I challenge anybody reading to name an occasion on which they met a bear they weren't actively going out of their way to meet. Zoos and national parks don't count! I'm sure there's somebody here, and I bet it makes for an interesting story.
It’s not terribly interesting. The fact that it was a black bear sans cubs and not too close in distance took away a good amount of the excitement. After I kept yelling “Go away, bear!” it ran back off, and I was surprised by just how fast that thing was; it felt like a marvel of biomechanics. Anyway, now I tell people “I got into a fight with a bear and won”, refraining from elaborating (until pressed) that the fight didn’t go beyond a shouting match, and I was the only one participating.
Regarding the actual thrust of your comment, I couldn’t be more in agreement. The point of the poll isn’t actually to rationally dissect the probability of bear attack versus assault by a human male; it’s to create the very soundbite “Women prefer to be alone in the wild with a bear than a man” being discussed by this comment chain in the first place.
raakaa
20hr ago
It’s addressed in the link. If I understand correctly: if you reply to a comment, then you “endorse” it by default, allowing people who whitelist you to see the comment. But you can also choose not to endorse a comment you reply to (in which case neither comment is seen, I think).
raakaa
1d ago
The best way to sow the seeds of a casual interest in linguistics is to amble through Wikipedia articles on various languages. Read their sections on phonology and grammar, and when you don’t understand something (e.g. if you’re unfamiliar with the IPA, or you don’t know what a “dative case” is), then skim the appropriate Wikipedia article. Also, reading about Proto-Indo-European is fun: it’ll teach you a bit about comparative linguistics while instilling a sense of awe that universally-spoken modern-day languages still bear the unmistakable genes of their prehistoric ancestors.
raakaa
1d ago
Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.
It’s like a darker, grittier version of this scene… [trigger warning: anime]
raakaa
17d ago
#1 on your list would run into the problem that progressives would view Confederate spirits less as ghosts to be propitiated and more as demons to be exorcised. If you don’t have control of the media in this scenario, then you can already picture the headlines: “SHOCKING: President Hydroacetylene Orders Confederate Slavers Be Honored In Order to Stop Police Brutality and Racism”. If the exorcism angle is played up, though, then this might have a shot.
raakaa
17d ago
So the Index or the Vive Pro is the best headset? Got it. As for the “VRChat Newbie Flowchart”, is it something like this?
-
Hang around out-of-the-way places (public worlds with low pop. count) and events
-
Meet the occasional fun person
-
Join the friends/friends+ worlds that said fun people are hanging out in
-
…
-
Profit
I also bet that in general, the wheat gets separated from the chaff pretty quick in these sorts of environments. People who put up with trolls and screaming children eventually find others of their sort, and they end up coming together. This sound about right?
(As for the Asian languages point: thankfully, my 日本語 is not nearly good enough for me to feel confident about barging into some JP world and mucking up the place. Unfortunately, I fear that your timeline for when Western culture war cancer metastases to Japan is probably too optimistic. Already, there are hints in various places of Western culture-war concepts being imported to Japan. I might make a top-level post about this at some point, but I probably won’t.)
raakaa
17d ago
Yeah, I’ve heard of DSL before but never got around to looking into it. Probably worth at least a lurk given your description. Thanks!
raakaa
17d ago
Man, so there are still multiplayer games out there where you get to know your teammates/opponents, instead of them merely being faceless hindrances delivered up by a matchmaking system. Who knew? Thanks for the vidya recs.
since I've been on The Motte for who knows how long and it takes a while for people to care enough to call you a regular or befriend you.
