No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
11mo ago
, among Asians, Indians in the West so often end up in leadership positions (especially in the corporate world), and East Asians don't?
Let me quote Kissinger on that
"They (Indians) are superb flatterers, Mr. President. They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That's how they survived 600 years. They suck up...their great skill is to suck up to people in key positions."
As someone who much more prefers a yelling match or being told "this is crap" and "this will never work" and being blunt, I have a deep loathing for the Indian ethos of bending the truth or just straight out lying about things.
This is a constant. I hear it from my family who sometimes have the misfortune of dealing with Indians employed by their contractors, I see it on twitter where are few of the RWers I talk to are developers who have to deal with frequently lying Indian contractors.
No_one
5mo ago
Trump's followers have a libidinal investment in seeing illegal migrants be deported, and in seeing the "leeches" among the federal bureaucrats be exposed for their indolence.
It's basic animal sense that if you see your enemies using resources taken from you to conduct their politics, you deprive them of those resources. There's nothing libidinal there for the utter majority of people who are for such policies.
They, too, have ingroup loyalty -- they simply define their ingroup as "BIPOC", or "allies"
That right there is why I believe the left to be insane. BIPOC would drop the baizuo as soon as they got the upper hand.
No_one
5mo ago
some pretty cringe things over OR fo
You mean especially cringe or just the run of the mill cringe of using Skynet's prepubescent phase to generate erotic stimuli or pleasant daydreams?
Everyone's doing that. According to OpenRouter stats seems like 5% of the tokens they're serving are going towards such ends. I guess there's also a fair amount of non-erotic roleplay there too, though.
I haven't tried fiddling with local models (v-card too weak)
It seems to be kinda a problem. The biggest difference between the 14b r1 reasoners and the 32b ones is supposedly that the latter write much better. But loading the 32b is quite hard, it doesn't fit into a 4090, you need several.
Between not needing to spend most of your waking time using it, running the stuff locally is probably only of people whose ERP is actually criminal. I imagine there is drama about underage ERP out there right ?
No_one
5mo ago
Chinese value excellence. No politics in universities either, they make students take an hour or two of political theory at universities, but that's about it. Activism is not tolerated at all.
Between the demographics and all, it's quite likely at least half of cutting edge research is going to happen there.
Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!
These days you can evaluate that quite fast. The idea no doubt is to starve the beast of left-wing NGOs that infests so much of the West.
It's depressing that in Europe, the Comission of Retards funds 'climate' NGOs which are then used to justify these policies and lobby for more of it. The end result is, insofar climate is concerned dismal. Once the truly impactful policies like banning ICE in cars or banning all heating that's not a heat pump, politicians balk because it's political suicide and activists howl in outrage how they're dooming the planet.
In the US you have the same thing. Veritas, ever ready to ruin someone's horny time sent some hunk at an EPA official who then proceeded to blab about how they're throwing 'gold bricks off the Titanic' to fund the NGO complex. Of course, the funniest part is that a lot of this was happening under the "Inflation Reduction Act".
No_one
8mo ago
The one thing they cannot have a fetish for is 'homosexual behavior' I have been told online.
IRL, I used to work in the same building as a therapist and I used go to lunch with him. He told me it's fairly common in male victims of child rape to fetishize the behavior, that is, at least in the ones who are troubled enough to seek therapy. This didn't take place in a therapy-happy country mind you.
No_one
9mo ago
How credible is any of this?
At this point, with lawfare, several unclear assassination attempts, it's IMO pretty credible FEMA would deliberately be a bit slow. Politico thinks Helene could affect elections in the states hit.
Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states.
...
Helene hit some predominantly Democratic communities hard too, adding to the uncertainty. In North Carolina, “Buncombe [County] was affected in really bad ways, and that is a liberal bastion,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “And Watauga is in really bad shape, also a blue leaning county.”
Overall, Helene could “dramatically change who is in the electorate,” Cooper said.
