Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
He's still kicking. Recently hiked up a mountain to prepare.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
It has separate stories each season, but, like True Detective, Season 1 is generally considered to be the best. Definitely the most iconic with the No Country For Old Men inspiration. Season 2 is also great, and Season 3 divides opinion more but is worth watching. Season 4, as far as I know, was considered pretty bad, but I've heard positive things about 5. Would strongly recommend starting from s01.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
This is 100% right; it's the same with soccer in other countries. Add to that that the best media for a given team is usually fan-created, free/crowdfunded, multi-media, and updated daily, and something like Sports Illustrated can't compete. The Athletic tried to combine the two formats by getting the best journalists specialized in popular teams and making it easy to filter for your teams, but my subjective impression is that it's declining in quality or at least putting on a more clickbait front to get signups (they were, relatively recently, bought by our good friends at the NYT).
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Just finished The Glory of The Empire. Very interesting book - it's an entirely fabricated alternate history of a Rome-like empire, set in our history (e.g. it's full of citations to people like Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, TS Eliot, etc. writing about the Empire). It's got a real feeling of plausibility, like you're reading the kind of mythicized histories people used to actually write about the cultures, loves, battles, and deaths of great men and cities. It gets more into spirituality and religion as the book goes on, but never fully woo. Would recommend to fellow history autists.
Bartender_Venator
4mo ago
Mike Solana has a newsletter also called The White Pill which is a roundup of positive tech/innovation news
Bartender_Venator
4mo ago
Podcasts I've enjoyed in rough order of when I remember listening to them:
- History of Rome
- Revolutions
- History of Byzantium
- When Diplomacy Fails (shout out to their Thirty Years War megaseries)
- A Japanese history podcast I can't remember/find, but it seems like other good podcasts about the Sengoku Jidai have come out since then
- The Hellenistic Age
- The History of Egypt Podcast
- The Timur Podcast
- Reconquista (have not tried the main History of the Crusades podcast, but Reconquista is good)
- The Cost of Glory (newish, but imo the best current history podcast)
- Russians With Attitude's history podcasts
- The Bailey
Kings and Generals and Historia Civilis are good for youtube channels. Johannes Niederhauser is pretty active on YouTube iirc, but I don't know how much guys like him, Michael Millerman, etc. do real stuff rather than teasers for their courses.
Bartender_Venator
6mo ago
Sports provide tremendous value as a source of community and social opportunity for fans. I've met some of my best friends through football - even if it added no other value to my life, paying the minor fees involved would be worth it. What's surprising about speedrunning is that it's incredible talent and dedication being put into a prestige race among communities which are mostly tiny and fully-online, and that it's talent that's more transferable to something useful. The physical and tactical talent a top athlete has could maybe be parlayed into being an effective soldier or a good oilfield worker, but that's not a loss to society comparable to having these speedrunning guys optimizing time on Sonic 2000 instead of optimizing some useful process. I guess the equivalent would be that a professional sportsman would be wasted in the Middle Ages when he could have become a knight instead. (And, indeed, some of the greatest knights, like William Marshal, started out as effectively their era's equivalent of pro athletes)
Bartender_Venator
6mo ago
create public trophies for rivalries that are displayed in stadiums prominently after rivalry match wins, and the absence of which is displayed after losses.
I think this is a thing in MLS? I don't know if they have actual trophies, but they have various trophy-style names for derby games.
Anyway, I'm sorry, but to make a league season really matter you have to do it like (football) football: since American sports will never add promotion/relegation, make championships a knockout tournament that runs alongside the league, and is determined by placement in last year's league. You can even do what football does and have a secondary cup for those who don't qualify for the main ones, so worse teams have a shot at a second-string trophy (West Ham won a third-string trophy last year and it was genuinely a huge moment for them).
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
For better or for worse he's basically a typical TPOT/Vibecamp-sphere guy.
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
From my experience there, I'd be sure to simply guess all the Texan cities I could think of connected to the energy industry. Lubbock, for instance, isn't in reasonable driving distance from anything except oil, but that's enough to get a lot of people there.
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
Is Brothers K really 900 pages? Damn, I'm 95% through on kindle and it flew by (admittedly on commutes and flights). What a book.
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
By the time I got back around to bulking again, my love of hot sauce had progressed too far for me to be satisfied with taco seasoning. I recommend Bertie's Pepper Sauce and other Caribbean sauces in particular if you like real flavour, not just heat and vinegar. Liking hot sauce (and learning how to use Asian spices) is a real cheat code for cutting, too, since it's zero calorie. Sub umami+salt stuff like soy sauce or furikake to change things up.
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
Would you happen to know of a good (i.e. human-written and not SEO garbage) guide to doing this? I've already looked at how to restore a functional taskbar, but not about all the individual details of ripping the crap out.
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
Based on the list, sounds like rederiving avoiding seed oils lol (and almost all Chinese/SEA food). If you do want to keep healthy fats in your diet while dropping weight, I'd recommend having some PFR 1 meals with low/no carbs as variety, or swap out heavy sauces for butter/coconut oil/animal fat (e.g. chicken livers go from PFR 1 to PFR 2 if you use peri-peri sauce instead of sour cream).
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
It depends if you have the time, inclination, and knowledge to cook large quantities of food you enjoy. Trying to dirty bulk on fast food and protein is pretty miserable if you're not spiritually fat, and if you're not a cooking type the sort of diet I bulked on for busy times in college (oats, plain ground beef, protein shake with milk and olive oil) isn't very pleasant either.
