Obsidian
1yr ago
Something's missing. From the stuff you tried, it sounds like maybe it is that you don't spend enough quality time with quality people.
As for myself, I try to keep a stable representation of who I want to be and what I deserve, and then I pay homage to that by getting up, going out, connecting with people, working out, etc.
Obsidian
1yr ago
We are at the stage where the technology exists but is not yet effectively controllable by those in power. Compare with the Internet, which was value-neutral for a long time; but today oligopolies in payment processing and technical infrastructure enable the ruling coalition to push its opponents into ever more remote corners of the ecosystem. Surely dissident online spaces like this one will only become more marginalized as time goes on; so it will be with dissident use of AI technology.
Obsidian
1yr ago
If you haven't read The Expanse, give it a go. It really is exceptionally good. Comparable to A Song of Ice and Fire, but tighter, and it sticks the landing. The worldbuilding is very strong, the plot is intricate and internally consistent. There are a few weaker points around characterization, particularly female characters, but overall one of the better works of fiction I've read.
Obsidian
6mo ago
Started the Bible (TOB translation). Integral Notes version.
It's a very busy text. I slightly regret not going with the Essential Notes version.
I tried starting Thomas Cook's 1728 translation of Hesiod's Theogony, picked at random. I'm having the opposite problem here; I'm failing to contextualize anything.
Obsidian
7mo ago
I can't parse half of the stuff in this comment but I'd love to hear you go on at length about it. Have you thought of going on The Bailey?
Obsidian
1yr ago
Over the next few years we are going to have to answer some serious questions like, do humans need to work? Do we need a continual growth economy?
These are old questions. It is worth revisiting Bertrand Russell's 1932 essay on the topic. The fact that it could have been written yesterday speaks volumes about how much progress the revolutionary spirit has achieved in the meantime.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I think what /u/MediumIsMessage is saying is probably true for androgens but not PEDs more broadly. I'm basing this off my brother's encounter with T, which made him into a much more manic/alpha type of guy.
Obsidian
4mo ago
As an independentist, what you're saying is true but irrelevant. People are fully economically illiterate, there is nothing close to a popular consciousness that we'd hurt from missing those transfers. We expect short-term economic injury from the turmoil, but that's pretty much it.
Obsidian
7mo ago
If this is done at anything less than world-ending scale, technological society will hormetically adapt to prevent future instances. It is all but hopeless.
Obsidian
1yr ago
It's not that I lacked a custom-tailored education. But I was intellectually starving, desperate for things to learn, for concepts to connect together. And adults just told me "just wait a couple more years, it'll come."
If I had another go I would want to change everything after kindergarten. I only skipped one year, and was held back from skipping several more for nebulous reasons having to do with social development - lot of good that did.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Ring Fit did something interesting from a game design perspective, but it's not at all worth it. It gets old really fast, and it's more preoccupied with preventing you from hurting yourself than with actually being fun or challenging.
Down Dog isn't a game in that it doesn't have interactivity but it's great.
Obsidian
1yr ago
new age Q-ists are pretty big about bonding, praise and positive emotion. Lots of yoga teachers and what not.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Any way I can get a feed of multiple online communities in one place, e.g. this one, rdrama and cumtown?
Obsidian
1yr ago
First, there is no reserve of fresh, high-morale troops that Ukraine is bringing to the fight, like the Allies did as the Americans arrived starting in 1917.
I think high-tech weaponry has fundamentally reshaped warfare, though the final word isn't written on this.
"unbounded supply of Javelins, Stingers and Bayraktars" is the new "reserve of fresh, high-morale troops". Maybe.
I haven't played Factorio in a while, but I'd like to submit my pitch for Industrial Revolution 2. It expands and improves on vanilla gameplay in a number of ways.
IR2 inverts a crucial dynamic from the original game.
In vanilla, science costs are everything. The cost of your actual base - in material, in assembler throughput - is a rounding error compared to the titanesque costs of making hundreds of little colored bottles.
