tkt
29d ago
It is hard to believe that a person with the last name of "Magyar" is actually a Magyar, but it seems to be the case here.
There’s always Archie Bunker’s theory to consider though!
tkt
1mo ago
blockade the blockade
I'm kind of amused now at everybody who was hyping up outrage and moral high ground at the original blockade. Like, closing a strait, that's beyond the pale, a war crime, clear justification for total war and carpet bombing, the rest of the world should rally behind Trump now right? Does Trump ever in any case go for keeping any moral high ground rather than 'What, they're doing the (supposedly bad thing) and we're not? Are we chumps or something? We gotta get in on this right now!'
tkt
1mo ago
Eh, in less modern societies it seems to me property has been king too. It'll be awesome to be a young able-bodied man with no property versus an old decrepit dude with no property, but any given property is more likely to be in hands of some older patriarch than the young man. Hereabouts in more rural times it was a common arrangement for the eldest son taking the reins of a homestead farm to sign a contract spelling out how to keep up his retired parents' lifestyle. A man without an inheritance will have a really hard time getting to having it made as good as one who does. The reason the industrial revolution was fed by an endless supply of workers happy to go for Victorian sweatshop wages and working conditions was, AFACIT, if you didn't have your own homestead or cottage or whatever, even if young and able-bodied, the pre-modern pastoral lifestyle might not give you much of a chance at a home or marriage or dignified old age. There was an endless supply of itinerant laborer men in dead ends that sucked way more viscerally than the the present day sort.
tkt
1mo ago
story in a video game is like story in a porn movie
There's a neat old blogpost that gets at how the porn movie grade story still has a hurdle to clear.
I think it’s fair to say the story in a fighting game has the same purpose as the story in a porno: People don’t really care about it, and it only exists to give context to the physical action. And that’s fine. But The story of DOA5 can’t even accomplish this rudimentary task.
In The Big Lebowski, we see a small clip of a porno movie. A television repairman arrives at a woman’s apartment. There’s some stilted flirting, and even though we don’t see more, it’s pretty obvious the scene is going to end with them screwing.
If that scene had been written by the person who wrote DOA5, then it would go like this:
EXT: Public Park. Day.
A woman is sitting on a park bench, looking up at the sky.
WOMAN: (To herself) Is it always like this here?
TELEVISION REPAIRMAN: (Jumps out of the bushes.) I'm here to fix the television!
The woman stares at the nearby fountain. We go close in on her face, which is expressionless.
(Long pause.)
REPAIRMAN: Hey! Are you even listening? I'm here to fix the TV.
WOMAN: (Mutters quietly without looking up.) I don't have a TV.
REPAIRMAN: No! That's impossible!
CUT TO: The two of them screwing in a circus tent.
That’s what this story is like. It’s this strange, disjointed series of camera cuts and dialog lines. You can see it sort of mimics the style of cinema in terms of shot composition and tropes. People linger over their alcoholic drinks, strike dramatic poses, and pause a long time before answering simple questions, but none of it actually makes any cinematic sense. It’s like it was put together by an alien species who doesn’t understand the purpose of movies.
tkt
1mo ago
Dunno how much it actually factors into anybody's decisions here, but the Trump admin's urgings in the spirit of 'oh the strait is open now, just sail, we've blown everything up and it's pretty safe now actually' and 'hey Euros/Japanese/etc please send escort ships, come on, don't be sissies' and related forum discussions of how doing otherwise is pathological risk aversion, feel a bit unconvincing while the US has a ridiculously formidable naval presence thereabouts, and keeps it way, way away from the Gulf, flying all the sorties in an expensive tricky way using tanker planes.
Like, I'd expect that those carrier groups include several of the very best ships on the planet for defending against every sort of airborne threat. If the new lethal warlike US Department of War visibly doesn't dare risk dipping a little warrior toe in the gulf, is it very surprising if most big slow unarmed tankers won't be that enthused either, nor the inferior warships of every other country. Maybe something even changes up a bit if the US actually brings in those Marine landing ships instead of leaving them hovering menacingly a few hundred km away.
tkt
1mo ago
tkt
2mo ago
That's kind of funny, hereabouts it's AFAICT a whole trope that men are prone to bonding over the shared (ridiculously alien to regular modern life and in many ways unpleasant) experiences of the semi-mandatory military service, and the ladies will get vocally frustrated if the dudes don't have the good sense to keep away from that immensely boring-to-them topic when they're around.
tkt
4mo ago
no soft power
The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.
derisive attitudes
IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.
tkt
4mo ago
FWIW I work on a tangly close-to-hardware C++ codebase that jumps through ridiculous hoops for perf optimization. A half year ago the frontier models did look incapable of doing anything useful here. Now after the new Gemini came out I gave AI another try, and so far it seems to actually get nontrivial tasks done with some prodding. Might be a lucky set of tasks I’ve had on hand, IDK. It’s getting together working, clean code changes in a minute that I think might take me a half hour and several rounds of trial and error.
tkt
6mo ago
What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?
