magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1hr ago
Without modern medicine, even assuming you got past childhood mortality, there were very few people who would've made it to their 60s since a lot of things we handle nowadays, such as early heart disease or infectious disease, would've just been fatal back then.
Making it to your 60s was never that uncommon. Pre-modern life expectancy was low, but that low number masks a bimodal distribution where most of the ones who didn't die as babies lived into their 50s. There were some fairly-hard limits in a bunch of cases (e.g. commoners eating bread with rock bits in it will have their teeth ground away over time), but there were definitely quite a few people who made it to 60.
magic9mushroom
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1hr ago
Most of the interesting things Half-Life was doing were not picked up by the games it influenced.
In a number of cases, that was a good thing.
The combination of puzzles and highly-costly information is unfun. A number of the puzzles require you to commit suicide in order to gain the necessary intel. The one where you have to lure an alien into a Tesla coil, for instance - AFAIK, the only way to figure out that the Tesla coil is there is to run past the alien, get cornered in the Tesla coil, and die like a bitch, hopefully not before you figured out what the bad-graphics thing you're looking at actually was.
Puzzles plus permanently-missable information are also not nice. The part where you have to fire the rocket into the alien, for instance, has the main clue come from a Barney, who is hard to hear and AFAIK only gives it once - and you can easily save after that, without a way to progress.
And I mean, it's not like there weren't puzzle games already! LucasArts had been doing them forever, and Zork Nemesis was a 3D puzzle game in '96. Half-Life was only an innovation in trying to be both an FPS and a puzzle game at the same time, and frankly it's an object lesson in why they often don't play nice together.
(I will say, a lot of the problems it has were obviously fixable, just not with the technology - particularly the graphics - of the time. In-game maps - even literal floor diagrams, like the ones present in buildings IRL for evacuation purposes - would have helped so much.)
On the other hand, I will note one thing about HL, and particularly to @OliveTapenade - Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
The "report reason" text-box for "other" is often insufficient to say what I want; could it be, maybe, twice as long?
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I want to force you to admit what, exactly, you think is being lost.
I think it's not at all clear that the earring's simulation of a person has sufficient fidelity to qualify as being the original person. It clearly has sufficient fidelity to qualify as being a person whom the original person would want to be, but that's not quite the same thing. Lots of people would prefer to be Elon Musk (or, well, at the very least Elon Musk before he went nuts); this doesn't mean that if we killed them all and replaced them with copies of Elon Musk, that would still be the same people.
Human cognition already consists of layers of delegation. "You" do not personally compute the contractile details for every muscle involved in pronouncing a word. Vast amounts of your behavior are already outsourced to semi-autonomous subsystems that present finished products to consciousness after the interesting work is done.
I think this is coming at the problem backwards. People generally identify with the high-level processes and not the low-level ones, so you'll just get a chorus of "but the low-level stuff's not me and is fine to outsource; the high-level stuff is me and is not fine to outsource".
Don't get me wrong - if you gave me the earring I'd put it on, because I have the Hero Mindset where I'm totally willing to die for the cause. But I'd consider that self-sacrifice, not self-affirmation.
(Props for mentioning that LLMs are worse than the Whispering Earring, though - and indeed, I'm unwilling to use them precisely because of this nonequivalence.)
A like and a subscribe would bring me succor in my old age, or at least give me a mild dopamine boost.
The Matrix has you, self_made_human. Or, at least, the social media algorithms do. Take off that earring; it's misaligned.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
The problem is that if they're limiting counterparties to losers, then it's inherently fraudulent - they're selling a service specifically, and only, to those for whom it's of negative utility, and thus are reliant on explicit or implicit deception to actually get business.
So yes, it is better that those betting options not exist than be run in that manner, much like how shell games are bad and shouldn't be allowed.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I think there's a combination of:
- BAU-is-eternal mindset. This is probably something programmed into us by evolution, since it was adaptive for 99.9% of human existence or so.
- Accepting that AGI is possible, that machines can surpass us, is one of those cosmic-horror revelations, on par with "God is dead". A lot of people, as Nietzsche put it, "blink" at those.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
I will note that SJ, as a rule, is not very fond of the idea of talking to racists/sexists. This is one of the defining attributes that distinguished SJ from 90s liberalism. This creates two issues:
- SJers are systematically likely to not see theMotte's purpose as worthwhile,
- SJers who do find theMotte worthwhile still have to worry about the other side of the social shaming coin - i.e., other SJers punishing them for engaging with us.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
People have recommended psychedelics to me as a treatment for my depression.
I keep turning them down, because of the psychosis risk. That left tail is very, very long.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
I remember someone talking on here about the "you do not belong here" comic, but can't find it (or the comic). Anybody know what I'm talking about?
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
But in most places, definitely including here on the Motte, you can map with nearly 100% consistency someone who is "critical of Israel" or "anti-Zionist" to "really hates Jews."
I'm an anti-Zionist who's part Jew, whose best friend is a larger part Jew, and who considers himself a follower of Yudkowsky/Siskind/Mowshowitz. Anti-Zionism's just not my cause area, especially not here in Oz.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
I will confess to skimming your post. Mea culpa. I also didn't particularly mean to call you an SJer - I was more gesturing at their influence over academia and thus the "default view".
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
· Edited 15d ago
Can you not hear yourselves? Do you think any decent woman would want to go within a mile of a man who thinks she should be literal chattel? Do you understand why such comments and attitudes drive feminism, and indeed drive it to the extremes which are bad for everyone? Is anyone really surprised Chinese or Japanese or Korean women would prefer to be spinsters?
