netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Suggesting that disabled coal miners go into childcare might be on par with that Ben Shapiro bit about selling houses.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Sure. If they can do those things, then they’re less disabled. How do you get from there to “handouts for people who didn’t have the intelligence or wherewithal”?
Imagine a more extreme case where a guy loses his legs and, thus, his lifelong job at the widget-stomping factory. If he gets disability, it’s not because he couldn’t make it in college.
Now say a doctor asks him, “hey, do you have any skills that could get you a different job? One that doesn’t require jumping up and down?” Here a college degree would be a mitigating factor for his existing, factual disability. The handout was never for failing college. It was for not having legs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
I figured those were ruled out by the “back problem.”
I agree that, if they are doable, someone might well prefer them to scraping by on disability.
What I don’t get is where “IQ and wherewithal” come into it. Either the guy is able to do jobs or he’s disabled. A college degree adds some set of jobs, so it can take him out of the disabled category, but not put him in.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Didn’t complete college and can’t do manual labor. Unless the good doctor is rubber-stamping disability for healthy young farm boys?
What work are they able to do?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
“That Part Of Twitter”. Not that it’ll make it any easier to search.
I don’t know what their deal is, but I think they’re related to the “vibecamp” thing. Which is also intentionally vague and a e s t h e t i c.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Okay, I admit it would be funny to make our 500k-character submission box contingent on filling out a 1k-character abstract. Only the abstract would start out visible, and users would have to click to expand the wall of text, preventing it from taking up attention by default…
But I am not convinced that this would help with the failure mode of, say, 100k-character AI Gish gallops. They’re still going to be slower to check than to create.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
I saw one of his tweets shared in a random (very left-leaning) discord server. I had no idea how to explain that he was legitimately unhinged.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Pennyfarthing.
Great visibility, terrible crumple zones.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Sorry! I really underspecified. I should have asked more about emergent historicity.
Consider a spectrum between abstract and concrete strategy games. Chess is a pretty darn abstract form of dudes fighting. Miniature wargames add all sorts of extra rules to flesh it out. For the most part, they hold on to useful game abstractions, like dice, or alternating turns. Once we get to real-time games, though, even those can be stripped out or hidden in the pursuit of verisimilitude.
Slitherine-type games seem to go really far on this simulationist end, though with some pretty unusual focuses. It's bizarre seeing abstractions like "cards" in Shadow Empire, a game which also models planetary hydrology and the military procurement process. But so, so cool. I'm going to have to check out all three of your realist/authentic mentions just to salivate over things I don't plan on learning.
But these simulations, sometimes ridiculously complex, don't usually converge on historicity. The game conceits, or the epicycles which were added to disguise them, keep most games from getting too realistic (and, presumably, boring). So we get Warhammer games where one side can be effectively "tabled" in one "shooting phase," giving up their precious "victory points." Divinity, where my squad can spend all our "action points" beating the tar out of one guy while his friends wait their turn. Really, action economy has got to be one of the biggest sources of this kind of divergence, but it's not like actual economics are safer. Victoria 2 is kind of infamous for keeping its plates spinning with careful scripting and duct tape.
Sometimes you get more verisimilitude by reducing the level of detail. I'd say old X-COM is a good example. Oh, there's plenty of game-mechanics nonsense, but the fundamental "Time Units" system does an amazing job of implying simultaneity. Move, and you risk enemies reacting. Hold your fire, and you get a chance to spend it outside the confines of your "turn." You get interesting game choices which wouldn't be possible in a real-time combat simulation.
So when I asked the question, I was thinking something more like: "what are the simplest, most abstract games which punch above their weight in encouraging historical strategies?" Games which reward pike blocks not because someone programmed an explicit stat bonus, but because the rules of their game world imply the physics of ours.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
In the OKC area, I recommend both the American Pigeon Museum and the Museum of Osteology.
I keep seeing the latter show up in Wikipedia photos.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
That’s ridiculous. “They” don’t co-opt random Christian aesthetics more than anyone else. Oh no, global warming activists have stolen the flood myth!
I agree that bright colors enjoyed a window of novelty. Along with synthetic fabrics and the rise of computer graphics, they’re responsible for some extremely dated trends. I would add that the fashion trends oscillate way faster, though. They’re at least as fast as the generational pressure of teenage rebellion.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Millennials weren’t dominating the new car market in 2007. They were in their mid-twenties at the latest. While I didn’t find data for ‘07, over the last decade, the under-35 age group never exceeded 15%. The Flattening started when Boomers and Gen-Xers were buying the majority of new cars.
Same goes for houses. The median house-seller was born in 1960. By 2017, that had crept forward to…1962. It wasn’t the millennials who were choosing beige or grey or whatever.
You know what was wildly popular in the early 2000s? Apple products. Ones that looked like this instead of this. The 90s was blocky and garish, but we were living in the new millennium. We could put chrome and white plastic on things. Monitors and peripherals got thin and sleek. This might be the only time that software looked more skeuomorphic than the hardware on which it ran.
We’re climbing the fashion barber pole faster than ever. Modernism to postmodernism to high modernism to a colorful, psychedelic mess in only half a century. Add another fifty years of nuclear ennui, a pinch of Moore’s law, and stir. The memes of 2014 feel ancient in a way that 60s counterculture cannot, because the latter never really died so much as it was commercialized and co-opted. Well, we got used to that, and now it’s taken for granted that corporations will sell cheap merch representing your preferred minority.
So don’t blame the gays for sending your 70s-ass appliances out of fashion. Give them ten years, or maybe six months, and the barber pole will come back around.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
I would hesitate to use targeted advertising as evidence for any particular trend.
Does Mr. Boyle have some special insight into the art world?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics? Or generalize those tactics to the magic or tech or whatever makes the setting unique.
I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Didn't it?
In college I had a part-time job with the facilities engineers. They'd digitized the blueprints for every building on campus, plus the full history of change orders. Before that, they had to go down into the halon-equipped archive and pull out file drawers with the originals. Surely that led to some productivity boost.
A couple years back, I was talking to an elderly woman who had worked in Saudi Arabia in (I believe) the 80s. She did payroll for an American-run hospital system, and oversaw their transition from bags full of paper money to checks. It sounded like a real quality of life improvement for the employer. Employees were a little more reluctant, but today, paychecks are ubiquituous. Except they've also been superseded by faster, self-documenting digital finance.
Then there's programmers. Even mirroring your hard drives has got to be more convenient and more scalable than a couple extra filing cabinets of punch cards. I don't even want to think about how the programmers of yore attempted version control. The productivity gains from digitization were obvious.
I suspect these generalize to most data-based industries. We're just more likely to take the improvements for granted.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
How much of a window do these LLMs have? Presumably, as a completely new user, I wouldn’t get much out of this prompt.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Practice.
Someone wrote a good post about it a couple months back, but I couldn’t find it. It basically said you could train the skill efficiently by drawing real objects every day. Sufficient experience lets you move from drawing what you see to drawing what you saw, once, in a different pose and setting.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
How exactly does one “offer the mantle”? I can’t think of any historical examples where one party politely set its opponents’ agenda.
If you’re actually asking why people aren’t blaming Democrats for Trump’s indiscretions, I assure you that they are. On this very board, even! If this is a suggestion that Trump might secure peace in our time by looting a little bit harder, well, you can consider me unconvinced.
I think people—voters—react to situations based on vibes. Losing my job to a financial crisis is bad. Cheap gas is good. Paying for someone’s abortion is bad. Defending democracy is good. Stick enough of these reactions together, draw a rough, inconsistent set of principles around them, and you’ve got yourself a political movement. The agenda of that movement, then, is largely downstream of its members’ reactions to whatever situations are most salient.
When the towers fell, public opinion was firmly in favor of massive retaliation. W was quite willing to oblige, and most of the opposition fell in line. There was never a dignified, first-principles discussion over who got to lead the charge. Even once the public soured on it, Obama picked up the bag and kept at it. Right place, right time.
There’s a bizarro alternate universe where Trump’s foreign and economic policies dovetailed into a strong COVID response. It’s one where the doomsday preppers felt vindicated as suburban liberals insisted that lockdowns are just racism. That possibility faded away as Trump began to downplay the virus. Once relaxing measures was Trump-coded, there was no chance in hell that Democrats would give up on the issue. Wrong place, wrong time.
The only way parties adopt an issue is if they’re in the right place when the vibe shifts. The only way for us to see a vibe shift on entitlements is if they somehow become obsolete. I think that either means mass mortality or mass productivity. I don’t believe the Republican Party can “offer” either.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
Point taken.
But “related to sexuality” isn’t really load-bearing. A big chunk of the politics leans on comparison to paraphilias. If being trans looks statistically different from crossdressing, or BDSM, or whatever else has gotten more popular since 2000, then it makes less sense to assert that it should be treated like those things.
I think the rest of your comment deserves a full response, but for now:
Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever;
Okay, but are there enough of them? If most trans people are crossdressing fetishists, then the prevalence of the latter should be a rough ceiling prevalence of trans people.
The first study I found with numbers on crossdressing prevalence was this one. 2.8% of men, 0.4% of women. Here is my choice for trans people, which suggests something like 0.2% of the population. Alright, there’s roughly 16x as many crossdressers as trans people. Sounds compatible with your model.
Except the gender ratios are pretty screwed up. This source talks about a 2:1 ratio. If being transgender is the extreme end of an incredibly skewed paraphilia, why does it show less of that skew?
(wait, this had better not be a regression-to-the-mean thing. I’ll check the math tomorrow.)
More importantly, the trend in that paper became less skewed over the last couple decades. Unless crossdressing has also become more egalitarian, that suggests something else is going on.
I’m ready for the Pacifier sequel where Vin Diesel takes on his toughest parenting challenge yet: the opioid epidemic.
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