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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1862 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How is it that America can be so evenly divided between just two political parties organically and this division persists over decades and decades?

I’ve asked this question a ton of different places to different people at different times and usually no one understands what I’m asking and no one’s ever given me a satisfactory answer so let me over explain what I am trying to ask:

I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.) The Pareto principle is always extremely visible in sales results. My top selling item will always outsell the next best selling item, usually by a factor of 2:1 or greater. This also persists over time. Occasionally I come up with a new item that overtakes the previous leader but if it is an evergreen item it will eventually sell so much that it also reaches the 2:1 ratio or better. Basically the most popular item will always win out over time.

I can imagine a business like a coffee shop, where they have like 10 different drinks. The coffee is the most popular item and then matcha and chai are the second and third most popular. The coffee shop could manipulate demand for the chai and matcha seasonally to nudge one more popular than the other. I can imagine being able to change the popularity of secondary tier items that way, but that’s a product of seller manipulation rather than organic customer demand.

Anyway the way party politics work seems like it would be even more difficult to nudge people from one party to the other. And parties are not just two different flavor drinks, they represent actual underlying philosophical choices and plans/theories of actions. How is it that the Pareto principle doesn’t take over and suddenly the majority of Americans agree that one of the parties is correct and now like 70 percent of Americans in all areas only vote for that party and the 30 percent that’s left only vote for the other one and the 70 percent are just left to rule forever? Aren’t there other democracies where things operate in this manner?

I am not insinuating manipulation or conspiracy but my mental model can imagine the even split over decades of a two party system upheld through manipulation but I can’t conceive of it as an organic process. If anyone can explain I’d love to hear it

@marinuso provides the classic election theory answer, which is supported by both game theory and observational evidence (most FPTP systems become two-party systems in real world).

Why Pareto principle does not apply? I can't explain it properly, but here is something interesting. Pareto distribution over things is not a physical or social "law", Pareto distribution is observed when frequency of things is produced by a phenomenon which is described by a power law. Many mathematical processes can be constructed that generate power laws, and lots of ink spilled to argue some of those processes describe one social behavior or other. See Newman 2006 Section 4 for a review. It's a long list, and the length of the list is the reason I think it's tricky to explain. When things are exponentially, normally, or log-normally distributed, it is easy to say why it is so (things occur at constant rate; things occur as sum of random variates; or things occur as multiplication of random variates, respectively.) Which is why I am a fan of the explanation given on page 23: most things that appear Pareto are not really Pareto, just log-normal distributed in a way that looks like a Pareto distribution.

It's not that difficult to think a hypothesis why popularity of consumer products in a coffeeshop would be log-normal. Suppose potential customer-events for each product depends on word of mouth. Word of mouth is a multiplicative process. First guy to introduce coffee to European peoples introduced it to U(0, Dunbar Number) of people. Each of whom can introduce it to U(0, Dunbar Number) of people. Continue this for generations. Due to some reasons that are essentially random, it turned out to be possible to cultivate Arabica in colonial plantations --> random multiplicative high rolls. Due to reasons that can be thought as random for the purpose of this hypothesis, Japan was closed off until commander Perry arrived (another random event), each of which had multiplicative effect close to 0, hindering the global popularity of matcha. Naturally this is just a just-so story, but it is reasonable to assume lots of social phenomena is multiplicative. And multiplication of random variates yields log-normal distributions.

In elections, the election system induces a need for strategic behavior which is more important than random individual voter preferences. However, in case it helps, I think it likely that popularity of individual politicians is roughly Pareto-like. Competition between the parties encourages them to put forward politicians so that they stay competitive in elections.

I would say it's because politics is by definition polarizing. If 70% of people agreed on something it isn't really a matter for the political sphere. Politics is for deciding on issues that may only barely have majority backing.

Part of it is just the election system. The first-past-the-post election system leads to a two-party system, because having more than two candidates favors the most dissimilar candidate. Consider e.g. the 1992 American presidential election. Bill Clinton got 43% of the vote, Bush got 38% and Ross Perot got 19%. The majority of the population voted for a right-winger, but a left-winger was elected, because the right-wing vote was split between two candidates. To prevent that, people with somewhat similar political stances all have to get together to back one candidate, if they want someone they can live with. Thus you end up with only two parties.

If the population were to shift, the parties would just shift along. For example, if the American populace became much more left-wing as a whole, at first the Democrats would win. But the radicals in the Democratic Party would be empowered, pulling the party further left; meanwhile the relatively more conservative people in the Democrats would get pushed out and join the Republicans, pulling that party to the left as well. Soon enough a new equilibrium would be reached. Even if an entire party does collapse, a new one will take its place.

In European parliamentary systems you get a different dynamic, because the parties are assigned seats proportionally to their national votes, and they have to form a working majority only afterwards once the election is over. So you can vote for a small radical party if you feel like it without wasting your vote. They'll get a few seats anyway, and depending on how the rest of the election went, they may pull the resulting coalition into the direction you want. The result of that is that you get a lot of different parties instead of just two.

So you can vote for a small radical party if you feel like it without wasting your vote.

Unless you're in Germany, where the 5% minimum vote share means that voting for fringe parties is indeed about as good as throwing your election letter (yes we get our election-specific voter ID per mail) into the trash unopened.

Thanks to this, fringe parties never make it off the ground here. They either cannibalize the structures, personnel and voters of older parties (this is what the far left and far right usually do), or they're a brief blip on the public radar that nobody takes seriously because you either vote big or you don't vote at all. Hence the mainstream establishment dominates, forever. The only upset to this was maybe the emergence of the Greens, but that was before my time.

Because neither party actually solves national problems, and so each cycle one party comes into power promising to fix problems, doesn't fix them, and the public turns against the party in power. ((This is both people changing their vote and members of either party being more energized to turn out or demoralized and staying home))

Every winning presidential candidate this century has run promising a more restrained foreign policy and every one of them has started wars or foreign entanglement abroad. With the exception of Dubya's reelection in 2004 during the Iraq war, which sort of goes to the point.

2008 Obama runs on getting us out of Iraq, and wrapping up Afghanistan by the end of his term we're still in both and add Libya and Syria, Trump runs on no more forever wars but doesn't pull back anywhere, Biden finally gets us out of Afghanistan but drags us into entanglements in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump II we are back in a fresh middle eastern war.

High cost of healthcare, big corporate malfeasance, immigration etc. Every president comes in promising to fix the issue and doesn't fix it.

We might see a dominant party if one party could deliver actual results.

The biggest frustration I had with Biden was his inability to put out a policy that didn't have just enough lefty bullshit in it to be controversial. The infrastructure bill was a prime example, with the initial draft taking such and expansive view of infrastructure that it was easy for Republicans to oppose. If it were limited to normal things they'd just end up bitching about passenger rail subsidies or something like that and it wouldn't have had as much bite. The argument at the time was that the Republicans are going to find something wrong with it anyway so let's give them some obvious bait so we can keep the stuff we want, but I hate that way of negotiating. I'd rather they submit an uncontroversial bill and dare the opposition to vote against it.

High cost of healthcare, big corporate malfeasance, immigration etc. Every president comes in promising to fix the issue and doesn't fix it.

These problems won’t be fixed because fixing them would require stepping on the toes of powerful industries or interest groups who have skilled lobbyists. The current situation pleases enough of the middle class+ that even appeals to the power of the voters won’t work to create change. And any movement on them will be easily weaponized into a deadly political attack: “government death panels,” “big government interference,” “socialism,” “ICE hates brown people.”

Trump actually ran appealing to his personal wealth as a form of independence from lobbyists and party machines, but governed in his first term as a fairly standard Republican allied with industries like steel and coal.

We’re in the situation because it’s a stable equilibrium since the 80s. Some kind of massive shock would be required to change anything, something bigger than dot-com, bigger than the recession, bigger than Obama, bigger than Trump. In other words, if things changed to the point that major political reform were possible, we’d have bigger problems than healthcare costs.

These problems won’t be fixed because fixing them would require stepping on the toes of powerful industries or interest groups who have skilled lobbyists. The current situation pleases enough of the middle class+ that even appeals to the power of the voters won’t work to create change...

We’re in the situation because it’s a stable equilibrium since the 80s.

Yes one explanation is that we have an 80% party and it's the corporate uniparty.

Alternatively, there's the corporate/deep state capture explanation, that as soon as a president seeking to change foreign policy gets into office, he's subject to deep state efforts to undermine him. Obama spoke of clashing with "the generals" when he tried to change course in the Middle East, while generals directly lied to Trump when he tried to pull out of Syria.

If you're cynical enough, the purpose of organized politics is pork barrel spending. Thus, the optimal amounts of votes to get is 50% plus the tiniest epsilon - it allows you to control the flow of money, with the smallest possible clientele to spend it on. Anything more, and you're spreading the profits thinner.

Part of the answer is that the division over the last decade is a little more even than it often was historically. Looking at the margin of victory in presidential elections, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-election-mandates, the most recent popular vote margins are all less than five in absolute value. But scroll up and you'll see many in the 15-25 range (a 20% margin is like 60-40). I think it's correct to notice that the gas station thing isn't quite enough to explain a consistent <5% margins

I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.)

In my ongoing attempt to turn the Motte into the Wall Street Journal for TurboAutists, I implore you to write an effort post on;

a) what you do and your perspective on your industry b) AI's effect on it, if any.

Standard bartering package; if you do an effortpost, I'll match it with either something I know about personally or b) a 3 hour research block plus post on something you choose

Ok, I'll write that essay.

Can I ask you why you're asking, btw? So that I can somewhat tailor my response to be relevant to anything specific you want to know. And where should I post the effort post? Here, the culture war thread, somewhere else?

Can you give me some topics you'd say you're knowledgable enough about that I might want to ask you about for your exchange? These could be as broad or specific as needed, just as an idea.

Great!

I'm asking because I am somewhat of a business nerd. I've asked a few other commenters about their line of employ when they've shown they have some real insight into it. Lawyers, for one, endlessly fascinate me (not in the legaleese or arguments, but in the day in the life of the job. There's a AAQC somewhere in the archives about the reality of being a DUI lawyer that was phenomenal).

I look at people who understand their businesses well as very applied, high value systems thinkers. An "academic" style systems thinker might be able to talk a good game, but an actual practitioner has insights that are completely missed by those academic approaches. The classic Back To School business seminar scene is this, canonically.

Mostly, I'd say I am interested in how e-commerce actually works outside of scammy YouTube influencer takes on it. Your comment about the pareto law of your products hints at this. I'd love to understand how you go about designing a new product, testing for demand etc. Perhaps also what the elements of success in ecomm are and what "pros" do versus what "chumps" do. I think this is enough of a framework to get started?

Trade topics:

I can tell you a lot about:

  • Ivy League (and other selective school) admissions
  • Real deal data science in both FAANG settings and research lab settings
  • Strippers, bars, hookers, nightlife industry in general
  • "HickHop" or the blended sludge of traditional Redneck culture smashing into Hip Hop / urban / black culture.

