with the word "need" is likely to lead to confusion. Instead, note that as long as the marginal benefit of adding one more developer is larger than the amount it costs to do so, they will keep on hiring, and so the key is to look at what those marginal developers are doing.

Large organizations have non-obvious advantages of scale. This can combine with the advantages of scale that companies have to produce surprising results.

Let's say you have a company with a billion users and a revenue model with net revenue of $0.25 / user / year, and only 50 employees (like a spherical-cow version of WhatsApp in 2015). Let's further say that it costs $250,000 / year to hire someone.

The questions that you will be asking include

  • Can I increase the number of users on the platform?
  • Can I increase the net revenue per user?
  • Can I do creative stuff with cashflow?
  • And, for all of these, you might consider hiring a person to do the thing.

At a billion $0.25 / year users, and let's say $250k / year to hire a person, that person would only have to do one of

  • Increase the size of the userbase by 0.1%
  • Increase retention by an amount with the same effect (e.g. if users typically use the platform for 3 years before dropping off, increase that to 3 years and 1 day)
  • Or ever-so-slightly decrease CAC
  • Increase expected annual net revenue per user by $0.00025
  • If the amount you make is flat across all users, double annual net revenue per user specifically for the specific subgroup "users in Los Angeles County", while not doing anything anywhere else
  • If the amount you make per user is pareto distributed at 80/20, figure out if there's anything you can build specifically for the hundred highest-revenue users that will cause them to spend 10% more money / generate 10% more revenue for the company (if the distribution is more skewed than 80/20, you may end up with an entire team dedicated to each of your few highest-revenue customers - I would not be surprised if google had a team dedicated specifically to ensuring that Mr Beast stays happy and profitable on YT).
  • Figure out how to get the revenue at the beginning of the week instead of the end of the week
  • Increase the effectiveness of your existing employees by some tiny amount

Realistically you will instead try to do 100+x each of these with teams of 100+ people, and keep hiring as long as those teams keep wanting more people. But those are the sorts of places to look.

Making a UI clone for Twitter should be not hard. Same for reddit, though moderation and customization functions may require some more work. Making full clone - with whatever ads, analytics, system functions, metrics, etc. exist and not visible to the public may be more complicated. Making it work reliably at scale Twitter works at may be a serious project for a serious qualified team, though it's definitely nothing impossible, just needs investment. Reddit I'd say the same with more investment since there are more options, but bare bones clones of both, especially if they don't need ads/analytics and billion scale, would probably not be too hard.

Facebook is a bit tougher due to a myriad of privacy settings and modes which may require some non-trivial approaches to data retrieval, and then there's whatever filthy black magic that underlies their feed algorithm... Plus it has streaming video, which is its own big can of worms, with which I personally never worked but heard it has a lot of dark magic into it too. Instagram/Youtube are also based on that, so the same applies there.

is their hold on the market mostly a result of network effects and their established large user bases?

On the market - definitely. Even if they had some super awesome technologies, it would likely be possible to reproduce the same results maybe with slightly higher costs and slightly less awesome performance, and for social media network effects beat technology any time of the day. Don't get me wrong - you need a lot of technology to run code at the scale of Facebook, and a lot of it goes not only to the site itself but to support the organization that supports it and makes money from it, but code superiority has nothing to do with their success. In fact, I have seen very successful projects (not ones you named, but also famous names) where the code and the technology behind it are very subpar, but as long as it works and brings in the sweet dollars...

Given the apparent simplicity and minimal improvement in the basic functions (from a user perspective) of many of these sites,

You can make a toy twitter in a weekend. Taking it from a toy to billion-users business with billions of revenue is the hard part.

Aside from server reliability, what other things do they need all these bigbrains for?

  • Maintenance - finding and fixing bugs (there are always bugs)
  • Performance improvements - in every big and old software, there's probably something old and slow and tons of money can be saved by making it faster
  • New features - you may not see them, but somebody else does
  • Revenue - for all those sites that means mostly serving ads, counting ads, selling ads, analyzing data from ads and so on
  • Business analytics - not the same as the above, the ad buyers get the above, this one is for the business itself
  • Internal tools - any large project has build systems, docs systems, test systems, etc. and somebody has to work on those
  • Moderation tools - for pretty much every site that allows user comments, if you don't want for the FBI to visit you, you need moderation tools
  • Catching up with new technologies - there's always new browser, new network protocol, new API, new login method, new security feature, new OS, new mo bile platform, etc. that needs to be supported

Probably a couple of dozens of other things I forgot to mention.

To put it in perspective, I was able to put together a decent Yelp clone within 8 hours. I had a webserver framework and Adderall but that'll give you an idea of what a ~3x engineer can do. With AI that's probably gotten better.

"Describe how you would implement a Twitter clone" is a fairly standard and easy interview question a senior software engineer should be able to answer to a reasaonable amount of detail. (The same question about Ticketmaster is significantly harder which would surprise most people outside the industry.)

Ticketmaster is way harder of course due to heterogeneity of the underlying data.

Network effects, mostly.

The last novel model was TikTok's: short vertical videos fed to you by an algorithm forever. Everyone replicated it as quickly as possible, but couldn't defeat TikTok.

