@self_made_human's banner p

self_made_human

Kai su, teknon?

10 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC

I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.

At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!


				

User ID: 454

self_made_human

Kai su, teknon?

10 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC

					

I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.

At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!


					

User ID: 454

Well that's better than nothing so I'll approve it.

We ask for a submission statement on frontpage posts. Please go into more detail about the article, we don't need a full on summary, but some context is necessary beyond that from just the headline. It's not a bad post and it's a reputable writer, but you need to make us aware of why it's worth reading before we approve it.

Great, another newcomer with a username meant to kill the dyslexics or keep obsessive compulsive vampires at bay.

Welcome, but for your future reference, please keep such questions to the dedicated threads, this thread is meant for high effort posts with a culture war bent, at least at the top level. It's not a big deal since you're new and might not be aware, but I'd prefer if you deleted your current comment and posted it there, ideally in the Small Questions thread, though I can hardly demand that you don't put it in whatever is newest since I do so myself.

I've seen the Terminator my dude. 40 watts is a ridiculously low power rating for a plasma rifle, because the screenwriters don't know physics.

It was a joke. And grapes do turn into plasma in a microwave, if you thought that was a joke.

https://www.snexplores.org/article/why-microwaving-grapes-makes-plasma-fireballs

I was filling out the ACX survey the other day and I ticked the boxes to indicate "I didn't have the internet growing up." I was in my mid-thirties when I got my first smartphone

Neither did I. My parents were luddites about things like giving their kids phones or internet access, I was probably past 16 when I first got a decent smartphone and a broadband connection. It's too long ago for me to resent them for it, but it was a stupid decision then and remains that way.

So I certainly am not so young that I don't remember a time when television and books were your best bet for entertainment, I happen to remember being rather dissatisfied with that state of affairs, and even more when it was artificially prolonged. I certainly didn't enjoy nature much at that time, but maybe it's all the mosquitoes that sour me on them.

As you correctly state, I think modernity is the best things have ever been, though I can happily acknowledge that people can have different tastes and there are certainly normal people who still pine for the uh, pines, and love being outdoors and on the trail. It just isn't my cup of caffeinated beverage. The majority of people do have that option, like your kids, and find other things more attractive. I understand that can be painful for you, given how dear that experience is to your own heart.

I feel the same about drugs like Ozempic in that their long-term effects are not yet known. One always pays the piper eventually, at least in my experience.

This kind of belief always confuses me. Many people seem to have an adversarial relationship with the universe, as if there's some ironclad law of Equivalent Exchange, and that because a simple pill has had so many positive benefits, there must be a catch somewhere, maybe it causes brain tumors fifty years down the line or something.

Thankfully, that isn't how things work. Semaglutide/Ozempic was known to be safe when it was first approved for diabetes a good while back. Then said diabetics began to lose an incredible amount of weight. Some drugs for diabetes cause weight loss, but not nearly as much, some even cause weight gain. This was so surprising they looked into it further and then were so blown away they decided to apply to the FDA for another trial to treat just obesity alone.

And then, after it was approved for that purpose, doctors noticed it was suddenly curing alcoholism and gambling addictions. It's basically an anti-superstimulus drug to a degree.

It is also extremely safe, the only negative consequence of note is occasional constipation in some people, and loss of muscle with the fat, which is a common issue for any treatment that causes rapid weight loss, be it gastric bypass surgery or fasting. The benefits still outweigh the risk enormously.

Your suspicion is highly unwarranted, all the more because other people with the same kind of suspicion have done their best to find something horribly wrong with it and failed to turn anything up.

The universe is apathetic, not evil. We can occasionally find ourselves a good thing, ozempic seems to be one of them.

Look dawg, the rules here stress extending charity to the outgroup. Not an infinite amount of charity, but certainly more than is implied by:

Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do.

Which would fall afoul of it if the rest of your comment didn't.

And then we happen to have:

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Which is precisely what it says on the tin. I'm not sure what your understanding of causality is, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the bare minimum required to be functional human being who acquired a degree of mental maturity greater than a neonate. While I, mod hat off, agree that there are gaping holes in their reasoning, and, mod hat back on I get that you're being hyperbolic, but that only makes you fall afoul of our guidelines on:

Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

You've got enough AAQCs under your belt to know that such drive-by culture-warring is against the spirit of what we do here. I ask that you don't do this again. Neither side, be it your ingroup or your outgroup, has such a clear monopoly on truth and clear thinking that you can make such claims. Certainly if you do wish to make those claims, we expect more from you.

