site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why do you think sneerclub exists? Are they just failed rationalists or think they are actually damaging the rationality/post-rat sphere by complaining in their echo chamber?

For context sneerclub is a subreddit dedicated to 'dunking' on rationalist and rat-adjacent people.

Because people like to bully others, and rationalists are an easy target.

A lot of them are ex-rationalists, and most of them dislike rationalists for standard progressive reasons, so it's just people who know about the rationalists dunking on them. But they do collect funny examples of rationalists being dumb, making it fun to browse

I go on Sneerclub every now and then because it produces fantastic fucking content. Seriously, the rationalist-verse produces some quality lolcows.

Like Scott Aaranson finding room in his post about FTX to whine about women on the internet being mean to him

I confess to taking this sort of conflation extremely personally. For eight years now, the rap against me, advanced by thousands (!) on social media, has been: sure, while by all accounts Aaronson is kind and respectful to women, he seems like exactly the sort of nerdy guy who, still bitter and frustrated over high school, could’ve chosen instead to sexually harass women and hinder their scientific careers. In other words, I stand condemned by part of the world, not for the choices I made, but for choices I didn’t make that are considered “too close to me” in the geometry of conscience.

Or Scott Alexander's old timey stuff hidden in the Disney vault about being pretty much asexual, and hence polycule being more of a fluffer job for him.

Or Emil Kiekegaard, who a lot of people have cited to me on here, but without sneerclub I wouldn't know he was changing his name and moving to avoid a really minor debt he refuses to pay.

Or like two out of every three things that Yud or Aella say. "How do I lose weight, don't say diet and exercise I've considered those" being a classic; as is everything Aella has to say about sex and the reactions it gets from her male followers.

Hell, I'm no better, I got got by a local schizophrenic/troll this week right here on theMotte. I'm sure there were a few posters who read my responses with the wisdom to say "Wow, m8, took the b8."

So the cause of sneerclub is funny rationalists. The rest is just the natural tendency of some people to get obsessed with anything and take it too far on the internet. LibsOfTikTok exists because of funny wokes, the rest is just people taking things farther than I'd like them to. The Colbert Report worked because Bill O'Reilly was genuinely a great target for satire around 2004.

More negatively, on the internet I've noticed an increasing tendency, here as well, to hate when anyone else is having fun or enjoying themselves.

More negatively, on the internet I've noticed an increasing tendency, here as well, to hate when anyone else is having fun or enjoying themselves.

No, it's when people are "having fun" or "enjoying themselves" by being dicks to other people. Civilized people don't like that and never did. It's not a new tendency.

Eh, I agree that it's not a new tendency, but I have trouble seeing where eg themotte is being dicks to anyone because nobody comes here by accident, even pre split. Even the most over the top content on here produces no impact on anyone outside the community, but sneerclub loves to come here and nutpick.

Like I said, we're hilarious sometimes, I'm hilariously pretentiously mockable a lot, but we're just having fun doing our thing. No reason to get obsessed enough about it to spend time documenting that you don't think such and such poster is real.

Civilized people don't like that and never did. It's not a new tendency.

Civilized people have always had fun hating the outgroup. The outgroup, who may also be civilized, has also always had fun hating the group that hates them.

You are aware SC is complicit in harrassment and doxxing of Scott Alexander?

I hadn't heard of any doxxing on their part, and I paid a bit of attention to them around the time of the NYT article.

It's not like it was ever hard to link Scott Alexander to Scott Siskind (Siskind -> Alexander was always more difficult and his primary concern). IIRC, I rediscovered his real name a couple of times when he posted links to some of his offsite writing.

a really minor debt

To be fair, forty thousand pounds (fifty thousand dollars) is not what I would call "really minor".

The original debt, if I'm reading all this correctly, was 13,500gbp, circa October 2019 about $17k. The increase is from interest accrued because he didn't pay the debt when it was accrued.

Maybe I need to check my privilege, but if $17k is change your name and move money for you, come on dude, get your life together. I have this conversation regularly about college debt, low five figures of debt should be easily workable if you're a real person in a western country in 2022, if you're either smart enough to have gone to a real college or smart enough that I should listen you. If you're a genius, as people have cited Emil to me, it should be practically meaningless to get it paid.

Six figures, fine, flee to avoid paying into a system you hate. But $17k? Just pay it and move on with your life.

Can you summarize why he owes that? I’m too lazy to click through all the links.

He filed a defamation lawsuit (over three comments under an article on Unz‌.com and one tweet), effectively lost at the preliminary-injunction stage (before the trial proper) (because the comments were statements of opinion backed up by linked articles, rather than assertions of fact backed up by nothing), and was ordered to pay half of the target's attorney fees (i. e., 13,500 pounds). He failed to pay that half, and the debt has mounted higher ever since.

What the hell how are the attorney fees for a case that didn’t even have a proper trial 13.5kx2=27k?? It this normal?

Smith (the target of the lawsuit) does not provide his "detailed assessment of costs" in the linked blogposts. Two items may be worth noting, however:

  • An entire year passed from the filing of the lawsuit (2018-12-07) to the denial of the injunction (2019-12-10); and

  • The law firm that Smith employed behaved badly enough that Smith sued the firm and recovered from it the other half of his costs (i. e., another 13,500 pounds).

It's real simple. Emil did an edgy age of consent post calling for age of consent at 13 or lower, some writer called him a pedo linking to the post, Emil sued the guy for libel. Emil lost, now he owes court costs.

I'd say the quality stuff is maybe like 1/15 of the posts on there. There are some real lolcows in the rationalist community, and then there's a lot of "LOL look at this guy dae racism right?!?!"

Also the head mod of the sub did an episode of the embrace the void podcast, it was one of the worst podcast episodes of all time. It was painful. Dude made exactly zero points, giggled to himself incessantly, and talked like a Gaelic valley girl, nothing but filler and uptalk. If that's the "experts" I don't know what you expect out of the novices.

More negatively, on the internet I've noticed an increasing tendency, here as well, to hate when anyone else is having fun or enjoying themselves.

I have very occasionally appreciated something posted on Sneerclub, but the thing is, they are not in any way "having fun." Sure, the story they tell themselves is that they are loling at the rationalist lolcows, but the reality is that they're full of bile and bad faith and they're trashing people out of spite, not fun. The entire sub is what our "boo outgroup" rule is meant to discourage in action.

As someone who'll say the same whether it's KF or SneerClub: tomato, tomato. If there's a line between "having fun" making fun of people, and just doing so to be cruel, it's thin enough to permeable.

I don't think SC is actually having fun. I think the "massive, seething inferiority complex" element makes having fun a very tall order.

I think you got me backwards, I meant that the rationalists et Al are having fun, doing their own thing, and that the sneerclubbers can't stand that.

This is apparent in some of the more outre criticism, there and elsewhere, of things like yud's sex life. It drives them nuts that he is getting laid, that some fat dropout wrote an elaborate Harry Potter fanfiction and made a life out of it while they have to grind away at their boring jobs and can't get anyone to swipe right on them.

Why do you think sneerclub exists?

It's right there in their sidebar, isn't it? They seem pretty comfortable owning the fact that they are exactly the kind of people Yudkowsky describes them as. They didn't take the name "Sneer Club" ironically; this is who they are, and who they apparently believe themselves to be:

There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it. E.g. my best guess is that RationalWiki started out as a Sneer Club targeted on homeopathy, and then they decided that since they were such funny and incisive skeptics they ought to branch out into writing about everything else, like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Dark Lord Potter (I infer) aggregated as a Sneer Club targeted at Harry Potter fics they considered inferior, mated with a self-conceptualized elite fanfiction forum for properly dark, gritty, adult HP fics - the most elite HP forum on the Internet, or so they considered themselves. HPMOR came along and was critically acclaimed by mainstream authors despite not (then) being dark and gritty, and it was by an outsider. So the sneering club encountered something that seemed to threaten their status. There is also a common attitude that nerds are designated bullying-targets; or to write it out at slightly greater length, people who talk about science are acting like they think they're snootier than you, which is especially deserving of a slapdown since the person is probably just some nerd in their mother's basement.

The result is not surprising. It's basically the same reason RationalWiki went after LessWrong with "HP fic that mentions science like that makes it snooty" substituted for "skeptics who talk about probability theory like that makes them snooty". I don't think this is complicated enough for me to need to write it out in Professor Quirrell's voice.

So, yeah.

Are they just failed rationalists or think they are actually damaging the rationality/post-rat sphere by complaining in their echo chamber?

I don't think they're "failed" rationalists, and I don't think they do much damage. Sometimes they do egg one another into brigading, doxxing, or other more blatantly anti-social activities, but that's true of many spaces--the chan boards, drama boards, etc. Basically it is people who are upset with the rationalist community, for whatever reason (sometimes, good reason!), but for whatever reason that has become their whole identity, at least for a time. I have compared it in the past to various "ex-" religious communities (ex-Christian, ex-Muslim, etc.) who spend a ton of time and energy criticizing their former in-group. It seems like a pretty banal sort of activity to me, but as they say, there's no accounting for taste.

Wow I hadn’t read that, or imagined they were so self aware. I’m surprised a group of self styled bullies can actually grow like that, but I suppose there’s a place on the Internet for everyone.

I don't think they see themselves as bullies. Or if they do, they see their victims as people who genuinely deserve it. (I suppose most bullies do, but most bullies don't actually convince themselves their bullying is virtuous, whereas SneerClubbers do.)

It's actually pretty common for internet communities to build up around the idea of disliking [group] or [thing] and spend copious amounts of time cataloging instances of events they believe makes such things or groups look bad. Endlessly.

I spent a lot of time observing these sorts of groups a while back and in the end they come across as, I guess, sad, since they never end up creating much of anything useful and for many of their members it seems to eventually become a damaging obsession.

I spent a lot of time observing these sorts of groups a while back and in the end they come across as, I guess, sad, since they never end up creating much of anything useful and for many of their members it seems to eventually become a damaging obsession.

So you're saying that you spent copious amounts of time cataloging instances of events you believed made such things or groups look bad. Endlessly.

You can watch it crystallizing in real time if you go to the CW thread and ctrl-f "Jew."

