erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
The hell is this, the Terrible Take Tuesday thread? Cowboy Bebop and GitS are not just good, they are excellent.
Seconded.
The plot in Cowboy Bebop isn't that special (though that isn't what it's about), but overall both are great series.
The overarching plot of Cowboy Bebop is mediocre. The individual mini-plots that make up each episode are great.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
I was not prepared for their Wikipedia photo.
If she was born in 1951, she must have been 57 or 58 at the time of the photo. She aged incredibly well.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Pol Pot had the best (worst?) numbers per capita, but by absolute amount of murders he is distinctly behind Mao, Stalin, and Hitler.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Sulla's website chronicles a very interesting episode in which he and another player called Speaker found themselves invaded by five civilizations at the same time, from multiple directions. Speaker masterminded an absolutely brilliant defense and managed to save their team, then counterattacked and ended the war by crippling one of the aggressors. You can see how important tactical details were in deciding the outcome; Jowy had enough materiel and bodies to defend in theory, but he positioned them poorly and lost the battle.
That change is the best change in the game! Warfare is so boring in Civ 4 because there's no gameplay to it, if you have a stack that counters their stack you win.
That doesn't do the combat system in Civ IV justice. Unit types have inherent bonuses and penalties against other units or in specific situations, and can further specialize by taking promotions. An longbowman that is a sitting duck in the field becomes a killing machine with placed behind city walls with the garrison promotions. There is no best unit; every unit has a counter. And huge stacks can get demolished by collateral damage, so you have to make careful decisions about how to split your stacks, whether to attack and if so with what units, whether to take an extra turn lowering a city's defenses but risk more defenders showing up, etc.
And that's all just tactics. Strategy is just as important. You need to decide whether to invade an enemy or defend, how many units to send in an invading stack vs how many units to leave home, which types of units to build, whether to spread out your defenders to cover all of your cities or concentrate them at the most likely point of conflict or concentrate them on your most important cities, and so on. Geography is also surprisingly relevant; the second easiest way to win a war in Civ IV is to defend against an intercontinental assault, because amphibious invasions are hard. You have to decide when and where to land, whether it is better to disembark close to an enemy city or in a more defensible square or to attack directly from the boats despite the penalty, etc.
But most important of all is economy and technology. By far the easiest way to win a war in Civ IV is to be one tech level ahead of your opponent. When two equally advanced opponents duke it out, the one with the higher production tends to win, because they can replace their losses while the other can't, and there is only so much tactics and strategy can do to tilt the kill ratio.
It's an impressively complicated system that the AI can handle almost as well as a human. Civ IV is truly one of the greatest games of all time.
First of all, "155 hours" is an obvious hyperbole; there are not literally a million holocaust movies, either.
Secondly, it's not just history class. The Diary of a Anne Frank and Night are staples of English courses. I was assigned both, as well as We Are Witnesses.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Look at the education system. "In high school, you get 155 hours on Hitler, 3 minutes on Stalin, and nothing on Pol Pot. Nothing on Mao. Barely a mention of Fidel Castro."
Look at the cinema industry. A million movies about the holocaust, one film about the Holodomor.
Ask random normies about Hitler, and they will tell you that he was evil because he tried to exterminate the Jews. Ask random normies about Stalin, and chances are they won't even know who he was.
I hear it's decent at creative writing, but that's sort of a wishy-washy benchmark. Maybe it will become the smut model of choice like R1 was for a while? That's... something at least?
K2 is censored. It refused my prompts to write Evangelion and Nagatoro lemons on the grounds that the characters were underage. I tried Uzaki-chan, since that's a college setting, and it still refused because it didn't want to write smut about copyrighted characters. Then I tried an original story, and it gave me a million excuses before finally writing a non-explicit response.
Okay, so we need a jailbreak. Which is a pain in the ass, but since it's an open source model, at least it won't be patchable. I looked around, and I found Mei Unfettered. I applied it, and... that was not worth the effort. I still had to age up the characters, the prose was more like the obligatory sex scene in a romance novel than a Literotica story, and then there's this gem:
“Condom,” she says, reaching for the nightstand. “Unless you want to explain a post-apocalyptic child support claim.”
You're better off using Grok, jailbroken ChatGPT, and whatever experimental SOTA models get tested in the arena.
Completely normal. My mom has been in the US 30 years and she doesn't speak English. It helps that a lot of businesses are bilingual, and there are even some that are exclusively Spanish. For example, before the internet took over television, she could watch Univision and Telemundo. And, of course, South Florida is full of Hispanics, so she has plenty of other people to talk to.
