erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 111:
Slowly, Harry's mind tried to recover itself a final time. Very possibly final, if he was right about the Dark Lord killing him after this... though the Dark Lord had said that he would resurrect Hermione, which seemed pointless if that was true... was that simply the Dark Lord following through on a promise he would not otherwise have been able to make in Parseltongue... why had he not just shot Harry on the spot...
Seriously, some last functioning part of his brain said to all the other parts, this would be a good time to think of something, something that the Dark Lord has not already thought of, something we can do without our pouch or our wand or our Time-Turner, something that Professor Quirrell has not imagined we can do... think, think, pretty pretty please think of something? Don't shut down now, even if you're scared, even if we've never really really faced death before in the sense of being about to die in the next hour, THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO SHUT DOWN -
Harry's mind stayed blank.
Suppose, said that last remaining part, suppose we try to condition on the fact that we win this, or at least get out of this alive. If someone TOLD YOU AS A FACT that you had survived, or even won, somehow made everything turn out okay, what would you think had happened -
Not legitimate procedure, whispered Ravenclaw, the universe doesn't work like that, we're just going to die.
Someone realises we're missing, thought Hufflepuff, and Mad-Eye Moody shows up with a squad of Aurors and rescues us. I think the time has come to admit we're not more competent than the standard authorities.
The saving factor does have to be something we do somehow, said the last voice. Otherwise there's no point in our thinking about it.
Suppose a time traveler came back from the year 2100 and told you that, in his time, Britain (or Germany, or France) was 99% white and 94% Christian, the way it was in 1951. Unfortunately, before he could explain how such a thing came to pass, he gets hit by a lorry, dying instantly.
What would you think had happened?
Well, first, I would have been shocked that the singularity didn't happen, and that there were still biological humans walking around in 75 years' time. But leaving that aside...
I would not think that the remaining white population of Britain had woken up, voted harder, elected a right-wing government, and peacefully fixed their problems.
I would think that a far-right coup had taken over the government, enacted martial law, and physically removed the Muslims, or something along those lines.
We are not voting our way out of this.
erwgv3g34
3hr ago
Haven't seen that one because I can't take Brad Pitt as Achilles seriously
Are you kidding me? He looks like a statue of a Greek god come to life, with a face carved out of diamond by angels and a head adorned with luscious threads of golden sunlight; he was perfect for the role!
erwgv3g34
13d ago
I tried the S&W M&P Shield 9mm at first, but I hated it. Racking the slide and loading the magazines was so hard, and there were too many buttons I didn't know how to use.
So I got a hammerless S&W Bodyguard 38 Special next. Much better! It's so simple; there isn't even a safety! The single button is for unlocking the cylinder, and then you just push a rod to remove the rounds.
Most people look at me weird for carrying a revolver in the age of semi-autos, but it's just right for me. Besides, revolvers have a noble history; American police officers were using them well into the 80s (as seen in Lethal Weapon) and Korean cops still use them (as seen in Squid Game).
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Alpha Centauri's writing is fucking incredible, but the gameplay is sadly outdated, with a lot of annoying micromanagement (units are supported by their home bases rather than by the faction as a whole, air units must return to a base every other turn or crash, etc.).
Welcome to the glorious PC master race. Protip: Steam is the best way to buy and play PC games. Always wait for a sale; never buy games at full price.
My recommendations:
- Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition ($5.99)
- Kingdom's Starter Pack Bundle ($8.08)
- Cursed Treasure 2 Evil Evolution Bundle ($1.46)
- The Scriptwelder Collection ($5.28)
- The Last Door Collector's Edition Bundle ($3.58)
- Axiom Verge 1 & 2 Bundle ($6.73)
- Cave Story+ ($1.49)
- Cave Story (Free)
- Iji (Free)
- The Battle for Wesnoth (Free)
- Magic: The Gathering Arena (Free)
A hunter is walking in the woods searching for the biggest bear he can find when he stumbles across a giant brown bear. He pulls out his shotgun, steadily aims, and fires at the bear. The bear seemingly falls into a nearby ditch and appears to be dead. The hunter slowly walks over to the ditch, until he feels a tap on his shoulder. The man turns around, and just as he does, the bear asks: "Did you shoot me with that shotgun?" The man replies "Yes", and the bear throws down the man and starts raping him.