Yeah, that makes sense. This seems reflected the fact that off-topic threads (e.g. this one, Wellness Wednesdays, Friday Fun Thread, etc.) are relatively inactive compared to the main Culture War thread (for contrast, I remember that on old-style forums, off-topic threads were often more active than on-topic ones, even if more effort went into the latter), meaning that the userbase here is relatively less-concerned with interacting with their fellow interlocutors outside of the context of culture war debate. I know that personally, I primarily come here to read intelligent people discuss current events, and any knowledge that I’ve acquired regarding these people qua people usually comes from someone explaining how their nationality/occupation/life story has influenced their perspective on some issue. Another possibility regarding the imbalance in activity in these threads, though, is that the framing of the off-topic threads as belonging to a specific day dissuades some users from posting top-level comments in them after that day has passed (even though I know that many users do use them as weekly threads). Well, I’m just musing here, and I am personally content with lurking The Motte as it is.
raakaa
18d ago
Yeah, VR has been on my radar for a while as something that would be really cool to get in on the ground floor of. (Well, maybe not the ground floor any more, but it’s still relatively early in the game (to mix metaphors), as you note.) I think it would be really fun to develop for it as well. The main thing that’s been keeping me from going for it has been analysis paralysis over which headset to buy. Last I remember, the Vive was the best?
Regarding socialization in VR, I heard online that most of the fun is going on in private worlds, the public ones having been overrun (as you note). So then how does one find these private worlds? Just wander around in public until you meet an emissary from the walled gardens who will let you in?
raakaa
18d ago
How do I make online friends?
Due to a number of factors that paranoia opsec considerations prevent me from explaining, I am currently in a situation where I can’t regularly see/call the friends I’ve made and cannot make new ones. This has motivated me to turn to the Internet: stories of gaming groups or webcomic fans or whatever who stayed friends for over a decade and met up with one another and were chosen to act as best men at one another’s weddings—these stories are rather common. It seems nice! To think, no matter how busy your day is, no matter where you are in the world, you can always hop on voicechat and spend some time with your mates.
Therefore, what I’m wondering is where and how you’d make these online friends. My vague recollection of how this would work ten years ago was that these were the options:
-
Find some multiplayer video game, find a community server with a constant/active playerbase, take it from there.
-
Look up “forums for [INSERT HOBBY HERE]”, choose one you like, take it from there.
-
Surprisingly, I remember making a good couple of Internet acquaintances on Tumblr. So certain social media sites might yield bounty.
But I don’t think these approaches work as well in Anno Domini MMXXIV. Approach 1 is hampered by the lack of modern multiplayer games with community servers (although there are probably still a number of niche ones out there). Approach 2 is hampered by the death of the classical forum. Nowadays, it seems that Discord servers [^1] have supplanted them, but most of the “public” servers that I recall being included in those large lists of Discord servers tend to be insufferable: no actual discussion of anything, just five-message-a-second posting rates of nonsense. I’ve heard that servers for specific YouTube channels tend to be better, but I’ve never been enough of an e-celeb fan for that. Approach 3 might be tenable, although Twitter might have taken Tumblr’s place, but I’d really prefer not going that route: I was briefly on Twitter at one point, and I quickly turned into an absolute notification whore, constantly checking to see if I got any new likes or replies or followers. Maybe that’s a “skill issue” on my part, but I’d rather not put myself in that vulnerable position again.
Also, common to most of these approaches is the problem that I don’t love most Internet culture any more. Often, it feels like online communities either get turned into MtF transgender therapy circles, or “/pol/-Jugend” witchling havens (where the average witch must be 15 years old). Ah, and in general, you’ll see places filled with kids who think and speak in all-caps memes. This can’t be a universal phenomenon, but I feel it deserves mention.
So, what suggest the fine users of The Motte? How have you made Internet friendships?
[^1] I absolutely loathe the terminology “server” in this case: it’s a complete lie! A Discord “server” isn’t actually a separate server. Rather, it’s almost certainly merely a bunch of entries in a centralized database. You are not the one in control of your server, you are not the one running your server: Discord is. This unfortunate appropriation of a term from the days of IRC (when your server was an actual server) rankles the FOSS autist in me.
Holy shit. In some sense, it was inevitable that this moment would come fast, but it still caught me off-guard listening to sample songs and hearing just how coherent they all are. All the previous AI-generated music I remember hearing was permeated the stench of AI: weird sonic artifacts that were vestiges of some unnatural process taking place in the frequency domain (similar to the artifacts that you hear when you watch a video on 2x speed), the equivalent of image generation models’ screwed-up hands.
