BahRamYou
2d ago
I'm not nearly as versed in the technical side as you, but my impression from reading this blog is that you're sort of both right? It's just that the 1980s were such a rapid time for PC tech development that it really depends on which particular year you look at. At the very start, in 1980, Sierra made a splash simply by having graphics at all, when there weren't a lot of computer games for sale on the Apple II, and the few that existed were either text adventures (still limited even in how much text they could have) or something like a port of breakout with very limited graphics. You could do better with arcade cabinets or video game consoles, of course, but those were specialized machines, not a general purpose PC. In that world, the graphics of [early Sierra]](https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/the-wizard-and-the-princess-part-1/) really stood out, and it took some skilled hacking from Ken Williams to make it work.
But then Sierra turned into a real company, with pressure to steadily release new games, so they stopped trying to push the edge in graphics and just churned out varients of more or less the same game, using their tried and true EGA-based engine that the made for the first King's Quest in 1984. Which looked nice enough when it first came out, but quickly aged, so their main claim was being easy enough to work with that non-hackers could make games, and they could sell to a wide audience.
But then at some point that formula stopped working, and they had to really double down again on graphics with their VGA games in the early 90s. Which weren't exactly a huge technical breakthough- the tech already existed to support it, and would have been even better on the Amiga- but they did a great job of just hiring skilled artists to make the pixel art look amazing, even if it wasn't super high tech. So then they got a new lease on life as a company making relatively simple, easy, family-friendly games which looked gorgeous but were also easy to run on less expensive computers.
Would you agree with that summary of the timeline?
BahRamYou
5d ago
If you watch the whole interview, Vance gives a pretty good answer to this (although more so in the context of UFOs).
Basically his argument was that, as much as he might want to investigate this, he's only one human and his time is limited. He has to deal with nonstop crisis like the latest developments in the Iran war. It's not like there's some file marked "the real top secret truth" that he can read. Investigating means interviewing tons and tons of different people, who mostly only know a small part of it themselves, and reading though a million pages of mostly boring routine court documents. On top of which, a lot of physical evidence was either destroyed or never collected during the early parts of the investigation, so they're stuck with mostly just a lot of vague reports.
For what it's worth, he did explicitly deny that Epstein was working directly for any intelligence agency. He didn't give any real proof of that, but he did say he had looked into it.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Thanks for sharing. Are you still able to exercise and build (or at least maintain) muscle while taking peptides, or is it purely for slimming down?
edit: second question, how do you get them? do you go through an actual doctor, or one of the sketchy online services?
BahRamYou
9d ago
I remember Steve Sailer (note: he's smart but obviously biased) used to do a lot of speculation about this on his old blog. Basically his argument was that a big part of the reason the NBA was so black was that talented young white players got bodied and fouled out of the game before they had a chance to really develop, and the couaches were too clueless or biased to stop it. We've recently had an increase in white NBA players, but most of them have come from heavily white European countries, where they get a chance to grow and develop at their own pace until they're ready for the pro leagues. The few white players in the NBA tended be guys like Larry Bird or Rick Barry, who were not only physically huge but also had "special" personalities (read: stubborn/mean enough to thrive in the dirtiest of games).
I really do hate what reddit has turned into. Some people say it's "dead internet theory," with the site getting ruined by bots. I say I wish they were bots, but I'm afraid that it's actually a humans who have been turned into something worse than bots. I feel like I'm actively losing brain cells every time I look at reddit. And yet I still find myself going there, out of habit or because google leads me there or because there's just nothing else left for large active text-based discussion forums.
To be fair, it might not be the fault of reddit itself, but a larger problem with the entire internet. There used to be so many independant websites and discussion forums. That meant a lot less pressure on any one site in particular. You could self-host a small, niche site with minimal features and weak security, and it would still limp along and be fine because it was part of a large ecosystem where everyone was using such sites. Now, it seems like every site has to either evolve into a large corporate walled garden, or die off entirely, either from complete lack of traffic or because it gets hacked and only used by bots or scammers.
I wonder if you (or, not literally you, but someone with a lot of resources) could attack this in a more indirect way? Part of the reason that small independant forums flourished in the 2000s was that there was so many free, easy tools for people to make and host their own websites. Nowadays those free sites are usually seen as not good enough to be exposed to the open internet, at least not without a lot of effort and customization, so people just default to using reddit/substack/youtube/whatever. But if you could create a tool that would allow someone to quickly and easily spin up their own custom site that is (a) open to the internet (b) easily discoverable on google and other algorithmic search engines (c) secure) (d) easy for new users to sign in and comment on (e) for the site owner to customize and monetize... then perhaps we'd see a resurgence in people creating actual, independant websites. And then you'd have less of the "responsibility without authority" problem of sites like reddit, where the mods that do the work are still stuck beholden to bland corporate policies and random anonymous idiots. We'd get all the advantages of real, private property instead of people just squatting on public land while park patrols try and fail to run things. And like you said, we might be getting close (or maybe even already there?) with vibe-coding tools where anyone can be like "make me a website focused on my incredibly niche interest, which looks like an old myspace page, but with great SEO and modern security."
