disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
No bio...
User ID: 426
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
4mo ago
Ne Zha 2 is currently the best selling movie you’ve never heard of. It’s a sequel to an animated film from 2019 which was… fine? Impressive for a first-time director with a small budget but nothing to write home about.
But Ne Zha 2 is worth writing about. To get the CW part out of the way, it was animated entirely using Chinese firms, allegedly after the director felt exploited and ignored by other international animation groups. Maybe (probably?) AI was involved and some other animators don’t like this. It still looks better than any other effects work I can think of.
But the movie is just broadly excellent. The dialogue and characterization are sharp, the plot is tight (except for an indulgent act 3), and again, it’s visually astounding. Worth seeing in theaters!
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
5mo ago
I do agree that story #2 was an achievement. The entire bit with
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
Culpability shouldn’t be a binary thing, where if you throw the first punch I get to burn your family alive and that’s on you. Britain make a last-second alliance with Poland which failed to deter German expansionism, and after Germany beat France the capacity of Britain to win a direct conflict against Germany dropped to zero. The whole of Churchill’s maneuverings were to provoke Germany into committing an atrocity that would bring the US into the war, which he did by targeting civilian German populations. Germany was culpable for starting the conflict, absolutely, but Britain was responsible for escalating the conflict to a total war.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
How does the development of tools for mass murder in the world wars fit into the paradigm of ‘following the rules’? After the fact, the indiscriminate killings of civilian populations via bombings or starvation by the UK, US, USSR, and to a large degree Nazi Germany are treated ambivalently by contemporary recountings, while the discriminate killings were immortalized by the Nuremberg trials and have been written into the foundation of contemporary morality. ‘Don’t kill civilians’ is perhaps an unworkably high standard, but I’d much prefer if that was held to a bit more strongly than tripwire alliances designed to further geopolitical goals. The US was actually pretty good about not doing evil shit aside from a handful of bombings later into the war, and I’d like that to be that standard, which the indiscriminate and pointless night bombings of the British very much fall short of.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
11mo ago
How did you meet? How have your expectations for a partner changed over the years and across relationships? Do you have any regrets that you learned from or might be generalizable?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
The Jumpstart 2020 and 2022 sets are great for beginners. Each booster pack has cards from a single color and theme, and you can shuffle 2 packs together to make something that plays out like strong limited or draft decks. You can get a booster box of 24 packs for ~$100 and treat it like a cube. Highly recommend.
Card Kingdom sometimes puts out ‘Battle decks’, which are a cheap way to get playable 60 card decks that feel strong enough. Nothing too crazy, but good for kitchen table games.
Draft or limited are super fun but very very challenging and not for beginners.
Commander can actually be fun but it very much depends on the play group. If all 4 players are chill and playing decks of similar power then the format can be fun, but it’s often pretty complex and politics plays a big role. It’s definitely the most popular format and the easiest to find IRL games for, and it isn’t too hard to build a budget deck for $50-100 that plays perfectly well in low power pods. All that said, the format allows huge variation, and the experience of playing against a high-powered deck with a budget deck can be torture. If your kid wants to play with others this is eventually where you’ll probably end up but I wouldn't rush there.
It’s a pretty good prior tho, no? With an N= all British people 1600-2020 you could rank order each person per generation by Clarks’ variables, derive a temporal weight for each, then see who is at the top and bottom, and the rank of their relatives. As is, Clark has to do a lot of estimations, tho he does try to justify them. The alternative hypothesis would have to find a reservoir for status outside of money, occupation, or education, which seems plausible but I’m personally drawing a blank for possibilities.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Not necessarily, because house value is a proxy for social status that depends on its contextual weight. If London is burnt to the ground, or becomes much more expensive, the relationship between social status and house value changes, but the underlying heritability of social status remains the same. If everyone had cheap houses, it doesn’t mean that the society has more social mobility, just that that variable doesn’t capture status any more. Note figure 3, where wealth has much weaker maternal heritability compared to occupational status and education.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
My bad, posted off the cuff and should have been more granular and done a bit more research. The conflict best maps as Catholics + Ukrainian Orthodox vs Russian Orthodox. This link from 2021 has UOC-MP as the largest denomination in the country, which is now 4% according to Wikipedia. Here’s a very nice map of the Ethnic/linguistic composition of Ukraine, notably missing from the exhaustive wiki page on Ukrainian demographics. I’m sure there’s more interesting West vs. East stuff I could dig up, but it’s not worth my time. We’re pwned, and it’s only going to get worse.
