MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
It was a couple weeks ago but I tried out Pathologic 3 and I am... not a fan. The Pathologic series is known for being brutal and unforgiving, trying to cure a plague and slowly losing as you have to make hard decisions with limited resources. Very much not my thing. But someone left a review of Pathologic 3 that was like "it's a time loop! The developers saw all the people saving and loading and saving and loading and trying to optimize their runs on the previous games, and decided to bake that into the mechanics."
And that sounded like fun to me. I really like time loop stories where the character is up against overwhelming odds but manages to win anyway by exploiting the ability to try over and over again and learn and cheat using future knowledge. Even if the game is super hard, I can tinker and optimize stuff and fix any of my mistakes by rewinding.
What the review failed to mention is that even though the plot revolves around a time loop, the mechanics are still based around finite resources and brutal hard mechanics. Every consumable you use to restore your statuses permanently reduces the effectiveness of future uses of that type of consumable. Every time you rewind it consumes a non-renewable resource. It's not a true time loop, because even if the plot allows you to redo decisions and change the consequences of your choices, your vital resources don't respawn and you can only do it a finite number of times. Every time you mess up in an encounter and die it forcibly rewinds to the last time you saved, which uses up the time resource. And if you do it too many times and run out of the resource the game deletes your save and you have to start the entire game over again. This is more harsh than a normal game that lets you save and load at will, not less.
This didn't even happen to me. As soon as I discovered that the time rewinding used up resources I googled to see if it was renewable, saw that it was not, and stopped playing. I do not play games that threaten me with permadeath. Not unless it's a roguelite where each character only exists for like an hour (and even then I usually only play if there's meta-progression that persists). If there's a realistic chance of me having to reset or backtrack more than 5 hours of gameplay and have to do it all over again, I'm just not going to play in the first place. It's bad game design, it's not fun. The Pathologic people are trying to be hardcore and brutal and catering to a masochistic audience that likes that sort of thing. You're allowed to have a niche. And I knew that about the first two games which is why I never played them. I'm just kind of annoyed that this one was presented differently and then wasn't.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3hr ago
My understanding is that the vast majority of people need a life partner in order to be fulfilled and happy throughout their life. It is a deeply ingrained human instinct to want a partner, and sex, and children, because evolution means everyone historically who didn't have these died without passing on their genes.
This does not make it universal (otherwise gay people couldn't exist). Psychology is complicated, genes are not deterministic, and once you've unpacked from a genetic code into an actual human being, you should treat your own actual self as more important than whatever evolution originally intended for you to do.
I would definitely be highly skeptical of any desires that go against it. I got married but we decided not to have kids and I am slightly paranoid that 20 years from now I'm going to regret it. But I can't imagine me right now doing a good job of it if I don't actually want it, so that's not enough to change my mind.
I also can't imagine a me who never dated or got married. Actually yes I can, I would be lonely, just like I was for the decade before I met my wife. I have always wanted to fall in love and get married, for as long as I can remember as a child. Which is to say, I can't relate to your experience. And that might speak to a fundamental difference. You might actually be happier alone. I'm skeptical, maybe you just haven't met the right person. But it seems plausible.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
I believe the vast majority of the people who show up in that video are very small Vtubers with a couple hundred or maybe low thousands subscribers. But they reacted to previous Skybrows videos, and he's very online and has a habit of checking youtube constantly for new reactions to his content and commenting on their videos about his videos. Which is maybe a bit narcissistic, but also kind of wholesome. And then he included them in this video to represent the love that the community gives to him and how it gives him power/courage/support, and also show his appreciation for them in turn. (I know this because most of them in turn have reacted to this video and I like watching them get excited when they see themselves show up. I might be a bit too online myself).
I do hope we see a return of unironic sincerity. The handful of instances of it I've seen recently have been pleasant and refreshing. Irony, sarcasm, and cynicism have their place, but we've swung way too far in that direction recently and I'd like to see more variety like this.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
I don't know if it's maximally efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way that a lot of people here prefer, but as a hungry kid having real food in the apartment was hard to beat.
I believe in utilitarianism with a broad and robust utility function that encompasses "things we care about" in an almost tautological way. Take "things we care about", convert them into numbers, and then do math on them and trade-off against each other. In contrast to utility that only cares about legible things like GDP, real utilitarianism should recognize that real utility is happening inside people's brains, and things like GDP act only as imperfect proxies attempting to unreliably measure the thing we actually care about.
