Incanto
5mo ago
What was the violation of the rules here? Seems like a pretty normal Motte post.
Incanto
4mo ago
"Who started it" is in general a notoriously slippery concept and not something a journalist should be so breezily "fact-checking". They can quote the Association of Very Serious People for a contrasting view if they want.
Incanto
4mo ago
$5 million seems like too much to attract a lot of interest, especially since becoming a US citizen makes one subject to global US taxation regardless of residence.
Currently playing and enjoying it, especially the aesthetics. I suck at parrying in every game that has it but with the difficulty on easy and with the right passive abilities I can mostly ignore that.
The dreamy beauty of the overworld (especially with that music) is a particular high point.
Incanto
10mo ago
I support free speech not because all speech is good (much of it is bad or even harmful), but because there is no ubermensch that I trust to decide which ideas I'm allowed to hear.
Incanto
3mo ago
Australia is pretty tightly allied to the US and is very likely to be involved in a direct conflict with China.
Socially, we have some issues related to mass immigration, but less so than the UK.
Incanto
4mo ago
I've been watching Claude Plays Pokemon a bit and while it does seem AGI-ish moment to moment, the lack of proper memory is rather crippling as it often gets stuck in loops for hours. Some kind of better memory/online learning may be the last step before we have entry-level AGI agents, but it seems non-trivial.
Incanto
5mo ago
Has the Trump/Elon government made any moves to ensure the military is on-side? There's been a fair bit of left media labelling their actions with DOGE etc as a "coup" (eg https://x.com/micsolana/status/1888346474007670971) and last I checked, while the majority of the military votes Republican, the generals are largely woke-left and I'm a little (though not extremely) concerned they could be moved to act if the left-wing media noise heats up. I'm not sure if Hegseth has had time to do anything yet.
Incanto
2mo ago
What I've read is that the magnetosphere doesn't matter because the atmosphere blows off very slowly (millions of years) so if you can create a new one in the first place you're fine.
Incanto
5mo ago
Not sure he has any demands, I think he just thinks that trade deficits are bad, therefore tariffs.
Incanto
6mo ago
I've been considering doing it myself lately. Not sure why. Seems fun.
It may be fun for some but if it's not obviously fake then it gratuitously damages social trust by adding to readers' expectations of bad behavior from others. I wish people wouldn't write these.
Incanto
2mo ago
Played classic in 2019 and a bit of SoD but my guild eventually fell apart in SoD phase 3 and I lost the motivation to continue.
Incanto
3mo ago
see if the uber-polished cyberpunk vibes of the newer cities holds up on closer inspection.
In Shanghai at least it's a bit of a mixed bag - pretty flashy in some aspects but kind of backwards in others. Dunno about Chongqing or Shenzhen.
Incanto
4mo ago
The programmers I know usually say it as a single word - which mostly occurs when pronouncing ISO 8601 (which I would say as "eyeso eight six oh one").
War brides and loot goblins: The Iliad
(Epistemic status: The Iliad is 2700 years old and practically a field of study unto itself. I doubt anything I have to say here is original.)
(You can skip this paragraph if you're familiar with the story). The Iliad is an epic poem composed in ancient Greece by oral poet(s), first written down around 700BC and attributed to an unknown poet called Homer (along with the Odyssey). It describes events towards the end of the Trojan War - a legendary event occurring hundreds of years earlier where mainland Greeks travelled to Greek Anatolia with the ostensible goal of rescuing/re-kidnapping Helen, a beautiful woman who'd been taken away by the Trojan Paris. Notable characters on the Greek side include warrior Achilles and his close friend/possible lover Patroclus, ineffectual king Agamemnon, and got-his-own-spinoff Odysseus.
Recently after a lifetime of mostly reading sci-fi and fantasy I was thinking that I should catch up on some of the classics. After comparing a few translations of the Iliad I went with Robert Fagles' version as it seemed the most energetic. (People like to say that the Iliad was meant to be listened to rather than read, but I'm not an audiobook guy). With the high and mighty reputation of Homer I was expecting an eating-your-vegetables experience where I might be encultured but not necessarily entertained, but it was actually rather engaging. The story is mostly (rather violent) action with a bit of drama and pathos and was clearly composed as popular entertainment first and foremost. Some sections get a little repetitive (there's a bit too much back and forth action - it starts to feel like a long MOBA match after a while) but overall it was both enjoyable and an interesting insight into bronze age society. I have a few scattered thoughts, some of which touch on culture war issues.
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Tropes. Some things I think of as Hollywood tropes are already present here. Random fighters die instantly and reliably in a single hit while major characters get injured if not missed entirely. The few that die get just enough time to make a dramatic speech before death. On the other hand they hadn't come up with quippy one-liners yet - when characters try to dunk on each other they make speeches.