My mom has tried to learn English, even taking classes at a local community college, but she failed. This is not surprising. Most people lose the ability to learn a new language after they become adults, and most people only have the intelligence to speak one language really well anyway.
From "Language is Culture" by Spandrell:
Mr. Lee held the popular idea that language was a zero-sum game? No, Mr. Lee understood the commonsensical idea that your brain has limited storage capacity. Like anything else. Your brain is made of atoms. It is not made of magic. It is not made of godly dust. It is a material thing. It is, in a sense, a container of information, and information takes space. It obviously does in computers; pray tell, NYT, why the brain should have infinite capacity? It doesn't make sense.
Now I don't know if LKY thought of it in these terms. I think that, as a language learner, he went by experience. I guess the more time he spent practicing Mandarin, or Hokkien, or Malay, the worse his English prose got. And that's exactly how it works. Happens to me all the time, and happens to anyone who uses 2 or more languages regularly. The more different the languages, the less commons structures they share, the more acute the problem. Again, there is no reason why it should not be so. Information takes space. It isn't hard.
Alas, it is true that academic linguists will not tell you this, even though they probably did in the 1950s. That is not because common sense has been "refuted". It is because since the 1960s academia has morphed into a worldwide racket of fraud and deceit. If you read this blog you already know that; economics is bogus, climate science is bogus, psychology is bogus; even more than half of medical papers are bogus. Well, surprise surprise, linguistics is also bogus. The language learning industry is huge. There's a lot of money in telling people that the brain is made of magic dust, that they can learn whatever they want whenever they want, as long as they give you money. 3 languages at the same time? Go for it! Kids are like sponges, they can learn anything. No, they can't.
Now of course, all human traits are distributed in a Gaussian curve. Some kids are pretty good, can learn 3 or 4 languages given some exposure. Some can't even speak 1 language properly by the time they enter primary school. Lee Kuan Yew, who was in charge of spending Singapore's money, realized he didn't have money to waste, and he took what was the most rational decision: let's focus on having everyone learn English, then let's make some half-assed effort at teaching a "mother tongue"; mostly for political reasons, so tribalists didn't complain. Some kids will learn the mother tongue well; most won't. Not the government's problem. Lee Kuan Yew was CEO and what he wanted was an efficient workforce, so English it was. And English he got. Well, kind of.
Japanese researchers, fortunately isolated from their American comrades because of their ineptitude at learning English, have long found that Brazilian immigrants in Japan often end up not bilingual, but "halflingual". They end up speaking shitty Portuguese and even shittier Japanese. Because Japanese is hard, they don't speak it at home, and whatever they speak at home tends to have very low vocabulary levels. So they end up sounding retarded even if they really aren't.
You know who else sounds retarded? Singaporeans. OK, sorry, that's overly harsh. I apologize to my Singaporean readers, I love you all. But I had to say it. With all due respect, Singaporeans in general don't speak proper English. They speak Singlish, which is a pidgin English with a fair amount of Chinese grammar and vocabulary baked in, and a pretty weird (and what sounds to me a pretty big Indian influence) pronunciation. As you may remember, even Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, by every account a 150 IQ genius, speaks what can only be described as pretty goofy English. Again, it's not their fault, it's just the unintended consequence of public language policy.
How did this happen? By forcing diglossia (widespread bilingualism) on Singapore. After independence most people spoke some either Chinese dialect at home, Malay or Tamil. The schools taught English, what is a foreign language to everyone. So yes, they learned, the minimum required to pass the exams, and went on with their daily lives. Given that kids spent almost more time at school than at home, eventually the exposure of English was greater than their respective languages. Let's say a random Singaporean teen was exposed to 65% English and 35% Hokkien during their formative years. So, surprise surprise, he ended up speaking a language which is 65% English and 35% Hokkien, and so did most everyone else, with all languages and dialects getting some of their stuff in this hodgepodge lingua franca that evolved into Singlish. And once that got widespread it became almost impossible to change.
My mother is going to die without ever learning English. But that's OK. I speak heavily accented English, and if I ever have children they will speak English as their native language. Assimilation is a generational process; just like no individual organism ever evolves, but rather the population evolves, no individual immigrant ever fully assimilates, but their lineage does.
From "Immigrant Assimilation Is Obviously High" by Bryan Caplan:
In The Culture Transplant, my colleague Garett Jones writes as if there is overwhelming evidence that assimilation is slow. So overwhelming, in fact, that you’d have to be a blind fool to deny it. I think his reading of the academic research is deeply wrong. But even if he were correctly summarizing what we know from the data, he’d be deeply confused about the actual facts about assimilation.