And again, if there's simply a topic you've had on your mind that isn't in my list, I'll put in some real effort to research and write it up - zero AI, all human.

The Civil war.

No, seriously, the Civil War. Historically, the last time we had what amounted to a multi-party election was the one involving Lincoln - there were four presidential canidates on the ballet, each a different party, each of whom received a sizable chunk of the electorate vote.

That entire instance kind of soured the notion of anything above and beyond two-party voting.

I appreciate your engagement but I don't see how this answers my question and is also the sort of response I usually get when I ask it. I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer. Why at some point one party doesn't just happen to take an objectively superior or more functional viewpoint, and becomes the dominant political theory that benefits everyone better, and proceeds to rule forever.

There have been times where one party or the other sweeps the election, but the response is for the opposite party to adjust it's positions. Each party has the incentive to adapt their positions to the electorate, and because they are both doing this at the same time naturally it falls to around a 50/50 split. It's actually more like a 33% split because there's also a third of people who feel cut out of the process, are too apathetic or too adverse to both parties, and don't vote.

Given that we have more real-time feedback with internet sentiment and good polls, the parties adjust much faster now and it is unlikely there will be a sweep again.

That said, the real mystery is why the two parties are so different from each other. Or are they?

This happened before- both major parties have done this, the other one just adapted.

I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer.

What makes you think that there aren't (fewer)?

Why are gas stations so often located next to each other?

Oh wow, this explanation does make a lot of sense but has some pretty grim implications for politics if true. The hot dog stand metaphor works when they're selling identical or fungible items, with identical signage/operation and so on. But if there is any difference, people will begin to prefer the slightly better one or the one that fits their needs slightly better. But the major thing that always got me the most confused about the resiliency of the two party situation is that political ideas and policies are not completely identical, or even really fungible, so at some point the underlying ideas and policies of the better team should win out. But since we've seen decades of this not the case it leads me to consider that, like @cjet79 implies below, there are fewer differences between the political parties than we're led to believe.

Lot of research has been done on this. There is a whole study in economics called "Public Choice" which studies these sorts of things. You are correct to notice that this is strange and doesn't make sense compared to other markets and products.

The main explanation is "first past the fence voting". Any system with a majority wins and takes all is one where only two parties tend to persist. One to win and one to chase the other. The chasing party will occasionally catch up and overtake the winning party. In European parliamentary democracies they often have representative voting, so as a party you only need to get a small portion of the vote to be part of the government.

What is also relevant is something called the "median voter theory". Since the US has first past the fence voting, the winning candidate will always appeal to the median voter. This tends to moderate candidates. As someone who is not a republican or democrat (im a libertarian), my perception of the two main parties is that they are mostly the same and tend to govern mostly the same. More wars, more government spending, more government intervention, rollbacks on government spending are minimal and ineffective. They tend to perenially disagree on issues that split the american people down the middle, but politicians on either side have little benefit to resolving those disputes.

So how did LLMs impressed you this week? My case - I had lost original 3mf, but had OrcaSlicer temp folder, which ironically orca can't open. I ask codex-cli to try and reconstruct a proper 3mf. For my astonishment is did on the second try.

Finally got around to test progress on image generation again.

My go-to test is creating an entire fake Instagram influencer from scratch. That nicely tests consistency between images, spacial understanding of the scene, prompt following on minute details, ect. It keeps me up to date on what the problems are when you fake photos of people (or fake entire people in general). I mostly create women, because that's more fun to me and also because this tests model censorship more effectively - the commercial models are a lot more touchy when creating women than when they create men.

The main result of my most recent session is particularly funny: Nano Banana 2 is another significant step forward on photo-realism, but it is exceedingly difficult to get it to produce images of conventionally beautiful people from scratch. Getting just a portrait of a woman that is above a 7 requires a lot of coaxing. If the major focus of the prompt is on some other detail, it will generate the most mid women you've ever seen. Nano Banana 1 was perfectly happy to just spit out 10s. You start the prompt with "photo-realistic full body shot of an attractive female college student..." and you could focus on scene, clothes, body position, camera equipment, ect., and it only needed minor coaxing for some body types and poses (as long as you kept it SFW). But Nano Banana 2 will often simply ignores instructions that coax other models towards conventional beauty. I wonder why. Peak body positivity seems long past. Did earlier models train predominantly on pictures of influencers on social media (because they post so much), and now photos of the rest of humanity have a more proportional ratio in the training data? Or are they trying to stop me, in particular, from creating and monetizing an Instagram e-thot? (I'm not, of course, I've lost interest in image generation, again, very quickly).

Other than that: prompt following is truly impressive now. You can pick scene, clothes, and body positions (either by describing them or supplying reference photos), and it will usually one-shot them down to the correct head tilt angle. Consistency (same person in different images) requires a bit of care, or ideally tons of reference images. We're not completely out of the uncanny valley for faces created completely from scratch, but this is where I notice the most progress (Nano Banana 1 makes beautiful people, but they look like influencers with the filters maxed out in the best case, and like very good paintings in the median case). Around 1% of images still have extra limbs or other easy tells.

Oh, and making images that help explain a technical concept is still hilariously bad. A straight rip-off of an existing image with a liberal dose of detail errors is the best you can expect. Ah, factual correctness in every detail... the old nemesis of AI still lives on.

I recently had sonnet make it through an entire session without mixing up VBIL and VBILX. I'm going to call the improvement.

A lot of the newest hotness has been a little too automated for my tastes, and haven't had much free time, so mostly screwing around with older configs.

Successes :

  • Writing's still surprising me. The prose quality is still lackluster, and there's been very few times where I haven't wanted to revise whole sections, but I've gotten into the mid-5k word and low-10k word ranges with a coherent plot, characterization, and escalating tension.
  • Some of that's smut, with its lower bar (hurr hurr), but some of it isn't.
  • And, perhaps more useful, includes criticism of things I've written conventionally. Sometimes pretty biting criticism!
  • Simple webdev stuff has kinda worked. I'm not a webdev guy, and a lot of my requirements are stupid (oh boy aspnet, I sure do love aspnet!) and use cases simple, but it hasn't really mattered whether Grok, Claude, or Qwen for simple one-off-stuff that's just meant for a short-term use.
  • FRC students have been using it on and off. I try to emphasize the limitations and make sure they understand what the code is doing, and sometimes it's just not capable of handling their goals, but it's been useful as a reference tool in environments where a lot of the info is outdated or outright wrong. Which is weird, given the general code quality of FIRST-specific tools...
  • Been vibe-coding (vide-building?) a homelab rebuild. My current home server setup is very traditional (installing things without wrapping them in four layers of containerization, like an animal), and I'm probably gonna stick with that, but it's been helpful to see how the other half lives, and a lot less frustrating than trying to get the right docker flags and commands from the normal documentation.

Failures :

  • Very long form writing is struggling. Took a shot at phailyoor's trial, but while there's definitely some battles won against the old exponential explosions from context window scaling, most of the 100B+ param models go from 4 t/s at the start to <1 t/s by 5k words in. Which wouldn't necessarily be a critical problem, since I can just run it overnight, except the models also sometimes go wonky -- either looping around the same few paragraphs repeatedly, or adding tangents -- that make the most naive attempts at setting up a 'run-and-forget' run unpalatable.
  • Spacial manipulation is Not Doing Great Bob. I had a problem that was effectively two axis of living-edge hinge, and to be fair that's a weird and uncommon problem, but it's ultimately either calculus or solvable by exhaustion (or Fusion360, which is nearly the same thing), but even the closed models just panicked over it and tried to send me to completely unrelated tools.
  • Similarly, TRELLIS2 and Hunyuan3D are simultaneously impressive and absolutely useless. Sometimes they fail to produce a useful image, and that's mostly understandable (as funny as it is for extrapolated magnets to end up monopoles or video game characters to turn Janus-faced literally), but they can often give nice-looking models... that are absolutely unusable, with complete disconnections, unnecessary duplicated 'layers' of meshes sharing the same texture, random islands of tiny features, so on.
  • Ironically, either my expectations for smut and fiction are higher than for professional writing, or the LLMs are worse at it, specifically. I've beaten the purple prose, em-dashs, not-x-but-y, and weird misplaced detailed from some form-letter grade business writing stuff out of even pretty dumb LLMs. But sometimes you can get an LLM to make surprisingly detailed conclusions that are pretty far outliers (discount code: knot) and then other times it misses really obvious stuff (including an actual 'how make babies'-level problem, and that was in an M/F attempt!).
  • Weirdly bad at picking out names. Whether for characters, for programs, even individual variables. Not necessarily unimaginative, but repetitive (why does GLM love the name Kael?). Dunno what the hell's going on there.
  • Trying to get something like VideoContext-Engine running. Still screwing it up. Not an LLM problem, just haven't had the time to figure out Yet Another Stupid Cuda Fuckery.

Try build123 for cad cam

Not sure if this counts, but I can't get over the fact that Hollywood wordcells, notorious for their poor understanding of science and technology, somehow ended up being right about how computers (will) work:

  • "Zoom! Enhance!"
  • "Computer, in the Holmesian style, create a mystery to confound Data with an opponent who has the ability to defeat him."

I've noticed this too. I've also noticed that the Enterprise's computer says "Acknowledged" instead of "Wow, that command is absolutely chef's kiss and has real Starfleet energy, I'll get on that right away. While we're here, tell me what thoughts you have on Deck Seven?"

I see you haven't watched any of thr new Treks, then.

They didn't, but mostly because I have been too busy to use them for anything I did not expect them to do by default. Whenever a new and exciting model launches, I stress test it extensively, but for at least a year, the models are good enough for my personal and professional needs. Last time I saw a massive improvement in quality that unlocked entirely new use-cases that blew me away was o3, otherwise I tend to feel slightly impressed.

From memory, GPT-2, 3 and 4, then whatever Claude just came out then, then o1 (from seeing others use it), then R1/o3. Native image gen with a variant of 4o. Those standout. Everything else falls under slightly better in ways that don't stick out.

But I am happy enough with them being good for research or editing my writing, or generating images. If they get significantly better in a manner that is glaringly obvious in normal use, I'm close to worrying (much harder) about losing my job.

Agent was successfully able to submit a public record request via an online portal, given sufficient detail and just a little nudging.

The power this potentially unlocks is quite sizeable, actually.

Using github copilot, GPT 5.4 seems pretty solid. Far more capable than 5.2, and more robust than 5.3. The only downside is that it seems a tad slower, but that I accept given how much more it ends up doing.

I've been using it privately as well as at work, and right now my main complaint is that it tends to be a little too eager to write more code, when a little less logic would keep the overall codebase a lot more maintainable. But maybe I'll yet be able to evangelize the LLM until it believes in the gospel of clean code.

Do you guys know of any actually insightful analysts of how the Iran war might play out? Any '(super)forecasters' with insights into how the Strait situation will affect e.g. oil prices over time, and what the pain points and pain tresholds of the Iranian regime might be?