Twitter is another good example: no amount of money spent by FAANGs helped them build a viable clone. Bluesky is thriving purely on network effects.

The engineers are paid to lower operating costs and improve engagement with the ads. Social networks are some of the biggest datasets in the world, and people expect them to work for free and 24x7: every dollar you spend on running them is coming out of your ad revenue. At this scale it makes sense to do things like develop your own compression algorithm for data and get the major browsers to support it to lower your traffic costs by 1%. Or to hire the author of the programming language your software is written in and to give him a team to improve its performance.

Hardest part to replicate is probably the server reliability because that takes lots of intricate work and the AI-driven systems (mostly recommendation / advertising) because you need data.

This matters different amounts for different companies. But I would say that network effects are a far bigger hurdle; the above is just sauce.

So in comparing, say, this site to Reddit, there's probably some complex code for managing the orders of magnitude greater traffic that themotte just doesn't worry about? Or are you mainly referring to baseline server reliability?

@lagrangian covered some of it: the fault tolerance you need as your system scales up. At that scale, freak incidents happen everyday. I still remember the chaos in my office when Google services dropped for a few hours.

Consider also the kind of bugs you start to get when you have users worldwide, all expecting to use their own language and writing system, and expecting UI and help to be available in that language.

Then moderation. If you’re building an up and coming social media, sooner or later someone is going to livestream a beheading or use it to send plausible death threats, and you’re going to be forced to deal with that.

Of course, most startups fail, so these are problems you want to have. But still problems.

Then moderation.

"A webform I can paste content into for others to see? Guess I'll programmatically post enormous amounts of child pornography into it."

Scott had a point about witches overrunning communities. He was right. The devil and his followers notice your website and have endless amounts of suffering children to show everyone.

So in comparing, say, this site to Reddit, there's probably some complex code for managing the orders of magnitude greater traffic that themotte just doesn't worry about?

Right. Zorba pays for the site out of pocket, but that is not scalable. The site occasionally goes down - we even lost most of a day of posts not too long ago. That's no big deal at our scale - just ssh in, figure out the bug, deploy something manually, etc.

But at e.g. Google scale, it's $500k/minute of gross revenue on the line in an outage, to say nothing of customers leaving you permanently over the headache. Fractions of a percent of optimization are worth big bucks. Compliance headaches are real. Hardware failures are a continual certainty.

Read about the brilliance behind Spanner, the database a huge amount of Google is built on: their own internet cables, because why choose between C[onsistency] and A[vailability] when you can just not have network P[artitions]?

You need an incredible degree of fault tolerance in large systems. If n pieces in a pipeline each have a probability p of working, the system has p^n - exponential decay.

Plenty of it is feature bloat, that said. You really can serve an astonishing amount of traffic from a single cheap server.

I don't have a good sense of scale—how much would you expect running this site costs per month?

Off the top of my head, $50.

  • Fermi estimate:
    Multiply the following:

    • 207 "report" ctrl+f matches = comments
    • 5 lines/comment
    • 20 words/line
    • 5 characters/word
    • 4 bytes/character
    • = 414kb

  • Comparing to dev tools, which shows 5.3MB, a factor of 10 I can't account for.

    • I'm a backend dev...what's an order of magnitude between friends.
    • Using that figure and 24k thread views on the culture war thread so far this week:
      • = 127gb/week
      • = 210 kilobytes/second

  • Let's assume we want to serve a peak traffic of 10x average and don't care enough to set something that automatically scales up and down:

    • = 2.1 megabytes/second

  • This is... jack shit.

    • A 3.5" floppy disk can do 100 kbps, filling the entire 1.44mb in 14.4 seconds.
    • I think it could probably be served off a Raspberry Pi.
    • If the vyvanse hadn't worn off, I could probably calculate how many threads/Ghz/etc are needed, but I'm pretty comfortable saying "one of any shitty processor can handle this load"

  • Google cloud charges for egress:

    • Checks notes:
      • $0 for up to 200GB/month, then $0.11/GB up to 2TB.
    • So (127 * 4 - 200) * 0.11 = $34.
    • I am not actually sure if serving traffic is "egress". Best guess: no.
    • (This is why startups shouldn't hire FAANG engineers.)

  • Worst case:

    • Something like $34 for egress and $20 for the VM itself.
    • Pretty close to my first number!

  • @ZorbaTHut, how'd I do? And would you be willing to share what % of costs you've had donated, vs paid out of pocket? You really shouldn't have to be paying yourself.

    • Edit: the patreon is at $140/month, so it looks like this site may be slightly profitable (ignoring the enormous value of the free labor). Nice!

That was all without chatgpt, but here's a transcript from my talking to it afterwards. I think it looks reasonable until maybe the end when I ask about vpn costs. Still comes out to ~$50. It did a decent job analyzing the amount of cpu used (which I skipped in the "jack shit" section).

People upload images to the Motte, could that account for the difference between the 400kb and 5mb?

I think some variety of "I'm an idiot" is more likely. I don't see any images. If they're included as hyperlinks, they're not loaded until you click (I think, and ~confirmed by dev tools)

Attached a screenshot of the resource usage breakdown. Largest element is 402kb for the banner, compared to 215kb (fifth place) for what I think is the actual comments (compare to my 414kb estimate - not bad).

