Corvos
30d ago
Do environmentalists not say that they're concerned about the effects of global warming - rising sea levels, crop destruction, etc. - precisely because it will affect people? That's always been my impression.
I would say there's a big split between the pro-humans (our children will live better, happier lives if we take better care of the environment) and the misanthropes (the environment would be better off without us).
Corvos
30d ago
Corvos
30d ago
I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action.
Yeah, I'd say getting modded is rare whereas having proof people aren't really interested in what you have to say is much more intimidating.
Corvos
30d ago
It's interesting how many different types we have here. As a contrast, being a non-American I find the legal discussion to be almost entirely insular and irrelevant, whereas the discussion of social and economic dynamics is universal.
Corvos
30d ago
This is going too far the other way. If your food supply is limited, you could cut down more of the forest for farmland or you could just refrain from inviting the next tribe over for dinner!
To put it another way, I like my hometown the way it is, I like the countryside the way it is. Yes, we could concrete over ever more of my small country, or build more hideous skyscrapers. Or we could just stop inviting in hundreds of thousands of foreigners every year.
Corvos
30d ago
I do sometimes get the impression London is full of monkeys...
Thanks, I didn't know that term.
the sharpness of this phenomenon is proxied by how status-conscious a place is
I think you're probably right. Bit of a feedback loop, too: the more absolute the hierarchy, the more people care about their place on it.
why don’t we vote on bringing back the bare links repository?
Eh. Might be interesting but I'm not really keen on bringing back the daily rage. I get as much current news through here as I can handle. I'm mostly happy with the site and @cjet79's formulation as-is, I just wanted to provide a little calibration in favour of 'this specific warning was too strict'.
Corvos
1mo ago
This feels though similar to Americans do not travel to other countries but everyone in Europe does therefore everyone in America are uneducated proles.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I follow.
All of Europe seems to have outsized capital countries, but the countries are probably more comparable to regions of the U.S.
Bear in mind the language problem. In America, everyone speaks the same language everywhere (more or less). In Europe, lots of people speak English but realistically only about 10% have more than a few phrases they remember from school, so moving is hard. In Asia there's basically no overlap at all.
So why do they pretend to care? Status games. Accusations of "appropriation" are a convenient way to signal higher moral status. If you can get a high-ranking person to grovel before you, you are higher status than them. If you can get a competitor fired for wearing a silly costume, then your chance at the top job just increased. This is why woke status games are most extreme in situations where 100s of people compete for a sinecure such as a college professorship. It's a crab bucket mentality.
Yup, that's a big factor for sure. I have seen exaggerated Italian accents coded as racist, or at least very insensitive. Nobody cares about us Brits :(
Woke people don't just appropriate. They want to actively erase non-Anglo cultures. Witness, for example, the use of the term "Latinx". Or the insistence that traditional people abandon their customs and religion to support LGBT ideology.
Absolutely, it's the old chauvinism in a new form, with no excuses this time. For all its flaws, old Hollywood was just trying to make films that sold well at home, and the cultural appropriation was an unfortunate consequence. The woke should know better.
To oversimplify, I think that real complaints about cultural appropriation like mine or the Australian Aboriginals (which by definition come from cultures lacking soft power) got filtered through woke Americans who did have soft power, and were redirected by those people for their own ends. Often unconsciously.
I take your point. I was going by https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/cities/united-kingdom which records London as 7.5m and Manchester as 400k but I accept that different boundaries can produce very different numbers.
That said, I was trying to get across that the UK isn't like, say, Germany, where AFAIK you can choose from a number of roughly equivalent top-tier cities depending on personal preference. You either make it to London and reap the rewards (and all the crap that goes with them) or you don't. And it's been that way since at least the reign of Elizabeth I. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_England_by_historical_population is the best I can do, I am assuming the link between population and prosperity).
Technically this does have points 1, 2 and 3. I get why the mods aim to have an effort filter for top posts but this isn't spicy and seems to have stimulated discussion effectively enough.
To steelman the original case against cultural appropriation, you really have to understand the context in which it appeared. Think back a couple of decades to when America was maximally hegemonic and arrogant. When I was growing up, it was accepted wisdom in Hollywood that any film that adapted British source material had to be set in America with American children, and the source was often mutilated to make that work: see The Seeker (an adaptation of my favourite childhood book) for a particularly egregious example, but they even tried to do it with Harry Potter.
It's not fun to see your culture stolen or made into a theme park version of itself because Hollywood execs didn't believe that their audiences could tolerate anything too exotic. And it's worse knowing that, because American soft power outmatches yours by an order of magnitude, your children will grow up with the American version of your culture as the default while the original dies a slow death. In the same vein, Hallowe'en is now a much bigger deal than Nov 4th in the UK, and spell-check + Grammarly is slowly killing British English. I can imagine it's even worse for smaller, weaker countries and cultures.
Of course, the anti-cultural-appropriation movement overreached, mostly by refusing to see any difference between genuine appreciation and chauvinistic snatching. But in an age of increased migration and greater communication between cultures (via the internet) it's more likely that, say, Arabs will get upset about American girls using their national costume to slut it up.
(Obviously I'm simplifying and cherry-picking, see for example the chinese dress brouhaha where actual Chinese people didn't give a damn. I'm trying to give a sympathetic explanation of one reason why people started pushing back against cultural appropriation. I enjoy dressing up myself.)
