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 think the misogynists were on to something in the 00’s when they would bully women out of FPS games. There’s a regional chat room in the game I currently play when bored and disenchanted with the world. The chat is filled with women whose names link to their OnlyFans — one audacious women even made a clan with her OnlyFans name and the clan is comprised of her subscribers. The chat is men trying to win the attention of these women, offering to buy them cosmetic items or carry them in matches. The worst misogynistic chat has more dignity to it than what unregulated gender-inclusive lobbies look like in this game.
Probably don't join those chats then?
This is the default world chat for the game, similar to an old WoW Barrens Chat. Imagine if Barren’s Chat was just girls spamming their OnlyFans and simps bending over backwards to give them attention
Was Barrens Chat otherwise famed for its conversation quality? In any case, I doubt you'd like it if it was spammed with Chinese gold seller bots instead, like public Path of Exile channels. Just ban advertising.
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Let's Make the Regular Season Great Again: Contra Freddie De Boer on Why the NBA Sucks Now
Freddie De Boer posts on why players demanding trades is making NBA fandom unsustainable. I was shocked to see how spectacularly Freddie missed the point, and bought into the very frame that is itself destroying the NBA. TLDR: Dame Lillard, star guard in Portland, demanded a trade from his hapless team to Miami. His team did ultimately trade him, but to noted metropolis Milwaukee instead. Freddie uses the occasion to talk about how it makes no sense for a fan to root for his home team if he's in a second tier city, because his team will probably never win a championship.
While Freddie does notice that Dame got traded to Milwaukee, he failed to notice that Brooklyn assembled three superstars who all demanded trades to: Philadelphia, Dallas, and Phoenix. And the Knicks over in Manhattan have been hopeless for decades. Player empowerment isn't about moving to big markets, it's about moving to superteams where players get the best chance to pad their resume with a championship.
Freddie buys entirely into the very frame that is destroying the NBA: that the championship is the only thing that matters. When we rate players' legacies entirely by their playoff success, and when fans only want to root for teams that have a "shot to win a championship." In a world of perfect parity, theoretically, each team would win a championship ever 32 years, reach the championship every 16, and the semifinals every 8. Of course, there will never be perfect parity, so every time a team wins a second championship in less than 32 years, another team gets shuffled back to the end of the line. If fans only want to root for teams that win championships, they won't root for most teams.
And of course that idea is clearly silly if you look abroad. In Europe, soccer teams buy players from each other all the time, and in most leagues there is a price at which teams are forced to sell against their will. Literally every European soccer team outside of maybe a dozen doesn't have a shot at ever winning a meaningful championship, yet so many of them have fans that will literally stab each other over team honor. Fans of rich teams win, fans of poor teams know they never will. Both still have fans. How do we explain that?
How do we make it worth rooting for the Pacers if the Pacers are as likely as not to never win a championship in your conscious lifetime as a fan? By creating things the Pacers can win. The NBA is already doing their best to make the regular season count more in the minds of fans, but it is already so far gone that I'm sure that won't be enough. Honestly, I don't even care enough about the NBA regular season to know how the regular season is structured, so my examples will be from the MLB or NFL.
So I have a proposal for all American leagues, not just the NBA, for how to astroturf some fan engagement in the regular season, even for teams that don't have a shot in hell: create public trophies for rivalries that are displayed in stadiums prominently after rivalry match wins, and the absence of which is displayed after losses. Basic idea runs like this. At a prominent area near the entrance to every stadium, each team would be required to erect a display area for trophies. Enormous, gaudy, awful trophies. Both the display and the trophy will be designed specifically for two things: so that fans will be tempted to take photos there for social media, and that fans entering the stadium will notice the presence and even moreso feel the absence of these trophies. You could have trophies for specific rivalries (Yankees would have the Red Sox and the Mets), or you could have trophies for division rivals (Eagles would have Dallas, the Giants, and the choke artists formerly known as the Redskins) or you could have both. The team that won the last match/series gets the trophy, publicly displayed in their stadium for fans to take photos with before games. The fans of the team that loses have to walk by the empty plinth before every game, the blank space reminding them that the trophy is in Boston/Dallas/New York, filling them with rage at the enemy having the trophy. Foment rivalry and hatred, force official channels and associated press for both teams to cover moving the trophy, make placing it at the winner's stadium a public event.
How will this help? Even in a down season, an otherwise mediocre team can sometimes sneak in a win against a hated division rival.. Now, rather than just playing spoiler, fans of down teams have pride to play for: we might not win the championship but if Any Given Sunday this game, we still get to keep the trophy, and more importantly keep the other guys from having it.
The other change, to discourage tanking, is to alter the draft order system. Sprinkling top talent among weaker teams is good, I like parity, but teams being as bad as possible is an awful spectacle. So I like the proposal I've seen before: at the 2/3 or 3/4 point of the season, the bottom 5-10 teams get the top 5-10 draft picks, but they are awarded in order of those teams finish to the season. Those bottom feeders are put into a new league table for the last 1/4-1/3 of the season, and the team with the best record gets one, second best gets two, etc. This would discourage teams from fielding anti-competitive teams after realizing their team is sunk, from selling at the deadline for future picks. Hell, teams in the bottom half might be buyers at the deadline to try to get that number one pick! Give teams that are out of the playoff race something to play for in the remainder of the season.