Some of the overestimate is from my extensions. Filtering those out, I see 2.0MB (2.3 uncompressed). 1.15 of that is fonts (unclear to me why that needs reloading each time - presumably this could be optimized out.)

/images/17366984362281015.webp

Probably something on the order of $20-40 a month. Depends how fancy it is set up, and how much traffic we get.

A little while ago someone posted asking if it was credible that Musk had achieved a world record in Diablo 4.

In a follow up to that, recently Musk has been streaming another ARPG, Path of Exile 2. For those not in the know PoE is what the true rarified ARPG gamers play. It's the Salty Spitoon. Diablo is Weenie Hut Jrs. Much like in D4, Elon's PoE2 character is absolutely decked out, the work of hundreds of hours. But not his. He also zero grasp of the game. He doesn't understand itemisation, he fumbles with interfaces, doesn't know how to play the build properly. I would bet against him having even having completed the campaign once. I have little doubt that his total misunderstanding of the significance of an item's character level requirement will be a meme in the community for years to come.

Wow, Musk really walked into the wrong neighbourhood here. His earlier D4 claim went mostly unquestioned (to my awareness) because frankly D4 bad nobody really gives enough of a shit, but with how zealous its fanbase is PoE was a bad choice to flex, and specifically PoE2 (brutal and borderline bullshit as it is) was a really bad choice. Other replies already mentioned it but you absolutely do not get this far (in HC to boot!) without considerable knowledge of the game, and the minor things like the item level gaffe instantly betray the lack of underlying knowledge. This whole charade distinctly feels like reading a "budget" starter build guide that has Mageblood or something as a required item. I will be very disappointed if there won't be a new meme unique item that does something with level requirements before the end of the year.

It warms my heart to see gamers(tm) continue to be the community least deceived by, or tolerant of, transparent bullshit. Truly the master race.

From what I've gathered with D4 there wasn't much for the community to judge, just some short gameplay clips without commentary and ladder positions. I assume if he had done longer streams and tried provide commentary on D4 he would betray a similar lack of understanding.

No, he regularly streams Diablo 4 for hours. This captured video is 3 hours long:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7Ca_SCFn8s

If this is what ends up breaking the spell around the guy, I'm going to be bitterly laughing for a very long time.

Is this an indication his diablo records a lie as well? Why?

D4 is just as much as a time sink as PoE so it's a reasonable assumption not all his progression on his D4 character is his own. I'm not a D4 player so I don't understand the specifics of the record. What i've gleaned from the community is if he did get the record illegitimately he didn't leave a smoking gun. Judging from the gameplay it's very item and character dependent, some familiarity with the game is required but it's nowhere near the level of skill typically associated with speedrunning.

Much like in D4, Elon's PoE2 character is absolutely decked out, the work of hundreds of hours. But not his.

What?

His characters in both games are very advanced, meaning he needed to play a lot to get to that point. Anyone that plays that much knows how to play the game very well. Because Elon doesn't play the game well it is a safe bet that he didn't advance his characters but instead he paid someone to advance them for him.

Just as the most glaring example, he offhandedly mentions his staff is "not very good" because its item level is 30 lower that his character level and that he "should find a better staff, y'know, over 30 levels". There is a grand total of 1 staff with better damage per second than Elon's on the trading website (where most players "find" better items, because creating them with crafting orbs is a matter of being rich and lucky, and finding them on the floor is a matter of being go-play-the-lottery lucky). 5 total quarterstaffs in the same ballpark of damage.

He then hovers over his Hands of Wisdom and Action (a unique item, the modifiers of which are unaffected by item level at all) and similarly dismisses it for its item level (even though it's an item likely crucial to his build).

If he had concerned himself even briefly with the gear system of PoE2, he would know that. It goes beyond glossing over the complexities of the game "for the laymen watching", the man playing the game on stream straight-up is not aware of what makes his decked-out character good.

I don't think this is true. I used to be a pretty big World of Warcraft guy and encountered people with much, much more play time than I had and excellent gear that were straight up terrible players. It's interesting to consider why they were getting carried in raids, but they pretty obviously were, because you'd bump into guys with much better gear that you could easily smash on damage meters anyway. In contrast, a buddy of mine that posted top 100 world parses on healing meters for some difficult bosses didn't actually play all that much. Beyond some necessary amount of time to learn a game well, people just kind of get capped out on their skills and stop improving.

If the point is that they're making incredibly basic mistakes... yeah, the above still applies. You could look at damage logs after and see highly geared players doing things like failing to keep DoTs on targets, letting their own buffs fall off for significant chunks of fights, and other egregiously incompetent play.

Healing parses are different from damage though, because you get your best healing parses on the first kill or two, the other players take less damage on later kills and you are also capped by the skill, classes and quantities of the other healers around you.

<-- World top ten Disc priest on one kill one time 15 years ago in "Heroic" SOO (would be called mythic now).

Beyond some necessary amount of time to learn a game well, people just kind of get capped out on their skills and stop improving.

I definitely agree with this. And there are (were) a lot of personality hires in any raid group.