In a few weeks, the hunter devises a plan for revenge on the bear. He brings his double-barrel shotgun and is really ready to get even. He walks through the woods and sees the bear, so he steadies his aim, shoots the bear, and the bear falls into the ditch, seemingly dead. The hunter slowly walks over to the ditch, and just as he does, he feels a tap on his shoulder. When the man turns around he sees none other than the very same bear standing above him. The bear asks the man, "Did you just shoot me with that double-barrel shotgun? To this the man replies "Yes", and the bear rapes him.
After a month has passed, the man has recovered and is very eager for revenge. He brings an elephant tranquilizer this time and is sure he will have enough firepower to take down the bear for good. Just as before, the man is walking through the woods when he sees the very same brown bear. He steadies his aim and fires. The bear falls into the ditch, and the man slowly walks over to him. After searching for a while, the man is tapped on the shoulder once again. He turns around slowly to face the brown bear. The bear then asks him, "You don't come here to hunt, do you?
Or they believed they were firing on enemy personnel from an enemy vessel they had just sunk. Not exactly very sporting or within the norms of modern western nations, but not that crazy.
Not that crazy? Shooting at shipwrecked sailors is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention; it's literally a war crime!
From the Second Geneva Convention, Chapter II, Article 12:
Members of the armed forces and other persons mentioned in the following Article, who are at sea and who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances, it being understood that the term "shipwreck" means shipwreck from any cause and includes forced landings at sea by or from aircraft.
Such persons shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Parties to the conflict in whose power they may be, without any adverse distinction founded on sex, race, nationality, religion, political opinions, or any other similar criteria. Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated, subjected to torture or to biological experiments; they shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care, nor shall conditions exposing them to contagion or infection be created.
Or do you mean this in a less literal but more meaningful way, as in only the Japanese have the cultural competence to actually make one of these any good. Because I would mostly agree with that, I don't think I've ever seen a decent visual novel come from anywhere other than Japan even if hypothetically one could.
I usually find Western erotic games to be superior to Japanese h-games, even apart from the bother of setting up a Japanese locale emulator to get the damn game to run. But that may just be because I don't like ugly bastards. I certainly prefer anime-style graphics to something like Daz 3D, but in the age of Koikatsu Party and Pony Diffusion any Western dev can make those.
erwgv3g34
17d ago
From "Unspeakable Bargains" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Once upon a time there was a man named Simon who was a successful junior trader at a financial firm in New York City, who was heterosexual and liked conventionally pretty women. Simon used to take attractive women out to swanky restaurants, and fancy theatres, and amusement parks on weekends, and buy them jewelry and clothing; and then they would go back to his place and have fun. One day, Simon decided to stop spending money on women.
Immediately after, women decided to stop spending time on him.
Simon was very depressed by this. "So they never liked me to begin with?" he bemoaned, clutching his hands against the lapels of his $4000 business suit. "They were just stringing me along for my money all along?"
"That's admittedly a possibility," said Noelle, a well-known author who wasn't conventionally attractive and could therefore go to expensive restaurants with Simon without sex entering into it. "But considering the sheer weirdness of what you just tried to get away with, we can't even conclude that much. I don't even know how to describe the exact mistake you're making. Why on Earth did you try that in the first place?"
"Numerous movies and TV shows have told me that if girls really like me, they'll like me for myself rather than my money," explained Simon.
"Honestly I sometimes find it a bit hard to really, deeply understand from a first-person perspective what it's like to make that mistake," said Noelle. "Admittedly, I'm privileged, because I attract people by being a famous author, and therefore I identify strongly with the aspect of myself that I market sexually. Like, anyone who only sleeps with me because I'm the famous author Noelle Smith therefore does like me for myself, as I define 'myself'. So it's hard for me to imagine the existential horror of needing to market oneself sexually using only wealth, physical attractiveness, sexual skill, and other characteristics that ultimately fail to distinguish you from millions of other people. But then I know that there's other famous authors who attract people and that doesn't seem to upset me. For that matter, I know that there's centillions upon centillions of perfectly identical Noelles elsewhere in our spatially infinite universe, and that doesn't upset me. I seem to have lost track of the thread of the conversation, where were we again?"