BahRamYou
11d ago
Very much agreed. I think people are brain-rotted by analogies that compare war to something like sports, where there's a clear winner and loser. It might be better to compare it to something like a riot, where there's a lot of chaos and no clear rules.
BahRamYou
11d ago
Even if they weren't actively shooting a week ago, there was no permanent peace treaty and the risk was still very real. https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/ says there's also some shipping in the last 24 hours. No idea how accurate that is though.
BahRamYou
11d ago
I did see that. It's just that, for obvious reasons, there aren't any sources with up-to-the-minute data on an active war zone. You''ll have to be patient for the data to arrive.
BahRamYou
12d ago
I think it's a bit of both. Going by the data here: https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a1730 the number of cargo ships crossing the straits are still far below pre war, but also significantly above the zero where it was at the start of the war. Iran can still significantly threaten traffic, but they can't shut it down entirely like they claim. The US also has the power to escort individual ships though, but it comes at a great cost. For what it's worth, oil futures are now back down to roughly what they were before the war.
BahRamYou
20d ago
To play Devil's advocate a bit... isn't there a place for this in any realistic democracy? The average voter isn't an expert in economics, or international relations, or constitutional law. Yet we're still expected to vote on all of these things. The only way this system works is if someone else interprets and simplifies the key issues for us, and maybe that requires a funny pundit more than a technical expert.
BahRamYou
22d ago
The obvious issue with that hypothesis is that, in most countries, the decline in fertility started long before the invention of smart phones. I'm sure the phones play a role, but it's hard to see them being the sole causal factor. Unless "phones" here is being used as a catch-all for any kind of modern entertainment technology, including old-fashioned CRT TVs, but I get the sense that the blog author means it literally.
My own opinion is that it comes down to the changing views of women's status and place in society. Technology like phones obviously help to change that culture and spread feminist messages, but it's not directly related to phones or technology at all. A big part of it is that, in the past, there was a relative shortage of men because they tended to get killed off in wars and dangerous manual labor, but now men are the majority in younger ages and there's a scarcity of women.
BahRamYou
23d ago
I didn't say you shouldn't understand them. I said that if you marry into a multilingual, cross-cultural family then there will always be some things you don't understand. What do you do, forbid the wife and kids from speaking their native language in your presence? "I swear to god, if I hear one word of Russian in my presence, you won't like the consequences...?"
BahRamYou
23d ago
I think people should just get used to being in situations where they don't understand every word that's being said. Maybe if you grow up speaking English in a predominantly English-speaking community, you're just used to everything being in the language you know, but the rest of the world isn't like that. People speak different languages. And even if you spend a lot of time studying, it's damn near impossible to reach the sort of native-like fluency where you understand literally everything that's being said in a big chaotic group setting, including the little jokes and obscure cultural references.
But that's OK. You don't have to understand. Most of that stuff just isn't very important. Hell, I met a guy from Glasgow once with a very thick accent, and even though we were both native English speakers I could only understand about half of what he was saying. But we still communicated just fine. People are just spoiled by media these days putting up a perfect translation of everything.
For individual advice, I think it's nice when kids make some effort to still learn and use their family's native language. If nothing else, it'll make their grandparents happy, and make family reunions less awkward. But realistically they'll never be perfectly fluent in it, and it's a lot more important for them to boost their English skills. Just don't push them so hard to practice it that they start to resent it.
BahRamYou
25d ago
I mean, I would hope that they're just teaching it as a text like any other, and letting students make up their own mind about what it means. But I'd be worried that Texas is trying to mandate it into the latter.
BahRamYou
26d ago
So therefore they are adulterating the passage and failing to teach its true meaning.
That's kind of my problem with this plan in a nutshell. The bible is a tough read. You've got this very old-fashioned text, which probably began as some sort of oral history, only later written down by various different people at different times. Then that gets translated from paleo-Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to Latin and then finally to English. On top of which, a lot of it is just plain confusing, with complex metaphors and moral lessons that only made sense from the point of view of a bronze age tribe living a harsh life. From my point of view as an atheist, some of it is fascinating and great reading, but some other parts are a horrible mess or just plain boring. I don't think it should be used to teach kids reading, because they're inevitably going to misunderstand it. I don't even trust most high school teachers to properly understand it- there's a good reason that theology and bible study is its own unique discipline.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
My opinion is that I don't mind a bit of hypocrisy in politicians, or flip-flopping, or even outrigh lying sometimes. It's part of their job.