If the point is that they're making incredibly basic mistakes... yeah, the above still applies. You could look at damage logs after and see highly geared players doing things like failing to keep DoTs on targets, letting their own buffs fall off for significant chunks of fights, and other egregiously incompetent play.

This kind of analysis was my favorite thing about raid leading. Making me nostalgic (I haven't played a video game with others in 8 years).

I've described elsewhere in the thread how Elon doesn't just make basic distracted-like mechanical mistakes, he literally doesn't know what his items do and how good they are (despite having had to craft them or more likely search for those specific items from the trading website). It's like if you met a top-level raider in WoW and he said his (best in slot for his class) items are "not very good" because they don't look pretty, which is the best analogy I can come up with for WoW because I don't play it.

This is all on hardcore league also, so it's not only a lack of game knowledge - Elon would have had to spend dozens of hours grinding experience on his character to get to level 90 without dying once, in a game known to ruthlessly punish players for lacking game knowledge.

Gotcha. I was looking more at the skill part of things rather than the game knowledge part of things. Beyond a certain point, yeah, you wouldn't bump into anyone making that sort of basic error when it comes to understand itemization and game mechanics. Even if they couldn't exactly tell you why a certain trinket mathed out to being the best in slot item, they'd still know enough to go check Icy Veins, see that it's best in slot, and cheerfully equip it.

At the extreme end, there are players in PoE who just look for the items the build guide tells them to look for instead of bothering to understand itemization. But they'd still look at item modifiers, not item level. A max level base can (and most often does) drop with complete garbage bonuses that make it worse than a well-rolled item with a much lower level base.

I played WoW circa 2008-2010, TBC-WOTLK era, and one thing you're discounting is that even back then there was a booming black market in selling characters online. Highly decked out characters were being sold online for thousands of dollars each. There were rumors of Chinese farmers, but i think the bigger source was just players who enjoyed grinding up to a high-ish level and then starting over. Which I can understand the appeal of!

i think the bigger source was just players who enjoyed grinding up to a high-ish level and then starting over. Which I can understand the appeal of!

Or they enjoyed it more than getting a real job. Definitely lots of people with a lot of free time selling their characters then and pissing off their raid by expecting to be regeared.

Yeah, I actually looked at selling my character around that time because it was a pretty close to BiS Death Knight at their apex of overpoweredness and I wanted to go do other stuff. I think it was worth about $500 (which would be a bad ROI, but good if you just didn't want to play more).

So, sure, that's a thing, but I also just bumped into quite a few people that just didn't seem all that interested in game mechanics but were willing to play a lot. I know these weren't purchased accounts because some of them were people that I'd hop on Discord or Vent with and they were nice enough guys, they just didn't care to go learn that that you always want to save Swiftmend for when Wild Growth is coming off of cooldown so you can maximize the healing boost on it, or that downtime on Flameshock is immensely costly because you'll wind up wasting free Lava Burst procs. These aren't exactly complicated mechanics, but if you don't know them then you don't know them, and if you don't really internalize them then you'll consistently fail at it under pressure. I ultimately just had to settle on the reality that I'm an obsessive nerd and that if I was going to heal for a casual raiding group (because I don't want to lock up four nights a week playing a game) then I have to tolerate playing with people that are going to put out shit damage and stand in fire. They're not bad guys, they're not even idiots, they're just bad at a game.

On the bright side, healing a mediocre group through difficult content with one of my best friends was one of the more entertaining things I've done in any game and the numbers on the parses wound up being world class precisely because people stand in fire and can't kill things fast.

I was that guy. I liked to make my gnome warlock spam cool spells and send my pet to attack things because it was fun. I think I understood some of the basics of how skills worked together, but I definitely hadn't optimized my DPS. I was pretty good at not standing in fire, though. Thanks for being nice to us normies.

As Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth once phrased it, "I mostly just picked my talents because the icons looked cool".

Why attempt such a brazen, obvious lie, with approximately nothing to gain? Just baffing. Make me think I'm being psyoped somehow.

I think the narrative that he's a deeply insecure man that really, really, really wants to be cool is basically accurate.

It would be a pittance for the world's richest man to buy a character, have one commissioned, or otherwise have it power-leveled by a ghost player when he's not using it. Plenty of Whales who are lazy/time poor do this, that is why there is a market for it. So you could say why not.

But why stream? This type of display isn't going to get him mainstream credibility. It might not be deep insecurity, but there's something going on. What 50+ year old man would pass off a relatively childish achievement as his own? (I mean childish as in how it perceived by the mainstream. We aren't talking Everest here. I say this as a lifelong gamer)

The same man who posts pictures of his face photoshopped onto Iron Man? At least with Iron Man it could be interpreted as some sort of post-meta-irony.

(Epistemic status: I think I saw that post screenshotted somewhere, I don't have a link)

He does retweet AI generated images of himself in costume that are created by his army of sycophants (that are more likely looking for a view/follower boost).

It's bizarre if true. He can't be clueless enough to not understand that this is extremely transparent. It's tempting to declare in the best traditions of armchair psychoanalysis that this is just how top management warps your brain, to truly believe that you get credit for playing your games the same way you run your companies - paying other people to do all the grunt work.