Proposals like that, rather than further complicating roster management or constraining players, will help make the Regular Season Great Again, and that will give fans of every team something to root for.
I think this is a thing in MLS? I don't know if they have actual trophies, but they have various trophy-style names for derby games.
Anyway, I'm sorry, but to make a league season really matter you have to do it like (football) football: since American sports will never add promotion/relegation, make championships a knockout tournament that runs alongside the league, and is determined by placement in last year's league. You can even do what football does and have a secondary cup for those who don't qualify for the main ones, so worse teams have a shot at a second-string trophy (West Ham won a third-string trophy last year and it was genuinely a huge moment for them).
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Another thought: don't the European soccer leagues have different tiers, and winning one tier graduates you to a higher tier next year. So instead of just one champion, there are three champions each year. Two lesser champions of course, but still something.
I wish when the second tier conferences in the NCAA were making cases that they should get playoff invites, NCAA football had adopted promotion relegation. It makes bowl games special (they become the promotion relegation games, gives all bowl conference teams a path to a championship, and makes the national championship game more meaningful because the winner won the top conference by beating half the country's top teams not creampuffs from a weak division.
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Pro/Rel also has the advantage that small teams can take pride simply in staying up in the top league. Sure, Luton Town fans probably never get to stunt on Man City fans, but they get to stunt on Leeds Fans. Even bottom tier epl teams have someone to look down on.
Pro/Rel wouldn't work in USA pro sports for geographic reasons. Freddie complains that kids in Indiana will have no reason to root for the Pacers, the vast majority of Americans would have no local team under Pro/Rel. Too much population too far from any real city. It works in England and France, where even the most remote areas are closer than one end of Texas to the other.
I don't entirely get this. At least here in germany, it's pretty common to care about second/third or local leagues if the favorite team isn't good enough for the first, and it's also pretty common for people to have a favorite team that doesn't really make much sense geographically(I grew up in northwest germany and rooting for Bayern München wasn't unusual there). Pro/Rel generally also allows for a very smooth transition between amateur and professional teams, which is a good way to generate interest in the "middle" leagues.
That's more or less exactly the American system: an area the size of Germany (by land area) typically has 2-4 professional team market areas. Germany is tiny by comparison to the USA. Hernigsdorf to Munich is 8 hours by car, Amarillo to Dallas is 6. Distances at which a serious fan could easily make a once a year trip, and would certainly go at some point in their lives. Pro Rel in America could easily create a scenario where half the population is traveling more like Hernigsdorf to London to see a real pro team.
What do you mean, "a real pro team"? Why are only premier/major league teams "real"?
NFL has 32 teams, so let's say we add FL1, a minor league with 32 more teams. Slowly but surely, these 64 teams end up in the 48 biggest metro areas.
These metro areas alone contain roughly two thirds of the US population. That's just people who can hop in a car and go see a game, a commute instead of a dedicated trip.
The only states that are too remote to have something that resembles their "home" team are:
You know what this list looks like? The list of states without NFL teams. Hell, even if you ignore the FL1 idea altogether and crowd the NFL into the biggest 24 cities, the list doesn't change that much:
Buffalo Bills move to NYC as the third team
Baltimore Ravens move to DC as the second team
Green Bay Packers move to Chicago as the second team
Cincinnati Bengals and Indianapolis Colts have to merge to survive
Jacksonville Jaguars move to Orlando
Pittsburgh Steelers move to Philadelphia as the second team
Kansas City Chiefs move to St Louis
Las Vegas Raiders move to SLC
New Orleans Saints are fucked
Tennessee Titans are fucked
Just two states will actually lose their teams completely in this situation.
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Doesn't every American high school have a team? How is that not enough for density? Kids in Indiana can root for their local amateur team that competes in the Indiana championship. Or for a local professional team that competes in the Midwestern championship. Or for whatever midwestern team that is in the minor or major league. Or really any team that's in the major league. Why should they root for the local team?
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Small signs of tragic America: driving down a suburban block with seven basketball hoops. The neighborhood would be better off with one basketball hoop that all the kids play at, instead they each shoot alone at their own individual hoop.
America gets what America deserves.
What does this mean?
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This is not fun. But I need to discuss it.
This is a bit naive. But I think one of the underrated aspects of living in our times is that we get to see poverty being eradicated in real time. And there is a real chance that it might be a thing of the past by the time Im old.
Im at a place now where I can start making dents myself. As in donate to charities.