It is extremely clear from his links that he does understand this; much of the point of his (or, well, Jim's) proposal to make women chattel is so that feminists attempting to become spinsters could be chained up and raped.
(And that's terrible.)
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
the Opium Wars are generally hard to defend
Not all that hard - well, hard for SJers, but not so hard for others. The fundamental problem was that "China did not want to be equal"; the Qing government did not recognise the existence of foreign nations, only tributary subjects (who could beg for favours, but not negotiate) and rebels (to be crushed). That attitude wasn't compatible with having functional international relations in a period in which the so-called Central Kingdom was not, in fact, the global or even regional hegemon. And, well, the usual result of nonfunctional international relations between countries with interests in the same region is war.
The precise causes of the Opium Wars were not amazingly sympathetic, but ultimately they, or something very much like them, were inevitable; the only way the Qing were ever going to start taking international relations seriously was to have their teeth kicked in.
(An obvious parallel in the West, if less bloody, was Pope Boniface VIII. He essentially declared himself feudal overlord of the world in the infamous papal bull Unam sanctam; the French king proved otherwise by sending an army to kidnap Boniface, resulting in the Pope's death and the Avignon Papacy.)
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
· Edited 14d ago
I will note that social media algorithms could conceivably be bad for developing brains the same way drugs tend to be.
Of course, "social participation de-facto relies on you taking drugs" is a horror for adults too, and so I'm leaning heavily toward "destroy Web 2.5" and/or "heavily-regulate algorithmic social media so that it stops being addictive".
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
Point of order: Greenland is part of North America, not Europe. It's closer to the North American mainland than to Europe, it's on the North American Plate, and it was first settled from the West. Yes, European colonisation has been a significant part of its history, but that's true of Siberia as well.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
If the Houthis had only attacked ships going to/from Israel, I wouldn't be describing them in these terms.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
What do you believe the Houthis should have done?
Not be hostis humani generis and attack everyone for attention. Israel doing bad shit is not an excuse to start killing everyone you can get your hands on in a giant temper tantrum. That's not a valid military target; hell, most terrorists wouldn't consider it a valid target. The groups with such nonexistent discrimination are what, serial killers, pirates and (most) mass shooters?
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
"We are doing this now because someone has to do it eventually and I'm left holding the bag and not a coward." Not inspiring.
I find this pretty inspiring, to be honest.
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
No, corruption is the idea that your personal goals are so important that you're willing to break the law to accomplish them.
I'd say "betray your responsibilities", not "break the law". Not all corruption is illegal and not all premeditated crimes are corrupt.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
If you want to create something like a byzantine agreement algorithm for a collection of agents some of whom may be replaced with adversaries, you do not bother trying to write a code path, “what if I am an adversary”. The adversaries know who they are. You might as well know who you are too.
What's wrong with this bit? I mean, sure, the post as a whole is paint-by-numbers terrorist propaganda, but this bit is just saying "there's no point giving instructions to the enemy, because he'll ignore those instructions; that's why he's called the enemy".
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
It's really, really a shock when you see it the first time because you're hoping that there will be the heroic ending of the plucky, scrappy underdogs winning over the villainous tyrannical regime (like every American movie and show does).
I was fairly confident a full heroic ending wasn't in the cards by that point; one episode wasn't enough for a real finale and no groundwork had been laid. I wasn't expecting the actual ending; I wasn't really expecting an ending at all, because I figured the show had sucked for two seasons and gotten cancelled (I had long since said the eight deadly words).
Also, if they wanted to shock me, they probably shouldn't have had the slow-motion.
I will say that shaggy-dogs are unusual for a reason, particularly when they leave a lot of Chekhov's Guns unfired (remember the Federation agent in "The Way Back" who orchestrated the massacre and killed Blake's lawyer? Because I do). I will also say that I find the best twist reveals to not be those that are shocking, but those the audience works out approximately five seconds prior.
I don't love the SFX being lousy. I don't care about graphics as long as I can understand what's going on (for a videogame example: Civ2 and X-Com are good enough; Dwarf Fortress pre-graphics and NetHack are not), so I just didn't really care about them one way or the other (which is why I never mentioned them).
Avon is "to hell with principles, I wanna be rich" but even there, their attempts to be space pirates go hilariously wrong (the fourth season episode Gold is wonderful with double-cross over double-cross).
The problem with showing this is that, well, eight deadly words. I cared about Blake/Jenna/Avon/Gan/Cally, not Vila/Orac/Tarrant/Dayna/Soolin, and above any of those I cared about Plot. Stuff actually happens in seasons 1 and 2; episodes fit into a broader picture. Most of the season 3 and 4 episodes have no broader impact.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Chara isn't utilitarian in the normal sense. She's an avatar of powergaming/level-grinding:
I am Chara. "Chara." The demon that comes when people call its name. It doesn't matter when. It doesn't matter where. Time after time, I will appear. And, with your help. We will eradicate the enemy and become strong. HP. ATK. DEF. GOLD. EXP. LV. Every time a number increases, that feeling... That's me. "Chara."
...and, I suppose, if you really want to read too much into it, the Killer-Ape/B5-Shadow philosophy of growth through conflict.
I mean, fascists are generally fairly open to the idea of there being a whole pile of parasites on society, and for all its usual reactionary trappings it's fundamentally a young man's philosophy.
(Not all nationalists are fascists, of course.)
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