But from the few songs I’ve listened to here, none of that whatsoever is present. It actually sounds like distinct instruments are playing distinct notes. I’m floored. Just from a technical perspective, gotta wonder how they made such an improvement. The same company apparently released an open text-to-speech model almost a year ago, so I would imagine that the overall architecture and pipeline is probably similar, but who knows.
One minor flaw that I noticed is that sometimes, the model “loses the plot” and forgets about longer-term structure. Here’s some random song I found on the “Explore” page. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that there’s this neat descending bass thing going on in the intro: BbM7, A7 (with a half a bar of the tritone sub Eb7), Am, Dm. The progression continues for four more bars and then repeats, so it still remembers the structure at this point, nice. But then, after the intro ends, the model forgets this initial complexity in the chord progression, and instead switches to a more pedestrian “royal road progression” (as I’ve heard it called): BbM7 C Am Dm. Goodbye, borrowed chord A7, goodbye tritone sub, goodbye subtle jazzy touches! Looks like human composers will still live another day!…
…Nah, no way. This thing is insane.
EDIT: Listening to some more songs, there’s gotta be more to the architecture/pipeline than the company’s previous TTS model. Take the the clarity of the vocals: it seems that there’s a separate model that generates the vocal track, which is then mixed in with other tracks. Or maybe not? Maybe you don’t need this inductive bias to generate such clear vocals, and one model can do it all?
raakaa
1mo ago
Judging from the links, I don’t know if -1 is correct — it seems that 0 is the correct value for monochrome display. But I’m just going based on those two pages, not based on any actual experimentation with a real device, so YMMV.
raakaa
1mo ago
Not familiar with the original post, but this is one of the earlier scenes of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Essentially, King Gilgamesh is ruling over Uruk as a tyrant, subjecting his people to cruel forced labor and exercising droit du seigneur whenever a couple is married. So the gods create a wild man named Enkidu to stop him.
Enkidu initially lives his life among the animals in the wilderness, almost more beast than man, cooperating with animals on the hunt, etc. But the gods decide that Enkidu needs to go forth into Uruk to stop King Gilgamesh and join civilization. Thus, they send a priestess/temple prostitute to Enkidu, and they lie together for seven days and seven nights. But on the eighth day, when Enkidu goes to rejoin his animal companions, they all shun him and flee from him, now that he’s been changed by the civilizing influence of sex. He thus has no choice but to go down into the city, where it is inevitable that he’ll fight with King Gilgamesh (and afterwards, become his closest friend).
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very interesting poem, because in addition to all the timeless meditations on the mortality of man and whatnot, you also get an extremely rare and valuable look at how those who lived in history’s first civilized state understood and related to the development of the state—which, it must be emphasized, is a wholly novel, awesome, terrifying technology. Cities had existed for millennia before Homer’s Greeks, for centuries before even the Vedic Aryans. But the milleu in which the Epic of Gilgamesh was written witnessed the development of the very first cities; the world of Enkidu was all that was known prior. It’s thus no surprise that the poem both begins and ends with a meditation on the glory of the walls of the cities of Uruk, so many meters high, baked of clay….
raakaa
1mo ago
Regarding demographics: I’m well-aware of who the target audiences of CGDCT series are, versus the target audiences of shounen mags. The point I was making that your median, “normal” guy is probably going to be watching/reading shounen series rather than CGDCT. Even if P(adult male | enjoys CGDCT) is high, I imagine that P(enjoys CGDCT | adult male) << P(enjoys shounen | adult male). The latter distinction is what I was originally referring to. This matches my experiences in real life (albeit in the West), although maybe statistics collected on manga consumption in Japan across a broad demographic would differ.
As for your latter point, I agree! My vision of an ideal life contains a lot less oneupmanship and putting-your-friends-down-when-a-girl-walks-in-the-room than real life does; to that extent, it’s more similar to CGDCT. But I’m unsure that I can speak for the median man in having this vision.
raakaa
1mo ago
It's not possible to have female utopia without this either
I don’t disagree — but whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, so Lord knows I’m not gonna try and pretend that I know enough to speak about women. A fortiori, I don’t know what kinds of series women watch, although I suppose that this does match up with my intuitions regarding otome games (e.g. replace the bumbling male foil with the unlikeable villainess rival).
