site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1191 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 28, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Just wanted to highlight the essays written by the Zero-K devs about RTS game design. Surprisingly thoughtful and interesting stuff:

https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes/11_-_The_Atomic_Solution_to_Monospam

https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes/16_-_Aim_and_Fire

One of the most important corollaries of the process is that weapon behaviour cannot depend on the existence of a target. This is known as the No Void Ray rule, as it was developed back when Starcraft 2 had a unit that gained damage the longer it fired. The unit was redesigned in the first expansion, probably because shooting your own stuff is allowed in Starcraft, but incentivising players to do it looked a bit silly. In any case, Void Ray would not even make it into Zero-K, since there would be nothing stopping it shooting into the sky when idle. Maintaining its damage bonus is smart, so we could not in good conscience prevent it from doing so. This would make the mechanic pointless, so we would avoid adding it in the first place.

https://hbd.gg

You scored an average of 1390 over 10 rounds in today's EthnoGuessr!

Your best round was round 1 with 2696 points guessing ProtoEthiopid!

Looking for new books as I approach the end of the Harry Bosch series.

A genre I really enjoy is "competence porn," in which a character or characters overcome challenges and trials via being really good at what they do, either against the uncaring Universe or against an opponent who is also really good at what they do. This was always the appeal of Star Trek, and in books I've enjoyed Andy Weir's novels, the earlier Took Clancy books, Bosch and Reacher, Starship Troopers, Sherlock Homes, and nonfiction like The Right Stuff and Failure is Not An Option. Looking for suggestions of a similar nature.

A genre I really enjoy is "competence porn," in which a character or characters overcome challenges and trials via being really good at what they do, either against the uncaring Universe or against an opponent who is also really good at what they do

This is the opposite of competence porn, but you may enjoy this movie called Blue Ruin.

This totally normal average guy discovers that the guy who killed his parents is being released from jail early. Totally normal average guy decides he's going to kill him, but... he's not a skilled assassin or anything. He's got average skills. He struggles to do basic action movie things a hero does effortlessly. He misses a shot at point blank range. He tries to slash tires and hurts himself. Stuff, if you really think about it, most normal people would screw up too.

It makes the movie extremely tense and gripping, IMO.

Sublight Drive is a Star wars fan fiction of the clone wars. Main character is competent and generally so is everyone else in the story. The only times there is anything approaching incompetence is when someone is outside their area of expertise.

A genre I really enjoy is "competence porn," in which a character or characters overcome challenges and trials via being really good at what they do, either against the uncaring Universe or against an opponent who is also really good at what they do

I've just finished Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by Parker. Loved it, fits your genre perfectly, and it was a nice first for me in that it's in a fantasy universe, but there's no magic or monsters. It's a quick read.

There's also an interesting subtheme of the meaning of duty and loyalty - the protagonist defending empire, even though empire is of course fundamentally unjust, even to the protagonist personally.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by Parker.

How cringey is the first-person narration?

Try Chip War. It's very interesting.

Been having a lot of fun with Mechabellum, it's an autobattler game where you put down your robots on the board, then they attack the nearest unit to them and lock on. This makes it very much a game of positioning and timing, you want the enemy heavy hitters targeting your little chaff robots, you want your snipers hitting their big hp single-entity bots.

There is a way to direct some units to advance in a specific path, this is great for drawing enemies out of position or beelining for the enemy towers.

Each round both players get access to 1 of 4 call-in abilities/unit sidegrades/drop-in units, so there are elaborate mind-games. Do you go after the opponent's Level 4 Mustangs with a missile? Or do you think he'll see that option and put a shield bubble over it, so you go after the Level 2 Mustang next to it? Do you anticipate he'll take Fortresses given your unit composition, so go Melting Point to forestall him?

Everything has a counter. If the other guy's going big on long-range snipers, you can get some Sandworms, melee bots that advance safely underground before popping up with chainsaws. Or longer-range artillery. Or a pack of small units. If he's focusing heavily on teching up his units, you can get EMP techs to undo them. You can even get photon coating upgrades on some units to counter EMP.

Also, the devs have done a good job consistently updating the game, adding new units and gamemodes for free. There's a wacky 4 player FFA mode, 2v2 so you can blame your teammate when you lose and classic 1v1. This all seems to be funded by cosmetic microtransactions.

