IguanaBowtie
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User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
Baldur's Gate 2 - IMO the jewel of Bioware's golden age, Dragon Age and Mass Effect might have surpassed it if not for the EA buyout, it holds up great to this day. I keep meaning to try Wrath of the Righteous which seems like as close as I'll likely ever get to a spiritual successor.
Path of Exile - More of a character-optimization simulator than a 'role playing' experience, it's still the best there is at what it does. (and the worldbuilding and lore is surprisingly tight for an ARPG, at least in acts 1-4) And there's nothing wrong with some roll-playing, some of my favorite tabletop campaigns have been filled with nigh-silly theoretical charop bullshit. Once you get to maps Chris Wilson owns your soul.
A few recent indie favorites: AstLibra (a weird Japanese JRPG/beat-em-up hybrid 1-man passion project), Phoenotopia Awakening (a zelda2-like with gorgeous sprite graphics), Crosscode (closest might be Secret of Mana, set inside a MMO world)
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
I take this, among countless other examples of woke values being shoehorned into popular geekdom and fandom subcultural iconography, as textbook syncretism.
The trick is, while syncretic content is often extremely transparent and obnoxious to adherents of the old faith, there's nothing keeping it from being perfectly good on its own merits. (beyond 'being based on something good' seeming to not help with Sturgeon's law in the slightest) Often you get a 'Last Jedi' that takes off like a lead balloon, but sometimes you get a 'Santa Claus' that wildly eclipses the cultural impact of the original inspirations.
For better or for worse, Woke really wants to absorb and convert Fandom, and is going to keep trying until it sticks or they lose the cultural dominance neccessary to credibly continue. As annoying as it is, it could be worse, and the harder fandom holds out for reasonable quality syncretism, the more their values get baked into Woke rather than vice versa. (As it's necessarily a two-way street)
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
A quick peek confirmed my suspicious: Chinese movie posters (and probably much of the advertsing) show Miles prominently mostly while masked.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2Bu6z6asFL.SL500_AC_SS350.jpg
The film also has a big cast, including some Asian spider-people iirc.
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
There's an underappreciated element here IMO: the instinctive refusal to utter fighting words while not being a fighter. The brain is capable of marvelous feats of self-deception & motivated reasoning not only in order to protect its self-image, but also to physically protect itself from harm, ie. by preventing the adoption of beliefs that will get its owner's ass kicked.
How often do we straightforwardly tell another person "I'm smarter than you"? I've never done it; I imagine most people haven't. With good reason: it's a challenge, 'fighting words', as it fairly directly implies 'so we should do things my way if we come to a disagreement' AKA 'I'm in charge now.' This isn't something any social structure can let stand, but modern white America even less than most, with its reliance upon poorly-defined social hierarchy for avoiding conflict. (See: VKR's Gametalk) If you're middle class, went to university or worked for a corporation, chances are very good that you've been extensively trained to subconciously avoid conflicts of precisely this type, and it may well be that this taboo is load-bearing. Scaled up, saying 'my group is smarter than your group' has even more serious social ramifications, again independent of the statement's truth value. Pretending it isn't so may be the best alternative.
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
I do recall liberals being pretty upset by Ted 'the Zodiac' Cruz. And Rubio, and Christie, and the rest of the republican slate, even Jeb Bush. At first they were worried about Trump the least of all of them.
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
I'm only loosely familar with commercial real estate lending (I did residential lending) but a major difference is that commercial lenders typically require market LTV maintenance whis means ~ margin calls. If your property tanks by 50% in current market value, your bank is going to call you & demand cash.
Now, they won't intentionally drive a performing loan account into bankruptcy. Banks are worse at liquidating siezed collateral than the original owner, and in any case really just want the loan payments. But if you have a generally solvent business, or you have lots of personal assets & gave personal guarantees (and most small businesses have to) they will absolutely make you shoulder the volatility risk and take your savings to pay down the loan to a % they are comfortable with. You can take the equity back out if & when the proprty appreciates again.