Reminds me of /r/fuckcars. God, that sub is a shitshow.

Why is this Sunday thread unusually active? 230 comments at the time of me posting this.

Also to admins, any statistics on how the forum is doing? Also noticed some new usernames I don't recognise from reddit. Any stats on new accounts?

Questions about building a PC, software development, and food all usually get a decent number of replies as most of the folks here have built a PC, many work in software development, and either can cook (in some cases I expect quite well) or have a strong opinion about why everyone should stop cooking and eat meal squares or whatever the most current version is. So there's a large number of replies to many of the questions (some of which generate chains of replies themselves).

We had each topic come up this week, which is good for the reply count of the small questions thread.

Also it seems like there's just a lot of activity. New CW thread has 500 comments in one day that's pretty outsized.

Until recently, one used to often hear people say that while software engineers had high salaries, they were actually only paid a small fraction of what they were really worth. If that were true, these mass layoffs probably wouldn't be happening, and they certainly wouldn't be causing stock prices to rise, as they did when Meta announced its layoffs.

Were the people who said software engineers were underpaid mistaken? Why did they believe this? Was it based on some naive calculation of profit per employee, ignoring the cost of capital, as is really common among people with no formal economics education?

I think it's practically impossible for anyone to calculate "worth" in this sense. It's like when Marxists talk about "surplus value." Even for simple jobs like cashier—okay, we know we're paying them 12 and hour, now how can we know if this is more or less than their "real" worth? It's not clear to me market value is different from actual value.

Some software devs are in a position to make changes that save companies millions of dollars per year. I guess in that case you could make an argument that they are worth as much money as they saved for the company, but they could only do that once for one company. They can't go from company to company saving millions of dollars in infrastructure cost. They might not be put in that position in each company, and there might not be the opportunity to save that much money for each company. It doesn't seem right that they should capture all of the savings as salary year after year, so, given that and the stochastic nature of optimizations like this where it's easy to measure the impact in dollars, what's a fair salary? Probably near the range of salaries we have now.

In my experience, most people working in an organization don't know or understand the big picture. This causes them to both overvalue the contributions of their peers - since they can understand them - and undervalue the contribution of other parts of the organization - which they fail to understand the value they bring. See e.g. this exchange I recently had with @thomasThePaineEngine regarding what HR does for the company.

If you mostly talk to programmers, you'll get a distorted image of the importance of programmers and probably some denigrating image of everyone else - first-level managers, C-Suite, marketing, HR - who perform non-technical functions that are vital for the company's existence.

In truth, while (almost) every function in the org is vital, most people performing those functions aren't. This is true for every discipline, and as such includes programmers. At the very least 50% of the people in any one discipline could probably be safely replaced, with minimal overhead.

On the other hand, there really are some high performers who deserve a high paycheck for what they do. Not all of them get what they deserve, and that's a shame. Sometimes it's because those people aren't assertive enough, or because some company policy prevents them from getting a very high raise. Some other times it's because they're very valuable to the org they're in, but much less valuable everywhere else - which means they don't have leverage.

Until recently, one used to often hear people say that while software engineers had high salaries, they were actually only paid a small fraction of what they were really worth.

Do you mean people here? Or just in people general? Can you link an example?

This is a bizarre statement to make.

Were the people who said software engineers were underpaid mistaken? Why did they believe this? Was it based on some naive calculation of profit per employee, ignoring the cost of capital, as is really common among people with no formal economics education?

If you put a gun to my head, and told me to make the best argument I can think of in favor of that statement, I'd go with something like: A lot of companies are bloated. You could fire a good chunk of the workforce, and be none the worse for it, which would imply you are overpaying the people who remain hired, and underpaying those that would remain if you got rid of the bloat.

...but of course, that doesn't necessarily mean software engineers would be disproportionately spared from being fired...

I've heard it a few times, but only from a generalized "exploitation"/pro-labor PoV. I haven't seen any arguments that would apply to programmers but not assembly line workers (etc.), but maybe OP has.

Do you mean people here? Or just in people general? Can you link an example?

People on the internet say it often.

What would sales for a small startup look like?

Lets assume Startup X in making enough money to sustain 10 engineers and 1 sales person. So the 10 engineers hire an MBA. What does the MBA do?

I'm asking this because the activity of sales is completely opaque to me. I can intellectually understand that for a company of sufficient size, that work needs to be offloaded to someone who only does that. But for a small company I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

As an actual salesperson in the tech space, I think a lot of the other comments are misguided. Gone are the days of salespeople doing easy fun shit with clients like golfing or going to the pub to drink. Nowadays salespeople have to challenge their customers, essentially change their beliefs about what they know/need in their business.

Look up the Challenger Sale, it explains the history of sales well.

The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions.

The idea is that sellers and buyers are in a perpetual arms race. Relationship building used to be the way to sell, and that's how it is now in the cultural consciousness. Unfortunately that idea is way behind the times. Excellent salespeople now have to be able to toe the line between pissing off a customer and convincing them that the salesperson is the authority, and knows better than they do, if they want to sell in a tough market or sell a lot.

This is a point I keep coming back to, which is that many jobs without obvious arcane technical skills nonetheless require a skill, it just happens to be one which is hard to define.

Sales is a good example here. Sales people have to understand their clients, they have to understand how to take clients golfing or fishing or bring in a mobile barbecue trailer to their place of business, how to field client concerns- which necessarily entails being able to understand their product and then explain it in an 85 IQ way, because clients rarely have specific knowledge of your product- how to present as competent professionals representing their chosen field, and finally have to have good enough people skills to forge a meaningful connection with their client(this is usually but not always by discussing something completely unrelated to the product), move it into a discussion of the product, and then ask for the sale, all without the client noticing or feeling awkward. They also need to be able to get inside their client's head and figure out who to talk to.

All of this is a skill, it's a totally separate skill from engineering, and it's also a more or less full time job because sales guys need a lot of flexibility to respond to client needs which necessarily entails taking time out of doing some other job. All of these factors militate heavily against hiring an engineer to do sales.

All this schmoozing you're describing is generally a really inefficient/old-fashioned way of doing things actually. You'd still do it sometimes in high-level business development, or maybe high-end account management/partner management, but it's honestly very niche. >90% of sales people at big tech are not doing anything like this stuff.

There certainly is a minimum charisma/personability bar for sales, but it's lower than you'd think. The work of modern tech sales people is closer to, say, what those in the 2000s "seduction" community used to do: think about interactions in a very methodical way which is totally inappropriate for True Love but actually quite applicable for tech sales. Except with emails and video calls instead of, you know, bars and booze.

The key thing salespeople do that's difficult, is to cause an outcome they have no direct control over. Coping with that inherent uncontrollability/vulnerability is what most people hate doing (ie experiencing a lot of rejection despite possibly having done an objectively good job).

I'd also contend that outside Enterpise sales (this segment generally not the biggest money-maker for companies, though it's the most highly-paid and desirable role to sell in) it's rarely efficient to persuade a person; more generally a rep is looking to act as a catalyst for a course of action that genuinely is in a client's best interest, but which left to their own devices they might never bother to do/investigate.

For a very small company CEO and sales is often the same thing.

Otherwise it's not much different from a larger corporation except account management and front line sales will be the same person, and there won't be any support functions.

As David Mamet so artfully put it in Glengarry Glen Ross, [They] get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

The core competency is being able to be told no a zillion times while your pay depends on getting a yes and still sounding confident on the next call.

Because the times are weird. Lots of tech companies went through a period of essentially free money reaching the apex last year with corona bux and currently collapsing. So hiring as many people as possible, starting moonshot projects and acquiring any remotely promising startup became a normal practice since everyone was trying to be the too-big-to-fail behemoth when the music stopped. Now they are reckoning with some of the excess and dumping dead weight.

There's a meme in software eng of the 10x programmer who does the work of 10 normal ones. In my experience, these people exist. But the 10x is more that the average programmer is lazy to a fault, i.e. the 1x is such a low standard that 10x isn't really all that.

So the answer is that the 10x are grossly underpaid while all the 1x are overpaid. And there's a lot more of the latter.

Its worth noting that the productivity of the 10x engineer doesn't mean he writes 10x the code or anything as such.

It might be that the "10x" engineer can just add 1 line of code that would take x engineers 10t amount of time. Or sometimes that one line of code could be incomprehensible to everyone but the 10x engineer, in which case even an infinite number of normal engineers wouldn't be a sufficient replacement of that one 10xengineer.

Viewing (engineer) productivity as something that can be measured is the wrong way to think of it. The correct way is "What is now possible with the addition of this engineer that was previously impossible?".

Einstein might have the raw intelligence of 50 toddlers, but even 50,000 toddlers couldn't do what Einstein did. IQ doesn't scale.


My hot take here is that every engineer is getting paid exactly what they should be getting paid. If your baseline calibration is the 10x engineer then yes some engineers should probably not get paid at all, and the inverse of that would mean the 10x engineer gets paid infinite money. Neither of those makes sense with even a minimal understand of marginal utility.

So, the market is probably much closer to the truthful salary than your intuitions.

"H1b slaves"

Yeah, won't disagree with the blatant one-sided class warfare. These dynamics are very salient to me given I come from a relatively poor and low status background and my technical skills are the only leverage I have, surrounded by nepotism and classism of the likes incomprehensible to most Americans. (I live in a shithole country).

I don't know which monster or Elder God symbolises this specific problem, it's not entirely Moloch. But whatever he is, I will forever live in his shadow, its etched into my mind, My (future) kids are going to go to the best schools and have the right tastes, because I didn't and I know the potent bullshit that comes along with not doing so.

Managers continue their wishful thinking

It's not that all engineers are not not fungible, some certainly are. But as you said, those whose work isn't are difficult to spot. A bad thing avoided can rarely ever be credited.

However this might be a good place for Hanlons Razor. A manager who doesn't know this is probably a bad manager. A manager (standin for all non technical people engineers have to deal with) might not know what a good engineer looks like, but he should know what a good manager looks like.

A good managers work is just an in-fungible as the good engineers. The fact that he might stay calm and hold the teams morale together by taking the blame himself when they are not working well together will not show up in the quarterly report.