Gripes:

Napalm heavy meta right now at high MMRs, too many bots have napalm/sticky oil bombs. This burns away all the low HP units and makes it a bit of an air-dominant game.

4 player FFA mode is a bit unbalanced and can wreck framerates

In a tangent of a reply over the in the Culture War thread I pointed out that in the States, the poor don't fund opera on behalf of the rich in any significant way, (because the poor don't really pay net taxes) and opera funding here, unlike in Europe, doesn't significantly come from the government. There's now a pretty even split between ticket revenue and philanthropy, so a better rephrase of the relationship I was critiquing is that the very, very rich pick up half the tab for middle and upper-middle class Americans to go see opera. I also added that as a Conservative, for me, this philanthropy is a double-edged sword. It keeps live opera going in America. But also, there is a predicable set of politics that tend to accompany MFA holders, who are put in charge of awarding grants and commissions to MFA holders, so MFA holders are writing operas for MFA holders, and as a result opera becomes even less of a popular living art form, and as a living art form gets trapped in an artistic ghetto. I noted that whatever friends and acquaintances I've successfully evangelized have taken an interest in exposure to famous pieces from the past, and not anything from an opera written by a living composer. I'd mentioned Puccini's Nessun Dorma aria from Turandot, and Donizetti's Cheti Cheti/Aspetta duet from Don Pasquale, as examples of beautiful & melodic, or comedically-fun & melodic examples that today's audiences still love, but would be seen as gauche by the MFA holders awarding grants and commissions.

@VoxelVexillologist asked if I could provide links to pieces like the latter as entry points for someone new to opera, and @KingOfTheBailey seconded and asked for a top-level post. The Friday fun thread seems a good place. Here was my reply to Voxel:

I'll start with the two pieces already mentioned.

A quick setup for what is going on in Nessun Dorma. There is a beautiful princess (Turandot) and the king, her father, does not have a male heir; whoever marries her gets a gorgeous wife and a kingdom. The princess does not want to get married, and especially not to a foreigner because of some past trauma in her family line. So, whomever asks for her hand has to successfully answer a series of riddles. If they succeed: gorgeous wife and a kingdom. If they fail: decapitation. A young unknown prince is travelling, incognito, through this kingdom. He sees the decapitated heads of failed suitors perched atop spikes on the outside of the city walls. But then he sees the princess, and falls head over heels. He successfully answers the riddles, and the princess is distraught at the prospect of actually getting married. So moved by love, he gives the princess a riddle. If she can guess his name by sunrise, he gets decapitated, but if not, she has to willingly(!) marry him. The princess charges all her servants with discovering the prince's name before sunrise, on penalty of death for failing to do so.

In Nessun Dorma (No One Sleeps), we hear both the prince's aria, giving his internal monologue, and in the background the chorus of the princess' servants. Some info on the composition of operas. Almost all begin with a libretto, a kind of poem, to which the composer then sets the music. The supermajority of operas have a different librettist and composer. The composer has great if not total license as to which lines and words within the libretto to emphasize and to repeat. The prince wills the night stars to set. And, when Puccini composed this aria, it was his choice to repeat the last word, thrice, to shape it -- victory... victory... victory!

This is an excellent live recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and you can use the closed caption option in YouTube to get English subtitles in case you aren't fluent in Italian. I think sports are a helpful comparison when discussing opera singers. There are different kinds of forwards in soccer, quarterbacks in football, etc. And, there are different kinds of basses, baritones, tenors, altos and sopranos. Roles are written for certain subtypes. Pavarotti is a great fit for this particular part because he is both more than a credible lyric and spinto tenor; he's capable of the warmth needed for most of the aria and as a huge-chested man, the power to drive its finale.

Setup for the duet I mentioned: Don Pasquale is a comic opera and if you like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan this should feel familiar and fun. Pasquale, himself, is the buffoon of the opera, and he's taken a young wife far too pretty for him, and after forbidding his nephew, who is his ward, to marry her even though the latter pair are in love. He is (rightly) suspicious she's still in love with his nephew, and he enlists Dr. Malatesta to help him try and catch the two out. Unbeknownst to Pasquale, Malatesta is on the side of the young lovers, and the small plot he proposes is a setup within a larger plot. Donizetti wrote a duet between Pasquale and Malatesta where both switch between addressing each other and making asides to the audience as the tempo keeps accelerating, ending with both talking over and past one another at breakneck speed.

