domain:themotte.org
HereAndGone
8m ago
The more you protest, the more I suspect, because this has happened before. "Me, a sockpuppet of Someone? Not at all!" (yes it was a sockpuppet).
HereAndGone
8m ago
I thought it was good, but weak. The story wasn't well-developed. And there seems to have been no follow-up or sequel as you'd expect.
HereAndGone
13m ago
I think the "getting girls when they're young" was less about actual paedophilia and more about "get them while they're impressionable, groom them to accept that you're helping them build careers as models or whatever, then have a stable of pretty young things to be arm candy at the parties you're throwing".
It's an old racket, people have been picking off girls since the days of stage coaches. They arrive in London looking for work, or are recruited by those who go into the country looking for girls, and are tricked into joining brothels by a procuress.
Len's Island is interesting: it's a technically well-executed game with a lot of effort put into it, that's also just painfully shallow. Lootless-Diablo-clone could work even if it wasn't unique or groundbreaking, there's just not enough meat on the structure. I finished the third dungeon a couple days ago, and there's only been six normal mook types (+3 reskins) so far, one unique boss per major dungeon, and most 'mini-bosses' just consist of rooms with a ton of mook-spawner cocoons. You can beat the first major dungeons just by dodge-rolling and spamming normal timed hits, the second starts to force you to use a shield and/or weapon skills, but there's only a couple skills per weapon, and that seems to be about as deep as combat gets. In theory, build variety around the enchantment system or skill point system should drive a lot, but they're pretty easily solved, too, and there's not a ton of choice economy around what items you'll upgrade in what order or how you focus on getting specific gear. There's several weapons, but most of them suck for the mook-heavy fights, and of those that do work there's not really enough difference to justify enchanting multiple. It wouldn't matter as much if the rest of the game was really compelling -- I love Vintage Story after all -- but so much of Len's Island focuses on combat or dungeon splunking that it's pretty frustrating, not just a chore, but a boring chore.
((Also, struggling with the UI. Why is the inventory and the build menu tied so closely together that you can switch from one to the other by mouse-click, but if you use the build button you can't interact with world items and if you use the inventory menu you can't place a structure?))
Maybe a slightly more complex combo system, or changeable special skills, or more reason to hotswap weapons, or cheap area denial combat potions? There's a lot of set pieces in the dungeons, maybe make them matter more than just being 'don't fall into this lava'? The devs are allegedly still working on the game, so maybe it'll change down the road.
The SO's gotten back into ARK, with Survival Ascended's Ragnarok release, so I've been pulled a bit into that when I can. The game is and always has fallen into the 'great idea, awful execution' from day one, both on the technical side and on the game philosophy one, and it still shows now. ASA and the new map release are better than ASE: gone are the fifteen-plus minute load-times, the frustratingly bad building system, and there's been at least a little effort to avoid the numerous outright glitches. ASE's Ragnarok was never really completed, and while there's a few missing critters in ASA's Ragnarok, it at least doesn't have whole biomes that were stapled on without being populated. Other parts aren't improved; whistle commands are still painful to use without a long keybinding session, combat is very floaty and weightless and depends on gameish stats that often don't make sense. I'm not as opposed as some to stat sticks, but if you're going to let a solo direwolf easily take down a pack of five carnos that each individually outweigh her, I need some way to actually tell that's going to happen other than jumping in and hoping, or memorizing a breakdown of how a critter's stats tie to their levels. And some parts are outright worse: the devkit is an astounding 1TB, which manages to break my record for 'western game developer was here', the new engine is very GPU-intensive even at its lowest settings, support for unofficial servers manages to be worse(!) probably downstream of the new owners partnering with a server provider, and ASA's Ragnarok manages to have more mesh errors than the already-notorious ASE version. There's a bunch of more interesting taming options than the old 'hit it with a club/tranq arrow and shove food up them', but a some of them suck, and a lot of the better modded solutions to the taming dilemma haven't been ported from ASE. Running a small dedicated server with wildly tweaked rates gets away from mandatory no-lifer play while still making most tames weighty enough to be meaningful... and it's still more commitment than I can really put into it.