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
I mean, there is another option - take simple steps to anonymize yourself before intervening, and if things go wrong flee the scene. A motivated modern police force can absolutely catch you if they decide to pursue the case, but they have a lot of similarly sad cases on their plates. A single extra "mentally ill vagrant dies in a scuffle he likely started, suspect disappears" isn't going to attract undue law-enforcement resources, and it's going to be suppressed in the media rather than being shouted on the street corners. "Blue-voting city fails its most vulnerable, again" isn't a narrative that pays the bills like "Outgroup member murders innocent in broad daylight", and the boys in blue have even less motivation to track you down in the absence of public outcry.
The downsides I can think of are that if you do get caught you'll be punished more severely, and that certain anonymizing tactics might make you seem like the aggressor and be on the wrong side of further bystander intervention. For the former, I'm not familiar enough with US/NYC law to know how badly, but since it seems probable that Penny is going to jail for a long time, a few more years doesn't seem like a good tradeoff against something like a 90% chance of a clean getaway. For the latter - well, this seems to come up rarely enough that two separate people in a train car being willing to get their hands dirty seems unlikely, and a brawl between unrelated belligerents is less likely to inspire heroics than one-sided harassment.
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
Don't have time for an effortpost, but you lost me at the prologue. Risk-taking behaviors can be meaningful, but I don't at all agree that risk-taking is a prerequisite for psychological fulfillment, and I think the crisis of meaning has a lot more to do with a decline in meaning gleaned from community, spirituality and introspection than that derived from constructively overcoming adversity. (which I'd summarize as 'glory')
Far be it for me to disagree with Conan about what is best in life, and I wouldn't object to plenty of work-culture reforms in the proposed direction, but I don't think they'd cure the disease that's being discussed.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Imo there's plenty that can be done. Cheap & easily obtained govt loans can dissapear by fiat, though of course that's politically unfeasible - more promising is a 'skin in the game' compromise; for schools to be eligible for loan tuition funding, they have to accept clawbacks to pay for loan defaults in some cases. (student flunks out & then goes bankrupt [shouldn't have accepted them], student graduates but isn't able to find a job in his field within a reasonable timeframe then defaults and/or renounces the degree [stop overproducing niche and useless degrees])
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I know this is one of the standard objections, but why are we so certain that our ASI wont just discard its original reward function at some point? We're sexually reproducing mammals with a billion years of optimization to replicate our genes by chasing a pleasure reward, but despite a few centuries of technological whalefall, instead of wireheading as soon as it became feasible (or doing heroin etc) we're mostly engaging in behaviours secondary and tertiary to breeding, which are frequently given higher importance or even fully supplant our theoretical (sticky) telos.
Maybe we got zombie-ant-ed by memetic parasites at some point, but presumably ASI could catch ideology too. Not saying any such values drift would be nice, but personally I'm much less worried about being paperclipped than about being annihilated for inscrutible shoggoth purposes.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
hoo boy, you aren't kidding
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Haha, brings back memories of the game's predecessor, Total Annihilation, which was my jam throughout middle school, and which contained what is still my favorite piece of video game music. (by Jeremy Soule, who went on to score Skyrim. Whole OST is a banger.)
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
The JM Greer breakdown is by source of primary income
-lower class= social assistance payments, food stamps, charity etc
-working class= hourly wages
-middle class= salary (including self-employment income)
-upper class= investment & inheritan e
Seems like 'blue collar' is a pretty good match for 'hourly wage earner' and 'white collar' to 'salaried worker', even though some skilled wage warners may make significantly more than low-status salaried employees.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
The problem is, the implicit goal of all of those examples was to increase the status of all of those groups relative to the dominant status group, cis straight white men. Dominant groups basically don't get to make these claims, and it's viewed as extremely dangerous when they try.