It seems to me that it will be very hard for the US to keep the traffic flowing through the Strait when a hostile Iran, who might feel they're in an existential struggle, will do everything to keep the Strait too dangerous to use. The US might need an off-ramp rather than more escalations. TACO is a thing - if the markets and the US population sours overly much on the venture, Trump might pull out and declare victory anyway.

But I want serious takes from serious people who know a lot more than I do.

Credible Defense on reddit has a lot of knowledgeable posters and high discourse standards, you'll high quality answers to questions like this and links to more formal presentations of the same.

Thanks!

I'll second /r/CredibleDefense, but also note that you get a very pro-US establishment bias from there. You're not going to find anyone who sympathizes with the Russians/Chinese/Venezuelans/Iranians.

I'll second /r/CredibleDefense, but also note that you get a very pro-US establishment bias from there. You're not going to find anyone who sympathizes with the Russians/Chinese/Venezuelans/Iranians.

Sympathize in what way? In national/ideological way "their cause is just" or in professional wargamer nerd way "their defense is credible"?

If the latter, Russian defense is not very credible excepting nuclear deterrence and the less to say about Venezuela/Iran/Cuba, the better. China might have a credible case.

I mean it in both ways.

You will find plenty of people who have operated US/allied military equipment and so you will have much more credible discussions about that equipment because the posters are have 1st hand knowledge. There are not posters with first hand knowledge of operating Russian drones, or first hand knowledge of Iranian procurement procedures, or first hand knowledge of how Chinese politicians order around the military establishment, or first hand knowledge of what it takes to get promoted in the IRGC. And so there's lots of unfounded speculation about these topics and any post about these topics needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

You will also find people celebrating when the Russian infantry gets thrown into the meat grinder and lamenting when the Ukrainian infantry gets thrown into the meat grinder.

Both of these biases is likely to lead to over-estimating US-aligned forces' capabilities.

Do you guys have any takes on this Professor Jiang guy making the rounds recently?

I guess it's interesting to see which conspiracy theories are tacitly backed by the CCP. Apparently the duct tape holding American society together is OnlyFans.

I guess it’s interesting to see which conspiracy theories are tacitly backed by the CCP.

...Again, what is the proof that Jiang is backed by the CCP? By that standard, everything in China is backed by the CCP. If the standard is simply that he works in China, is Chinese, and isn’t in prison, then sure, but even the “is Chinese” part is questionable since he holds Canadian citizenship. This guy is employed at a fucking Chinese high school, and that means he is backed by the CCP? He’s Canadian and was educated at Yale, ffs. Chinese nationalists might as well claim he’s a non-citizen who should be deported on the basis of his Yale diploma alone.

China, like America, is a land of wackos. Go on the Chinese internet and you’ll find Chinese Zionists, Chinese Dai-Nippon Teikoku lovers, Chinese Scientologists, Chinese communist femboys, Chinese flat earthers, and everything under heaven. Remember the Chinese brother of Jesus? We’ve had plenty of them throughout history, and things are not really that different now from 100 years ago, except that the wackos have even more exposure. Some of those wackos are employed by Peking or Tsinghua, which is far more meaningfully “CCP-backed” by any standard than Jiang.

The CCP also doesn’t really care about wacko history channels on Youtube. They care more about “muh protecting private business” than about protecting wackos who happen to be “aligned” with their ideology. They just took down a social media account with millions of followers for spreading the "fake news" that caffeine in boba tea is so damn high it's addictive (which harmed the business of a major Chinese tea chain), even though that same account had a track record of publishing negative coverage of Chinese real estate bubbles, Chinese local government debt, and how the Nationalist Party played a stronger role than the communists in the Sino-Japanese War.

Americans are practically blind to Chinese internal discourse, and the same cannot be said for the Chinese.

It’s all so tiresome.

I'll caveat that relatively small no-name accounts get smacked for often more-arbitrary causes than hitting a big business; the tea leaves for this point pretty heavily to the powers that be getting their collective panties in a twist over some queerbating.

That doesn't mean the CCP necessarily cares about Jiang, but it doesn't mean they're ignoring him.

I've heard of her and had the vague impression that she was more ambivalent toward the CCP, or mildly pro-CCP even, or at least not the usual kind of diasporoid hater. What’s the story there if you care to explain? Who is she, and why is she censored?

That said, my point is that Chinese censors seem to care far more about slutty outfits, trans, and gayness than about actual politics (with the obvious disclaimer that yes of course you get censored if you say really naughty things). You can see that in the crackdown on homoerotic novels, despite how popular they seem to be in the SEA market, which you might think pragmatic politicians interested in maximizing national power would be happy to let flourish.

Meanwhile complete nobodies or moderately well-known online accounts post things you would expect the censors to crack down on but turned out just fine. At the same time, accounts are also regularly banned for promoting “伪史论”, i.e. the claim that all western history from Mesopotamia to the Renaissance is fake. Plus the overt Han nationalists, plus the America haters who use too many curse words etc. If you're on the internet enough you certainly develop an intuition for the overall contour of Chinese censorship, but the frequency of both false positives and negatives suggest either that they are rather clumsy at it (which is definitely true), and/or they simply do not care enough to e.g. run sentiment analysis on everytihng (which I think is also true).

That the censor is incredibly vague and occasionally seem to act against "their" interest is incredibly frustrating. That might be the whole point, so called 罚不可知则威不可测. It also degrades the Chinese internet discourse dramatically. Shameful and wasteful, in that the discourse is discouraged at all levels of society which is detrimental, although I do not believe in free speech absolutism. That being said I think the usual American talkpoints re Chinese censors are still incredibly ignorant. I can hold both viewpoints at the same time without any internal contradictions.

Who is she, and why is she censored?

There's a lot of weirdness around her if you read her thread on Kiwi farms. It's pretty clear she was to some degree a booth babe and front for her white boyfriend Timaz. It's pretty clear he wrote a lot of her tweets and is responsible for a lot of her persona. She hides him because it makes her look like what she is eye candy with a white tech savvy male pulling her strings.

She also used westerners ignorance about China to hide some of her weirdness like saying she needed him as a beard when no one in Shenzhen would care if you were a lesbian as long as you didn't blast it on social media. Or saying she was censored for having a Uighur girlfriend when nobody would care about that unless you announced it. As well as her being a persona entirely focused on Westerners and having virtually no presence on Chinese social media. Anyway she's shady enough the government could bring the hammer down for any number of reasons. Or she could just be lying I wouldn't rule it out. She hides behind the veil of "Chinese censorship" when it's convenient.

Many such cases, I'm afraid.

What’s the story there if you care to explain? Who is she...

Wu was a popular persona in the physical electronics space from 2016-2022. Some of that's downstream of her... assets, but she also provided a decent amount of hardware, software, and general guidance work, and while a lot of the actual hardware stuff she did was more focused on getting attention than genuine novelty, it at least passed the poc || gtfo test. Her biggest impact was explaining the cultural and social touchstones of a lot of Shenzen's lesser-known or 'obvious' bits, to the point she was doing semi-regular talks on the matter. Since this coincided with a lot of casual and hobbyist electronics people starting to trawl Shenzen, she got a good boost or two from 'bunnie' huang, and that

... and why is she censored?

No idea. As you say, it could just be 'slutty' outfits, the lesbian Ughyr partner, or saying naughty things, although she'd been doing all those long enough that the censors would be pretty late. It could be that the norms changed. It could be that she'd been talking them up as ways to criticize Western governments more than China, and that was being read differently by her censors; it could be that her wording had changed in ways to subtle for me to recognize that they did; it could be any of a thousand other things.

But I think it points to the ideology mattering more than the private business, at least in her case. She does still give the pro-Shenzen writeups, even if that's the only social media she does now.

She's also a bit of an op. with a white boyfriend/husband pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/naomi-wu-sexycyborg-realsexycyborg-timaz.65719/

People proposed this theory back back when Wu came up on the Old Reddit, along with the theory that she was an intentional CCP op. It's plausible, in the sense that it could happen, be hard to prove, and would have some explanatory power, but there's basically no attempts by those KFers to consider what would disprove it. I'm not going to say either has to be false, but I remain skeptical.

Sure it's not proven but I think it incredibly likely. There are a lot of connections and she has photos of him and her in Egypt and in his apartment promotes his printers and has admitted they live together and called him her "beard" which I don't believe because she posts about being a lesbian on twitter. She says a lot of things that are designed to appeal to westerners ideas of China but fall apart if you have knowledge of Chinese society. For example Chinese police do not care if you have a Uyghur girlfriend. They do care about personalities posting about homosexual relationships on Twitter. So her excuse for Timaz being a beard makes no sense. It does make sense if she's a character designed to appeal to thirsty redditors though because having a boyfriend ruins the fantasy. These influencer type girls are always hiding their boyfriends. Have you ever seen a lesbian look like her? She's very much had surgery to appeal to the male gaze. She obviously does have some knowledge of 3d printing and tech but she's a manufactured product and I think there's essentially 0% chance she's actually a lesbian. Whatever she is she's not a CCP plant they'd be horrified by hald the things she says.

It's less that you haven't proven it, and more that it feels like people started with the conclusion and then tried to look for any data supporting it. It's not just that this evidence sometimes has other alternative explanations (hell, some of the alternative explanations are a little sketchy themselves!); it's that there's no real 'okay, what falsify this' or even a 'okay, what would explain the same data with fewer epicycles'.

That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it makes it hard to feel any level of confidence.

Have you ever seen a lesbian look like her?

Uh... yes, actually. There's even one at the FRC environment I support, albeit caucasian and taller. For all the Subaru Flannel stereotypes are founded in reality, there's a lot of people outside of the stereotypes still. I have known (cis!) femmes who glorify the Barbie Doll look, obvious implants and all. I'm way too androphillic to get it myself, but different strokes for different folks.

Maybe things are different in China -- meyerlemon's response here seems like it was viewed from a literal funhouse mirror to Western Perspectives. But I don't have good sources clearly saying that it is different this way, either.

Thanks. That’s interesting.

I guess I should be more careful with my phrasing. I shouldn’t have conveyed that ideology matters less than private business in the eyes of Sauron of the East. The reason we have such pervasive censorship is obviously downstream of their ideology. What I was trying to say is that the actual contours of the Chinese censorship machine are hard to gauge, and you probably can’t capture them with a simple low-dimensional model. Plus the fact that censorship used to be handled manually by low-wage, barely educated workers (it’s a running joke on Chinese internet that they hire people who barely finished 9 year mandatory education to read and censor your posts) makes it unpredictable and inconsistent. So you can’t easily infer state ideology just by looking at what they censor and what they don’t.

I don’t think that is entirely what they intended, and intention seems more relevant here than actual outcomes. If they had (have, since were in year 2026) panopticon-like tools, I’m sure they’d be happy to use them. Maybe then it would be easier to infer the state-promoted ideology by looking at which kinds of wackos they allow to speak.

