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
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.
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 never connected the two usernames, but I did notice both were excellent posters. Welcome.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Very happy to see you here. This series is one of my favorite fixtures of this space.
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.
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
1yr ago
I predict that this is a false dichotomy, and that AI is going to lead to a reorganization of American political coalitions such that the red and blue tribes will not exist in recognizable form. There will be schisms, alliances of convenience, and especially the rise of currently non-existent or occluded political interest groups.
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
Any way I can get a feed of multiple online communities in one place, e.g. this one, rdrama and cumtown?
Obsidian
1yr ago
This is a fully general prediction for any technology.
Yes, it is in fact a political philosophy of technology. I'm still chasing literature support and context for it to be better able to communicate it, but at this point I'm pretty confident in it.
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
It comes down to relative power. If you can make a weapon that lets any idiot (or, eventually, no idiot) destroy a main battle tank unassisted, then you don't need to worry very much about military training when facing tanks. Repeat mutatis mutandis for infantry, planes, drones, etc.
My take is that the West - including Turkey - is providing weapons to Ukraine that are decisively superior to what Russia is fielding.
Obsidian
1yr ago
The Northern Lights (American: The Golden Compass) would be great for middle school, as it is about standing up to groomers and keeping your integrity even when it's inconvenient. The strong gypsy representation and relative antagonism towards religion are both bonuses in my book.
Roald Dahl's The Witches is a good children's book about dealing with difficult changes, so put that in as well. Add The Chronicles of Narnia as well.
For high school... my school had a heavy focus on stories of disprivileged people, which I found helpful. One of the options was The Notebook by Agota Kristof, which is a great little read in spite of the beastiality and gang rape. We also had to read at least one book that reflected traditional life and culture in our region, which is something I think every school should do.
Ideally you'd want the kids to be exposed to at least one work of genre fiction and at least one work of literary fiction. At least one work reflecting liberal values, and at least one work subverting or critiquing liberal values. A few book-length works, and a few short stories.
I'm excited to see what the other posters come up with.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I'm keeping it for /r/redscarepod, /r/redscarepodprivate, /r/slatestarcodex, /r/theschism.
Roll call! Who made it over?
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