This is a favorite comic opera of mine but not as famous as many so the recordings on YouTube are a bit limited in terms of quality. Here is one that I quite like, by Hampson and Pisaroni who have great comedic chemistry with one another.

There's a lot appealing about opera if you geek out about it. There's history in it: Verdi's Nabucco, to avoid censorship, smuggled a call for a unified Italian nation state within a biblical story, and Va Pensiero was the unification movement's unofficial anthem. Wagner drew inspiration from the same Nordic myths that Tolkien did, and his works are so dense with symbolism he's been claimed by all different types. Obviously the Reich's interest was horrid, and Wagner was certainly antisemitic, but as an example, prior to WW2, he was a darling of the Marxists (clearly Gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods, was about the death of nobility and feudalism, only to be replaced by capitalism, and Das Rheingold, a symbol of capital itself that allows the industrialist Alberich to oppress the proletariat, Nibelungen).

And there's also at the highest levels stunning virtuosity. Mozart wrote his Queen of the Night Aria for his sister-in-law who was a virtuosic soprano. When testing the upper limits of a singer's vocal rage, taking small steps up to the highest pitch makes hitting those highest notes much, much easier. So, Mozart arpeggiates the approach when he writes this aria, making it brutally difficult to sing. If you see it somewhere other than at one of the major opera houses, there is serious tension in the audience, as everyone waits to see if the soprano singing it will hit her high F in tune. On the other end of things, here is a professional opera singer turned vocal coach breaking down how a truly elite soprano deals with signing the role.

Does anybody here care to recommend a bag or a backpack? I'm looking for something fairly rugged that I can use to lug around a delicate object that's about 8"x8"x8", with external pockets for accessories.

Most camera bags are a little too narrow for that, but that's the basic idea I'm trying to find.

I’ve had a messenger bag from Timbuk2 for a decade or so that I still use every day, and like.

Being a bit of a cheapskate, and a bit illiquid at the moment anyways, I haven't played around much with AI until the free tiers started getting good enough. Hot dang have I been having fun, and I have been cracking up at the edge cases of what they'll refuse or eventually create, sometimes in weird and roundabout ways, especially Gemini.

Overall, Gemini 2.0 produces more accurate images than Grok 3.0, but refuses way more often. Going back and forth to generate prompts in Grok then images in Gemini probably worked the best. It doesn't seem to like generating couples posing for a portrait, though I could generate more people (Gemini likes harems, can't decide if I'm surprised or not) and sometimes talk it into removing the extras. Families are difficult. I thought the problem was a reluctance to generate kids, but it's the same issue as couples- seems the content restrictions make it reluctant to one-shot (am I using that right?) a man and woman together. Generate a mother and child then add the dad back later, works. DALL-E 3 is... good at what it does, which seems to be only slightly related to the prompt but highly detailed. Ask for [detailed description of an adventurer and a witch about to enter an ancient forest], get back an old wizard with ridiculously ornate robes instead. Might try 4o next month or whenever the new image gen trickles down to us freeloaders.

Playing around with them for writing has been interesting and rather less convoluted. Someone on twitter mentioned Grok is especially good at "human prompting" and I agree, it's better with its own little suggested questions at the end. Feels a little less 'magic' than the image generation, though. Turning a thousand words into a picture in a few seconds is more affecting than turning a thousand words into... more words.

So! I'm sure I could dig through archives here but I'm lazy. Are there good, not-too-hyped resources for learning more about how these dang things work and how to wield them properly? Assume basically no programming experience, and my knowledge of how computers function is somewhere around "electric demons in magic sand" metaphor level. I've missed the boat on learning all that much but I'd still like to round out my knowledge a bit.

Are any of you using LLMs for fun projects? I've heard Claude makes a decent life-coach substitute but I haven't tried that out yet.

I have been using Suno AI to make music about silly events and inside jokes that amuse me. I have a song about my favorite character in Gloomhaven, a song about how much I hate snow, a song about my wife being a loot goblin in a game, a song making fun of some redneck who harassed my brother, a song about a tiny plant my wife got in a toilet-shaped pot that we put on top of our toilet, etc...

