gakles
7d ago
I have a very similar experience. Never been depressed but i've found that listening to music while walking around town or doing work decreases my net happiness. Personally I think it's because my train of thought gets derailed several times a minute by catchy lyrics, taking me out of the moment and forcing me to reorient myself each time. Not that I'm walking around in a distracted haze while listening but these microdistractions take a toll on my mental attention.
This could be a symptom of the genres I listen too though, lots of trap, rap, and drill so it's not exactly calming mozart. I do find that while working out this "violent" music actually helps because it takes me out of the direct unpleasant feelings but also keeps my pulse high. I guess dissing the opps is good for preacher curls but not autumn afternoon walks.
gakles
26d ago
Looking for something new to read. Big fan of military scifi/thrillers and near future stuff, huge fan of Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising and Team Yankee among others. The genre seems to have fallen off, the more recent ghost authored Clancy stuff is fine but the thriller aspects make it take so long to get to the action. I've read all of FX Halden's books and James Rosone's Monroe Doctrine as well as quite a few others, unfortunately the part of the genre Kindle recommends me is increasingly filled with ai slop. Anybody have any recs?
gakles
1mo ago
Semi-related graphics card question: My PC is 10+ years old right now and my mac can run some games but emulation and minimum graphics only get you so far. In the next 2-3 years will the current expansion of chip fabs lead to cheaper cards in the future? I'm hoping to build a cheap, medium-tier gaming PC for less than say $1500 (cheap peripherals). Thoughts?
gakles
1mo ago
WARNO! I kinda hate the base game for being too arcady and competitive at times so I've been playing with either the CRMxWIF modpack or rebsfrago. Rebsfrago is soooo slow but pretty fun, and building artillery dominance can be fun. CRMxWIF is great but the roster is too limited and theres not too many neat things units can do, like SEAD or really nice artillery strikes. My micro is pretty shit but im having fun using long range weapons to snipe the backline, and my ai teammates do most of the real pushing. I'm starting to get a feel for what a good unit roster is (in both mods) but I just can't seem to get a combined arms push going, I'll be able to take the next copse of trees if I have all sorts of indirect support but I find it miles easier to just erode the enemy with long range fires, I'll get twice the kills, lose fewer units, and don't have to micro my frontline as much.
gakles
2mo ago
Just got back into Project Zomboid. The game is so fun when it works, but the pace of development is killing me. I dropped it a year ago in anticipation of NPCs in build 42, but they still aren't here, and I'm playing on build 41 because half the mods I want to use are unsupported in B42. Currently playing a mechanic with the scrap warrior mod on 4x pop no respawn, hopefully it'll be a long playthrough but I'm struggling to clear out a safe zone to even begin dealing with the bigger hordes. The FPS optimization mods are impressive, I went from a stuttering nightmare to a decent experience even when around a 100+ horde.
gakles
2mo ago
I think the game has huge potential, particularly with the already thriving, somewhat supported modding scene. I'm honestly a little concerned the devs are spending too much time making new planes and not new systems/qol/optimization, because they'll announce a plane in the roadmap (eg. heavy cargo lifter) and modders will spin one out in half a month.
gakles
2mo ago
Neat! I've been burning my excess tokens from claude's $20 tier trying to vibecode my own videogame. I want to make a naval warfare sim sorta like Rule the Waves but in the modern era. I have minimal coding experience (I don't know how to use github) and have basically just been feeding claude prompts and letting it sort things out.
So far the going has been good, if a bit slow. I tend to burn through the 5-hour limit within an hourish using opus on medium thinking, with about 3-4 hours every week dedicated to this for the last 2-ish months. The sim needs to run on a mac, so I've spent a lot of tokens telling claude to plan the architecture and look for optimizations, which, to my amateur analysis, has been reasonably successful. The latest version is 47k lines of typescript (is this good? bad? I don't know :) ). Theres ships with different modules, planes, doctrines, missiles of various types, and intercept programming, as well as reasonably(I believe) accurate modelling of radar and flight performance.
I've tried using Sonnet to code, and it works surprising well for things which don't require too much forethought, like "make a model and loadout for an arleigh burke destroyer". It's not so great at things like "The tomahawk missiles keep falling into the sea after launch, find out why and fix it", where it tends to get fixated on one aspect or metric and ignoring others. In the latter case, the launch booster didn't have enough thrust, but it kept trying smudge the lift surface size to get the missiles to fly without it. As a whole, I've found that using Opus (and fable, for the brief moments it was available) lead to net faster progress and implementation of systems I wanted, with at least an order of magnitude less mistakes. A few weeks ago I migrated from a browser interface to electron I believe and Opus made the switch painlessly while I'm sure Sonnet would have fumbled.
