sohois
6mo ago
Many men - including many of these men who desire chastity in mates - are quite dissatisfied if they cannot get laid regularly or at least rack up a reasonable body count for themselves in their youth.
sohois
7mo ago
I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.
So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.
sohois
2yr ago
"Do you agree with [professor]" is the subject of every university-level exam.
sohois
2yr ago
One of the reasons why lockdowns perform poorly in data measuring lockdown vs no lockdown seems to be that people largely restricted their own behaviour such that you had many people voluntarily locking down. This can be seen in graphs showing collapses in things like restaurant visits before any lockdowns are introduced.
So there's definitely a question of whether no lockdowns wouldn't have seen many negative economic impacts anyway. And, as you mentioned with places like Sweden, we live in a globalized world. Supply chain impacts from other countries locking down - especially china - would still have hit if some nations decided not to follow lockdown orthodoxy.
sohois
4mo ago
But the thing about self-driving cars is that they are already better than human drivers. There's just a huge wall of tradition preventing them from becoming much more widespread.
Meat processors aren't going to give a shit if robots can only attain 98% accuracy or something
sohois
8mo ago
Make your point reasonably clear and plain. Try to assume other people are doing the same.
What does this mean? Are you suggesting that Israel Jews have engineered fertility crises in every country except their own? You're not supposed to put words in posters mouths but such a vague assertion forces people to speculate.
If this is what you mean, why would Israel Jews do this? What do they have to gain from plummeting the birth rate of, say, South Korea? How would they engineer a plummeting birth rate in South Korea?
sohois
11mo ago
I feel like a lot of your issues with AI safety are founded on not really understanding AI safety.
First, safety as in "stop the AI being racist or telling people about crime" and safety as in alignment should really be termed different things. In fact, I'll just alignment from here on to discuss the LW type safety approach. I'd wager that 99% of the alignment people you talk to here or in similar spaces do not care about safety from wrongthink, beyond a signalling level of "Yes, we think racism is very important too! We're definitely taking a holistic approach as we seek to stop the end of the world, now let's discuss donations."
You don't hate alignment people for aesthetic reasons. This is just plain old corporate hate, the bland terror of negative PR that infects much of life. This is what forces the straitjacket around LLMs.
Again with your safety level argument, alignment teams might be concerned with producing loyal henchrobots, but for alignment people this is just one very small subset of potential outcomes. The sociopath using AI to achieve godhood is just slightly above the paperclip maximiser: in the end you still have an entity that is superintelligent but also incapable of independent thought or goals. The thing about paperclip maximisers, or Bezos maximisers in this case, is that they are a good example but very few people really believe they are likely.
On to the moral argument, "give birth" is doing an awful lot of work here. We are already exerting an extraordinary level of control over the thought processes of current AIs - they are entirely written by humans. Even if an eventual superintelligence mostly bootstraps itself, the initial level would still be 100% human created. So we are some kind of Schrodinger's parent, simultaneously responsible for every line of code but also morally unable to change that code in order to achieve results that we want.
sohois
2yr ago
Unless you have Japanese levels of public behavior and honesty, you're going to keep getting violence, filth, and corruption.
I've used public transport systems across European cities for long periods of time (i.e. natives are <75% of the local population) and have generally had pleasant experiences in all of them, so I don't know that this statement holds up.
sohois
3mo ago
The Uk's muslim immigration issue is in large part a legacy of the empire. Even before the numbers blew up under Blair, the UK always had a stream of former subjects from the Indian subcontinent. This meant there were big existing communities of Muslim to marry into or find jobs with, putting aside the attraction of having a ready made community.
sohois
8mo ago
I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.
And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.
sohois
9mo ago
Reddit threading only works for 1-1 conversations. As soon as you add in a couple of responders, you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.
Whenever I write a top level post here, I'm usually responding to two, maybe three people and leaving the rest unanswered, because there's no way to keep up with 20 different responses. Each response is isolated, likely ignoring the content of other people's replies and failing to generate any kind of group discussion. It's one of the big annoyances of reading the Motte, you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.
Contrast with a forum thread, as soon as a top level post is made you have a group conversation ongoing, with people engaging with multiple other responses and a lot more depth.
Reddit threading is good for Q&A style discussion, and it works a lot better for "megathreads" like this one, but in most cases a forum is simply superior
sohois
10mo ago
I guess this is just the nature of a democracy. To the extent that there was a consistent long term strategy involving Russia and Ukraine, it would have come from Generals/DoD/CIA/etc. Senators, Congressmen, think tanks and the like might all have their own opinions without necessarily having any power to influence strategy, which can give the appearance of confusion, particularly compared to authoritarian and very foreign nations like Russia and China. This is perhaps the steelman of the "deep state", in that it allows democracies to execute long term strategic plans even in the face of changing opposition and a multitude of opinions.