Happy Sunday everyone. I am at a bit of a loss with how to go about potentially upgrading my desktop PC.

There is a well-established culture & system around upgrading phones every 2-3 years. Companies make it enticingly easy with trade-ins that reduce cost and waste. Same system exists for cars.

But not for PCs.

I have an HP Omen desktop that I bought for $1700 before tax in Nov 2020. It was on sale and had/s excellent specs: i7-10700K, RTX 3080, 32gb ram, 500gb SSD. I'm pretty sure it still sells for $1700+ today, at least in nominal dollars, which is bonkers for what should be fast depreciating. Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

I don't game much, maybe a little bit of StarCraft 2 and RimWorld every now and then. So the graphics card was an overkill from the start and meant to be future-proof. The 3080 will easily suffice for at least another 2-3 years, I'm sure.

But I'm tempted by a new CPU. UserBenchmark suggests that a 13900K outperforms the 10700K by 33% on "effective speed", or 61% on single core speed. By the time the 14000 series comes out next year, perhaps it'll get to +50% effective speed and +80% single core. At some point, the $600 or however much the next-gen costs will be is worth it to me if my computer runs 50-80% faster depending on the application (for example, RimWorld is mainly CPU limited and has no multithreading.

But it seems cumbersome to upgrade the CPU. I could watch a bunch of YT to learn how to swap out the CPU myself, but I'd rather not, in case I mess something up. I have no passion for tinkering, so the time I spend learning and failing would be stressful and a waste of time. I also understand that not all motherboards support newer CPUs, and the 13900K also draws double the power than the 10700K, so I may need to get both a new MOBO and a new PSU. All that feels like a tremendous headache to me if I were to DIY.

Alternatively, I could wait until the desktop is dying after 2-3 years, and then I toss/recycle it for a new one. But this seems suboptimal too, given I value and am willing to pay for a faster processor, but that's all that I care about. I don't want or need a brand new PC.

The third option is to find a pro to upgrade the CPU (and possibly the MOBO and PSU). Microcenter seems to have a CPU installation service for $80 (plus a $40 "recommended diagnostic"). I could also take it into a local repair shop, which I tend to think of as somewhat seedy and serving computer illiterate people at a premium, but that's probably just undue prejudice.

What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.

Unless you're regularly running CPU-heavy applications, there's no reason to upgrade unless you're actively seeing detrimental performance. A few years ago my MB crapped out and I decided to upgrade my CPU and RAM because it was Black Friday and everywhere was running deals. So I upgraded to a six0core Ryzen with hyperthreading and saw fuck all of a performance increase except certain processes (like converting large files between formats) ran faster. Interestingly enough, it was useless for the one area where I did need increased CPU performance; at the time my job required me (or at least it was easier) to OCR 1000+ page documents, which took a substantial amount of time on my work laptop and locked me out of doing any other work since I needed Acrobat to accomplish pretty much anything. The new CPU certainly made the process a little faster, but Adobe doesn't support hyperthreading so it was still running one page at a time (albeit at faster speed) rather than the 12 pages at a time it could theoretically handle. I was super pissed that a pro-grade product that costs a decent amount of money didn't have such an essential feature. The punchline is that even in cases where you would see a difference software limitations may prevent you from seeing it. Like you, I'm not much of a gamer so I have no idea how it will effect that end of things, but for most everyday tasks you should be fine with what you have unless you're performance is lagging.

Makes sense. I do expect that everyday tasks will see virtually no difference, and that the upside comes from just a couple of CPU-heavy apps. But as you note, once you do have those use cases, it does feel a bit magical to just cut down the processing type by 30% from one day to the next (and hundreds of dollars later).

Oh, good chance to ask, how good is acrobat OCR? I've been using the one built into Google drive, but it's not possible to batch it.

It's pretty good but it's time consuming for larger files. To provide some context, I was doing legal work for oil and gas and I had to determine if certain assignments pertained to certain leases (an assignment is when one company conveys lease rights to another; I'll include things like mortgages and financing statements in this category). They often do this in large documents conveying several thousands of interests at one time. It can be incredibly time consuming to do this by simply reading the document, especially since most of them are ordered by some kind of internal lease number rather than alphabetically or geographically or by some other parameter that I have access to. It gets even worse when they're conveying different interests for different leases and there are several exhibits to go through. After OCR I'd usually search by lessor name first. If I found what I was looking for, great, if not, I'd try parcel number, and if that failed, I'd search by the recording information for the original lease. These latter two parameters were kind of dicey because the information is often laid out in a table and the OCR occasionally has trouble determining where the line breaks are. With a name you at least have the security of knowing that the first few letters will be consecutive without a line break. If I got to this point and didn't find anything then I figured I could safely assume that the document didn't apply to the lease I was concerned about, unless, of course, there was some kind of blanket language, but that's usually easy to find. It wasn't 100% accurate, though, because there were some cases where I knew that what I was looking for was in there but it wasn't coming up because of a typo, or bad scanning, too-small printing, etc. at which point I'd have to search the whole document manually. My superiors didn't like relying on OCR because of this, but in my experience mindlessly scanning page after page was more likely to lead to an error than the OCR was. The advice I'd give to the client relied pretty heavily on the applicability of certain of these documents, so I'd say that it's probably good enough for whatever you plan on using it for, assuming that it isn't an application that could get you fired or cause some other kind of serious problem.

I never had to batch scan so I can't comment on how well this works. One final caution I'd give is that OCR info causes the file sizes to balloon considerably. The firm I worked at required us to eliminate all exhibit pages from these documents except the ones that were directly applicable to prevent the already-large size of the client's product to balloon to unmanageable levels and take up too much room on our cloud storage. This was followed by a prohibition on including OCR'd stuff in our final client PDFs for the same reason, as we saved copies of all our work and it was taking up entirely too much space. It wasn't uncommon for one of these large documents to take up in excess of 300 megs due to all the additional OCR data. So if you plan on saving all of these PDFs locally, it's something to be aware of.

Wow, thanks for the review. If you trusted it with that, it must be more than good enough for the stuff I was doing (casually browsing through old French books)

I would do nothing if I were you. The CPU upgrade process isn't that complex (but I have been upgrading my PCs since my dad let the magic smoke out of the floppy drive and hung up his hat):

  • pick the CPU you like

  • find out the socket

  • check that your cooler can mount on the socket

    • you might have to order a new mounting bracket for it

    • or you might need a new cooler

  • check that your mobo has the same socket and its chipset supports your chosen CPU

    • or you might need a new mobo
  • if you need a new mobo, pick one that has the same form factor as your current one and that has enough expansion slots for your devices (not a problem for most modern PCs)

  • if you need a new mobo, check that it will work with that GPU or SSD you might want to buy next year (PCIe version)

  • if you need a new mobo, check that your RAM is compatible (DDR4 vs DDR5 in 2022)

    • or you might need new RAM
  • if you need a new mobo, check that your PSU is compatible (no new connectors)

    • or you might need a new PSU
  • just in case, check that the new wattage won't overload your CPU (there are websites for that)

    • or you might need a new PSU
  • if you need a new PSU, check that it will work with that GPU you might want to buy next year (power and connectors)

  • order your new CPU, cooler, mobo, RAM and PSU

  • disassemble your PC

  • assemble you new PC

lol

I really appreciate your taking the time to write out the detailed steps, but I have to ask, you do realize what you wrote out does not mesh with "isn't that complex", right? I'm stereotyping here, but maybe forward the list to someone who is not your dad and isn't a DIY tinkerer, and ask them if they think it's a stroll or a massive undertaking. Just a few examples:

pick the CPU you like

I mean I would just go by userbenchmarks but as another poster nearby commented, you can't necessarily even trust that because of its anti-AMD bias, and the "effective speed" metric isn't as straightforward as it sounds like. Now I have to go down another rabbit hole to understand what's best.

find out the socket

I have no idea how many types of sockets there are and the pros and cons of each.

you might have to order a new mounting bracket for it

There's another hour at least of research to understand what's going on

disassemble your PC

assemble you new PC

This reminds me of the draw-the-rest-of-the-owl meme.

Honestly you see willing to make some non-optimal choices and maybe give up some money or porformance for ease. if you just buy a new motherboard and cpu bundled you can just follow the lego like instructions that come with the motherboard. You will probably spend some two digit number of dollars more and have slightly worse performance but it's probably the middle ground you're looking for.

I did expect this reaction, but it's honestly not that bad. Building a shed or changing a tire is harder, because you actually require some manual dexterity to turn your knowledge into practical results. Learning how to upgrade a PC takes a few evenings of scrolling and the parts actually slot together with minimal effort.

For example, if you search for 13900K on Wikipedia, you get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake, where it says in plain text it uses socket LGA1700. Then you click through to the page about the socket itself and see the list of chipsets that work with Raptor Lake, of which there's just one, the most expensive Z790.

Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

This isn't normal. Or rather, perhaps it's normal in the statistical sense that the average person's computer is an unreliable heap of junk, but it's not nominal, and you shouldn't put up with it. "It just does that sometimes," is a piss-poor way to relate to computers, and if a hardware problem is causing your machine to crash that hard, it might also be corrupting your data.

You can use a couple passes of memtest86+ to identify some problems with your memory. It's not great for overclocking-related instability, but if your memory chips are going bad it should be able to detect it. You can run prime95's blend test overnight to ferret out CPU/memory/motherboard problems.

In my experience, poor electrical connections are the cause of a significant fraction of weird computer problems, although this may depend on the humidity in your climate. You can try re-seating your RAM and graphics card, as long as you are careful to avoid ESD. (Touch your computer's metal chassis immediately before touching any components, and do not remove from the confines of the chassis. Pop it out of the slot and right back in again.)

If none of that fixes it or finds anything, your computer is probably still under warranty if you bought it new. BSoDs are not supposed to happen, and you should make them somebody else's problem. The ability to do that is the whole point of buying from an OEM.

But I'm tempted by a new CPU.

First off, don't. In my opinion, your current machine will be fine for at least 5 years.