The weird part. I only feel the want for Asia and Latin America to improve. Even though the biggest improvements are to be had in Africa. When I think of Africa I just think that they are so far gone, there is really nothing to be done about it. And in part they also deserve it. Ive seen with my own eyes Asians of various flavors put their lives on the line just to make a living. Africans not so much. The ones Ive met have been on general much more prone to a life of free riding, crime and whatnot than their poor Asian counterparts who are working machines who make massive sacrifices for a better standing.
The dilemma is obviously the highest "ROI" of my charity money is to be had in Africa. But I dont want to help Africans.
Can you not post this kind of thing in the friday fun thread?
It would be fine in the general culture war thread.
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It's perfectly fine to value lives differently.
There can be vast swathes of populaces and their future descendants that could be a net-negative value to you and your descendants, current and future. It'd be foolish to subsidize such populaces, and/or to boost their fertility via your donations, only to cause more problems for future you and your descendants.
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Not entirely true. India is a lot poorer than people think.
India as a whole is already poorer than a bunch of African countries. But entire regions housing 400+ million people (Bihar & UP) have sub-saharan Africa level HDI.
On the bright side, the YOY improvement in UP and Bihar is astonishingly fast. But, 50% growth over a small base, is still a small number.
It's a real shame. Bihar has some of India's smartest, producing the highest math scores in the country, but the entire state has been run by gangsters for the last 50 years. You know Biharis love math when their biggest celebrity is a math teacher who finds geniuses and sends them to IITs. It's no surprise given that Bihar was home to India's Archimedes in Aryabhatta & inventor of proto-medicine in Shrushruta. The Biharis are notoriously hard working, cultured and scrappy (for better or for worse), but the region has been stuck in a 1000 year slump (post islamic invasions), which shows no signs of changing. UP was in the exact same situation for decades, but has been turning a new leaf with a much needed hard-ass leader in Yogi. (India's most popular state level leader, very much a Modi++)
Funding schools, education and manufacturing in UP and Bihar is the surest way to pull these regions out of poverty. Sadly, almost every NGO is in cahoots with the worst aspects of society. So you really need to know someone on the ground level to fund the right institutions.
Africa is an entire continent. You can simply start with funding the Africans you no issues with.
Wildlife conservationists are a good place to start. The East Africans, North Africans, West Africans & Southern Africans are geographically and culturally distinct. Pick your poison ?
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Yeah this is severely not fun. I really don't understand why you put this in this thread instead of the cw thread, it would fit in much better. There is nothing fun about this thread.
Spend your money any way you like, don't try to justify it. Personally I'm with @CertainlyWorse - spend it locally. Improve the lives of people in your area, especially if you are concerned about the efficacy of your charity - Africa, Asia, South America - you might as well be shooting your money directly at the moon for all the impact you'll see.
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There's a real understanding that you can only rescue the few. There seems to be a schocastic application of this in Western education systems where teachers try to pull out high potential kids out of the thunderdome. There is nothing wrong with spending your money where you think it will do the most good.
Personally, on an individual level I think I'm at the point of keeping an eye out for young boys and men stuck in a bad upbringing and trying to either mentor them or whatever. No one else is coming. Girls have enough heroes.
I don't care what race they are.. and gender really. But I give myself license to pick and choose.
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Psst, you want to eradicate poverty in Asia? I'm right here, PayPal open.
Jokes aside, I agree with you that in certain important ways, charitable spending on Africa is a waste. Call it pearls before swine, but it seems to me a great deal of the dysfunction in the place is for HBD reasons that are immune to milquetoast interventions like giving them money, education or slightly better infrastructure. We've been trying for like 50 to 60 years to get them up to speed.
Asia pulled itself up by its bootstraps from comparatively dire straits. Crushing poverty of the type where people die of starvation or have their potential ruined by nutritional deficiency is rare now. Sub-Saharan Africa it isn't.
You can no more improve their lot in life in the long term than you can give an orangutan a mansion and credit card and come back 5 years later expecting to the see the rise of the Organuschild Family. You have to solve the problem of them being orang in the first place, and nothing short of gene therapy or other forms of enhancement will help.
(In case anyone anyone accuses me of being more racist than I deem strictly necessary based on HBD metrics, given observable reality, the comparison to another ape is solely because that's about the only other clade of animal for which the metaphor works. It's more labored with crows, dolphins and pigs isn't it?)
At any rate, don't feel weird about it and don't let anyone shame you. Your values are your own, and anyone who hates people for doing something more than the already societally acceptable default of nothing is a retard.
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Object-level: Obviously, Effective Altruism's concept of effective charities is what you want here. The usual place to start is GiveWell, but all of their top charities work mostly in Africa. Individual EAs often donate to other specific causes though, and there are many smaller projects and charities catalogued in various places. There's GWWC, maybe the places open philanthropy gives grants to, maybe just browse posts on the EA forum. Some of them do most of their work in specific places, some of which are in Asia, so you'd just look around there.