Well, maybe the recent example of how it went in the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics as Russia-aligned puppet states? Reading Telegrams at the time, they managed to degenerate the nicest, wealthiest, most industrialized and most pro-Russian regions of Ukraine into two ridiculous Mad Max failed states of tortuous adventurer warlords, with a drafting effort that makes the current Ukrainian one look tame. The conditions and governance sounded so surreally bad that I'd have chalked it up to shameless war propaganda, except it was all coming from people wholeheartedly on the Russian side of the fence and in on the action.
One can come up with all sorts of arguments a totally overrun Ukraine would end up nicer than LPR/DPR, like another Belarus or something, or arguments it could be about as bad. "As bad" is godawful compared to Europe with migration. The current grinding forever war seems way nicer than LPR/DPR, or even a serious risk of going LPR/DPR.
tkt
7mo ago
With most now-rich founder tech CEOs I could buy that. With CPUs, GPUs, OSs, social networks, whatever, there was a stable of plausible looking competitors and one caught a lead and rolled up into a progressively fatter cat that no other could compete with, network effects and all that, and maybe any one of them could have done just as well. ('anybody' seems a stretch, say, I'd most likely screw it up if asked to be a team lead of a team of any size. I might manage to manage a kitten but wouldn't bet on it. Very happy that tech companies have an IC track. And probably it takes a more select type to be a startup founder that doesn't fizzle out than, say, a Starbucks franchise boss or line manager wherever)
But SpaceX? Why would you expect some socioeconomic factors to turn up the same thing if there wasn't a idiosyncratic space maniac Elon driving it? There have been any numbers of attempts at space startups with comparatively incredibly lame results. Probably the most serious one has been Blue Origin where (if we believe the AI slop Google gives me for the search prompt) Bezos has likely poured in 100x as much of his own money as Elon did, and managed one (1) orbital flight so far, and some tens of 'hey we edged just over 100km so we can claim our tourists visited space' which tends to be peak space startup achievement. Is there any reason to think that swapping out Elon some random other boss wouldn't end up with at most a Virgin Galactic, instead of the wildly implausible looking outcome of first catching up with the established fat cat aerospace companies that had been doing this for decades at scale and made a giant government-funded grift of it, and then undercutting them on launch cost by 20x?
tkt
8mo ago
I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.
As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.
In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.
OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.
tkt
8mo ago
TBF it probably helped I was in a provincial university in the boondocks, a ways from the city center, so it was a hassle to go there on bicycle, narrowing down the food options. Like, the nearby options for anything with fries or bread or pasta were mostly famiresu chains that are sort of a weird uncanny valley imitation of some American diner. There was IIRC way more pasta and sandos in Tokyo. Going to the city center there was the best pasta I'd tasted to date but I wouldn't burn an hour+ of a day on the bicycle too often to get there :P. And I was on budget, which would bias me toward the school cafeteria or cheapo rice bowl places like Sukiya that didn't really give an urge to have the meal with extra everything. Going to visit as a grown up tourist with techie salary I engorge myself way more on the good stuff, so I guess moving there wouldn't have the same salutary effect anymore, unless I simultaneously went broke.
tkt
8mo ago
Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.)
On personal anecdote this feels kind of more of an indictment of the modern Western nutrition and food knowhow, whatever that consists of. I spent an year there, and basic Japanese university cafeteria chow + restaurant food had me lose 15kg, going from overweight to borderline normal, in a few months, without any special effort on my part. Like, a bowl of rice + some toppings would have me totally lose any sense of hunger for the rest of the day while keeping me energetic and alert (and doing more exercise than ever since), and I'd have to consciously try and eat more than that. Seems to work fine on the native population too.
tkt
10mo ago
It feels very highly British that the article brings up a crime of "criminal conversation" and a "peculiar court".
tkt
1yr ago
And they have plenty of human capital
Hard to say. Most of the births are now in the countryside to poor peasant farmers. Hardly “elite human capital”
One of Scott's book reviews had a neat thesis that homesteading peasants are the first step of the magic formula that produced the Asian tiger countries.
