07mk
3mo ago
We play the game from their perspective. This is literally the necessary and sufficient condition to establish qualia, I think.
This is a bizarre perspective. That the medium in which a work of fiction is presented actually influences the facts about the fictional world is something I've never encountered and something that seems completely wrong. Controlling a video game character (or "character" or "object,") established that the person dictating the actions of the character has qualia, not that the character within the world does.
Even if we were to posit that it did work that way, this doesn't get around the problem that the game is filled with NPC androids who are treated by the game as if they have qualia. NPCs, obviously by definition, have no human controlling them, and so they fail to meet this sufficent and necessary criterion for having qualia. Thus, it would make no sense for the game to present them as having them, and likewise for the in-universe characters to do so. Likewise, NPC humans - the fleshy kind - lack a human controlling them, and thus they fail to meet this criterion. Yet the game presents them as having qualia deserving of empathy, and in-universe characters treat them as if they do.
I don't think this is a good criterion for this particular thing.
Bringing in money is certainly the best actual metric in terms of actual value generated for the company, but it's also really hard to measure on a per-employee basis. My intent was to analogize a pro athletes performance in the sport against a generic employee's value creation.
That said, most times I've encountered people attempting to model how much actual value professional athletes generate, generally the conclusion is that the top players are far underpaid relative to how much money they make for the teams and leagues. Eg. I think when Conor McGregor was in his prime, he was getting paid I think less than 2x as much by the UFC as any other lightweight championship fighter (like a few hundred thousand USD per fight, for single-digit million for the year), and I read some article claiming that he was responsible for some double digit percentage of the UFC's total revenue, which seems to be on the order of multiple hundred million USD, which seems entirely plausible. I've seen similar things written about other big stars over the years, like Michael Jordan or Shohei Ohtani, and I don't know how good these models are, but to a basic fan with some basic understanding of the way these leagues operate, they all seem quite plausible.
And given the pay disparities in some professional sports which can be like 100:1 for top players versus rookies, that this disparity is smaller than their ACTUAL value would indicate that individuals really can be worth orders of magnitude more valuable in doing the same job.
If we want to get at the ACTUAL value, perhaps we could look at actual income of musicians, who usually sink or swim by their own personal direct success at making songs popular enough to get people to listen to them on streaming platforms or even buy on CD. And so there's no company setting salary to really manipulate the income. There, we know that the top performers are billionaires, and the bottom ones don't make minimum wage.
07mk
3mo ago
I know almost nothing about this guy or the circumstances around the tattoo, but this sort of attitude is definitely something I would respect about him if, indeed, that was part of the thinking that went into not removing the tattoo. It's the same reason why I respect people like Chris Pratt or Jeremy Renner (despite not particularly caring for their acting chops), for standing firm with their Christianity/conservatism despite the way Hollywood tends to treat people of such beliefs (they seem to be smart enough self-marketers not to make a big deal about it like, say, Rachel Zegler did with her views on that whole Israel-Palestine ordeal, though). That kind of firmness against complaints about shit that doesn't matter is something deserving of respect regardless of the actual contents.
07mk
3mo ago
The real issue with Boomers(and Spiritual Boomers) isn't that they're old and entitled, it's that they're old and refuse to acknowledged that the ground game has changed.
I feel like I have a vague memory of essays by boomers saying something like this, but I've so rarely run into it that I can't remember, and I've certainly never seen it among boomers IRL. Not that I hang out with a lot of those, so that doesn't mean too much.
But, eg this past week, I saw some kerfuffle on the social medias involving zoomers complaining about boomers not understanding how hard it is, and when I looked into it, it was because some boomer said zoomers ought not spend $28 ordering lunch and even generated a realistic cheap plan to make their own sandwiches, and zoomers scoffed that that was basically concentration camp food. Every interaction of this type that I look into seems to play out like that, where basic financial responsibility and the most minor of suggested sacrifices is made out to be some huge ordeal. Notably, I've never seen boomers implying that this would solve all zoomers' woes, merely that those are the types of things they should do first before declaring that making it in this economy is impossible.
I'm personally a privileged millennial, who was lucky enough not to suffer the pains of the 2008 crash that happened around the time I started working. So I don't have enough personal experience with such stuff to weigh in on. But I certainly have the experience of sacrificing location and comfort for price in rental, sometimes spending nearly 2 hours in commute each way for work, doing meal prep and budgeting my restaurant meals, not ordering food for months, not paying for any entertainment subscriptions, finding used or free furniture from Craigslist, things like that, in my 20s and even 30s. They're just not that much sacrifice, and certainly I think my qol with all the benefits of modern technology and policework is better than that of boomers when they were young adults.