As a side note, I’m always fascinated by the obvious difference in preferences between Western and Eastern men when it comes to women. Wu is barely attractive to me, and I’d guess general Chinese netizens would rate her 5/10 tops. Not because she’s “fat” as my anorexic countrymen thinks, it’s about facial features. I have a friend I’d rate maybe 3/10, but she ended up with a blue-eyed German boyfriend who, to me, looks like the kind of guy you’d see in Nazi propaganda posters. And obviously in porn featuring EA women, the preference for EA men vs Western men also seems very different. It’s pretty fun to observe, and I’m curious whether anyone has studied it.

I think it’s broadly known that hardline Chinese nationalists and the far right are censored on Chinese social media. They are a potentially large opposition group to the CCP’s vaguely Marxist post racial broadly liberal future vision of Chinese society. Communism itself is, after all, an imported ideology invented by two foreigners whose statues sit in many major Chinese cities and CCP assembly halls, and in the name of which much classical Chinese art, architecture and civilizational infrastructure, from the elite Chinese court cuisine (reportedly the most complex and elaborate in the world) to forms of media was destroyed or severely damaged as decadent, backward and reactionary just a few decades ago by the very party still in power.

I wouldn't describe the CCP as wanting a post racial or liberal future, I don't think even their propaganda says that much less the reality on the ground. The cultural revolution is usually seen as a product of Mao and madness so the current party doesn't have too much of that sheen on it and allows criticism of it (most notably recently the three body problem). The modern party is fairly nationalistic itself and has presided over a revival of Chinese culture so it's hard for a nationalist opposition to get too much steam. If anything I think the biggest point of tension is Mao, rather than Communism being "foreign" but all the Mao iconography is symbolic these days so most people just ignore it but it definitely shows the contradiction of modern China.

I think it’s broadly known that hardline Chinese nationalists and the far right are censored on Chinese social media.

I don’t think that is “broadly known”, certainly not here, which is why I’m posting. Some people pattern-match them to fascists and assume they would not target nationalists, but that apparently is not true. Like you said, the communist party is left wing in nature and is skeptical of nationalists, while still having to draw its power from the Chinese nation whose people are by and large nationalist. So they censor right-wing nationalists, but also anti-nationalists, which creates confusion for observers across the pond. Many such cases, where one method of inference works in the US but not China and vice versa.

I always wanted to know how the party reconciles the gap between the nationalist majority and its communist core. The banner on the left of Tiananmen says “Long live the People’s Republic of China” while the one on the right reads “Long live the unity of the peoples of the world”. That tension has been there forever.

One obvious thing they are doing right now is redefining communism. After all they are the only surviving communist party with that much power, and who is to say their interpretation is wrong. So on Chinese national television you will see explanations of why Mozi was proto-communist, why Laozi was proto-communist, and even why Confucius himself was basically a communist after all. Turns out our Yan and Huang ancestors had been communists all along. I wake up - another psyop about a known Confucian being communists ad infinitum. Good luck with that rehabilitation campaign. I love to see it.

Edit: oh you probably know this but they are censoring communists too. The communist book club (马克思主义学社) in Peking was banned many times and I’m not sure if it exists anymore. And various communist bilibili internet celebrities, avant-garde feminist artists, third worldists who see the party as socialist imperialists, yada yada. Transitional pain I guess.

Yeah I made a post about him a few weeks ago he isn’t too popular on themotte

https://www.themotte.org/post/3413/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/393199?context=8#context

DD_geopolitics strikes again, and it’s roughly as credible as last time.

Twitter delenda est.

He's part of a long line of people with no credentials who say things that sound interesting when taken out of context, but when you dive into the material you realize he's a crackpot.

In defiance of the typical advice to avoid making any decisions for a year, my husband's desktop died while I was getting a backup of the data.

I have gotten the external raids mounted on another system to get them backed up. That leaves me with the internal drives. I don't see a raid card in the machine but I could be wrong. The symptoms of the machine are getting stuck in a boot loop. It dies/restarts at different points so I think it's the power supply. A drive enclosure is significantly cheaper than a replacement 825w power supply. It could be memory, but there's only one module so I can't do the easy test of swapping out memory/sockets to see if the problem goes away.

I don't exactly want to decide to let his system be dead. He was a gamer & also did tons of graphics processing and he babied this thing. But neither my daughter nor I have his use cases and resurrecting this just to shut it down after I get a backup seems pointless. If the internal drives are in a raid my decision is made for me. But if they're not...

This is why they say to not make major decisions for a year. Not just because it's too easy to decide something in the throes of madness, but also because your ability to think just flat out goes out the window.

So. Would you rebuild it? Play one last game of Half Life 2 since he'll never get to play 3 (like there will ever be 3) with his daughter? Or focus on the data and get backups of his photos and digital art and leave the hunk of metal dead like its owner?

Just because nobody else has mentioned it yet, LLMs are very useful for this kind of tech troubleshooting. It can be a bit frustrating dialling it in to the appropriate level and angle of investigation but the shear speed and detail of the replies can make it much more effective than waiting for replies on forums (speaking as a reluctant and unenthusiastic Linux user). Look up the motherboard model and ask it to help troubleshoot why it's getting stuck in a boot loop.

For my part, assuming it's a Windows PC and/or you're a Windows user, Hiren's Boot CD can be a handy tool if you have a spare USB stick. Skim through some YouTube videos if you need to know any more about it, they'll explain it better than I can (or again you could ask an LLM).

Until you mentioned a daughter, I was 95% confident you were gay. Now I'm down to 10% confidence, mostly because of the possibility of adoption.

Oh. Reading along, I just realized he passed away. Sorry. I'm glad you're doing your best to keep his memories alive, and even play into his interests. If my future wife went to such lengths when I was in the grave, I would be very happy about it.

To actually answer your question, I think the data you extracted is worth more than the system itself (at least when it's clearly broken). If your husband was alive, he would probably care more about the fact that you retained the information and the fact you even want to play HL3 with your daughter, rather than the fact that you played it on his old pc. If your daughter wants to keep it, keep it. Otherwise you might feel a little better if you, say, gave away some of the working but unnecessary parts to charity or some eager kid who is friends or family. Thank you for trying, either way.

I've been told (by real life lesbians) I have a dyke aesthetic but that's as gay as I get.

Excess computer gear is definitely getting donated. We have the makings of a Very Nice homelab, especially if someone's interested in playing with VOIP and anything telephony. I'm pretty much all cloud these days and it's going to be hard enough to find someone who's interested in a few full size racks and a mix of equipment that includes 2U servers. I hate to think of this stuff going to scrap, but it may end up that way. (The kid's not interested in hardware & I doubt that'll change. So no need to hang on to it for the inevitable flip back to on-site data centers when everyone realizes VAX, oops, cloud, isn't the end-all.)

Thanks for the input. I'll try for the data on the drives as a first pass.

First thing to do if you haven't already is load the BIOS and reset the configuration. Many enthusiast systems have performance setting options which will attempt to overclock various components, which usually works, but when it doesn't it can cause issues like what you describe. There should be an option to set everything back to normal or safe settings, which might fix the problem all by itself.

Second thing to do is try booting a recovery environment like https://www.system-rescue.org/. If this is successful, you can try to mount the hard disk partitions to copy data to another drive or network share. This won't work if the disk is encrypted, unfortunately. You would be able to test the RAM though - it's one of the boot options on that image. You could also run a few hardware tests, like copying the hard drive blocks to /dev/null to test for read errors.

Another tip that might help you is that if it's a standard ATX power supply, you can try scrounging one from just about any other standard PC. The machine will need no more than around 100 watts just to boot up. The high power requirements only really come into play when working the GPU and CPU hard.

I can't get completely through a boot cycle, which is why I'm leaning towards flakey power supply. It's a dual CPU, wouldn't a low watt psu put stress on that? Sorry, I haven't really played with hardware since I had to put the IRQ jumper on my soundblaster. Swapping out memory is easy, calculating power needs is harder.

I'll dig through the boxes of spare bits and see if there's a power supply in there. Oh! Somewhere in his building o junk there's a fluke. If I find that I should be able to narrow down issues. Thanks for putting me on this line of thinking.

First thing to do if you haven't already is load the BIOS and reset the configuration.

Another reply pointed out, "Motherboards often have raid features built in, but those have also gone out of fashion, because they’re unreliable and often lead to tough data recovery situations at times like this."

But they are the sort of thing that a geek who wanted to squeeze out a little more performance (speaking from experience) might be tempted to turn on, so IMHO the first thing to do is to load the BIOS and record (even if just with a few photos) the configuration, just to make sure there aren't any weird settings like RAID striping that might be necessary to read the drives but might be lost in a reset.

The specs say the motherboard system has a built in raid. But I'm not clear if it was required, and he did use this system for gaming, and he typically used raids for redundancy not speed. OTOH he also did a lot of graphics processing ... yeah, betting going with a drive enclosure isn't going to solve my problem here. Still, worth a first pass.

Sorry for the late reply.

A drive enclosure might actually solve your problem here! To be safe from weird RAID (or logical volume, I guess) issues, the trick is just that you don't want to try to mount any filesystems on the drive directly, you want to make a copy of the raw drive image, and then you can experiment with copies at leisure without risking any overeager software doing anything to screw up the original. I'd personally take the image from a system with a Linux "rescue" distribution, to avoid anything trying to be "user-friendly" by auto-mounting filesystems and auto-"repairing" anything that doesn't mount cleanly, but you could prevent such "repairs" even more surely by using an enclosure with a hardware write-protection switch.

Once you've got backups I wouldn't worry at all about the original hardware. Digital memories are irreplaceable and get more valuable with age; computer hardware depreciates fast.

Are you at all concerned you'll find stuff that will make you think less of him?

My wife isn't technical enough to save my hardware. But I'm wondering if I should set my "personal" files to be at least less obvious or something.

Not at all worried about anything I might find. I was married to him for 30 years. I know everything important about him and there's nothing I would or could find that would diminish my love and respect for him.

FWIW, I appreciate that my husband named his directories rationally so I just have to delete "porn" and won't be accidentally running into it when I'm trying to save family photos from loss.

I personally think it's awesome that you're going through the effort of recovering this, especially given the fact that he created art. I think it'll be worth it - I only asked the question because I don't see the value in digging through his porn stash (if he even has one). Best of luck!

Are you at all concerned you'll find stuff that will make you think less of him?

Forgive me for being blunt, but I think it's important to tell you that I don't think this is any of your business or that this is an appropriate time to ask.

My wife isn't technical enough to save my hardware. But I'm wondering if I should set my "personal" files to be at least less obvious or something.

Given that there's some concern about her finding them I don't believe there's any possible justification for you to save such things locally in the first place. Not trying to beat you over the head with this, especially given the above. It's the conclusion I've arrived at after much soul-searching and I wanted to share. As it stands you're just revealing your preference for which you love more.

... It's not my business (what the fuck?), and that's not what I'm asking. It's a question meant to make OP think about what they want to get from recovering these files. Is there any value to be found in scraping into what might be someone's most private directories? I wouldn't read through my wife's diary unless she expressly gave me permission to after her death.