What are these “actual facts”?
First, if you compare first-generation immigrants to people from their countries of origin, they’re very different. First-generation immigrants proverbially do straddle two worlds. Yes, most seem very foreign to natives in their new country. But they also seem very foreign to friends and family from their original country! I’ve travelled all over the world, and met hundreds of first-generation immigrants in the U.S. My wife is a first-generation immigrant. I see with my own eyes that their assimilation, though far from complete, is high. If your eyes are open, you’ll see it, too.
Second, if you compare the children of immigrants to their parents, they are very different. A contrast of night and day. Indeed, I’ve never met an immigrant parent who failed to notice that their kids had massively assimilated. Usually, though not always, to the parents’ dismay. And again, I’ve known many hundreds of second-generation immigrants. They’re some of the people I know best in the world. All four of my children are second-generation immigrants. If any of them still had one foot in Romania, I would know it
If you want to quickly assess an individual’s assimilation, your best bet really is to listen to how they talk. If they can’t speak the local language at all, they’re probably not assimilated at all. If they speak the local language with a thick accent, they’re moderately assimilated. A mild accent? Highly assimilated. No accent? Then their assimilation approaches 100%. If you’ve met a lot of immigrants, you know this to be true.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
I still remember when the admin of my videogame forum was killed, and the Daily Mail was the first to get the basic facts of the case right (board member obsessed with the admin's girlfriend decided to murder the hypothenuse) while "respectable" outlets like the BBC were talking about wargame fanatics and dark secrets. I got reverse Gell-Mann amnesia from that, and now trust the Daily Mail more than any other British newspapers.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Total risk mitigation is just miserable. Every time you drive somewhere, you are accepting a small probability of dying horribly in a car crash. Yet very few people are content to become hermits who work from home and get everything delivered. At some point, you simply have to accept the tradeoffs of a life worth living.
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 20:
Professor Quirrell was silent for a moment, then smiled. "Tell me, Mr. Potter, can you guess what thought went through my mind when I finished assembling the thirty-seven items on the list of things I would never do as a Dark Lord? Put yourself in my shoes - imagine yourself in my place - and guess."
Harry imagined himself looking over a list of thirty-seven things not to do once he became a Dark Lord.
"You decided that if you had to follow the whole list all the time, there wouldn't be much point in becoming a Dark Lord in the first place," Harry said.
"Precisely," said Professor Quirrell.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
...who the hell cooks rice and beans in the same pot? To begin with, the best way to cook rice is in a dedicated rice cooker.
Beans are just an inferior legume; chickpeas and lentils are much better side dishes to go with rice. As for protein, you should be getting that from animal products, not from plants.
I can believe that illegal farm workers are poaching, maybe stealing small stock, but they'd butcher a cow and there wouldn't be a 'carcass' left(Hispanics are actually very fond of animal parts not normally eaten in anglo-american culture; poor unassimilated Hispanics[which farm laborers would be] are actually known for not liking steak very much in comparison).
Cow heart kebab is the bee's knees, even if it upsets my stomach. I've never cared much for cow lung, but I'll eat it if there's nothing else. Organ meat is good for you; that's where all the nutrients are.
Amusingly, I've slowly assimilated into the American taste for steak. When I was younger I would only eat it well done, because I thought bloody meat was gross, and consequently I did not enjoy steak any more than I did chicken, and I found it distinctly inferior to fatty pork, despite being more expensive. But after years of getting bombarded by the medium rare meme, I broadened my horizons, and now I realize that the gringos were onto something with this whole steak thing.
And even then, the only real improvement has been in photorealistic 3D graphics. 2D graphics had already peaked by the late 90s; there's not much further you can go after you can already make gorgeous games like Marvel vs. Capcom. Stylized 3D graphics took a little longer, but by the early 2000s we already had beauties like Wind Waker.
I'm a big believer that the whole quest for MOAR POLYGONS is a mistake, and that we would have all been better off if we had just stuck with the PS2 and Game Cube instead of upgrading our hardware every five years to ever more expensive consoles with ever more expensive games, all in the name of making photorealistic 3D titles look slightly better with every iteration.
Which is why I'm a PC gamer now; I just buy old games on the cheap from Steam.
Not that there is anything wrong with taking the high road and turning your back on media, but there's at least two good alternatives:
One: Watch old stuff. No, that's not the same as rewatching stuff you already like, because nobody has enough time to consume all the multiple lifetimes of classics that already exist.
