How close to done is this? I'm seeing epilogues in the latest chapters, so I'm hoping it's finishing up?
I've got a few web serials on my plate and the thing I've learned most is that it sucks to hit the wall of "most recent update" or worse "last updated 3 years ago", and I've realized I'm way happier if I just let them finish or not-finish the story before I commit my time.
I should look into... someone in the SSC diaspora had a cool story about "what if the person who became Superman was just kind of awful but took over the world anyway", I really enjoyed that but then hit the "most recent update" wall. It has to have been a few years at this point, maybe they're done. It's a shame I forgot the name.
wraelk
10mo ago
They wouldn't have to be on the list themselves, they'd just need to have enough friends and supporters on the list that it wasn't worth throwing them all under a bus to maybe get a solid hit in on Trump.
wraelk
10mo ago
I think this is more about the incredibly nice interactive UI than gatekeeping the actual knowledge of how to tie a knot.
I have no problem searching whatever arbitrary thing I want on my phone, or indeed typing paragraphs of text: if all this app did was present pretty text instructions I'd have no interest, it's easy to get those text instructions to my phone any time I want for free. But I want to learn knot-tying and don't really understand it, and this seems like a significant improvement for learning.
If you think that sort of thing is easy to code through AI, you're welcome to throw an open-source and free version of it up somewhere, you'd be helping out rope enthusiasts everywhere and making a convincing case that the developers aren't doing anything important. I suspect the easy-to-code version of that app loses a lot in usability though.
wraelk
10mo ago
The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.
But it's not like putting those in the upper track would have actually helped there, higher-tier classes are if anything more restrictive. And it certainly wouldn't have helped the other kids in that track having their education disrupted.
Maybe this suggests the "bottom track" should be significantly shorter or more freeform: get the basics down, then either let the kids out of schooling early or let them spend that time in more focused programs. The writers decide they like writing and then get to spend their whole day on writing instead of learning chemistry. This seems like it might help mitigate the impression that being pushed into a lower track is a permanent blight on kids' lives, that they're being condemned to a label of "stupid".
Granted, they might later learn they're not all that great writers and regret wasting their time focusing so heavily on it, but they're unlikely to pivot into the chemistry or pre-calc classes they're missing in the upper tracks.
I guess the downside is that this style might be attractive enough to pull kids from the upper tracks, but at the very least it would be an unknown that might negatively impact college admissions, so the default path-to-career-success looks basically the same.
wraelk
10mo ago
This might run into some issues: Islam has exceptions for doing forbidden things in times of necessity, so you'd just be selecting for anyone who is non-Muslim or is Muslim but believes strongly enough that coming to America is vitally important. There's probably some heavy overlap with "would pretend to be a different religion" in the first place.
wraelk
10mo ago
The question is whether you're training a Smithing (exceedingly powerful applications to combat) or a Lockpicking (slight improvements to things you could already do just fine).
wraelk
10mo ago
I think the payoff is that it slightly expands the options of the Ukrainian public (that is, the portion of the country that would get to vote in the election).
They could conceivably be against the war and vote out Zelensky, an option which they don't really currently have: the press is censored and the country is under martial law, speaking out publicly to overturn Zelensky is probably pretty dangerous.
If they just vote Zelensky back in with overwhelming approval, then things end up exactly as they are with elections suspended, but we at least have the information that their heart is still in the fight, that they had the opportunity to back down in a secret ballot and chose not to take it.
Of course, this is dependent on the elections being conducted fairly, which may not be the case. But if Zelensky holds an election and rigs it/intimidates voters/whatever, that would just put him in the same position he is right now, but with the added risk of information on his actions leaking out.
If Trump managed to get himself paid $1 billion from the federal government somehow, I'm reasonably confident people wouldn't just ignore it, despite that being less than 1% of any of the numbers we're talking about.
wraelk
11mo ago
I think the "annexing canada" and the "tariff canada unless they accede to his demands" might be coming from the same place: "you're entirely dependent on the US, so get in line and work to our benefit, rather than benefiting from our largesse and then stabbing us in the back in every public forum you get into"
I think there are some other similar things in Trump's policies, like asking NATO to pay for its own defense: some of that is just cost-cutting, but some of it is the NATO countries deriding the US for being a warmonger while being completely dependent on its warfighting capability. I suspect if they were praising their benevolent protector instead of claiming they're superior because they don't need to spend money on weapons, it would be a lower priority.