This is bog standard rich dude stuff in many traditional rich guy meatspace sports. Amateur to semipro SCCA motorsports is full of rich guys who are mediocre drivers and spend a ton of money to try to get the car to carry them to wins. Hell, the entire sport of Polo allows the Patron to take one roster spot and the handicap system is designed to make it competitively practical to field him, resulting in last year's US Open where a team owner in his late 50s suffered an accident that left him in a coma. Rich guys hire hunting and fishing guides who line things up for them to take trophies, they get the best gear to help them compete, anything for an edge to claim glory.

We only find this shocking because we're not used to people using videogames as a status flex.

they get the best gear to help them compete, anything for an edge to claim glory

Devil's advocate: people being able to buy the best gear also advances the sport. Competitive shooting does this all the time in its Open divisions, where you can run basically anything you want; if you've discovered a kind of setup that gives you a leg up over the other shooters then it's perfectly valid to use it (and if it came out of your garage you'll probably have people wanting to commercialize it).

Of course, not all divisions are Open (so if you don't have 5000 dollars to spend on the best gear, you can still be competitive with everyone else), and you still need to actually make the shots so if you're bad you'll get beaten by people in lower divisions much less your own... but having a division where you can just push the envelope however you like advances the sport.

I agree!

Spending money on the sport also supports events, a lot of pros in minor sports support themselves coaching or training amateurs.

I'm just saying that buying the appearance of competitive talent is a super-normal thing that rich guys do all the time.

Even things like travel, highbrow art consumption, wine collecting, often resemble trying to spend a lot of money to appear interesting.

I mean, we don't expect the hunter to build his own rifle or a racer to build his own car. But we do expect them to know what their gear is doing.

In racing there are amateur series designed around home-mechanics, with price limits and rules against outside work. 24 Hours of Lemons, junk car races. The idea is you limit the purchase price of the car and forbid anyone outside the team's drivers from working on it. The archetype being four buddies taking turns driving in the endurance race, after fixing up a $500 Ford Taurus on weekends in their garage.

And notoriously you run into teams of four that are three professional mechanics and one investment banker, with the mechanics being paid "friends" of their patron, the car too nice to ever realistically find at the price point they claim, and the patron isn't a great driver but with a better machine he gets the anchor spot on the team and pulls across the finish line in first place excited for his trophy.

Of course the reverse attitude can morph into universal envy and ego protection. Physical culture is a hobby of mine, hardly one in which I've achieved much, but even I've experienced the twin levels of bullshit here: people richer than me comment that they can't work out because they are just so busy with work, people poorer than me say it must be nice to be able to afford all that equipment etc. And both have some point to them, but I'm sure if I dug into my interlocutor's lifestyle I could dispute it.

Interesting thing about physical culture. Arnold said that there are no shortcuts. You can only get an impressive body by working for it. But arnold was full of it. You can buy steroids and speedrun to the finish line pretty much. I doubt that Jeff Bezos knows much about lifting yet he looks more jacked than you or me.

"'roids are not for the lazy" is how it's been put to me by... guys who do a lot of 'roids.

Speak for yourself.

But for that matter, I think the impact of steroids is often overstated. Bezos undoubtedly had to go into the gym to build that muscle. Was it easier than it would have been without steroids? Sure. But he did put in work to get a body like that. Probably more work than half the people bitching about his steroid use have put in.

to truly believe that you get credit for playing your games the same way you run your companies - paying other people to do all the grunt work.

Yes. If he paid the best PoE2 theorycrafters to come up with a few character builds and hired teams of high-APM dudes to playtest each one round the clock, which one of them should get the credit?

If only his team came up with a novel build. Looking at it, it's a fairly standard HoWA monk and the distinguishing part is how much grind went into maxing out his items, not the novelty of theorycrafting.

Consistent, static user interfaces are so last year. Modern UX design is all about placing the most-used options in the most-accessible places so that new users can find them as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, I'd like to recommend a plugin to anyone who likes creating dynamic user interfaces in that style: Markov Keyboard is a revolution in UI design, placing your most-used letters in the most-accessible locations on your keyboard. Instead of just doing this once (as in a Dvorak layout) it remaps the keys after each keystroke, maximizing the benefit.

(ask me about my latest experiences with Windows 11. Or don't. I'm sure you can guess.)

Funny. I was really upset when my work PC switched to Win11 because it removed most-used options. Specifically right-click shortcuts to git bash and the like. They had the nerve to just hide the existing menu under another click!

I guess the Explorer changes have been more persistent, once I learned that. But right click really bothers me.

Does this mean I can type my most common sentences by pressing the same key over and over again?

I remember there being an accessibility interface that worked this way. There was an endless tree of letters that you moved through at mouse-controlled speed and each node was sized to reflect its Markov frequency, so after "Hell" you could select a massive "o" at full speed, but "a", "e", "f", "i", "u" and various punctuation were also quickly accessible.

dynamic user interfaces

Found Satan's Motte account.

Anyways, how's the dynamic keyboard layout working for you and can I get this on my phone?

I already have a split keyboard and lefthand mouse at work, so I'll avoid further user interface contrarianism. But I am open to better phone keyboards.

