comicsansstein
No bio...
User ID: 582
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Oh okay, I consider 4K to be a meme and never looked into any tech adjacent to it, which explains why I haven't heard of this. Still bad for the future, I guess, but not immediately concerning.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
I can't hear you over the sound of my novelty suit :V
(The sound is ゴゴゴゴ )
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Yeah, that one
comicsansstein
2mo ago
The trick is to spend a lot of time theorycrafting outlandish ideas, so that when somebody asks an out-there question you have a ready fully baked take instead of coming up with one on the spot. The downside is that it's slowly making you insane and unable to carry a normal political conversation because you jump to faraway conclusions ;)
comicsansstein
1mo ago
A puzzle, transformed from being about [redacted] to being about ice cream.
There is a famous gelateria in town, and the owners are rather insistent about only pairing specific toppings with specific ice cream flavors. Their 'old reliable' combination is whipped cream and chocolate chips paired with vanilla. You are aware of the combo, to the point of when somebody mentions choc chips and whipped cream you automatically think about vanilla ice cream.
You know that choc chips are also commonly paired with mint ice cream. They are also less commonly paired with caramel and strawberry flavors, although the latter only in some more specific combinations.
You know that whipped cream is sometimes paired with coffee flavor.
You are applying for an apprenticeship, and have to pass a test so that you won't break the flavor pairing rules. Among the questions, there is the following:
(Below, "flavor" refers to ice cream flavor, not the toppings)
We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where the dessert could be done as a single flavor in one of the two flavors. Given that, suppose you have a two-flavor dessert with chocolate chips and whipped cream (and no other toppings). What of the following flavor combinations would be the best choice for this dessert?
a. vanilla-mint
b. vanilla-caramel
c. coffee-vanilla
d. mint-caramel
e. caramel-coffee
I think that when presented outside the context of [redacted], the answer is obvious, but I want to make sure ;) I'll let you know what this is about in a day or two
comicsansstein
1mo ago
My engagement ring was an armillary sphere (much like this one, only with a gemstone), which had a disadvantage of being impossible to resize. I had to be extra careful when picking the size, so after some back and forth with the jeweler he sent me a few measuring bands that he uses (turns out that much like shoe sizes, the actual dimensions of the "same" size can vary slightly depending on the vendor). That left me no choice but to present them to my now-wife openly, so she new that a proposal was coming, eventually. In the end, it was a good outcome because she tends to get overwhelmed when presented with sudden situations and that setup enabled her to have just the right level of surprise :)
Because the engagement ring is elaborate, for the wedding rings we decided on a simple design.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
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Echoing my question buried deep in the thread: can anyone recommend a good historical source to read up on the AIDS crisis, that's less opinionated than the Salo forum?
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Has anyone here ever had an experience with hiring a private detective? Is they way they are portrayed in the movies or books pure fiction?
comicsansstein
11mo ago
To be honest, I just jumped at the opportunity to speak about something I have first-hand experience with, for a change ;)
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Can you elaborate on the HD signal?
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Becky Chambers' books, that someone at the old motte described as "nothing happens to a very diverse crowd,"
Not on the old motte, it was kontextmaschine, back in 2015.
If you have any idea about how I can monetize near-perfect recall of who said what and where, I'm all ears ;)
comicsansstein
2mo ago
When I was much younger, the transformation of Poland into a free market democracy and reactions to it by the communist party remnants (turned social democrats) was quite fresh in my memory. I thought that leftists hate Reagan because he presided over the victory of capitalist America over the communist vision of the world.
Then I got fluent in English language and eventually American politics, and learned about many policies of Reagan that were quite disastrous, like kicking The War On Drugs up a notch. I thought then that leftists hate Reagan because he gutted the welfare state, broke a major strike (air controllers) and left the gays out to die.