We don't want politicians to be perfectly honest, consistent, straight shooters. If they were, countries would go to war over basic disagreements, and then just stay at war forever because no one could ever forgive or forget. The job of the politicians is to smooth over those disagreements however possible, and words are cheap.
So for the past few months, Trump and Vance have been saying pro-Israeli and anti-Iran stuff, because they were allies with Israel against Iran. Now they're trying to make peace with Iran and get Israel to stop fighting, so they're saying anti-Israel and pro-Iran stuff. That's just how the game of politics works. But as far as I can tell they would never actually do anything against Israel, and the deal with Iran is still basically "stop bombing, allow shipping through Hormuz, all other details TBD."
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I feel like this essay kinda nailed it: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
For a long time now, leaders of every organization have been under pressure to hire more women to make things more equal. They don't want to step down themselves, or fire anyone, so the easiest solultion is to just prioritize women for every new position. The result is that, while overall employment still tends male, new hiring is strongly stacked towards women.
On top of that, there's technology and automation, putting downward pressure on employment in general. No company wants to hire anyone at all.
On top of that, there's the relationship between the sexes. Women might say they want an equal partner, but their revealed preference seems to be that they want a partner who's superior to them and has power.
Put it all together and you've got an absolutely toxic situation for young men. I don't like where this is going.
The biggest obstacle I see is that Iran is so highly fractured right now. The IRGC isn't some tight-knit organization, it was always decentralized and now its blown up to hell. There's probably some hardliners who want to keep fighting, some doves who want peace, and a variety in between who just want personal advantage. Even if some sign a peace treaty, there's no good way to stop the hardliners from breaking it. And there may not be any one individual in Iran who can exactly account for where all of their nuclear material and anti-ship mines are.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
The thing with the tariffs is that the reaction (as measured by the stock market) was so strong and so swift that Trump instantly buckled. That makes it hard to tell how much the actual long-term economic or political damage would have been. It's almost a perfect paradox- We can be perfectly safe that he'll never do tariffs, because the reaction would be so horrendous, so he's free to threaten them all he wants.
But also, yes, if there's anything to make a trade war look trivial, it's an actual shooting war. The Iran war is taking up so much space that it's hard to think about other things.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think the real answer is that most people are just very short-term in their thinking, especially during the most fertile years of their life. In the past, they had kids because sex feels good and they just didn't think much about the long-term consequences of pregnancy. Now, they think too much about the pregnancy itself, and not enough about the long term benefits of having children.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Sure, that's fine. Just as long as you acknowledge the yawning gulf between "here is a mathematical formula that describers all human interaction" and "as far as I'm aware this is the majority opinion." The next step might be to gather evidence to see if that actually is the majority opinion, and if so how much of a majority it is.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I would say those are all reasonable answers, but a lot of that is well you know that's just like your opinion man. Different people are going to have very different opinions on this. Some guys genuinely might not care if their wife is sleeping around, because it gives them more freedom. Some might even get off on it. Others might hate it more than anything, to the point where they would feel honor-bound to kill over it. And most people act very differently in old age than they did as teenagers. You're trying to turn complicatd, messy human emotions into some simple math formula.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Men are raised around the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else. Nice guys get the girl. And, after all, anyone can be nice. That's part of why this is important social messaging. But of course in the end, the boy must live. And he discovers that, in fact, niceness isn't what gets the girl. Being hot is, having status is.
Isn't the problem that there's a tension between what society wants and what an individual wants? Society doesn't really care whether some random teenager "gets the girl." It only barely cares whether men overall get married, insofar as it needs to keep the fertility rate up to produce more workers. What "society" wants is for boys to be nice, stay out of trouble, and go to work. And, you know, those are pretty good things to want overall in society... it's just not the only things that a male mammal would want. I don't know the solution, but I wish we could at least start by openly acknowledge the problem.
Is this still the case when both people are in their 60s or beyond, and have lost a lot of libido, and are mostly looking for a comfortable partner to grow old with?
Even if they still have a lot of libido, does the wife regain her value if her party days were multiple decades in the past, or does the stain on her soul linger forever?
Does her value as a "virgin" remain after she's been married for decades and had sex thousands of times with her husband?
Ha, that's funny to think about! And maybe it's also considered too dangerous to allow computers to directly control weapons, so everything has to be manually aimed by humans...
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