Corvos
1mo ago
I keep my phone in black-and-white, so I thought the painting was in green and they were going for a Fisher King sort of aesthetic. With the butterfly it might have worked.
I can't imagine who could have thought that this was a good idea. I suppose they were going for red == regal.
Corvos
1mo ago
Off the top of my head, I suspect that Ukraine will break eventually, Putin will take over some or all of the country but be unable to enforce particularly high levels of order or get his industrial base high enough for further invasions. Ukraine will be remembered as a pointless tragedy / failure of western will / pyrrhic victory depending on factional allegiance.
Corvos
1mo ago
I can't speak for Korea, but one-major-city countries are pretty common. England is famously lopsided: London is 7/8x the size of the next largest city, and contains almost all of the seriously high-paying jobs. With a few principled holdouts, if someone lives in a city that isn't London it's usually because they can't afford it there.
Singapore is basically a city state. I'm sure there are others.
Corvos
1mo ago
I don't think it would work :) Training on posts about the Hero's journey would (probably) just make the LLM better at writing posts about the Hero's Journey*. I've generally found LLMs to be pretty bad at transfer learning.
*It does the same to me, actually.
I take your point, but on the other hand, think of it this way: the American Revolution, the French Revolution(s) and the Russian Revolution were all radical overhauls of society that required tens of thousands of people to die for the movement to succeed. That seems like valuable information that shouldn't necessarily be discarded in a general analysis unless you are performing a specific comparison of one armed revolutionary movement* against another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
https://www.history.com/news/revolutionary-war-deaths
*The question of how far you can hold an ideology responsible for the movements that it produces is vexed, obviously, but if there's a strongish link between a given ideology and violent rebellion I think you have to take that into account to some degree.
Realistically, I want to achieve something halfway between go-anywhere-do-anything and a rigid tale. Many good authors have the laws of narrative ingrained so deeply that they can write almost on the fly. New ideas are fit into a satisfying framework as they arise, or else rejected. There may or may not be a story plan to follow, and that may or may not be altered as writing continues.
On this basis, I've been trying to develop a 'plotty' roleplaying LLM that can fit events into a classic story structure as they occur, whilst incorporating the user's actions. So, in your Socrates example, the-user-as-Socrates can take actions to try and prevent his death. If he renounces philosophy, you can still make that work as a tragedy: a man gives up what really matters, only to discover that life isn't worth living without his principles. Or Socrates' escape attempts can succeed, and you have yourself a thriller as he tries to escape persecution. Like any dungeon master, it may have to break kayfabe at some point and tell the user, "you can do this if you really want to, but I can't make it work with the story" but in general this should be done silently and behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck getting an LLM to think on this level of meta. I don't know if it's a limitation of the finetuned models I have access to, or I'm just not running something big enough. Would be grateful to hear from anyone running >13b models.
Corvos
1mo ago
https://store.steampowered.com/app/204880/Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire_Rebellion/
Sins of a Solar Empire.
Galaxy scale space combat RTS with plenty of mods. Can zoom from individual ships to fleets to galaxy without ever leaving real-time gameplay. Factions are cool and pretty distinct.
“HRV for Biofeedback” is an app for iOS that is very accurate as far as I can tell and uses the camera + flash on your smartphone to graph your heartbeat in real time. Note that it costs $5 and you have to stop and do a 1-minute scan, it’s not always-on.
I had tachycardia (sudden-onset very fast heartbeat) not long ago. My smartwatch didn’t detect it (too brief, too far out of expected range) but the app showed it perfectly. The response on the graph also showed heartbeat returning to normal exactly at the moment I felt it do so. It was also able to show things like skipped beats. Strongly recommend.
I thought about getting a Kardia but in practice the app was as much as I needed. Is this just for personal checking, or does your friend need the alert?
Corvos
1mo ago
I think it means, as you say, specific, personal drama from other forums. If I recall correctly, someone got tempbanned a few years ago for making a top-level post that was just a blow-by-blow of drama they'd had on a different site. I would guess the intent is to prevent the Motte being recruited for internet raids and turf wars. Probably less relevant now we aren't on reddit.
I think this enemies put him under more pressure than a man can reasonably be expected to bear, and eventually it was too much. I still vividly remember the Cathy Newman (Channel 4) interview: I have never seen an interviewer more clearly intent on ruining someone. He won that bout, but enduring that over and over again would wreck anybody.
In case it's not obvious, I have a lot of sympathy for Peterson. Many influencers are indeed obnoxious grifters, but Peterson really does seem to have been a good man who was trying his best. Having people come after you like that changes the way you look at the world. I had a much smaller, more intimate experience along the same lines and it definitely radicalised me in many ways.
My explanation for the modern southerners being the intended target:
Most modern southerners are the descendants of Confederate soldiers. They live in the same places, have the same names, sing the same songs and sometimes wave the same flags. Like most people, they generally prefer to venerate their ancestor's impressive deeds whilst downplaying or forgetting the ones they disagree with.
Taking their statues, deliberately mutilating them, and then melting them down can be seen as, and was seen as, an attack on those people. It's saying, "This is what I think of your history, this is what I think of your pride," and it's also saying, "you can't stop me from destroying things that matter to you".
You may think that southerners shouldn't have taken it personally, but they did. And on observing this fact, the Left did not go, "Shit, dude, I'm sorry. I didn't realise this stuff mattered to you." They went, "Ha! Suck it, racists." Which to my mind tells you who they were aiming at.
In other words, it's 1.
More options
Context Copy link