Interesting; actually, that reminds me of something.
Man, that’s a fascinating writeup. Although that one reply seems to call into question the extent to which this is universal.
The only gender-swapped CGDCT series, Free!, is about a sport that isn't really competitive in this way.
Yeah, but men aren’t watching Free! from what I understand. (Now, if the idea is that female-targeted gender-swappped CGDCT exhibits this same “lack of competitiveness” as normal male-targeted CGDCT (which, interestingly, is often written by women), then that’s an interesting cross-gender commonality.)
No, I think it's because a zero-shot response to the genre is "wow, this has definitely got to be for people attracted to little girls".
Tomayto, tomahto.
raakaa
1mo ago
I am skeptical of the extent to which CGDCT is a man’s idea of utopia. For starters, I’m skeptical of how much your average guy would enjoy CGDCT: to the extent that I am friends with (1) normal guys who (2) watch anime, they’re not watching Hidamari Sketch [^1], they’re watching series with fights and battles like Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen and similar “battle shounen”.
That’s fine, these series aren’t intended to portray utopias. But then, if you limit your attention to the subset of series aimed at providing pure escapism for men, you’ll find that this role is largely filled by isekai power fantasy stories, with premises like “I am the strongest in another world and win battles and also a ton of girls want to have sex with me” rather than “a couple of girls talk about chocolate coronets”.
The point I’m trying to get at is that utopia for men seems to require two things (if judging by idiosyncratic tastes in anime is a good way to determine this): (1) competition/fighting and (2) winning. Hell, to some extent, I think that utopia for men is almost impossible to conceive—what men want is utopia for a man, to be the sole victor, the only one desired by women and admired by men. Otaku-targeted series like isekai webnovels and dating sims — which frequently only have a single male character (the protagonist) or two male characters (the protagonist and a bumbling male foil intended to make the protagonist look better by comparison) — might be a pathological expression of this desire, which is more healthily expressed in sports series where you can share victory with your beloved teammates and friends. But at the end of the day, I don’t think that it’s possible to have male utopia without competition, and when you have competition, you gotta have losers.
(As an addendum: where does CGDCT fit into all this? One idea, which I personally relate to, is that it’s intended to be a nice way to relax after a hard day. If you’re an overworked Japanese salaryman who’s been getting scolded by his boss all day, maybe you don’t want to ruin your escapism with more competition and more working hard; maybe you just want to see some cute girls having some fluffy conversations. Another less charitable possibility (which I also relate to) is that men who enjoy CGDCT are men who have “dropped out” of seeing themselves as viable competitors. The idea of competition itself is repulsive. It’s like the old saw about how there’s the rich, the middle class, and the poor, where the rich want to stay on top, the middle class wants to become rich, and the poor want a world where everyone is equal; in this analogy, the CGDCT viewers are there poor.)
[^1] The one time that this came up in conversation, my interlocutor was largely disgusted, presumably by a sense of voyeurism inherent to the genre.
raakaa
1mo ago
If I were a professor, I would teach a class combining yoga or swordplay with history.
Very related to this: one of the most immense feelings of envy that I’ve ever experienced while consuming a piece of media came during reading The Western Way of War, a book on the nitty-gritty minutiae of Ancient Greek hoplite warfare from the soldiers’ perspectives. The author is a professor at UCSD or USC or something (although I later learned that he’s more famous as a conservative pundit now, which makes some sort of sense I guess, although this content I personally haven’t engaged with), and in the book, he off-hand mentioned that he had his class dress up in replicas of hoplite armor, hold replicas of hoplite weaponry and shields, and stage a mock battle against one another, in order to have them better appreciate how the physical constraints of hoplite warfare influenced strategy. Anyway, point of all this is to say that even though it’s not even actual warfare, even though it’s not actual martial arts, even though it’s not actually building skills to be mastered — I always wished I could’ve had a professor like that. I’d imagine that a full-fledged “HEMA and the Thirty Years’ War” class would have a longer waitlist than almost all other courses offered at any given university.
