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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled

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joined 2024 February 19 23:50:04 UTC

It's TZD


				

User ID: 2892

spring

due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2024 February 19 23:50:04 UTC

					

It's TZD


					

User ID: 2892

but I wanted something of reliable quality

oh no. Do yourself a favour and pick up Lyonesse instead. All three books combined are shorter than one of Sanderson's doorstoppers. Vance is everything Sanderson isn't: excellent prose, effortlessly amusing, briskly paced, tight plots and fun characters.

This is a mad rush to overturn UI into an LLM chat

I am reminded of the opening scene in PKD's Ubik, in which the penniless hero unsuccessfully haggles with a pay-per-use talking washing machine(?).

There are a great many interesting places on Earth right now should you so desire an escape from the oppression of peace and stability.

Now that it is finally Joever, favourite Biden meme?

For me, it's this edit with the Transformer's ending credits.

Do you have any examples of a TBI whitepaper becoming a devastating policy?

Failing to prevent Russian oil from ending up in western markets is a failure of application. Sanctions shift the expected outcome by making the sanctioned party pay a higher cost to achieve their goal. In the case of Russia, this means the point at which they are no longer able to sustain the war effort arrives sooner.

The Russian economy is not doing quite well, it is verging on stagflation.

https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/11/russia-central-bank-dilemma?lang=en

The war with Ukraine means that Russia’s economic policymaking is caught in a paradox: on the one hand, the government is increasing expenditure (over 8 percent of GDP is being spent on the war), which fuels inflation, while on the other, the central bank is trying to dampen inflation by raising interest rates. It is this paradox that drives calls for greater coordination between the government and the central bank. Of course, the looming specter of a recession and stagflation also mean that there is a preemptive hunt under way for scapegoats.

Western sanctions mean that the Russian elite has no institutional alternative to Putin and Russia’s current economic course. They can’t flee to the West, and their only option if they want to earn money is to remain in the country. But high interest rates are squeezing their margins and cutting into profits. Business lobby groups have complained that companies are scaling back investment plans.

The case for China is much murkier. But if one starts from the assumption that ASI are of the same level of strategic significance as nukes, improving your chances of getting there first seems like a defensible position to me.

I wouldn't be willing to write off Llama and Meta's AI team at this stage, it's a safe bet that they're working on their own CoT models and it's any body's guess what they'll be like in terms of price to capabilities. Deepseek is impressive but also much more spikey capabilities-wise than other language models. The real test for open source models is the community uptake, but even then I wouldn't even say it's over even if teams were overwhelming choosing to finetune Deepseek over Llama. It only took one generation for Anthropic to turn "Clod" into the darling of AI enthusiasts everywhere. It's still anyone's game.

Agreed. I decided not to fill it out on this basis.

"With a car you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

I love poetry, but this just cracks me up.

Careless Whisper

On the topic of music, does anyone know of any good blogs/videos aimed at laymen that explains why current pop music sounds the way it does?

It does seem contradictory and self-defeating, but so does much of the progressive orthodoxy. Regardless what I am positing is anti-tech rhetoric and maybe something performative like restricting phone use to strictly utilitarian ends, not full blown ludditism.

I think if wokeness will get a second wind it will look quite different, see Tea Party and MAGA. If I had to take a swipe at how it might be different I could see there being a luddite/anti-tech angle. I think you can already see some seeds with phrases like 'tech bro'. Plus it's fertile ground for anyone with grievances or misgivings about the negative cultural impacts of social media, as well as the economic impacts of increasing automation.

No, no. It's perfect.

In 1921 Wittgenstein wrote a nearly incomprehensible book that, if i understood it correctly, puts forth the idea that trying to find definitive answers to questions like 'what is truth?' and 'what is justice?' is stupid. We might come up with a definition that we find personally amenable, but in creating this definition we have not made a discovery about the world itself. In rat-speak Wittgenstein might have said that trying to find answers to big mysterious questions is trying to map an unseen territory. My personal answer to the big questions is that the questions are stupid.

Despite this Wittgenstein did believe in God, and passionately, but rejected intellectual proofs. Whether that's enough really depends on what it is precisely that you're grappling with. Do you want assurances of immortality? Comfort in mortality? Belief that what you do matters?