What is the hedonic treadmill but a consequence of a series of subjective experiences?

A disabled person experiences the utter horror of being disabled. He's still disabled later, and subjectively experiencing all the issues that brings (alongside coping mechanisms), and yet his mood trends back to where it began. The same for the suddenly rich lottery winner, though presumably the more modest but sustained gains from those who earn a lot of money (I don't think the studies were on net worth, rather income) leads to higher well-being longterm.

These are almost certainly not the same as the downregulation of opioid receptors in addicts, but they're all examples of the body's stubborn desire to achieve homeostasis. It's the ultimate Nothing Ever Happens Chud of all time. Then when shit does happen, I come in.

It's all homeostasis, be it becoming inured to a single form of once novel stimuli, or to the gestalt impression of all the things that act on your mood.

I think people are largely happy or unhappy, and the ‘hedonic treadmill’ is mostly about the ways in which that naturally unhappy proportion of the population cope.

Some people are certainly happier or unhappier by default than others. What the hedonic treadmill claims is that they tend to revert to whatever that default is. It does not rule out variance between people or even within the same person, simply that in the latter case it will almost inevitably converge.

I would certainly hope that reading on the Motte is more "useful" than the majority of wastes of cellulose that line the shelves of bookstores.

Yeah, if you're just looking at memes on /r/aww, that's a different matter, but my phone is a fucking portal to nearly the sum of human knowledge, it's a skill issue if someone can't make that improve their lives in some capacity.

The hedonic treadmill is very much not a cope. Paraplegics recover to baseline happiness in months and so do lottery winners. It's one of the more robust findings in psychology.

But claims that money doesn't buy you happiness are bunk, it does, even if it has diminishing returns and is more of a log scale. There have been plenty of recent papers on it, of pretty high quality. Obviously when you get into the realm of multi millionaires and then billionaires, good luck getting a proper sample size, but for anyone who doesn't have 7 digits or more, money will make you happier, just not linearly.

That's why I took pains to clarify that superstimuli are not necessarily bad, it's that the ones that people get into a hubbub about that are being selected for being bad for you in some way.

Modern music is superstimuli, fucking Mozart is superstimuli. Food with spices added is superstimuli. The main consideration is that this form of enjoyment far outstrips anything in the ancestral environment, not that its bad for you. We just call them out more when they are. If it could make a caveman or medieval peasant fall to their knees, it counts.

And why shouldn't it be considered bad if people cannot choose to adhere to an aesthetic solely because their will is attenuated? I'm no puritan, but something isn't working here for a lot of people.

Just because you like an aesthetic doesn't mean the universe is obligated to make it easy. I'd love to be ripped, I don't blame smartphones for not being there.

If you think smartphones are a distraction or you prefer hiking over Netflix, then find out a way to minimize smartphone use. They are not so utterly overpowering that you have no other choice, not in the way someone can turn you into a heroin addict against your will.

We do have solutions for willpower, I happen to fall outside the normal range for it/executive function to the point it's a detriment in my life, so I get to take ADHD meds. Ozempic, if it wasn't amazing enough already, has evidence suggesting it solves the issue of addiction in many cases, such as food addiction, gambling and even alcoholism (!!)

What you are not going to achieve anything with is "dopamine detox", which besides being a frankly retarded name, doesn't seem to provide any longterm relief to its adherents. The majority who try it end up back on the phone after a few days. Try something else, and the problem isn't that big of a deal in the first place for most.

Humans vary a great deal, and the hedonic treadmill and recalibration has strong evidence even if it doesn't overwhelm literally every human. Consider yourself lucky it doesn't seem to be an issue for you.

Besides, those concepts do not claim that happiness and joy can't exist. Otherwise opioid addicts would eventually stop outright as they get bored. They certainly develop tolerances, but the actual enjoyment remains the same with ever increasing doses, it's downregulation in other aspects that makes them need bigger doses till the point the side effects become lethal.

Plus the recalibration works both ways, it might well be that even a day or two is enough to reset your enjoyment of a cheeseburger, whereas if you were (somehow) given a dozen cheeseburgers in a row and an infinite stomach, you'd be rather bored of them by the end if you went through like a train.