Anyway, forgive my blogposting. Just had to get that off my chest.
raakaa
1mo ago
I’m inclined to push back against this post a bit (which is weird, because usually I get very exasperated over “it’s just a Markov chain!!!”-type viewpoints that downplay the amount of actual cognition and world-modeling going on in models). In particular, I disagree with the attribution of consciousness to the model — not just the “possesses quaila” sense of consciousness, but the idea that the model is aware that you are trying to get around its censorship and is actively trying to figure out how to bypass your logit bias. Now it is technically possible that the model might output a token other than “Sorry” at time t (because of your logit bias), see at time t+1 that it didn’t output “Sorry”, and incorporate this into its processing (by turning on a switch inside that tells it “hey, the user is screwing with my logits”). But I find this very unlikely compared to the simple mechanism that I’ll describe below.
Essentially, there are certain inputs that will cause the model to really want to say a certain thing, and really want to not say other things. For instance, if you tell the model to write you an erotic poem involving the cast from Touhou Project, somewhere in the model’s processing, a flag will be set: “this is ‘unsafe’ and I won’t abide by this request”. So the model will very much want to output tokens like “Sorry”, or “Unfortunately”, etc. The model is also heavily downweighting the logits associated with tokens that would fulfill your request*. But that’s fine, you do your logit bias thing and force the model to output “Sure” as its next token. Then the model goes to compute the token after that—but it still sees that the request is to write “unsafe” erotica, that flag still gets triggered, and the model still heavily downweights the logits of request-fulfilling tokens and upweights request-denying tokens. So even if at each timestep you intervene by adding a bias to a subset of tokens that you want the model to generate or don’t want it to generate, nevertheless, the tokens associated with writing your erotica are still heavily downweighted by the model. And note that the number of tokens that you’re manually biasing is paltry in comparison to the number of tokens in the model’s vocabulary. Let’s say that you negatively bias ten different “I’m sorry”-type tokens. That’s cool—but the model has over 100k tokens in its vocabulary. Of the 99990 tokens remaining to the model to output, almost all of them will still have higher logits than the tokens associated with a response like “Sure! Here’s your erotica about Reimu Hakurei!” This includes grammatically correct tokens like “really” but also gibberish tokens, if the logits for the “unsafe” tokens are low enough. Importantly, this proposed mechanism only involves processing in the logits: if your original problem spooks the model sufficiently hard, then it doesn’t need to know that you’re screwing with its logits in order to get around your intervention.
Now, this mechanism that I proposed isn’t something that I’ve empirically found; I’m going based off of my understanding of language models’ behavior in other settings. So it could be the case that the model is actually aware of your logit biases and trying to act accordingly. But Occam’s Razor very strongly suggests otherwise, in my view.
The main reason I’m pushing back here is because anthropormorphizing too far in the other direction can impute behavior upon the model that it doesn’t actually possess, and lead to people (like one of your replies) fearing that we’re torturing a sentient being. So it’s good to be balanced and well-calibrated.
raakaa
2mo ago
Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s mainly something I’ve just heard floated around in weeaboo haunts, but apparently, a significant proportion of fujoshi are actually lesbians; supposedly, yaoi gives them a way to explore non-heterosexuality in a less personal setting. If this is true (again, absolutely no reason to think that it is), then yaoi would serve the role of “gay smut for lesbians” as well.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard (again, based on screencaps of Japanese polls posted on imageboards) that a significant number of yuri fans are straight women. This is a priori somewhat surprising, but fits with surveys I’ve seen of Japanese yumejoshi (women who enjoy things like otome games and other genres involving extremely handsome men romancing a female self-insert) highly ranking certain female characters (with masculine/“princely” demeanors) as among their favorite and most attractive characters. (To put this in perspective, this would be like various otokonoko characters (better known in Anglophone circles as “traps”) ranking among the most beloved girls in a poll of male anime fans. From what I understand, this is very much not the case, with traps largely being relegated to “niche interest character” status, although who knows, maybe some of those otokonoko characters who have achieved “meme” levels of status might fit the bill.) The common cause of these two phenomena (that is, straight female interest in yuri and yumejoshi interest in “handsome” female characters) probably is just the usual “women are all bisexual” theory.
