Turniper
4mo ago
Better to get divorced, charged, or threatened when you've got a million in the bank, a paid off house, and an umbrella liability policy than when you don't have any of the above. For some things, there's preparation. For others there's not much more you can do than have a good attitude and a steady hand.
Trying to mitigate every possible risk just ends with becoming Brian Johnson and probably dying at 82 anyway.
Turniper
4mo ago
So, they could do virtually zero damage, mortally offend most of the entire western world by deliberately targetting a religious site, and get properly nuked in return? The offense to deterrence ratio on that plan does not pencil.
Turniper
4mo ago
My car is 18 years old. I think it's gotten one wash in the last 6 years. I tend to wash it whenever I needed to vacuum it anyway. It's perfectly serviceable.
Turniper
4mo ago
Why not just use one of the many existing commercial solutions? That's what we did last I dealt with OCR'ing PDFs, just used Azure's API and then processed the data. Would be surprised if a raw vision model is cheaper or higher quality.
Turniper
5mo ago
I'm really glad we got an update to this. I was invested.
And uh... Yeah, that sounds like a cult. Always amazed the millions of documentaries we get about these seems to have made approximately zero dent in their ability to pop up.
Turniper
5mo ago
I mostly don't. I belong to product discords so I can ask questions about their code's weird behavior. This works great for me but they've probably answered my question a thousand times and I can't google their previous response.
I hang out in writer's discords so I can sometimes get muted for a day for making a joke that tangentially references drug use in a channel that allows the presence of children. This is stupid but I'm not gonna get bothered by it. It's just easier to taboo whole topics of conversation than make intelligent calls about the difference between a joke that references something and corruption of the youth.
If I actually want to, y'know, chat with people? I either use my own server or a friend's server. It's pretty much the only way to avoid officious mods, big public channels wade through so much shit on a daily basis that anyone who mods one will eventually become trigger happy. For the notifications: If a channel gives me a notification I don't need literally once, I mute it forever. You're basically never gonna regret muting things on discord in my experience.
Turniper
5mo ago
Xianxia, chinese cultivator fantasy. The second is book 2 of that same series, about an alcoholic monkey daoist loosely inspired by Sun Wukong, and the third is a weird sort of deconstruction of romantic tragedy set in fantasy post revolution not-france.
Turniper
5mo ago
Steadily making progress editing my first novel, and writing my second and third. Been averaging 6k words a week written for 3 months now. Remarkable how fast 25k words a month turns into books. Excited to get to the point of publishing. My first book is going through the royal road->kindle unlimited pipeline, and the initial reviews have been pretty damn good. I'm quite proud of it. I just need a title, been calling it 'Between Beast and Buddha: Book 1' in my head for ages now.
Turniper
5mo ago
These things are not unrelated. People like you more if your infodumps feel like stories than if they feel like condescending lectures.
Turniper
5mo ago
Oh, I finished my first proper book a few weeks ago. I still have editing to do, a cover to commision, layout to complete, and a marketting campaign to plan, but the text itself is largely finished. I don't expect to be doing any more development edits beyond continuity fixes.
It's gotten pretty solid reviews from free readers (It's serially published now, it'll go down when it launches on Kindle Unlimited). I had some unsolicited interest from publishers and agents, but I'm leaning towards just doing it all myself because even a 'good' publisher's cut is 50-60 percent on ebooks, and that's just not worth it to me. Probably gonna try to partner with a publisher for the audiobook, because I know a guy current DIY'ing that, and he's spent into the five figures already.
Overall, I'm quite happy and proud, but it still doesn't quite feel real. I don't think it will until I have a physical copy in hand.
Turniper
5mo ago
Idk about his jurisdiction, but they generally do that? I get a yearly letter even though mine are paid, with my balance and any proposed changes to the tax regime.
Turniper
5mo ago
If you read the complaint, it sounds like they did exactly that, considering Dennis was served a foreclosure notice in person. I'd assume he got a heckuva a lot of deliquency notices too given that he lived at the address in question. It's right in the middle of page 3. Haven't read the full thing, but I can't say I'm feeling very sympathetic, it sounds like Dennis received repeated notices over the course of 12 years and just ignored them. They were probably addressed to his Dad, but you really should read any correspondence from the government addressed to your dead dad if you want to keep his house.