See, the main crux of it is that if there's an objective reality out there (and there are a lot of very complex ideas hiding in those two simple words), we are simply powerless to directly perceive it.

In practice, I choose to act as if there is one. I have niggling doubts in my mind that the world as we see it could be fake, but I will throw up hands if asked how likely that is to be the case. Our decision theories really don't like infinities, and we need better ones if they're even possible.

So I certainly act as if my observations of reality or the advancements of science are evidence that my subjective reality aligns with (hypothetical) objective reality. Given that I don't have the mental bandwidth to hold that many layers of abstraction in my head at once all the time (and the expected return on doing so is minimal), I will happily say that Science provides "objective knowledge about the world" in the sense that it helps us establish or discover facts that are independent of observers (for all that I can't actually put myself in the shoes of another person and check).

In this view, Bayesian calculations may be correct under Bayesian rules, but they are superflous in our search for objective truth, other than perhaps as an attempt at formalizing our reasoning - where they, in my opinion of course, miss the mark by failing to talk about the external objective reality we are interested in, instead focusing on our subjective confidence.

You take it for granted that an objective reality exists. Which is fine, but I have more subtle theoretical concerns that prevent me from accepting that as axiomatic. I still think, as I've said, that this is potentially true and more importantly I can't show otherwise, so our behaviors do not diverge until the point the Creators/God show up or the butterfly stops dreaming of the human. I don't think those are likely to happen, so we act the same way and trust in empirical analysis in everything but metaphysical debate on a niche online underwater basket weaving forum.

But what this does mean is that I vigorously disagree that this is a failure of Bayesianism. We simply can't do better without taking as axiomatic that our observations are observations of an objective reality.* If you wish to do so, well you won't be harmed by it, but I act the same as you do without holding that belief.

I appreciate the nuanced debate, it's a shame it's buried so deep and we can't get more people into it, but feel free to ping anyone you think might have a useful opinion to offer.

*In the same vein that a theist might claim that Science is flawed because it cannot prove the existence of God, which becomes a pointless criticism for someone who finds the latter's existence dubious.

Well, that's one way to describe a malfunctioning microwave when you put a grape in it.

I think it's full of shit.

Unless you've overdosed on dopaminergic drugs (why'd you steal grandma's Parkinsons meds, the opioids look very different, oh wait she's detoxing from dopamine far more effectively than you can), then it's not an excess of dopamine that's causing you issues.

Even hand-waving that away and coming to the problem of super-stimuli in general, just because something is a super-stimulus does not necessarily mean that that's a bad thing.

Movies are super stimulus compared to live actors. Nobody particularly cares to blow up Hollywood on those grounds alone.

Reading a book is superstimulus compared to staring at a campfire and gossiping, and books weren't part of the ancestral environment. Anatomically modern humans 100k or even 10k years back out weren't cracking open tomes of literary fiction.

I have ADHD, so I have no need for excuses of modern superstimuli to account for my attention deficit, it was obvious from birth. And yet I read voraciously then, because it was more appealing than everything else, and I still do, even if my tastes have evolved and become far more niche. I'd read even more if there was more content that aligned to my particular interests.

McDonald's may be lowbrow, but it's an observed fact from its popularity that it's more appealing to most people than caviar is (and caviar's reputation as fancy is recent, it used to be peasant food and even served for free as an appetizer to coax you into ordering a drink in some parts of Russia), and while Japan has McDonald's, they don't have an obesity epidemic. Since we don't know why that's the case, we can hand out ozempic to Westerners and let them eat delicious food at cheap prices without killing themselves

Even something as genteel as coffee was once the source of enormous controversy:

https://www.ncausa.org/about-coffee/history-of-coffee#

European travelers to the Near East brought back stories of an unusual dark black beverage. By the 17th century, coffee had made its way to Europe and was becoming popular across the continent.

Some people reacted to this new beverage with suspicion or fear, calling it the “bitter invention of Satan.” The local clergy condemned coffee when it came to Venice in 1615. The controversy was so great that Pope Clement VIII was asked to intervene. He decided to taste the beverage for himself before making a decision, and found the drink so satisfying that he gave it papal approval.

I'm pretty sure the current Pope has a cellphone.