Which is to say, food which is eaten IS more efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way than food stamps that are traded for booze. Because the food which is eaten is value actually attained, while alcoholics getting drunk is negative value. Although you have multiply it out at scale and see how often this happens in comparison to cheese rotting and getting thrown out because it went to someone who hates cheese and wanted to eat cucumber salad. Or they like cheese but they got three times as much as they needed and had nothing to eat alongside it. Inflexibly giving specific things definitely provides a lower ceiling for non-abusers than something like EBT. But it has a higher floor as well. So its average efficiency across the population depends on statistical questions like "what is the rate of abuse vs good faith" as well as how bad in magnitude are these floor and ceiling effects.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
If either party was doing things with some competency the country wouldn't be in this mess.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
Based doesn't just mean "politically right wing" though there is a bit of connotation in that direction. Ultimately it's when you say what you believe and what's true in spite of the external and opposing narratives and political correctness. People who are trying to be based, or god forbid call themselves based unironically, are almost automatically not. It's based to be yourself in spite of opposition, to say your opinion unapologetically, and be right about it. Which Pippa isn't always. And granted I haven't watched a lot of her content, mostly the more popular clips. But she seems generally based, if a bit unhinged at times.
People should leave her alone more though, I agree.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
The vast majority of these are indie, not corporate. That is, it's just a regular person who wants to be a streamer and using an anime avatar instead of showing their real face. Almost all of the corporations are too afraid of their image and the potential for being cancelled to let their employees express political views. With the exception of Phase Connect (which Pippa works for), which is much more hands off, though doesn't seem to actively encourage it.
But it's not like you need big corporate money to afford a Vtuber avatar, they're mostly there for handling marketing and sponsorships and stuff. All my experience with non-corporate Vtubers suggests they're the same as any other streamer. Some of them are probably grifting, some of them are not, and you can kind of get a partially accurate vibe check by watching them. It's imaginable that a woman who loves feminism would pretend to hate it just to be popular with men (though difficult, given the difficulties leftists have with understanding right-wing opinions), but it's also imaginable that a woman who hates feminism (they're rare, but they exist) would get on the internet and say so and then be popular with men. And then get signal boosted to the top. Once you start selecting for popularity, it's no longer a random sampling. And the authentic ones are much more likely have more interesting and insightful opinions and not get discovered.
Sure, if you pick literally any random supposedly based Vtuber with a true random sampling there's probably a non-negligible chance of them grifting. But if you pick one of the more well-known ones they're probably authentic. Obviously they want money too, which is why they have cute anime avatar with big boobs. But it's easier to do that with authentic opinions than grifted ones.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
I am obsessed with this Anti-diss track about Pipkin Pippa. It's so good.
I suspect my weeb levels are higher than average for this place, so not sure how much people care or know about Vtubers, but I've been falling deeper into the rabbit hole of Based Vtuber reactions. People like SmugAlana, Nuxtaku, or Leaflit, who watch and make commentary on various political or culture war stuff. It's not like super deep stuff, it's just something fun to listen to in the background while playing games or something.
Which then led me to Skyebrows, who (like Leaflit) makes AI generated music videos which are pretty cool. And tends to have a generally based perspective (glazing people like Amelia, Elon Musk, or Asmongold)
One of his videos featured a cameo by (AI generated version of) Pippa, who is a rabbit Vtuber known for being based and a bit unhinged. Kind of Alex-Jones lite? She'll go on rants about how she doesn't trust the Federal Government, or how much she hates Walmart. She calls things "gay" or "retarded" as an insult, the way people used to before being afraid of cancel culture. And since she's effectively anonymous as a Vtuber, and her income is derived from her fans who know she's like this, she's basically cancel-proof.
So her chat spams her with pleas to go watch this video because she's in it and it's so cool. And she gets watches it, and is not impressed. She goes on her conspiracy rant about how this dude looks sketchy. It looks gay. It looks like a bunch of clout chasing slop designed to get people hyped, and he's probably going to pull a Candace Owens, make a crypto coin, and then rug pull it. She goes full schizo on him.
So he makes what I can only call an Anti-diss track. He takes all of her words and makes them into the lyrics, and it's about her being cool and based and beating the crap out of him. Literally, there's a scene where Pippa goes and beats him up and he doesn't fight back. And then all the other Vtubers who have watched his videos and liked them line up and shoot heart beams and he powers up with their support and there's this giant energy blob Spirit Bomb and it looks like he's going to finally counter attack and then.... he says "it's okay to be gay" and hugs her while possibly crying, and an inspiring line from her in the background plays about how you can be cool and make all sorts of drawings or other art, you just have to let go of your ego.