The newest CPUs that might be compatible with your motherboard are Intel 11th-gen, and those were widely panned for being an insignificant improvement over 10th gen. There are some workloads where they win, but some where they lose because the 11th gen i9 has only 8 cores compared to the 10th gen's 10 cores, and the power consumption is very high. That could be a problem for upgrading, because OEM (HP/Dell/Lenovo) motherboards are typically not designed to be capable of supplying significantly more power than needed by the CPU the PC comes with.

Furthermore, even if you replace your motherboard, published benchmark results for the 13th gen CPUs are usually using the newer DDR5 memory standard unless they say otherwise, so you'd have to replace your RAM too or else have slightly (only very slightly) less performance than the internet says.

UserBenchmark suggests that a 13900K outperforms the 10700K by 33% on "effective speed", or 61% on single core speed.

Userbenchmark is notoriously terrible. The operator has a strong anti-AMD bias. That wasn't too much of a problem back when Intel had a solid lead in single-thread performance and he could just weight low-thread-count benchmarks heavily, but since they've caught up he has to put a heavier and heavier thumb on the scales. At this point it's practically an entire arm.

The 13900K has as many P-cores as the 10700K, and 16 extra E-cores on top. Therefore, it makes no sense for the "effective speed" difference to be less than the single core speed.

The tricks, in this case, are:

  1. The "effective speed" does not account for workloads using >8 threads at all.

  2. The "effective speed" includes memory latency in the average. Memory latency contributes to the performance of a computer, but it isn't independently observable outside of its effect on any particular benchmark. It's an implementation detail. Picking a CPU based on memory latency makes about as much sense as picking them them by clock frequency or die size (i.e., none, unless you are designing a chip).

Unfortunately, unless the application you care about (Rimworld) is directly benchmarked, reading benchmarks properly is very difficult without a decent understanding of the characteristics of your application -- how threaded it is, how big its memory working set is (this is not the memory usage task manager shows you), etc.

Also, a lot of the published benchmarks really suck. Examples include single-thread cinebench (completely fits in cache on modern CPUs, and real users don't use Cinema 4D that way), Factorio benchmarks with small factories that run way over 200 UPS (broken by large L3 cache, which won't happen for factories that struggle to maintain 60), benchmarking Civilization games for frame rate instead of turn time, benchmarking frame rate in games that aren't CPU-limited in typical play (400 FPS 720p is benchmarking the graphics driver, not the game), etc.

What I would suggest is to find the openbenchmarking.org link from a recent CPU comparison article on phoronix.com, and filter the results to show only benchmarks that have similar characteristics to your application. For example,

  • Web browser tests: lightly threaded with small-ish cache footprint (based on 5800X vs 5800X3D.

  • Compiler benchmarks: heavily threaded with moderate cache footprint.

  • Google Draco: lightly threaded with large cache footprint. Most CPU-bound games are likely to fall in this category.

First, I respect your expertise and appreciate your willingness to educate the noobs.

About the lifetime of BSOD, I think I've mentally resigned to suffering from monthly strokes because basically every PC I've ever owned has suffered from it. They ranged in manufacturers: Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, they're laptops and desktops, they ran various versions of Windows. I am a very respectable average user, I swear. I don't subject my machines to harsh physical conditions, never spill anything on them, don't live in filth where dust covers everything, don't live with electrical surges, don't have little cousins borrowing it, don't mine crypto, don't pirate or visit sketchy sites with viruses, don't open phishing emails, don't leave it on 24/7, don't unplug USBs until I'm told it's safe to do so, I update fairly frequently, etc. The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers or Amazon/Best Buy. Anyways, you get the point. And yet I've literally never owned a single fully stable machine. Whenever I feel frustrated by a sudden crash, I remind myself that engineering is already a marvel, that these extremely complex machines can handle so much abuse and still have 99.99% uptime. The occasional hiccups do make me perpetually a little paranoid about losing data, though thankfully most applications are very good with real-time saves.

I will share one suspicion I've had about the cause of the BSODs, in case it provides any obvious clues to you as to what's the main culprit. I use a browser plugin called video speed controller to speed up all kinds of media that are too slowly paced. I think my freezes have semi-frequently coincided with when playing a video at higher speeds (say, maybe 2.5x or even 3x). Do you suspect that to be a RAM-related issue?

At any rate, you provide interesting resources that I will be sure to check out. I guess it'll take a couple of months to know for sure if anything changed, and it'd be a shock to me if it does (but I look forward to that)!

In my opinion, your current machine will be fine for at least 5 years.

I love your optimism. I can tell you that none of the machines I've owned lasted 7+ years. It's not that they always become inoperable at that point, but that they seem obsolete by the 5 year mark at the latest. I don't mean to sound like a snob. It's just that a computer is what I interact with the most both professionally and leisurely, so I think it's worthwhile to invest good money in it. Like, if I drove 8 hours a day for work and for fun, you bet I wouldn't be trying to extract every last bit of value until it qualifies for cash for clunkers. Plus, I really don't think it's that wasteful; people replace their thousand dollar smart phones every 2-3 years, so going all the way to 7 years for a $1700 computer seems comparatively overly conservative.

About the lifetime of BSOD, I think I've mentally resigned to suffering from monthly strokes because basically every PC I've ever owned has suffered from it. They ranged in manufacturers: Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, they're laptops and desktops, they ran various versions of Windows. I am a very respectable average user, I swear. I don't subject my machines to harsh physical conditions, never spill anything on them, don't live in filth where dust covers everything, don't live with electrical surges, don't have little cousins borrowing it, don't mine crypto, don't pirate or visit sketchy sites with viruses, don't open phishing emails, don't leave it on 24/7, don't unplug USBs until I'm told it's safe to do so, I update fairly frequently, etc. The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers or Amazon/Best Buy. Anyways, you get the point. And yet I've literally never owned a single fully stable machine.

There's probably some common factor, although we can only guess at what it is. Whenever I've seen a machine behave like that it's been some combination of

  • Installed in a shed with no climate control and free access to outside air.

  • Over a decade old (chips and capacitors do degrade).

  • Manufactured during the early 2000s "capacitor plague" (rumor says one capacitor maker tried to steal a formula from another and didn't get it quite right).

  • Fixed by spraying contact cleaner in the memory slots and re-seating.

  • Showing messages in the log that match a common complaint on the bugtracker for the Linux kernel or graphics driver, and the problem goes away when that bug is reported fixed.

  • My own damn fault for overclocking/undervolting something.

Things that might be different between us:

  • We have different electrical grids.

  • We have different levels of background radiation. (EPA says gamma cross count rate in my location is ~3000/min.)

  • Almost none of my machines run Windows (only the one in the shed). But people on the internet say Windows BSoD-ing all the time is supposed to be a thing of the past.

  • All of my machines are either home-built or business grade.

  • I run one pass of memtest86 whenever I get a new machine or replace RAM. Only time this found something though, was when I was buying dodgy RAM from eBay.

If your electrical supply is spotty, you might be able to fix it with an uninterruptible power supply that has the "AVR" (automatic voltage regulation) feature. Unfortunately they're kind of expensive and the batteries usually have to be replaced every few years.

I will share one suspicion I've had about the cause of the BSODs, in case it provides any obvious clues to you as to what's the main culprit. I use a browser plugin called video speed controller to speed up all kinds of media that are too slowly paced. I think my freezes have semi-frequently coincided with when playing a video at higher speeds (say, maybe 2.5x or even 3x). Do you suspect that to be a RAM-related issue?

Playing back video at high speed is obviously a heavier load than 1x, but it could be any of CPU, RAM, power supply, or even the graphics card, assuming your browser uses hardware video decode (probably does).

The first thing you might try is to see if you can reliably reproduce the problem by cranking the video playback speed to the moon. I use a similar extension, "Enhancer for YouTube", which has no upper speed limit AFAICT. Use youtube's "stats for nerds" to detect dropped frames, which means you have reached the limits of your computer (or internet connection). This probably works best with a short video that you can re-play without having to re-download.

If you can reproduce the problem, you have a very good "my computer crashes when I do this" story to tell the warranty people.

If that didn't work, to try to differentiate between causes and maybe find a better reproducer, I would suggest...

First, install hwinfo64. This will show you a bunch of things, but the important ones are the Windows hardware error log counts and the CPU temperature and package power. Here's an example of it in use.

Then download prime95. Run the "small FFT" test for at least an hour. If your computer crashes, any of the threads crash, any of the self tests fail, or hwinfo shows any errors in the Windows log, it is probably a CPU or power supply problem. If the CPU package power is not near or above 125W while the all-thread test is running, and the CPU temperature is at or very close to 100°C, it's a cooling problem (heatsink detached in shipping?). If "small FFT" doesn't find anything, you might try blend. Keep in mind "CPU problems" are likely to be "motherboard power delivery to the CPU" problems, so replacing the CPU might not fix it.

For the graphics card, you can use any of the unigine benchmarks. Superposition is the most similar to modern AAA games, but also a large download. You have a monster graphics card with a much higher peak power draw than the CPU, but if you only play games like Rimworld and SC2 with vsync on, it's probably not being pushed close to full power. Unigine will do that. Unfortunately, I don't know any GPU tests that check their own results and are easy to run. But if it crashes, that's a fail obviously.

For the memory, memtest86+ is probably easiest. There are better tests that the overclockers use, which you can find here.

To really put the hurt on your power supply and cooling, you can run 7 threads of prime95 and unigine at the same time. This will draw more power than pretty much any real workload other than folding@home, crypto mining, or things involving custom job schedulers, but a proper computer should be able to take it.

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that you will be able to identify the problem. But the good news is that you only need to find a reproducer, to use as ammunition against the customer service line. That's part of what you're paying for when you buy OEM computers and replace them before the warranty runs out.

I love your optimism. I can tell you that none of the machines I've owned lasted 7+ years. It's not that they always become inoperable at that point, but that they seem obsolete by the 5 year mark at the latest. I don't mean to sound like a snob. It's just that a computer is what I interact with the most both professionally and leisurely, so I think it's worthwhile to invest good money in it. Like, if I drove 8 hours a day for work and for fun, you bet I wouldn't be trying to extract every last bit of value until it qualifies for cash for clunkers. Plus, I really don't think it's that wasteful; people replace their thousand dollar smart phones every 2-3 years, so going all the way to 7 years for a $1700 computer seems comparatively overly conservative.

