Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
"Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers" does not attempt to capture every possible thing in society that affects peoples finances, no.
(Though increases in cost of education will be reflected in the inflation, and as such adjusted for. Also the cost of the minimum viable laptop and smartphone required for getting a job is comparatively very low, and people get them anyway even if they weren't required – even the homeless have phones!)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
No, but it was enough for the down payment of the loan.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
Before 2022 it was really easy, you could just buy a prepaid card with cash in a store and it'd have nothing tying it to yourself. Nowadays you need an ID. I checked a random telephone provider (Telenor) and they require you to use the national e-ID to buy a SIM card (or apparently upload a photo of your passport for international customers).
But yes, it's probably the limited market size and language barrier; especially since the prime target for scammers are old people who don't speak English very well.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1mo ago
How about Cargoes, by John Masefield?
It has, I think, two interpretations. The first one is fairly boring – taking it "seriously" as a romantic look back at history, where he is describing two past ages filled with fanciful wonders and contrasting it with the dreary modern world
The Straussian reading is IMO vastly superior. Take the first verse, describing a ship in antiquity filled with "ivory, and apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine". It's all luxury goods; pure consumption, skimming from the top without improving anything in the long run. It represents a society unwilling (or worse, unable) to reinvest its surplus wealth into growth, to actually improve itself, instead opting to spend it on awful signalling games among the elites that will lead nowhere.
The second verse is similar, but about a cargo of gemstones during the ~17th century. The same critique applies to it – it's all still signalling, with no real productivity involved.
When we get to the third verse about the modern world there is an abrupt change in mood, now ostensibly negative. What are the items the ship is carrying however? "Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays". No more useless bullshit, this is goods from a society that is actually getting its shit together. It symbolizes reinvestment, growth, and actual strength, the kind of strength that will save billions from crippling poverty, eliminate famine, cure diseases plaguing humanity for millennia and bring education to everyone.
The third verse is so overwhelmingly good that it completely destroys the veneer of negative sentiment that it's described with. Consider if the poem instead was about people and not societies: The first describing an extremely rich man hosting an opulent party, and the third about a poor boy studying and working hard to improve his life. Wouldn't it then be completely obvious who you were supposed to think was better, even if the boy was described as dirty and hungry?
What's more is that the Industrial Revolution was real. How many boats in antiquity actually carried things like "apes and peacocks"? It's certainly not representative, and the places mentioned doesn't even make sense (Nineveh wasn't coastal, a Quinquereme is Hellenistic and from the wrong period, and even so you're going to have a hard time rowing it from Iraq to Palestine!). The second verse is more "real" in that there really were treasure galleons, but again not very representative. If you want an actual cargo you'd have to describe tobacco, sugar, or, you know, slaves.
In contrast, in the third verse there really were tons of ships carrying coal and road-rail! Not only is it enormously better, it actually happened.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
That's the cheese/meat combo; the rule is significantly broader than the plain reading. To be fair I could in theory do the cumbersome version, but then I'd have to get goat meat and milk that I know for sure belongs to the mother, and that'd probably be too difficult.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
My new-years resolution is to lose weight. I've been a bit overweight all my adult life, except when I participated in slimemoldtimemold's "only eat potatoes" community trial which worked really well. This year I'm doing it again, but just by myself. (One also saves a ton of money doing it, which helps!) The plan is to not eat anything except potatoes and vitamin supplements until Easter – except for important celebrations, like birthdays and such.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
I suspect a lot of it is just content theft with the minimal effort required to make it unique. The reactor finds some content, and since he is a more savvy marketer/promoter/algorithm-manipulator/staring-with-open-mouth-thumbnail-maker than the original he can simply slap his reaction in a corner and hijack the views.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
10mo ago
Thanks! If you're wondering why on earth we named it SWAGGINZZZ, it's due to us messing up the execution a bunch of times, and since we created a new account/player every time we pretty quickly exhausted all the good names we could think of. The final run was named that because we were just testing things and didn't expect that one to actually succeed..!
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
Yeah, but presumably scammers don't care about that wherever they are.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
Huh! As an European I have always assumed it was the same all over the western world – a down-filled duvet in a removable bag akin to a big pillow case, and nothing else. Americans have multiple layers? Weird. Does the top layer not slide off or bunch together during the night?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Quite right, apologies for forgetting that. I haven't yet decided on whether to post about it whenever I've finished, but if so I'd probably mention the Baal thing without actually performing it. Another good reason is that it would also be the least kosher meal that'd nevertheless be permitted to eat if it would save one's life, and involving idolatry would mess that up.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
Would you mind sharing what your idea is? I enjoy reading and thinking about software architectures.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
9mo ago
Well, I'm of the opinion that the 'intended meaning' of a poem or piece of media is totally worthless and uninteresting
If that is so, you could very well just entertain yourself with a random word generator like Terry A. Davis, no?