Modern UX design is all about placing the most-used options in the most-accessible places so that new users can find them as quickly as possible.

Have you, uh -- used much modern UI lately? My impression (unless by 'modern' you mean MacOS circa 2002) is that modern UX design is all about hiding useful options in locations that are not only obscure but literally invisible (see 'mystery meat', scroll bars, etc ad infinitum) to all users, if not (always) going so far as requiring users to learn undocumented 'gestures' to invoke frequently used things. (see iOS since its inception, but steadily escalating and spreading to other previously functional incarnations of various touch interfaces)

Eleven steps to change Powerpoint from centimeters to inches is totally reasonable given that nobody would ever want to do that, and how could you make room for all that completely-necessary whitespace if you didn't remove all those buttons nobody cares about anyways? "Time and Language" is the perfect place to find a ruler.

Furthermore, "most" has to be contrasted with "least", so designers can maximize how modern they are by shoving things ever-deeper into the abyss.

More seriously, one of my pet peeves is frames in frames in frames, each sized slightly-incorrectly so that they have independent scroll bars. One of the "electronic textbooks" I had in university was hosted on a website that showed you a fraction of a frame that showed a fraction of one page. If you wanted to read two complete pages, you had to:

  • read the first half of the first page
  • scroll the textbook-display-widget frame to the bottom to access its scroll bar
  • scroll the page up to see the bottom half
  • read the second half of the page
  • scroll the widget frame up to the top to access the page turning controls
  • flip the page
  • wait for it to contact the server and load one more page...

I made a flowchart on modern software recently, and it had a wonderful feature where if you dragged an object (e.g. an arrow linking two steps) to an edge of the screen, it would scroll the window in that direction. I zoomed in on one end of an arrow, grabbed it to move it slightly, and...It's off the bottom of the screen! better scroll down. It's off the bottom of the screen! better scroll down. It's off the bottom of the screen! better scroll down. It's off the bottom of the screen! better scroll down. It's off the bottom of the screen! better scroll down. It's off the bottom of the screen! better scroll down. It's off the bottom of the screen! better scroll down.

I ended up zooming out and squinting at a couple pixels, except they had the great idea that your mouse should snap to their best guess instead of the closest feature if you're sufficiently close.

Now that Canada is finally rid of Justin Trudeau, we can critically examine the most important issue that he faced during his long reign.

Was it immigration? How about the housing crisis? Economic stagnation?

No. I am of course referring to the rumor that Justin Trudeau's father is actually none other than Fidel Castro.

Whether the rumors are true or not, Trudeau brought this on himself when he gave the Communist dictator a bizzare, glowing eulogy after his death in 2016.

But is Justin Trudeau really Castro's son? Certainly the physical similarity between the two is striking. And it's well known that Trudeau's mother was sexual promiscuous and that the Trudeaus were close friends with Castro, himself a notorious libertine. Furthermore, the Trudeaus just happened to be touring the Carribbean around the time of Justin's conception. This article does a good job of making the case that, of course, Justin is Castro's son.

Naturally, this has all been deboonked by Snopes, who rates the rumors as "unfounded". Nevertheless, I don't find Snopes' take very convincing, as it seems quite possible that Castro and Trudeau's mother did indeed tryst, either via the Trudeaus visiting Cuba (which of course they may have been desirous to cover up) or via Castro leaving Cuba.

So where does that leave us?

Since I doubt Trudeau will submit to DNA testing anytime soon, we would need to find another way to establish paternity. Enter AI. Did you know that AI is able to tell the sex of a person with high accuracy simply by looking at their retina, something that trained opthamologists are not able to do? What if we employed similar techniques to detect parental relations?

I make the following modest proposal. We should train a deep learning algorithm based on hundreds of thousands of labeled father/son pairs. Then we ask the AI whether Castro or Pierre Trudeau is the true father of Justin. It's the only way to be sure. Canada demands the truth!

If it’s true I assume the CIA knows. Castro had/has living relatives in Florida, it would presumably be easy to pull DNA from a drinking glass or laundry at the White House after a diplomatic visit. Doesn’t mean we would know, but if it’s true I expect the public will find out sooner or later.

In the US the secret service will always have one or two people assigned to collect and destroy all DNA left behind on napkins or glasses by the president. I'm assuming it's the same for other western heads of state.

If definitely isn’t. Perhaps for Russia and China, but leaders of second/third tier countries don’t have security teams capable or willing to do that kind of cleanup.

I would give long, looong odds that CSIS is not doing this and never will -- basic functionality as an intelligence service seems pretty far beyond them, there's just no way that they are worried about somebody going CSI on the PM.

I could 100% imagine starting that program just to have somewhere to shove the dead weight career-climbers any high prestige organization has to deal with. Same reason spec-ops has a bunch of do-nothing posts for officers checking "did a stint in spec-ops" off the list.

Let them wipe forks for a year and put "personal bio-data security lead for PoTUS" on their resumes for when they go into corporate security.

Why would they care, and why would they ever make it public if they knew?

I'm a Trudeau truther. I think there is seriously a significant likelihood that he is Castro's son. Looking at photos of his mother shortly before getting pregnant and hanging out with Castro, they might have been fucking.

