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EyesAlight

Formerly blendorgat

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joined 2022 September 04 22:18:44 UTC

				

User ID: 207

EyesAlight

Formerly blendorgat

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:18:44 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 207

It feels vaguely alt-right-twitter-fascist to argue aesthetics like this, but come on. Everyone in that illustration is obese, save the two women wearing burkas, and though I personally rather like the way they look, the intention of a burka is to make women less attractive. Both buildings in the background have graffiti, including a delightful short paean to "CLIT" on the front door of the apartment building.

Opinions differ on the aesthetic quality of tattoos and piercings, but if you ask me they can be attractive only in isolation. When everyone in the foreground has a tattoo, piercings, or both, it's hard to argue that looks good.

And, sigh, though I don't personally have a problem with it.... it's worth saying the quiet part out loud: less than a third of the people in that illustration could be mistaken for ethnic Germans. That's a fine vision for America, but in a country where ~90% of citizens have European ancestry, what is that trying to say? What would it say if I put together a poster of my vision for South Africa and 3/4 of the people depicted were white?

Negligible, unless retroactively incorporated into the story of WW3 just because it occurred around the same time.

There aren't any great powers on the side of Hamas, only Iran, and only partially. There are chances it could escalate to a war with Iran, but that would not be a world war.

The reality is: the next world war occurs either because China attacks Taiwan, or Russia invades a NATO country. The latter is... extremely unlikely.

I'm also quite curious for an uncensored perspective on this. I knew it was bad, but the story below about being site-banned for coloring a pixel in the canvas thing is so far beyond what I knew about it really threw me. I've always pushed back against the ring of Gyges story, but if admins are willing to go that far just because they know no one will ever find out...

I've gotten stuck in a rut of reading Lit-RPG recently, which I really need to extricate myself from. Just finished the published books of Defiance of the Fall, which was a nice mix of the Chinese cultivation genre with lit-RPG. Still, if I just read 3,000 pages of something with more substance, I imagine I would feel better about my reading habits.

Eh, I think the use of the word "race" in that quote misleads a bit. All Churchill is really getting across is the old reply to Melos: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Not a very Christian perspective of Churchill, and not one I agree with, but he's not just saying that there's a hierarchy of races, and if you're lower you have no moral claim against your betters.

I agree, the writing seems significantly above average for a CRPG. Characterization is a bit weak for non-companions, and I do agree with the complaint that the world feels too small. But compared to most of the dreck you see nowadays, it's really quite good. (Still, when the "fate of the world" is at stake, I'm level 9, and Elminster dips into my camp to say hi then leaves, it feels a little silly.)

The big defining feature of Larian games is the way they try to simulate everything: you can throw a bottle of water to put out a fire, or throw somebody off a cliff to kill them, or pickpocket your enemies Big Sword before the fight. If anything, it's like Skyrim as a CRPG. There are pluses and minuses to that, and honestly, I would prefer an old-Bioware or Obsidian take on the gameplay, but it's still fun.

The most recent CRPG I'd played was Wrath of the Righteous, which I liked more, if only because it had a really defined identity of its own. That, and Pathfinder/3.5 is strictly superior to 5e.

I think I'm about due for a reread of Blindsight - I read it years ago online and loved it, but at the time I hadn't read much about consciousness. My (vague) recollection was that it mostly elides the hard problem of consciousness. I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

In the era of LLMs, that seems pretty silly, since ChatGPT (or at least the un-neutered Bing) can do a great job of pretending to experience. But maybe there was less hand-waving than I'm remembering?

Biological reproduction rates pale in comparison to memetic ones. Ignoring the unfortunate reality that effectively no one has found a policy capable of flipping fertility declines, what use is a Russia of 400 million if 300 million read the New York Times, or at least watch Marvel movies?

As with so many things in space, I think the timeline is driven by one binary variable: does SpaceX's vision of a rapidly reusable Starship come to fruition?

If it does, asteroid mining goes from a pipe dream to a reality in the blink of an eye. So many things that work in principle work in reality once you can toss a hundred tons to orbit every day of the week.

Is there a transcript available? I'm enjoying Network State so far, but spending 7 hours listening to a podcast which I could read in a half hour is not going to work.

Have any of the Borges essays stood out to you? I've had that on my bookshelf for years, but I didn't ever get into it like I do his short stories. (I've read straight through Ficciones several times...)

Also took the change to change my name; never really liked "blendorgat". I used to use a random phrase generator for all my usernames, but my paranoia levels have decreased somewhat. (Which is to say, I'm still using a randomly generated phrase, but not distinguishing between sites anymore...)

Since we don't use it to order or hide posts (I think?), I don't think having downvotes hurts too much. What I'd like to see are additional or replacement dimensions. LessWrong added an "Agree/Disagree" vote, which I like, with the original upvotes indicating quality alone. That can make it easier to get the highly upvoted, highly disagreed with posts that are really the ideal.

English, courtesy of GPT4: https://pastebin.com/UPGRajKA

There are a few places like this which really stuck out to me. At the beginning of Act III, some refugees are squatting in a merchants house, and you come across him asking his guards to clear out the house. The situation is presented as a moral dilemma, which is immediately undermined when you read the merchants mind and find out he's smuggling terrorist bombs into the city, okaying your inevitable slaughter of the guards and the man.