I think, even from a universalist hedonist utilitarian perspective, the longtermist idea that something like AI safety research or governance work is more important than malaria nets is very compelling. Marginally preventing a few dozen unnecessary deaths vs playing a part in shaping the entire future. Or at least, it would be if AI safety research and governance work was net positive or doing anything important, which isn't obvious. But however you approach it, the issue of AI and future technology transforming everything does seem to eat every other ethical concern if you think enough about it. Holden Karnofsky, previously co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, recently stepped down to focus on AI and is now "Director of AI Strategy".
If someone things that whatever goal is so important that all tool are justified and ethical concerns are unimportant, then it will not go well
I despise such hand wringing on whether or not something as basic as cause prioritization is warranted. The question is whether its true, and everything follows downstream of that.
Do you deny the general principle that some things can be considered to be more important than others? If not, then your issue is with the object level arguments for why AI is the most pressing issue of our time. Anyone who doesn't see the blistering speed of progress and the obvious issues arising from us creating something smarter than us that we are not ~100% sure we can control is, to put it bluntly, not making full use of even their own human intelligence. I don't trust their judgment of what a superhuman one would do.
Otherwise it's going "Oh no, won't someone think of the clogged toilets!" when your ship is about to hit an iceberg. Humans have been trading off things for each other for as long as we've existed, and I don't want to waste both of our time by giving a billion examples of it being true.
cause prioritization is entirely fine, deciding that anything is justified to reach goal X is not
Who exactly says "anything" is justified? That's a strawman if I've seen one.
Even Yudkowsky claims that dropping bombs on data centers is justified, not that we should blow up the entire planet in advance or return to the stone age.
Serious problems justify serious solutions, that's the whole point.
maybe I misunderstood
or extrapolated it too far
Fair enough, but I'd like to reframe your concerns with a hypothetical example-
Imagine we spot an asteroid on some deep space scan that has a significant non-zero chance of hitting Earth within a decade and causing a mass extinction event. For anything but <1% odds, any intervention necessary should necessarily take precedence over everything else.
As for AI, plenty of people think the odds are much much worse, and the time scales shorter
My position is that some basic and minimal rules should be upheld, for several reasons.
many ethical positions are actually coordination rules: society with random murder, rape and looting is simply less efficient than one that manages to avoid such destructive tendencies (and while you can claim that some external looting may be efficient: it got less efficient over history, and for asteroid impact we would want global coordination anyway)
if scenario X gives unlimited power to powerful they will happily invent fake X scenario or exaggerate it, we should limit incentives to that
there are many ethical positions that I would not want abandon, even if someone credibly claims that it will would have good consequences (I do not care how much convincing sophistry would be applied is that slavery and rape should be legal, I am going to oppose it anyway even if superintelligent aliens would arrive and announce that it should be done)
scenario X may be based on serious mistake and not actually apply
For asteroid impact: I would accept 50% asteroid tax, I would not accept slavery and outlawing criticism of government.
In general I would not accept "any intervention necessary", as it often results in counterproductive interventions or utterly not needed evil. Though I have no big illusions about my potential influence. Or would be likely to be convinced to support stupid policies anyway, lockdowns initially seemed a good idea to me (not examined yet whether it made sense to start them or whether it was stupid/evil/based on pure panicking).
Note that we had several cases in history of (2)/(4) scenario happening
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The impression that people who spend a lot of time in dissident right circles (ie our corner of twitter), regardless of their own politics, have of Africa is indeed an unsalvageable shithole, The Camp of Saints, 7.5 tfr Nigeriens trapped between the desertification of the Sahara and ISIS, millions in desperate Libyan camps trying to make it to Europe with the belief they’ll be soccer stars, millions more in the Congo being raped and butchered by gangs fighting over diamond and rare earth metals mines, an orgy of violence and - even in comparatively peaceful parts of Africa - miserable, grinding, absolute poverty. Africa, Addio in other words.
And it is true, of course, that all those things exist to some extent in Africa. But it is also true that they provide, at best, an extremely incomplete picture. Since 2016 I’ve travelled regularly to Sub-Saharan Africa, everywhere from Nigeria to Namibia, from Sierra Leone to South Africa, from Zimbabwe to the DRC to Ethiopia. And the world I see, as someone in finance, is obviously as skewed as the world a UN volunteer in a refugee camp sees.
But I have to say, the progress in the last ten years alone has been incredible. Often it’s obscured on statistics because of the collapse of EM currencies since 2014 (and more generally since 2010), and because population growth, which is slowing down, has been so high. Sometimes the stats do show this, as in e.g. Rwanda. Kinshasa is a completely different city to the one it was a decade ago. So is Addis, which has hugely developed and is now often (airport aside) quite pleasant, with a neat monorail that’s mostly clean, some good public spaces, despite the fact that they’ve been fighting a civil for for a few years now. Both cities, by the way, are cleaner than Mumbai. The growth of the middle class in many of the places I work has been extraordinary, entire suburbs with air conditioned malls and movie theaters emerging wholesale from the earth, even in countries not blessed or cursed with great natural resources. Government is (slowly) getting more competent, things are moving beyond paper into digital, where they’re more easily tracked and the petty corruption that cripples all developing countries is slightly more easily detected. The living condition of the great majority of Africans, who do not live in war zones or even in grinding poverty (perhaps a third do, which obviously isn’t great, but it isn’t the majority), is improving.