It's the same concept if he were a nerd who spent a lot of time on his computer. People deserve some privacy, even from their intimate partners, and even in death. And I'll take a hard pass on your judgment about what's appropriate to keep on my personal computer, thanks.

While I wouldn't be quite that harsh and blunt, I do agree. Now's probably not the time to be wondering if he had slightly questionable porn bookmarks or retained pictures of an ex.

First of all, I’m so sorry for your loss.

My opinion is that you should work on getting a backup of his data and not worry so much about repairing the computer. There’s an SOP in IT that you should always focus on data recovery first, and that’s something I try to follow in my personal life. You never know what might be in his disk partition that would be meaningful.

I doubt you’re in a place where the resale value of his computer plays much of a role in your thinking. I don’t know that I would be. I actually don’t know enough about the secondary component market to say whether it would be worth it for that reason to invest in a repair, but of course that depends on what the problem is.

I can’t read a fellow geek’s mind, but I can say that hardware raid with raid cards has gone out of fashion in the consumer enthusiast space. Motherboards often have raid features built in, but those have also gone out of fashion, because they’re unreliable and often lead to tough data recovery situations at times like this.

I’d presume the system uses Windows, in which case my main concern would be not getting bitlockered out of the data on the drive. Microsoft’s hard disk encryption… isn’t great, but it’s persnickety, and often works by only allowing access to the data on the drives from the computer itself, based on hardware encryption keys. If he was using bitlocker, that would definitely make repairing the system as it stands your best option. This scenario would make the SATA-to-USB adapter option unfortunately not viable.

Boot loops could be the power supply (although that’s not really where my mind would go to first) but it could also be a lot of things, of course. Including software issues. Since you’re in that place where you’re dealing with grief and decision making/critical thinking can be impaired, this might be a situation where asking a friend or family member with IT experience, or hiring a reputable PC repair company, would be the right call, even if you have the technical experience to do some troubleshooting yourself. Grief and data loss are two things I wouldn’t want mixed.

I am fortunately not having to worry about money. We'd been planning for his retirement so we were already financially set up to not need his salary, and I have always intended to work until they cart me out of the building kicking and screaming. But everyone should plan for these eventualities. I won't qualify for the social security widows benefit until I'm 60, several years from now. If we'd been a single income household (or if I'd only had a pin money job) and not planned for a potential early death (our daughter's over 20, so if we'd done a 20 year term life insurance policy on him when we had her, it'd be done by now), things could be rough right now. And tough even were I 60, bluntly. If you take it at 60 you're cutting your monthly pay by something like 28% and if you needed to take it at 60 the odds of you having a better benefit to swap to once you're at FRA are pretty low.

Thank you for mentioning the built in raid - that's a feature on his system. I was thinking of a repair company, mostly because we're old enough that most of us who played with hardware haven't in ages beyond bespoke gaming rigs, and we've all been down sizing which means our piles of spares have been whittled away. But since asking anyone else (friends or repair service) to work on the system comes with the non-zero possibility that it gets hosed, I want to do every (non-destructive) thing I can think of first.

Thank you for mentioning the built in raid - that's a feature on his system. I was thinking of a repair company,

DP Xeon (?) is pretty niche for a gaming rig -- it's more of a 'rule of cool' hobby project since about 2015, although I'm still pretty down with it myself. (not for gaming tho)

I think if you can get the BIOS to open (F12, [Del] or some other brand-dependant key on POST) there will be an option showing you whether the board's built-in RAID is enabled -- I don't know your husband, but if he is like me he would not have done this, and slapping the drive in an enclosure will be sufficient. This is all that most 'repair companies' would be up for anyways, and I think USB cages are like $10 on Amazon nowadays? My recommendation is to just do that yourself, unless you see some RAID settings in the BIOS or another system has trouble with the drive -- in which case you might be stuck troubleshooting the hardware a bit. PSU would not be my first guess -- presumably the system was working previously, so I wouldn't think sizing would be an issue?

I have tried to catch it in a boot to get to the bios, so far no luck. I found an external enclosure and the drive didn't mount/wasn't recognized. I'll find another and then check a different drive, too.

I think the system was working previously, but it's a guess. He'd been feeling a bit under the weather before things got bad, so it had possibly been late November since he touched the computer. He asked me to turn it off once he went into the hospital, which was late December, and then it was late January/early February when I first tried to get a backup of it and at that point it didn't boot successfully. The UPS it was on also died sometime during this time period, which is probably also influencing my desire to blame the power supply. Even though all other electronics in the house are fine so I don't think we got hit with a power surge, which even if we did, the UPS should have absorbed it. I'll run through the things I can do, then see if there's a repair company that can do something other than what I've done. And based on the input I've gotten here, I'll consider that good enough.

Polling for the BIOS key should be the very first thing that the system does after POST pretty much, though -- if it's boot-looping at various points in the process, this should be possible.

What's the specific motherboard? As I said, DP systems are quite niche in desktop/gaming use these days but there are niche communities associated that may be able to help -- the boards are server-oriented and can be quirky.

If it truly won't enter the BIOS menu that's a pretty big clue in itself -- standard procedure would be to unplug absolutely everything from the board but one stick of RAM, a keyboard and mouse, enter the BIOS using onboard VGA (if present) and proceed from there.

Thanks for these tips. It turns out it was the power supply. I got a replacement (someone on ebay lost their motherboard & was parting out their old bits, serendipity!), popped it in the case, and am mid-backup now.

I had taken it down a minimalist system and it was still exhibiting the behavior & I was going to swap out memory if the psu didn't fix the issue. I really appreciate the additional trouble shooting steps. They let me do things while I was waiting for the power supply to come, and it helped to think I might make progress. Maybe I'll bury the old power supply in the back yard since his computer apparently got broken heart syndrome.

If you're only trying to get the data off of it, just get a SATA to USB adapter and call it a day, or find a friend who is willing to tie up his PC for a couple days in exchange for a free hard drive. What you're describing could be any number of things and I wouldn't just start throwing parts at it if you're not going to keep the machine. The only caveat here is that you might be able to resell it if it's working, which might not be a bad idea if you consider an 80 dollar power supply a major decision. Also, what's on here that you need? I understand wanting to save his work, but unless you think you're going to look at it from time to time in remembrance, there's a good chance you'll just transfer the data to a new hard drive that will sit in a drawer for the next 50 years.

Edit: I would add that I've had two power supplies fail on me and neither of them did what you described. The machine would start to boot, then shut off. I think. It's been a while, but I don't remember any boot loops. That could still be it, just letting you know my experience.

It was his primary windows system, so it has art and photos on it. We're talking ~15TB if not in a raid. A lot of that would also be dev work, games, and just junk, which I don't need to save, but I want every bit of his photos and art I can save. His first retirement project was going to be making more prints of his favorite digital art & photos, and I expect over time my daughter and I will do just that.

Thanks for the data point. I'm keeping memory in mind, too. If it's the motherboard and the drives are in a raid, I'm SOL for this system. I've gotten backups of all the NAS and external raids, and I've got the SD cards for his cameras. I think without the drives on his computer I'll mostly be losing his newest artwork, which is most likely in an unfinished state. And maybe I'm just making myself feel better.

I would think the data on it is more important than the machine itself. I have a decent gaming rig that I keep up to date. But if it crapped out and I was gone I wouldn't want my wife stressing about getting it working again. I'd possibly want it to go to a friend who might be able to get some use out of it after swapping out the hard drives.

Thank you for the input. As not-a-gamer it's really hard to tell how far babying the gaming rig goes. Y'all spend hours with these things! And care deeply about even peripherals like the perfect mouse and keyboard.

It is a nice keyboard. It's got a nice thunk to it, like the old IBM keyboard. Modern keyboards are garbage.

As a fellow PC owner and husband I would like to echo what cjet79 said. I would not want my wife worrying about maintaining my tools/possessions.

We do care about the quality, but I view them ultimately as tools. And for me a tool that doesn't provide utility is a bad tool.

But that's not the only view on tools, some guys turn them into collectors items, some treat them like status symbols, and some treat them as end goals where they want the best tool for the job but are rarely caught doing the job.

You'd know best how he might have felt about tools. But I'll repeat the sentiment above. Id feel worse if my tools caused stress and uncertainty over any possible course of action my wife might take.

I replied before reading all of the comments, so I'm glad to see others feel a similar way. If I was dead, the fact that my wife kept my data and memories, and tried to play a video game I would like with our child would have meant everything to me.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke. It's more scholarly and less popular than expected. The title apparently means that for all the woke signalling being done, actual wokeness is more about appearances and ambition than anything.

Calvin Westra's Moth Girl. I, uh, didn't think anyone would ever write a good novel told almost entirely through text/internet messages, and I think I was wrong. Also interesting to see the book take themes and tricks from his previous novellas and expand them. The man's a maestro and I expect great things in future.

I just started Jane Austen’s Emma. I’ve been meaning to read more ”proper” books for a while and I recently watched and loved Clueless (1995) which turns out to be a very well regarded modernized adaptation of Emma to a 90s high school setting. Thus getting an annotated ebook seemed a natural choice (for the high, high, price of $4.50). Wish me luck, lol.

Some googling for translations has also revealed an interesting example of elitism in literary circles. People recoil at the very idea that someone would translate older English language Classics to modern late 1900s / 2000s English and tell you to just suck it up with the overly complicated sentence structure and completely changed meaning of words. However translating to a foreign language - which throws the sentence structure to wind and streamlines it significantly - is somehow perfectly fine. Goddamn elitists…

However translating to a foreign language - which throws the sentence structure to wind and streamlines it significantly

Then that is a bad translation. If a book has complex and difficult sentence structure in the original, it should be preserved in translation (and some translations, like Ottilie Mulzet's translations from Hungarian, imo qualify as great works in themselves). Of course, good writing, ideally, has sentences which are complex but not difficult, sentences which flow, which pull you along in a clear semantic progress from concept to concept. Reading these sentences is a skill, one which modern readers have to develop, but that's fine, it's part of being a good reader. You may be taking too much of a jump at once - consider taking a look at Conrad or some other turn-of-the-century author, who can act as a bridge into the Victorians. Personally, I read very few Victorian novels, too stodgy for me, but still try to keep sharp on it to read Victorian poetry, history, and philosophy.

With respect to archaic terms, that's understandably frustrating to non-native speakers, but also part of the game. There are very few cases where you can seamlessly replace a word without some semantic or rhythmic difference. Where I do share your frustration is with the ebook format. Footnotes are very easy, and often necessary, on a physical book (e.g. there is simply no way to do without them for a Classical text), but a huge pain in the ass on e-readers.

If a book has complex and difficult sentence structure in the original, it should be preserved in translation

Are you actually proficient in two languages that belong in two different language families?

Because if you are, then you should know that preserving the original sentence structure is flat out impossible in many cases because languages have different grammars. What is correct structure in language A can be very much not correct in language B.

sentences which flow, which pull you along in a clear semantic progress from concept to concept.