Most of them sound like real songs you might hear on the radio. Nothing super profound, but not terrible. Well, actually probably 80% of the time it's terrible, but as usual with AI you discard the garbage and retry and reprompt until you get something good. Occasionally I write the lyrics myself from scratch, but most of the time I prompt Chat GPT on a topic and then tweak the lyrics to fit the context better before giving them to Suno to make a song. It's wonderful, and I am gradually accumulating a playlist of actually good songs that mean something to me.

Are any of you using LLMs for fun projects? I've heard Claude makes a decent life-coach substitute but I haven't tried that out yet.

I don't actually know what you do, but perplexity is excellent for sourcing papers from the scientific literature if you're starting in on a new (sub)domain.

This week I had to replace the bottom bracket on my bike. Chatgpt told me which kit to buy, and then I was blown away when it instructed me to go take a picture of both sides of my crank/cassette so it could be certain what we were ordering would fit. Somehow I missed them adding that functionality, but it's mind boggling to me that it can 'see' in addition to just parsing language. I guess I doxxed myself given that my openAI account uses my real name and my ignorance of bike repair/photos of my shitty commuter bike are in their database. Maybe the next SolidGoldMagikarp exploit will start regurgitating all my personal data for the world to see.

While I was at a startup, I was responsible for all kinds of biology subfields that I had no expertise in. I wonder if they'll ever realize how I did all the modeling, although at least a lot of our data has been validated externally. I advertise myself as a full stack biologist now :)

It's still not really useful for professional things. When I ask it to come up with new ideas or commercial opportunities in [area], it just regurgitates reviews I could read myself or tells me every garbage idea I have is phenomenal. But I haven't had the patience to systematically test all the available models recently, or put serious effort into prompting.

Chatgpt told me which kit to buy, and then I was blown away when it instructed me to go take a picture of both sides of my crank/cassette so it could be certain what we were ordering would fit.

Can it really estimate the dimensions of the bike? Impressive.

Yes and no. I'll see if I can paste the conversation:

I ask it if the amazon kit I want to buy has everything I need to replace the bracket:

Final Verdict: This kit looks 90% complete for threaded bottom brackets (square taper, Octalink, Hollowtech II, etc.). If you’re running a press-fit BB (BB30, PF30, BB92, etc.), you’ll need a press and possibly an extractor tool too — but those are specialized and not usually in multi-tool kits like this one.

Want me to help identify your BB type before you order the kit? A quick check of your bike model or a photo of the BB area can tell us a lot! 🚲✨

It piqued my curiosity by asking for a photo.

If I upload a photo you can tell what kind of bottom bracket it is?

Reply:

Yes — if you upload a clear photo of the bottom bracket area (where the crank arms meet the frame), I can usually identify the type of bottom bracket you have.

Here’s what to focus on in the picture:

A side view of the crankset and bottom bracket area.

A close-up of the crank arm connection to the BB (is it square, splined, or hollow?).

Any visible markings or labels on the bottom bracket shell.

Once I see the setup, I’ll figure out whether you have a square taper, Octalink, Hollowtech, Press-fit, or something else — and confirm if that tool kit covers it all. 🚲✨

At this point I'm cracking up as I'm now a slave to the machine, running errands for my AI overlord. I trundle outdoors and take a photo of my chainrings.

Looks like you’ve got a square taper bottom bracket — I can tell from the square-shaped spindle poking out where the crank arm attaches. This type is super common on older bikes and some modern budget models.

Here’s what you’ll need from that tool kit:

✅ Crank puller — To remove the crank arms (make sure it supports square taper). ✅ Cartridge BB tool — For unscrewing the bottom bracket (a splined tool like the Park Tool BBT-22 or similar works for most square taper BBs). ✅ 8mm hex key — For the crank bolts. ✅ Grease/anti-seize (not in your kit) — Good for keeping things quiet and preventing seizing when installing the new BB.

Once you’ve got the tools, the steps are:

Remove crank arms using the crank puller.

Unscrew the bottom bracket (left side is usually reverse-threaded on English-thread bikes).

Clean the shell, grease the threads.