Instead, I think there's going to be a nasty knife fight for victimhood status between groups with existing claims to dis-privileged status that want access to sexbots (severely deformed and/or disabled people probably having the strongest claim) and advocates for the sexual rights of the AIs themselves. If the former wins out then it will be hard to justify gatekeeping the technology; the latter, motivated by a combination of self-interest in preserving female SMV and 'yuck' factor in seeing something female-shaped being sexually exploited (even and especially when the object claims to like it) will be much more likely to torpedo the entire concept by having it morally and legally equated with rape.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I'm predicting a simple solution to this one: 'doll'-style sexworkers. They cosplay as your waifu, your AI instructs them through an earpiece like a porno director, and your augmented reality equipment fills in the gaps as best as possible.(Soon to be fully arranged by your AI waifu herself, to avoid breaking immersion - you give her an allowance, she surprises you with 'date night'.)
No technological reason why we couldn't do this right now, especially with GPT4 already having built-in img2text. Whether social pressure is applied to stomp out this sort of thing is another matter, I think AI is going to disrupt gender politics more profoundly than birth control, & institutional feminism is very quickly going to come down on the anti-AI side.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
My personal ideal utopia-pod is definitely going to have
-extensive awareness of the universe outside the pod, albeit largely delegated to subservient AI as most information coming from that vector will be uninteresting.
-self-sufficiency. I won't be farming up the calories I consume/KW my upload consumes, but I already don't do that.
-ample self-defense capabilities.
I agree that I wouldn't be substantially altering the outside world on a regular basis, and this is probably the crux of the issue. But I for one would likely bite that bullet, depending on the particulars of the technology available.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Seems to me that women are behaving rationally.
-having kids & taking care of them properly is insanely hard work compared to white collar labor. It's rewarding, but so is a successful career, or having interesting hobbies, or alternately partying & getting stoned all the time
-you can simply chose not to have kids due to high-quality birth control & safe+legal abortion, no need to be sexually abstinant like in the bad old days
-if you're just having sex for pleasure, a lot of the utility of monogamous relationships is lost.
That following their modern sexual incentives leaves a good 30-50% of men out in the cold, is simply not women's problem.
Men might make it their problem eventually - failing any big changes, getting outnumbered & overrun by a pro-natalist culture seems inevitable. But there are some big changes in the pipeline (notably AI, sexbots and artifical wombs) which have a high probability of obviating the whole discussion.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
How does traditional machine learning even begin to address these problems?
I'm just a stable diffusion hobbyist, but overcoming these challenges sounds a lot like what happens every time I load a picture into the UI and hit 'interrogate'. Currently it provides impressively accurate text descriptions but (admittedly) you can't reverse the process to replicate the original image from the text output. I'm not sure if this is harder than it looks for images*, but for music increasing the resolution from 'description of the piece' to 'full chart transcription for each instrument' seems plausible, quite possibly as a side-effect of text-to-music advances.
*Stable Diffusion's interrogation ability could probably be a lot more powerful already, but afaik it's not really a big focus area because imagegen is much sexier.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Americans and Germans didn't dislike eachother that much.
I heard differently from my German-Canadian relatives who were a teenagers in WW2. But likely the Japanese kids got it worse.
But I was actually thinking after my reply about the persistence of certain liberal outgroup modes, notably the KKK and Nazis (who are kind of a super-KKK). Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that there's hardly any of either group left, those that managed to hang on being almost universally despised & marginalized, but you still hear about them all the time, and a certain kind of leftist always jumps at the chance to pattern match their foes with one or both of these two groups.
(Status: speculative, possibly uncharitible)
One possibility is: liberals just really hate racism, so the biggest baddest racists of the 20th century loom large in their imaginations. I'll grant this one to an extent, although not all instances of racism attract equal fervor. (especially when perpetrated by nonwhites).
I think the more interesting explanation is: at its roots, in its memetic DNA, modern liberalism is designed for fighting the outgroup that it was born to oppose. "This Machine Kills Nazis", everything else is incidental.They might hate racism, but not on first principles, not really; they hate racism because racism is what the KKK did, and they exist fight the KKK. The modern humans who make up the ideology don't have write access to it anymore, so in order to steer the Nazi-killing machine in the direction of the outgroup-du-jour they have to make it think they're Nazis.