I sense that zoomers were too grown up being fed fearmongering that these were the end times, and COVID plus AI gave them a one-two punch right as they were becoming adults. Like generations before them, they were sold a false bill of goods about college being the solution to all their career problems, and there's certainly blame that deserves to land on their parents' generations to some extent for all of that except maybe AI. And so they're somewhat understandably weary of being told advice. But jumping at shadows is still jumping at shadows, and devoting significant energy towards criticizing others instead of criticizing oneself tends not to be all that useful for getting oneself out of a hole, regardless of who dug that hole or put one in there.
07mk
3mo ago
One of my favorite examples of the arrogance of modern humans (including myself in the past, and I'm sure in the present as well, just in different ways) is thumbing our noses at people using the awkward 12 for so many things, instead of the simple, elegant 10 of the metric system. Of course, the beauty of 12 is that it's easy for dividing things evenly among 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 people. And also any multiple of 12 with an even number is easy to divide among 8 people, and with a multiple of 3 is easy to divide among 9 people, due to 4 and 3 being factors. When not everyone knows long division or even the concept of decimals, Arabic numerals or fractions, having such a flexible number as a standard makes a lot of sense.
07mk
3mo ago
if my buddy rings me up and tells me about the great sex he had last night, I'd kick him in the butt if it was that banal.
On the other hand, perhaps you'd slap him on the palm if it was banal?
07mk
3mo ago
I honestly think, for most people, IF they want to wear a watch and are willing to pay more than like $50, a Casio G-Shock is probably the best choice. I happen to just prefer the analog aesthetic, but digital is generally easier to read and use and set, has much more functionality like timers and alarms, and, of course, G-Shocks are just really, really durable. Ever since I started wearing a watch again as an adult, I've taken notice of how careful I tend to be when swinging my left arm while walking and such, which is extra mental work (though perhaps it's also prevented injuries to my left hand, so it's worth it in the long run?). If I'm wearing a watch at all during any physical activity (which I usually don't, but there are many occasions when such timing is useful), it's usually the G-Shock I got as a present.
G-Shock accomplishes something of a blend between the two but also as I’m getting older, it’s becoming difficult for me to determine what’s in vogue for the new coming of age.
I think, with watches, it honestly doesn't matter, because basically no one notices. It's one of those things that I feel like I need to complete the look when I'm dressing formally, but it's not like people pay much attention to that part anyway, and in everyday wear, it's even less. Though, who knows, perhaps as non-smart watches become more and more relics of the past, a G-Shock with its sometimes hulking design or distinctive screen setup will become a conversation starter.
07mk
3mo ago
I have two 800$ ish Seiko’s I enjoy.
This is a brand I've heard almost nothing but good things about, but I didn't really check them out much. As of tomorrow, I'm going to have two Seikos that I hope to enjoy, one of each of the Seiko 5 Pepsi collaboration watches. Most watch collectors are familiar with nicknames for various Rolex GMT/Submariner models, such as "Hulk" for an all-green one or "Batman" for a half-black, half-blue one, and one of the most popular is the "Pepsi," which is half-blue, half-red - and I have to respect that Seiko decided to take that and actually make it a real thing, at less than 7% of the price of a Rolex. I also happen to be one of the superior minority that prefers Pepsi over Coke, so I felt like I just had to have these in my collection. There's 7k of each produced in the limited run, and I'm hoping that maybe something crazy will happen with Pepsi in a few decades that would drive a complete collection of both of these watches up in value.
07mk
3mo ago
I have an Original Grain wooden watch made from old whiskey barrels
I had never heard of such a thing, and they're gorgeous. I have some friends who got me into enjoying whiskey as my hard liquor of choice in my 20s, and these would probably make some solid gifts for them.
07mk
3mo ago
Why the f should we assume that these robots have a subjective human-like experience of being alive? This is supposed to be taken for granted in the game, but the qualia is never even attempted to be established. They look almost human - so they must be human inside their digital cpus? Really?
My half-baked hypothesis is that some writers just don't have empathy for other humans or consider them as conscious beings that have inner experience similar to themselves; they only behave like they do because that's the "rules of society." As such, they think that, if they set up a new fictional world where androids appear as humans, then the same "rules of society" must apply to them also.
07mk
3mo ago
Probably not the worst analogy to the Stranger Things denouement. It's a good enough simulation of the actual thing to give a lot of the same feelings, but there's a core missing that just prevents it from achieving the same things as what it's simulating. And it's a lousy way to finish a 10-year-long relationship.