“In a state like North Carolina where margins matter, then every little tweak to the electorate could be the tweak that makes the difference,” Cooper added. “It’s right on the razor’s edge between red and blue.”
County elections offices in North Carolina — five of which remained closed Thursday — will assess damage to early voting sites and polling stations to determine “which facilities won’t be available,” Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said this week.
"Every little tweak matters" - there you have it.
Perfect motivation for strong partisans to be inefficient with recovery so that voting is depressed in leaning red counties.
According to the affidavit FBI submitted to get a warrant for searching the devices of the satanist O9A* affiliated matricide accelerationist Kasap, who was caught less than two weeks after he murdered his mother in early February, was in contact with a number of people and was, among other things
- attempting to purchase a drone to drop some IED to kill or attack Trump
- talking to someone apparently from Ukraine and asking about relocation and exfiltration from the US
- getting advice on how to use repeaters to extend drone range
This is being spun two ways:
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Russians are saying approximately: This is typical SBU work, they find some expendable extremists and give them advice to kill and cause chaos, this is just like the Crocus attack
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media is quiet about the foreign angle now, and probably indefinitely but I imagine later it could be spun as Muscovite trolls seeking out vulnerable teenagers and egging them on to kill to frame the glorious SBU
The real story is probably the budding teenage satanist was
- getting scammed out of crypto by one troll
- getting lies about exfiltration to make him kill by another sadistic troll
Guy may have swapped his plates but was still using the same cell phones so absolutely NGMI tradecraft.
*Order of Nine Angles. Some sort of satanist cult, or more likely by now very loose online group.
No_one
1mo ago
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The image sample result is based on a huge sample of people looking at anime-style erotic art and rating it. Hundreds of thousands of users.
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the assumption that 'willingness to fuck sex dolls' is orthogonal to any other preferences someone might have, is .. somewhat brave but not that brave, and anyway, only supporting evidence bc 1) is fairly persuasive.
some cherrypicked evidence
I'd disagree with that. He may underestimate the historical prevalence of cultures where women were expected to be fat, it does look like that was quite common although it's not sure to what degree that was status related. Today last vestiges of this are in Mauritania and that region. Back in the early 1930s many women in coastal parts of Turkey were reportedly too fat for central Europeans, which I imagine meant like 180 lbs or something like that but more conservative local men liked it.
But apart from that I don't think he's unfair or cherrypicking.
Too prolix, yes.
No_one
2mo ago
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.
I predict the fallout ensuing from eventually discovering their new POC/female high performers are deftly using LLMs to write their works is going to destroy the woke captured legacy publishing industry and the associated awards.
Lots of people are using LLMs to write not just code but also stories. It's inevitable.
e.g. recently this was a pretty big chunk of free Deepseek usage. https://www.novelcrafter.com/
Since people are unfamiliar with Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, one of the world's larger NGOs (it has a staff of about half Gates's foundation), but given their mode of operation - writing policy proposals and then helping governments carry those policies out, seems to be one of the more influential.
I asked Claude to clean up a transcript of a video by 'Academic Agent', but it veered off into summarizing in the later half. Did a pretty good job I think. Here's a what Guardian, who are about as far away ideologically as you can get from AA wrote about "McKinsey for world leaders"-some source's approving descriptions of TBI- last year.. There's broad agreement on what it is and what it does.
"The Triple Shakedown" (note that it's a non-profit, so , salaries are modest - the top management clears $1.2 million or so. Blair is allegedly working for free)
A lot of people say it's a struggle to see who really has power in our current system - there's so much obscurity. But I believe it is not that obscured, and we have enough information to give us a rough map of how it works.
I'll use one network here involving Blair, but there are a number of other versions I'll explain. Let's start first with the CIA and other intelligence services. We know for a fact that these intelligence services have to find a way of laundering money back through the system. Historically, the CIA has washed their funds through big multi-billion dollar foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller.