In IR2, science is cheap, or at least comparable to vanilla. But infrastructure is 5-10x more expensive and complicated. So the dynamics of the game shifts away from giant buses and towards big beautiful malls.
In vanilla, there is really only one power distribution medium: electricity. There is the embryo of a second power distribution medium in the form of coal lines feeding furnaces, but the final solution to the furnace question is easy to work out, and indeed everyone is using the same design. Steam trains are a curiosity and mostly unworkable.
IR2 keeps coal lines, but it also adds a new early-game power distribution story in the form of steam, carried through pipes. Designing with colony-wide steam distribution brings a number of new problems and solutions that you wouldn't encounter just in vanilla refinery design.
In vanilla, there is one way to smelt. IR2 has three, with accelerating efficiency: vanilla smelting, crushed ore smelting, and washed ore smelting. Crushed ore is available fairly early; washed ore coincides with the time you want to centralize your smelting. (I've designed a poly-ore washing and smelting setup with rate-limiting before, it was a great challenge.)
The IR2 recipe graph has byproducts.
The vanilla recipe graph also has byproducts, in particular from oil refining. And that makes for interesting designs! But the IR2 recipe graph has many more, and some of the byproducts participate to cycles in the recipe graph, leading to integrated multi-product lines. It's neat.
The average well-designed vanilla base looks like a main bus with long production lines sticking out on either side (or on only one side in some designs).
This is by necessity. When you need 10+ assemblers for every product to get decent scale, an orderly rectangle of stacked production lines is the only way to get anywhere.
IR2 by and large does not require long production lines. I am a big fan of Seeing like a State, so I appreciate that spaghetti is actually a competitive design strategy all the way into purple science.
This extends to trains, by the way. One or two cargo wagons is all you'll need until fairly deep into the game. This enables designs using e.g. dense city blocks, a design I'm fairly proud of.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I feel like it's time to stop and think about the nature of your relationship if that's where it's going.
Decide how much you trust/distrust him without external help and go from there. Social intuition is a wonderful tool, and if you get it wrong you'll learn from the experience and get better.
Obsidian
3mo ago
It also makes such posts cattier, which is a disincentive in and of itself.
Obsidian
3mo ago
I’d say what distinguished the forum originally was more a commitment to free speech than to civility, though it had both of course.
In my mod days we experimented with keeping to a particular Overton window, above and beyond what was required to continue existing on reddit, in order to keep posters broadly comfortable. Drawing the line was frustrating and arbitrary and I hated doing it. Stuff like, don't insist on conspicuously misgendering trans posters, and don't lay 100% of the blame for any given issue on Mexicans/Jews/whatever. In any given specific situation we could have reasonably ruled in either direction, but if we'd radically committed to either free speech or civility the moderation would have become exploitable and the forum would have blown up.
Obsidian
4mo ago
I, a frog, would wish to team up with you on a peaceable separation campaign.
Federalists on either side are wretched people.
Funny, I very much experienced the "spiritual" aspects as cheap filler. They definitely set an intriguing mood, but they didn't populate it with a message.
It's vanishingly rare that we see spirituality or mysticism well done in sci-fi. The Starcraft II single-player campaign was another otherwise-decent story that was held back by poorly engaging with this. I just don't think most sci-fi writers have a connection with the divine. And godly men don't write sci-fi, mostly they write about the world they belong to.
I've been thinking that BSG with the "spiritual" bits expunged would be a much greater show. Though I'm sure something else would jump out as begging to be cut.
Obsidian
4mo ago
The devs quit way too early on that one. The learning curve is all over the place, and the horror effect lasts maybe one hour. Shame, it's such a cool game.
Obsidian
4mo ago
@FCfromSSC origin story is iconic. I relate to the terror and depression of cancellation, but I could never put it down like you did. I'd say "go on The Bailey" but that'd be missing the point.
It's funny because this is OCD spectrum behaviour but there's no telling whether there's a hidden sixth point that goes "also, OCD is ruining my life" or if this is the full extent of your quirkiness
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