You perceive the world in a slower, calmer, more rational, interconnected way.

Sounds an awful lot like boredom to me. And I'm intimately aware of what that feels like, and would not for a moment trade the fruits of modernity for it. While boredom hasn't been cured, it's more bearable than it ever has been. If I need human company, I can keep my phone away, and I have ADHD, what's their excuse?

You're arguing aesthetics more than anything else. There's no reason to prefer black coffee over coffee with sugar barring personal taste and diabetes, humans like sugar. Some of us also like to be contrarian hipsters. I drink my coffee any way it's served, because I don't care.

Your best bet is attempting to buy out part of a stockpile of a failing nuclear state.

Best bet would be either Pakistan or NK.

Good luck beating the Saudis to the punch in the former, and for both cases, expect very angry DEVGRU to show up at one point. Someone is going to be pissed if you try.

If you have that much money, you can probably acquire fissile materials and even own a reactor legally, and you could hire all the nuclear physicists and engineers you like. It's the enrichment process and building the nukes in a safe manner that would be extremely difficult to pull off, unless you managed to pay some seriously hefty bribes, and convincing most countries to let you amass a nuclear arsenal is one of the few things that you can't buy with money, much like US can't just hand Xi Jinping $100 billion to fuck off.

It's probably easier just to coup an existing country that has them, or co-opt a non-nuclear power with a degree of sovereignty that is miraculously respected after your antics.

Well, at least you don't need to live somewhere with particularly permissive gun laws to make it work!

So on this level I'd say Bayesianism is a worthwhile pursuit of formalizing this kind of thinking, and we can set aside the question of how well it does this for now. I say "on this level" because there are many variants of Bayesianism, and some claim Bayesianism does much more, such as Bayesianism providing a (partial) justification and rational basis for scientific theories instead of induction, which we have agreed it cannot do, i.e. it cannot elevate our theories beyond the status of a guess.

I certainly agree that Bayesianism can't solve the problem of regress or induction. But since nothing can, we have made absolutely no progress in solving it (despite many very intelligent people trying), my strong suspicion is that it's an impossible problem to solve, and so we might as well just make do.

Can you call everything a guess? Yes.

Yet guesses are certainly not made equal. We can be much more certain of some guesses than others, and while we can never get to perfect certainty in anything, we can often get close enough for government work, or even to establish extremely powerful laws of physics.

When a guess becomes so strong that we would be utterly flabbergasted if we suddenly saw evidence it was false, then we can dispense with the formalities and call it a fact, or true.

Bayesianism often gives up on this goal, and confines itself to only our expectations and related calculations. It thus gives up on saying anything about objective reality, and confines itself to talking about our subjective states of expectation and calculations of probabilty regarding those expectations. This, for me, is an unacceptable retreat from figuring out objective reality as the aim of science. I'm interested in how the world really is, I'm not interested in our subjective calculations of probabilty (other than if they can perhaps help in the former).

My stance is that this isn't a form of unwarranted cowardice or retreat, but a pragmatic acknowledgement that we are subjective observers forced to grapple with evidence acquired through sensoria. There is no scope for an actual bird's eye view, we must trudge through the territory and map it as we go.

Our probability theories breakdown utterly, or become garbled, when confronted with things like the possibility of the Simulation Hypothesis being true, Boltzmann brains and so on. I can't rule out with any degree of real confidence that this isn't a simulation, and the laws of physics as we best understand them imply Boltzmann brains are inevitable, let alone the implications if the Universe (and not just the observable part) is truly infinite, at which point every possible arrangement of matter and energy will be forced to tile over and repeat somewhere.

Or I could be crazy. I could be making mistakes.

We cannot eliminate this, and on top of that, we are computationally bounded entities.

Could this be a simulation? Could I be a Boltzmann brain about to vanish into a fizzle? Am I crazy? Regardless of my credence in any of them, I simply choose to operate as if it's not true, since that is the course of action with the highest payoff if they're not true, and if they are, nothing I do matters (we can't even usefully speculate as to what a potential simulation is for, or if the laws of physics at that level correspond to ours).

Thus, if objective truth exists, we can never know with perfect certainty (as always, without assuming the conclusion in advance), and science can only constrain our expectations and improve our ability to model things at the level of our observations of our environment.