As a 90s kid, I think Nintendo/Sega/Doom would probably be somewhat analogous to the D&D from the 80s. Playground arguments about some obscure (false) cheat code that requires some elaborate set of steps or one's "uncle at Nintendo" leaking them some upcoming release would be fitting and certainly accurate. Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were 2 of the more iconic films for boys in that era. Perhaps a lot of low-fat foods packed with sugar? OJ Simpson would be big enough in the news for kids to know something about, too. Getting a new AOL CD with a free 15 hours of dial-up internet every month/week/day would make sense. Speaking of which, the dial-up modem connecting sound (I recently watched a zoomer streamer comment utter disbelief at her chatters saying that it was a real thing, when she had thought that it was just some meme up to that point).
That said, I loved the 40 minute "18 months later" epilogue that provided closure, more or less, for all our characters. Was this accomplished with transparent emotional manipulation backed up by an iconic soundtrack? Yes it was, what's your point?
To me, this felt like trying to tickle yourself or have sex with your hand. When I am made consciously aware that the events are happening because the writers wanted to manipulate me, rather than because of reasonable action-and-consequence within the world in which it was built, the suspension of disbelief is lost, and I'm left emotionlessly thinking about the writers instead of emotionally empathizing with the characters. I'll also say that, with both Stranger Things and Game of Thrones, I was shocked by how many people thought that the final season was a sharp dropoff from the penultimate one; for both, I had thought that the penultimate season was garbage, and the final season just felt like a continuation of the trajectory.
07mk
3mo ago
The difference between a (good) lawyer with 2 years and 18 years of experience is a hell of a lot more than 10x, though.
I'm somewhat surprised (but not really - the answer is that people just don't really think much about these things) by how common it is that people just argue from incredulity that someone surely couldn't be worth that much more than someone else in terms of the job they do. Commonly with billionaires, or people who make $multimillion salaries compared to, say, entry-level employees who make less than 1/200 of that.
Because, looking at one of the most fair and transparent jobs in terms of measuring performance - professional athlete - it's pretty clear that the top players really can be that much better. Even just making it to the pro level likely places you at least in the 95th percentile, if not 99.9th, and when you zoom in in that tiny sliver of humanity, you realize that the gap between the top players and the median players is HUGE. In 2000, Pedro Martinez wasn't just the best pitcher in MLB, he was better than the 2nd best pitcher in MLB by a gap larger than the one between the 2nd best and the median MLB pitcher, according to most stats. If you look at other top-level talents like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, similar phenomena seem to occur.
Given that the gaps are this big in just that tiny top sliver, it tells me that the productivity gap between the very top and the median worker (who's probably what, in the top 30% of everyone of similar age?) is likely to be absolutely enormous. I could absolutely believe that one individual is actually a million times more valuable to a company than a junior employee in terms of value created and thus, in some cosmic sense, "earned" that salary that's a million times higher. There's no real good way of quantifying this in a rigorous and fair way, but, I'll say, I have no incredulity when it comes to this notion.
07mk
3mo ago
My actual implementation idea is just to cut my taxes down to near 0 and increase old people taxes while slashing OAPs.
This doesn't seem like the worst idea, or even a bad idea. I'd be curious to see the precise details and what economic models predict in terms of how this affects incentives. Perhaps you could solve your baby affordability woes by becoming a politician, then using that power to steal from the government direct money towards friends and family or make money through insider trading, because your ideas seem likely to be popular enough to have at least a decent shot at winning elections.
How is that bloodier than the present redistribution system? Nobody in the West is doing early 20th century bolshevism.
The bloodiness in these things often come down to friction in implementation. I.e. the existing democratic system often prevents changes like this, because there are a lot of old people who vote, relative to not-old people. As such, it's usually just a matter of time before someone like you gets replaced by someone more extreme than you who calls for just eating the rich murdering the olds, who can't really fight back all that well anyway. After all, who's easier to kill than the weak and frail?
07mk
3mo ago
I'm about 8 hours into Detroit: Become Human, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure game from 2018 about near-future Detroit where AI-based androids have become normalized in society, leading to mass unemployment and such. I have been shocked (though I shouldn't have been*) by just how bad the writing and world-building are, given the generally positive reception it got.
There was basically no attempt at thinking through the implications of how a world where near-human-indistinguishable androids are common would work. E.g. one of the 3 player characters is a detective android, who creates resentment among the human detectives for taking their jobs, instead of using them as force multipliers to solve/prevent more crimes. There's also no signs of android police being deployed en masse as street-level police thanks to their greater speed, strength, accuracy, and expendability. Other issues include things like each android model being built with the same face and specialty for that model, when, with computers, it should be easy to mix-and-match (assuming each specialty requires so much data that the android only has enough data storage space for a single specialty). They also lack any sort of "black box" and must be interrogated as witnesses, and their memory is gone when they "die."
