BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
Unironically they are mediocre stories and don't follow what's recognised as good modern storytelling. The iliad for example is about a month during the Trojan war, and the first 10 days of that is about a plague because Agamemnon was lecherous and wouldn't let go of a war sex slave he'd captured. The famous trojan horse story isn't even present in the Iliad, it ends before that point and just goes up until Hector is buried. Nor is the death of Achilles part of the Iliad.
It is very weird yes, and the Odyssey is only slightly better, the focus of the action and how much time is spent on different events is very weird and inconsistent according to modern tastes: Odyssesus nearly returns to Ithaca very early on in the story to the point where the people in his entourage can see it on the horizon, but then some asshole opens a bag full of stormy and dangerous winds that they have been explicitly told to never open (just put the bag tightly sealed in a chest and send it to the bottom of the ocean) and then they get blown back basically to their starting point. That bit reminded me of the Father Ted scene where Dogual presses this big red button on the airplane with a massive "Do Not Press" written right above it.
Yes, pains me to say this but in 2 years time a qualified plumber may well be worth more to countries for immigration purposes than a senior staff level engineer at Google.
Honestly meat processing needs to be paid much much more than it is at the moment. It's a very "dirty" job that still requires a decent amount of knowledge and skill (do you know your beef cuts? I don't know my beef cuts...) and the people doing it and suffering aren't any less human than middle manager Becky in HR with her mediorce degree and unmemorable experience managing a team of 4 people.
If this means Becky from HR gets to eat steak at a restaurant less often then so be it.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
9hr ago
Even if you do have strong ties to your grandparents, if you're an only child of only children there's no way you're going to end up taking care of 4 different grand parents well all of your own dime once your parents retire. If your spouse is the same that's 8 people being sustained off of the two of you, and this is before we get to any children.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
1d ago
The first step in its hack was breaking out of its sandbox to take control of its computer. The second was hacking the OpenAI internal network until it found the internet. The third was hacking HuggingFace.
Man this is literally textbook "Origins of Paperclip Maximiser", in any sane world this leads to a sector wide emergncy and enforced stops until we Figure Out What The Fuck Is Going On.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
Ah, that was an extremely embarassing thing and a one off black mark to be forgotten. Pakistan are known for being mercurial, one day they make easy pickings of the world champions and then a week later look like they're all on some drug and lose to a much worse team.
Personally I prefer League (to watch, wouldn't want to personally play either) but yes I'd agree Rugby Union is still a very good sport to watch.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
Can't believe it but at the moment I'll take "Full AI Communism" over whatever slop western tech companies want us to accept.
Also, a fair value (minus the hype) for SPCX is something like $20 per share, it's still massively overvalued.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
Even Rugby Union is the superior sport to gridiron football (all variants).
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
This is just cope. Polo is a more expensive sport to play by any standard and is also more involved and I'd wager, a superior gentleman's sport compared to the hooligan sport that gridiron football is. And yet the US is nowhere to be seen in the polo rankings and would get bodied by multiple developing countries were a match between national teams to be held.
Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.
Baseball is undoubtedly an inferior sport to cricket, and the US national cricket team I guess would likely lose to Zimbabwe. Perhaps even Hong Kong.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
5d ago
I object to this characterisation of myself.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
5d ago
As someone who has just finished Inifnite Jest (and so have earned the right to be insufferable for the next few weeks) all I will say is that AI definitely helped me understand what was really going on throughout different sections of the book and all the links between things and throwaway comments that were made hundreds of pages earlier. I think I'd have needed at least 3 readings of the book to get as much out of it as I did with one reading plus 5.6 Sol sitting next to me to bounce my questions and observations off of. Definitely added to the reading experience.
If the market is genuinely preferring AI written or assisted literary/artistic works over the human made counterparts then it's the Authors/Artists who need to adapt and change. Yes there will always be a niche for pure Human stuff, just like how there's a niche for DFW type stuff (most people would not consider 1100 pages of walls of text that don't really go anywhere including 100 pages of endnotes, some of which have their own endnotes to count as "good writing"); but it will be a niche, and the anti AI people need to make peace with that, just like how the "don't use AI for coding" people have had to make peace with the fact that pretty much all code now ends up written with AI.
And yes, AI will not be writing anything on the level of art as Infinite Jest for a long while, human writers/artists should stop serving low grade human produced slop and switch towards attempting grander works or fail in the process. If you're not mediocre, you're safe from AI for a while yet.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
7d ago
Now Balaji is asking to meet with the PM of Malaysia as essentially equals
Man I can't believe how stupid these tech bro "leaders" are. Pretty much all the charter city efforts etc. have all failed because the idiotic leaders of the efforts think that because they bring in the money that makes them an equal to the actual sovreign state whose land they are on and demand they should be treated with the same level of respect and deference in the country as senior figures in its government.