Turniper
6mo ago
Nah. Ours did a bit last year, and we just voted in 3 people to the board who ran on 'roll back the due hike and stop bothering people about clover in their lawn'. We got exactly that. It's like any other form of democratic government, you get what you vote for.
Turniper
6mo ago
Ugh. This reminds me I need to get back into rigging for my game project. AI generated 3D animation clips can't come soon enough for me.
Turniper
6mo ago
I can think of plenty of alternatives. For example you could have an entirely status based society. Nobody has property, control over an object's disposition lies with the highest status person who currently is using it in some way. Falls apart pretty hard for consumeables and investment, since any arrangement of capital is fundamentally not durable.
You could also have a society where all property is truly communal. And we just execute anyone who tills over a flower bed to plant something new, or cocks up a chemical factory testing a new formulae. Execution is a little hyperbolic, but basically incredibly strong rules and manner based order that strongly discourages anyone from messing with anything under threat of ostracization or physical punishment.
These alternatives just kinda suck, which is why we have ownership. Because otherwise a small minority of people will do antisocial things.
Turniper
6mo ago
Nah. It'd be tremendously ineffective. People would just lie. If we wanted to effectively do immigration enforcement bureaucratically, it should be handled by drivers licensing or E-Verify processing. A point of contact where people need to show up in person, and we're already expecting you to present and verify documents.
But there's no political will to do that, and deporting people who commited minor crimes lets the masses lap up blood without doubling the price of berries at Walmart.
Turniper
6mo ago
Aight, I'll bite. There isn't one. There's no form of collective ownership that doesn't involve the same definitional characteristic of denying someone some form of right over the property. Even the most enlightened form of communism will entail restricting some member of the community from doing some thing to the property. Even a nomadic society with the most minimal form of ownership imaginable will still provide exclusionary rights over personal property, and have rules about who gets preference in occupying any given site.
Turniper
6mo ago
I don't think most of the country finds 'we should not use effective tools to enforce our immigration laws because it will encourage illegal immigrants to engage in more criminality' to be a very persuasive argument.
Turniper
7mo ago
How is such an obvious target not immediately blown to pieces via airpower? The only reason the houthis are getting away with their current operations is precisely because they aren't doing stuff that presents an obvious stationary target.
It's not just the ships the pirates face, but the nations that back them.
Turniper
7mo ago
Closing in on 130k words on my current story. Couple more months and I'll officially break 5 figures of income from writing fiction (Across 2 years). Pretty good for not having actually published anything yet, it's all been donations.
Turniper
7mo ago
As opposed to what? It's not like a ceasefire would result in frontier states not rearming, or sanctions being lifted. All that is gonna happen anyway, and Russia appears to be fine with it.
Turniper
8mo ago
Except America isn't an empire. Because the nations that you claim are our vassals are not our vassals and will not act like our vassals if pressed to do so.
Well, except Japan. Japan is arguably our vassal. Hence why they're buttering up Trump, because their future existence is actually to some degree predicated on American security guarantees.
Turniper
8mo ago
Slow writing week, only 4k words.
Got a fair bit of programming in, still ripping parts out of previous projects to build something newer and more tightly scoped. Basically Warframe if it were a slower, more tactical, dungeon crawler. The goal is to build out a very limited multiplayer mission shooter so I can focus heavily on really perfecting combat. Then maybe build it out into a full game as I go. It's been fun revisiting some of my older features. Chat has a much more scalable api backend now, and I'm really looking forward to revisiting active ragdoll + poise. It was already quite fun knocking dudes down, I'm really looking forward to playing with poise breaking crowd control spells. Sending people flying with spikes of earth and gusts of wind should be a very fun playstyle even if I give it minimal damage.
Nice! I just hit 200 on my current story, nipping at your tail! I put yours on my to-read list, always looking for good new scifi. Haven't really found anything recent that scratched the itch since Theft of Fire.
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