Things are being built, sometimes to great (although underreported) success, some of which I have helped to fund. New hotels and restaurants and luxury apartment buildings line the main streets of nearly every major sub-Saharan capital, along with new parks and gardens, the emergence (at last) of actual public services, including street cleaners and so on. And there is, a few countries (like South Africa) excepted, an air of infectious, absolute optimism. Last time I was in Kinshasa our clients took us out to try interesting Chinese-African fusion food, we went to a warehouse gallery that could have been in LA, we even walked around which I’d never have done 5 years ago. Small things, of course, and limited to the country’s top 5% at most (and in any case, some will say, evidence of the American monoculture spreading far and wide), but still progress in some sense. Many Africans live lives that are now comparable to the ‘global middle’, including in large parts of Latin America, India, parts of the Middle East and so on.
Even if one accepts the DR position on various evopsych concepts, it is a fallacy to suggest this means there is some “maximum level of development” to which a people or nation can aspire. Does that mean charity is warranted? I wouldn’t say so, but then I think charity is never warranted beyond one’s immediate community, where judgment about impacts is easiest. But Africa is far from a lost cause, and I’m very optimistic about its future (although, of course, I have every incentive to be).
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Decided to redo the cover art for my novel:
Any strong opinions on which one looks best?
/images/1696055832712833.webp
/images/16960558334619613.webp
/images/16960558340576553.webp
I think the font and colour choices would be better suited to some girly Bridget Jones-y chicklit novel than to a sci-fi novel.
#1 makes me want to read the book more than the other two
Well, it's been updated already, not that I've noticed anyone complain in the past.
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#3 because I can take it more seriously
seconded
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Scantily clad women still catch eyeballs, though these examples are just the AI being horny af rather than an intentional attempt at my part!
In hindsight, I guess it's not surprising that a machine learning model trained on data largely from the Internet has seen an overwhelming amount of porn, or at least porn-adjacent content.
I wonder if coming up with a less-biased dataset will eventually require something silly like, say, street view to make observations more like reality. On the other hand, humans watching Hollywood movies already see a biased dataset compared to everyday life.
Porn not needed.
An AI trained on female social media accounts and/or street view would also likely reflect the revealed preference of (young) women to be scantily clad and to be sex objects.
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#3. Rockets FTW
I want cyborgs, rockets and superheros, which is a tall order for most image models, but DALL-E 3 can handle it most of the time.
There are a few that evoke similar moods, which I could use too
/images/16960980249845638.webp
/images/16960980252711985.webp
/images/1696098025535511.webp
/images/1696098025836889.webp
The second one is pretty cool
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Why don't you use several prompts and do the compositing yourself?
I mean, I could, I know my way around SD, and photoshop, but it's a pain, and DALLE-3 is so good it's easier to try multiple runs and pick the best.
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Wow, the ladies in that first one are certainly scantily clad. And yeah Dall-E 3 is frickin good. Man can I just go into cryo sleep for 5 years that would be dope.
The man in the first one is scantily clad too ;)
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I think the first one has the best composition. Third could work, but the text would need to be placed a bit differently so as not to cover the kid.
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The first two are nearly on par, but unfortunately the second one is slightly spoiled by the child’s hand obscuring the superhero’s hand in the picture rather than interacting with it in some interesting way. One of those ways AI can still mess up in a way no decent artist would.
Nice proompt-fu tho!
Thanks! It's going to be a relatively small thumbnail/cover, so it's unlikely that anyone is going to spot the small details.
Bing Image Creator with DALLE 3 is a godsend, it's so much better than MJ or SD at understanding semantics and interactions between objects. In the older models, having a woman holding a child while looking at a painting of a superhero would result in woman painting a child superhero half the time, leaving aside the woman is also supposed to have cyborg legs.
We're so close to the point where we don't even need prompt-fu anymore that I can't take too much credit, but I know that making something like would be a PITA even using advanced tools like Controlnet for SD.
At any rate, I'm no longer sorely tempted to get an MJ subscription. This is at least on par aesthetically, and maybe better.
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The subtitle font looks like an Instagram font, I don’t like it.
Understandable, I'm no graphic designer, and that's what I managed to wrangle out of the free tier of Canva. I'm already torturing the crap out of DALLE 3 with the prompt, I don't think it's going to handle extra text on top. If you have any concrete ideas on how to make it better, I'd love to hear them, I'm not fully content either.
You can create any image, drop it into Keynote as a slide, then superimpose any font(s) you like. Then simply export the slide as an image file. PowerPoint can also probably do this. I'm sure Photoshop, etc. can do this as well but I've no experience.
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I’d try a few different font varieties.
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I don't like the third because the scene makes no intuitive sense. Space suit guardian so far from the space shuttle. Is he the equivalent of a full kit wanker? So for me the two top ones remain and I have a slight preference for the first one.
