Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
15d ago
Something I ran into today: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/epic-cplusplus-coding-standard-for-unreal-engine#inclusivewordchoice
Good thing I can now code Boomer Wish Fulfillment, Minority Slayer 2000 and Dubiously-Consensual Intercourse Simulator in a fully inclusive style. Thanks to whoever wrote that coding standard!
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
Random thoughts: This is a return to normal. The 20th century saw an excessive standardization of all work as office or factory work, i.e., external workplace work where employed and salaried workers work under direct supervision. Employers now realize that this needn't be universally enforced. You can in fact just hire people to do their job, let them handle the details, and judge them based on their effective output. It may take some bossware to make it function for jobs that rely more on putting-in-hours than on getting-things-done, but that's a fairly minor hurdle.
What was once the craftsman's workshop adjacent to his living quarters, the farmer living on his farm, the daytaler sleeping right next to tomorrow's task, is now the employee working from home. It's a revival of an older and universal theme that was briefly obscured by some of the excessive outgrowths of the industrial revolution.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
Be quick about it; I think the gratis period expires today or tomorrow.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
25d ago
"Speaking plainly" that wasn't.
Congratulations, you have succesfully cherry-picked one of the right's worse representatives. Is this supposed to teach anyone anything other than "This Natalie Winters I never heard of before who I will probably never hear of again seems a little vapid."?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
In addition to what all the others wrote, and keeping in mind that leftists are an increasingly rare but still essential resource on the motte, why not leave?
You can enjoy living in a bubble where you're right and everyone around you is right, everyone agrees on everything and there needn't be any controversial debates in which, god forbid, there might not be one side that is clearly correct and another side that falls in line after being shown the obvious truth. Instead, if your American bubbles are anything like our German bubbles, you and the well-aligned people around you who already know what is right and what is wrong can heap fire and brimstone on the outgroup with impunity. Not, mind you, that discourse on the motte is always better than that. But it'll feel good. It'll feel good to be right, and among other right-thinking people, and to hate the wrong-thinkers together. You can bond over your shared hatred, and if that ever gets boring, have a little purity spiral and ostracize some of your former own who didn't stand sufficiently far on the right side of history. And when you're done hating, you can go back to educating those around you, teaching them the latest and greatest in sociopolitical innovation.
Leftists do this. Rightists do this. Apolitical people who stumble into political bubbles and just try to fit in do this. Why shouldn't you do it too?
Of course it's real. What else could Iran have done? They can't project power, their long-range weapons are running low, their terrorist groups abroad have already reached the limits of what they can do. They won't exactly just cancel the Islamic Republic and call the game lost. Anything drastic they might do - buy nukes from Pakistan or the Norks, mobilize their army and march on Israel through whatever is in the way, or rebuild Fordo two miles below the mountain - will take time, and time is exactly what a ceasefire buys them. Does the same for Israel, too, but I suppose that's a gamble worth making when all your alternatives range from wishful to fantastical.
Edit: Time to eat crow. I guess Iran is taking a stand on principle, where the principle is "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me". That, or they don't have their missile men under control.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
12d ago
Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Imperial Germany was absolutely an Obrigkeitsstaat (elite-state?) ruled by a small number of people with very token democratic institutions that were meant to channel republicanism into wearing itself out and discrediting itself via fruitless procedures conducted within a powerless framework. That "democracy" never amounted to anything, wasn't taken very seriously by non-activists, and got absolutely bulldozed over by the actual rulers whenever they didn't jump according to orders. The Prussians in general and Bismarck specifically had a habit of allowing seemingly republican instutions to take the wind out of activists' sails, only to pull the rug out from under them and have riot police beat the shit out of them a few years later. The counterrevolution was still very much going on in Imperial Germany.
So the "legacy of democratic" norms was really the legacy that democracy was a farce. Does that square with your perception of inter-war Germany?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
11d ago
I can well imagine that "brought to life" implies that whatever damage it suffered since or even leading up to death would be repaired in the process of resurrection. Which might raise the question of why damaging it further matters, then, but I suppose it would be disrespectful to intentionally work opposite to God's intended course.
Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.
Historically the limit on such technologies has been that you need one at least one human to actually be the weapon, wield the weapon, or direct the weapon. The weapon would not be able to go places where humans cannot go (at least not without using vehicles, which makes the weapon a lot larger, more detectable, less flexible and less affordable), cannot be deployed in numbers greater than the number of available and qualified humans, and will never be cheaper than the price of one qualified human + the technology involved, and will be at least as detectable as the human wielding it.
