Corvos
6hr ago
My parents (admittedly over 60 now) can't reliably open a browser on a laptop. They certainly have no idea what a QR code is. The idea that parents will be able to find the parental controls, understand what they're doing, and set them independently is unlikely in many cases, so they have to trust their children. In ten years it may be quite different but right now I think that's still the reality and realistically Discord has to bear that in mind.
Corvos
6hr ago
Has there been a non-Baltic Western state that dissolved in the last couple of centuries? I can't think of any offhand. Austria-Hungary was dissolved by force post WW1, as was Germany post WW2.
Corvos
1d ago
I'm skeptical that there is some breakout male author who could bring in male readers the way these authors bring in female readers (the last truly cross-gender mass phenomenon was probably Harry Potter and even that was a majority female fanbase). I'm very skeptical that publishing would refuse to print it if they actually smelled that kind of money.
The thing is, famous authors start off as un-famous authors. Their reputation is grown by getting good publicity and bookshelf deals from the publisher while they're still nobodies, and they don't want to do this for men as much as for women and minorities. That's why by-men-for-men fiction only thrives in places like Japan and genres like litrpg where it's customary to pluck authors from the highly-ranked webnovel lists, which make it possible to gauge their potential without investing in them.
Corvos
1d ago
How old are you? I would say things generally start going wrong at about 30 - I got a gastric problem from a not-great diet that had been fine up until then plus some heart stuff, my friend did something permanent to his ankle skiing, somebody else started getting serious insomnia, etc.
Zoomers seem incapable of enjoying a story in which a character has values different from theirs, and furthermore they are prone to assuming that the author is endorsing those values.
I have more general thoughts on your post that I may flesh out later. Responding to this specifically, I think the dirty secret of 2016-2023 is that most woke callouts and twitter mobs were directionally accurate. People are actually pretty good at making friend/enemy distinctions and picking up on hidden feelings. Obviously the actual content of many of the accusations were bollocks but I strongly suspect that most people who ended up having trouble with the woke (including me) were genuinely reluctant or fake converters to the cause and thus, by woke standards, enemies.
The same is true for authors' values. Seen from a purely political, non-artistic perspective, putting badthink in your books is transmitting it to your readers. Rooting for the Empire is a common issue. To quote Blake re: Milton's Paradise Lost: "[Milton] was of the Devil's party, and never knew it". Even putting this aside, you run into the problem that in a hostile society lots of authors do deliberately assign their real views to a villain, to give their grievances and fantasies an airing with plausible deniability. In pre-liberal times, it was common (I am told) to write long volumes of risque smut before the heroine abruptly realises her mistake and spends the final chapter as a fallen, repentant woman.
One might believe that the artistic merit / enjoyment engendered by a book massively outweighs its potential for spreading badthink with plausible deniability, or one might not. But I will put forward that these positions are both preference choices rather than one being correct and the other being a fallacy.
More to the point, I think, in the Potterverse and in most pre-Millenium British fantasy novels magic has an implicit moral understructure. For example, the love of one person sacrificing themself for another is a powerful protective force against evil. Dumbledore makes it pretty clear that there are far deeper forces in the world than the paltry stuff that wizards usually throw around and regularly criticises Voldemort for fundamentally misunderstanding how magic works. You cannot feed yourself on magic - you cannot transfigure food. There is literally a room full of Love in the Department of Mysteries that is so terrible and dangerous that his lock-pick melts when he tries to enter.
I suspect that part of this moral superstructure is the implicit rule that you cannot magically hide your true self for long. Voldemort literally becomes ugly as he mutilates his soul. Harry’s father has an inherent nobility and his Animagus form is a stag, where Wormtail becomes a rat, and it is not possible I think for that to be reversed.
Trans people then seem to be ruled out. Even if you believe the trans identity is the reality, then I would think that spells would work better.