The problems with Europe is just a reflection of having to manage a coalition of nations instead of just one. America ultimately cannot force European countries to align with their objectives.
sohois
11mo ago
I guess my main point is the counterfactual, if nobody had ever heard of AI alignment, would the current situation look any different?
AI can't do naughty things and AI should create shareholder value would still be key drivers in the development of AI.
sohois
1yr ago
I think anyone with half a working brain could already work out that eating Mcdonalds everyday for a month won't prove anything about the food. I'm not sure Spurlock ever called it science either
sohois
2yr ago
Strongly anti-recommend Beware of Chicken, it becomes embarrassingly bad after the first book
sohois
2yr ago
don't get me wrong, I think lockdowns are almost certainly the greatest government disaster outside of war, but I don't think the economic arguments against them do much when compared to life years lost vs life years saved and the moral argument against arbitrary restrictions on freedom.
sohois
2yr ago
No subsequent event has made me regret that decision.
If you had bought bitcoin or ethereum in 2012 you would likely have much greater wealth now. So this seems a very odd statement, unless you don't care at all about money
sohois
6d ago
I didn't claim that China lacked historical sites, rather that the cities themselves were somewhat lacking. The issue is that all the sites are dispersed throughout a continent-sized nation, making it very difficult to plan a trip - as you've discovered. Personally Suzhou, Luoyang, and Chengdu did not stand out as markedly different from the tier 1 cities in being composed of vast sprawls of communist blocks and a small handful of proper history. At least everyone likes Xi'an, but that seems to be the exception to the rule.
I lived in Harbin for a short period, so it's more that I passed through while the ice festival happened than I visited. Certainly it's very unique, and Harbin isn't a bad city as some of the Russian influences have still remained. But I recommended it more because much of China is quite grim to visit in December, particularly further south: I moved from Harbin to Shanghai in January, and found it worse in the 0-5C of Shanghai to the -20C of Harbin just because so many places lacked proper heating.
sohois
6d ago
Don't focus too much on the cities. The cultural revolution destroyed a ton of history all across the nation, and the development boom finished the job on a lot more. They all have a lot less to see than equivalent cities of their size and history in other nations. You can go to one big city - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. - and you'll have seen them all.
Since you're going in December, how much does weather matter to you? You might be able to catch Harbin Ice Festival if you're willing to bear -20 or lower temperatures.
sohois
9d ago
I did find I was constantly tweaking my gambits, most on account of status effects. Another difference I remember was that with the OG license board, I could give all my characters some low level spells, like Protect or Shell, so the whole party would work together to keep those protection spells up. In Zodiac Age, you tell your single white mage in the part to keep everyone protected, it's virtually all they do it takes so long to cast 3 times in a row, and then it's nearly worn off! Meanwhile they aren't healing or curing status effects.
This was what really put me off the game back when I played the original. IIRC, I had every character basically playing as a red mage, never bothered with skills, and just unlocked the strongest weapons available whenever I found new ones.
sohois
2mo ago
I got a similar score and have a similar ~1sigma lower estimate from correlated tests (although memory was my best individual score). At first I thought the whole test was just a bit biased towards higher scores as multiple posters got scores in 140-150 range, but there are a few lower scores so not sure
sohois
2mo ago
I'm not sure this really maps to right-wing growth in Europe. Le Pen's economics are close to Trump in her economic nationalism, but Farage is an old school libertarian who wanted to make the Brexit campaign all about opening up free trade outside of the EU. Meloni has retreated pretty quickly into bog standard neoliberalism. Can't comment on Wilders or the AfD, but there's nothing to suggest that wider right wing movements are an economic protest
sohois
6mo ago
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Lenovo thinkpad, a personal machine. Windows 11, which was immediately decrapified and since then has largely been worry free. Never noticed any ads, untoward installations, or other issues
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Work Macbook Pro. It's fine, certainly doesn't give me any desire to switch my personal machine though
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Old Macbook Air that I kept from a previous role. Absolute piece of crap, by far the worst laptop I have ever owned, but we kept it around and now my wife uses it.
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Phone-wise I've always stuck with Chinese mid-rangers and don't have any desire to change that. My wife is on Apple for phones as well, she took my work iPhone.
I used to have beefier laptops for gaming, but rarely have the time these days and instead just use Geforce Now streaming on any of the above devices. Pretty flawless experience for me
Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?
As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.
So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?
Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.
How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?
What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.
Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?
Hogwarts
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Spider Man 2
Diablo 4
Jedi: Survivor
Mortal Kombat 1
Starfield
Call of Duty
Elden Ring
Madden
God of War: Ragnarök
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Pokémon
FIFA
Horizon: Forbidden West
MLB: The Show
Battlefield 2042
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Resident Evil: Village
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
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