With sufficiently advanced drones, those constraints go out of the window. All of a sudden your weapon can be arbitrarily small, arbitrarily cheap, arbitrarily numerous and arbitrarily dispersed. We're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones. They will fly close to the ground if not crawl outright, utilize cover and concealement, infest all your nooks and crannies, be so cheap as to be freely replaceable, operate completely autonomously, and if they find you they'll shoot you with an embarassingly small zip-gun right in the dick.
At least that's the way things are headed right now. As so often, attack precedes defense. Maybe there are low-hanging fruits for countermeasures - some kind of electromagnetic weapon that prevents drones from functioning in a large area but that doesn't affect humans. And then, since we've already tasted the forbidden fruit, you can bet someone will develop organic circuitry. Maybe human soldiers will huddle in fortified bases surrounded by miles of completely denuded flat country, protected by some kind of automated RADAR and LASER system that zaps anything that moves their way. But honestly, it's wishful thinking either way.
More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare. I don't feel like there's any more to explain here because it seems so very obvious. With autonomous drones, we will have uncoupled warfare from the human frame and mind. The current human-controlled drone phase is just a clumsy first step towards honest-to-god man-made horrors beyond all possibility of comprehension. From that point on it will barely matter whether the drones kill us with jury-rigged mortar shells or by dropping polonium in our coffee cups or by buzzing near our ears until we go insane or by shooting a tiny laser from the horizon that neatly severs our neck arteries. It will not matter much wether they're built in a dozen factories, in a million living rooms, or self-replicating right here and now. Either way, us humans will be obsolete as combatants.
But that's future music, of course. For the more immediate future, near-term developments will depend on what the lowest-hanging technological fruits are and who's picking what. Just making drones cheaper, making them smarter, and making them more easily controllable in large numbers (i.e., giving them limited autonomy) will significantly increase the numbers deployable en masse. Short of that, we may see more drones integrated organically into existing human and vehicle formations, like the Americans are already known to be experimenting, where they will probably work much like they already do in Ukraine, mostly for reconaissance and as loitering munitions, only everywhere and used by everyone and employed even more liberally.
This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.
The big cracking point will be drone autonomy. One might think that this is not going to happen, that it'll be unethical and banned by some convention or treaty, but I posit that it's entirely inevitable. Unlike with NBC weapons that are either useful mostly against unprepared civilians (BC) or have incredibly high requirements of the situation before their use becomes at all practical (N), autonomous drones will be universally useful and practical due to their scalability and flexibility, from high-level strategy down to tactical nitty-gritty. No military force will be able to afford not employing autonomous drones. The killbots may not be right around the corner, but they are coming for sure. Anyone refusing to use them will be militarily irrelevant.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
5d ago
Some minor coding, preparations for future "features", but nothing visible.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
14d ago
Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?
Yeah, by walking right up to them and asking them "hey, do you have a few minutes to talk about your writing/fencing/programming"? (Or sending them an email, anyways.)
By accomplishment? Hell no.
I've come to a similar conclusion regarding many statements along the lines of "you can't fight fate/genetics/the system/[phenomenon]". Much like "randomness" among young people, i.e., the belief that they will enjoy positive outcomes independently of their actions or lack thereof, many people, and especially older people, will excuse their refusal to change their habits by appealing to some greater force that supposedly nullifies any potential efforts on their part. "You can't know that behavior X will have outcome Y!", they say. "You could make an effort to X and then Y might still foil your plans!". And sure, sometimes that's object-level correct. It seems advisable to be able to gauge somewhat to what an extent and at what cost you can influence your outcomes. But many people employ this seemingly analytical language in a completely binary fashion terminating in non-arguments that are thinly-veiled excuses to indulge in bad behavior.
Examples:
- "I'm too old to quit smoking, we all die in the end anyways, and besides many smokers reach a ripe old age."
- "Yeah, I could eat less to be less fat, but CICO is an oversimplification. Also, muh metabolism."
- "I have to let my child do whatever it likes, children turn out well enough regardless of what parents do."
- "I'll go exercise tomorrow, but right now I need to binge netflix. (x365)"
- "Just don't write unit tests, those take too long and we've never had trouble without them in the past."