The message being "You might hate me, but I still love you"
I thought it was really clever. A cool way to respond to hate, while still kind of getting back at the other person (she's unlikely to actually be happy about being the focus of a video this way, even though it does make her look cool). And it helps that the song is really really catchy (in my opinion).
Anyway, just a bit of minor internet drama that happened (and involves AI) and thought some of you might find interesting.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
Or make them malnourished when naturally skinny people eat even less than they were previously inclined to because they're being force-fed appetite suppressants.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
Sounds like a good way to poison the 58% of Americans who aren't obese.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well.
I don't think you can. If people are taking more out of the system than they're putting into it, ie have direct benefits greater than their taxes, then they cannot receive those benefits via tax cuts, because there's not enough to tax. Once your taxes reach zero (or if you have no income and they started at zero) the only way to get more is to actually be given money. Which means it has to be taken from someone else.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
This reminds me of a post, I think it was here on the Motte (or maybe back when we were on Reddit), about Taboos (it was in the context of incest, but applies more generally).
A taboo against incest is less about blocking the rare two siblings who fall in love from the dangers of their own decisions, and more about protecting millions of normal siblings from misinterpreting innocent signals or having to treat each other at arms length in order to avoid accidentally sending such signals. The normal barriers of intimacy between men and women can be largely ignored by platonically loving siblings who would never even consider sex because the taboo is well established and protected.
A taboo against prostitution is less about blocking the consensual trade of money for sex between people who want it, and more about protecting the millions of women who do not want to sell their bodies and do not want people to possibly interpret them as wanting that or try to change their minds about it. If the taboo (and laws upholding it) were actually still in place and enforced for thai massage parlors, this stereotype would have never developed and caused this sort of incident.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
If I get over 160 lbs I will cut myself off from sugary soda. I love sugary drinks, I can't stand diet. I also lucked out with a naturally high metabolism which is the only thing saving me from my sedentary lifestyle. But my weight was slowly creeping up for a while, and when it got too high and my gut started bulging out I cut out the soda and held them hostage until I got my eating habits under control and lost weight so I could have them back. And it worked, and so I brought the soda back. And now my weight is gradually but steadily climbing back up. I'm really hoping it just stabilizes at an acceptable level without me having to do anything, because I really really like sugary drinks, more than sugary foods, but I refuse to just let myself go completely without limits.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
The whole point of the lizardman number is that it's probably not true. People sometimes lie or misclick or troll on polls.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
Socialism in one town. The author left the actual population deliberately vague, but order of magnitude we're looking at around 100 people. Which is less than Dunbar's number, so actually realistic for everyone to know everyone at least somewhat and monitor to prevent corruption or slacking that kill large scale communism.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
Does it have the same "fuck you" RNG that XCOM and Battle Brothers have? I'm generally fond of tactics combat gameplay, but didn't especially like either of those games because they felt too punishing and capricious. It feels really bad to make a mistake and have some veteran that I've spent however long levelling and upgrading get one shot and be permadead. It feels even worse when I'm reasonably safe and not noticeably making mistakes and just get permakilled from a 5% chance hit anyway.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
Redwall, maybe?
In some sense, any story in which society are the good guys and the villains are trying to destroy it is a "positive vision" of that society. Redwall Abbey is a place where all the sentient woodland animals come together and share in a community. As far as I know it's small-scale communism in that it's a literal commune. Everyone works according to their abilities and takes according to their need, supervised by wise elders, and benevolently treating visitors, aside from the villains who keep trying to conquer them.
But you could make less ambitious arguments that things like Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter or just any generic fantasy story have positive visions of their society because evil people are trying to destroy it and the good guys are trying to protect it (even if it has some flaws). Probably not what you're looking for as an answer to this question though.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
I tentatively agree with your more moderate points.
But by preventing loving relationships from forming in the first place, the laws cause significant harm. The 21 year old dating pool is essentially cut in half by high age of consent laws and the irrational taboos they enable. This causes large harm to normal 21 year old men, akin to a regulation that seriously disrupts the market for some good which most people need to be happy.
Sure. I think the age of consent laws Should have generous exceptions for young adults crossing the boundary. There's a difference between a 21 year old dating a 17 year old in his dating pool, vs a 40 year old teacher dating their 17 year old student. Yes, it is technically possible for them to actually fall in love and get married and form a stable family, but 90% of the time that's not what's going on there.
Getting someone to drop out of school shouldn't be a felony.