If you are a science fiction fan, for example, can you seriously tell me that you have already watched all of Star Trek (the pre-Enterprise stuff), Babylon 5, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits? If you are a film buff, have you honestly already tried going down the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies, or all Best Picture winners made before the year 2010? If you are an animation guy, have you truly already watched all 2D entries in the Disney Animated Canon, Don Bluth's entire filmography, and the standard recommendations of Gargoyles, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the DCAU, as well as hidden gems like Exosquad?
I doubt it.
Two: Watch foreign media. The woke mind virus may have taken over the Anglosphere, but Asian stuff remains largely isolated. You could embrace the hallyu and watch one of the very nice K-dramas that are going around, most notably Squid Game. Or you could dive into anime, which is truly a completely different world; there is a reason why men fall in love with anime girls and Demon Slayer can outsell the entire American comic book industry. As AntiDem put it:
The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community - a world not slathered in gratuitous degeneracy and consumerism, peopled by unmarriageable women and increasingly angry men, which is in the process of careening toward disaster because a corrupt, ineffectual government is helpless in containing an uprising by violent lunatics hopped up on a fanatical ideology.
In the 20th century, people longed for a galaxy full of advanced technology which would take us to unknown worlds beyond the stars, and were inspired by television which showed it to us. In the 21st century, people long only for home and family, for peace and stability, for connection and friendship. To hell with the stars - just give us back the hearth and the dinner table. That is all we dream of now.
I encountered anime in the first year of my adulthood. It taught me that there was another path available - that people could behave differently than they had in my shattered family and the cold, brutal place where I grew up. That there were other ways to go through life than being selfish and angry all the time. That not every love between a man and a woman was doomed to end in bitterness and hatred. That people could be your friend for reasons other than wanting something out of you. That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates. That not everybody breaks promises whenever they become inconvenient. That there are other approaches to the world than cynicism and irony. That not everything is a scam, and not everybody is out to hustle you.
Nothing in my life up to then had taught me any of that.
The fact that the Republican base went with someone like Trump, rather than someone like more Hanania-adjacent, is somewhere between 'something that will never be forgiven' and 'It's not like I wanted to be popular with you' and 'I knew you were all idiots anyway.'
Hanania-chan is tsundere?!
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
I haven't seen this show, but all the praise being lavished on it makes me go "Really? Do none of you remember the likes of St. Elsewhere, for example, which also trod this path of 'slice of life reality in a hospital serving lower economic area'?"
People don't watch old shows. They just empirically don't.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Chess is a fun hobby, and definitely a healthier way to spend time than staring at a screen, but it's not really useful in any way. As the siblings note, it is one of those tournament professions where only a tiny handful of people can ever hope to make a living, so unless you want to go full Polgar and make an all out attempt at raising a champion, that's out. Transfer of learning doesn't exist, so all those quotes about how chess teaches foresight and vigilance are full of shit; learning chess teaches you to play chess, period. And we are not in an age or place where it is a common pastime, so it is not particularly useful as a social skill, either.
I would say it depends on what it's funging against. If chess time or money comes out of the soccer budget, which keeps the body healthy, or the reading budget, which is useful in general, it's probably not worth it. If, on the other hand, time at the chess club would otherwise be spent on Instagram and YouTube, by all means go ahead.
Yes?
If you take that random sample of 12 year olds and run them through the education system, where they are force-fed Shakespeare and algebra against their will for another 6 years, you will find that:
- Most of them fail to master the material.
- Most of them forget what little they memorize as soon as the exam is over.
- Most of them never use any of it in real life.
The few things that the average man is both actually capable of learning and truly increase his economic productivity thereby are basic literacy, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication table. The average man cannot actually learn rhetoric or geometry, and resents the attempt to teach him. More to the point, the average man never actually needs those for his job, or to function outside of it.
See "Genetic Russian Roulette", "Against Tulip Subsidies", "SSC Gives a Graduation Speech", "Book Review: The Cult of Smart", and "A Theoretical 'Case Against Education'" for Scott's absolutely brutal takedowns of the education system. Then wash it down with some Education Realist, Bryan Caplan, and Various Refrigerator.
It is the fate of every woman to grow old and watch her beauty fade. Would not mind if she spent her youth, beauty, fertility, and purity on me; that is, indeed the greatest gift that a woman can give a man. But the thought that she gave them to another man is unbearable.
From "Fertility" by the Dreaded Jim:
It would seem that the male belief that fertility and attractiveness decline rapidly once a woman reaches a certain age is phallocentric and oppressive.
Equality means that female ovaries have the same functional lifetime as male testicles, which is logical, and, like equality itself, insane.