No doubt. But security update stoppage and battery degradation are big drivers of phone replacements, and neither is a problem for desktop computers. I am using a $200 phone, a CPU launched in 2013, and a graphics card from 2016, and they do what I need them to do.

Thanks, I definitely plan to run your recommendations the next time the PC crashes for no apparent reason. Until then, there is still hopium that somehow the problem goes away all by itself...

No doubt. But security update stoppage and battery degradation are big drivers of phone replacements, and neither is a problem for desktop computers. I am using a $200 phone, a CPU launched in 2013, and a graphics card from 2016, and they do what I need them to do.

Different usage levels and/or preferences, I suppose. What you describe sounds a bit too ascetic for the vast majority of people, at least those in middle class. Unless you never dine out or order delivery, food has gotten so expensive that $200 lasts like two restaurant dinners for two in a big city, at which point I'd much rather skip those two dinners and save toward say a $400 rather than $200 phone or upgrade to a $200 CPU from this year, and either would deliver much more utility.

people replace their thousand dollar smart phones every 2-3 years

Yeah, and that's idiotic. I haven't needed a smartphone upgrade in probably 5+ years. The only reason I've gotten a new one is hardware failure (one I dropped and the screen cracked, one stopped taking a charge).

Don't upgrade your PC because people upgrade their smartphones for no reason every couple of years. That's like saying "well Bob down the street gets a new car every year so I do too".

Hard agre with the other posters, BSOD is not normal, and shouldn't really ever happen during normal use, much less a couple of times a month. For comparison, i have not BSOD'd for years outside of deliberate overclocking-to-failure tests.

The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers.

This is your problem. All "manufacturers" (they arent the ones actually building your system) are going to ship your PC with reams of shitty, unstable bloatware. Bloatware and its associated background processes is probably the #1 source of BSOD for normal users. Even doing a "fresh install" of windows is not usually sufficient to get rid of it, as the bloatware is now being hidden on separate partitions of the hard drives (you can thank Dell for starting this practice). So unless you installed your own freshly downloaded copy of windows (from MS only, not the computer seller), on a freshly wiped and single-paritioned hard drive, you probably have bloatware.

So either go with a PC building service that is just compiling parts and lets you do the windows install, or build a PC yourself, its really quite easy these days.

Man, I love this community. Hope it doesn't die from the break from Reddit.

Speaking as someone still running an I5 8400: if you upgrade, send me your old one?

I wouldn't say this upgrade is worth it unless lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills can't burn your loose change fast enough, but if you did the valuable part would be the learning process. Being able to pull out parts is important, and putting the actual CPU in is just a matter of slathering on paste and slotting it in. The most annoying part is ensuring all the mobo cables are plugged in firmly, but that's another useful experience. And you'll need a new mobo because 12th gen changed to a new socket, so you'd basically be building a new machine. Your PSU might be fine though.

Another thing to check out is your ram: HP prebuilds often use cheapo stuff to pad out the gigs. I salvaged 16Gb from one of their Envys to get my machine up to 32, and it slowed the XMP timings way down. Actually makes a 5-10fps difference on a 100% Factorio benchmark save. Or you could just wait for DDR5 prices to drop and upgrade to that later.

I would agree with your analogy if I were desperately looking for a scalper to sell me a RTX 4090 stat because my 3090 Ti is just not shiny enough. But come on, we're talking about 3-4 generations of CPU later. That's hardly cartoon billionaire status we're talking about. Plus, it's an asset! Would you think someone who spends $600 on round trip tickets to the Caribbean is lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills?

I have "HyperX® 32 GB DDR4-3200 XMP SDRAM (2 x 16 GB)". Is that el cheapo ship? Should I upgrade those instead? I believe I can handle pulling out and inserting memory sticks... I hope.

Oh, no, that's pretty good. The last hp i7 prebuilt I saw had ddr4-2133 4x8.

Honestly it might be worth it considering you'd probably have to recheck all your mobo connections as part of the bsod troubleshooting anyway, if you spend a lot of time in RimWorld lategame.

I'm in a similar situation with Factorio, but had to force myself to admit that I'm not CPU-bound in any actual work process, and any upgrade was only for a fraction of the ~2hrs of game time a week.

I have "HyperX® 32 GB DDR4-3200 XMP SDRAM (2 x 16 GB)". Is that el cheapo ship? Should I upgrade those instead? I believe I can handle pulling out and inserting memory sticks... I hope.

Aha! As Herr Bernd says below, that's decently fast memory, if HP enabled the XMP preset. But also, if they enabled the XMP preset, that's technically an overclock of your processor's memory controller, which is spec'd at 2933 MT/s max. XMP almost always works, even when it's out of spec, but... sometimes it doesn't. That might be the cause of your instability.

Unfortunately, memtest86+, which I suggested before, is more aimed at finding problems with the memory itself, rather than problems with the communication between the CPU and the memory. For that you'll want one of the overclocker-preferred stress tests that I linked before.

You can poke around in the BIOS setup options and try to find out if XMP is enabled, if so disable it, and see if that makes a difference to stability tests (assuming you find a test that reliably reproduces a problem). Turning off XMP will make your computer slower, and how much slower depends on what non-XMP settings are burned into the memory sticks.

If you're up for a challenge, you can try to stabilize the XMP profile with extra voltage, or find a stable intermediate speed between XMP and default non-XMP. If you try, the rest of that DDR4 OC guide will be helpful. But I do mean challenge. Memory is kind of the last bastion of "real" overclocking, in that every other part of a modern desktop has self-test circuits to characterize its own timing margin, and is able to run near maximum performance out of the box (if only for a short turbo boost time window). And unless you have error-correcting RAM like on a server or workstation, a memory overclock is the most difficult kind of overclock to validate, and the most likely to persistently corrupt your data.

It's so unexpected for someone who is clearly highly knowledgeable about this to go with a 2013 CPU and 2016 GPU. It's like the cliche that you never trust a skinny chef. I'm sure your choices work for you, but unless you're rarely on your computer for work/fun, I wonder if in 20 years you'll look back and think that the savings just wasn't worth the last-last-last-last-last-gen performance or experience.

Where'd you see a 2013 CPU?

Remember he's repurposing all these as Linux machines for specific roles, where using old hardware literally doesn't matter in the same way that smoke alarms don't need 5nm process chips.

I still use 4th and 6th gen i7s picked up from the dump, and for the jobs I use them for there's no difference in user experience. The 4th gen was thrown away weeks after someone tried to "upgrade" it to win10, turning it overnight into a laggy piece of shit with broken Bluetooth and GPU drivers lol.

Hang on, can't he just set it to 2933 in bios?

Probably? I don't know if that would pick JEDEC timings, re-use the XMP timings in cycles directly, or adapt the XMP timings in nanoseconds.

I think he should try it and see, but I don't think he's reported back about whether he's found any test that reliably produces a crash.

Building consumer desktops is more tedious and time consuming than it is a tremendous headache. If you can't figure out how to put together silicon LEGO then you're the perfect market for the local computer shop's services. They're not seedy but they are more or less charging an idiot tax. If your ego or wallet can't handle paying that then spend a few hours on /r/buildapc to figure it out.

Also it doesn't even sound like you have any reason to upgrade. Is any game you're playing not running at smooth 60fps?

Some CPU cooling systems really are a pain to mount.

That's why you watch a video review of the cooler you want to buy to see how much of a PitA it is to mount.

I bought one, took great pains to mount it and now I can't get it off. :S

Please, there may be children reading this.

Eh, idiot taxes are charged to everything. I don't think the world is better off if everyone changed their own oil, raised their own chicken, filed paper taxes, or drafted divorce paperwork.

I think my interest in upgrading the CPU is not dissimilar to people who buy the latest iPhone Pro Max Supreme every year. No one really needs that camera upgrade, but it's nice. And the out of pocket cost isn't too different either. To answer your question, there are a few applications that noticeably chugs due to CPU limitations. RimWorld (in late game) is one, and Excel (large data sets) another.

Specialization is of course good, but all the things you've listed (except changing oil) are much more complicated and take longer to learn than building a PC.

If you're so rich that you can call it a convenience tax rather than an idiot tax, then sure call it that instead. But if your time really is that valuable one wonders why you asked here in the first place.

Eh, Elon Musk still shitposts all day when his time is worth like a million an hour (if you divide his 189B net worth by the number of hours in 33 years between his age and when he turned 18, you get 0.65m per hour). I think we mortals should be allowed to complain about complexity even if we can afford to have a pro take care of it.

My RimWorld doubled in TPS going from a Ryzen 1700 to a 5600x. That felt nice, it meant I could play a single save game for like 30 hours before it became unbearably slow as opposed to 15 hours haha.

This is exactly what I'm talking about! I wish they had multithreading but people say that'd require the code be rewritten from scratch, so only recourse is to brute force it with better hardware.

Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

No it isn't.

A bsod isn't normal, there is something wrong maybe in the OS level, maybe with drivers, maybe hardware, but its more than a mere warning that can be ignored most of the time.

What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.

Fix the bsod issue, then literally nothing.

Your setup is so hilariously overpowered (in all aspects) for StarCraft2 and Rimworld that you are doing this for no reason other than to please your lizard brain that just wants to buy shit.

You are asking "I drive my Ferrari to the grocery store all the time, should I buy a Lamborghini?" WHY WOULD YOU??


I play similar old school games like you and I'm using a Ryzen 5 2600 and a GTX 1070 setup I bough 5 years ago. Still running strong.

I would have fixed the BSOD if it just required the latest drivers and updates. It's probably something at the hardware level, which sort of goes back to my lack of interest in DIYing diagnostics.

My CPU is not overpowered for RimWorld. This is too much detail, but once you get to 50+ colonists the game barely runs on 1x, let alone 3 or 5x speed.

Also, my setup hardly compares to a Ferrari. It's a $1700 machine. 14'' MacBook Pros start at $2k, and I know the average startup doesn't issue its developers a Ferrari on day one. It's more like a base model 2020 BMW 5 series, with me asking the best way to swap the engine for the 2023 model.