Thus, is science useful? Absolutely. But it can never provide perfect certainty, but we can certainly operate without that, and in practise we do. We can converge ever closer to 100% confidence that our map faithfully represents the territory, and that's good enough for me.

Reality does not care about our probability calculations.

And yet we are not Reality itself, or able to stand above it. Hence we should care about our probability calculations.

The closest we have to perfect certainty is in things like logic and math, but those do not actually exist in a vacuum to be poked and prodded, they're instantiated within our brains and other computers, and thus even what you (and I, with usual caveats that I omit when the discussion does not go this deep) might consider self evident truths, like 2=2 being true, could be the product of error in our cognition. Let's just be glad that we think this is extremely, extremely unlikely, and carry on with our lives nonetheless.

Hmm.. Given that I'm single and circumcised, and I can get four times the wives at half the price, I'm tempted.

I've heard the demand for doctors is really high, can't say why.

Unemployed agents could always move into veterinary euthanasia or find work in PETA.

No chimpanzees as I find them vulgar.

This is so incredibly funny to me, but you're indisputably correct, chimpanzees are indeed rather vulgar.

I suppose orcas made it and dolphins didn't because the latter are rapist, onanist necrophiliacs who happen to have great PR?

This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data.

Uh.. The paper you linked is at least 50% of an academic shitpost or meme.

I'm not kidding. I've read it before.

It has legitimate arguments about neuroscience and the validity of their analysis tools, but those tools were not designed to analyze Von Neumann architectures and transistor based circuits.

I'm not a neuroscientist, but the principles of neuroscience are both not designed for the task these guys did (and they did it at least partially as a joke) and have proven results elsewhere. Further, we have better options for circuit analysis in silicon and don't have them in neurology, so the paper correctly points out that they're flawed, we just don't have better alternatives but are working on them.

We understand a great deal about many individual pathways in the brain, such as the optic pathways, and there are hundreds of different pathways we know a great about down to the neuronal level while being very far from being able to tell what any arbitrary neuron does.

This is because neurons are complex. It takes 1000 ML neurons to simulate a single biological neuron, but guess what, it's been done.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/

When the guy tried to parachute off the Eiffel tower, he did so because he'd tested the idea with models first and had some direct evidence of the thing he was attempting to harness

He didn't test it enough. His friends literally begged him to try his apparatus with a dummy before he used it himself, but he was too proud and confident in his invention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#:~:text=Franz%20Karl%20Reichelt%20

From his arrival at the tower, however, Reichelt made it clear that he intended to jump himself. According to a later interview with one of the friends who accompanied him up the tower, this was a surprise to everybody, as Reichelt had concealed his intention until the last moment.[9] His friends tried to persuade him to use dummies in the experiment, assuring him that he would have other opportunities to make the jump himself. When this failed to make an impression on him, they pointed to the strength of the wind and said he should call off the test on safety grounds, or at least delay until the wind dropped. They were unable to shake his resolve;[7] seemingly undeterred by the failure of his previous tests, he told journalists from Le Petit Journal that he was totally convinced that his apparatus would work, and work well.

Trust me that I have the common sense not to do that. I meet the low bar of not being insane.

You all share the conviction that the human mind is arbitrarily tractable, controllable, malleable, that Selves can be engineered with no regard to their own will, and despite all evidence to the contrary.

There are many ways to control the human mind.

The only natural category these lot have is that they were completely wrong, and it's a bit rich to make that assertion about me when I'm discussing what I have clearly labeled as an extremely difficult engineering challenge. What else do you think that my belief that it would take us several decades to get there (in the absence of AI) means?

No, I think you're straightforwardly wrong about what is possible right now, and especially about what it shows. I don't think scientists can "emulate a rat brain", meaning create a digital simulacrum of a rat that allows them read/write access to the equivalent of a live rat brain. I certainly do not believe that scientists can emulate "1% of a human brain", under any reasonable interpretations of those words. My argument isn't that compute won't improve, it's that the mind is probably intractable, and that certainly no evidence of tractability is currently available. I have not looked into either the WBEP or EBRAINS, but I'm pretty confident they don't do anything approaching actual emulation of a human mind.

I never claimed that they have a virtual rat running around either. In this case, they managed to fully analyze the connectome of a rat, mapping all the neurons and their interconnections, but it takes much more than that to get an emulation running.