I'll forgive you for insinuating that the dude is some kind of try-hard LARPER haha, he just has a whole bunch of cybernetics. Maybe he stood too close to the launch last time?
I do prefer the first two myself, I was particularly torn between them.
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Tired:
Wired:
Fired:
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Hm. The latter uses 68 characters (without spaces) to convey the same information that the former uses 56 characters to convey. I think I prefer tired to wired.
The second format is big-endian rather than middle-endian, though. I hope you aren't one of those people who prefer 9/30/2023 to 2023-09-30.
Per your link, big-endian cites put the most important info first. If that is the case, why does the page cite come at the end, given that that is of vastly more importance than the fact that cert was denied, which is essentially legally meaningless. It adds nothing to the weight of the case as authority. And, the point of a citation is to aid the reader in finding the cited material; the fact that cert was denied does not do that.
PS: I don't understand "order 1120." 1120 is the page of the reporter than the order denying cert is published on, isn't it?
Think of it as a folder hierarchy on a computer. The "most important" item always is the folder at the top of the hierarchy—in this case, the reporter.
The point of putting the informational stuff in parentheses rather than in parenthetical commas is to make it easier for the reader to skip over it if he wants to. I'm not a lawyer, but when I read court opinions I find the parenthetical commas rather confusing and annoying.
can be simplified to
or
Of course, I am used to the standard form, so it is hard for me to say how others view it. But note that in legal citation, the most important material is often placed in parentheses. So it is usually a "read this" signal rather than a "it's ok to skip this" signal.
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Is it the brackets? I like nested brackets too!
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I think this would be more interesting to our Jewish friends. It’s a longer piece about a Jewish bookstore and the trade in older Jewish books. Longer read.
https://mishpacha.com/the-fine-print-2/
Great article.
It seems unfortunate, in a grand sense, that so many rare books are sold without being scanned and uploaded to libgen and friends though. For every person who found exactly the book they're looking for at that shop, probably a five more didn't because they weren't there. And even if that'd undermine the financial self-interest that drives people to collect the books initially, there'd be no deadweight loss if the books were scanned but kept private for however many decades.
Which also brings to mind - there are many who find fulfillment in professions that are, in a fundamental sense, obsolete. It seems to me that this is, somehow, wrong - it's better to push at, and likely fail at, the frontier, instead of lingering in the dust, enjoying oneself. The former is tougher, and more interesting too, imo - and simultaneously materially benefits all more. But it seems likely that technology, AI, etc will consign us all to the latter in time.
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Thought I'd share my experiences playing soccer for the first time. Maybe some fans can weigh in on this and confirm/deny some of what my friend said in the following story. And if you're not a fan, might motivate you to watch/play a match yourself.
Sports have never really interested me. Try as I might they always seemed repetitive. I have a friend, we'll call him John, who has been playing soccer casually for 11 years now. He often sends me highlights of Ronaldo or Messi's best plays and I sort of just nod at what I assume is impressive athleticism but never really appreciated on a deeper level. Last week I was traveling and ended up in John's city, where he agreed to let me spend a few nights. But he insisted that I join him for a casual soccer game. He plays in a rec league at his university (not varsity) and we weren't even playing with the rec league team, just a bunch of grad students who play casually. The circumstances were less than ideal. I was running on about 7 hours of sleep total the last two nights combined and was kept awake mostly by nicotine. But the weather was nice and John was adamant so I agreed to a match.
I was predictably terrible. Slow runner, uncoordinated, had a hard time keeping track of the action. To make matters worse the players for whatever reason didn't bother to wear any identifying jerseys or headbands so I had to figure out as I went along who was on what team. Overall, I pretty much achieved blocking the player with the ball a few times and forced them to make an inconvenient pass. Not particularly fun but a decent workout at least.
Later at John's apartment, he asked me some questions about the experience and we talked in person for the first time about the game and why he enjoyed it so much. As we talked, I began to understand the appeal myself, even as an unathletic STEM guy. John basically made it seem like, at the highest level, soccer is more of a mind game than a test of speed and strength. Before, I naively thought the game worked like this: "You dribble as fast as possible. You keep track of the few people closest to you and look to pass it to the teammate closest to the other team's goal who is available. Rinse repeat until you win the game." In a sense this isn't wrong, but I massively underestimated just how much information processing the best players do during a game. John estimated that as one of the better players in his rec league, that he could keep track of 4-5 objects on the field with a very high level of accuracy. Say, the ball and 4 of the players' bodies. He guessed that the best player in his rec league could track 6-7 objects at the same level, and the best pros could easily handle over 20. Idk how accurate this is. But to prove his point he analyzed a play by Sergio Busquets (I'll edit this post with the video once I find it) where he, based on a very brief <1s glimpse of a teammate in his peripheral vision, running at an angle to him, knew exactly where to pass the ball such that it would reach said teammate from a distance. And it was by far the best pass possible in the situation, far from any of the other team members. In another video, he receives a pass from a teammate despite 3 defenders standing between him and the ball. This seems impossible. How did he know where to stand? The answer: he was watching where the defenders were looking the entire time enough to know they hadn't seen him. I had no idea that level of spatial awareness, that fast and over such a large distance, was even possible.