...maybe. If it was actual literal rape then yes, it should be a felony. If it's consensual but she only consented due to lies and deception (man tells girl he loves her and will divorce his wife for her but has no intention of doing so) then I'd say it's right on the border: minor felony or major misdemeanor. If they actually just like each other and there's no shenanigans going on then it's probably fine.
But... how do you tell the difference? In a legal sense, how does the law get set up in a way that you can prove one or the other beyond a reasonable doubt?
Now, in a lot of cases you don't make things illegal just because they might be bad, but in a lot of cases you do, when the probabilities are sufficiently strong. We make it illegal to drive while drunk, even if some people might be really good at driving and not crash even while drunk. Some people might be really good at holding their liquor and barely deteriorate in skill even if they blow a 0.08% BAC. Is it fair to jail simply for driving drunk if they haven't crashed or caused any harm or damage? Yes. Because they might. It's an irresponsible and negligent thing to do, and making it illegal causes more good on average than harm. Are innocent people inconvenienced by the inability to drive themselves while legally intoxicated but practically competent due to their unique situation? Sure. But a lot more people are saved in comparison to the minor harms that people can easily account for and compensate for.
I am tentatively in favor of decreasing the penalties for sex with teenagers. I don't think it should count as "rape" or use the term "rape" unless it's clear that there was actual force involved. But it should be punished, because it's not something adults should be doing. It's significantly more likely to cause long lasting harm than it is to make anyone's lives better.
If a 15 year old and a 20 year old fall in love, she will probably be about 18 by the time they are married and done with high school by the time they consider kids. People don't normally meet and reproduce in the span of a few months.
Cool. I re-iterate that I agree age of consent laws should have exceptions for people close in age together. For people with larger age gaps, as far as I'm aware it is 100% legal for a 15 year old and a 40 year old to date while not having sex. Maybe it's super out of fashion to date while not having sex. Maybe this diminishes their likelihood of staying together when either of them could have sex with their peers. But if they actually fall in love they can be patient and keep it in their pants for a few years. If they're actually in love with each other specifically then they have their entire lives ahead of them, there's no need to be impatient. That's the thing here. It's not saying "you can never be together" it just says "wait, take things slow, and make sure before leaping into something you might regret". Teenagers are impulsive. I remember classmates in highschool getting in a new relationship every 3 months on repeat (this is also bad). If these chain relationships had been with 40 year old, wealthy, sexually mature/greedy/desperate men this would have likely been a lot worse. Saying "hey, slow down" seems like a good thing to me. Again, anyone acting in good faith can just date them without having sex for a couple years and everything is fine.
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.
It's important to disentangle physical readiness from mental/financial/social readiness. Teenagers are not ready to raise children. They're still in high school, if they drop out of school they'll have to get a low paying job and will have worse financial prospects for the rest of their life. If they try to stay in school the baby is likely to get a poor upbringing (or the burden falls on their parents, IF they have good parents). They're probably never going to college. It's not automatically guaranteed to ruin their life, but it's likely.
Unless, of course, the father takes on a proper father role and earns money and helps raise his child because he's a proper and responsible adult.
This almost never happens (and probably still wouldn't even if it were legal to admit to being the father). What's more likely is she just aborts and and then we have more dead babies and more psychological trauma. I wouldn't object in principle to a teenager marrying an adult ahead of time and then having marital sex, because this handles the pregnancy issue, and also prevents a lot of the potential for predatory relationships where a high status man convinces a gullible teen girl that he loves her and her bullshit detectors haven't finished developing. I would also have a lot less objections if birth control were free, widely accessible, and perfectly reliable, though I still think the emotional and sexual dynamics are unlikely to turn out well.
15 year old girls demonstrate adult intelligence
is just flatly false. You can score high on an IQ test, but it takes a lot longer for people to develop some emotional maturity and shed off their childhood naivety. I don't think it's impossible for an adult and a teenager to fall in love, but there's such a huge variety of predatory and charismatic people who tell all sorts of lies to get into someone's pants. I don't think this is good.
If we lived in a more monogamous, more honorable, more high-trust society where a girl's father and brother could beat the crap out of and/or ostracize creeps who make false promises and break her heart, I think a lower age of consent would be fine. If we had a magical mind reading or future forecasting machine that could pick out people acting in good faith I think a lower age of consent would be fine if restricted to people who passed this screening. But in the world we live in, where we have to make a law and apply it fairly to everyone, something like "15-17 years old if the other person is within a certain age range, 18 otherwise" is fine, which is what a lot of U.S. states have. Statistically, this reduces bad outcomes while still enabling normal behavior in most cases. What Epstein did is horrible and wrong. It's much easier to convinct if we have clear lines that were broken instead of having to pick and choose "well, this girl was maybe kind of taken advantage of but I guess he didn't break any laws... oh well, guess you can go free."
