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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

For that matter, don't use an email to sign up at all. Insane to associate one when you're allowed to skip it - one of the few things I liked about Reddit was their similar lack of an email requirement.

All right, I'm going to dig back in when I get a minute! Thanks for the recommendations.

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...)

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

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.

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...)

Deprived of organized religion, man inevitably turns back to dualism, and the good god Progress needs her dark sibling. Call him Ahriman, Moloch, or Capitalism, the name reflects the namer more than the reality.

Less tongue in cheek, I think the fact that poverty is the natural state of humanity is what people miss. It's very easy to see negative consequences of our economic system, and I can't/won't try to refute those. On the other hand, the billions of children not dying in poverty and starvation because of economic liberalization are easy to miss.

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...)

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.

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.

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?

I have been trying to get into Persuasion by Austen, after realizing that I'd never read a single Jane Austen novel. So far, funnier than I expected, but I'm missing a fair bit of context. There's also a lot more "tell rather than show" than I would expect, but that may just be the first few chapters.

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.

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.

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.

It's certainly not as nice as a good 1911, but the Sig P365 that I carry occasionally is by far my favorite polymer handgun I've ever shot. It doesn't make much sense - the frame is tiny, but it fits my hand better than many full size pistols. Certainly better than any Glock. I know it goes against consensus, but I really hate that "rattley" feel Glocks have.

But the absolute most fun with a pistol I've had is with my 22 suppressor and Ruger Mark IV, with a custom trigger and a heavy bull barrel. Zero recoil, sounds like a BB gun, and I can terrorize soda cans at 75 yards offhand.

I know it's a tedious comment to make, but the only thing that worked for me was stopping drinking.

There are plenty of good ways to minimize hangovers if you drink in moderation, but in my experience every one of them fails in the face of sufficient whiskey. If you're drinking plenty of water, getting plenty of sleep, taking painkillers, and you still have hangovers... you might want to consider the root cause.

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?

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'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.

Hola! Going to take a while to get used to the new interface, coming from old.reddit, but it's good to get away from that site.

Now I just need to figure out the custom CSS and get threads made clearer - seems hard to read.

Oh, certainly, I'm not saying the only thing holding us back from von Neumann probes and a Dyson sphere is mass to orbit! But if you skip autonomy, on orbit mining, and on-orbit manufacturing, you can still make a business case for the simplest asteroid mining possible:

  1. Identify asteroid with 100 tons of platinum

  2. Launch intercept/dock mission a la Hayabusa

  3. Slow burn for intercept course with Earth using ion propulsion a la Dawn (not to mention Starlink and a million Soviet spacecraft)

  4. Crash it in the desert and recover contents

100 tons of platinum is only a couple billion dollars, so this only works once launch prices for the monstrous probe necessary for something like this are reasonable and you can cut costs on the probe by removing the anal mass optimization currently necessary.

This is obviously far less revolutionary than true asteroid mining with on-orbit processing and manufacturing, which is what will kickstart the off-Earth economy, if we ever get there. Still, it's a start.

Treaties banning weapons only work when people either can't or don't want to build those weapons. We have treaties banning chemical weapons because no one wants to either use them or have them used on them. On the other hand, we had some treaties limiting the Russian and US nuclear arsenals because neither of us wanted to keep burning capital on the race.

Neither is the case here - the US is poised to gain a quantity advantage in space that no one outside of China will be able to match. (And China only if they can keep fast-following, since they're behind right now.) You can be sure the brass in the Space Force would love nothing more than to scale up Delta 9.

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.

Yep - there's a reason the "us against the world" meme is unkillable. If Clyde's got Bonnie, he can go without status if need be.

Not to mention the growing contingent of men with neither relationships or status...