These days I think that many of the things that Reagan was blamed for were inevitable, or rather that they were symptoms of larger trends not influenced that much by the presidency - that stagflation was the result of forsaking atom, and so the American civilization's capacity to generate energy stopped growing (I don't remember the details, but I remember seeing a group of charts that suggested that energy prices and capacity over the centuries are the answer to "why did everything started going to hell in the 70s"). And after reading the Salo thread, I don't believe that a Dem president would make a difference w/r/t AIDS - the public sympathy just wasn't there yet for this to get major funding, that required decades of positive propaganda. No funding means that PrEP isn't developed, which means that mostly nothing can be done.
(The viable solution would be to go full authoritarian and shut down the bathhouses, but no American president would do that. I think that for example in the USSR less gays per capita died of AIDS, mostly because homosexuality was much more seriously persecuted and so they had, ahem, less opportunities to get infected. That's some heavy duty tragic irony.)
Also, seeing people talk about Late Stage Capitalism I'm kinda back to thinking that many leftists do in fact have unprocessed grief over the collapse of the USSR and a miserable failure of their imagined future. Mark Fischer pretty much made an entire sub-school of thought out of that grief. And so they hate Reagan because he is the face of the triumph over their future.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
On the other hand, people who are the furthest to the other side are often very antinatalist, which should have a moderating effect over the generations. But it's hard to speculate, the current demographic transition is literally unprecedented in the world's history.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Yep, that's the one. By the way, if anyone has a better, more mainstream source to read up on the history of AIDS crisis, I'm all ears.
comicsansstein
6mo ago
I am a very weird person so my feelings probably don't generalize, but for as long as I've remembered I've had the feeling of getting the implicit signal that "high" art is not for me.
Specifically, I've felt that one's supposed to interact with high art with preconceived notions of what's good and what's not, with the actual act of viewing/reading/listening to something being a bit of an afterthought. You're supposed to like the things that have been declared Good and Worthy, with little room for discussion. I'll take people slinging their personal flaming uninformed opinions about the latest vidya with great fervor over that consensus-driven stagnation every day.
Incidentally, there were attempt to bring that top-down consensus "its Art and it's Good" enforcement to the world of video games, but they failed miserably. Remember The Path, Graveyard, and Bientot l'ete? The auteurs that made them eventually quit game development after having a meltdown about the uncultured gamers. Meanwhile, people like Daniel Mullins prove that you can be high-concept without ghettoizing yourself.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In 1939 Eastern Bloc was formed during the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. This possibly saved those countries from a worse fate.
As long as you weren't a Jew but an ethnic Pole, being invaded by USSR was the worse fate, both in 1939 (Katyń, to name one thing) and in the last phase of the war when the "liberating" red army was marching westward, raping and pillaging to its heart's content (estimating the number of rapes during that time in hundreds of thousands is possibly lowballing it, about 9% of the Polish population had syphilis after the war).
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In the post above, you write
having just lived through the Canadian lockdowns
which implies that you're a Leaf, so I don't see how stealing USA's hypothetical 60s valor, or speaking about "average American's" horror is of any use here. But more to the point: how come you're still alive, then? Why didn't you live up to your proclaimed ideals, why didn't you take up arms against Trudeau regime, or died trying?
The difference between Vietnam and Russia's 'special military operation' is that the latter is fought on Ukraine's home soil. I thought that this was obvious, but apparently it needs pointing out. No western country had a war on their turf since 1945. If they did, the just-so-stories about how their superior civil liberties flow flow their citizens' moral superiority would melt rather quickly.
Also, there's no such thing as "Soviet Poland", Poland (along with Czechoslovakia, etc.) was not a soviet republic, but a separate state. Authoritarian, not totalitarian, and you having two factual errors in one sentence makes me think that you're getting it wrong on purpose, although I fail to imagine what it might be.
But it the American soul is truly as pained by my country's predecessor's existence as you claim, I'm afraid they have mostly their former president to blame. FD Roosevelt mad a deal with Stalin, and so the iron curtain landed to the west of Poland, instead of to the east. I guess "live free" only goes so far, and sacrificing entire countries' freedom as a bargaining chip was acceptable to 40s Americans.