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
Yep, this is an example of GPT insisting on something like an ABABABABA rhyme scheme (grace/race, name/game, etc.), which is actually quite an odd one that you would rarely see a person using, since it's difficult to get good rhymes if you're using the same one so often (see: rhyming race with embrace). My theory is that, beyond what's going on under the hood causing trouble with sticking to form, GPT is bad at selecting good rhymes, because good rhymes are generally in some way unexpected and present novelty to the reader - i.e. the opposite of predicting the next token.
I wanted to test your theory about trivia questions, so I tried a little test - asked it to give me some trivia questions on Roman history, and then to give me a harder set. The first set was very simple (amusingly, two consecutive questions had the same answer: Julius Caesar, and two questions in the second set also had Caesar as the answer), but the second was more interesting. One or two were hard enough to stump me, which made sense, but at least three were historically inaccurate as questions, and so were the answers that ChatGPT gave. The most incorrect was claiming that damnatio memoriae was instituted by Domitian, but it also had mistakes reflecting a pop-historical conception of what the Roman Empire was. I guess this is an example of ChatGPT's repetition of consensus, and that aspect makes it inherently difficult to write good trivia questions.
As a poet, it's also awful at poetry. It writes some painful doggerel about whatever subject you choose, and seemed incapable of following instructions about form, meter, or length. A while back I tried to get it to write a Spenserian stanza, and it wrote the same ABAB four-line stanzas over and over again no matter how hard I tried to explain what a Spenserian stanza was (ABABBCBCC).
Bartender_Venator
7mo ago
Speaking purely about what I know, the Kyoto School is one of the most impressive philosophical movements of the 20th Century. Probably top ten rather than top five, but still great and largely unheard of in the West - for instance, I find Religion and Nothingness to deal with some Kantian problems in a way which both prefigured and exceeded modern Western Kant scholarship. Of course, they highly are influenced by Heidegger, who is sometimes called an existentialist, but at the least it's very expensive existentialism.
Bartender_Venator
8mo ago
Yeah I just couldn't resist talking about football, too excited for the season starting.
The HBD point is kind of interesting, because both of the main 'black' sports have a much greater selection for body type which would presumably crowd out a lot of athletes who are smart but don't have the right body. But, while basketball does demand some serious tactical nous and on-the-spot thinking, american football is much more about getting really big guys and having them follow specific tactics to ram into each other, while giving themselves traumatic brain injuries - and when I think of famous black athletes doing really stupid stuff, it's pretty much all american football players and not NBA players.
Also I think both of us have confused motte and bailey here, I meant to say that the motte of your point is sound but I'm not sure about Cowen's bailey.
Bartender_Venator
8mo ago
To add to the other comments, it's far easier to injure yourself with dumbbells rather than a barbell. For DB bench you need to know how to fail safe and be ready to do it even at the limits of exertion, for BB bench you just need to not drop the bar on yourself. They also exert more force on your shoulders in a dangerous position, particularly in incline bench, which is good for training stabilizers but also carries a higher risk if you ego lift.
Bartender_Venator
8mo ago
I think Cowen is just overrating the intelligence of his examples, which is a particular weirdness of basketball fans (probably trying to signal their own intelligence despite following a sport with a pretty dumb fanbase). LeBron is notorious for pretending to read. I'll give him Jordan, who clearly has impressive business sense, and trust him on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whom I only know from Airplane! In general, top athletes are surrounded by a large staff trying to make them appear as well as possible to the public, including media coaching and PR.
In the sport I follow, football (no, football football), intelligence seems to be all over the place, and somewhat but not entirely correlated with "football IQ." The easiest way to see this is by looking at the jobs they take after their playing career, with most top managers having played a high-football-IQ game rather than a physical one, often in midfield - Guardiola, Ancelotti, Wenger, Arteta, etc. all fit that mould, and Klopp describes his playing career by saying "I had fourth-division feet and a first-division head." Meanwhile, a lot of top players become pundits based off reputation, and quite frankly come across as pretty thick, if good at courting controversy in the mode of modern media. Or, to take an example of current players, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe broke into the Arsenal team around the same time, and had very similar promise until ESR's injuries and Saka's break-out, but ESR is known among the team for being humorously dim while Saka scored relatively similar exam results to people I know from top private schools.
The bailey of your point is sound, I think, it's rare for top top athletes to be that stupid (much below 100IQ it would take a lot of crystallized intelligence just to understand top-level tactics). I'm sure most top footballers are above average intelligence, but not that much above average and generally quite uneducated. So there's definitely a floor for required intelligence, but at the highest level it's something which is important but can be traded off against other aspects of one's game, such that the smartest players aren't the best players and the best players aren't necessarily so smart that a guy like Tyler Cowen should be fawning over them and reading the books they "wrote".
(To address the elephants in the room: Ronaldo isn't that smart but makes up for it by sheer force of will. Messi is probably very smart but so cripplingly introverted he doesn't let it show off the pitch.)
Bartender_Venator
8mo ago
I'm reading Emanuel Mayer's The Ancient Middle Classes - I happened to travel with Professor Mayer some time ago, and learned a tremendous amount about Classical urbanism, art, and life in that time, most of which I've not encountered in my other history reading. Heard he had a book published, so naturally decided to give it a look. Also dipping into the print version of Land's Xenosystems published by West Martian Press, a great little outlet which I encourage Urbit folks, dissidents, and internet weirdos to support.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
You aren't doing yourself any favors by comparing yourself to the 1 well-compensated profession that even practitioners themselves will admit is a scam.
I think you may have misread that - consultant doctors =/= management consultants. A "consultant" in medicine referrers to a specialist who has completed training.
This post generally makes sense, but I think you're overestimating Sotomayor's health. She's had paramedics called for diabetic episodes before, and from the claims of some of her former clerks she doesn't do the best job of controlling her blood sugar levels. We can't know anything for sure about this, of course, and apparently she travels with a medic, but "top-tier medical care" only works if you comply with it properly...
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