But even beyond this, Studwell talks up the almost spiritual benefits of land reform. In a typical land reform measure, an equal amount of land gets allotted to every peasant family. This is about as close as anything ever comes to the completely fair starting position that eg John Locke liked to fantasize about. Everyone gets to work for themselves in their own little small business, reaping the consequences of their own decisions. The generation who grow up immediately after a land reform tend to be thrifty, hard-working, honest, and civic-minded. They go on to found all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development.
Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.
Tried very cursorily to search if the Chinese peasants are the homesteading sort and got as first hit a local paper which sounds like yes, and they now want to run down the homestead system. Maybe that's how they finally fall flat.
tkt
1yr ago
Frankly, it would make more sense to turn Canada into five states than one big one (BC, Ontario, Quebec, Western, and Maritimes).
Giving Democrats a good time in Senate elections too!
tkt
1yr ago
Also they have the data point that the pro-Russian breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk ended up being AFAICT horribly, cartoonishly bad places to live vs. usual post-Soviet oligarchy. If they threw in the towel, sure, they might end up a Belarus, much better off in hedonic terms than being current Ukraine in war. But they might also end up a DPR/LPR, a way worse place to be. A principle of being cautious and not gambling with bad outcomes doesn’t really point at capitulation then.
tkt
1yr ago
My pet lowbrow armchair sociological theory is: there is no drift apart, there is instead an incredibly high level of cultural, ideological, whatever coupling. When any bigger US issue du jour appears on an US-centric forum like this, it shows up here in Europe a bit later, usually as a malformed parody version of itself, often on high levels of public life and politics. As a prime exhibit, see our Finnish center-left party head doing an over the top cringy imitation after Obama got elected. Or in the pandemic times, in quick succession, we first got a condemnation of local antivaxxers protesting when the act of gathering in a crowd might spread the disease, followed by it being excellent to gather up in a crowd to protest in solidarity of BLM. Likewise the local anti-immigration right parties run very much on American import anti-woke memes. The US cultural influence somehow inflicts on us the animal spirits of whatever is going on over the Atlantic, no matter how out of place in the local circumstances or logically inconsistent with itself the result is, and we go helplessly along.
Because of this this coupling, we won't sound very friendly and grateful toward the US no matter what -- we run too much on material copied from the US, and the content of it is all wrong for that. The local population more influenced by US progressive thinking will have a lot of imported self-flagellating anti-American memes to chew on (sometimes weirdly idolizing Scandinavia so at least we're getting a healthy boost in national self-esteem out of it). The folks inspired by current Trumpish thinking from the US right maybe aren't that flavor of anti-American, but will also not be America First, but of course rather rah-rah Finland First or Portugal First or Poland First.
If America someday feels like really warming up the transatlantic relationship, it just needs to develop a mainstream cultural worldview by whose standards America is just fine, and which is universalist enough that if you make a garbled copy and search-replace the word 'America' with 'Belgium' it doesn't turn into 'Belgium is the greatest country in the world, every other country (such as America) is run by little girls'. We'll lap it up instantly. It doesn't have to be all the way universalist -- Biden's 'let's own the Russkies together' seemed to me to work to this purpose just fine while it lasted. Sadly it was also very easy for the US right to see that as a project of a self-interested Europe to fleece the US, I guess.
tkt
1yr ago
is this, like... actually a defensible salient? It doesn't really look like it
It sort of maybe does to me? There is some sort of a river going through Sudzha, which sounds by default nicer to defend than the original state border. I was pessimistic at the start, thinking there was no way UA wouldn’t stall out before reaching the river bank, and now optimistic again since they did. (Well, in Google street view the river looks very puny so this might be wishful thinking)
A lot of those sources are written last summer, or last fall (in which case they'd likely be building on older observations). Anecdata: my company encouraged use of LLMs then. I found them totally useless in our not so easy codebase, shelved the thing and went on the manual way. At the time I'd probably have agreed with the vibe of your post. Then reading some hype about Gemini 3 in the winter I gave it another shot; models turned out to have got over some hump; and now they look like genuinely useful productivity tools.
I can believe LLMs will have a way harder time cracking law or medicine or mechanical engineering or whatever, but with coding you can come up with endless tasks that are sort of real-world difficult that you can beat the model against on giant server farms without zero interaction with the real world, the same formula that worked for AlphaGo, so stands to reason that they'd git gud there faster.
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