Install the new BB, making sure it’s the right spindle length and shell width (e.g., 68mm x 113mm).

Reinstall the cranks.

Do you want me to help figure out the exact size BB you need too? You can either measure the old one after removal or I can guide you based on the crankset type. 🚲✨

A few messages back and forth (omitted for length considerations) before it asks me for a picture of the crankset.

Got it — from this new photo, I can see the crankset more clearly. It looks like a Suntour XCM or similar vintage-style triple crankset, which often pairs with a square taper JIS bottom bracket.

Given that it’s a triple crankset (3 chainrings):

Bottom bracket shell width: Likely 68mm (common on road/touring bikes from this era).

Spindle length: Typically 113mm or 118mm for triple cranksets like this.

For a Suntour setup like this, 113mm is usually a good starting point — it keeps the chainline more centered. If you want a bit more crank arm clearance from the frame, 118mm works too.

👉 Recommended bottom bracket:

68mm shell width x 113mm spindle length (square taper, JIS)

Brands like Shimano (UN300 or UN55), Tange, or Token are reliable options.

Would you like me to find a compatible bottom bracket online or walk you through the installation next? 🚲✨

We'll find out this weekend whether we're one step closer to AGI or I wasted 50 bucks on Amazon.

68mm shell width x 113mm spindle length (square taper, JIS)

Did you, um, measure those things? I'm not saying the robot is wrong in this, but both of those could be measured precisely enough with a tape measure (or calipers if you've got em) to be pretty sure you're getting the right thing.

But like, why would I do that when I can just ask computer?

More seriously, it's hard to measure my old bottom bracket without being able to take it out, right? Or is there something I'm missing? My understanding was that if I bought a bottom bracket that was slightly wider it may change my pedal width and I'd just have to adjust my derailleur.

Barring a short spell, ChatGPT has never used nearly as many emoji during a chat with me. Is there something in your instructions or memory?

Definitely not instructions or memory. I hate emojis. There doesn't seem to be any commonality to when it throws in dozens of emojis; that specific conversation had random work-related questions, random discussions about biology and then a lot of questions about bike bottom brackets. Every answer was full of emojis.

Jesus Christ, BB replacement has been such a pain for me. I too had a square taper, but purchased one of the incorrect depth to start. The manufacturers don't even list what you have anymore since they use interchangable suppliers, and my budget hybrid bike had one that failed after a measley 2,500 miles which is absolutely pathetic for such a basic component.

Between the opaque nature of diagnosing it and the need for specialized tools, it's the bike repair job that gets the biggest thumbs down from me.

If you haven't checked out the park tool videos on YouTube yet for these things, do. They're awesome at least.

Yeah, at this point I've spent as much on tools for taking out a square taper and fixing all the other shit wrong with my bike as I would have buying a new beater off craigslist. I'm down to the cups and they're so rusty they may as well be welded to the frame. My wife is not amused.

In my defense, we got a (relatively, for our area) lot of snow this year and half an inch of snow induces such panic in the populace that a fleet of plows immediately dump a metric ton of salt on every road. Now that spring is here, I've replaced the chain, cassette and derailleur. FML.

Park Tool videos are solid. I really like RJ The Bike Guy too for his videos showing how you can do the same work without specialised tools and why you should save yourself a lot of trouble and just spend the money on the right tool, even if it's not the pro spec Park Tool version.

I don't actually know what you do

Neither do I, anymore. Well, I do know, it's just boring and I'm grouchy about it. My career isn't research involved these days, and given everything the stability of sticking around is preferable to the risk of finding something more satisfying. I do miss those days and Perplexity would've been a godsend back in the day, I'm sure. Might look into it just for fun and to scratch the old itch of wanting to learn more again. That skill has grown stagnant and contributed to other issues.

then I was blown away when it instructed me to go take a picture of both sides of my crank/cassette so it could be certain what we were ordering would fit.

Dang! The paid version, I assume? Starting to wonder if it'll be worth the cost just to help with some minor repairs around the house.

it just regurgitates reviews I could read myself or tells me every garbage idea I have is phenomenal.

Yeah, I've definitely picked up the chat function not being particularly creative and being obsequious unless you run into one of the walls. I've tried refining some creative writing ideas with it a couple months ago but wasn't impressed. As fast as things move it might be worth another shot.