This is exactly why I wish such english -> english translations would exist! To me the old text does not flow. It's overly complicated in ways which contribute absolutely nothing to it and could be streamlined with minimal alterations (see example 3 here) that would subtract absolutely nothing from the original. And of course the original keep existing for anyone who wants to read them.

Reading these sentences is a skill, one which modern readers have to develop, but that's fine, it's part of being a good reader. You may be taking too much of a jump at once

Seriously, what is it with these condescending personal attacks? Do you truly believe that anyone who disagrees with you can only do so because they are somehow inferior?

Unless your intent is to demonstrate that literature buffs are narrowminded gatekeeping idiots who can only consider their own position and never anyone else's, in which case you're doing an excellent job at that. It sure takes some guts to complain that non-native speakers don't have perfect enough grasp of the language when only a small fraction of the natives speak any other language with remotely the same fluency.

With respect to archaic terms, that's understandably frustrating to non-native speakers, but also part of the game.

No, it is not. Some of it can be but others are simply a case of changed meaning where a new word can be substituted in that place to restore the original meaning.

Because if you are, then you should know that preserving the original sentence structure is flat out impossible in many cases because languages have different grammars. What is correct structure in language A can be very much not correct in language B.

I think I've been unclear there. What I mean to say is that if a book has complex and layered sentence structure, that should be reflected in the translation, and likewise if it has clear prose with short sentences. Translation is not a case of going word for word. For instance, if you are translating a single-sentence modernist novel, your translation should if at all possible be a single sentence in the other language. It's an art that trades off preserving word-for-word accuracy, semantics, flow, rhythm, and structural considerations. I've read a couple works in multiple translations, and you can see how the tradeoffs work and which translators do it better.

I did see your examples, and I'm sorry to say that Example 3 is just worse prose (to be fair, Example 2, the Finnish translation, is execrable, I assume because that sentence structure is impossible in Finnish?). It's easier for an inattentive or less experienced reader to follow, because it breaks up the sentence with an extra verb and a reminder of the subject, but it kills the rhythm and unbalances the structure. Try reading the original and the edit out loud - notice how, for instance, the original is instantly dramatic, with the little break between "Woodhouse" and "handsome" making you read "handsome, clever, and rich" with energy, notice how the emphases on "house" and "handsome" both play on each other and break natural iambic rhythm in a way that makes "handsome" bounce off the tongue, and that runs all the way to the next strong syllable of "COMfortable". Meanwhile Example 3 reads comparatively flat, just conveying information, more like a movie narrator or a story you could read out in a classroom.

Seriously, what is it with these condescending personal attacks? Do you truly believe that anyone who disagrees with you can only do so because they are somehow inferior?

It's fine for the various forms of art appreciation to be skills you have to learn and develop - and, as you point out, only a small fraction of native speakers ever develop them. As an example, I am a complete philistine when it comes to appreciating music (but I also don't insist to my Wagner-loving friends that he's got too many notes and they're just gatekeeping). I suppose I could couch it in more padding and compliments and so on, but this is the Autism Forum. I told you how it is, and gave you my advice, which is to use authors who bridge the gap in prose style between the modernists and the Victorians as a way to develop those skills.

To a more general point, I think a lot of people have skills they don't think of as "skills" but as innate things which are reflections of their intelligence, self-worth, whatever. I've made this point a lot in the various Wellness Wednesday discussions of socializing, making friends, dating, etc. that those things are skills you have to learn and practice consciously, and doing that is the difference between getting what you want socially and becoming an ngmi shut-in. People are more receptive to that advice about social skills here, because, again, this is the Autism Forum, but it's also true of reading and writing prose. Such is life.

However, translating to a foreign language—which throws the sentence structure to the wind and streamlines it significantly—is somehow perfectly fine.

This sounds like a strawman to me. Plenty of people hate "streamlined" translations into other languages. "Localization" of Japanese games and anime into English has borne the brunt of this criticism, but I don't think it's unknown in other areas.

Esteemed writer Vladimir Nabokov (in the "translator's foreword" to his 1958 translation of A Hero of Our Time):

This is the first English translation of Lermontov's novel. The book has been paraphrased into English several times [footnote listing five works from 1854 to 1940], but never translated before. The experienced hack may find it quite easy to turn Lermontov's Russian into slick English clichés by means of judicious omission, amplification, and levigation; and he will tone down everything that might seem unfamiliar to the meek and imbecile reader visualized by his publisher. But the honest translator is faced with a different task.

In the first place, we must dismiss once and for all the conventional notion that a translation “should read smoothly” and “should not sound like a translation” (to quote the would-be compliments, addressed to vague versions, by genteel reviewers who never have read and never will read the original texts). In point of fact, any translation that does not sound like a translation is bound to be inexact upon inspection; while, on the other hand, the only virtue of a good translation is faithfulness and completeness. Whether it reads smoothly or not depends on the model, not on the mimic.

In attempting to translate Lermontov, I have gladly sacrificed to the requirements of exactness a number of important things—good taste, neat diction, and even grammar (when some characteristic solecism occurs in the Russian text). The English reader should be aware that Lermontov's prose style in Russian is inelegant; it is dry and drab; it is the tool of an energetic, incredibly gifted, bitterly honest, but definitely inexperienced young man. His Russian is, at times, almost as crude as Stendhal's French; his similes and metaphors are utterly commonplace; his hackneyed epithets are redeemed only by occasionally being incorrectly used. Repetition of words in descriptive sentences irritates the purist. And all this the translator should faithfully render, no matter how much he may be tempted to fill out the lapse and delete the redundancy.

When Lermontov started to write, Russian prose had already evolved that predilection for certain terms that became typical of the Russian novel. Every translator becomes aware, in the course of his task, that, apart from idiomatic locutions, the “from” language has a certain number of constantly iterated words that, though readily translatable, occur in the “into” language far less frequently and less colloquially. Through long use, these words have become mere pegs or signs, the meeting places of mental associations, the reunions of related notions. They are tokens of sense, rather than particularizations of sense. Of the hundred or so peg words familiar to any student of Russian literature, the following may be listed as being especial favorites with Lermontov:

[list of 13 Russian phrases, of which four are borrowed from French]

It is the translator's duty to have, as far as possible, these words reoccur in English as often, and as irritatingly, as they do in the Russian text. I say as far as possible because in some cases the word has two or more shades of meaning depending on the context. “A slight pause”, or “a moment of silence”, for instance, may render the recurrent “minuta molchan'ya” better than “a minute of silence” would.

A few years ago I read A Hero of Our Time in English, now I'm curious which translation it was.

How is it a strawman to say that the existence of foreign language translations is considered fine by people? I've certainly never seen a literature enthusiast who'd want to restrict others from reading translated works when they can't read the original language.

As for streamlining, the very act of translating English text to Finnish inherently changes the sentence structure because English and Finnish are in different language families and have completely different grammar. It's impossible to translate many forms of archaic English to Finnish without streamlining the sentence structure because proper Finnish doesn't have the same forms of very long tacked on sentences (there are some long sentences but they are different form and thus wouldn't be any more authentic than the streamlined ones).

Obviously poor quality translations are considered bad but that's the very reason why I wish someone would make slightly streamlined versions of English language classics. As it is, my options are 1) try to read the originals and give up because the text is too laborous and annoying to read (without a very good cause, ie. the language used was the norm for the era instead of being a dedicated stylistic choice as you'd find in some books that intentionally evoke the feel of archaic language), 2) read at best a middling quality translation (because they are old and done without access to proper understanding of the source material) or 3) hope a newer high quality translation exists (eg. Pride and Prejudice has been translated by Kersti Juva who's renowned for her outstanding Tolkien translations). Given the lack of option 3, how is it better to either prevent me from reading the book in the first place or to force me to read a subpar translation (that gets say 70% there) instead of allowing me (and everyone else without requiring N different translations) to read a slightly modernized version that's 95% accurate to the original? (and will result in outright better comprehension and appreciation of the text because it uses the words in their modern meaning instead of 200 year old outdated meaning that will cause misunderstandings)

And if you think the existence of people who think that is a strawman, take a look at this and this comment in thus subthread which are essentially saying just that.

How is it a strawman to say that the existence of foreign language translations is considered fine by people?

I didn't say merely "translations into other languages". I specifically said "'streamlined' translations into other languages".

As for streamlining, the very act of translating English text to Finnish inherently changes the sentence structure because English and Finnish are in different language families and have completely different grammar. It's impossible to translate many forms of archaic English to Finnish without streamlining the sentence structure because proper Finnish doesn't have the same forms of very long tacked on sentences (there are some long sentences but they are different form and thus wouldn't be any more authentic than the streamlined ones).

Streamlining should be kept to an absolute minimum. I know approximately nothing about Finnish, so I can't say anything more there. But see the Nabokov quote that I now have been able to add to my previous comment for his thoughts on Russian–English translation.

Obviously, poor-quality translations are considered bad

"Quality" is a meaningless buzzword.

Obviously, inaccurate translations are considered bad, but that's the very reason why I wish someone would make slightly streamlined versions of English language classics.

Streamlining and accuracy are inherently opposed to each other. The more streamlining a person does, the more he becomes a paraphraser (or a localizer) rather than a translator. Again, see the Nabokov quote.

Also: To clarify, I am not opposed to the creation of streamlined/inaccurate translations/paraphrases/localizations, as long as they are clearly labeled as such rather than being passed off by their publishers as truly accurate.

Goddamn elitists…

Checking in.

If you can't read Austen you aren't really literate in English. Annotations are fine, adaptations are fine, but you should be able to read it without some Reader's Digest bowdlerization of it.

I guess I'm not really literate then. Of course, I assume this means that you in turn can read eg. Dostoevsky in the original Russian editions without problems, right? Afterall, by your measure anything else would be "bowdlerization".

And just to be clear, I'm not talking about some "simple English" version but simply updating those words and terms that have changed their meanings in the last 200 years (and there are enough that the first chapter alone has 34 foonotes!) and making minor changes to some of the overly complex sentence structure so you don't have to keep a dozen different things in mind just to be able to parse a single sentence.

But more to the point I simply cannot understand this view where nobody, not even non-native speakers, should be allowed to have an easier to read version available for them that stays authentic to the original's spirit and it would be better that all those people simply not read at all such books.

Dostoevsky in the original Russian

Or, more precisely, Dostoevsky with dialogues jumping between original Russian, French, English, and German. His upper-class characters jump between the four languages in their conversations, as they would in real life at the time. No properly-educated young lady would speak Russian without at least a hint of a French accent.

I guess I'm not really literate then. Of course, I assume this means that you in turn can read eg. Dostoevsky in the original Russian editions without problems, right? Afterall, by your measure anything else would be "bowdlerization".

As far as I'm aware, the only changes to the original Dostoevsky (and contemporary authors) that are present in the editions you can read now are grammar changes - that is, updating the 19th century spelling, full of i's and ъ's, to the grammar USSR and modern Russia share.