Presumably this will also put pressure on Canada as a whole to produce a government that is capable of acceding to Trump's demands, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of his goals. If the current Cathedral bureaucracy churning along in Canada isn't going to deign to respond to someone they see as the next coming of Hitler, they can be presented with an economic collapse and associated angry mobs until they change their mind and/or are replaced.
Honestly, that might be kind of a clever approach to it: present incredibly reasonable demands like coordinating with the US's DEA on whatever fentanyl is flowing over the border, when you're ignored implement the tariffs, then when blamed for the resulting economic collapse point out the incredibly straightforward requests you had that anyone should be fine going along with. Exacerbates existing concerns with the faceless/motionless government, requires your opponents to take a pro-fentanyl stance, and hopefully resolves itself quickly enough to not do major economic damage to the US.
Musing a little further, I wonder if this is why Trump is cutting out government spending early on: he sees tariffs as a temporary financial shock that will cripple the other nations far faster than they'll cripple the US. Cut out a bunch of spending, use the resulting funds to shore up everything until your international counterpart caves, then when you need to re-add all the essential spending that would be an issue to cut out for too long, the tariffs are already back in the toolbox and the resulting economic hit was entirely hidden.
wraelk
11mo ago
While it's entirely possible Trump is absolutely excited to apply tariffs all around, my perception is that for Canada and Mexico his goals are more to use it as a "big stick" to get them in line with his goals: "your entire economy depends on us and I have the power to ruin you, so here's what I want you to do", like how he used it as a threat with the Colombian president refusing deportation flights
Canada's economic interaction with the US doesn't seem to be harmful in terms of the US's long-term economic success: "you send us oil, we refine it and sell it back to you" is actually a pretty good setup for the US. If anything, it seems to paint the Canada-US relationship similarly to the US-China relationship, where not building domestic industrial capacity leaves the former dependent on the latter.
The question then becomes whether Canada will cave sufficiently to Trump's desires, and I can see there being some pain there: Canada's tended to frame itself as "the US, but properly enlightened" and I expect that will lead to some #RESIST and trying to get Trump to cave first, and I'm reasonably confident Trump will actually pull the trigger if it comes to it.
wraelk
11mo ago
My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings.
I played Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's League equivalent, for a few years and I actually played entirely against bots: I really enjoyed the mechanics of MOBA games and the minute-to-minute gameplay, but I didn't want to deal with the toxicity that seems an inevitable part of those games and I didn't want to be in the endless "gotta get better" spiral that comes with skill-based matchmaking.
On the broader point, there are loads of games that are made entirely for single-player experiences, and while sometimes you get into a community discussing it there's no need to do that. I actually quit the Factorio subreddit around the time the expansion came out because I didn't want the game solved for me, and now only dip back when I'm in the mood to collect a set of random tips, I certainly don't post there for my own social validation. And while I do have friends that play Factorio now, that wasn't the case for many years.
Most of the starfighters used by the rebels are relatively new: the B-Wing first saw combat 4 years before the Battle of Yavin, the X-Wing appears to have been less than 10 years old at that point as well, although there's no clear answer on when it was developed. Apparently originally pitched to the Imperials rather than the Republic though, so that's a cap on how old it can be.
It does seem like they have trouble making paradigm-shifting advances though: the Y-Wing is Clone Wars era and while it has problems, it's perfectly capable of performing on the same level as more modern fighters, it's not like we saw anyone complaining about getting assigned a Y-Wing instead of an X-Wing for the Death Star run.
Some weird regressions too: I initially thought Obi-Wan's hyperdrive ring in Attack of the Clones was something that got improved upon for the Imperial era, but the N-1 starfighters in Phantom Menace had integrated hyperdrives, so that was just a deliberate design choice.
More options
Context Copy link