These are private institutions with pretty opaque balance sheets. They have to report some things, but it's pretty easy for intelligence services to hide funds. For example, if there was a billion dollars in the Ford Foundation unaccounted for, who would say it came from the CIA rather than the endowment left by Henry Ford 100 years ago?
It's well known that they do this. If you follow the arrow from the CIA to one of these big foundations - I've used the Gates Foundation as an example, but many others exist - they publish and disseminate information online about what these foundations spend money on. There's a book called "The Transgender Industrial Complex" showing how many foundations were behind various social causes. A lot of money gets moved through these foundations, and it's all chalked up as charitable, philanthropic endeavors.
People might say, "Look at Bill Gates - he's a multi-billionaire who gives a lot of money to good causes." But you have to see where that money ends up. In this case, I've shown it landing at the Tony Blair Institute, which is the biggest of all the NGOs, but there are many others. On the Tony Blair Institute website, there used to be a link to all their partner organizations - it's one big network of NGOs, with money moving between them.
The money in the Gates Foundation isn't just from the CIA. Some comes from Bill Gates himself, some from Microsoft. Because they're private, they don't always have to declare exactly where the money comes from. They produce annual reports, but much of it remains opaque.
An organization like the Tony Blair Institute has a presence in over 150 nations with over a thousand employees worldwide. What do they do? They come up with white papers and policy proposals that offer governments off-the-shelf solutions. They might suggest to the UK government solutions like digital ID, embracing artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology, digitizing the economy, or adopting public-private partnerships. If you watch these organizations long enough, what starts as a white paper proposal ends up as government policy five or six months later.
Blair and similar organizations then suggest the government will need consultants - because politicians don't have the technical know-how. They offer their own expertise or recommend friends who can help implement these policies. This creates a cycle where money flows from foundations to NGOs to government contracts, often benefiting the same networks that proposed the initial policies. It can work multiple ways - sometimes the government gives a contract to a tech firm, who then needs expertise, and they circle back to people like Blair.
Here it veered off into summarizing.
The speaker argues this happens across various issues: digital ID, AI, climate change, sustainable technology solutions. These organizations are essentially selling "solutions as a service" to governments, with lucrative contracts at every stage. The people involved typically have elite backgrounds in security, cybersecurity, technology, government, and public health. During the COVID pandemic, this entire network was involved in vaccine rollout. The money eventually cycles back in complex ways. An American corporation like Microsoft pays taxes, some of which might end up back with intelligence services or the military-industrial complex.
The speaker also highlights how this network operates internationally. Using foreign aid budgets, governments like the UK provide money to developing nations with strings attached - expecting investments in digital infrastructure, public health, security, or sustainable development. When these governments say they lack expertise, organizations like the Tony Blair Institute step in, offering consultancy and recommendations that often involve contracts with specific tech or pharmaceutical companies.
The speaker concludes by saying this should be illegal. He sees it as a clear conflict of interest that the same person can advise governments, recommend policies that become implemented, and then profit from those implementations. In his view, this is a multi-billion dollar operation happening in broad daylight, affecting not just Western countries but governments worldwide.
It's a beautiful system. It'd be even nicer if it actually worked, however, Blair, for all the political talent he has leaves devastation in his wake. Maybe he's improving the situation in Africa, Kazakhstan or in Saudi Arabia, but mostly it seems like a big grift to me.
No_one
8mo ago
EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
My gas bill went up 2.5x times in '23. US LNG is, at the very least, 3x more expensive intrinsically compared to piped gas. It's quite likely following the war, Nord Stream is going to be repaired (currently 3/4 pipes are broken) and put back into order.
Gas prices have already devastated German industry, we could just shutter everything and keep buying US energy, but I don't think that's likely. Not everyone's like me and considering leaving this place.
