Corvos
1hr ago
Duly noted. It's one of those terrible language things where the correct answer appears in your mind and then you think, 'hang on, I remember getting this wrong before,' and then you swap it round and you get it wrong and the whole ghastly cycle repeats.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Corvos
2hr ago
I have been climbing stairs very aggressively.
I'm not quite sure of the maximally aggressive way to climb stairs. I have this image of a Teutonic figure ein-drei-zwei-ing his way up and down 10 flights for half an hour, moustache bristling, possibly with a longsword slung over his shoulders.
From a foreigner's perspective, all of that Imperial presidency stuff is happening because voters want things that congress isn’t providing.
I would estimate that 20% of the population max are principled states’ rights maximalists. The other 80% want ‘good things for me and my brothers and sisters in the rest of America’ and they want to be able to move around without risking those things. They can’t agree on those things which is why we have all our modern drama but that’s by the by.
If you dam a river and the throughput of your dam is insufficient for the pressure of the river, that dam’s going to end up underwater.
Corvos
1d ago
The Founders envisioned 'Citizen Legislators' who returned to their farms and businesses.
The thing is, you cannot nowadays become a leading politician in idle moments between managing your farms and businesses. Not unless you are a wealthy landowner who doesn't need to spend the first 35 years of their life building those things or working their way up the corporate ladder.
Corvos
3d ago
Even if we're discounting rhythm in AI prose, though, there are many other reasons it's bad. There's a lack of structure at any level, other than randomly inserted lists and stuff, and it's fraught with all sorts of repetitions and other inefficiencies. It blurs meanings, inserts arbitrary detail, hallucinates, forgets stuff, etc. Much of this is difficult to be seen at a paragraph level. It's the kind of thing that builds on itself, until you're left with a tottering spire of slop.
I don't actually disagree with this. I enjoy using it for roleplay and I think it does novel-writing fine, but I had to push my CEO quite hard to stop using it for business communications and info summaries because the structure is always wrong somehow. That is, the structure is appropriate for this kind of communication but not for the actual info being communicated. It's hard to describe what I mean but 'arbitrary detail' describes it well. It's like the student essays I used to mark where you aren't sure if it's incomprehensible because you're tired or because the student can't write.
Corvos
3d ago
Maybe your second language is stuck in 'the virgin internal voice', and only your native tongue escapes to 'the chad cerebration'.
Oh god, my eyes. I cerebrated your meme and now I can't uncerebrate it...
What's the context of it?
I like to think both have their place, and it is advantageous to be able to swap between them.
I take your point. I actually can't swap in my second language (and really want to find out why) and in my first language I've never really dared try because reading and remembering fast is an ability I value and worry about losing.
you choose your words on account of the syllable sounds and count and plosive arrangements in addition to their semantic content
I am convinced there is a huge difference in reading interests between those who hear what they read as an inner voice and those who don’t.
In my native tongue, the sounds and rhythms of what I read mean almost nothing to me. I look at it, and the knowledge it encodes appears in my brain. That means I read very quickly and have very little interest in artful writing or poetry, but a great deal of interest in plot and character.
In my second language, for whatever reason I can’t do this. I read much more slowly and care much more about how things are written.
I strongly suspect this is responsible for much of the gap between ‘literary’ forms and appreciations of writing and ‘genre’ standards of writing.
Do you hear these sounds when you read, or later on analysis of the text?
Corvos
4d ago
If you say something contentious enough to trigger a dogpile, you have to reply to every comment on it.
Corvos
4d ago
Just to be clear, this meeting happened to you specifically? Oliver Sacks wrote about a similar case and I found it very striking, but I wasn’t sure if he’d made it up.
Corvos
5d ago
While I disagree with Crow’s second paragraph, I can definitely see why he’s creeped out at people who believe ‘my life and all of yours are meaningless flotsam, no meaningful relationship between us can exist, even if I kill you nothing important dies’ having influence in his life or his community.
Corvos
5d ago
Hypothesis: in a modern society, law and regulation is simply too complex for an MP or congressman to learn in the time they have, much less meaningfully edit. That would be if democratic politics selected for autistic systems people to begin with, which it doesn’t.
These people *have * to delegate their power to professionals one way or the other. All that’s stopped is they no longer have the fig leaf of ‘approving’ the one page summary that the person with real power gives them.
Corvos
5d ago
The view over the hilltops. The taste of Toad in the Hole. The ways and pastimes of a people.
A constitution is a very thin wrapper over the customs of centuries, which is why Britain never bothered with one.
Corvos
6d ago
I'm confused. How many people in the US would be actually surprised/outraged if we got into a hot war and someone bombed a military base, which also had a school on it? We'd be upset about getting bombed at all, but I don't think the fact that a school on the base also got hit would add to the upsetness. It seems like a legit strike would also harm people at the school.