Plot points strike me as nonsensical as well, including the use of a local TV station to announce a revolution well before anyone has even conquered a single block, much less the entirety of Detroit, and even less the entire United States and the world, or a human androids-owner just standing there and yelling at them while they rebel and tear him limb from limb. There's also a clear attempt throughout the game to depict the androids as a sort of "second class citizen human," but no effort was made to depict the androids as capable of having qualia, and so the whole thing just feels like playing make-believe with dolls. This came out 2 years after the TV show Westworld at least made a valiant effort at depicting androids as having qualities deserving of empathy, and this game didn't even go that far.
I'd give it a solid 2/10 so far. Solid, because the graphics, level design, and voice acting are quite good, the former especially for a game that's old enough to be in 3rd grade. I'd be curious how a modern remake, using modern AI tech as the guide for how future androids will make decisions, would look. It may be one of the last major AI-focused fictional media before the recent beginning of the age of AI in 2022.
* I shouldn't have been surprised, because the only other Quantic Dream game I played was also awful in terms of writing. This was Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, a sort of urban fantasy mystery game that had an absolute banger opening scene (your player character, in a trance, murders a man in a diner bathroom, and then awakens to give you control to figure out how to get out of there without alerting the cop eating at the diner) followed by a good first 1/3, a mediocre middle 1/3, and god-awful final 1/3.
07mk
3mo ago
Usually, people who are older tend to make more money because they can provide more value by nature of having more experience and understanding of how to provide value. There's also greater replacement costs when it comes to employees that have been working at a company for a long time; someone who isn't all that productive but knows a specific company's systems well could be hard to replace and thus command higher pay than a productive junior member whose responsibilities are low enough such that they could be exchanged for another junior member, and older people are more likely to have worked at a company for a long time.
It's not as if older employees automatically earn more than younger ones for the same entry-level job, except for cases of some other factor that's often correlated. E.g. some possibilities: older employees are more likely to have experience negotiating for higher base pay, or they're more likely to have kids and get a sort of parent-sympathy bump.
There's a strong argument to be made that the current allocation of compensation doesn't properly reflect the actual productivity or value that these individuals provide. There's an even stronger argument to be made, written in blood, that no one can be trusted to make a reasonable judgment call on the justice of such allocation in an economy-wide scale that is better than what we have now.
AI might obviate all of these, but, well, modern AI is less than half a decade old, barely long enough to have gone to and finished college. These things take generations to turn around, not mere single-digit years.
Back to the actual point at hand, I'm still curious what your spending is such that you don't believe that $150K+ plus whatever your wife makes isn't enough to afford a baby. Your fixed costs for things like rent/mortgage and loans must be truly astronomical to make that be the case, and at least the former of those could be changed.
07mk
3mo ago
Seiko SBPG001
In terms of digital watches, I only have a bunch of cheap $5-$30 ones (as a recovering weeb, I enjoy the occasional $5 anime-branded Casio knockoff), along with a Casio G-Shock I got as a gift, I gotta say, that's one sexy-looking watch. I've been interested in getting a solar-powered digital watch, because I hate paying to replace batteries (though, it's not like automatics are any cheaper, in terms of regular maintenance - it's just that I can fool myself into ignoring the necessary maintenance with them), and I might look into that one.
07mk
3mo ago
I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now. So that would be a take based in reality, yes?
Without knowing more details, I don't know how much of this is based in reality. It certainly beggars belief that someone in the top 5% of income couldn't afford to have multiple kids, much less a single baby. My basic Googling says that this would be over $150K for someone in their 20s and over $290K for someone in their 30s. I understand that cost-of-living varies a lot, but as someone living in a medium-high COL area who has friends and family who are decidedly NOT in the top 5% (they certainly make less than me, and I'm certainly not in the top 5% in income) who have multiple kids, I don't understand how the math could work out to make it unaffordable.
07mk
3mo ago
Tissot was actually the first "nice" watch I bought, on a whim at an airport jewelry shop while waiting for a flight. After taking my jaw off the floor at the watch prices, I zeroed in on the cheapest one and got a $200 quartz Dream Classic with Roman numerals (for which I'm a sucker) with a large 42mm dial, for the easy readability. I knew practically nothing about watches and mechanical vs automatic and whatnot back then, but I learned later that Tissot had a really good reputation as a Swiss brand for the sub-$1k market (that this is considered a "cheap niche" rather than "premium" is just... perhaps SNAFU is the right term). I bought another Tissot, a Le Locle (also with Roman numerals), at about $500 some time later, and I do like both of them. Very light and slim, and discreet.
