charlesf
2d ago
most of modern India's problems could be fixed by getting rid of special treatment for the lower castes and making Brahmins truly the top dogs again.
I've worked with many Indians in corporate America. I've even been sent to Hyderabad and Delhi a few times over the years. Its takes a while for Indian coworkers to open up to you about this stuff, if they ever do, but opinions in the same general neighborhood as this are incredibly common, though not necessarily the part about Brahmins being in control, the bits about special treatment of the scheduled castes seems universally unpopular amoung people who don't receive the treatment, and even some that did. Of note, Indians that work in corporate America in the US is a powerful filter on who you hear from.
charlesf
2d ago
There's a whole type of content creator that basically makes videos answering very commonly asked questions on the internet, or with very short walkthoughs for commonly researched tasks, that puts most of their effort into stretching their video (that might even be answering a yes/no question) out to at least 10 minutes long with the actual answer appearing after two ads, then using SEO tricks, imitating the name and appearance of channels with better reputations, and other non-value add techniques to get views, that has been suddenly decapitated by AI, almost overnight. The channels that actually care about thier subject matter aren't doing much better if its not something nuanced or likely to be hallucinated about by AI. The stretching out of the videos to absurd durations is still about chasing as much add revenue as possible before the viewer closes the video. So not only does it take waaaay to long, it always seems like they are just about to answer the actual question in the name of the video, but they aren't. If you're lucky someone will timestamp it in the comments and the channel owner hasn't removed it yet.
charlesf
7d ago
their civilization makes Israelis and Zionists uncomfortable and envious.
Is there anything in particular about modern Iran toward which Israelis/Zionists are envious? I'm not trying to make a point here; I ask out of genuine curiosity. There is much in the very long history of Persian culture to be proud of. I ask because I hear things like this from time to time from very, very anti-Velayat-e Faqih Iranian exiles but there's never any follow up. Modern Isreal seems to have little to envy modern Iran about, with the giga-caveat that much of this is Isreal's doing I suppose. Perhaps its that Isreal is driven to harm Iran out of theoretical envy at what Iran might have become in a counterfactual recent history where there is no Isreal to have prevented their greatness?
charlesf
7d ago
The ultimate “replayability” is not to be found in any game where the story and drama are largely driven by the non-player controlled characters and environment, which is most games. Player vs Environment is much more popular as a core game type than Player vs Player, yet its only in the games where the drama is overwhelming driven by player actions creating constantly emerging content where true replayability can be found in my opinion.
The problem with this is that 99% of obligate PvP games are short iteration, high twitch reaction, high skill: 1st person shooters. FPS have a strong filter for a certain player type and have very few opportunities for the players to drive the content. Other games have excellent PvP systems but it’s a sideshow that is entirely avoidable if you aren’t interested in it, like Guild Wars, or never re-iterate, like Eve online. The trick is medium term iteration (a single “match” takes anywhere from a week to a month to finish), slower pacing, still obligate PvP, but much of the competition between the players takes place outside of direct face to face combat in gathering and refining resources and producing weapons and building fortresses that take 20 people multiple days to finish constructing. A thousand people on both sides, or more. Imagine an RTS type game, except all the pawns are players. 0 bots. And the match takes two weeks to a month with the medium term pacing. Only a handful of games have tried this and they’ve all eventually failed. The only game out there right now that gets close is called Foxhole, a war simulator with two factions that are permanent enemies, every weapon and bullet are made by players sans a small amount of starting weapons, almost every defense structure is player built, complex industrial chains are needed for advanced items, massive amounts of resources requiring dozens of people working together for days to make 1 battleship/super tank. A month long RTS with no bots or AI NPCs. 1-3k players online together in a single game world. It’s almost the same map every war, the developers make gradual adjustments over time. It has a level of genuine risk of losing all your efforts and hours invested in any particular war while you’re asleep that few games are comfortable with. For me the extremity of negative experience you can have in Foxhole, thousands of manhours of work lost to an ambush or nighttime raid, is a huge part of the draw. Very few major studios will ever publish something that they know has common content interactions that can drive the players into a berserk rage (souls types excluded, this is their thing too). I get bored very fast with any multiplayer game with training wheels rules to protect the slow and soft. And no loss is ever for very long: the next war is never more than a month away and you get to try again with grand plans and a lot of “this time we’re doing it differently” planning with your friends. Fully 60% of people who try Foxhole hate it immediately, another 30% grow to hate it in one war. The remainder become obsessed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=YE5bPhKpoWU
charlesf
2mo ago
I generally have an extremely good memory that I've been semi-coasting on most of my life. It made tests in school trivial but also drove a lot of boredom as I'd read the entire book for class immediately then get bored a couple weeks later.