Looking at what's been happening in Ukraine, Iran and so on, I think that you'd (plural) be incandescent. It would immediately form the basis of huge volumes of war propaganda against the baby-killers for domestic consumption. Diplomats from the UK would be dragged in front of a mike and ask why they aren't doing more to stop innocent American children being slaughtered. Meanwhile any unfortunate civilian casualties abroad would be targeting accidents resulting from the enemy's perfidy in leaving children next to their bases, unlike the US which is (..now) doing everything possible to get them out of harm's way.
That just seems to be how war is.
Corvos
6d ago
I do wonder how much selective empathy is going on.
Bucketloads, on all sides. In general the wars of the last decade have really opened my eyes to the fact that most people can't have empathy (even nominally) for the opposing side of a conflict that they actually care about.
(I don't claim immunity to the phenomenon myself, and noticing that has been pretty creepy too. Especially since noticing it doesn't actually change it.)
Ultimately wars don't start when the leader of a formerly peaceful nation wakes up and decides to kill some people, they are an escalation of a violent and hostile relationship. If invading Iranian territory and killing its head of state doesn't make A+I the aggressors, probably aggressor/defender is the wrong way to look at this conflict.
For example, if Iran had nuked America six months ago, I think people would call them the aggressor even though America was imposing heavy sanctions i.e. blockades on them, had multiple times threatened/attempted to/historically actually achieved regime change, was attacking them via regional proxies (Israel) and had already bombed them.
I don't think it's about being old or young. The wars of our great-grandparents' day were existential, at least if you were in Europe. And notably the one party in the Iran conflict for whom this stuff is - rightly or wrongly - somewhat existential is Israel and they are ultimately pretty accepting of casualties. Likewise Ukraine.
If you are American of course it's a bit more complicated, but I still think that WW2 was visibly more urgent from an American POV in ways that created greater tolerance for large-scale casualties. Japan attacked the US; and the Nazi regime were very powerful, very dangerous genuine racial supremacists who had taken over France and Poland, presided over mass bombing and mass executions, and had the explicit goal of ethnic cleansing Eastern Europe for German expansion. Putin just isn't in the same league, and neither is Iran.
Corvos
6d ago
Labour in the UK are trying surprisingly hard as well, from what I can see. Not doing that well but definitely much more than I was expecting - and more than the Tories for that matter.
Corvos
6d ago
Makes sense. I was thinking that 'inability to explain' or denial at that age might be simple inarticulacy / fear of adults or authority rather than literal amnesia or dissociation.
Fascinating! I am once again in awe of the TV showrunners of House who realised that a medical mystery could be swapped for a crime mystery.
During normal daily activities, the boy would suddenly freeze. He would look incredibly distressed, and then he would get the human equivalent of the zoomies. He would sprint around the room. After the running stopped, he would approach his mother or older sister and bite them. Sometimes he bit hard enough to draw blood. He could not explain why he did this or what he experienced during the episodes.
Aggression related to panic attacks?
I looked at him again. He was a perfectly normal, fidgety kid missing a few baby teeth. There were no obvious signs of hydrophobia, though I mentally filed rabies under "highly unlikely but technically possible."
He'd be dead, wouldn't he? Survival time is usually less than a week after symptoms appear, though I'm surprised to learn you can have morbid rabies for months or years before symptoms show up.
EDIT: google AI lied about its sources but 'within a few days' does seem accurate: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/13848-rabies. Other sources say one to two weeks: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/rabies/for-health-professionals.html
In the nicest possible way, a lot of these justifications seem deeply hypocritical and self-serving.
I am glad to be told this by my benevolent overlord.
America, unlike Iran, famously never uses its dominance of key global markets to get its way /s
You have killed their president! And let us not forget that America created the Taliban, supports Kurdish rebels, and almost certainly aids and abets Mossad campaigns of sabotage and assassination in Iran. There is no possible way that America can present itself as a principled objector to asymmetric warfare.
It's weird how unstable American global stability feels. More to the point, this is precisely the kind of behaviour that spurs people to make nukes. It's now absolutely undeniable that any country who doesn't wish their cities razed and their leaders black-bagged when America feels like it, needs nukes that aren't controlled by America. Even the UK Labour party now supports getting a new nuclear deterrent that's not American-controlled. These people were unilateral abolitionists 5 years ago! America eying European and Canadian territory and licking their lips doesn't help even slightly.
'If this goes badly, that makes it even more important to do it!' That's a Kafka trap.
The moral argument I give you, but taking that seriously seems to demand that:
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