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Names. An interesting difference from almost all modern media is that almost every single character who dies in battle, no matter how minor, gets named, usually with their father's name and often even a mini-bio as well. This does get a bit repetitive at times but also takes the cost of war more seriously than the typical Hollywood mowing down of faceless mooks. One interesting exception to this is that the dozen Trojan soldiers sacrificed by Achilles for Patroclus's funeral pyre are not named - perhaps their deaths were not heroic enough.
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Morality. Ingroup-outgroup morality is very strong here, as well as an absence of altruism in the modern sense. The characters don't see anything wrong with looting random cities, slaughtering men and taking women as slaves, nor with summarily killing (or human-sacrificing) prisoners or desecrating their enemies' bodies - indeed they tend to boast about these things. Achilles just barely softens a little at the end, with bribery required. The Trojans are worried that they might be sacked and killed/enslaved, but they don't seem object to this on moral grounds. Meanwhile both sides show a great deal of concern over protecting the bodies of their fallen comrades, even at great risk to themselves.
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Loot. The characters are obsessed with loot and on multiple occasions get killed or injured while trying to loot their enemies' armor mid-battle. They also send people back to base with loot mid-battle instead of trying to win the battle with their full force. Even the god Ares, fighting in the battle, stops to loot one of his victims - I guess even gods could use a spare set of armor.
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Gods. The gods are involved surprisingly directly and frequently in the story, going so far as to redirect spears and arrows or even fight in the battles personally. Most often the gods seem to be used to explain events that in modern times would be attributed to good or bad luck - oh your chariot broke down, or your spear missed? Must have been the interference of Zeus again. They also seem to think character's thoughts for them at times - something that formed part of the basis for The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, if I recall correctly.
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Women. Human women play little role in the story except as prizes - an explicit goal of the Greeks is to take the Trojan women as slaves/war brides, and both the Trojan war and the Iliad itself start with disputes over the possession of women. At the funeral games a woman, 2nd prize for one of the events, is even rated as being worth only 4 oxen, compared to a 1st prize cauldron worth 12. (This may have been intended as a joke, perhaps implying that this woman was not so desirable - another woman is also part of the first prize for the prestigious chariot race). It's interesting that the goddess Athena is portrayed as something of an ass-kicking girlboss, unlike any of the human female characters.
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Theme. The theme could perhaps be summarized as "War is harsh and tragic, but at least it's glorious. Also you can really load up on loot".
One thing I speculate about - for a long time Homer was prestigious partly because you had to know ancient Greek to read him. Then there were various English translations (famously Alexander Pope's rhyming translation), but they weren't so easy to read, so there was still some prestige from the effort. I wonder if relatively easy/readable translations like Fagles have hurt the prestigious nature of Homer and, along with feminist opposition to the very unfeminist portrayal of women in the story, contributed to the apparent decline of the classics in academia.
I'll leave you with an excerpt from the end of book 20, which reminded me a bit of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
Achilles now
like inhuman fire raging on through the mountain gorges
splinter-dry, setting ablaze big stands of timber,
the wind swirling the huge fireball left and right—
chaos of fire—Achilles storming on with brandished spear
like a frenzied god of battle trampling all he killed
and the earth ran black with blood. Thundering on,
on like oxen broad in the brow some field hand yokes
to crush white barley heaped on a well-laid threshing floor
and the grain is husked out fast by the bellowing oxen's hoofs—
so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions
trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed
with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car,
sprays of blood shooting up from the stallion's hoofs
and churning, whirling rims—and the son of Peleus
charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth
splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms—
Incanto
11mo ago
I think you're right on the vibes but it's funny that someone almost old enough to retire is considered "young" in American politics these days.
Incanto
4mo ago
Finished (Romance of the) Three Kingdoms, unabridged translation by Moss Roberts. It was pretty enjoyable both as a story and an insight into Chinese history and culture. The biggest difficulty is the constant bombardment of new unfamiliar names. It helps if you already have some idea who the most important players are. Also the last 15% or so is less enjoyable because the most interesting characters are dead and we're basically recapitulating the earlier stuff but grimier and less heroic. Definitely worth reading if you have any interest in the era - or you could watch the Red Cliff movie to get a (slightly modernized) taste.
Incanto
4mo ago
My guess as to the biggest missing factor between here and AGI is efficient online and self-directed learning (aka continuous or lifetime learning).
Incanto
3mo ago
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. (There's an element of edginess there because the main character starts out as a torturer/executioner, but he isn't a sadist and sees it more as job/necessary evil).
Incanto
8mo ago
Sounds like you don't have a clear goal or reason for getting a degree other than that it's vaguely something you feel expected to do.
Man, I hate this modern trend of journalists smugly injecting their own opinion into reporting. I want to hear what happened and what was said, not what some midwit journalist thinks about it.
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