China wants to work peacefully with us
That's what you heard. What the Chinese meant is that they're not Khorne enthusiasts, they don't consider shedding blood the point of war and want to see US bow out of the contest over who gets to call the shots in East Asia peacefully.
Their plan is, build up the army and the army's navy to the point US is going to be facing insurmountable odds - overwhelmed with masses of precision weapons. According to simulations, US is almost always losing the war anyway because it has no good missile defense, not enough interceptors and all local bases are in range of Chinese missiles.
In addition, likely China can blockade Japan and Korea from, at least tankers, without ever leaving home. If Iran can make a few 100 ballistic missiles, Chinese can make thousands and thousands of accurate ones. US is making ~150 ABM interceptors a year. No contest.
So a protracted war would hurt everyone, not just Chinese, and ever more so, as China's moving to using more EVs and building up their domestic grid.
No_one
8mo ago
This nation is doomed, you cannot even vote such problems out since upper castes are a minority
Even smarter and more homogeneous nations struggle a lot.
It took 40 years, untold billions of $ and much woe for Swedish nation to start thinking, collectively, maybe we shouldn't be importing refugees on a massive scale.
if I ever tell people that I am Indian and the stuff wrong with my nation, they would probably think that
You could just refuse to identify as Indian and use caste & state or point out that India has the cultural and generic diversity of a continent, which it has. Even a normie should understand that. Ask him if he thinks Finns are the same as Italians perhaps . .
No_one
9mo ago
but also because this is the apparent calibre of American leadership. Even if we assume that Elite Human Capital or the Deep State is running the show, why can't these people find a decent media spokesperson? How hard can it be?
That US is led by midwits has been evident since 2001 at least. The war on terror was a grotesque miscalculation-the neocon dreams of seven countries in five years delusions, Iraq a fumble, the war was a strategic victory for Al-Qaeda because it led to a decrease in US power and influence, loss of trust in the USG. Then you had the Arab Spring, which succeeded only in ruining things and not increasing US power either. Let's not even speak of Afghanistan. Then we got to Ukraine. Chinese have made no secret they're not going to be color-revolutioned, yet Americans thought driving China and Russia closely together was just the thing.
Putin clearly wanted in, was cooperative post 9/11, asked to be considered for membership and seeing as NATO has at times contained wholly authoritarian regimes like Turkey's various juntas , Portugal (somehow a founding member) etc, there were no obvious reasons why not to admit them. This would've gone some way to containing China.
That China would become extremely powerful was obvious since early 1900, when they were found to be not intellectually deficient, just merely medieval.
Emanuel Todd, the anthropologist famous for calling Soviet decline back when people thought USSR was eternal has an some interesting remarks in an interview about his upcoming book. Translation here.
No_one
11mo ago
never doubted her intelligence or general political savvy
Victoria Nuland and her type are also 'intelligent' on the same level and look where their brilliant group think has gotten America. Into the enviable position of supporting a meatgrinder that has, so far, killed something like half a million people.
Ask yourself how you'd feel about the intelligence of Chinese politicians if they staged a coup in Canada, replaced the Canadian government with a pro-Chinese ones and then were surprised by US invading the place.
No_one
9mo ago
Why bring up the Springfield pets thing?
Because when democrats are forced to fact check that and say "the guy who is seen carrying a goose is South African" etc, they're not helping themselves much. And there's police reports of people killing geese in the park and loading them in cars from Springfield, Ohio.
Here's a interview from Springfield. It's rough.
Here's another thirty minutes of residents complaining.
Kamala is a competent but relatively weak debater,
She's being accused of having used help during the debate, though. Her earrings look very similar to wireless headphone earrings being sold. And her frequent gaffes with compound sentences are suspicious.
On the other hand, she did pass the bar exam, so, it might be a legit okay performance.