As someone who rides a bus and subway most workdays of the week, I've certainly realized that I'm never going to regularly wear a real luxury watch or even "premium" watch, which is one reason among many that I've gravitated towards cheap Chinese knockoffs. Crime in my commute is pretty much not an issue, but the thought of having multiple $thousands taken off of me in a near-untraceable way triggers my paranoia quite a bit.
07mk
3mo ago
naturalized Americans don't count as Americans?
I happen to believe that we're the MOST American!
07mk
3mo ago
Listening to some guys talk has turned me off Rolex before I could get any serious interest in it. If I was going for a high-price watch as a daily driver(assuming I had the money to spend), I'd probably be aiming for an Omega or Bulova(ie, the other moonwatch).
Going to a Rolex boutique has certainly turned me off them. But it's probably just sour grapes for me not being high-enough status that Rolex doesn't just bring out the secret stash from the back for me. My money is just as good as fake Johnny Depp's, damnit! After that experience at Rolex, I've certainly started considering an Omega Speedmaster, but I haven't done enough research into them yet, as they seem to have a bunch of different models, and I don't know which ones have the proper lunar landing connections to be good for value speculation.
I'm pretty sure I saw Trump do his own Trump-brand watches, which look, you know, how you would expect.
Hm, you're right. Its FAQ explains that they're actually sold by a company called TheBestWatchesOnEarth LLC, which I'm absolutely shocked is not an actual Trump company, and which licenses the Trump name and brand and everything. The first 3 types of watches listed for Men's are: Fighter, Warrior, and Mugshot Suit. As always, Trump proves un-parody-able.
The more reputable Chinese watch brand names in the single-digit-hundreds range generally have quite high quality like you've discovered.
I haven't had any of them long enough to say, but that's certainly been my experience so far, from a few I've bought in the $70-$300 range from Chinese brands Tandorio, Berny, Addiesdive, and San Martin. San Martin is the most expensive of those, and I just had to get one of their watches which featured Chinese characters for the numbers, which I haven't been able to find in any other brand, not even other Chinese brands. I bought a few from Tandorio with customized engravings (and one with customized dial) since even with the customization they came out to the $120-$250 range, and I just hope they're made well enough to last long enough that I'm capable of feeling nostalgia for the reasons for the customizations. I'll probably turn to Tandorio for gifts every once in a while for my male relatives/friends.
07mk
3mo ago
What kind of candidate should the Democrats run if they want to appeal more to middle class voters?
I think the number one thing Democrats need to prioritize for that is making sure whatever selection process they follow doesn't hinge on aesthetics, but rather on specific policies. If there's any focus on aesthetics, it should specifically be about that candidate's open and perhaps even disrespectful disavowal of existing policies and the people who supported such policies and the ideologies from which those policies came.
(Perhaps we could go even one more meta layer up and say that the candidate should be selected for based on her willingness to disavow the process by which the Democratic party selected those people and ideologies as well, but that's probably too indirect and low impact).
07mk
3mo ago
If I'm fortunate enough to survive as a POW or at least have a close friend of mine survive as a POW instead of being turned into a goop of chemical bonds for fuelling AI killbots in the coming robot wars, I certainly don't plan on sticking anything up my ass just to keep it. Then again, if I demand my wife bite the bullet (or rather not bite anything, unless the AD's into that) to help secure such an artifact for our child, perhaps I should be willing to at least carry a hunk of metal in my ass for a few years. I don't expect to have any friends nearly as cool as Christopher Walken, though.
I don't think humans looking similar to ourselves is why we believe they have qualia. For instance, I don't believe that a wax statue has qualia, nor do I believe that a cardboard cutout of Harry Potter has qualia. I think there's something about the actual physical (biological) similarity to ourselves, not merely the appearance, that make us believe that other humans have qualia. Whether or not androids are sufficiently similar to us to justify such a belief is an interesting question that has been talked about in scifi at least since Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, and I'd guess even earlier, and the only thing we know so far is that no one knows the correct answer.
You haven't explained the actual sufficient and necessary criterion you outlined, though. Could you explain the reasoning for why "being controlled by the player" makes sense as the one single criterion for a fictional character having qualia within their fictional universe? Would you say that, any game like a Walking Dead or Mass Effect where the in-universe characters and sometimes the game tone itself presents life-or-death decisions about NPCs as important is making no sense, since these NPCs definitionally have no human controller and thus no qualia to lose?
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