Corvos
1d ago
Have you ever watched Primeval? It was made in the early 2000s with the tech from Walking With Dinosaurs and broadly follows that premise.
Fan-trailer here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JLir0TDJ3GY?feature=shared
Corvos
2d ago
My biggest personal grip with litrpg is when the story reads like a D&D campaign converted into a novel. The fights feel like a string of meaningless encounters.
This was the big problem with Worth the Candle for me. It felt like the author had a list of a hundred 'super cool D&D adventures' that he wanted to fit in, and just slotted them one after another, with only the barest excuse for why they were happening. I grant that this is somewhat justified by the setting, but it doesn't make it good writing.
Corvos
3d ago
Isn’t that what we’re doing here? To my mind, this explained better by @kky’s theory of traction.
The average person has no idea how to get from “I am upset about this” to “I am taking effective (paramilitary?) action against it”. If I remember correctly, both the CIA handbook for building an internal insurgency and the famous “Rules for Radicals” both hypothesise that showing supporters intermediate steps along this path is the primary purpose of an effective resistance movement.
Corvos
3d ago
But consider the potential SOTA in a year or two, when they're comfortably at par with mid-level coders. A senior SWE is usually happy to delegate to multiple experienced juniors, without worrying too much about the exact implementation details. My impression is that we're not there yet.
AFAIK it's usually mandatory for all written code to be reviewed before it's merged into the code base. At my last company every Pull Request (submitted code) had to be reviewed by two people, plus or including the 'owner' of the files in question. Review is usually considered a very onerous duty to be avoided where possible, and in theory reviewers bear as much responsibility for the final output as the original writer. The purpose is partly to inspect the quality of the code and to make sure it's doing what's expected (even senior guys fuck up) and partly to make sure that at least a few people are familiar with each part of the codebase.
This was at a 'move-fast-and-break-things' company. The review standards at somewhere like Intel are of course significantly higher.
Corvos
3d ago
one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years
I’m no doctor but you’re going to need a really oblivious mortician to present an eight year old corpse as fresh :P
Bonus question: if a man dies at 40 and gets WfB’d for another 3 years, is he:
- a 3 year old corpse
- a 40 year old corpse
- a 43 year old corpse
Genuinely not sure.
Corvos
3d ago
I’m quite happy to take the actual point of the copypasta and accept that the wrapping is for dramatic effect.
Mostly I’m responding to the idea that the prior posts weren’t downvoted for being on the wrong side of the debate but for being rude.
It seems to me there’s a charitable and an uncharitable way to read any of these posts and that the ‘wrong’ side gets less charity by and large. IMO the same copypasta would be downvoted to hell if it was an anti gun message in the same format.
Don’t have any actual action items I’m pushing for here, I just think the phenomenon is obvious and worth noting.
What about things like quaternions, which suddenly became relevant when we needed to interpolate 3D transforms and do rotations without Gimbal lock? The current best process for calibrating cameras is to use dual quats, which also means needing dual number theory. Were those areas originally expected to be useful for engineering? My understanding is no, but I'm not a mathematician.
Corvos
3d ago
when someone posts some shit implying me and anyone who shares my views is as out-of-touch as Principal Skinner from the Simpsons
The 'children' in this case are all the other countries in the First World. The point is that American disputes tend to act as if the rest of the world doesn't exist, hence cject's OP implying that nobody anywhere has any trust in their fellow citizens except in certain parts of the US and in the Third World, which I find frankly ridiculous.
And this is in fact my point. People, not just you but in general, immediately leap from 'I don't like this opinion' to forming the worst possible interpretation of the post and then downvote. Meanwhile they apply much more generous standards to people who agree with them. This is Confirmation Bias 101, everyone knows humans do this. These are such sensitive issues and the resultant standards are so strict that, in practice, (and, yes, in my opinion since as you point out I am not Tzar of internet points) there is no meaningful gap between "a complaint about different standards" and "downvoted for merely making an argument".