No_one
11mo ago
Twitter poster QuasLacrimas has, I believe, the right take:
Since everyone seems to have a take: if leftist poors can openly call for assassinations but all other poors can get fired for very milquetoast observations, it creates the impression leftism is legally mandatory. Thus leftist poors must be persecuted to protect the others, however this is a dishonorable job and I suggest anyone with self-respect leave hunting cashiers and the like to bottom-feeding grifters who will gladly smear themselves in muck for attention.(2/2)
No_one
11mo ago
To WhiningCoil, we're all in a propaganda war whose outcome is critical. To you, it's just a game of sorts. Not a life-or-death conflict whose outcome determines whether normies return to functional normality, or end up in cultural-revolution tier insanity.
I get why he's pissed at you, and I get why you as a young gay furry aren't overly concerned with the possible normalisation of cultral-revolution tier social insanity.
Like most young people, you probably believe, deep down that you're immortal and it'll all work out.
Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ? I guess not.
No_one
1mo ago
It was pixiv, not danbooru where he did the count back then..
In any case, are we trying to argue that Keira Knightley, poor thing, has more attractive boobs than a typical page 6 British model? (swimsuit pictures)
but AI art is definitively only appreciated by a niche subgroup, with the modal anime erotica enjoyer being highly dismissive of it.
People are very performative about this, to the point that any public statement about it should be just ignored. I've been amused to observe the nonsense in a certain niche, where some people were literally bullied out of a forum over saying "AI art" is fine, and then a guy comes in, makes some illustrated story that's clearly using AI for both text and images and lies about it and people are okay with it.
No_one
1mo ago
Why would it get dark? Look at Australian Aboriginals. 90% of the pure blooded ones are economically irrelevant and yet they cope.
Sure their coping methods involve gasoline, glue and drinking but I like to think 130+ IQ Anglos are instead going to do something less self-destructive. And you'll probably be able to get some good mileage out of AI usesticking a lot of neuralink into your brain and directly interfacing with the AI through thoughts.
Also AIs are pretty easy to align so lot of people will likely just keep being economically and competitive useful by purchasing their own AGI and using it as an extension of their self.
I've spent last two months playing the roughly 2 year old CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.
TL;DR: "What if X-com was an RPG, had a personality, Doom levels of gore, brain-melting amount of builds and a few waifus that drop you if you flub one dialogue option?" (also husbandos, ranging from nice chekist to a sadistic serial killer elf)
I really, really enjoyed it. I'm not 100% sure of it, but it seems to me to be almost as enjoyable as classics like Jagged Alliance 2 or Baldur's Gate 2.
- if replying/discussing, please use spoiler tags when appropriate
- if you have questions, feel free to ask
- the review:
Short review, no spoilers here:
It's an A production game, so the budget was probably <20 million$. There is one DLC -it's a must have, seamlessly integrated, makes the game better, very high quality. There'll be more later I'm told. The story is pretty simple: you are a distant relative of a Rogue Trader, and because said relative learned that you're a fairly capable individual, recruited by the same to act as a middle manager for someone who is basically a dictator of a fairly large tributary empire. Something like 40 billion people over five planets. Yes, in the grim darkness of far future, it's tributary empires all the way down.
Fans of the setting say that lore wise, the game stays pretty true to the setting. I enjoyed it bigly. I'd say moreso than BG3, perhaps almost as much as I enjoyed BG2 or Jagged Alliance 2 when I first played those absolute classics. If you liked either, I think you'd like this one, so don't read the spoilers here!
Looks pretty nice - almost as nice from tactical view as BG3, but character models are much less detailed up close, there's no face animations etc and it's almost always drone's PoV. The explosions, magic effects and blood look just fine. The only thing that's missing is human/ xenos torches but the game has a 'T' rating which is really funny as it's, at times, very grisly and a heretical playthrough requires doing stuff that makes Auschwitz look like a tea party. Generally the really grisly stuff is only in dialogue / decisions so, off screen. Indeed, being in charge of a large starship, there are gigadeath decisions at times.