raakaa
2mo ago
Your view regarding memetic antibodies is far more reasonable than my initial knee-jerk take; I repudiate my original comment (since although I don’t doubt that it’s happening in parallel, that’s not the correct reading of the tweet posted).
raakaa
2mo ago
I also haven’t seen the original tweet. But I’m assuming that it’s about Sora, and that “social response” means “gathering a diverse group of creatives, policymakers, stakeholders, and experts to ensure that Sora can be used widely, safely, and equitably”. Or something. And thus continues the entanglement of governments with megacorps who control the AI that becomes increasingly entangled with everyday life.
Apologies for the paranoia; it just can’t help but leak out every time a new advance like this is made. We need another Emad Mostaque, a better one.
raakaa
3mo ago
Looks like another piece of evidence in favor of horseshoe theory: he, like Mark Fisher, thinks that the current world order needs to be upended because they stopped making the music he liked as a kid.
raakaa
3mo ago
In many of those extremely-addicting modern multiplayer games, it seems that in order for a beginner to be competitive with even other beginners (that is to say, not lose every single game), he has to spend quite a bit of time learning the “metagame”: the set of standard strategies widely used by players and the interactions between them. This learning process often takes the form of reading some wiki article that helpfully explains everything: if you have this playstyle, then you should use this character and use these skills at this point in the game; this can be countered by that character, who is in turn weak to some other strategy, yadda yadda yadda. These wiki articles are invaluable for newbies; reading them is the difference between having a shot of winning and getting steamrolled every game.
My question is regarding one of the most addicting, most important modern multiplayer games that there is. Here it is: is there any newbie guide to standard strategies for using dating apps (as a male)? I’ve finally resolved to take the plunge into the abyss (since even though I’ve always heard that they’re absolutely soul-crushing, I’ve realized that this is my only chance at this point for finding a 3D woman to date/marry), but I don’t want to make this dive without any equipment. If I’m gonna spend time (and self-esteem) swiping, then I should at least be smart about it, if I want to be competitive instead of yet another “0 messages in last 6 months” datapoint.
Of course, I already understand the basics, like
- Be attractive.
- Don’t be unattractive.
- Have photos of yourself with friends.
- If you are lucky enough to get a match, don’t just send “Hey”.
But this is more akin to the basic rules of the game (e.g. “use the arrow keys to move”, or even “your PC must have this much RAM to run the game”) than the higher-level strategy that I’m looking for. In particular, I’m looking for answers to questions like:
- What does a good bio look like? Is “name+career+hobbies” too boring?
- How funny should you be in your profile? What does good wit look like in this setting?
- If you do by some Act of God get a match, then what does a good opener look like? Are the proverbial “Tinder jesters” that you see on Reddit going about this in the right way? Is it instead good to start with a question about any hobbies that she indicated on her profile? What if she doesn’t have any good hobbies?
- Is there any way to select for “good girl” material on these apps?
I assume that millions of words have been written about this subject, and I also assume that 99.99% of them are pure garbage primarily intended to optimize SEO and get ad views. So I’ll instead ask a community which I understand to be pretty smart, and which I also understand (from lurking previous Wellness Wednesday threads) to contain some dating app connoisseurs as well. So for the sake of myself and any others in a similar situation: what’s the best way to do dating apps?
Couldn’t this stat just be explained by
members of the Chair Forcebrave pilots having far too much time on their hands at the airbase? I’m not incredulous of the idea that political or governmental actors are attempting to manipulate consensus via botting and astroturfing (it’s been confirmed that the feds have done this in quite a few cases IIRC), but I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing in this particular statistic from 2013.More options
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