Corvos
3d ago
Fair points, but verification is usually way cheaper than generation. If one actual human PhD can monitor a dozen AI agents, it is plausible that the value prop makes sense.
Not necessarily! It's an adage among programmers that reviewing somebody else's code is often harder than making your own, because you have to figure it all out and then try to create some ideal version in your head and mesh the two together.
It's actually a big issue with vibe-coding - I end up with a codebase I don't understand and then have to do the work of figuring out the framework for myself anyway.
FWIW I agree with you that certain arguments get much more downvoted than others. The commenters below aren't wrong, but they are applying very different standards to those for the pro-gun arguments. "Are the children wrong?" is not on par with "Listen up, you dumb motherfucker" in terms of rudeness. It can't be helped, people are just like that, including me. Minor imperfections or rhetorical flourishes in an argument disagreeing with you are much clearer than those from people on your side.
Broadly, I think we just have to accept that the bar is different for different posts. I'm reasonably proud (not that I care about dumb internet points hem hem) that my comment in that thread stayed above 0.
Broadly I would say:
-
Popular opinion, well written: 30-40
-
Popular opinion, badly written: 10-20
-
Unpopular opinion, well written: 0
-
Unpopular opinion, badly written: -10
-
Unpopular opinion, gratuitously insulting: -30.
Those are the numbers to try and beat.
Corvos
4d ago
We’ve got a base there, so we’re renting the islands back again from their ‘rightful owners’. Nothing will actually change, Mauritius will just have lots of our tax money now.
Corvos
4d ago
You’re right, I wasn’t really thinking about extracting max value from limited compute.
Corvos
4d ago
This is still my benchmark for what serious AI research should be thinking about:
Corvos
4d ago
The total salary of all therapists is surely far higher than the combined salary of all nuclear engineers? I tried to find aggregate employment figures and failed.
Broadly, there are huge amounts of people who are very lonely and unable realistically to fix that. I think the value from providing a real-enough friend to them would be vastly more valuable in both utilitarian and monetary terms than almost anything else. I hope of course to move to an open, almost-free solution.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if europhiles in the UK would rather be part of Macron's vision of "Strategic autonomy" than America's junior partner when it comes to foreign policy
Not a chance. Joining AUKUS was a giant middle finger to the French (who had been supplying the original contract) and a very visible symbol of allegiance to America over European integration. This is why DeGaulle tried to keep us out of the EU, he figured Anglo instincts would come to the fore.
preferring neutrality in the case of a Taiwan-based active conflict)
Neutrality maybe. But definitely not taking the Chinese side. More like our position re: Ukraine.
The forthcoming UK recognition of Palestine is I think an example that leftist anti-western opinion definitely has a role in UK policy-making.
I was going to have a sentence excluding that specifically but I mean global power politics between the big players. Being pro-Palestine is different, it’s going against US desires but it’s not siding with Russia or China except incidentally.
Corvos
4d ago
Maybe, though I think that's a mistake on his part. In any case it sounds like I misread you:
I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you
so apologies for that.
If he thinks that (and I’m not sure he does, America has been very anti the sale) then he’s an idiot. The UK is reflexively pro-America.
I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you, because the UK criticises America (especially Trump and MAGA) so much, but it’s still true. The UK sees its criticism as coming from a colleague in the same tent, and will never side with China or Russia or really any other power on a matter of serious geopolitics. All we ask for in return is some subsidies and some head pats but we will make do even without.
There are maniac Leftists of course, even in the government, but they hold no influence on these matters and they will certainly not support Russia/China over America.
I doubt the same is true of the Mauritius.
Corvos
4d ago
I agree completely, especially with
a nightmare of feeling impotent and trapped
This was a big part of Yes, Minister's critique - the Civil Service and 'British Democracy' might be all that stands between us and barbarism, but isn't it convenient that this lines up so neatly with what they wanted to do anyway?
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