Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
No bio...
User ID: 265
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
14hr ago
Put me down for Team Shakesneer, opposed to Team Rov_Scam.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
14hr ago
I'm libertarian in that I oppose most international borders. The reason is that it violates human rights for very little justified purpose.
Do you lock your doors at night? Is your bedroom open to migrants? I assume not, for obvious reasons. Why don't those reasons apply to, say, the Longhouse of your tribe, or the City Hall at 3am, or your sovereign nation?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
14hr ago
If the brain is a prediction machine, tricking it into playing video games is a fantastic way to get reps in. With tradeoffs, natch.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
14hr ago
Current project is a Holdem (poker) website, multiplayer or single-player with bots, implemented in Elixir, using Event Sourcing and CQRS architecture. Nearly feature complete for a first draft, I am on the cusp of making it available for people to bang on.
Briefly:
- Play chips, no money
- No-friction profile and wallet tracking (no passwords: cookies and tokens)
- High-fidelity hand history, for real-time or post-hoc analysis
- The bots you play against can also advise your play
Rationale:
I was around for poker boom 1.0, with Chris Moneymaker winning the World Series of Poker, back when it was hosted at Binion's, in the Rounders era. We are now in the second wave, GTO, Game Theory Optimal. A completely different meta with different terminology has evolved in the last 10-15 years. I got one goshdarn Doug Polk video in my viewing history, and now I'm nerdsniped into learning about GTO poker, having played maybe 3 poker games in the last 20 years.
So I needed to get my reps in, and I needed advice. Possibly from LLMs. Who could watch my own gameplay and decision making and tell me about my decision, additionally providing new-meta (and old-meta) analysis that should feed better decisions. And I need a lot of reps. So what I have really built is a poker trainer, disguised as free-to-play multiplayer site. I just want to be placed into a realistic situation, with limited information, and train myself to make good decisions.
The crux of this is a so-called "hand history" format that is easy to read and follow, yet informationally complete. I have not found any free poker site that provides a useful hand history for this. So I'm building one. I have a freemium revenue model banging around the back of my brain somewhere.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
14hr ago
I have a ballistics library which includes tons of real-world cartridges and is primarily concerned with estimating muzzle velocity for arbitrary barrel lengths. This would be most applicable to a a sim-style shooter like Tarkov or milsim stuff that wants real world cartridges with real world data. I have the basics for POI relative to POA but zero collision detection with terrain or objects. That much is technically out of scope for my project, which is more of a ballistics database than any sort of engine. But designed to hook up to an engine.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1mo ago
Spendy, but check out https://www.maisonmargiela-fragrances.us I am familiar with their Replica collection, like "Jazz Club", "By The Fireplace", etc.
Disclaimer: this post was written with LLM assistance; the ideas are mine, and I stand behind them
The Simp/Pimp Dialectic: Authenticity and Cultural Knowledge in 1980s-90s Hip-Hop
The term "simp" emerged in 1980s West Coast hip-hop not simply as the antonym of "pimp," but as a more nuanced critique of inauthenticity, cultural shallowness, and failed masculine performance. While contemporary usage has flattened the term into a simple insult for male submission to women, its original deployment by artists like Too Short, E-40, and Sir Mix-A-Lot encoded a sophisticated commentary on taste, realness, and the difference between genuine cultural knowledge and mere posturing. Understanding "simp" requires moving beyond the binary opposition of dominance versus submission and recognizing it as a term that could simultaneously attack both the fake player and the genuinely weak—united by their shared failure to embody authentic masculine competence within Black urban culture.
Too Short's description of a simp as a "knockoff pimp" is particularly revealing. The word "knockoff" suggests counterfeit goods—something designed to look like the real thing but fundamentally lacking in quality, craftsmanship, or authenticity. This framing positions the simp not as someone who has chosen a different path from pimping, but as someone attempting to inhabit that same space while failing utterly. The simp might put on the performance—talking the talk, claiming status, pursuing women—but lacks the genuine article beneath the surface. This interpretation aligns perfectly with hip-hop culture's broader obsession with "keeping it real" versus being exposed as fake, a distinction that could make or break an artist's credibility and, by extension, anyone's standing in the community.
Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1992 deployment of "simp" in "Baby Got Back" makes far more sense through this lens of authenticity versus superficiality than through any simple pimp/simp opposition. When he raps, "A lot of simps won't like this song / 'Cause them punks like to hit it and quit it / And I'd rather stay and play," he's not calling committed men simps—he's calling the "hit it and quit it" crowd simps because they're shallow, trend-following poseurs. These are men whose tastes have been colonized by mainstream (read: white) beauty standards, who chase after "Cosmo" ideals and "rock video" aesthetics rather than possessing the cultural depth to appreciate what Mix-A-Lot celebrates. They're fake because their desire is derivative, borrowed, inauthentic. They lack the connoisseur's eye, the deep cultural knowledge that would allow them to recognize and value what the mainstream dismisses. In this reading, the simp is culturally shallow—influenced by "skinny white girl culture" rather than grounded in authentic Black aesthetic appreciation.
Yet the term clearly also carried the "simpering weenie" meaning—the overly accommodating, submissive man who places too much value on women's approval and lacks the masculine self-possession that the pimp archetype embodied. This wasn't contradictory so much as it was targeting a different manifestation of the same fundamental failure: the absence of authentic masculine competence or "game." The 1992 Boyz II Men track "Sympin' Ain't Easy" captures this dimension, describing the degrading work of begging and pleading for female attention. Here the simp isn't pretending to be something he's not—he's genuinely weak, openly subordinate, transparently desperate. But both the fake player and the genuine weenie shared a common deficit: neither possessed real game, real knowledge, real cultural authority.
The semantic flexibility of "simp" allowed it to function as a catch-all critique of masculine inauthenticity in multiple registers. You could be a simp by being a poseur—someone trying to perform dominance or cultural knowledge you didn't actually possess. Or you could be a simp by being genuinely submissive—someone who had given up the performance entirely and openly accepted subordination. What united these uses was the fundamental assumption that authentic masculinity required a specific kind of cultural competence, self-possession, and freedom from both mainstream influence and female control. The pimp represented someone who had mastered this competence; the simp represented various modes of failure to achieve it.
This etymological complexity has been largely lost in the term's contemporary internet usage, which has reduced "simp" to a simple insult for male emotional availability or respect toward women. But the original 1980s-90s usage was far richer, encoding debates about authenticity, cultural capital, aesthetic discernment, and the performance of masculine competence within a specific subcultural context. The pimp/simp dichotomy wasn't really about control versus submission—it was about real versus fake, deep versus shallow, culturally grounded versus colonized by mainstream values. A simp could be someone faking dominance just as easily as someone genuinely submitting; what mattered was the failure to embody authentic masculine authority and cultural knowledge.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1mo ago
75% of your bodyweight in protein.
Wew, lad! What is your conversion factor, lbs to grams?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1mo ago
inhuman competitive forces.
Your point is taken and well-made, but I have to mention: Mises would disagree, but not Moloch!
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
2mo ago
Which facts are you disputing? The deadly weapon operated by Good was an automobile. Good struck the officer with her vehicle. Assault with a deadly weapon. Babbitt did not assault any police officer and was unarmed. Babbitt died while trying to breach a windowed door.
Which side is my side?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
2mo ago
One was an assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. The other was breaking and entering. I believe these have different thresholds for the use of deadly force.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
3mo ago
Here is some more on CoT that I find related and interesting, but revolving around deception:
https://nickandresen.substack.com/p/how-ai-is-learning-to-think-in-secret
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
3mo ago
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
3mo ago
Chris Bray has an interesting take
If you click on that last link, you’ll see a local TV news journalist going to one of the same daycare centers that Nick Shirley went to, and doing it long before. But you’ll also see a bunch of obvious differences in framing that turn out to be extremely important. Nick Shirley just said there are no children here; the mainstream journalist did a questions are being raised story, a “some claim” thing, noting the presence of regulatory violations. He even says out loud that he didn’t see any children at the supposed daycare center, but he can’t quite bring himself to stick the landing. He needs a government official to say that there are no children there. He needs an official narrative to advance. Watch for yourself if you want to see the difference.