- "I'm not going to speak to a stranger, they might be a predator!"
- "I won't talk to my boss about my salary, those misogynists won't pay me more anyways."
All of those statements ignore any realistic expected value in favor of just keeping on trucking as usual, by pointing at some supposed mechanism that confounds any attempts to impose one's will upon the world.
I went to a HEMA tournament a few weeks ago. It was peak hayfever season, I was keeping myself somewhat functional with an ample supply of antihistamines and complementary coffee, I had barely slept, but there I went to compete, I cannot do otherwise. I ended up in a pool that contained the following types of fencers:
- One very quick guy who ended up winning the whole tournament,
- An accomplished veteran of countless tournaments,
- A relative newcomer in good shape,
- A fairly unmotivated but physically fit guy whom I had fought twice before, one win and one loss,
- Myself, completely out of practice and in the worst physical shape of my life, and
- A girl
1 and 2 made short work of me. I got a few sloppy hits in, but otherwise got justly dismantled.
3 turned out to be left handed, and I completely failed to adapt to that in time (I ended up having to realize that I grossly overfitted my entire fencing style to defend against strong blows from my opponent's right). We fought again in the eliminations, I tried to recall my best anti-lefty techniques but failed to pull them off, then just switched to maximum aggression and threw a wide variety of different attacks at him which got me a lot further, but but my opponent used his superior mobility to get safe hits in and retreat.
4 did exactly what he did in every fight so far, going in hard and fast to push me out of the ring - I saw it coming and tried to use his momentum to swing him out instead, but fumbled it. From then on I used what worked against him in the past, kept him at a distance and hit his exposed extremities. No pretty fighting, but it worked, I won that one.
6 had previously gotten absolutely pounded by 4, who won the match by repeatedly going in close and grappling her with little resistance. I fought 6 last in the pool, and was by then thoroughly exhausted. I first scored by doing what 4 had done to her, went in close, grabbed her right arm with my left and just gave her a one-handed bonk on the helmet. I could have probably repeated that a few more times, too, but instead I wanted to do better and tried to outfence her at medium distance, which just turned into silly sword-waving on both gassed-out sides. She ended up winning that one by pushing herself and paying actual attention in the end, while I was just phoning it in out of fatigue.
First time I lost against a woman in a swordfight!
Also, 4 took an honest-to-God nap right next to the ring. I was very impressed.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
No offense, but can the mods please just blanket ban any post that builds an argument based on LLM output?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
11d ago
I agree with your overall reasoning. Our favorite current-day technologies could theoretically be used as the next step in the formation of homo technicus, tool-using man who outcompetes his more natural rivals because technology just makes him better at life, but right now those technologies are mostly used to hook into our path-of-least-resistence hedonism to maximize engagement and minimize agency. In the long run, we'll figure out how to use them more intelligently and efficiently for productive purposes, and how to protect ourselves from addiction and brain-addling engagement-maximization-schemes. Well, "we" - some will, some won't, and the former will make it further into the future than the latter before technology progress makes humans in general obsolete.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
20d ago
That is rather the weakest part of his argument. Many people here absolutely do argue against video games, against pornography and in favor of marriage.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
At the point where the father prevents the boy from picking up a sword. That's where you should have stepped in, enthusiasticaly pressed the foam weapon into his little hands, and distracted or even confronted the "father".
Of course I'm heavily biased here. I'm doing what I can to teach fencing and grappling to my 3-year-old daughter, who at least humors me even if she has no drive to fight. Kid wants to pick up weapons? Great! What parent wouldn't want their child to develop a healthy enthusiasm for self-defence, or maybe even the capacity to defend others? Boys may be boys and girls not as given to physical fighting, but even then, kids of either gender benefit from learning how to handle themselves.
I have a habit of alienating my wife's friends and family members by telling them straight-up what I think on controversial issues. My own family members know better than to start, by now, and my own friends either have no opinion on childrearing or are conservative enough themselves. So I don't think I'm playing internet tough guy when I say that I would have no problem telling the parents in your tale that what they're doing is straight-up horrifying and that I hope the child grows up to escape their influence ASAP. If they want to virtue signal to provoke the squares, fine, consider this square provoked, but they won't get off uncontested.