Damn that's amazing, I've been really frustrated with the limits subscribers have on Sonnet.

From what I've gathered with D4 there wasn't much for the community to judge, just some short gameplay clips without commentary and ladder positions. I assume if he had done longer streams and tried provide commentary on D4 he would betray a similar lack of understanding.

D4 is just as much as a time sink as PoE so it's a reasonable assumption not all his progression on his D4 character is his own. I'm not a D4 player so I don't understand the specifics of the record. What i've gleaned from the community is if he did get the record illegitimately he didn't leave a smoking gun. Judging from the gameplay it's very item and character dependent, some familiarity with the game is required but it's nowhere near the level of skill typically associated with speedrunning.

His characters in both games are very advanced, meaning he needed to play a lot to get to that point. Anyone that plays that much knows how to play the game very well. Because Elon doesn't play the game well it is a safe bet that he didn't advance his characters but instead he paid someone to advance them for him.

A little while ago someone posted asking if it was credible that Musk had achieved a world record in Diablo 4.

In a follow up to that, recently Musk has been streaming another ARPG, Path of Exile 2. For those not in the know PoE is what the true rarified ARPG gamers play. It's the Salty Spitoon. Diablo is Weenie Hut Jrs. Much like in D4, Elon's PoE2 character is absolutely decked out, the work of hundreds of hours. But not his. He also zero grasp of the game. He doesn't understand itemisation, he fumbles with interfaces, doesn't know how to play the build properly. I would bet against him having even having completed the campaign once. I have little doubt that his total misunderstanding of the significance of an item's character level requirement will be a meme in the community for years to come.

If you made this comment in 2016 you'd be asking why he hasn't tried to take Kyiv yet.

Regardless of that Russia is not in a good position even if it desired to do so. Russia failed it's security commitments to Armenia in 2022 and Syria in 2024 in all likelihood due to funneling the vast majority of its military resources into Ukraine, starting a second invasion would severely diminish its ability to prosecute the war effectively in Ukraine. Even if fighting in Ukraine ceased tomorrow Russia would still want to let its economy cool, and rest and rearm before attempting even a fairly modest invasion.

The US/Britain forced Ukraine to consistently talk the most hawkish stance and reject negotiation with the promise that the US/UK would have their backs.

Negotiations went nowhere because Russia's terms would leave Ukraine as good as defenceless. I wouldn't characterise this as hawkish any more than I would characterise someone that strikes back in self-defence a violent person.

I really enjoyed all the planets except Aquilo, I didn't mind the slightly different manner than bases need to be constructed in due to heating requirements but the way that expanding out your heating network too fast could cause a shutdown was a source of frustration. I also wasn't the biggest fan of platform design and interplanetary logistics.

But I do empathise. Because despite Space Age stealing my soul for a couple of weeks I can't imagine myself replaying it any time soon. With biters off vanilla is practically therapeutic. Needing to be attentive to possible jams or freezes on multiple planets and paying a high cost for fucking up makes playing Space Age feel like juggling flaming swords.

I haven't played 2 since release and I still spontaneously recall the I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down rant.

How exactly?

I specifically meant initiation/manhood rituals might be disjoint from the betrothal process. I do agree that men will also screen suitors, but it is the women around the bride to be that initially select suitors, aiming to weed out the lechs, cheats, gamblers, liars, creeps etc. AWDTSG groups are analogous to this latter process in that the daters are seeking judgement from other women.

Or something else?

I believe men are much less likely to want to subject themselves to the possible public humiliation of dating a known tramp.

in reality, generalized and simplified expressions of women's overall frustration and latent anger directed at the loss of manhood initiation rituals that characterizes modern post-patriarchal atomized societies; namely, the current social reality is that adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men before they are, in effect, released into their wider social circle from the family environment

I'm no anthropologist but my gut sense is that manhood initiation rituals are much more significant to a man's place within the male social order and the vetting of prospector suits for a maiden was primarily women's work. In more patriarchal societies the former might be downstream of the latter, but they might also be completely disjoint.

I’m rather certain we’ll never see a “Are we dating the same girl” online men’s group anywhere.

I expect this is because in public male social contexts men bear the brunt of the social cost, probably more so in the west. Look no further at the semantic creep of cuckoldry and the degree of blame that gets heaped on men when their girl is faithless.