Some more videos he showed me featured Ronaldo scoring goals in the dark and Ronaldo pulling off knuckleballs, basically a technique where you kick the ball with such little spin that it takes on a very erratic trajectory, but when does correctly might lead a goalkeeper to anticipate where it would land had it had a normal spin.
Overall, much more interesting things going on that I had previously given the game credit for. And something I could see myself watching in the future. Also worth noting that for the first hour of my own match, I felt like I was going to vomit or faint. But after that, I got a second wind of energy, and felt very relaxed, even had a mild runner's high. John explained it as my body burning fat instead of the glucose in my bloodstream, have no idea if this is bro science or not.
That is an interesting write-up because as someone who played casual football my entire life I have never thought of it in these terms. It has always been more of a casual brawl over a ball with limited rules of aggression. But then I always play as the dirty defense who either stops the ball or stops the player so maybe that is just my perception.
Think most of the players in my friend's casual soccer circle would feel similarly. The players on his rec team might have better gamesense.
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In fencing, there's second intention which is basically a fancy term for feinting such that you get your opponent into the right distance/position for your next attack to hit.
I heard from a fairly respectable teacher that it can go as high as fourth or fifth intention, which is just totally beyond the perception of anyone who isn't international-level. I believe they do these things without conscious thought, it's reflex and trained intuition.
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What if I told you practically almost every skill/artform is like this? At the high levels, it's not only mechanics but also a mind game especially if it's adversarial like a team-based sport. There are very very few things in the world where you are not better off with more juice flowing through your brain. And almost everyone is so mechanically gifted at the tail ends that winning/losing almost entirely boils down to strategy.
This is why I find people who harp about their hobby having so much richness and depth and complexity to be done right, so annoying. It's like stfu man, everything other than stamping envelopes is like this. I'm all ears to discuss the particular ways in which your hobby is uniquely complex in ways that is not obvious, but the fact it is complex and multidimensional in and of itself is not very interesting.
I naively assumed that the skill ceiling was lower in the mental game of soccer and the pros were distinguished by varying degrees of athleticism. But actually no, even among the best players there's a huge variation in levels of spatial awareness.
Game sense, it's usually called, and yes, once a base threshold of athleticism is achieved it's the biggest factor for success in most sports. With some exceptions, as american football and baseball do have players whose job is mostly maxing unidimensional athleticism, but not all of them. Game sense is still the top skill of an american football quarterback.
To an untrained eye, watching sports you see a very chaotic situation and don't understand why some players are so revered, they just seem to be lucky to find themselves in a position to score a goal and other players in that position would have had similar success rates. But then over time, you figure out how most of sports is about putting yourself in that favorable position.
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What do you have against my hobby? Getting the stamp to match the paper grain is not something you learn on your first night of stampin.
I'm kidding, but yeah there is a huge amount of depth to a lot of things. I play in a rec league sport and my current skill level is frustrating because my strategic mind is easily outpacing my ability to execute. Not because I have a brilliant strategic mind, but because I'm badly out of shape so execution is harder.
I don't know if it was Kasparov, or if it's even true. When he was asked, "When should I learn openings?" his response was "After you've already become a grand master".
But I agree with the spirit of the probably fake anecdote above. Even if not in such an extreme form.
I think most hobbies are experienced best when there is an early "grind" period where you just put in work to build a solid fundamental/mechanical baseline far above the minimum required to start strategizing. This way when you start getting perceived as good (combination of mechanics and strategy), you can really take off.
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The particular ways that they're pointing out for soccer to be complex were in fact non-obvious to me, and I thought the writeup was interesting.
My second paragraph isn't directed at OP
fair point.
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Reminds me of this analysis, as well as the linked articles from the 2014 world cup which include the quote “only Messi has figured out how to win matches by moving less than everyone else.”
It's true of most sports though, the best players can predict the play before it happens. In tennis for example, the pros start moving for the balls trajectory before it is hit. I guess based on the opponents body and arm motion. Us unfortunate mortals are the ones who tend to play reactivity.
Soccer does seem to be the sport with the most to keep track of though. Idk how basketball compares.
American Football, and ice hockey seem equally if not more complex. The players are more tightly packed together in American football, and there is more of a meta of "everyone rush towards the ball". And hockey plays physics and velocities a lot more.
Basketball is probably comparable. I think the three-d space is a bit more used in basketball, but there are fewer players. And the ability to use your hands adds variables to positioning.
There are also plenty of recreational type sports that seem more complex to me. Airsoft or paintball can easily get fiendishly complex. Knowing your teammates, enemies, and all of their firing trajectories, as well as possibly ammo or gun jam situations. If soccer is Chess, then paintball is Chinese checkers. You'll need an extra decade or two of moors law to beat humans at it.