Now, as for the state...eh. In an ideal world, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-competent yet all-benevolent state will have prevented that scenario from occuring in the first place. In our current world, with our current states, I think it's better for the state to stay out of it.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
14d ago
Pretending that this is a serious suggestion:
It's not the quantity of the beatings, but their accuracy. You need to
- correctly identify asocials, and catch them in the act and
- beat them appropriately and publicly.
And this is difficult because
- It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.
- If the beatings are too piddly, people will not take them seriously. If the beatings are excessive, people will hate the goons dishing them out rather than the poor asocial who just got his teeth knocked out for taking one minute too long on the loo, which weakens the entire institution. If the beatings happen in secret so that nobody can judge whether they were appropriate, you end up with some kafkaeske nightmare state like the soviet union or Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Either way, you raise up class of violent state-sanctioned thugs who beat people up for not loving the state enough. It's not a winning recipe in the long-term.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1mo ago
I keep getting accidentally kicked in the balls by my child. It hurts, alright, but it's nowhere near the most painful thing I endure for the kid's sake.
Frankly, I keep getting kicked, smacked and elbowed in absolutely all my bodily parts. I think that's normal. Right? It's normal for every day to be an MMA cage fight against a little monkey.
A tangent.
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare. I know this means that I effectively espouse the need to pay out the ass for private insurance, and that there will be a very large parts of the population near the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum that will look very disagreeable even to my middle class sensibilities. A low-wage class, a serf class, a dehumanized mass of barely viable specimens, or outright unviable ones kept alive by their barely viable associates, or unviable ones in the process of honest-to-god starving on the streets. But what will the world look like with another few centuries of public welfare and, I assume, no eugenics? The same low-viable population, only grown unchecked by economic pressure thanks to welfare always bailing them out at significant cost to the productive elements of society.
I keep being told that this is baseless, that the unproductive poor will be elevated by education, or that they will naturally stop breeding, or that each subsequent generation is a blank slate and those non-viable traits will not persist over long timeframes. Or, of course, that AI will fix everything for everyone anyways. Or that there's no point in worrying because the planet is doomed and we may at least die in solidarity and upholding basic standards of living and human dignity for everyone on the way.
But I don't see it. I just don't. What I see is ever-growing burdens placed on those who create value, to the benefit of an ever-growing proportion of those who do not. I'd call it injustice if that made sense to anyone nowadays, when "justice" means that those who don't work are sustained by those who do, forever, no strings attached. Until society as a whole produces nothing but parasites and their sustenance - and then either collapses or finally puts a stop to these dynamics, much later and more grievously than had it been done earlier.
"Do you want to see people dying in the streets?", one might ask me. No I don't. Of course not. But it strikes me as quite possibly the lesser evil, in the long run.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
30d ago
German is very permissive with compount neologisms, but the constituent parts must be valid. "Kritikal" is not. Maybe for nuclear physicists, but I don't really think so. Try "judenkritisch".
But also, please explain yourself. Why German in the first place?
I agree on inter-society competition favoring cultures that can actually reproduce, with a small caveat that if your low-fertility society can siphon off kids from high-fertility societies fast enough AND assimilate them properly, then it can persist even without breeding the next generation on its own. But that's a theoretical construct that the west at best imagines itself to be like.
But I'd also like to point out that
- A nitpick: Sex is no longer equal to fertility nowadays, given contraceptives exist, although I suppose a thorough-enough nullification of bodily autonomy can remedy this.
- More substantially: Women traditionally aren't just a possibly-fertile hole, they also need to provide semi-skilled labor around the house, and need to have decent social skills and personality to boot. A society in which women are available for sex and possibly child-bearing but fail at all the tasks and interactions that follow is one with marriages so miserable that men will voluntarily refuse to marry.
Reducing marriage to the provision of sex alone may not be entirely off the mark, but it ignores a large part of what makes it important.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18d ago
A way around this is to
go to a different range.
Not sure. This seems like a fairly evident instance of moderating the post and not the poster. Hadad's was rule-compliant even if it was bad, whereas Chris' contained a personal attack and thus broke a rule even if it correctly identified Hadad's post as bad. Pretty much just like Amadan's modpost said. If this actually encourages Hadad (and/or others) to post more screeds and discourages Chris (and/or others) from arguing against them, then...well, that's not good either, of course, but it's by no means certain that that will even be the effect. Whereas ignoring the rules to play favorites with this or that poster just throws the foundations of the motte out of the window, which is certain to have negative consequences for everyone.
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