So here follows a public service announcement for women:
Ovaries dry up a lot quicker than testicles. At age thirty six two fifths of women are infertile, and most of the women that are theoretically fertile have a hard time getting pregnant, plus there is a substantially higher risk of the pregnancy going wrong. So you should have your babies before thirty six. If planning three babies two years apart, need to get pregnant at thirty one. If pregnant at thirty one, married at thirty. Which is why your prospects for getting married plunge abruptly at thirty, because any potential husbands are doing the same arithmetic. Yes, some woman you know got pregnant and married at forty four – but your chances of being that woman are not good.
And from "Michael's Story":
As a man I am very visual. God made me this way. I cannot help finding a physically beautiful woman attractive. Why did these women not at least give me a few years of their youth so I would have time to fall in love with them and permanently burn their image in my mind’s eye? I need something to remember when we are 50 and married. Yet she spent her 20’s parceling herself out to guys who gave her nothing and offers nothing to the guy who gives her everything. I’m expected to commit hard earned resources to raising children with what is ultimately a suspect woman whose history I know nothing about. A 30+ unmarried women has very high chance of having a questionable past and baggage. I believe the more men a woman has been with the less likely she is to be emotionally committed each subsequent one. When you have handed out little pieces of your heart over years to dozens of different men what is left for the husband you proclaim to truly love? What value do the words “I love you” mean when she has stared into the eyes of 10-100+ different men and said the same thing?
At 30+ women’s physical appearance has nowhere to go but DOWN. Is this what women mean by “saving the best for last”? Marrying at 30+? How can women spend trillions of dollars a year on beauty products yet at the same time claim a women’s age “shouldn’t be important” to a man? And what about children? Did they ever think their husbands might want to have children? What’s more likely to naturally produce a quicker pregnancy and healthy offspring? A fertile 24 year old in her physical prime… or a 35 year old aging womb? What if I want multiple children? At 30+ a women can easily before infertile after her first pregnancy.
As a result of everything I’ve seen and experienced in my life I would like to make an announcement to all the desperate 30+ year old women out there: I would rather suffocate and die then spend my hard earned income, love, trust, and substance on you. Your entitled, ageing, feminist, jaded, baggage laden and brainwashed. And if I cannot marry a women in her 20’s I REFUSE TO EVER GET MARRIED. Given my high income this should not be a problem. However I’m concerned at some point I will have to start looking overseas (Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe etc.). I’m not going to marry one of these 30+ ageing entitled females who clearly have an agenda of their own. I intend to get married once. Marriage is meant to be forever. I will not be a starter husband for one of these used up women. I can’t tell you the number of men I’ve known who married late and were rewarded by losing everything they spent their lives building…
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Some people say it’s hardwired in the female psyche, although I don’t know how nature would hardwire a wealth preference into humans in an ancestral environment where wealth was just ‘being fat’, and some sticks and shells. How could Lucy in the savannah have learned to be turned on by zeroes on a bank statement.
Women are not attracted to zeros in a bank account; they are attracted to the things to the things you buy with those zeroes. Which is why rich men go out of their way to signal their wealth with expensive cars, flashy jewelry, bespoke suits, etc. Those things confer status, and status is something which has always existed and which women are definitely hardwired to be attracted to. No woman is going to be attracted to a man who has a million dollars in his bank account but lives like a pauper, at least not for his money.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
From in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die:
Costco is ENORMOUS. The parking lot must fit hundreds of cars, and on a Saturday afternoon it's mostly full. The shopping carts look practically big enough to drive down the street themselves. They go in through the huge automatic glass doors into a high-ceilinged, concrete-floored, vast echoing room with shelves and shelves and shelves of food. And a lot of things that aren't food, too, clothes and toys and bicycles and electronics and even furniture.
...
It's wonderful. She is not totally flabbergasted, she's been inside a small-for-this-world ethnic grocery store in California, but this is a glorious height of human achievement that belongs among the wonders of the world, and she loves it, and she bounces on her heels and squeals and praises God who made civilization and all who made this bit of it with His hand guiding.
"Everyone should live to see Costco, and Heaven and Hell should have it," she concludes this praise.
No, "roommates" in this sense is people who share the same house but have their own rooms.
In the old days, people who only needed a single room could instead live in a single room occupancy (e.g. Judy's apartment in Zootopia), but ever since we decided to make those illegal, anyone who cannot afford a studio has no choice but to move in together and rent individual rooms in a house or apartment, with all the attendant friction and problems.
(This is one big reason I still live with my mom; if I have to have a roommate anyway, who better than my mother who loves me? What's the point of moving out just to become roommates with a stranger?)
Different boards have completely different cultures. /b/ is not /pol/ is not /k/ is not /r9k/.
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