Of course, I assume this means that you in turn can read eg. Dostoevsky in the original Russian editions without problems, right? Afterall, by your measure anything else would be "bowdlerization".

I don't claim to be literate in Russian. You got me there.

But more to the point I simply cannot understand this view where nobody, not even non-native speakers, should be allowed to have an easier to read version available for them that stays authentic to the original's spirit and it would be better that all those people not read at all such books.

Because with a little effort, one can read Austen in the original, and by struggling through one or two such books in the original, one can learn to read them. And by doing so one unlocks the entire history of the English language. And such efforts are what keeps the entire concept of the English language stable and keeps it from drifting permanently into low slang and ebonics.

Languages are defined and anchored by the great works of literature that the literate members of the linguistic group are expected to read and understand. Dante in Italian, Homer for the Greeks, Virgil in Latin, Goethe in German. The English that God has blessed us with has remained remarkably stable from Shakespeare to today. I can attend a Shakespeare play and with a little inference from context clues get what is being said.

But this process requires collective effort to maintain. And when we create shortcuts, like "updating" Austen's language, we destroy that effort, we would permanently cut off that part of our heritage. We would be left with people unable to read the Declaration, the Federalist Papers, John Stuart Mill, the Gettysburg Address.

We've already mostly lost this to wokeness and ignorance, with the literary canon in tatters. For decades every American public high school student was forced to read Shakespeare at least a little to pass, now it's been replaced with modern identitarian garbage. Was there ever a time where the majority of Americans could read the Great Books? Maybe not, but there existed a literate culture that could. We're in danger enough of losing that as it is, and maybe it's all irrelevant in the age of AI. But it was a beautiful thing while it lasted.

So please, leave me Austen.

English is essentially anchored by Shakespeare and the King James bible, and for specifically American English also Twain. Not by Jane Austen, particularly- while she definitely 'counts' as a literary great, Pride and Prejudice in not an anchorwork for English as a literary tongue the way that Shakespeare's first folio is, nor the the King James bible.

It's not that simple to delineate one classic as the anchor of a language and another as outside of that. Certainly Shakespeare and the KJV are the bedrock of modern English, but everything within the canon serves a purpose as a bridge from here to there. Austen is much more accessible to the modern reader than the KJV or Hamlet, and reading things like Pride and Prejudice will prepare you for reading Shakespeare. Reading Austen serves much the same purpose, really, because Jane Austen read Shakespeare and the KJV. It's not about preserving one work and not others, it's about preserving the connective tissue that makes a living tradition with our ancestors.

My seventh grade English teacher had a big chart on her wall that some past class had made, with literary and intellectual movements stacked on top of each other, with their themes and what they were reacting against in the past movement. The writers of the Enlightenment were reacting against the religiosity and irrationalism of the medieval period, the Romantics were reacting against how boring the Enlightened rationalists were, Realism reacted against how goofy the Romantics were, Modernism and Absurdism reacted against Realism's limitations, etc. An extremely Hegelian view of literature. Everything exists within a context.

When you start editing original texts, you get stuff like this. The old teen girl book series Pretty Little Liars has been "updated" in the latest releases, including e-books apparently purchased in the past and stored in the cloud, to include modern references. At least, that's the stuff girls noticed, I wouldn't be surprised if slurs that would have been mildly edgy in 2003 were edited out in 2020. Now I'll grant you that PLL isn't a core work of the literary canon, but the only way this kind of thing doesn't happen is if people at least try to prevent it. I don't want to be hunting for particular editions of a book to make sure it's the real text and not recent politically correct innovations.

Austen is much more accessible to the modern reader than the KJV or Hamlet, and reading things like Pride and Prejudice will prepare you for reading Shakespeare.

Funny, I would hard disagree on the Shakespeare point. Sure, there will be even more words you have to look at the footnotes for, but Shakespeare's plays are written to be performed on stage, generally in a simple and natural meter, which inherently limits sentence length and complexity. Having trouble with To Be or Not To Be? Just read it like you were speaking it. Austen and the later Victorian novelists are the result of a tradition continually building on Shakespeare's English, making it more structurally complex and verbose to fit a reading public rather than a theatre audience (if nothing else, if you look at Victorian novelists, their most kudzu sentences are generally physical descriptions of a scene, which Shakespeare doesn't do much. Marlowe, yes, but rarely Shakespeare).

87 years ago, our forefathers founded a new country based on liberty and equality. Now we are at war with ourselves in a test of whether our nation, or one like it, can survive. We gather on a battlefield of that war to dedicate a cemetery for those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of our nation, as is proper. However, there is little we can do, as it has already been consecrated by those who fought here. No one will remember this ceremony, but no one will forget the battle. Now we must use their deaths as motivation to finish the job and guarantee the future of democratic government.

Someone who cannot read The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation is not a literate American.

This just sounds like a WW2-era speech. I can almost hear the mid-Atlantic accent.

And by doing so one unlocks the entire history of the English language

Let's not get carried away here - reading Shakespeare will help you with reading Old English approximately not at all.

I should have specified modern English, roughly Shakespeare to today, but I felt that would be more confusing than useful.

Frankly, I don't care about the "history of English language". Neither do I care about "[your] heritage". I am afterall not English (or anglo- anything).

I simply want to read a few classic books in versions that don't require constantly jumping back and forth for no good reason or require using translations that can't capture the meaning of the original, being simultaneously both inaccurate and sounding archaic in precisely the wrong way (ie. many Finnish translations from 1940s and 50s). I don't see how making a new entirely optional version aimed at modern and foreign readers would somehow erase the existence of the original, particularly given that it's out of copyright and can't thus be removed from the market (like happens with movies). This isn't about "proving my literateness". I just want to read the book so that it's actually enjoyable instead of a chore.

Contrast the first paragraph of the original:

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

with the only available Finnish translation (translated back to English and differences to the original bolded):

"Emma Woodhouse was beautiful, intelligent and rich; She had a comfortable home and happy disposition; She seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence. She had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with nothing to meaningfully distress or anger her."

and with something close to what I'd prefer:

"Emma Woodhouse was beautiful, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, and seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; She had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

Do you really think that people should have to read the second instead of the third when the first is not an option?

But the quality of the prose is the entire reason to read Austen in the first place. If you're going to throw out all her original language, why not just go watch Clueless instead? If the basic plot and themes of Emma are what you want, there are dozens of adaptations out there that will be much easier to consume than the original. You could always buy the Young Illustrated Classics edition. That's how I was originally exposed to much of the English canon as a child.

Austen was a beautiful and wickedly sharp prose stylist. It's worth slowing down and trying to appreciate it.

Mostly it seems like your problem is with the quality of Finnish translations. I'd rather the publishers work on improving the literary quality of their translated works than spend resources producing simpler English language versions.

Frankly, I don't care about the "history of English language". Neither do I care about "[your] heritage". I am afterall not English (or anglo- anything).

If you don't care about me or my heritage, I don't see why I have to care about you or your convenience. If you want an easy reading for the non-native English speaker, read it in translation, which you've pointed out exists and is easier for you.

Do you really think that people should have to read the second instead of the third when the first is not an option?

I don't really see how the third is a massive improvement over the first. The first simply seems to be an option to me, and I'm comfortable with the idea of gatekeeping here. By putting in the effort to read the first, you can easily come to understand the sentence structure and the meaning of the word "handsome" in context, which will help you read other works in the same period without needing translation. With a modicum of effort, these things evaporate for you.

I, of course, will never have a meaningful opinion on Homer or Tolstoy by my own standard. Awkward, as those are some of my favorite works, and I have an effortpost on them in the hopper, but alas. I am not perfect.

I don't see why I have to care about you or your convenience

You don't. All I ask is that you not actively try to prevent me. Yet you keep claiming that I must read it the original way.

read it in translation

I would if a high quality translation existed. It does not exist. See example #2 that I linked.

I don't really see how the third is a massive improvement over the first.

Yes, for a native it may not be. For a non-native like me it's a significant improvement in readability.

which will help you read other works in the same period without needing translation

Again, I do not care about this. I'm not doing this for some school course or bragging rights. All I want is to read the book so it's enjoyable to me.

Why are you trying to force me to do something I do not want and that has absolutely no effect on you? Why are you so much against people simply enjoying literature if they do not do it exactly as you prefer? You don't have to read it. All I ask is that people like me be allowed to read a version we prefer without ridiculous gatekeeping and personal attacks.

Seriously, all this does is further the impression that literature buffs are gatekeeping assholes who care more about some weird concept of purity than that people actually enjoy literature.

How exactly am I preventing you from doing so? If such a modernized abridged Austen existed, I wouldn't go to the Barnes and noble at the mall with my buddies from jiu jitsu and take every copy and throw it in the river.

I (and those similarly situated and opinionated) would probably vaguely sneer at it as degenerate or childish. I would probably judge someone negatively for reading it if I saw it, the same way I judge people I see reading Bill o Reilly "killing" books or White Fragility or Heated Rivalry. Maybe if I got worked up I'd write a tweet or a substack essay or an effort post about it, but probably not. I would view such a thing as a slippery slope towards the English speaking peoples, my people, being estranged from our own heritage. That would not lead me to violent action, I am after all not Italian, but I would sneer and gatekeep.

Given that you know that such would be my reaction, your objection seems to be that the possibility of that sneering prevents such a work from being published? But why should I withhold judgment of something I believe would harm my cultural heritage to enhance your convenience?

Gatekeeping is good, actually.

You should be able to read a book from ~1800 without needing a translation. Literally, it’s not that different.

Literally, it’s not that different.

Oh, really?

Do you often use words like "bride-people" or "valetudinarian", describe someone as of "easy fortune" or say "consequence" when you mean "social position"? Those are examples from just the first few pages of the book.

I mean the latter two, yes. Bride people seems easy enough to parse, especially with context. I will admit to probably needing to look up valetudinarian, but we have dictionaries in our pockets.

No, but reading books like Emma is precisely the way one becomes familiar with these sorts of archaisms. It'll never get easier if you don't force your way through it. But once you've got a couple 19th century doorstops under your belt, the prose becomes a lot easier to digest.

Also, the different language is half the fun! There's nothing wrong with having to look something up every other page. Consider it an opportunity to learn something new.

Looking up every second word is how I learned foreign languages to begin with. If it weren't for brute-forcing my way through foreign literature via dictionary, I wouldn't be writing to you right now.

I think there is value to knowing the words the author selected. Consequence is a word that shows it's not just "class" and that class is more than just how comfortable your life is. Consequence means that these character's lives are considered more significant through the means they get their bread. The word choice is an introduction and an education into a mindset that is unlike ours.

With about 40-80 hours of practice, you can accustom yourself to the vocabulary and grammar differences. The number of words you will need to look up will go down to maybe a dozen a book. This is very different from requiring everyone read all novels in their original language, because learning a whole language takes 1000s of hours.

Also modern people write like that sometimes. Pick up This is Happiness by Niall Williams for example.