(Huh. This is what it must have felt like to be a Quaker during WWII.)
What of the democratic election of Yanukovych, based on support from the Eastern Russian speakers? What of the Donbas referendums for independence? The context for Ukrainian secession is more Bosnian War than Scottish progressives. This is Eastern Europe, my man; the legends aren’t good, but Грозный.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
There’s a big difference between technical capacity and legal or economic feasibility. We’re already past replacing bad docs with LLMs; you could have a nurse just type up symptoms and do the tests the machine asks for. But legally this is impossible, so it won’t happen. We can’t hold a machine responsible, so we need human managers to insure the output is up to standards; but we don’t need lawyers to write contracts or programmers to code, just to confirm the quality of output. It isn’t as clever as the smartest scientists yet, but that seems easily solvable with more compute.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
HBD is a useful scientific frame insofar as it goes against the default blank-statist universalism of academia writ large, but the number of people who truly give a shit about the phenotypic variance populations on psychometrics is a rounding error. The issue is that people like to make interventions which don’t do anything. We can quibble over effect sizes, but right now I could use embryo selection to get a marginally smarter child compared to controls. There isn’t any known environmental intervention that can more the dial on adult g.
I’m actually quite sympathetic to giving more credit to random noise, but nobody has time for the humility that would demand.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Roller mobster goes way too hard
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
What are y’all listening to?
I just discovered Lunar Society and I was blown away. The guest list is great but I’m most impressed by Dwarkesh’s ability to think through a statement and find something to push back. Very highly recommended.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
Do you think there is only one bad guy in WWII? I’ve never said “true villain”, nor “race traitors” for what it’s worth. I’m saying Churchill sucks, not that Hitler or the Nazis are the good guys.
Given that Germany was already at war with Britain why would you expect anyone in the British leadership to want to make life easier for the German high command rather than harder?
Given that the Nazi regime thought it was at war with the Jewish cabal that controlled Europe, why should the Nazis want to make life easier on the Jews rather than harder? The answer is that killing civilians is wrong and doesn’t advance your war aims, but everybody but the US missed that memo. The same can be said for the treatment of POWs.
I can’t speak at all for DeGaulle, although the French colonies certainly aren’t where the war was won or lost.
I think the crux here is that you want the winning side to be treated as the good guys, and I want all players to be held to the same standards. War is bad! The Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets were super evil! The British were their usual level of evil, with Churchill channeling their worst tendencies. The Americans were slightly more evil than WWI but still basically the most moral players in the war.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
Untargeted night bombing raids were effectively hitting only civilians, but the whole period has so much stuff going on that I don’t think we’ll change each others mind here.
I would consider the fact that Churchill's side won pretty much every every war he was involved in to be evidence to the contrary.
This seems very silly? Stuff Churchill actually was responsible for, like Operation Wilfred or the Gallipoli campaign all seemed to end disastrously. Britain barely came out ahead in WWI, and in WWII the British contribution to the European theater was essentially their naval blockade, while the actual war was won by Russian soldiers and American industry.
Madagascar
Germany had beaten France and claimed their colonies. They were offering the transport of civilians out of a war zone, but that wouldn’t help British war aims, so it was denied. If you inhabit the frame of winning at any cost, then sure, Britain was playing to win, but so were the Germans, and what they did sure does seem evil. If Britain was losing the war, would you be surprised if they started killing the Germans they had put in concentration camps?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
The British sent bombers targeting Germany for IIRC 9 months before the Germans retaliated. I can’t speak to Germans bombing civilians in Poland, tho I would believe it.