"I was being sad about the fact that all of those girls turned out to only be attracted to me for my money," said Simon. "Honestly, it wouldn't even disturb me all that much, except for the fact that all the movies and TV shows have told me that this is an inferior quality of love, which means that somebody else is doing better than I am."
"Oh right, that," said Noelle. "Yeah, and I was saying we couldn't even conclude that much, though there is a certain prior probability in play. Look, it'd be one thing if you were poor, but honest, and also extremely handsome. But if you're visibly wearing a $4000 suit and still trying to take the girl to eat at McDonalds, that sends another message entirely. What the hell were you thinking?"
"I was thinking that at least Wendy, of all the women I was dating, said that she liked me for myself and that the restaurants had nothing to do with it!" declared Simon. "I'm genuinely disturbed that she turned out to be lying!"
"Oh, Wendy? Yeah, her I liked," said Noelle. "Simon, I don't think Wendy was lying. I think she was making a deep-seated error about how her own psychology worked, like, she was having trouble interpreting reality in a way that didn't seem horrible to her, so she slipped sideways into a nearby universe instead. Look, Wendy's model-level beautiful, right? She can date in the big leagues. 'Don't marry for money, hang around rich girls and marry for love,' as the saying goes. Wendy's pretty enough that she can afford to hang around with a hundred people in your rough category of socioeconomic status, and pick out one that she likes. She could still have been attracted to you more than other rich guys, because of the fine details of your personality or something. Like, she found it cute the way you snort in the middle of laughing, or whatever the hell it is you think it's acceptable for women to be attracted to."
"Yeah, but it's not okay that Wendy also cared about the money!" said Simon. "That makes her a horrible person, right? Or at least shallow. A woman with real depth to her wouldn't care about my money at all."
Noelle thunked her head against the wall of the restaurant booth they were in. "You know," she said, "even if we concede that this hypothetical quality would earn a woman 2.3 virtue points, which could in itself be debated, my mind is still going: 'But why would somebody that virtuous need to end up dating somebody poor and unattractive? Shouldn't she be able to score a wealthy boyfriend who's attracted to excessively virtuous women?'"
"I'm starting to wonder if I've gone to the wrong friend for consolation here," said Simon.
"Possibly," said Noelle. "I mean, I'm having trouble imagining a universe whose mating market ends up that far out of equilibrium. Like, I can't believe in the implied alternative to mating markets for long enough for me to become emotional about it, or something like that. But even so I feel you're being unfair to Wendy in calling her shallow. If you hang around 20 guys whose personalities attract you, and then you marry the one who takes you to the most expensive restaurants, there's nothing wrong with that. There isn't even anything shallow about that. Deep women can like Kobe beef too. There's nothing wrong with wanting to go to expensive restaurants at the same time as being with someone you like."
"Of course there is," said Simon. "Let's be realistic here, if you like 20 people for themselves, there's going to be some quantitative level at which you like them, and if you pick the wealthiest person from among those, you're going to end up sacrificing 0.3 liking points so you can get 10 wealth points. How is that not shallow? I know, I know, you think everyone just is shallow, and maybe that's true, but it's still sad."
Noelle thunked her head against the wall again. "See," she said, "I don't think of myself as being cold-heartedly cynical when I reject that way of looking at things. I don't think that kind of exchange is bad when it happens alongside everything else in life. I don't think that optimizing your own life and reaching up for things is selfish and bad. I don't think it's wrong for a woman to want jewelry and for that to influence her dating life, so long as that one consideration doesn't take over her life at the expense of everything else. And aren't you the guy who never asks out any woman he doesn't consider to be at least a 9 out of 10?"
"That's not the same at all!" Simon said indignantly. "I can't control who I'm sexually attracted to. It's not like I try to score women on the same scale that everyone else uses, the way that wealth is objective and measurable, and then I only try to score with women who score at the 90th percentile. I just can't control who my brain is attracted to, that's all--there's no choices involved."