I'm decently happy with the current program: ships follow orders, missiles fly, some are intercepted, theres cool sprays of CIWS and 5 inch guns when cruise missiles get to close, and airplanes are mostly capable of launching standoff munitions and doing air combat. That beiing said, it's pretty rough on the edges, theres no main menu or situation setup: I have to add ships/planes via lines of code if I want them in the simulation.
If anyone with experience wants to check it out I'll happily post the code to github. I'd love feedback, I'm sure the llms have missed some big things, somewhere, but I'm to dumb to ask the right questions.
gakles
2mo ago
World War Z was a book which really stuck with me. I read it in my early teens and went into it looking for the archetypical zombie thriller and I was completely blindsided by the breadth of storytelling. Brooks' choice to tell the story from ordinary people, discussing their lived experiences made each vignette much more real to me. I can honestly say that by the time I was halfway through I was thinking about how hard it would be to block the staircase with sofa. Brooks has dropped in a ton of personal moralizing to the story, pretty obvious in certain parts during my most recent re-read, but as a teen I was too enraptured by the story and too young to pick up on most of. For those interested in more WWZ content there is a super long althist rewrite from a very leftist perspective in this thread. It's even more heavyhanded than the original book and laughable at times but a fun (and occasionally enraging) read. I haven't found another book like WWZ with that approach to storytelling and grounded approach to zombies. Please let me know if you know of any others like it!
gakles
3mo ago
I think people are acting more selfless than they really would be, and ofc voting was influenced by surrounding discourse, and of course the scenario is that red won, so some <50% of the population picked blue and died. The plurality of less-selfish people who voted blue, who then get thanos-snapped, were probably load bearing to some degree. I think there are a lot of negative externalities to red winning that red-pressers aren't considering.
gakles
3mo ago
Something something time preference.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where red won. Sociologically it would be an interesting question of how a society which thanos snapped itself would cope. Rugged individualism? "They were stupid and weak for picking blue, we're the smart ones."?
gakles
3mo ago
Sorry, deleted my comment because I realised you were only responding to the belligerent claim, which is fair, my bad.
Aggressively and incessantly waging war
I think theres a distinction between the relations Israel and Iran had before and after both sessions of surprise aerial bombing. I guess my motte would be that both surprise attacks severely increased direct kinetic conflict, civilian suffering, and heightened tensions in and between both states, in a way that wasn't there on the days before both attacks.
wrt your two questions:
- Nope, and to slightly modify the common saying, I have jewish friends.
- Not really, I generally fall into "the trust the experts" crowd and Jewish people rarely directly advocate against the (these days dismantled) technocracy. If American military(and financial, etc.) support for Israel is considered public policy then I do blame a subsection of jews for that.
gakles
3mo ago
We can't destroy Iran's capacity to build cheap drones without blockading land routes from China and every garage where they can be assembled in Iran. Russia can't do it to Ukraine, Ukraine can't do it to Russia, and we couldn't do it to the Houthis. Shahed type drones (not to mention mines) will always pose a threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz unless the Iranians on the coast no longer want to launch drones or are no longer there (read: invasion).
gakles
7mo ago
Source: 10 minute talk with expat uber driver
Anecdotally, my uber driver, an expat phd student in Australia was in favor of regime change but was skeptical the current protests would be effective, he argued the protesters didn’t have enough conviction and firepower. With current reports of the state killing several thousand protestors, I might have to agree with him. We’ll have to see if the people are willing to march in the streets when they can be mowed down by heavy machine guns.
gakles
7mo ago
Its just awful optically, only one shot actually went through the windshield, the rest were through the driver side window, meaning the car was past the officer by the time he really punched her ticket. By the time he unholstered, the wheels were pointing away from him, too. Not that this really matters, in that if she actually wanted to smoosh him or another officer she could have obviously turned the car around/started reversing and she had technically already acted to smoosh him (while turning so as to not smoosh him, but still). Doesn't change the legality, but it just looks awful. If the left had any credibility, this would be an excellent time to use it to argue against ICE overreach. Alas, they've cried wolf a few thousand times too many.
Have you tried Path of Exile 1? It's 13 years old now so very much matured out of EA with insane complexity.
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