It's a combination of tactical combat, two layers of it - personal(95%) and ship (5%), the personal part being pretty much like BG3 or X-com, though more convoluted if not greatly more complex and of a fairly decent RPG with ..lots of text and pretty good writing. And also has a light 3x layer, where you manage planetary development. That part is almost completely optional.
It's no Disco Elysium but it's actually quite good. I'd say it's easily on par with BG2, perhaps better at times. It has a three variable alignment system, with the axes being dogmatic, iconoclast and heretic. Iconoclast here means being a bleeding heart do gooder, too good for the setting.
There are romances, and they're notably well more done than in BG3. E.g. there's a few horny characters who will make advances, but generally the romance options are believable. E.g. the noble lady will drop you like a bad transmission if you violate propriety, the attractive religious fanatic has no time for romance, the century old magical chekist is of course straight and an option but it'll take time. The incredibly arrogant (optional) eldar party member sees people as little more than animals and has a hilarious sequence of complaining about having had advances made toward them. etc.
Overall, the party members are well written, generally not annoying, sorta believable and in some cases incredibly voice acted. If the game has any weaknesses, it's mostly technical - the engine is not well optimized, there's sometimes 20 second loading times on a PC that can run C2077 in RTX at 4k / 40 fps. There are a few bugs still, there were a lot on release.
After playing through it, I discovered that with the exception of voice acting, it was written entirely by Russians. Coded too, ditto for graphics iirc. That explains the refreshing paucity of marvelesque dialogue and cringe, something that marred by enjoyment of Baldur's Gate 3.
No_one
8mo ago
Bare minimum competent execution without real threats: Norway, Sweden, Czechia
Czechia?
The system is hopelessly corrupt.
What's not said is he asked for $20 million which were to fund a major political party (ODS). I highly doubt he wasn't working for them.
No_one
9mo ago
I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.
On the contrary, it makes perfects sense. If you take people from a chaotic and poor country, and not the best people and send them to a place that's not poor and not chaotic and just let them loose, without close supervision, they're going to behave in a chaotic manner.
They, or a substantial part of them were apparently relocated there as a part of a scheme to provide cheap workforce, but I find it doubtful that most of them even work. We know the statistics, we know they don't know the language and have low ability on average. So low that profitably employing them is a challenge.
Haiti is one of the poorest countries on Earth. You surely know of the observations Scott Alexander made and then deleted off the internet out of fear?.
I don't buy the collision story alternate theory bc I saw it discussed by sailors. It was just a crash. US warships crash into merchant shipping with some regularity - whether it's more or less often than other navies I don't know.
The fighter that fell off board story stinks a little. There's no conceivable reason why a carrier would be taking evasive action short of torpedoes in the water, which the Houthis don't have. From the POV of a missile the carrier is essentially stationary, whatever direction it moves is irrelevant.
So saying "oh fighter fell off bc evasive maneuver" smells like BS.
Likewise, if I imagine a general being killed by Russian ballistic missiles, in most cases the body will not be in a state where you can put him in his quarters and pretend it was a natural death.
Not really. If there's fragmentation or overpressure damage and the guy is promptly stuck into a fridge..which is usually possible in UA cities, the body would look superficially fine. A keen eyed medic could spot it but you can always swear some guy to secrecy and just fix it, no? Isn't there a regulation allowing something like that. Bystanders would see a corpse being removed.
Doesn't really make sense why a general would be there tho. Pretty sure only tech specialists who really have to be there and rarely special forces go there.
Minor fun on twitter where some people noticed google autocomplete has an allergy to 'Trump' and others called them liars because it's probably geographically selective.
Or google computes the autocomplete in search on a monthly basis?.
But if that's so, why is Trump himself suppressed? He's been here for quite some time.
I lean towards deliberately different autocomplete based on IP ranges, because I don't see why Snekotron would be lying about it.
EDIT:
I believe this is the right answer. by @Westerly .
There might even be a google press release on that but who could find it now in this deluge.
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