Anyway, I can potentially have an issue with any piece of information if I initially learn it wrong. The factually incorrect memory sticks just as strongly as the accurate memory. I have to "patch" over the bad memory with a new, disctinct "correcting" memory. Forever. The best example of this: I learned east & west backwards when I was 6 years old. I realized around 9 or 10 I'd done this; they painted a giant map on the school playground with the directions labeled. 43 years later west and east are still backwards, but I have a second memory that overrides the first one: "you learned this wrong, you have them reversed". There are probably 10-15 things like this. I've got Slovenia and Slovakia locations switched (I grew up around both groups of immigrants and have some Slovak ancestors, it wasn't just trivia).
I also can't remember names. They're too arbitrary; a series of mouth sounds/written symbols that represent a person with no real connection to the person. People's names might as well be 4 digit numbers for all the connection they have to the person and my ability to remember them. I have to make flashcards when I move teams at work or there are new people I've met that it is important I remember them. I have spent probably 50+ hours of my life over the last 40 years intentionally drilling myself to remember important names. I can also learn these wrong like in the first example; I try to just stop using the names of these people if I can. I also have trouble telling people apart. Its not full blown prosopagnosia, I can tell different people apart generally ok. But if they are the same age, gender, race, and culture I will struggle. I actually do worse with members of my own race/culture. I also tend to find the overwelming majority of people to be rather interchangable, non-unique, and frankly boring at a personal level, which doesn't help.
On a side note, if someone's name is in a song, I can relibably get that song to start playing in my head when I see them. Infinitely easier than remembering their name.
charlesf
2mo ago
I was speaking with a senior dev at AWS earlier today about AI and coding. Amazon has its own tools for both devs and corp staff and doesn't allow outside tools for anything but simple questions who's output will never be in a work product. He said that one of the bigger surprises for him was how many devs, especially the more junior ones, have adopted using AI for a lot of their coding questions and drastically reduced or stopped using the popular developer forums like StackOverflow for research. He asked a few of them what the main appeal of asking the AI was and they said, even though the AI is often wrong and you have to double check all its answers, it never insults you for knowing less than it does or mocks you for trying to learn something, which was an extrememly common experience on the forums. My own work involves some AI interaction intent-verification where my teams review AI-human interactions for new products to judge how well it captures the person's intentions and the quality of responses. From my POV one of the best things about these AI bot tools it they can't (deliberately) lie, automatically making them better than I'd estimate 75% of the people they will likely replace, who lie constantly.
charlesf
2mo ago
Depends on the state and how old the kids are. Depends on the community too I imagine. When it happened to me (in Ohio in the 80s/90s), they asked if we had any relatives, we told them about our grandparents, police and a social worker drove us there and spoke with my grandfather for a few minutes, dropped of some papers, and left. My mom bailed out a couple days later and we went back a week or so after that. We spent most weekends there anyway so it really wasn't a huge change for us, though going to school from there was weird at first. If there was no one to take the kids, as happened to some of my friends, they went to the youth detention center while awaiting a temp foster situation. If the "kids" are over 16, and its a repeat issue like it was for me, then they may discuss minor emancipation with you. This was the route I ultimately took.
All countries are different. Within the Philippines there are even significant regional differences in culture and religeon. I've spent time for work in Manilla and Cebu and most of the people I met there seemed like genuinely good folks and were I not already hapily married could easily see enjoying a relationship with a Tagalog or Visaya for many of the reasons mentioned in this thread. I doubt I'd say this about many of the other places I've been for work like Singapore, Malaysia, or especially India. There's just something different. Maybe it b/c I was raised Catholic.
edit - banana ketchup is gross
charlesf
2mo ago
I worked as a bouncer through college and for a few years afterwards. I took a lot of shifts at the nearby LGBT+ night club as the pay was better and it was not any worse than anywhere else, though the dangers were...different. I made a lot of friends there too. I can't help with stats on this stuff at all, but I can share the sort-of popular, tribal understanding of these things from within part of the community. Its well understood within the LGB community that lesbians are hitters. They were also the most likely to attack the bar staff by a wide margin. In fact I'm pretty confident that all of the people we had to call the police on were lesbians, they were definitely all women, some could have been bi. On the subject of bisexuals, they are often looked down upon by the Ls and Gs. I'm talking about people who actually experience genuine attraction to both sexes that they have acted on and continue to pursue, not self ID bisexuals who are straight in practice. They are seen as unreliable, undependable sex-addicts who lie constantly. Some parts of the community have significant anti-bisexual bias to the point of not allowing them in some clubs/events at all.