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What are you all reading this week?
I am reading a book about stovebuilding. Youtube suggested me a video about building a small stove and I ended up binge-watching the whole series. The dude (does English even have a name for a person that builds stoves/masonry heaters?) name-dropped an author, and I got his book. Turns out my parents had another book of his 30 years ago and I remember looking at the stove plans as a kid.
I am not even planning to build a stove.
My third re-read of R.K.Morgan's 'fantasy' trilogy "Land fit for Heroes". It's pretty good if you like violence, though there's a slight bit of reddit atheism thrown in there. My suspicion is that he didn't like what he was seeing in England as several of his books feature various abrahamic-like religions having their imams get the knife.
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Please build a stove
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First?
Anyway I just found out from @self_made_human you can get a big ass meal in India for literally $3. Jesus Christ that makes me want to go so bad. If I can stay for a few weeks might even make up for the insane cost of the plane ticket. Now I see why all these white software dudes move to Bali. Cheap food, cheap hookers, what's not to love?
Congrats on finding out the third world exists?
If you are making like 100k USD you can almost live like a king with an army of servants in the third world. Even with 50k you can live a very good life. (If I were in that position I would pay above market rate to a very few lucky people lol)
I do like the idea of working a remote job and moving to Thailand or Bali, the only thing that deters me other than having said remote job is that the people are not English speakers, social life is going to be rough.
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Ok, If you are going to India ........ hit me up. India is an amazing country, but doing it wrong can leave you with a slum-dog millionaire impression of the place.
I'd recommend:
Skip:
Most of the standard worries of white people visiting India are borne out of stupid things that no Indian does.
Don't shop on the street. Proper stores will have reasonable prices, with fixed rates & higher quality. I spent ~25 years in India and never ate shit from the streets. There are a million better options more a marginally higher cost.
The best chaat in India (my favorite cuisine) costs about 2 dollars of a meal. They have indoor AC seating, use mineral water and wash hands after every serving. You don't have to go eat at the street side spot to save 1 more dollar. Your loose-motions are on you.
You can get a properly hygienic bis-ass meal in India anywhere for under $7. If you must eat on the streets then remember that all food in India is prepared fresh. The best way to make sure no pathogens touch you, is to see the shit get cooked in front of your eyes. If it was exposed to fire for a few minutes before you eat it.......you're good. Do not eat cold chutneys and sauces from random places please. Lots of times, your sickness is not due to food, it's heat stroke. India is a hot country. Stay hydrated. Don't spend the entire day in scorching heat. My only 2 cases of terrible food reactions came from drinking unpackaged-cold-water and heat stroke respectively.
Same thing with hotels. Good hotels costs between 50-100$ a night. It's cheap, pay up. Don't try to go stay at the $20/night spot and then complain when the toilets didn't have soap in them. You brought this upon yourself.
Same with visiting completely random desolate spots. India is a big country. We have a lot of guides for everything. The curated stuff is good. If you're hiking through the forests of Jharkhand and get caught by violent Naxalite–Maoists then that's on you. If no Indian visits there. It's for a good reason. Thankfully, the spots I recommend (Western Ghats, Delhi, Himachal & Leh-Ladakh) are quite safe. Just don't hike through a Tiger or a Leopard sanctuary.
Don't be an idiot. You'll be alright.
Great comment! Will be revisiting if I ever do go to India. Wish I had the funds to travel more now, alas.
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My friend got bloody diarrhea without ever touching street food. YMMV.
It's the water that gets you.
He only drank bottled water.
It is also the ice in drinks or the water that the vegetables in your dish was washed with or the water you brush your teeth with or... Water can get you in a lot of ways
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I had a similar experience as your friend.
Went to Bengaluru in 2018. Was incredibly careful the entire time. Avoided most sketchy street foot and only ate in decent restaurants.
Ended up with food poisoning. The suffering was so bad I won't soon forget it. It was the worst I have ever felt in my life, by far. I loved everything about India but that experience is enough to make me not want to go back.
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The climate ? That it's populated by brown people who see you as a bipedal wallet ? That it's full of obnoxious tourists ?
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I would be afraid of getting sick because of lacking immune system to Indian pathogens. If you can’t drink the water and they are cooking with water…. But maybe if it’s really hot and has curry in it
Nobody told you not to ingest unboiled water in any place outside of the developed world ? I thought that's like traveller 101.
In much of tropical Asia, you can get literal brain-eating parasites from eating salad? Apparently it's now also in Florida and the Mizz delta.
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That reminds me of when I was in a 99-cents store and saw a pregnancy test on offer. Some things you don't want to skimp on.
PS: Bali? You said India; did you mean to type "Indonesia"?
Eh I've just heard a lot about Bali. Idk.
Yeah, but where did you hear about the $3 meal? I would hate to fly all the way to India and end up paying $4.50 for dinner.
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IIRC, the regulations on manufacturing mean that 99-cent pregnancy tests are exactly identical to full-price ones. (That may not be true in your jurisdiction, of course.)
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