There’s almost no difference between the facts aired by a Minneapolis TV station in January and the facts aired by Nick Shirley in December, but the tone and the framing are from a different universe. Mainstream journalists have been saying for years that some say there is fraud in Somali social services in Minneapolis. Controversy is swirling. Questions are being raised. Officials are looking into. Their instinctive focus is on narrative, on what is being said. They pull back. Nick Shirley races forward, and lavishes attention on the agitated response. Legacy media haven’t ignored the story; they’ve tiptoed up to its edges a thousand times.
See also the remarkable example of County Highway, which recently produced a long, detailed, deeply reported, and thoroughly grounded story on Somali social services fraud in Minneapolis, with eagle-eyed political context. Sample from a long story of what County Highway put into print well before the Nick Shirley video:
The state’s entire view of its role in society would soon change in ways that made the frauds far easier to execute. In 2016, Minnesota introduced a $35-million program that provided direct funding to state-based nonprofits working on issues of racial equity. Over the next few years, the state embraced an easily abused model of service delivery through private-sector clients, even as evidence mounted that these programs were beacons for fraudsters.
In 2018, a whistleblower claimed that over $100 million in payments through the state’s childcare assistance program had been fraudulent. The way the scam worked was dismayingly simple: Daycares and other childcare providers, which require a license to operate in Minnesota, would obtain names and identifying information for children eligible for state-subsidized care and then bill the government for services they hadn’t actually rendered. Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash. In 2017, Twin Cities travelers declared $100 million in physical cash transfers out of the country to airport customs agents.
But this story produced something like a fraction of one percent of the attention that Nick Shirley got with a dramatic video, which is an…interesting thing to notice.
Swiss cheese: Information has to flow through a long series of gates that don’t overlap, overcoming the faked-up reactions and distractions, overcoming the absence of patience among consumers of information, overcoming official uninterest and calculated distortion, and probably a dozen other gates that we can think of if we put our heads together.
Note that the first point here collides with the second point: All the people saying that Nick Shirley suddenly just made up a fake story to get clicks or advance his evil far-right agenda run head-on into the problem of a decade of the same topic being discussed.
Nick Shirley wasn’t the first, or anything near it. But he was the one who broke through, for reasons that can be discovered and elaborated. That’s something to think about as we consider all the things that need to be dragged into the light in a sick political culture.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
5mo ago
Wasn't it Lorenz who secretly surveiled a Clubhouse gathering only to falsely accuse Marc Andreesen of being retarded?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
5mo ago
As Churchill said, nobody now mourns the native Americans beyond the vapid and entirely European absurdity of “land acknowledgements”.
What did he say?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
5mo ago
You seem to say that judgement is a major factor. It's not merely the quantity of labor expended that makes something valuable. People have to like it.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
I never really cared for the guy but had some kind of lasting respect for him. I desperately want to watch the CK documentary or be involved in its production.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.
This depresses me.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
7mo ago
I have read that Claude and/or Claude Code has gotten dumber lately, due to "quantization", which I think makes a lower resolution model that is cheaper to operate. So that may be why I feel like Sonnet has a case of the dumbs. I rarely interact with Opus or Gemini Pro these days, on the CLI.
Your argument is wholly distinct from dailydogma's and more interesting, granted. But dd was saying that the prevention of a human from crossing a property boundary is a human rights violation. A very strange argument coming from a libertarian. I would like to know which human right that is, what it may conflict with, and the nature of the violation.
And while I agree that my analogy may not hold for various reasons, as it scales up and out, I argue that none of those reasons coincide with or support dailydogma's position. And I would be interested to know the scale at which dd believes it breaks down.
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