Your CPU is in fact overpowered for Rimworld. Having 50+ colonists is an extreme outlier case, like people who play Factorio and then try to build mega factories.

like people who play Factorio and then try to build mega factories.

Is there any point to factorio other than building mega factories? It's not called Cottagecorio, and only like 25% of the content is really involved in a playthrough that just "beats the game."

There are factories and factories. I've had a lot of fun building (quite large) factories in that game, but I have no desire whatever to try to get into the megabase game. Building a factory to produce thousands of science packs per minute is not my idea of fun.

Regardless, though, people who do that in Factorio are at the extreme edge of pushing the game. The hardware they need to sustain that is far greater than what the average Factorio player needs. Similarly, if one has a Rimworld colony with 50+ colonists that's outside the norm, and it means they're going to have higher hardware requirements.

My CPU is not overpowered for RimWorld

I do not know the particulars of RimWorld.

But exotic usecases are insatiable. You can make any CPU in the world struggle if you just spawn an arbitrarily large number of bots in games made in the 90's.

If your usecase is not too far out of the bounds of how RimWorld is meant to be played, then I suppose just do whatever you want. (Do it regardless, but you asked for suggestions).

Ferrari

The point I was aiming to get across is that a Ferrari is far far far too overspecced to drive to the grocery as is a a high end CPU is for running games that were modestly intensive from half to 3/2 a decade ago.

Not about the expense of it.

If your usecase is not too far out of the bounds of how RimWorld is meant to be played

It is way outside the bounds of how Rimworld is normally played, for what it's worth. So a CPU upgrade may help, but it's hardly required by the game.

If your main goal is Rimworld performance, AMD's 5800x3D CPU is going to be the best value you can buy (or the 7800x3D when it comes out next year) because its huge cache makes a big difference (up to 40%) for complex sim games with lots of entities.

I've been drooling over these for Factorio, but similar sort of position where I can't justify it for the ~2hrs a week I spend using the PC that way.

CPU sim games are such an upgrade trap: "yesss, now I can simulate seven million pieces of iron moving down a belt! Progress!"

The widely-touted Factorio benchmarks run at well over 200+ UPS. The outsized gains from the big cache don't hold up as well with larger factories that struggle to maintain 60, presumably because they overflow it. Something that does help Factorio run faster on pretty much any computer is forcing it to use a larger page size with mimalloc.

Even in that case it's going toe to toe against a CPU twice its price with vastly higher single core speed, which is pretty amazing!

Thanks for the tip. If my business programs were available on Linux I'd switch over entirely at this point.

Interesting. Never thought about the cache mattering. Thanks for the tip.

Is there a good (legal) way to listen to World Cup games over the internet? Like, internet radio or something?

Separately and of less interest to me, I'm also assuming there's no way to watch (rather than listen) that won't cost an arm and a leg.

Is it illegal to watch internet streams?

https://tunein.com/

I think this should work? I've used it for other sports events before.

BBC? They don't seem to gate access to their audio broadcasts.

Exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

I'm also assuming there's no way to watch (rather than listen) that won't cost an arm and a leg.

I'm assuming you mean legally, because otherwise there are plenty of simple options

Any more accounts on twitter like @crimkadid? I think the technical term for him and his ilk is a schizoposter (if not please correct me). But he seems to randomly tweet about topics such as autism, IQ, sociology and history. Kinda hard to summarise but it is one of those accounts that likes to post various in depth threads of a topic matter they are (supposedly) well versed in.

I'd like to see more of these accounts. I like the fact that there are minimal jokes and pop culture references and has what feels like an extremely high information density. If you know of anything similar, let me know.

«Schizoposters» with more or less believable hot takes about human biodiversity and essential qualities of «races» are prevalent in the esoteric right Twitter, chiefly in BAP's circles. The greatest among them all was Hakan Rotwrmt (RIP), and MIYA BLACK HEARTED CYBER ANGEL BABY was a close second; both were apparently collective accounts ran by extraordinarily witty people.

See our resident spammer Carlsbad (?) burrowing into the BAP network.

He's not exactly a schizoposter, schizoposters are more openly crazy, but he's def related. I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense. Not that there aren't 'edgy dissident' claims/accounts that are valuable, but they're outnumbered by nonsense by several orders of magnitude, and telling the difference takes effort. A similar account is @realhumanschwab, whose output is similarly nonsense and without value.

I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense.

On that basis are you saying this? His inferences are straining credulity, but he cites genuine data.

I wrote something here but I lost it to browser issue, so shorter:

tl;dr my issue isn't with non-expert science, my issue is specifically with this guy's results and conclusions. It's really easy to 'cite data', there are piles of bad studies everywhere, and you can draw ridiculous conclusions from reasonable studies easily. Tweet threads or better blogposts with strong conclusions are fine, but the results need to be correct, and this guy (and a lot of other vaguely right-wing posters) are not putting out correct stuff.

this is what I was thinking of when I wrote OP. Lots of data is cited, but it's not useful data. Japan high EPA+DHA (sure), "There’s a national correlation -0.63 (strong) between seafood consumption and homicide rate." is uncited (nation-level correlations like thisare totally useless, horrifically confounded), cited "The effect of omega-3s on aggression is powerful enough that it has also been noticed in dogs" n=36, in dogs is not evidence for anything in humans. He quotes "The mood profile was improved after Omega-3 with increased vigour and reduced anger, anxiety and depression states. This was associated with an effect on reactivity with a reduction of reaction time in the Go/ No-Go and Sustained Attention tests" without citing it, which is from this - a n=33 psych study that finds a large number of effects of omega-3! It improves scores on the sustained attention (p<.01, p<.0003 for physical reaction time and EMG latency) and go/no-go (p<.0005, p<.0001) tests, improves vigour (p<.0001), reduces anger (p<.001), anxiety (p<.01), depression (p<.01), fatigue (p<.04), confusion (p<.04). Ofc, the systematic review i could find on one of those topics (depression), found no significant result despite a pooled N of 3000. So I just don't believe that paper, tbh.

This is what I mean - yeah, he cites data, but not in a 'literature review to find out what's accurate post replication crisis' sense, but a 'here's a paper that agrees with me!' sense. It's really easy to get papers that agree with you! There are some 'meta-analysis of 4000 RCTs of traditional chinese medicine finds that it works' papers, but that doesn't mean that TCM works!

His most recent tweet thread (which I still haven't read, just saw when i clicked his profile and it was relevant) ends with

The important question: do omega-3 fatty acids, protective against inflammation, depression, and schizophrenia, also protect against TB? At bare minimum they do boost serum Vitamin D, which is closely linked to disease risk.

With a link to the paper ... is this supposed to be evidence that omega-3 helps with inflammation? "Omega 3 helps with vitamin d/inflammation/depression/schizophrenia -> it helps with TB" is not a conclusion you can make if you've even had a HS biology course. Benadryl+SSRIs+antipsychotics+IV vitamin D won't treat TB.

Even his non-sourced assertions are just weird

For much of my life I've thought it obvious that the mental differences between generations are so large that they have a biological origin. As far as I can gather though, I am the only person in the known universe to think this.

huh?

Well Galton got further than 90% of modern social scientists (whose received wisdom still looks like this) with just that plus a bit of math. Directionally the same, it seems, happened for the whole Hajnal line discourse, Indian Aryan issue and other topics. We've been hearing a lot of cackling from the wannabe sophisticateds about stupid racist nazi chuds obsessed with foreheads and brow heights or using CaLiPeRS to reach conclusions about intelligence; but time and time again it seems like calipers work to an extent. So I think there are grounds for cautious optimism about this approach.

Pre-20th century, or perhaps more to the point, pre-Civil Rights guys were less technically informed but also less mindkilled and could reason freely on the basis of what is now unattainable purity of real experience; explicitly rechecking and refining their intuitions with modern tools could be a legitimate way to revitalize anthropology in the broadest sense.

That said, wilder schizoposter accs are merely riffing off the aesthetic of gentlemen scientists, if not scholars of the occult.

See edits.

Anyway, what I'm asserting is that the presence of bluster of this kind is not enough to disqualify the proposition as «uniformly just nonsense». Something like 25% of Uriah's conjectures may well prove correct. If I were to bet on it, I'd say that brachycephalization-domestication thesis, episodic memory vs. «stamp collecting» adaptations and the bit about Oceanian quivering smell less like bullshit than Japanese Omega-3 one, but all of it is within the realm of sane academic hypotheses, if not Overton-compliant ones.

Milk Lobe is... controversial in my mind.

brachycephalization-domestication thesis

Wouldn't domestication proceed by subtle neurological changes, rather than bulk physical ones? Genetic variation in temperament exists, and wouldn't selection on that make much more sense than head-shape?

episodic memory vs stamp collecting

I guess that's from this? The thread also includes brachycephaly claims as part of a claims that 'northern europeans are smarter than all the other ones'. And that claim isn't true afaict? Spain and italy don't have significantly lower national IQs than norway/UK/germany/france (according to lynn 2010, 98/97 vs 99/100, which is just not enough for any claimed large difference, and plausibly explained by migration). The lactose tolerance thing also doesn't seem plausible. But directly about episodic memory vs stamp collecting: I can't find any 'data' on this, but I personally know several europeans and several jews with extremely good 'episodic memory', and several europeans and several jews with very poor 'episodic memory' - and generally intelligence isn't just made up of 'memory', but much more complicated, i think, so looking at large differences in intelligence in terms of 'being caused by memory types' is just confused, imo.

I couldn't figure out what 'oceanic quivering' is by searching 'from:crimkadid' on twitter so idk.

You mention galton:

Galton produced over 340 papers and books. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He was a pioneer of eugenics, coining the term itself in 1883, and also coined the phrase "nature versus nurture".[2] His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.[3]

crimkadid isn't doing anything like that. He should, and I'd be interested if he was, but he won't.

Wouldn't domestication proceed by subtle neurological changes, rather than bulk physical ones? Genetic variation in temperament exists, and wouldn't selection on that make much more sense than head-shape?