Also, while great men theory of history is probably wrong. Thousands of above-average men can make a dent, at least in the short term. As it happens, some 22000 of Poland's cream of the crop were murdered in the early stage of WWII, which made mounting a successful resistance to the Soviets rather difficult. And the culprit was... would you look at that, Russians! I mean, Soviets! But surely, my antipathy towards Russia must only be because of the Western propaganda.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.
I don't think that's the mainstream position. I think the mainstream position is a series of concentric lines of defense.
The first line of defense is "how dare you!?". The point and sputter, as Sailer calls it. An attempt to dissuade the opponent from even breaching the subject of whether different people have different aptitude, without addressing it. Might involve siccing the mods on the opponent, or arguing that Something Must Be Done abut the fact that such a discussion can even take place, on sites where mods aren't available or sympathetic (i.e. twitter).
The second line is to deny that measurement is possible, i.e. IQ denial. Expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.
The two-and-a-half is to acknowledge that individual differences exist, but group differences don't or are irrelevant. Lewontin may be invoked.
Only after those we're approaching what you postulated as the mainstream position. Even then, the primary focus will be on present oppression, i.e. it will be argued that the result in education continue to diverge because the black students are underfunded or otherwise discriminated against. Only then, after it's shown that funding is often negatively correlated with test scores, it may be admitted that inherent group differences exist. Very cautiously and tacitly, as it may get the admitting party into hot water from the people who stopped at layer one.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Did anyone ever ran that study controlling for other mental issues, which iirc are highly comorbid?
comicsansstein
1mo ago
The hypothesis I've heard from my friend who watched it is that the showrunners wanted to make a Mass Effect show, but failed to get the licence, so they retooled as little as possible to (barely) fit Halo lore.
comicsansstein
3mo ago
I don't use cloud saves for photos not because of privacy, but because I'm afraid that inevitably due to an error on either side an empty folder is going to get synced the wrong way and I'll lose five years' worth of photos. As for music, movies, and ebooks: lol lmao, as if I'm going to vendor-lock myself to a single storefront.
comicsansstein
10mo ago
Idk, I'm quite fond of refrigerators and dishwashers myself.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
I'm highly interested in (a copy of) that reddit post, if you can recall any further details about it.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Years ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that one of the advantages of living in a country that's 98,5% monoethnic (and with most of the 1,5% being virtually indistinguishable) is that cultural tastes don't break down along ethnic lines (as the latter don't exist) and so I can safely dislike whatever the fuck I want without people trying to tar me as a racist. I still stand by that opinion.
I disliked Peja and Liroy and what-have-you back when I was a teenager, and judging from what I hear on the radio when I go to the barber, the condition of Polish hiphop has only gotten worse in the next 20 years. The beats are slower and more repetitive, the lyrics are uninspired and more repetitive, and it's hard to treat boys two thirds my age rapping about their gangsta exploits when the only actual dealer I know is a deeply pathetic person.
Saying that contemporary pop owes its style to hiphop may be a bit of an own goal, as I haven't heard a pop song released in the past decade that I would call "good". There are some passable ones i.e. I won't wince when I hear them on the radio, but my threshold for "good" is that I would like to listen to them on my own, and the last album to clear that bar was Gaga's Artpop, so 2013. There's nothing released that's catchy on the level of Song 2 or Rockafeller Skank. There are even no popstars - Taylor is the last remaining one, and this is why her fanbase is so psychotic sometimes. In better times, all this fan energy would be diffused between multiple artists.
comicsansstein
10mo ago
My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)
The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.
Parentheses are rot13.
That thread did indeed prompt this question. I wondered if having no preconceived notions of what a (Freen Natry) is would make the people less likely to be stuck on an incorrect answer. I tried to give all the info a (Zntvp cynlre) would have, without tipping the hand too hard. I may have overcomplicated things.
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