charlesf
2mo ago
The story of the establishment of the Space Force before Trump was ever involved is long and fascinating. The key proponent that actually got it done was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Raymond . The short version is that there had been elements within the USAF, NASA, and congress that have been arguing for a separate military branch for outerspace operations since the 60s. The space stuff actually started in the Army, though it transistioned to the Air Force by the 60s. In the early 80s they finally made a separate Space Command org within the USAF, but this is when the case for a separate force really started to gain momentum, though it would be a long time with an abortive attempt until it actually happened. The argument hasn't really changed in nature at all over time, just relevence, as the circumstances have changed around that Air Force: the subject matter expertise, experience, and career paths for the space related operations has become too complex and specialized to remain in the USAF, just like the Air Force itself emerged from the Army for largely similar reasons. General Raymond spoke many times about his own path through the ranks, mirrored by many of his peers, where he'd be productivly commanding a org within the Space Command of the USAF, get promoted and transferred out of SC back to the general aviation Air Force, and everything he was working on back in Space Command fell apart. Yanking the COs and NCOs back and forth, in and out of Space Command produced worse officers/nco performance in both orgs, chaotic career paths, and hastened retirements of COs to fled to the private sector to continue to follow their passion for space. Essentially that we would be unable to field a competent space command as long as the career people with the expertise could be yanked out of the org at any time without recourse. The Air Force had been promising increased autonomy and specialization to the existing space command, stating they'd stop jerking the career people around and allow them to specialize but never made any real moves to implement it. I think, in my very amateur observations since then, these arguments have been borne out by the record of the USSF, which is operating quite effectively according to everything I've seen and read, especially compared to the other branches. (particularly the Navy which is a mess).
charlesf
2mo ago
People on the internet love to roleplay the epic things they totally would do in any given situation
Something I was discussing previous on a different board, and that is a larger issue beyond this event, is that the majority of people have effectively 0 experience making important, possibley life or death decisions, when their body is absolutely flooded with adrenaline. In our prehistorical past, this prepared us for violence. This response is, in the modern day, often an evolutionary trap. My father was a career NCO in the USMC and he occasionally spoke about training people to manage, and if possible prevent, adrenal responses to the events around them. Even people that are aware of the issue, who've had training and exposure to stimuli to try to assuage it, still don't ever really know what their response is going to be when it happens. The fight/flight/freeze response really doesn't understand modern society very well.
charlesf
2mo ago
A decent % of gay men aren't into the party scene at all and want the same sort of long term relationships that hetro men and women generally have.
As a statistician, gay men are pretty much the only demo that are honest-ish on surveys about sex and relationships. It makes comparison data even more alarming to look at if you aren't ready for it. While on average a gay man in the US has about 7x more unique partners than a straight man, there are a large fraction of gay men that aren't actually into the casual sex/hook up gay culture at all really, or aren't attactive enough to participate even if they want to. If you only look at the numbers of the top 25% or people that have had more than 4 lifetime partners, its starts looking like someone made a calculation error. Epidemiological data in college comparing gay men to straight men and all women was how I learned what an axis break was as a freshman.
edit vv - yes, only self identified are considered gay. the other group are 'men who have sex with men' (MSM) a unique demo that is somehow often 100% straight. researchers generally focus on behavior and not labels/identity here as the MSM demo esentially cannot be intereacted with in a cooperative way if treat them like they are "gay".
charlesf
2mo ago
It'll be 26 years in a couple of months, I've been there for 24. It still my most used website, but I can't imagine a new user would get much out of it. We've all known each for a couple of decades now and its a lot of very old inside humor. One thing I really do enjoy is that most Goons are over 40 now and a lot of us are in some fairly important roles in society, particularly tech. I've had connections on SA help me out with things I'd never have known someone IRL who could. People in gov't, upper management of FANG companies, etc. Its like the Internet Freemasons. I can join pretty much any semi-popular online videogame and there will be a Goon group waiting to teach you the game and give you stuff to get started.
I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office yesterday and my wife noticed a number of....spicy? (I think was the term) books on the bookshelf. None of the current monster/dark fantasy stuff thats all the rage right now, but absolutely text based pornograrphy for women. About a dozen of them. The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible. This was an office in a Catholic hospital.
... and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.
Its impolite because its only men that seem to take issue, and its inappropriate for men to criticize women. Full stop.
I've left out the absolute best part imo. The overwelming majority of these books are written in a non-omniscient* first-person, producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose. They can't keep track of who is doing what; literally can't tell who the subject/object of the sentence is and get so confused they give up on the book. The meme is "3rd person is immediate DNF" (did not finish).
*non-omniscient in that the main PoV character often lacks the knowledge of what the main PoV character is thinking or planning.
https://tiktok.com/discover/i-cant-read-third-person
https://old.reddit.com/r/Barnesandnoble/comments/1lhiwrs/third_person_difficulties/
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4854296-struggle-reading-books-in-third-person
charlesf
3mo ago
-There isn't nothing.
-Don't make the cars behind you have to slow down. This starts with knowing there are cars behind you in the first place. This extends to far more than traffic.
charlesf
3mo ago
I've found often that two people can sometimes agree strongly on, to use a turn of phrase, the diagnosis while differing quite a bit on the course of treatment, as it were. It can be refreshing to be around someone that sees the world the same way you do, even if their idea of what should be done about it is questionable.
charlesf
3mo ago
My experience has been that people in Spain react pretty well to being addressed in (competent) Spanish by visitors. In fact this has been my experience in every Spanish speaking country. Especially since English isn't anywhere near as common in Spain (and Italy) as Germany or the Nordics (I suspect France as well, but they'll never admit it). Depending on how you learned Spanish, you might want to brush up on some of the word useage and phrases common to European Spanish. I've found the Madrileños fairly easy to understand once you get used to the seseo. You can watch Spanish news broadcasts to get an idea. Other parts of Spain I've not done as well understanding them, mostly Andalucia, despite it being my favorite part. Most educated Andalucians can switch to Castillian without issue though.
charlesf
4mo ago
I lot of the men I know personally that are Readers pirate a great deal of books. I generally do for anything that isn't a new release by an author I support, in which case I buy a copy on release, then read the pirated copy anyway as its often more convenient to do so (and I can copy text out of the pirated file to search on the web with, Kindle makes you manually retype anything you want to search from the book). Books files are very small. I have an old external drive in my desk with about 90,000 books on it, including p much the entire cannon of western classics and all popular fiction published before about 2014 or so.
charlesf
4mo ago
No one involved in this cares specifically that women read more books, though its almost certain that they do. The important fact is that they buy more books. The difference is subtle but important. All these lists and awards etc are just marketing aimed at their currently primary demo. That it also lets them denegrate and ignore male authors is just a happy coincidence that fits the zeitgeist. How convenient. I've read thousands of books in my life, fiction and non, and I don't think I've ever once been influenced by any form of advertising or marketing or 'buzz' of any sort over a book. For me this is an area of the economy that is blessedly free of this scourge, and at least for the books that men are still buying this is still true. I'd be fine if male authors were officially barred from all best-of-lists and book awards as I consider them to be negative influence on the space as a whole. Like forbidding my favorite male actors from appearing on reality tv or political ads. Que horror.
charlesf
4mo ago
Not exactly, but I have known multiple conservative athiests, a few of whom were vegetarians, not vegan. They all tended to be odd in other ways as well.
charlesf
4mo ago
Part-time wiki editor, I know enough to quickly identify and avoid problem areas and stick mostly to dry, non-CW stuff. That being said, always check the Talk page, including its archives. It can sometimes be hard to locate the links to the archives if the one of the pages "guardians" is especially good with the system and knows how to obscure them. This is generally done by archving a Talk page that is no where close to the size that would actually require it to keep the page tidy, in order to push inconvenient comments and topics off the "front" talk page and bury it behind hard to find links. If you know what the URL format for archived pages it though you can just manually edit the URL. I've found a few articles where this is the only way to see them too. The reason to do this is two fold, first you have to establish if a page has 'guardians': personally motivated editors with a dog in the fight who use their familiarity with the processes and rules of wikipedia to maintain a partisan/biased presentation in the main article and crush anyone who tries to correct their deceptions. Its usually only one person but can be a team on some higher profile articles (the Mao article is a good example of a team of guardians). Once you have confirmed that a page is camped out by a "power-editor", the next step is see what they are hiding. Page reverts, suspicious locking, agressive archiving, high levels of vitriol to basic questions about the article are all good signs. Its very hard to actually delete things forever on wikipedia, so they have to hide and obscure the history of the article as best they can. See what they are hiding to see what is missing from the article. Once you get fluent with reading Talk pages and version histories, its one of the more entertaining parts of wikipedia imo, though it does real harm to the quality of their obstensible 'mission'.
Are any of you pathologically secretive? Very, to an extent that has done obvious harm to my life and relationships.
have problems with feeling excessive amounts of shame? Not in the least. I'm not sure I actually experience shame, in addition to a number of normal human reactions/experiences.
I tried to expand on these points in more detail, but the aforementioned secrecy is preventing it. Its a constant priority since childhood to conceal my presence and actions from others. I'm also incapable of trusting other people at anything beyond the most superficial level so avoiding them entirely is much easier than constantly having to independently investigate and verify every little thing they say or do. This also includes hiding any traces of existence that I can: moving quietly, not distrubing the world arround me, drawing no attention to myself or my actions. I'm only capable of relaxing when I know with confidence I'm alone and can't be ambushed suddenly. So paranoia I guess, not shame.
All of this being said I'm incredibly happy and live what I consider a very privledged life. I'm almost 50 and have been with my wife for 30 years. She's helped a lot in ways she doesn't fully understand. I WFH and live in a very rural area (closest city of any meaningful size is about 2.5 hours away.) I can go multiple days in a row only ever encountering my wife. She sometimes expresses she wishes she could do more things for me like what some people call acts of service? I think. Like household chores. I won't let her (or anyone) do my laundry, prepare my food, or really any of the day to day tasks of being alive. I do all the shopping, bank/finance stuff etc. I make more than enough that she doesn't have to work so this tends to leave her with not much to do. She has her own issues that make it very hard for her to maintain regimented employment and in on SSI. Once a week she makes dinner for us both, though I have to watch the entire process or I can't eat it. We sleep in the same bed (her's) most nights but I do have to maintain a separate bedroom/office for when I'm overwhelmed by her presence, maybe 1-3 times a month. I'm fine with her entering this room but she knows not to touch anything and she understands if I move something from outside this room to inside of it to leave it alone. I'm very fortunate that I've a lifestyle that accomodates my issues and especially for my wife. Its worth mentioning she has her own mental health issues just as impactful as mine but of a significantly different nature. Our disorders "fit" together very nicely and its something we both noticed right away.
I am perfectly capable of going out and navigating society, interacting with people etc. Its not social anxiety at all. In fact I don't really expereience any forms of anxiety very much. Its more of a positive compulsion if that makes sense, not motivated by fear or anxiety. I can and do manage to be around and interacting with people just fine, but I prefer formal relationships with clear expectations of the workplace or similar situations. I can't interact with society just fine to achieve my goals, I simply consider solitude superior in almost every way, and just easier to live my life. People cause way more problems than they solve.
Unstructured socializing has 0 appeal and if I manage to make an attempt I usually bail out and go home pretty fast.
charlesf
4mo ago
Concurring with this. Every time I've ever encountered a QR code in an email its been a printout image that was scanned/copied to an email and sent out. At the other end of this spectrum are web links in printed materials, with instructions to click here, with the typo red-squiggle line included on the printout.
I took a good amount of formal music lessons as a kid and young adult. Much of the syllabus of instruction back in the 80s/90s for this was classical, marches, and jazz. Acedemic Jazz is a thing, and when its all you have experienced you have to take other people's word for it that jazz is cool, or maybe that it used to be cool? Then one day when I was 18 I got hired by a friend of my father's to take over for their recently departed drummer, mostly jazz standards and Great American Songbook stuff. Still pretty 'square', but some of these guys played in other jazz groups too, who performed at bars, who had drug and alcohol problems. Real Musicians. Thats when I learned that Jazz is a conversation. It has a huge history with a smaller present day, but the conversation has never stopped. An improvisational jazz performance, if the musicians are good enough and know about the history of the conversation, about the muscial past and present of jazz, is itself a small new addition and a reflection on that shared past. There are inside jokes, touching tributes to passed away friends, challenges and submissions, all expressed entirely through their instrument, wordlessly. There's an entire other world in there, as wide as it is deep, if you can speak the language.
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