What's cookin' this weekend, The Motte?

Ever since I restarted intermittent fasting, my passion for creating and eating exotic foods has increased quite dramatically, since I'm thinking about food nearly constantly in the latter half of the workday. It is probably for the same reason that I am torn about what I should be doing: creating new exotic foods with ingredients from the Asian grocery store? Eating old food that I don't even know exists yet? Or maybe I should be going cheap and cooking up old beans in the cabinet or roasting/boiling some chicken leg quarters?

Yesterday I went with a compromise option, maki sushi with slightly old frozen fish that had been taking up space for a while, along with some taberu rayu (Japanese spicy chili oil) I had never been brave enough to actually use. It was great. Now there seem to be plans for going to a new wings place tomorrow, which really throws a wrench in the rest of the dinner plans, if you ask me, but I also have been craving wings recently, too, so not the worst thing in the world.

What is your approach with regards to preparing raw fish for sushi at home? I've been tempted recently and have done some research, but it seems very difficult to find any relevant safety statistics for different preparation methods. For example, I THINK at this point (at least for salmon) the consensus seems to be that you want farmed Atlantic salmon that has been previously flash frozen at lower temps than a consumer freezer to kill parasites. However, a) it's hard to find out whether a salmon filet has been previously frozen, especially since amateur fishmongers seem to think 'fresh never frozen' sounds better even if they don't know/it's not true, b) I can't find any raw numbers about parasite infection risk from eating salmon this way at home, c) I can't find data about the risk from food poisoning eating this way, and to what extent curing for a short time might help with this. Also whether buying frozen or freezing at home has any significant effect or if it's just totally useless of it's not at low enough temp.

I'm probably going to just rip it with what knowledge I have and see what happens, but if you have any ideas they would be appreciated.

Serious Eats has a good rundown. My sense is that, practically, most of the fish that you're going to be able to buy through 'normie' channels has been "super frozen", regardless of how it's presented in the supermarket. When I've tried looking into how the major commercial operations work, it seems that most of them don't even bring their catch in for processing on land. They have processing facilities built into the ship (or some have multiple 'catching ships' that just operate near one big 'processing ship' that they can deliver to much faster than going back to a land-based facility), where they cut stuff up/freeze/can/whatever, all while still at sea. Again, there are no guarantees, but my bet is that you're probably surprisingly safer just buying something from the grocery store, banking on it having been previously super-frozen, than you would even if you went and caught a fish yourself and then had to figure out what to do with it. It is surprising and counterintuitive to me that this would be so, but it is what I think is probabilistically true, since the commercial operations are more scared of running afoul of regulation, so they're probably going to just super freeze everything.

Serious Eats has some other recommendations, but I think there's usually a caveat of whether you're dealing with tuna/farmed salmon vs. anything else, and I think you're basically safe if you're doing tuna/farmed salmon. I've heard in the past that you can do surprisingly low-temperature sous vide on salmon, not changing its texture much, and I've done this myself when I've made sushi. The FDA would call this "mild temperature processing", but the literature is pretty sparse; I just checked again, and it's one of those, "This seems to be a thing that people are doing, but we don't really have good studies to know whether it does anything in that temperature range." Oh well; I guess I maybe don't know if I'll do it again the next time. Maybe I'll still do it just so I don't get the side eye from my wife (she seems to be okay with the idea that it's still "cooking" it, similar to how we sous vide other things in ways that are much much more strongly supported by the literature), and I'll hope it doesn't actually slightly increase the risk of what I think is already a very small risk. Again on this point, the Serious Eats article looks at rates of problems in Japan, and basically concludes that the risk is tiny.

I just watched some videos of fish processing on ships again. It's really like any other part of our food production supply chain; if you look at it, it sort of makes you think, "How could this possibly be safe?" ...yet probabilistically, it pretty much is. Maybe someone with more time could try to estimate micromorts or something from eating sushi... but I have no idea how just making it at home with regular supermarket tuna/farmed salmon would compare to eating out at a random sushi restaurant. Literally no idea which would even be a relatively bigger risk.