Surely someone could get some of his DNA to verify.

I also do not accept for a moment that Ronan Farrow is Woody Allen's biological son, when Mia Farrow was known to have been close and physically intimate with Frank Sinatra for years following their divorce.

The AI idea is intriguing, but surely DNA testing is a realistic possibility in the future even without Justin's personal consent, right? He's got three children, and DNA testing often outs this sort of thing indirectly when people are simply curious about their ancestry and get it cross-compared with a massive database.

It's unlikely that Castro's kids would be in the database and it's unlikely that a match would become public knowledge, barring a data breach.

Castro had relatives in Spain.

Castro probably has 5th cousins or something in Florida. Genetic testing can pick up on relatives that close

I'm looking for an online essay, I think from a blog. It was a criticism of the high-speed train in California. It received a lot of pushback in the comments on Hacker News but made a lot of interesting points. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Perhaps https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/10/11/why-high-speed-rail-hasnt-caught-on/? I remember it making a good point for airports over high speed rail, at least good enough to sway me.

Yes! That's it, thank you.

"California's high-speed rail is a bad investment" is an evergreen topic on HN. It is probably one of these 120 articles but without an indication of when you saw it or what specific pushback was in the comments it's hard to say with more detail than that.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump chatting away before Jimmy Carter's funeral is quite something to see:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5cnfNgvKsoo

Does Barack humor him diplomatically like a crazy MAGA uncle at the Thanksgiving table? Maybe, but Obama coolness breaking into a chuckle is genuine, Donalds joke must have hit. At the same time Obama has literally the ear of the next President, Trump is listening intensely what he has to say. You know deep down Trump thinks Obama is cool.

Bill Clinton can't wipe the grin off his face even when he's at a funeral. Granted, if several decades with Hillary didn't affect him, then nothing will.

I saw it captioned thusly:

"Obama makes light-hearted jokes with Hitler, 11 days before he is due to take over the country, ban democracy, and establish a white nationalist dictatorship".

Of course, it was Obama that came out with heavy fear-based language against Trump not even three months ago, in a last ditch effort to sway the election to Harris.

Obama's trying to pull a reverse Carter here, sullying a once pristine reputation with his behavior as an ex-President.

Obama's trying to pull a reverse Carter here, sullying a once pristine reputation with his behavior as an ex-President.

His presidency's reputation was never "pristine" unless you were living in a particular bubble (which controlled the institutions).

When Bush walks over, Obama stands up to shake his hands like an old friend. Trump stays seated and neither he nor bush acknowledge each other. Then Obama and Trump are back to cracking jokes with each other.

What sort of history do Trump and Bush Jr have?

Trump did put a stop to the Bush dynasty by not only beating Jeb, but humiliating him so hard there is no possibility of a comeback. After Trump has his moment, Cruz can come back. DeSantis can come back. Even Little Marco can come back. Jeb is done and will never be president, ever. Jeb is the supposed big guy in the prison yard that Trump made his bitch upon arriving to send a message.

I wonder who GW was giving the thumbs up to.

Obama and Trump are both members of a very club of former POTUS. Smaller still is the club of those who ruled over the US when the power was as centralised in Washington, rather than dispersed among the states and when the US was the preeminent global power. Thus they could be said to have wielded the most power than anyone else throughout history of the world. I think this naturally forms an understanding and kinship which transcends party lines.

My theory has always been that Donald Trump doesn't care about anyone. Don't read that as "he hates everyone because he's a narcissist." He has a perfectly neutral with no priors feeling towards literally every human on earth.

Pair that with the fact that he's is, first and foremost, a walking one-on-one charisma machine. He's adopted this so deeply that it permeates his very speech. "Everyone is saying X is the best X ever, no one's ever seen anything like it!" ... "We're going to do Y and we're going to do it so well that it's the best thing that will ever happen." These are almost carnival barker levels of over-the-top flattery and positivity. The reason they exist as verbal artifacts in Trump's lexicon is because he's been practicing them day in and day out for 40+ years. It's reflexive at this point.

When he sat down next to Obama, he had some factual details in his mind about the man. Probably not many. He had, again, zero prior esteem estimations. So, he just started to plug in the few fats he knew about Obama into his CharismaLLM.exe and let it roll - because this is what he does with every single person he talks to directly. (Major caveat: Rally speeches and press conference Trump is different. Everything I am saying here only applies to one on one or maybe small group conversations).

Where it gets interesting is that Obama, the vaunted "orator" (although I think he was DRASTICALLY overrated as a speaker) was far less than charismatic one on one. He wanted to argue about policy in the way a Harvard Law professor would; dueling papers. Instead of doing the hard but necessary work of politicking - you know, the thing he was elected to do.

As much as I think Trump doesn't really care about other humans one-on-one (reread the intro paragraph!) I think Obama is deeply offended and angered by Trump's intuitive understanding of politics and people. This is quite literally the bookish nerd watching the bombastic class president shit all over his "legacy".

In short, I believe that, deep down, Obama thinks Trump is cool.