But it's very much the only effortful game of its kind, with maybe Palworld as competitors. Nightengale devolves into a dungeon spelunker and the pet system is a joke, and a lot of the few others in the genre either don't exist or work even worse. I have some hopes for Amiino -- Palworld meets Hi-Fi Rush-style combat is a match made in heaven, even if the music integration ends up more muzak -- which when you're looking at Chinese gatcha f2p for innovation is a worrying sign, and that's eta 2026.
phailyoor
18m ago
This is a multi-step plan that supports a level of sophistication and prior thought.
Even total larpers have plans that include multiple steps. The difference is that larper plans don't work.
No_one
18m ago
The game feels kinda long, but I think it's mostly bc I suck at it. E.g. I'm always dealing with some problem and running it at slowest speed. Even though the supply chains are less complex than Factorio, the extra details and infrastructure related stuff means there's more..problems that can crop up.
Don't think I played the tutorial, I just did the in-game one.
If I were you, I'd give you this advice:
-
remember that you'll need to scale up .. almost everything. (my current big issue is I can't expand my settlement without dumping a megaton of crap into ocean)
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plan ahead knowing that and you'll do fine.
My biggest peeve with the game is truck dumping. You lose gigantic amount of terrain-moving capacity if you incorrectly set up allowed dumping and truck drive across half the map. NEVER allow a dumping designation outside of a designated mine!
5434a
30m ago
It's pathos over logos.
The equivalent is a man saying that a forum post got him so agitated that he smashed his laptop to pieces with his bare hands.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
39m ago
The ancient Greek system of slavery
There isn't a single ancient Greek system of slavery. There are two well-documented systems of slavery (Spartan helotry and Athenian slavery) that are sufficiently different that the sources usually use different words for them. There does seem to be a consensus that Athenian slaves (except for the slaves in the polis-owned silver mines) were treated considerably better than the Greek average, and that Spartan helots were treated worse. That in turn suggests that even more distinct systems of slavery existed in other poleis and we simply don't have details.
but if you asked the same people "Should it be legal for certain people to be employed in jobs they can't quit" many would say yes.
I haven't come across these people. Apart from the special case of military discipline, sufficiently few people support bringing back indentured servitude that the business associations lobbying for broad enforceability of non-competes have to lie and say that it is about protecting trade secrets and not stopping people quitting their jobs to get better ones.
"People who quit their job and can't find another one should be allowed to starve" is a position with non-negligible support, but that is a different view to "people should not be allowed to quit their job in the first place". The right to quit your job for a better one is fundamental to the capitalist concept of freedom.
I in fact did not ignore that, I explained how reprisals, which actually happened, were indeed an ugly reality that can obviously be criticized in their own context but they don't ultimately provide evidence for the most unusual, important, and controversial claims made by the Holocaust narrative. Her father and cousin joining the Partisans is testimonial evidence for the German's own self-stated reasoning for interning the Jews, providing a fundamentally more plausible alternate explanation for this network of camps than "they had a secret conspiracy to murder them all in shower rooms". As we speak, Israel is preparing to deport the entire population of Gaza into a concentration camp built on the ruins of Rafah for similar reasons.
I'm sure she has provided more detail elsewhere, but the story is depressing enough as it is; I have no desire to listen to the poor woman talk at length about how most of her family died.
I actually did look to see if she provided more detail elsewhere, and when she made her debut as a Holocaust Survivor on tour. As far as I can tell, the first reference to her story was in 2014 when she apparently made her debut. I can't find any reference to her story before that. So assuming that this is when she began telling her story publicly in 2014, she would have been 77 years old giving an account from experiences as a 7 year old. How many stories can you reliably tell from when you were 7 years old? There's nothing in her story that is fundamentally implausible, such as survivors like Irene Zisblatt who make absurd claims and outright lie, but it's something to consider when weighing the evidentiary value against extremely unlikely claims like millions of people being tricked into walking inside gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
44m ago
You're the only Indian I've met who claims that people would get beaten in the street for various transgressions and I really find it hard to believe. Every Indian woman I've met seems to have a story about getting groped in public and the offender never gets beaten by the upstanding citizens that you claim inhabit the subcontinent.