You are a Finn right? It's worth noting that the a core part of "English" education in America has been reading the classics, so we do get more practice with the more archaic style. This serves to expand vocabularies, recognize more styles of English communication, and to understand where some words and cultural references come from (I'm looking at you Billy S).

If your primary experience with English is dryer teaching English or technical writing some literature will absolutely be a bit challenging to read, but much of it was more or less lowbrow at the time and it is expected that an "educated" person in the U.S. be able to read these with an excess of assistance.

Separately, many English speaking people will have a fluency with Victorian social norms that will puzzling to people from outside milieus.

Probably your struggle is as much vocabulary as it is missing cultural context.

EDIT: An earlier version of this comment had misremembered OP's country of origin. Apologies for all involved and for my dead dignity.

Jane Austen was not a victorian writer, and he's Finnish anyways.

I don't know that she's a popular part of the American curriculum, either- Shakespeare makes a strong showing in the better programs, and everyone reads Huck Finn(The American novel). The shorter works(Where the Red Fern Grows, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird...) are pretty common. Younger grades have modern literature written almost specifically to be read in English class. In high school, I remember a bit of Steinbeck, more Dickens than I would have preferred, but perhaps a quarter of the curriculum being Shakespeare.

Context

Yeah def mixed him up with someone else.

Doesn't need to be literally Victorian or Regency for random English bullshit and Amero-English bullshit to be an appropriate description of context that is skipped off of.

And agree with the characterization of Austen being less popular than Shakespeare etc, but it remains pretty popular with women and girls who read which means the influence is there.

And the point remains: it's not pure highfalutin, and educated people will communicate in that way at times and American students are supposed to be presented the opportunity to develop understanding of those references. It's much harder for non-English speakers to get the exposure (especially in the formative years) to make this stuff easily understandable.

You are Indian right?

Accusing a Finn of being Indian...

Dang must have had 'em mixed up with someone else - point remains about it being a first language vs. not a first language expectations thing.

Always going to be harder coming in.

I just finished the bound copy of selected Canterbury Tales. I was doing a tale a day, and today was the Prioress, and, weird. It was just a blood libel story. A Christian kid really loves the virgin Mary, and some Jews take exception to it and murder him and throw him in a latrine. Miracles occur and the body is found and the Jews are punished.

It's such an odd inclusion in a set of tales I mostly associate with humorous tales of disloyal wives and dishonest preachers. I guess it's just the times? But it's so vicious! Is it satirical? It doesn't seem so. I guess "also Jews are evil and Satan lives in their hearts" is just a message Chaucer also wanted to include?

What the Hell Did I Just Read? (John Dies at the End: Book 3) by Jason Pargin. FWIW, I didn't like the second as much as the first but #3 is exploring concepts that are more interesting to me and I'm liking it better than #2.

I finished Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True during the week. It was pretty good, and I really did get the impression it had been gestating within the author for a long time. It concerns events which happened in the late 90s, but was only published in 2022. I really did feel like Hsu has been writing about these events in private journals for decades, trying to process his feelings.

Reading Lying for Money for the third time. One of the most entertaining non-fiction books I've ever read, I just cannot get enough of it.

Best version of Railroad Tycoon? I've been hankering to give it a proper go, having only played one of them in my youth (where I quickly went bankrupt).

You may want to check out Transport Fever 2 (soon to be 3). It's made by Germans I think, who presumably thought that Railroad Tycoon was too simplistic.

Transport Fever 2 is pretty but IMO in sandbox mode it's only worth playing with custom maps manually set up such that the supply chains make more sense. Otherwise the only brickmaker sets up shop three years' journey from the only stone quarry and the game makes this work by paying you absurd amounts of money to make the delivery. The economy generally makes absolutely no sense and I find it breaking suspension of disbelief. Also the game tends toward death by micromanagement when you have to manage the maintenance and depreciation schedules of countless individual buses (e.g.) across the map. But, the sheer beauty and ability to zoom in to street/rail level make the game worthwhile. If you do want to generate and edit custom maps be sure to watch some videos because there are hidden settings to make them extra gorgeous.

In general I find that TF2 makes for an excellent train table sim, but the game elements themselves don't fit right and mainly serve as a fig leaf.

Contrast with Sid Meier's Railroads! which I think is a fun and awesome game despite its age, where laying rail is more intuitive and supply chains make sense because industries tend to spring up near their inputs. The challenge is in competing with AI rail companies, which adds a very fun layer to the game including poaching their vital industries at auction and buying out their stock. Maybe selling some of yours for capital to expand, which makes you vulnerable to takeover in turn. It's fast-paced: a normal game lasts half an hour to forty-five minutes. IDK why this one never got more love but I played the heck out of it when it was current. Installing it now requires some tampering with files and third-party patches IIRC.

2, I think. Though I know some people say OpenTTD is now the best version of a railroad builder

Though I know some people say OpenTTD is now the best version of a railroad builder

They must be using a peculiar definition of "best". It's a good game. It's elegant in its simplicity, and it's amazing how large you can make the system using so few rules. The UI is historic, and hilariously bad. It has been hugely influential on transport games.

But it's not Railroad Tycoon 2. The depth and complexity is just much higher there. The game gains so much by having an amazing campaign. It gets genuinely difficult towards the end. It has been more than a decade, but I still remember only beating some of the later missions by starting right out the gate with pump-and-dump stock shenanigans, and using the proceeds to execute a hostile acquisition of one of the competitor railroad companies...

I played a bunch of Railroad Tycoon 2 (it got a Linux port back in the pre-Steam-Deck days when that really meant something), but IIRC I usually exploited the AI's poor stock-trading capability in the other direction - my usual game style somehow (I forget how; it's been decades) would quickly convince the AI that my stock was nearly worthless, and also left the AI convinced of that for a while after I'd started pulling in decent profits. So I could issue shares at the start of the game to fund a good running start, buy back my whole company for pennies on the dollar after the stock price crashed, and then issue and rebuy shares judiciously at elevated prices to fund expansions thereafter. The actual rail building was fun, but it felt like I was financially "cheating" to pay for it.

My classic strat for economic advantage in RTII was to build up my railway to a profitable network. Then when I had enough capital I would invest in the really killer advantage: "tunnels" you could build by using the lay track feature to change elevation of terrain. In this way you could cut through mountain passes to lay flat track that would in time be massively profitable, but in the short term cost your company millions in losses. If you sold all your stock before doing this, the effect on the stock price of your company seeing losses in the millions in a given year would instantly crater it to $1, at which point you could easily rebuy all the shares. Then going forward your company would be even more profitable than before because the one-time loss incurred in "tunneling" through the mountains would be repaid by the much faster and flatter route.

Once I had dominant control of my own company I would then pause and create subsidiary companies with my excess personal funds (every two years was the minimum) to create AI-ran companies which would just run low-profit goods to my stations and use the AI bonuses to make money. Then I would without unpausing be re-elected chair of my main company.

To be fair, many Greek shippers use this strategy IRL to this day, so it's not fully unrealistic.

I just play Factorio for my train fix these days.

Same (just got to Fulgora for the first time) but I'm increasingly feeling a desire for something like factorio plus population management. A colony rather than a crash site. Trains are more fun with conductors and passengers rather than fully-automated engines and cargo that could just as reasonably be carried by bot or belt.

When I do want the train fix, I edit the settings such that resources patches are at maximum scarcity but also a bit richer. Trains should be all about those long journeys between nodes. It can be done. And this way there tend to be big stretches of unspoiled countryside along the way.

Also a big fan of the cargo ships mod.

Check out Captain of Industry (light colony sim elements in that every facility needs people to work it and you have to grow food and provide housing for them), or Sweet Transit (the game is nothing but moving passengers around from place to place so they can go to their jobs and whatnot).

Songs of Syx is about managing populations and supply chains, but it doesn’t have micro-scale factory puzzles as a core loop. Might or might not be of interest.

But I’ve been dying for a Rimworld hybrid where you shepherd your colonists through Minecraft tech mods. Single-tile machines fed by cables and pipes, not scaling factories. I can dream.

What supplement brands (vitamins, minerals, creatine, pre-workout, etc) do you trust and use? How did you make that determination?

I know several pharmacists, and at least one is adamant that when it comes to OTC meds and vitamins, just get the cheapest ones you can find. If it says it has 500 IUs of Vitamin L then that's what it has, period. It's a chemical compound,.and one company's isn't any different than another's.

It's pretty well confirmed at this point that supplements may have wildly different amounts of vitamin L than what's on the label.

My understanding is that the supplement industry is not regulated in the same way drugs are so reputability of manufacturer is critically important since they aren't required to have the content or purity as advertised. See: lead in fiber supplements.

The one I trust most is Nootropics Depot. Scott talks about them in: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-trustworthy-are-supplements

Originally, I was drawn to them because they had a good reputation when I was researching phenibut sources (which they no longer sell). Then I tried many of their products and they worked as described. The products have certificates of analysis. The owner (u/MisterYouAreSoDumb) posts on Reddit alot and I can tell:

  • He is very knowledgeable.
  • He is focused on quality and improving the industry. He calls out shady practices in the industry that are verifiable.
  • There are many people that respect and agree with him.
  • He has been in the space for a long time and is known for pursuing mission and long-term goals over short-term profits.

Another factor in my determination is that giving money to his company supports the development of novel nootropics that are easily accessible outside the medical model. I have a grudge against the medical system/FDA/government for how they handle psychedelics, MDMA, phenibut, tianeptine, racetams, and other substances that I believe people should have greater access to.

I buy most from Sam's Club, I generally trust that the products will be quality and won't kill me.

And you get bulk pricing.

If its grey-market stuff, I intentionally look for sellers that have a physical presence that is close enough to me that I could, if needed, show up and confront someone personally and/or burn down their building.

Or, more seriously, that makes it easy to attempt legal action on them, although if you dig into how these entities are structured, its clear they're really trying to make it hard to pin them down.

Beyond that, repeated positive interactions and referrals from trusted friends are the go-to.

I just buy whatever they sell at Costco. Otherwise the choice is overwhelming, especially since I have no idea who to trust.

What do you think about AI being employed as tool for propaganda in the Iran War on either side? Will we see widespread use? Has it already been used in the Ukraine War or is this its first appearance?

Absolutely in the Iran war. All videos under 10 seconds are now suspect. It's really annoying since now shaky camera angles and ditzy women repeating inane comments again and again are now signs of authenticity.

There's a long and annoying discourse about whether Netanyahu is really dead, based on sus analyses of him having six fingers in a video when for the life of me I can only see 5, whether a coffee spills or not...

  • Everyone will use whatever tools are at hand to generate propaganda
  • There will be widespread use. "We" may or may not see it depending on how good people are at working the models
  • I remember seeing a picture of a "wounded soldier from Ukraine" who had six fingers and bandages that morphed into his uniform and his arm.

Please recommend a good news source about War in Ukraine, ideally impartial and ideally focusing more on objective criteria rather than politicians statements or shock footage.

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