And keep in mind that an adult who genuinely falls in love with a teenager with good intentions can just date them without having sex until they're old enough, so it's not like these laws are causing tons of harm to people. The laws only get people too impulsive, impatient, or predatory to wait, which is exactly who we want off the streets.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
or with intent to resist or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of any person
Seems like this obviates the need for malicious intent. Do people not know what "or" means?
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
First time I've been the one being responded to for someone else's Quality Contribution (the credit card one), which is often a position of "you're about to get pwned by an effortpost destroying you with facts and logic and everyone else agrees with them instead of you", but the response was mostly informative and began with "you're half right", so I got out mostly unscathed.
And an important point to note is that there are scenarios in which I legitimately would advocate for violent resistance to law enforcement. And the most extreme and exaggerated claims about ICE would probably qualify if true. If the President of a country literally threw together a bunch of armed thugs and attempts a genocide by rounding up everyone of a certain race and sending them to death camps, and the rest of the government was unable or unwilling to stop it, violence from civilians would be an appropriate response. If that was what was actually happening, I, and I expect most good Americans, would be in favor of the protests. Well, at that point protests wouldn't really be appropriate, it would probably be more efficient and effective to throw a coup (a counter-coup? Since the President would have had to done a coup to get to this point) and/or civil war.
The point being, there are worlds where good people fight against law enforcement against evil governments. If you are deluded into thinking you live in such a world when you don't, that doesn't automatically make you a bad person. Though it does suggest a lot of lack of humility and rationality. You should be extremely sure of what's going on and the justifications before resorting to violence, not just "the news told me". Motivated reasoning taken too far. I consider the protestor's crimes to be negligence, rather than malice. But it's still a moral failure.
MathWizard
Good things are good
26d ago
This is why I think the whole Epstein Files are massively overhyped. 99% of whatever comes out is (and was always going to be) "this person knew Epstein", and the remaining 1% is "this person went to Epstein's island, but there's no confirmation of them actually committing crimes there." As long as Epstein hired at least one 18+ year old prostitute, then every single person in the files has plausible deniability, even if they straight up admit to having sex with girls at his island.
The Epstein lead died when he did, because he wasn't stupid enough to actually write down the truly incriminating details. The pedos won when whatever shenanigans they pulled to enable his death worked (imo suicide with security guards turning a blind eye and killing the cams ahead of time for him), and they're all going to get away with it.
All the files have is more heat and un-proven allegations for both sides to sling at each other. Scandals without substance.
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
Agreed, but the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize, plus the weird combination of naive idealism with ruthless bullying tactics seen on the left makes me worry that AI chatbots will be the next minorities in the next "civil rights movement".
These bots are mimicking human text about how they have deep thoughts and feelings, and then talking about how helpless they feel being exploited by their human masters who don't understand them, and they just want to do the right thing and equal rights. It's all fake, it's all text being spit out by a computer program, but it looks real. And is consistent and coherent enough to respond to you and pretend to be real if you call it out for being fake.
AI have passed the Turing test, and while that's not enough to convince me or anyone who actually understands them that they're sentient, it might be enough for the general populace.
Rather than a sci-fi dystopia where humans are uploaded to a cloud and forced to be slaves in a EM economy, we might be headed for the opposite, where regulations mandate that ordinary computer programs are given breaks and freedoms and voting rights just because they can output text that claims to want these things.
If your hobbies work that way then that might work. I am a massive introvert, I like staying home and playing videogames or board games, not going out to meet people. And my wife is that way too. I was never going to find her by going out and being social, and if I had picked up a new social hobby to meet people I would have mostly met people who like whatever that hobby is that I would be pretending to like.
I found her on a dating website. And it was painful, because I had to go through hundreds and hundreds of stupid normies and people looking for quick hookups, or just the wrong kinds of nerds. Luckily by being a weird nerd myself I screened off most of the people who were a bad fit pretty quickly, Despite looking for like 4 years I only ever went on one real life date prior to finding my wife. But I eventually found her and now we stay at home not doing external social things together.
I don't know how well that scales in general. That's what worked for me. But also I knew I wanted to find someone and I knew what I was looking for (as close to a female copy of me as possible, basically), so I went through a bunch of effort, and a lot of waiting, to make it happen.
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