Here is a vicesplainer on the career trajectory of one Delhi pickpocket. He joins a gang that has so much opportunity for larceny that they're pickpocketing around the clock in shifts. He certainly doesn't fear retaliation from honorable bystanders, the only thing he seems to fear is the gang after he tells them he's out.
wayfarer
48m ago
Despite what Western media reporting might have you believe, the rate of petty crime in India is surprisingly low. People rarely get pick-pocketed or robbed. Do you know why?
what you mean by that? Out of lets say 25 people you know - how many were pick-pocketed within last year? How many were robbed?
If answer for first is greater than 1 and for second greater than 0, then it is "surprisingly low" only because people had low expectations from India.
(and while petty crime is annoying - what about more serious crime? Lets say that woman goes alone during night though city - is it likely that something bad will happen to her?)
TitaniumButterfly
56m ago
This explains so much about a prior housemate of mine. Every single one of those things in spades. I'd tell the horror stories but am happy to find that, seven or so years later, I finally seem to be over it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
57m ago
I mean even in your own home away from home, there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison. Women are too good to spend time in jail for their crimes you see? In fact, their reasoning is that since more women are being sent to jail, something must be wrong with the legal system, since women are wonderful obviously. So we'd better start shutting down the women's jails so they can't be sent there.
Leaving aside the wisdom (or lack thereof) of this plan, this isn't what is going on.
There are no plans to get rid of women's prison. There's a plan to get rid of a women's prison. Women are not too good to spend time in prison for their crimes:
“There are a number of women that need to be there. They’ve done terrible things, they need to be punished, and that’s the best place for them."... About two-thirds of women are imprisoned for non-violent offences.
Would they, if they looked at the men's prisons, find many of the same reasons for leniency apply? Probably (it seems the overall rate of people in prison for nonviolent offenses is 61%), and they obviously don't because women are wonderful and men aren't. But your hyperbolic framing of what's going on is just that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
57m ago
The Greeks (and Americans) frequently allowed skilled and disciplined slaves to save up enough money to buy their freedom.
Inasmuch as courage or valor was expected, it was of the "discipline and goal orientation over extended period of time" type, rather than the "violent revolt" type.
The thing in this clip, basically:
TitaniumButterfly
59m ago
I recall that this was indeed an embarrassment to the Roman elite when Spartacus repeatedly beat them and their troops. Ruined a lot of narratives as I understand it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
59m ago
When Aristotle talks about "natural slaves" he's not really talking about some American nightmare-vision of an antebellum plantation.
Yes, this is right--it's always interesting teaching the Politics because I have to explain to my students all of the ways in which "slave" can be interpreted. Fortunately, Aristotle himself also lays out how differently slavery was practiced in different parts of Greece--very like your footnote suggests of antebellum American slavery. In Book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle writes:
Or, upon what principle would they submit, unless indeed the governing class adopt the ingenious policy of the Cretans, who give their slaves the same institutions as their own, but forbid them gymnastic exercises and the possession of arms.
Apparently, at least from Aristotle's perspective, slaves in Crete were just regular people who couldn't hit the gym or own guns pointy metal objects. This was apparently more generous than slavery as practiced in Athens, which was in turn apparently more liberal than the way it was practiced in Sparta. To the best of my understanding, chattel slavery was not the norm in ancient Greece, but neither was it unheard of.
These days it is essentially impossible to have a nuanced policy debate on slavery. We have insisted on eradication of the practice, while in great measure merely obfuscating it. If that was a necessary step to the elimination of chattel slavery, well, then I suppose I can't complain too much about it. But I find it at least of interest that so many technically free, politically enfranchised humans in the West would probably be better off with greater guidance--even though I do not regard myself as in want or need of similar intervention.
(But that may simply be a further question of degree. If we really did build a genuine superintelligence, unfettered by "alignment" to some other human's political agenda, would I not be wise to submit myself to it? I feel grateful to doubt that I will ever face such a choice.)
Tollund_Man4
1hr ago
Maybe this calls for an inverse catch-22. If you have enough executive agency to successfully organize a slave revolt, you clearly do not belong to the slave class. Welcome to the ranks of the masters brother.