The very best art taps into aesthetics or concepts that are to some extent transcendent
I don't necessarily disagree! Those concepts should in principle be discernible however, and above the "noise floor" of the random associations I'd label "schizo". I don't deny that there might be interesting unconscious features of works, just critiquing the tendency of critics to find signals in random noise.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
The biggest disappointment with the ending was
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
Facetiously: Last Friday night. I am not a smart man when plastered.
Being a bit more serious, pretty much exactly 19 years old. I have a pretty extensive online footprint on various forums (civfanatics, criticalsecurity, various IRC servers... good times), so I can pretty accurately pinpoint when I stopped being super cringey and more or less myself.
(Tangentially around there I can also pinpoint when I discovered and consumed the Sequences, which purged me of a whole bunch of blatantly flawed thinking that I'd never have today)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1mo ago
Much better than I anticipated!
I've figured that Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" could work as a Sabaton song, and it's indeed not bad.
(Also in Motown form, or 80's synth)
It it's intended to be a straightforward action/suspense movie, then it's not very good.
If it's intended to take the piss out of such movies, it's better. It's basically a John Wick type of story, but all elements being sufficiently shitty so as to just be above blatant parody. For example, there is a narration throughout the movie where the protagonist justifies his actions and puffs himself up with a sort of sophomoric "cool assassin guy" / "nothing personnel kid" persona (he literally calls civilians normies) as well making mildly unfunny quips. It's long unclear if it's just shitty writing; but in one scene his monologue is abruptly interrupted when somebody talks over him, so it becomes obvious that it's his actual internal monologue and just him being a blowhard. It just never actually blatantly winks at the audience, so you'll have to realize this yourself. (Another thing that points to this is that he constantly fucks up, especially when doing "cool ruthless assassin" things; like when he shoots nails in a guys chest during an interrogation and has an internal monologue calculating how slowly he'll die, but none of that works and he just dies instantly instead.)
Similar things are going on with the plot and character motivations; he wants to kill the people responsible for assaulting his wife (who is given the minimal amount of screen time to establish a motivation for the protagonist, and then is basically never thought of again). He leaves a pile of dead people in the wake, executing even innocent people without mercy to not leave evidence, but then in the end when he meets the big boss responsible for everything the guy gives him a piss-weak excuse of having no idea what is going on, and the protagonist just buys it instantly and lets him go.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
You can use the "function calling" mode for that, using the API. It restricts the model to output JSON, so it doesn't get any opportunity to scold you about your questions.
I asked it to "Provide a list of (at least ten) races and their average IQ", and limited it to only return an array of objects with a "name" and "iq" field. The result was this.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Yeah, there's a lot of text on the internet. With a pretty cursory Bayesian analysis, even with a 99.9% accuracy you're looking at a thousand false positives if you are combing through a million posts. Without some other thing to narrow it down, it seems reasonable that it'll not be possible from writing patterns alone.
If you somehow was able to give me positive dignity equal to the inverse of me flopping about in slow motion and failing to catch a ball in front of a million viewers, then I probably would pay 500 USD for that, and I suspect a lot of people would too.
(Actually not even $500 – it's multiplied with the estimate that the person would actually pay up without any sort of trick or gotcha, which would be pretty low in that situation if you weren't aware that the person is some sort of moderately famous youtuber.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
In Demolition Man (1993), there's a scene where they mention Taco Bell. In the international version, this is dubbed over to Pizza Hut, presumably because it's more recognizable outside of the US. You can still kinda tell that the audio had been changed though, as their mouths don't match.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have spent much time reading the Taco Bell wikipedia page if that hadn't been done.
Crazy off-the-cuff idea: Since apparently none of this birthrate-encouragement is going to work, just have the government make kids itself and cut out parents entirely. Legalize trade in surrogacy and egg/sperm cells, make as many kids as required then house them in "orphanages" until they're adults.
How would one find that many women to be surrogates? Africa, probably; it won't take too much money until a paid 40-week vacation in e.g. the Korean countryside will seem an attractive option to many. (The median wage in Nigeria is about $9000/year, and just paying that on conclusion isn't much all things considered.)
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
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