False dichotomy bordering on the absurdity heuristic; subtle changes in cell behavior may be evolutionarily easy to reach (particularly on timescales he discusses, i.e. dozens of generations) though selection on pathways that affect embryonic cell migration and, say, characteristic relative white matter tract lengths and thus gross anatomy, and not strictly on microscopic scale; and indeed, if head shape as such is not being strongly selected upon, it can be thrown around by apparently unrelated pressures. Specifically, domestication syndrome in animals corresponds to allometric cranial changes; there is a (fairly contested) model attributing it to neural crest alterations.

For all I know, within-population temperamental variation is still linked to head shape in the way he describes. I admit I haven't checked.

Spain and italy don't have significantly lower national IQs than norway/UK/germany/france (according to lynn 2010, 98/97 vs 99/100

According to Lynn, speaking of Italy as a coherent population with some average IQ is very misguided, Sicilians don't even crack 90 while Northerners get to 103. I am not sure about Spain but it does seem to me that, indeed, an average native German is more than 1 point above a Spaniard, and Scandis are obviously not «99/100». In at least one large sample of elderly Western Europeans, there is a gamut of over 1 SD in «categorical fluency» and «episodic memory» task performances. (Admittedly, contra Uriah, they are correlated).

4 points aren't nothing on the population level.

Why you say this is explained by migration is beyond me; migration can explain many distributions, but that's a minor elaboration on selection.

generally intelligence isn't just made up of 'memory', but much more complicated

Sure, but come on now, he doesn't assert that it is.

I couldn't figure out what 'oceanic quivering' is by searching 'from:crimkadid' on twitter so idk.

https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1264785819870601216

More comments

@/crimkadid

I'm going to be losing a few hours here.

Your best bet is academics. There are a lot of Academics whose tweets are minimal joke/fluff and mostly about happenings in the field they are in.

Like I mentioned in another comment, I'm playing historian. In my research I saw some articles mentioning a court case that I'd love to look into. I have the approximate date, the court it has been brought to, the names of (some of) the defendants, and I can take a good stab at the name of the plaintiff. Basic google-fu has failed me so far. Are historical (well sort of, we're talking about the 70's) court documents public in the US? If so how would I go about getting them (I don't care if it involves fees)?

Have you tried PACER?

Thanks! It's a state court case, but this might be useful in the future.

Judicial records are open to public scrutiny unless the parties can convince the judge to "seal" those records (barring some exceptions that vary by state—juvenile prosecutions, names of children involved in divorce proceedings, name-change requests, names of rape victims, etc.). I assume you can just submit a records request to the court, possibly under the state's FOIA equivalent.

Thanks! I'll try that.

What does EA mean? I've seen a few people use the term but I guess I'm out of the loop. (Not electronic arts I don't think).

Probably Effective Altruism, a kind of meta-charity that seeks to find the most bang for your charity buck. The posts were about a recent scandal surrounding one of its backers, Sam Bankman-Fried and his company FTX.

So, what are you reading?

I'm reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Have never managed to get past the beginning.

I read The Picture of Dorian Gray maybe 15 years ago. I recall it being equal parts boring and pointless.

Edit: Below someone says it made a big impression on them. I guess it really shows different strokes for different folks. What a waste of paper and my time that book was.

Blood Meridian. Dorian Gray is on my shelf waiting to be read.

Just found out yesterday that there's a new Mistborn book out, so I picked that up tonight. Really looking forward to it!

Just started Augustine's Confessions. Last book was Runaway Horses.

Two of my all time favorites. What did you think of runaway horses?

Amazing. Spring Snow was very good, but Runaway Horses was even better, perhaps because it draws so closely to the events of Mishima's life. I'm tempted to write an effortpost on my thoughts on it. I'm looking forward to reading Temple of Dawn, but I've heard that it and Decay of the Angel aren't as well-regarded.

Please do! I haven't read Mishima in years now and I'd love love love to think about it again.

Still on Anne Rice's vampire novels. I'm on the fifth now and it's a noticeable drop in quality, I may stop on this one if it doesn't get better soon.

How did you find Flowers for Algernon? I remember it being very sad, particularly towards the end where Charlie goes to a lesson just like at the beginning of the book and his teacher runs out crying after realizing he had reverted to his old self. I also thought the author exaggerated or maybe found it hard to portray Charlie as being smart in a convincing way at his peak, especially implying he had learnt several languages during the experiment (which took less than a year iirc). This felt silly and the book would have been stronger without it.

Less intellectual or darkly funny than I hoped it would be, given the humour at the beginning. Played heavily on sentiment. Felt a lot like a myth. Can't say it stirred much sympathy in me, but the portrait of the less intelligent was memorable, so it might become a counterweight to careless thoughts about intelligence in the future.

It gets credit for making the smart Charlie genuinely fascinating in his prose and focus, though it took some time for the writer to prove that he could write such a character. I think I would have liked to see this character play a more independent role. He was inspiring if cynical when he was being himself, unpleasant when he was crazy, dull when he was letting his life be owned by others.

Charlie whisking away Algernon, the quiet parts with Fay and his work were the best parts. Overall, eh. Can see why it's a classic. Seems like a book that I'll likely return to when I'm more interested in its themes, but it felt a lot like those sentimental sci-fi movies that pop up every now and then. Maybe it set the example. Either way, it managed to reach some heights, so it was worth the time.

I encourage you to stick with that book, it made a huge impression on me as a young man.

I am currently reading The Living Reed by Pearl S. Buck. I have a nearly complete set of Pearl Buck novels, which were previously my mother's, which were previously her mother's. There's something kind of neat about being the third generation of my family to read Pearl S. Buck; there's nothing specific about us or our history that would push us to do this. I just like it. I really appreciate Buck's virtuous characters, wide dramas, and honest, deep exploration of other cultures.

By the way: has anyone reading this ever read the works of Edward Rutherfurd? If so - would you recommend them?

Personally I'm pretty open to his ideas (leaning somewhat conservative and low-key wishing someone could explain Christianity in a way where I can accept it), but I found his arguments baffling and nonsensical on closer inspection. I had much more luck with CS Lewis's Mere Christianity. I'm glad it worked for you though!

Chesterton's fiction is also great. The Man Who Was Thursday was a kind of masterpiece. His Father Brown was good, though I only read a few of the stories.

I’m a recently re-reborn Christian. I was raised a mix of Protestant, agnostic, and none. I later became a non-Catholic Catholic, then a Catholic convert, then nothing, then somewhat Episcopalian, and nothing. Recently, I’ve really rediscovered my faith. I’ve started reading the Bible, and reading/listening/watching a lot of apologetics stuff. I’ve tried a couple churches, too. So, I have some questions:

  1. I attended a non-denominational church this morning for the first time. From their website and what I’ve seen about them, it seems to me like it is of the conservative and evangelical variety. That’s good. That’s what I want. But the more I didn’t, I can’t find anything firm beyond the “sola scriptura,” Grace by faith, stuff. No comments on LGBT issues or abortion. By contrast, there are some local churches that are very explicitly evangelical and conservative, though they approach it in a conservative way. Is this lack of clarity the norm for non-denominational churches? I’ve looked up reviews for the church, but those are all over the place.

  2. With that said, how much does denomination really matter? Of course, if a church is Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, etc it matters. But within, say, Arminian Protestantism (meaning non-reformed) does it REALLY matter as long as you believe the basics?

  3. Any book recommendations (or podcasts or articles) on apologetics, denominational difference, converting, or similar topics?

  4. Any denominational recommendations? I want a Bible-believing, conservative-ish, evangelical-ish, church. I like churches with groups. I like ones that help the community. I like both traditional and contemporary services, too.

Thanks in advance.

Hi, I have a couple of thoughts for you on this. Re: #1, yes churches can be very cagey about that stuff. If you read a lot of the doctrines/statements of faith that they publicly post, it's astonishing actually how similar they can be on the surface.

It's no secret that polarization has hit the church as much as anywhere else. Some pastors have gone all-in on one political side or the other, and many, many more pastors try to walk a tightrope so as not to alienate anyone. I've found the only real way to know is to go and visit and see what the vibe is. Or you can at least start by emailing the pastor about questions or issues that are important to you, and see how they respond.

On your other questions, it's hard to answer because it's really such a personal decision and so much depends on the local community. I do think overall, unless you take a hard stance on certain questions, the question of denomination does not matter as much as things like small versus large church, worship style, member engagement (small group Bible study, volunteers), and community outreach/service.

Although, as a Christian who I believe takes the Bible seriously, just make sure it's a place that teaches the Bible above all else. Christian nationalism is not a Biblically defensible stance and neither is prosperity gospel stuff or the pastors who give the hard sell on giving. I'm a deconstructionist and an exvangelical, and if I may warn you to be discerning there - just because it's my home turf and I know the pitfalls. Too many non-denom evangelical churches get a nasty case of tunnel vision. Read stuff that's over 100 years old. Heck, read stuff that wasn't written in our current political moment. With two millennia of tradition and Christian theology and philosophy, it's inexcusable when a church wants to treat tradition as if it's a dirty word, when in fact evangelicals are as beholden to tradition as anyone else, they just don't recognize it.

FWIW, you may have seen this but here's a quiz to help you choose a denomination. https://www.quotev.com/quiz/13157643/What-Christian-Denomination-are-you

Here's a handy chart although this is Protestant only:

https://christianityhaven.com/threads/denomination-chart.6144/

Here is an article with probably more information than you wanted to know:

https://www.christianvalour.com/christian-denominations-guide/

TLDR; visit churches in several denominations. Listen. Meet people. Find one where you feel comfortable, and get plugged in to a regular small group for Bible study or prayer. Commit to volunteering and loving your neighbor. Go to a church service to receive blessing as well as bless others. Go in God's grace.

here's a quiz to help you choose a denomination

Man, I knew this was going to be funny, but we didn't even get past the first question.

The One True God is Triune.

(God is three people in one God)

.

Yes, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

or

No, only God the Father is really God, Jesus is created.

No other options. Fantastic.

It sounds like you have commitment issues.

In my mind, it's key to commit to a church and stick to it. Be a Catholic. It's not that difficult.

Is there any neuro/psychological significance to habitual and unaffected non-symmetrical facial expressions? I don't mean stroke symptoms, I mean things like smirks instead of smiles, single eyebrow raises, sneers, head tilts etc.