In this context, ¬HBD being taken as gospel seems perfectly natural.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
The only strategic reasons to adopt ¬HBD are if you already believe its premises.
IMO the main reason to adopt ¬HBD is straightforward: explicit rejection of HBD, or more properly, habits of thought developed over decades spent vigorously condemning anything that smacked of post-hoc justification for discrimination against black people. The hated outgroup believed proposition N, therefore we will believe ¬N, and any statement that can be interpreted as supporting position N (however innocuous) will be treated as giving succor to the enemy.
It also has the benefit of never having to tell someone to their face that they're part of a group that is intellectually inferior to one's own, which is fighting words even if true - an understated benefit for someone who's afraid of getting punched!
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I'm ready to call it now - preference cascade.
NYT publishing this article mere days after the abject failure of trans activists to organize a high-profile boycott is incredibly telling. And there's been lots of signs that public opinion (especially elite public opinion) has been getting brittle on the issue - no one likes getting bulled by moralists all the time, especially when they're your distant social lessers. Moreover, this isn't a dramatic turnabout & could get accepted fairly quickly by the laypeople - I had a leftist freind tell me umsolicited that they were sick of 'purity politics' on the left (though I checked, they didnt consider JKR cancellation to be an ecample - yet)
Cynical take 1- JKR got fed up & hired a big money PR firm. Possibly quite some time ago, with them waiting for (engineering?) a time and place to strike back. Her upcoming podcast series with the WBC escapee lady fits this theory nicely.
Cynical take 2 - Alternately, the powers that be decided that the TERF wars were sucking up too much oxygen & that it is now time for 'healing & reconciliation' and a renewed focus on squashing down the populist right. Which I've argued for before - right now is the worst possible time for leftist doctrinal infighting, their position is overextended and their enemy is visibly regrouping.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
My prior would be, McKinsey will meticulously hand-select companies to design studies that will flatter elite opinion. Staying on the right side of the right people is how those lucrative public contracts keep flowing in.
I've never heard any mechanism proposed either. Do you know if they controlled for company size? Would be funny if they were just measuring returns to scale, with big companies having more diverse employees due to having more resources to devote to DEI.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Plan A
-astroturf a leftist movement objecting to immigration on egalitarian grounds (we treat immigrants like dirt! Immigration = slavery!) and oppose it as clumsily as possible. (Being exploited by us is a human right!)
-Make sure they get their goal: a massive set of payments that equalize opportunity for immigrants and existing nationals, say $500k towards education, housing etc per head, (mostly in services, negotiated with a new govt agency single-payer style) paid over a decade or so.
-This will be ruinously expensive at current immigation levels; immigration will have to be curtailed, on moral and practical grounds. ^_^ It has a second silver lining of enabling some extreme cream skimming.
-this will be paid for out of a new tax on individuals, which will be punishingly high but accepted as a moral neccessity
-with a loophole: expenditures on your own kids are deductable. A portion of family housing costs & food, plus 100% of accredited sports and activities, education, childcare, lost wages due to parental care (after passing a test showing you're competent to do so - more money for better results!), parental education, plus bonuses for hitting milestones like literacy and psychological good health, plus a big 'successful launch' bonus at age 18. Babies are just immigrants from heaven! :^)
Downside is lots of nanny-state intrusion into childrearing, but you're the conservative government & can bake in a bunch of universalism at the start.
Plan B
Start a big war. Nothing like material privation and a wartime economy to make babies happen.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I've had some success with this trick even without upper-class signalling - just being tall-ish, not a visible minority, clean-cut and walking confidently is enough to pattern match with 'belongs here' about 90% of the time.
I'm not sure I would try this in Dubai, though. Risk of extrajudicial punishment if caught seems a bit high.
And yet, letting American memes (and the prosperity that they seem to breed) naturally & nonviolently melting-pot away the newcomers' less endearing traits seems to have a pretty good track record. You still end up with a disproportionately immigrant underclass, but that's also part of the plan, isn't it? 'Immigrants get the job (that natives dont want to do) done?'
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