It was sort of amazing to see Obama get bullied into releasing his long form BC after years of birtherism conspiracy shilling by Trump

Anyone else playing Metaculus? I had a terrible 2023, mostly because I did not have any idea how a number of new features worked. I did much better in 2024.

This year in 41st in Peer Accuracy scores and 251st in Baseline accuracy. I have no idea how that stacks against all the other users, but it seems...not bad? Part of what limited my baseline is I only answered 49 questions out of almost 1k+ (though I may have bombed more if I answered more--who knows). TemetNoscoe #1 player answered 570 questions. Sheesh!! I finally figured out Peer Accuracy scores and in a way I prefer them as it's more of a comparison to how you did against other predictors in the questions you actually answered.

This question about refugees was a massive bomb for me :https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20784/ I also blew this one about two lunar landings: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20919/ I got this terrible Andrea Bocelli question wrong, but outperformed everyone... https://www.metaculus.com/questions/30252/

Overall, I'm kind of grumpy about Metaculus. I hate the spread questions, which I just refuse to do anymore. The resolution criteria is often ridiculous. I don't know how much longer I'm going to play, but I do like feeling like I'm kind of able to do ok at predicting stuff.

How'd everyone (anyone?) else do?

Please remember that "50 percent plus 1" is an incorrect description of a simple majority. Robert's Rules of Order edition 10 § 44:1:

The word majority means "more than half". For example (assuming that there are no voters having fractions of a vote, as may occur in some conventions):

  • If 19 votes are cast, a majority (more than 9.5) is 10.
  • If 20 votes are cast, a majority (more than 10) is 11.
  • If 21 votes are cast, a majority (more than 10.5) is 11.

"More than half" is not the same as "at least 50 percent plus 1". Assuming integer votes, if 19 votes are cast, "more than half" = "more than 9.5" = "at least 10", while "at least 50 percent plus 1" = "at least 9.5 + 1" = "at least 10.5" = "at least 11" = wrong.

What is your favorite puzzle game? Tetris? Puzzle League? Klondike? Minesweeper?

I recently started playing Puzzle League (specifically, emulated Tetris Attack), and I have to say that it's the most fun I've had with a video game in a while.

"It's really crazy. People are climbing into delivery trucks to look around, stalking clerks, sneaking into storerooms. Sometimes they will line up before opening just to be the first to ask whether there's anything new," said the press secretary for the PLCB [Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board]. "We want to give the average Pennsylvanian the opportunity to buy a once-in-a-lifetime bottle. We don't jack up the price, and we don't make it hard to find."

Through the Attestations, the PLCB showed that Pennsylvania's bourbon-whiskey enthusiasts have a strong desire to lawfully purchase bourbon whiskey at the PLCB's [govt.-owned liquor] stores, causing annoyance and inconvenience. With regard to a "risk of physical harm to or the personal security of an individual" [sic], as required by [the law], the Attestations provided mere speculation. Therefore, we conclude that the PLCB failed to meet its burden of establishing that the requested records are exempt from disclosure under the personal-safety exemption.

When will people learn that high prices are better than shortages?

At least fifty percent, plus one half.

What is your favorite puzzle game? Tetris? Puzzle League? Klondike? Minesweeper?

I recently started playing Puzzle League (specifically, emulated Tetris Attack), and I have to say that it's the most fun I've had with a video game in a while.

I've never played the original Tetris Attack before, I assumed it was a Tetris game and was thoroughly confused by your framing. I loved puzzle league back in the day though, I ended up in hospital in a foreign country once and while my girlfriend at the time lent me dozens of her ds games, I pretty much just played planet puzzle league and picross all week.

What are you emulating it on and which emulator are you using?

I don't know about OP, but the SNES version is good. SNES emulators are pretty much solved by now, so any emulator is good enough, but for puzzle games on the go I'd recommend looking at chinese portable emulation consoles. For low end emulators like you'd need for puzzles, the Miyoo consoles are cheap and impressively well built for the price; they'll easily emulate 16 bits consoles and below, plus the PSX. If you wanna go further there's a whole rabbit hole for emulation consoles. Look for handhelds from Anbernic, Retroid, Trimui, etc...

Man that is a hell of a rabbit hole. I mostly emulate on my phone these days (ds and gba games work flawlessly on most android devices and that was my heyday) but my nephew's birthday is coming up and he's obsessed with emulation at the moment. Between this and the opening of steamos it's a good time to be a fan of portable gaming.

What are you emulating it on and which emulator are you using?

I'm just using BSNES on my computer.

What is your favorite puzzle game? Tetris? Puzzle League? Klondike? Minesweeper?

Tetris is evergreen for me. But sometimes I temporarily get into others (Puyo Puyo, Puzzle League, Columns, recently Cleopatra's Fortune). When I want to feel particularly angry I play the Tetris TGM games.

Please remember that "50 percent plus 1" is an incorrect description of a simple majority.

It's "50 percent (rounded down to the nearest whole number of votes), plus 1".

Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the … tss tss

FLOOOOOR

This made me laugh way harder than it should've. Well done, I thought about nominating this for AAQC but figured the mods would just be annoyed if I did.

Nah, we don't mind getting a goofy report or two. Well, maybe when the actual roundup is made?

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