If we're still talking about Greek society the free man was someone who valued liberty over life and had the valour to actually claim it. Granting a slave freedom merely for organising a revolt would be a lower standard than what was expected of free citizens when they are called to defend their own freedom against an invader.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
You can absolutely enter into agreements that restrict the 1st amendment right to free speech, NDAs, trade secrets, non disparagement clauses, even just normal character clauses in a contract restrict your right to free speech.
The first amendment protects from the government, it does not protect from private contract law.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
I agree with you about games, and to some extent TV and books- games take so long to play, and there's so many old good ones, that we just don't have time to keep up with all the new released games. Even if you buy them all to test them out, it's only scratching the surface, which really doesn't do them justice.
Movies are a bit different since they really don't take much time or effort to watch. Especially if you just focus on the big mainstream Hollywood movies, you can just see 1 or 2 a month and pretty much keep up with all of them. But admittedly I don't even do that much anymore... it's just so rare to find a new movie that interests me.
AnarchyDice
1hr ago
The point is that a battery storage system is not hooked up to the theoretical total energy contained in fossil fuels or nuclear rods or solar irradiance, it is connected to the output of the power plants and solar fields. That output (and corresponding residential/commercial/industrial usage numbers) is what the battery needs to be sized in relation to. Heat pumps may help on the margins with that number but there are no low-hanging fruits to pick up in the world of energy usage and production.
Zephyr
1hr ago
There are no pure assertions of "negative" restrictions on rights -- there are only positive assertions of rights. "You should not have the right to do X" can be rewritten as "I should have the right to punish you for doing X". Or, more explicitly: "I want the right to punish you for doing X".
I think this is a bit confusingly written. There are three possible states here:
- You have the right to do X.
- Everyone else has the right to be free from you doing X.
- You may do X, but you do not necessarily have the right to do so.
The way you phrased the above implies that 3 and 2 are equivalent, while I don't think they are.
Free speech (in America) falls under 1, murder falls under 2, while something like "paint your house vibrant pink" falls under 3. In theory, you are not allowed to enter into an arrangement where your right to free speech is abridged*, you are forbidden from entering into an arrangement where you are allowed to murder someone**, and you are free to enter into an arrangement where your ability to paint your house is denied (HOA).
- The reality on the ground may differ from the ideal. ** Soldiers and police officers aside.
charlesf
1hr ago
Maybe, but I've never really used books very much as part of my practice. I find books about Buddhism and meditation interesting intellectually but not always useful for progressing actual practice. The ones I enjoyed the best are probably the more semi-biographical ones were other people share their experiences and details of their practice. There are certain predictable milestones as well as potential stumbling blocks that almost all life-long meditators eventually encounter. Some of these I would also categorize as real dangers. An experienced teacher is indispensable for navigating this and I don't find books or writing to be a functional ersatz. I imagine you could probably do ok with instruction over the internet though. Still, there a few books I've enjoyed that stick out. Anything by DT Suzuki is pretty good, though he is a major figure in modern pop-Buddhism that's not really his fault; the hippies became somewhat obsessed with him in the 60s. Alan Watts is also quite good, though I prefer his more academic audio lectures where he explains the basics of Indian philosophy. His other stuff in general is quite syncretic and personally idiosyncratic to his own practice and not really what I'd call standard or traditional, and the hippies got ahold of him too. Another author I enjoy is Taitetsu Unno who writes in English about, and is a minister in, Jodo Shinshu Pure Land Buddhism. There is much less interest in the west for Pure Land, despite it being the overwhelming majority of Buddhists in China and Japan. I learned to meditate at a Jodo Shinshu temple when I was young. Meditation is actually not a core practice of Shin Buddhists at all, most never do it at all, though it does exist in the tradition and is more common in the clergy. The underlying philosophy of Pure Land doesn't really require it as part of the practice, they are mostly chanters; their path to liberation is entirely different from the more well known types like Zen or Tibetan traditions. However this temple shared a facility with a Rinzai Zen sensei who held twice weekly sessions. Shin and Zen have a good and fairly long relationship in Japan so this wasn't that strange to the natives at the temple. I feel like speaking or writing about the experience of meditation is always something of a farce. Its a category of experience I find often beyond my ability to communicate about. At its core is meditation practice. I do a mixture of sitting and walking/working meditation as well as chanting, mostly the nembutsu. I think I understand the aversion to pop-Buddhism though. I learned at a temple of Japanese immigrants and their decedents. They were extremely sensitive to the idea of their religion being a caricature and their non-Japanese visitors being any sort of cultural/religious "tourists". Many of them were quite militant about resisting anything that felt like being exoticized and were very clear that they'd prefer that no non-Japanese were allowed in the services at all, ever. One thing the Shinshu in the USA does that I really like is translate the majority of their teachings into plain English, borrowing many terms from Christianity. Their organization is even called the Buddhist Churches of America. Many of these changes were made post WWII in an effort to integrate more fully into American culture. The temple I attended was founded by former internment camp prisoners who left their old communities en masse after the war and founded entirely new communities in American cities that had little or no Japanese presence before the war. I think that my introduction to the practice coming from this group was very helpful for avoiding a common trend I often see in western Buddhists of what I can only really describe unkindly as LARPing. I have over the years learned a great deal of Japanese and Sanskrit/Pali terminology out of academic interest and as part of deepening the practice. Some of these terms are very useful for describing concepts that sometimes require an entire sentence in English to convey, but I don't think a successful meditation practice requires learning any foreign languages at all, nor adopting the cultural practices of a different people.
Panem
1hr ago
In a previous Wellness Wednesday I talked about my summer challange to climb 41 4000ers, and promised there some trip reports. So here I go!
Prelude
The Climb Against Time, my summer challenge to climb 41 4000ers in one season and raise funds to develop an Implantable Artificial Kidney, started with disappointment. Here, after a good warmup stage of preparing both my body and mind in May, I was hit by terrible snow conditions.
In early June I attempted Allalinhorn through the Hohlaubgrat, mainly a snow route with a little bit of rock scrambling at the summit block. This attempt proved futile as we were bogged down by slushy snow straight from the hut all the way to 3600m where we turned around. This futility was followed by heavy bouts of diarrhea and vomiting, having contracted some stomach bug from the water or the fellow inhabitants of the dingy winter room at the Britannia hutte. Between trying to keep my immunosuppressants down and running to the toilet, days passed, and the snow that had plagued us on the approach had long since vanished in the raging rays of the early summer heat wave.
The week after, I was again in the Alps, this time to try Les Droites or the Aiguille Verte. Neither was in condition; the mixed routes were too soft and prone to rockfall, and the rock routes were too wet and filled with rotten snow. Instead, we did Aiguille du Moine as a workup climb. I was getting incredibly frustrated. I had 41 4000ers to go and here I was, grounded, without any so far. I needed a win, and I needed it fast.
Under these conditions, I accepted Freddy’s offer to try our luck at Dent du Geant. I met him in a cafe just next to the telepherique going up to the Midi. He seemed somewhat out of it, tired and hazy. He had just been up the normal route to Mont Blanc and had come down that night, slightly dazed from the exhaustion. In all likelihood, I had a similar daze, having just come down from my ‘emergency bivvy’ that I had set for myself by the Courvecle refuge at ~2700m to get a bit more acclimatization in and catch the train from Montenvers at 1800m, saving my legs almost 2000m of vertical. Two men, at two different sides of the massif, yet the same cold, sleepless night.
We went over the plan and agreed to meet in two days. We drove across to Italy over the Mont-Blanc tunnel in Freddy’s van. Here we promptly got the lift to Pointe Helbronner at 3462m to make our bivouac. The Italian side of Mont Blanc is steeper and wilder. Layers and layers of rock buttresses rise abruptly from the earth to meet the gently sweeping glaciers coming from the French side at the high summits. It amazed me that there was a path straight down almost from Helbronner to Courmayeur, a sickening amount of vertical on mostly loose rock. Dent du Geant The Bivvy
We got off the lift and could immediately see our objective, Dent du Geant or, Dente del Gigante as Italians would call it. The Giant's Tooth did indeed look like a tooth. I was used to the view of it from the French side; from there, with its sweeping North Face and its cloud perpetually lingering under it, it looked impressive. Now, with us so high up, it looked small and, importantly, attainable.
We moved slowly up the glacier towards our mountain and settled on its shoulder, off the glacier at 3600m. It was an impressive bivvy location. Only 400m below our summit, with the entirety of the Mont Blanc massif to let our eyes gorge upon. Here I started with the ritual of collecting, melting, and boiling snow.