Seems to shirk away from any actual dilemma: if an apparent conflict between the players incentives (XP + GOLD) and morality arises, there's always an out so you can satisfy your desire to be good and still get the cash.

Keeping your shibboleths opaque is good practice if you're trying to identify true descendants of Jacob in ancient Canaan, but is it really a concern here?

As I see it, if people post in line with the local post-rationalist idiolect, and do it in a thoughtful and considered way, who cares if they were reading EY on LW in 2008 or if they first heard about SSC from the NYT? There isn't some Platonic ideal of a Mottian which one can possess or not. (Or maybe there is and we need to institute a series of membership trials? That would be fun, if somewhat impractical)

If somebody comes in and tries to dissemble by talking about their "priors" while simultaneously arguing that certain ideas are harmful and we ought to censor them, they're going to stick out like a sore thumb. Using the right lingo won't hide that.

You can never be perfectly secure, no matter how many resources you spend on the path there. After having my identity stolen a few years ago, I ramped up my level of paranoia, but even when you're dealing with financial issues you can only go so far.

In my opinion, the most important layers I use are:

  1. Use a separate, randomly generated password for each site, tracked in an offline encrypted password store

  2. Don't admit to criminal activity online, or make any statements that would pass the "local newspaper headline" bar

  3. Harden your personal finances and personal relationships so they're robust to perturbation

From 1, there is no correlated danger from any particular site being hacked, even if they're storing passwords in plaintext. (Which I certainly hope we're not doing here...)

From 2, you acknowledge the fact that any anonymizing procedure can always be broken, and mitigate the consequences regardless. I don't care if it's a VPN, Tor, or your own personal series of hardware proxies, it can be broken. The only way out is to act within your risk tolerance. I'm confident that if someone came up to my boss with some mildly spicy rant I wrote on the Motte, he'd be glad to ignore it so long as it didn't draw public attention. Thus, the local paper headline limit.

From 3, which I admit is a bit beyond scope, you make certain that should the worst happen you'll be all right regardless. (And financial independence is a good thing to have regardless.)

If somebody intends to spend their life as a hardcore political dissident, these sorts of measures aren't sufficient, but then I'm not intending to do that.

"Just bow before the golden statue, you don't have to mean it."

On the first level, it's always rational to give in to threats of force when you are uncertain that you can resist, and never more so than when all you have to do is give up some wispy theoretical thing like "sovereignty". Just calculate the probability weighted present value of future benefits and select the decision branch that maximizes it, right?

But game theory is baked into human nature: tit for tat is optimal in some games, but we go even further to ensure deterrence. Break into my house and I'll shoot you; invade some Roman lands and they'll destroy Carthage; blow up a battleship in harbor and America will bend every resource to your complete submission or annihilation.

In repeated games, vengeance is rational, and resistance in the face of impossible odds is logical.

Minimizing the present value of human suffering is not, and never has been, the primary aim of a nation at war.

This is exactly correct, and I think it is the true aim of some of the Israeli leadership at this point. That breaking point may be very far along the line however, given the experiences of the 20th century, and I'm not convinced the Israelis have the will to go as far as they will need to.

The analogy above someone used of the war with Japan is a good one: in that case the US acted continually as if their goal was the complete subjugation of the Japanese people at any cost, if not through unconditional surrender then by annihilation. That approach works, but you have to follow it - you can't bluff at it.

The lack of a free/cheap teleportation ability really hurts it - 75% of the fun of DOS2 was from having that thing ready to go at all times. You get telekinesis as a level 5 spell, but that's obscenely expensive to move some crates around, and dimension door only teleports one person. It's a bit painful.

I don't disagree with the thesis, but a man in grief from losing his wife and daughter taking foolish actions is not some modern affectation... Maybe I'd complain if he was a priest of some dark god, but Selune isn't presented that way.

But that's exactly my point - they shouldn't and won't. From the perspective of a hypothetical emperor of Russia, if you were to focus on one thing, population numbers are simply not the primary driver of success. You have to convince people that your cause is right. That's not just a post-modern perspective, that's the task of every leader in human history. (In some systems those you have to convince are an aristocracy, in some the wealthy, in others almost everyone, but it always works the same way.)

The Internet and automatic translation simply makes it impossible to be a big fish in a small pond, as your "subjects" will be inculcated in the most effective (read:virulent) ideas that they are exposed to on the web. You either win on that battlefield, or on the physical one. Putin was at least wise enough to recognize that he and his nation weren't up to the memetic battlefield; his mistake was overestimating Russia's ability on the physical plane.

Remarkable lack of conviction - if you cross the Rubicon, you have to enter Rome. Unless this was prearranged for some inscrutable 15D chess reasons, and probably even then, Putin has to have Prigozhin killed.

Then again, no one said Prigozhin was a genius. Maybe he just doesn't realize the gravity of the situation.

Is there a level of technology that would render these questions solvable?

I'm not aware of any device or software that could even move us closer to solving the hard problem of consciousness. (Maybe sufficient biological knowledge to construct a synthetic human fully from scratch would help somehow, but even some deity-AI that destroys our civilization won't be able to trivially do that...)