Naturally this pisses off not only the senior government figures but also the ordinary population who are naturally already suspicious of the project because it's usually targetted at higher income levels than the median in the country and so you've given the leaders, who are pissed off at you for insubordination an easy way to both get rid of you as well as get some popularity points with the comman man by kiboshing your project. And so yet another effort to do something which in all respects should be massive net positive utility for humanity gets shut down because tech bro leaders who've been fellated one too many times by the US government at home can't shut up.
The more and more time goes by and I think about it, the more and more convinced I am that China did the right thing with Jack Ma those few years ago vis a vis putting people in their rightful place.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
8d ago
VARgentina have done enough to fill a mid sized book for why they and their team should be disliked and shunned by all right thinking people.
A good starting point is to take a look at Maradonna's cheating "hand of God" goal where he deliberately lied to the referee about what had happened; this is just not cricket.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
8d ago
Apropos of England vs Argentina, I absolutely called it: https://www.themotte.org/post/3822/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/458055?context=8#context
Wouldn't be England if they didn't first give us hope only to lose in the worst possible way and to the worst possible team to lose to.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
14d ago
Thank you for reminding me to read more C. S. Lewis.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
16d ago
The old reputation is sticky. If your product isn't something people buy with great regularity, it may take decades or even centuries for that reputation to fall to its proper place
Applies to countries as much as it does to products. Europe has been declining since at least the end of WWII and definitely since Suez but its reputation still allows it to go around collecting rents because people (rightly or wrongly) want to suck off on the residual prestige (I'm personally guilty of this as well).
Oh, I genuinely dislike Belgians. My least favourite Europeans by far. Again, no issue with the land or its art (many great artists have come from the land now known as Belgium), but rather once again, it's the people and their ancestors. And actually, this time I have an issue with the country itself (in a way that I absolutely don't with the UK or France or the US) and how it's built from wealth extracted through opression of other peoples in far flung corners of the world to an extreme degree even the other colonial powers were horrified at (say what you want about the Brits, at least their colonialism was probably the most "enlightened" version of it out there).
The Jutes didn't get their own soveriegn country. Neither did the Frisisans. It's a sad accident of history that Belgium even exists as a country today and didn't get absorbed as a part of France.
“Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host,
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in hell”
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
18d ago
1/3rd of the way through Infinite Jest. Finally reaching the stage where it starts to be enjoyable rather than a slog.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
18d ago
Fair point, I agree the same (approximately) contribution to PPP GDP, however even globohomo coffee flavoured swill in England adds more to nominal GDP than the same liquid does in Istanbul. Then there's also the whole PPP vs Nominal debate to be had, there are genuine advantages (such as vacationing overseas) that come from being ahead (or more ahead) in nominal vs PPP terms, and of course the capital investment point still stands in how quickly people are able to produce the same level of PPP output.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
18d ago
Yes, many Americans have no idea how much people dislike the Belgians (and not just for the actions of Leopold II). Previously I was rooting for USA win here. After this, well, I'm still rooting for a USA win here, but it's now a little bitter.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
19d ago
No, the sorry state of the UK is caused by repeated and incessant pandering to the lower classes and the unproductive of all stripes and colours and ages.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
19d ago
I am, in England. NHS care is basically unavailable except for emergencies (and even then, expect 6+ hour waits) unless you want your problem looked at in 2028.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
19d ago
I love visiting Britain, but you would have to pay me to make me live in London.
Oh boy yes absolutely. I'm British and if it were not for my highly paid job that requires me to be in London I'd be off to some mid size place like Letchworth Garden City (or, shock horror, Milton Keynes) which is basically like American suburbs but done right (never been a fan of the anti-suburb crowd, the US messes up in certain respects with how they do them but the basic idea is very sound).
Fair enough. Yes there are many good things to like about the US like its (imperfect, but still, extant) meritocracy. Now if only the people of the country would stop trying to prevent others from moving there to achieve the exact same goals and wishes the current population also wants. Regardless, the country still remains genuinely welcoming to others in a way (continental) Europeans are not and have never been.
In anticipation of the 4th of July 250th anniversary I was going to change my flair here to "Benedict Arnold did nothing wrong!", but then I took another look at the current state of the UK and what the US, despite it's flaws, is still like and thought better of it...
If only everyone had their own Mysterious Magnate gifting them a chocolate factory maybe western countries wouldn't be in this mess...
More options
Context Copy link