You'll be disappointed by my answer. I just cook the fish. I never really cared that much about the taste of raw fish. The texture is interesting, but I never could taste any subtleties. The thing I like most about sushi at home is the hot vinegared rice; salted cooked salmon or trout is good in it, and so is cooked chicken, and so are the other crap I like to add. Spicy mayo can taste good on the top or inside, unagi sauce can taste good on the top or inside, but usually I just dip each piece in some tamari soy sauce and have at it.

As for fish, yes, I have a sushi book that says flash frozen is best. I think freezing at all will kill parasites, so if you're paranoid, you can just freeze it yourself. Or just cook it.

I'm dying to cook up a batch of shortbread cookies this weekend. Or maybe cheddar and chive scones.

It's funny you say that about intermittent fasting. How are you managing it? I try to restrict all my eating to an 8 hour window or less each day, but I see other people skip entire days. I try to give myself a cheat day a week, and that goes OK I guess. I donno. Starting to think I should drop it down to every other week. Whatever changes in body composition I was seeing seemed to have dropped off, though my energy levels are more consistent throughout the day which is nice.

I manage it by not eating during the workday or anything for breakfast at all. I look forward to the black coffee I have after noon. I also take a nap at lunchtime.

My real weakness is the weekends. The association of home = food time is very strong for me. Not eating at all at work is comparatively extremely easy, especially since my boss stopped ordering full pizzas for lunch and letting me have the leftovers multiple times per week.

Related: for some reason, when I am by myself, I am never motivated to go get fast food or takeout or eat anywhere except home.

I love this cover picture from this Bloomberg story about bringing electricity to rural Africa.

The rural village in some remote corner of Zambia, the mud huts that look like they have for centuries, or perhaps even millennia (bantu expansion aside). The savannah with the mountains in the distance. Look closely and there are a few signs of modernity, but for the most part these people live the way people have done since the arrival of agriculture. And then the solar panels on a concrete slab, like a spaceship landed in prehistory.

My post in the main thread yesterday was perhaps a little doomerish. I didn’t mean for it to be. If they’re lucky, the people of this little village will get to skip the industrial revolution, the blackened cities, the smog and traffic, the hell of industrial warfare, the corporate rate race, and will find themselves in the future, contented and looked after in their own small corner of paradise. I hope they do.

Some opinions issued by the US Supreme Court have been fairly long. But have you ever devoted any thought to the International Court of Justice?

The ICJ's opinion on the legality of the secession of Kosovo from Serbia (penned by President Judge Owada of Japan, for a majority of nine against a minority of five) is 54 pages—far from outrageous. (Compare the US Supreme Court's recent 42-page majority opinion regarding Trump's presidential immunity.) But there also are nine other opinions from individual judges. Of those, the longest (a concurrence from Judge Cançado Trindade of Brazil) is 95 pages by itself, and the other eight (three concurrences and five dissents) take up 78 pages in total. And you can add to that both a 31-page summary of all the opinions and an eight-page press release super-summarizing the majority opinion. That's a total of 266 A4 pages—easily enough to make a book! (The aforementioned US Supreme Court stuff has only 64 pages of separate opinions and 8 pages of summary, for a total of 114 letter-size pages. Note also that the US Supreme Court uses significantly larger margins than the ICJ does.)

Programmers love semantic versioning.

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes

  2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backward compatible manner

  3. PATCH version when you make backward compatible bug fixes

Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Can this be applied to fiction writing?

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  1. MAJOR version when you make a retcon

  2. MINOR version when you add information in a backward compatible manner (e. g., a new chapter)

  3. PATCH version when you make backward compatible fixes (e. g., to English or continuity errors)

Additional labels for pre-release (e. g., Patreon-exclusive vs. public) and build (e. g., HTML/EPUB vs. Word/PDF, or fanfiction.net vs. archiveofourown.org) metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Programmers love semantic versioning.

also popular

Semver is one of a couple programming concepts that are widely applicable. Mostly my field is full of cutesy bullshit that prevents the art from being taken seriously (PHP? Gulp/Grunt/JavaScript in general?) but yeah, it's awesome.

Europeans sometimes note the American (or perhaps Anglo) ability to get to the fucking point in an efficient manner. With law, the example I usually heard cited was constitutions, but I heard similar comparisons of academic papers, though I think in that case Europeans learned to boil things down a bit.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats