celluloid_dream
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User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
25d ago
- bad guess about how the item will fit after washing or wear. This is especially a problem with shoes. Some people seem comfortable with a full +1 size of slack, but I want mine to be snug within 1/4 size of perfect, which usually entails buying them just slightly too small so that they are the right size after a few weeks of use, but it doesn't always work.
- insufficient courage / better judgement - I thought I was that person. I'm not that person, so the item goes unworn.
- some unforseen issue that I couldn't have reasonably predicted when trying the thing on. (unfixably scratchy tag, weird stitching that turns out to be a problem in everyday use, etc.)
- and similar
celluloid_dream
26d ago
some combination. basically: will I ever wear this thing, or will I hate it for one reason or other (fit, looks, quality) and decide buying it was a mistake?
celluloid_dream
26d ago
What's your hit rate when shopping for clothing (casual wear)?
Trying to figure out if I'm uniquely bad at this, or if it's normal and I just need to be buying more stuff to increase successes, or instead skill-up and reduce the failure rate. I think once I've walked out of a store with clothing, there's maybe a 50% chance per item that it actually works out for me.
celluloid_dream
28d ago
trend in modern gaming to do a 3rd-person PoV with the camera offset to one side so the player has the center of the screen open in an attempt to be a hybrid of 3rd person (advantage for melee action, jumping, and narcissistic obsession with seeing what your character looks like during every second of gameplay) and 1st person (advantage for precision shooting, crafting placement, seeing stuff that is not your character).
It achieves this by sacrificing symmetry in a way that my OCD can't handle. It feels so wrong to be moving something on the left or right third of the screen. What if something comes at you from the left? You're missing that part of your peripheral vision! You're left-sided. Everything is off balance. It's not right, I say! Worst offender and probable source of the trend: Fortnite
If a game wants to have both, that's fine, but it should do it by allowing swapping between centered 3rd person and centered 1st person POV camera like the old Jedi Knight games did.
celluloid_dream
28d ago
ugh. I want to check it out, but it looks like it suffers from terminal camera-off-to-the-leftism
celluloid_dream
28d ago
I went for slaves over robots because they can do farming/industry/mining. The bots are useful for specific, narrow tasks. It's worth having some salvage bots to scrap derelicts and do simple logistics. The combat bots are hilariously overpowered killing machines, and I think optimal combat strategy might be to have a full ship of them, just point the army at what you want to die, and don't even send any crew.
Truthfully, I found slaves to probably not be worth it when factoring in the food and energy costs (demands ongoing resource intake), and I should have put a bullet in most of my captives and cut losses, but at that point, running a successful slave operation was kind of its own goal, and after sacrificing everything to get those slaves in the first place, it felt right.
for sure, the combat is a bit shallow at the moment, and I'm very interested to see where modding takes it.
celluloid_dream
29d ago
Video game thread.
Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.
Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.
Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.
Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.
That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.
The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
In your post, and in some replies here, you're constantly sliding between different implied definitions of good/bad opinion. I think it'd help if you were more explicit.
"Person has factually incorrect beliefs about the world" is different from "person's claim about morality is unpersuasive to me" is different from "person articulated this thought poorly" is different from "person says things I find aesthetically distasteful" is different from "person's post got ratioed on twitter".
If you mean all of them, what do they have to do with each other? If you mean specific ones, which and why?
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
It should converge to blue, because people have loved ones, and the recursive "what do I think they think I think they'll press" combined with enough shared cultural sentiment of "I wouldn't want to live in a world without my loved ones" = Blue wins
but personally, like @sun_the_second , if I'm being brutally honest with myself, I value my own survival above others'. I'm a rationalist, not a romantic. I'd pick Red. Extrapolated out, maybe Red wins
(no, I don't have kids)
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
Proponents will say that's good. It acts as a deterrent. Personally, I don't want the gun in the dialogue tree because I don't trust the average person to be in control of themselves at all times. Gun proponents will answer back that's exactly why they want the gun, and round we go.
But either way, it's a totally different thing than dangerous chemicals. No one is going to accidentally fly into a rage and manufacture explosives - at least not quickly
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
It's less about the people who are plotting to do evil, and know they are in the wrong (terrorist, school shooter, pre-meditated murderer). It's more about the people who think they are in the right ("I feared for my life!"), maybe even are technically within their rights, but morally should not kill a person in the situation. It's more about the people having a bad day, pushed past their limits (fired, cheating spouse), etc, and might do something they can't take back.
A gun being in play (in the glovebox, open or concealed carry) adds an option to the dialogue tree. "so anyway, I start blasting"
plus, the second-order effects of this. If you think someone else might start blasting, how are you going to prepare?
So I choose to believe that whatever happens after this mortal existence, in the fullness of Eternity, is worth it.
*Yoda voice: Believe, or believe not. There is no choose.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
Yeah. It can go to some very weird places quick. you start writing in a fake lowercase ultracasual unpunctuated extrawordified mess to show off how not ai your prose is
There's also just the fact that language spreads organically, so it may not even be that a given person is getting it direct from the LLM. They might be getting it third-hand through their social circle or influencers.
This looks like your words. Please tell me it was all your words and not GPT-enhanced. I don't want to be taken in. The writing is good, but bloated, which is why I am still narrowing my eyes a little.
This sounds a lot like Claude. I've been keeping a list of Claude-isms so I don't accidentally start repeating its favourite phrases (possibly common to other LLMs as well), and I notice too many of them here to be a coincidence. My current list:
- "not just X, but Y" (or similar)
- "that tracks"
- "sit with" things
- "is X wearing a Y suit (X dressed up as Y, this wearing that, X with better Y, or similar)"
- em-dash, obviously
- "it costs something"
- "clear-eyed" about a thing
- "two (or both) things are true"
- "bones" of something. "has good bones"
- the correct possessive apostrophe and correct angled quotation marks, “” instead of ""
- some virtue "curdled" into some vice
- "a rounding error"
- "in real time"
- "quietly"
- "But here's the thing"
- "gently push back"
Edit: a few more
- "the kicker", "here's the kicker"
- "the X is the point"
- "he/she is going to be fine"
and more I haven't jotted down yet. A lot of them are just common expressions or phrases, but enough of them together, and I start to wonder..
@self_made_human , sorry if I'm mistaken about this, but I think you would want to know if they're slipping into your writing voice.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
It even does this unprompted when it's confident enough. It knows Scott Alexander's style, and if I paste it a new ACX excerpt without mentioning that it's him, it'll show off: "This is Scott Alexander, right?". It gets Sam Kriss easily. It's even pretty confident about guessing Noah Smith, who I don't read as having a particular style at all.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
I was startled a month or so ago when I pasted in a thread from the Motte as context to ask about sports ticket policy (from after its training cutoff), and in its answer, it casually used female pronouns for @2rafa, who had made a short comment that was not at all revealing of gender.
How tf does the model know that? No one in that thread had referred to her gender. I triple-checked. It must be in the weights somewhere. It must have picked it up over the years of people using "she/her" in reference to that handle, and just follows suit.
I wonder if it has this kind of built-in knowledge of all minor internet hangouts, or is the Motte special? - elevated as a high quality source explicitly or implicitly
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
1-3 drinks, once a week, socially. 30s.
We're in a strange time for alcohol. A confluence of factors moved against it. The ones I've witnessed:
- Work From Home killed the standing drinks-after-work outing at my office. Even when enough people happen to be in, no one expects enough people to be in, so don't make contingency plans that allow them to go out ("oh, I would do drinks but I drove", "I have to get back and feed my cat/dog/crippling-social-media-addiction")
- The economy. Alcohol is expensive af. Other vices are cheap. I hear people say: "Why would I spend $10 on a pint, when I can fill my vape for" ..whatever it costs. I forget. I don't vape. People are getting laid off and are worried about their financial future. They are cutting back.
- It's just not cool any more. This is vibes, and it might just be my circles, but it's seen as something like smoking cigarettes - unhealthy, dated, low class.
But I'm sure it'll be back eventually. Alcohol is Lindy.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
Fun framing, but I think it proves too much.
Almost every technology has this advantage. Is a Roomba tax-advantaged over cleaning staff? Is a tractor tax-advantaged over farmhands? Productivity gains are good. If you tax them, you will get less of them.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
"LLM’s are highly unlikely to get us to AGI. It’s the wrong architecture for getting there, period."
What makes you so sure about that? This sounds to me like: "fixed-wing aircraft are unlikely to get us to flight. It's the wrong architecture for getting there, period. We need flapping wings. Every animal that flies flaps its wings"
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
How do you deal with your nose becoming acclimatized to the specific scents, and to scents generally?
Presumably you pick one because you want to smell it, and smell like it, but as the days go by, it fades into the background of your perception, and you either unconsciously start applying more to compensate, or else get to appreciate it less. Do you worry about becoming one of those people suffocating everyone else in the elevator? How do you gauge the strength on a daily basis? (your wife, sure, but she probably gets used to it too)
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
It's somewhere between that, and Limited Wardrobe. More like: "Character often wears something different, but not always, and sometimes re-wears the same clothes in different outfits"
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
- When characters have a wardrobe that they cycle through in a season/series, and you see the same articles of clothing occasionally re-worn, the way a normal person would.
Seinfeld comes to mind as the obvious example. Just recently noticed this a few times in Halt and Catch Fire.
Can't find it on tvtropes. Maybe it's not a trope at all, just a good costume department.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
I can't get over the fact that no-tie guy is named "Petty". That is YA novel levels of nominative determinism.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
related: I wish there was a "Yes, left turn on red!" sign (e.g. when turning left onto a one-way street). It's the same principle as RToR, but because it's left, not right, most drivers don't realize they can.
ha. yes, I genuinely regret not buying a lifetime supply of some items before they discontinued them. Would have felt extremely autistic to do at the time, but I miss them and nothing has replaced them.
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