You need the actual weights of the neurons (in the ML sense), and for that you need optogenetics to study it, presumably in a live specimen, or you need to destructively scan the tissue with other techniques (if they were live when you started, they won't stay that way for long, hence why preserved tissue samples are used, including in the EU program. Besides, they only claim to have emulated 1% of the human brain, as a pilot program and technology incubator, your guess is as good as mine what running 1% of a brain does).

But looking back, I think it's pretty clear that this belief came from inference, not evidence, and from some pretty shaky inferences too. As you put it, "nothing in my knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology or engineering rules it out", and I wanted to believe it, and it fit neatly with other things I wanted to believe, so I discarded the contrary evidence and ran with it. That's what people do.

Do you think I peg my expected figure for how long it might take (counterfactual blah blah) because I am "discarding evidence"? No. It's because I have repeatedly acknowledged that it is an enormously difficult task.

Hell, if I was in charge of funding, I wouldn't put too much money into human brain emulation either, because AGI makes the wait-curves too steep. Anything we mere dumb humans do to painstakingly achieve that is likely going to be a waste of time and resources as opposed to a far more intelligent entity working on it, and we're building those even if they're decidedly inhuman.

Please, please, recognize the difference between "I know this is so" and "I don't know why this shouldn't be so". Both are useful; I argue that both are entirely necessary. But it pays to be clear about which one you're using in a given situation, and to not mix the two up.

Once again, if it's not contradicted by physics, then it's an engineering problem. We can emulate neurons, and to within the limits of measurement and innate noise, as the link to quanta shows.

It is a hard problem. It is still a problem that I expect will be solved eventually, and am reasonably confident I'll be alive to see it.

DALL-E 3 lol, but use Bing Image Creator, in some ways it's still less anal about prompts than ChatGPT's version of DALL-E is, for all its been censored to hell too.

"Don't tread on me" flag with a snake that is smoking a cigar, while holding a bottle of vodka with one hand and shooting a gun with the other hand

(I know it's called the Gadsden flag, I just explicitly called out the snake because I wanted it to be doing, well, that)

I grant it to ya, those picks certainly have unique aesthetics. I'm certainly fond of the Stoner 63, need to play around with it in VR some more.

I'm pretty sure Elden Ring would be a much harder game if the bosses came with AKs of dubious make. Or easier, if you could pick them up.

With all the hubbub over in the main thread with the ATF, it's the perfect time to have a favorite gun thread!

In other words, what's your favorite gun? Preferably a real one, but I'm scared you'll shoot me if I adjudicate too harshly, so if it launches a projectile from a barrel I'll let it slide.

Trick question! Anyone worthy of this contest can't have just one answer.

In my case, the top 5 are:

  1. The MCX Spear. Because we were due an M5 already, .277 Fury is a wild cartridge, and while it's grossly overkill for Russian conscripts or Chinese soldiers in Alibaba armor, when the robots come for you, better come packing. I was mildly inclined to reconsider because the Textron entry to the NGSW program was a bit cooler, a bullpup with a telescoping barrel that shoots polymer rounds? If only it hadn't been a bullpup, it would be a shoe-in.

  2. The G3. While the FAL is the right arm of the Free World, I simply think this one is neat. Well, at least I think it looks cooler stock. An SA-58 variant of the FAL with modernized furniture certainly tells you the 70s are back with a vengeance.

  3. The MG-338. For when you still don't have power armor and can't have Infantry hoof around Brownings, but want something with more oomph than 7.62x51.

  4. The Mk-18. My short-barreled beloved. Compact, all the cool kids use it, comes gucci-d out. Closely tied with a Honeybadger or Sig MCX Rattler both in .300 Blackout for small but deadly.

  5. The Mk-18 Mjolnir. Do not confuse these two entries. The Mjolnir fires .338 Lapua. Because fuck you and the tree behind you (for a modestly sized tree).

  6. Thought I'd stop at 5 did ya? Mistaken. The PKP, because we need some Soviet or Russian representation. Better than the M240B in almost every way, including weight. So good that new and not so new NATO countries like Finland and Poland field them.

One day, I'll make it to Battlefield Vegas, and then I will dual wield PKPs and fire them at my feet till the recoil lifts me straight to Valhalla.