On Churchill: yes. This is why Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do. He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war. Additional beef: Hitler’s offer to turn Madagascar into a Jewish-German colony was denied by Churchill because he wanted to maximize the number of mouths Germany had to feed on the continent. Decent odds Madagascar would have been turned into a charnel house anyway, but we won’t know thanks to Churchill.
Agree with Germany being dumb, but I think it was more that the Nazis thought that their struggles were due to a Jewish conspiracy that ran Europe, rather than perfidious Albion being perfidious. German theory-of-mind takes the L once again.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
Culpability isn’t a very useful metric when this stuff seems pretty overdetermined. Germany and France will try to unify Europe under their control, UK will try to stop said unification, Russia will try to expand the empire, Americans will sell stuff. The stuff I’d like to argue about is whether to treat a particular player as behaving in a respectable way or not. WWI, with all its slaughter, had its deaths concentrated among men explicitly waging the war, with some exceptions for starvation in Germany near the end. We don’t revile Germany for its behavior in that war today, because their conduct was within the relatively wide bounds of honorable conduct for that conflict. WWII on the other hand has widespread and unrelenting barbarity by nearly all players, excepting the US and France. The Germans are rightly reviled not because of their blitzkreig through Belgium but because they liked to kill civilian Jews for bad reasons. We too should revile the British approach of sending planes to scatter bombs indiscriminately amongst civilian German populations for different but still bad reasons.
Very few people care about the alliance between Poland and the UK because the alliance was explicitly built as a last-second deterrent for German expansion, not because the Polish and British governments had a long and close relationship of mutual protection. Local players had their own reasons for disliking said expansion, but from the American perspective there really wasn’t any reason why we should care.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Does the invasion even happen without the CIA providing intelligence and training for the Ukrainians? Is Minsk II ignored without American armaments and implicit support? Yarvin says we don’t have this war without western deep state meddling, and that seems trivially true. Ukraine as Russian client state saves a lot of lives. If it’s worth it is a separate question, for Americans, Ukrainians, and Poles.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
After digging out 3 boxes of tattered 2001 era MtG cards from my childhood closet, I want to get back into the game but I’m not sure where to start. I have a handful of nice cards that have aged well; a vampiric tutor, some common-rarity Rhystic Study’s, some old shocklands, but everything else looks severely power-creeped. Should I start going to drafts? Just grab a prefab commander deck? Smash random shit together and just show up?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Do you feel like regular use of Tylenol is wrong?
I suspect that people transpose a dislike for the medical system onto the things the system controls. If you had to cajole an ethanol prescription from your PCP every 3 months your relationship to booze would seem craven and desperate, even holding the quantity and quality constant. If you could pick up amphetamines at your local gas station, would it still feel so gross?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Biologics are a big category, of which the -mabs are the early success story. The next evolution would be exactly what you described, where we can construct a protein to block targets by way of a fancy ml chemistry algorithm instead of trial and error. Beyond that, we get into de novo synthetic proteins that have more in common with sci-fi nanomachines than penicillin. Then, ???.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
There is the implication here that Ukrainians have, or should have, a kinship with Russia (similar to the kinship between Sweden and Finland), and I simply do not think this follows. I, in fact, have been under the impression that Ukrainians already didn't like Russia long before the events of the Euromaidan, as they very much wanted nothing to do with the legacy of Communism and the USSR.
Definitely not what I meant. Think more in terms of Hong Kong and China, or the varied demands America has placed on Central and South American states vis a vis drug manufacturing; some shared history, but most of it is a big player who gets to tell small players what to do. But since there isn’t any doubt that the big kids wins every fight, we don’t have entire cities reduced to rubble.
I think you’ve also papered over the real ethnic differences that underlie the ongoing conflicts in the Donbas for the past 10 years, although you certainly aren’t alone there. Western Catholic Ukrainians want to join the west and Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians want to reintegrate with Russia. This conflict wouldn’t have happened if splinter states for ethnic Russians were permitted, as the local referenda asked for. This war is not a noble fight between a tyrant and an underdog, but a civil war backed by opposing global powers. Seems bad to me.
The Culture should definitely be on your list. Player of Games and Excession are total bops
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