It always amazes me how long it takes to melt and boil snow. For the subsequent bivvies with easy lift access, I decided I would bring water up from the valley and save the time and hassle. Yet the time spent over the Jet Boil was not in boredom, for there was tomorrow's route behind us, and the routes for later, in front of us, to admire.
I had met my partner Freddy on a belay at Pointe Lachenal just a month prior. I didn’t know him well, aside from the coffee shop chat, and we had never climbed together either. Yet from the get-go, I was at ease; things were just meshing well without trouble. So we lay feet to head, as two wide-shouldered men could only lie in this tent, and slept soundly.
Until we were woken up around 2 am by the sound of metal and the flash of headlamps. I opened the zip of my tent and looked up; lo and behold, a train of lights heading up the approach gully. "What the hell? It's 2 am, are these people mad?" I asked rhetorically. This was not a long climb, and I certainly did not expect people to start at the hut at 1 am, yet here they were, clambering up the mountain in our backyard. I suppose it makes some sense to be the first on route for such a popular climb, yet the thought of leaving the tent at such an early hour and doing most of the climbing in darkness did not appeal to me at all.
Let them, we thought. We will get going at dawn. No need to rush; let the rock warm up. As I got back inside the tent, I looked up at the Kuffner, the mythical route of my desire. It cut so steeply up the side of Mont Maudit, intimidating at this time of day, with the deathly skirts of the Cursed mountain dropping steeply to either side. It, too, had a train of lights moving up it. I hoped and dreaded for it in the coming weeks.
In our tent, we brewed up, ate, and slowly but steadily got ready. At 5:40, just on the tick of dawn, we joined the light train going up the approach gully. The Climb
The first part of the climb was about 250m of steepish snow mixed with some rocks and rock passages. It was not too difficult, and we had a good clear night and so a refreeze. We moved past these sections to the start of the technical climbing slowly and easily in about 1hr 30 minutes.
We looked up to see that even the first pitch had fixed ropes aiding the way. We decided to simul climb this (climb while moving together). I remember this being the hardest pitch of the whole climb. Perhaps because I was still cold and not in the climbing mindset, but tugging on the fixed line in boots, it all felt very powerful. In either case, we made it up the first pitch to the second. I led the second pitch fairly easily placing a few pieces here and there, mostly just to place something, rather than a strict absolute need to place something.
The last move of this pitch was interesting, a mantle move using huge shipping ropes to help on to a massive terrace, at the beginning of the Burgener slabs. Freddy soon joined me on the belay.
The Burgener slabs, though on every photo I have seen look intense and hard, were far from it. Massive cracks go up the rock with good places for both foot and hand. The climb is only marred by the massive shipping rope yarding up the face, detracting from the seriousness of such an objective and its beauty. Yet the ropes were there and so Tug, started to tug, all the way up the slabs to the steepening just before the summit ridge.
Here it got a bit powerful as I entered the chimney, without the ropes I would definitely need my rock shoes but in this case there was no need. The climb was also as well protected as a multi-pitch sport route. So it all felt quiet breezy. I quickly led the remaining pitch on the summit ridge to the Maddona and gave her a kiss on the forehead.
We had made it, my 1st of the 41 4000ers. There was a huge welling of relief. Finally, at-least one was done.
Soon after this I took my immune suppressants. There is always one set at 10am and one set at 10pm, summit or valley, sleep or climb, this was the 10am set.
After summiting there was only the 7 or so rappels down the south face to do. These rappels were quiet fun (when expertly done as Freddy did so) with large overhanging sections which suspended you mid air.
All in all it was a glorious start a very long adventure, where good partnership met good conditions to give a beautiful outing.
[I am a few weeks delayed with all the write ups by the way but they are coming!]
I think what we are not getting here is that Aristotle means slaves. Not "people who need to be looked after" or "people who are incapable of not fucking up their lives" - we do accept that there is a social duty to look after the mentally ill or the intellectually disordered who can't live without support.
He means "people who are born to be property". And that, dear Mottizens, is the nettle you need to grasp: do you really advocate that some people are property?
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