"Well," said Noelle, "I have to admit that I'd feel a lot more sympathetic if you said that you were willing to date 6-out-of-10s in exchange for them being okay with you being frugal. As it stands, I can't help but feel like you're trying to be a barista who insists on still getting the $4 but not giving people the coffee. It seems to imply an asymmetry in how your mind sees people--that you see them being 'selfish', but not yourself trying to 'just live a better life' or however you'd put it."
"I didn't think sex was supposed to be this cold-blooded exchange!" said Simon. "And maybe it is, maybe there's no escaping it--but then it's okay for me to be sad about that, right?"
"I'm not sure exactly how to describe what mistake you're making," Noelle said, "but it has something to do with it being really horrible for some reason that something matters, and that thing clearly does matter in the real universe, so you don't want to live in the real universe anymore. And also something to do with you having trouble really taking on somebody else's perspective, maybe because that would force you to acknowledge that the thing is allowed to matter."
"Would it kill you to say that my feelings are valid?" said Simon.
"I'll say it if you pay me $50," said Noelle.
Simon shook his head. "I wonder if the reason we have a taboo against greedy women in the first place is that women like you ruined it for everyone else."
"No, see," said Noelle, "I feel like I'd want $50 in exchange for saying that, and my feelings are valid too."
Or, as Alpha Centauri put it:
"Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant."
– CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
erwgv3g34
17d ago
The grandparent now reads "Removed by @FCfromSSC". Was this on purpose? I often see deleted posts reading "Removed by [$MOD_NAME]", but I only just now realized the mods might not be aware of it, like they don't notice filtered comments.
That ad reminds me of the secret projects from Alpha Centauri. "The Artificial Intelligence" would fit right in with "The Self-Aware Colony" and "The Dream Twister".
See also "Cognitive Trope Therapy": "if your proposed program sounds like something the Rebel Alliance has to fly a daring fighter raid to blow up before it can be activated, consider you might be the bad guy."
erwgv3g34
19d ago
You fantasize about castrating chads because you will not allow yourself to fantasize about putting women in chains. That doesn't make you a rightist, it makes you an incel.
Not what I see.
Since this thread is about forum moderation rather than coding prowess, let's look at the text leaderboard on Chatbot Arena. The strongest open source model is glm-5.1 at 25th, followed by mimo-v2.5-pro at 32nd and glm-5.2 (max) at 33rd. The 24th strongest model is claude-opus-4-5-20251101-thinking, which as the name suggests came out in November 1st of 2025, 20.5 months ago.
Seems to me like "a year or two behind proprietary models" is accurate.
EDIT: Whoops, I accidentally added an extra year. Opus 4.5 actually came out on November 24, 2025, while GLM-5.1 came out on 2026-04-07. So open source models are 4.5 months behind proprietary models; closer than I thought.
erwgv3g34
19d ago
Seconded. Normies ruin everything.
The problem is that Reddit became popular, and popular web sites cost money to operate, and advertisers are skittish about associating their brand with "that website with an entire section devoted to jailbait photos." So /r/jailbait had to go.
Rest in power.
From "Are Demons Real?" by the Dreaded Jim:
There is also an excellent practical reason for believing in demons. It makes the behavior of our ruling elite so much more intelligible, and thus enables you to put on the armor of God, protecting you from being driven crazy by their craziness.
As Charlie Kirk, martyr for Christ, told us, the proposition that Church and Easter are inessential activities, but bars, race rioting, and burning down Wendy’s are essential activities makes so much more sense if you assume our rulers are possessed by demons. Really, it is hard to explain Fauci weaponising a formerly harmless bat virus any other way, and even harder to explain why he has not yet been executed for crimes against humanity.
Charlie Kirk’s assassin was radicalised by hanging out on forums full of trannies, and a whole lot of trannies give an overwhelming impression of being dead bodies controlled by hostile alien entities. When one runs into a trannie, it is sometimes hard to disbelieve in demons.
erwgv3g34
20d ago
Incorrect. Israel is interesting opposite case. They have large urban population, educated women and everything. And even secular population has TFR above 2.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
The biggest blockers would be radioactively-hot CW-content that provokes a safety classifier or flinch reflex. That is nothing that can't be prompted away.
This is my biggest concern. I wouldn't trust any of the woke AIs to mod The Motte even if they had the technical capability to. Grok, maybe, but that's not a SOTA model.
