BahRamYou
9d ago
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...
BahRamYou
11d 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
14d 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
17d 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
17d 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
19d 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
20d 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
20d 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
20d 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
29d 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.
fully agreed with this. Of course you can still find occasional good posts here and there, maybe even the occasional good (small) sub. But the site overall has long since gone to hell. It rewards the worst sort of posters and drives away all decency. At this point, you just have to expect a massive circlejerk response there no matter what you write.
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