My second biggest concern is technological dependence. If we built a forum based on active AI participation, what happens when the companies pull the models? We would have to use open source AIs to be safe, but those are a year or two behind proprietary models.
My daughter is an only, my spouse and I were from families w/two kids.
My daughter used to say she wanted a big family, like half a dozen kids. But she's changed her mind having dated. By the time she views her male peers as mature enough to marry, she'll likely be in your position and be limited by age/decreased fertility due to age. She's entering her mid-20s and isn't sure it's worth wasting her time on dating. I tell her there are guys out there who don't spend all their time gaming, but have no idea where to point my daughter to find them (church is out, she's an atheist; work is challenging, young men in stem are... spending all their time gaming).
I tell her there are guys out there who don't spend all their time gaming, but have no idea where to point my daughter to find them (church is out, she's an atheist
And you don't tell your son with money problems to get a job, because he just doesn't believe in working?
Uh nothing I can do as a father I guess. You tell the Man son!
I'm not sure if I understand your point but, yes, it is very common for American fathers to tell their sons they're sure there are jobs out there that will hire them, but not have any actually useful information about looking for them.
His point is that @fribble should tell his daughter to go to church; whether she believes in God or not is irrelevant.
Attacking Chinese datacenters wouldn't make sense because bombing GPU clusters only helps if there is already an international treaty to limit AI research, and such a deal would need to include both America and China at a minimum to be effective. The example given was that if the US, the UK, and China had signed a pact to stop AI development and later it was discovered that Russia was training frontier AI, then the anti-AI alliance had to be willing to airstrike Russian server farms (with conventional bombs) even if doing so inherently carried some risk of starting WWIII.
My grandmother had seven; my grandfather had eight (the seven he had with my grandma and one illegitimate daughter that was raised alongside her half-siblings). I'm a millennial. These sorts of numbers were common a few generations ago.
From "Dégénération" by Mes Aïeux:
Your great-great-grandmother,
she had fourteen children;
your great-grandmother,
had about just as many;
and then your grandmother,
she has three, it was enough;
and your mother didn't want any,
you were an accident.
Or, as the English version puts it:
well now Your great great grandmum She had fourteen kids to raise
and then Your great grandmum nearly followed in her ways
Then your grandmother had three and decided to prevent
And your mom had just the one and she was an accident
I wasn't an accident, but my sister was.
The immediate precursor to Overcoming Bias was the Shock Level 4 mailing list, and the precursor to that was the Extropians mailing list. Eliezer met Robin on Extropians; he is cited in Hanson's 1999 "Comments on Vinge's Singularity" page.
For those of you that don't know what a mailing list is, it's basically the ancient equivalent of a subreddit; e-mails sent to the group's address would be forwarded to all subscribers. I'm not old enough to have ever used one; I cut my teeth on internet forums similar to Data Secrets Lox.
erwgv3g34
25d ago
It's infeasible at the population level, not the individual level. Individual people can obviously learn more than one language; I myself already speak both English and Spanish.
But most people do not have that capability, nor the motivation to learn, nor the use case to make it worthwhile. Me? I have been a weeb since I was watching Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball as a five year old, I have been interested in learning Japanese since I was in middle school, and I will never want for practice, since I am constantly consuming Japanese media, from anime to video games to hentai manga.
This is unlike, say, French, which I took two years of in high school, and which I barely remember; what the hell am I supposed to read in French, Jules Verne? I took French for the Bright Future scholarship, not out of any love for the language, or need to use it. So as soon as I graduated, I let my studies collapse.
Similarly, I am against trying to teach everyone algebra, despite the fact that I know algebra, and indeed calculus. Most people do not have the capability to learn algebra, hate the subject, and get no use out of it; I myself can count on one hand the number of times I have used algebra outside a classroom. But that does not mean engineers should not learn calculus.
erwgv3g34
25d ago
I got Learn Japanese To Survive! Trilogy and Cursed Treasure 2 Evil Evolution Bundle. The first because I am going to learn that fucking language if it's the last thing I do, the second because I like tower defense games. They are also very cheap; $5.18 combined.
A virgin cuba libre.
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