Asking because it occured to me that I find it an engaging and attractive characteristic while on the other hand finding symmetrical expressions more open and genuine, or at least less nuanced. Wondering if there's something like a left brain right brain factor or if it's just learned behaviour and unconscious imitation.

I'm not sure there are any examples of a non deliberate use of asymmetrical facial expression aside from tics. It always implies one is consciously putting on a face.

Downthread I asked about upgrading PCs; I hope to get some advice now on upgrading cars.

Well, very specifically just one component--push start.

I have a 5 year old compact SUV. No complaints whatsoever, especially since I don't drive much. But the one feature I wish it had is keyless/push start. The nonretractable key takes up more space in my pocket. More inconveniently, I can't just lazily leave it in my pocket and have the car's door auto unlock when I'm nearby, and then push a button to start without having to take the key out of my pocket, insert into ignition, etc.

I know, first world problems. In my defense, like 90% of the culture war thread is first world problems.

I did a bit of light googling, and it looks like there are after market kits you can buy and self install. Best Buy had a promo just a couple of days ago selling a Compustar 2-war remote start for $140. But the YouTube video I saw was extremely intimidating. Forget about swapping out CPUs, this looked 10x more complicated!

So I'm definitely going to a shop for this. My questions for the DIY community are:

  1. I don't need remote start. I just want push start & keyless entry. Any suggestions on reputable brand or model of the kit I should look into?

  2. Is this after market modification even recommended? Since it deals with unlocking and ignition, I feel it carries much more risks than changing the audio system or something. It'd suck if a faulty product or installation caused the car to crash (which I assume is extremely unlikely but not impossible...?), or more likely, maybe cause me to be completely locked out in the dark and cold one day, or the latest Kia boys to buy some USB stick to take all Compustar-modified cars to joyrides. I guess I'm asking if this after-market tech is mature enough to be trustworthy.

  3. What's a fair price you think to pay for this? Say if I buy the parts, would you expect $300 for the labor? $500?

Thank you amigos.

Oh thank God, I thought you were about to buy a new car over the key shape

On the other hand, if there's ever a time to do something like that it's now. The used car market has gone mad. I could literally sell my car for more than I paid for it.

Meat. How do you know you're getting the good stuff and not some ultra-processed slop filled with cheap, rotting bits o' this and that?

It seems like this choice is a spectrum.

On one hand, you have the raw stuff: steak cuts, chicken thighs, pork chops, etc. Things that look like meat. Here, you can discern quality by figuring out the origin.

On the other hand, you have spam and spam-like products. It's probably sat in that can for months. It's probably a mix of all sorts of meats and meat-things, along with a bunch of chemicals that aren't too good for your body.

But what's in between? Like, if I buy ham at the store, how can I discern whether it falls more into the ultra-processed category or rather into the raw stuff category?

(I'm trying to be more systemic about my diet and part of the equation seems to be minimizing ultra-processed foods. This is easy with stuff like chips, sweets, soda, etc. but not so much with meat.)

Edit: My thanks for the excellent advice!

I just stopped buying processed meat at all. Sometimes miss corned beef, but it made me realize that the majority of processed meats were just a byproduct of needing to store it without freezers. Like sauerkraut for the fall cabbage crop.

Honestly I'm going off of packaged meat entirely the way the quality of chicken has been dropping. DIYing the whole thing has kinda spoiled me on store bought stuff.

the majority of processed meats were just a byproduct of needing to store it without freezers. Like sauerkraut for the fall cabbage crop.

Well yeah. But the reason for developing those techniques doesn't change that they make meat delicious.

Eh, I've kinda gone off the salt content of stuff like bacon. Although right after posting I had some great Italian sausages, which tasted better than anything I cooked with a pig from the same litter, so who knows.

Hey, if you don't like it by all means don't eat it. We all have things we don't like, after all. I'm just saying even though the techniques of curing/smoking meat have outlived the need for food preservation, doesn't mean we should by any means stop doing it.

Find a butcher you trust, get meat from them. How do you find a butcher you trust? That's a harder answer. I would look the quality of their meats, you should be able to tell visually to some extent (e.g. by looking at steaks for good marbling). Buy some and taste it, determine for yourself how good the product is. Get to know the butcher and talk to them about how they source meat. A good butcher will care about the quality of their product, and you should be able to pick up on that when talking to them.

All that said, I have a local butcher I trust and I don't always go to her shop to get meat. Sometimes I just get meat at the supermarket because I'm already there, and it's easier. But if you're concerned about the quality, finding a butcher you trust is the best way.

Good question, difficult answers. I’m assuming you’re in the US, because everyone on the internet is. This makes my number one tip more difficult: Find a butcher that still slaughters their own animals. If you generally like the quality of their meat, buy it. When in doubt, ask them.

More generally, buying things with a clear name definition can help. Parma, Black Forrest, etc. are protected and while that doesn’t guarantee everything, it might help.

Most generally, use your noggin. Ham, both dried and cooked (aka Prosciutto vs. Honey Glazed or whatever, should be from whole animal. I’m not going to get into what is healthier, but the difference between that and Bologna-style deli meat or any form of salami should be apparent in taste and texture. If it is mandatory, look at the label.

In general, meat that is not bought raw is probably quite a ways towards that processed label of yours. The one exception is air cured things, but even there, salts or lyes are often used to help in preserving. If you put some raw meat on a hook for 6 months, you’re probably not going to want to eat it.

My two options are the following:

a) Buy expensive meat directly from local farmers where you can look the cows in the eyes or

b) Get whatever's convenient and don't look at all, just be glad it's something to eat.

Choices are usually dictated by the state of my wallet.

On the other hand, you have spam and spam-like products. It's probably sat in that can for months. It's probably a mix of all sorts of meats and meat-things, along with a bunch of chemicals that aren't too good for your body.

Hormel's Spam™ is perfectly fine meat made from pork rump and shoulder, salt, potato starch (to prevent the infamous gelatin at the top of the can), sugar and sodium nitrate. It really doesn't deserve the reputation it gets.

Of all the readily accessible preserved meats, Spam is probably the least processed option.

It's also very good when cooked in a heavy skillet or flat top.

Yes. Slice, pan fry, enjoy.

to prevent the infamous gelatin at the top of the can

But it's the best part of spam! I used to scoop it off every canful back when canned ham humanitarian aid was a thing in Russia.

I remember some posts at the previous place talking about an Islamist (Taliban?) leader that was radicalized when he studied in the US and was horrified by American attitudes to casual sex, homosexuality etc.

Does anyone remember the guy's name and have a link and/or more details?

Well, he was radicalized by things like church youth dances. Truly the most chaste and proper monitored mingling opportunities for young adults. Sayyid was of course horrified and disgusted by women in long skirts dancing with men who belong to church social clubs. But I don't think that acceptance of homosexuality was on anyone's agenda among these people.

Where’d you see this? Wikipedia only says that he condemned the licentious West, but doesn’t really give any examples.

It does sound like this guy was quite an idealist.

In 1948 or 1949 he attended a church social in Greeley, Colorado. Here are his thoughts:

The dance hall was illuminated with red, blue and a few white lights. It convulsed to the tunes of the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs. Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion.

Which is a less disgusted and condemning than I recalled. But anyways, it is silly that he thinks a 1940s American church social "convulsed" with "seductive passion". He spent the rest of his life bitterly complaining about all aspects of American culture and saying that opposition to all white people must be the cornerstone of the Egyptian nationalist movement.

I was especially unimpressed by the part where he asserted an Islamist country would need no government.

and was horrified by American attitudes to casual sex, homosexuality etc.

And by the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside".

This seems like the right person, thanks!

Can someone who understands computer explain how kiwifarms managed to come back with even its .net address intact?

I thought they'd had their domain registration stolen and were being null-routed by all the backbone ISPs, but I can access them reliably again. Is the owner just a wizard, or is there something to the old "the internet routes around censorship" line?

I've never seen a single organization hold up under the full weight of the blob before. It's honestly awe-inspiring to watch.

Funny thing is: at least one Russian ISPs blocks kiwifarms too.

Might that just be general censorship with Russia being an authoritarian regime that’s increasingly keen on cutting itself off from the outside world?

It's not a random site site chess.com, blocking kiwifarms is antithetical with "keen on cutting itself off from the outside", it's a world practice

KF was blocked by Roskomnadzor (Russia's FCC equivalent) for hosting an meme of Santa saying "ho-ho-holocaust" in 2020.

They got their registration registered with a reliable provider, and as for being null-routed it was either a rogue employee or more likely Null himself fucked up lol. You gotta remember, it's just one guy flying by the seat of his pants. Even this website has more cumulative competence I suspect (though idk, maybe Null also has a secret cabal of nerds advising him).

it was either a rogue employee or more likely Null himself fucked up lol.

According to Null, the problem resolved itself without his intervention somehow. Liz Fong Jones did take credit for somehow making a top level provider add an exception just for kf so make of that what you will.

Damn the new culture war thread has 500 comments in one day. Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.

Is it mostly people arguing with Points, or did I miss something?

Edit: yeah, a variety of spice

I wouldn't say fears of death are unfounded, if anything they are the voice of the reasonable. New users stumbling their way into the motte sub not being a thing anymore is still THE major issue.

It fills me with great joy to see that the motte is doing well but as the cliche goes nothing good lasts forever. Until there is a substantial amount of evidence that the forum in its current state is sustainable, I'm going to reserve my celebrations.

Like it or not we are still part of a much looser marseyverse network. Even in the old world the /r/drama to /r/themotte pipeline was probably responsible for more user flow than anyone wants to admit. I don't have any of the data I'd need to prove it but there were a couple rdrama posts to some post here this week and I'd put money on that being responsible for the comment uptick.

Redscarepod's reddit I s on the crossroads where they must choose to accept the cappy's help or perish.

I feel like it'd be useful to have a "who's linking here" news section (pingbacks, blogs used to call them, right?). I like knowing where people are coming from if there are any weird shifts.

I wouldn't say fears of death are unfounded

It absolutely was. Most of the activity always came from regulars churning out content. I'd bet The Motte could probably be active indefinitely even if you banned everyone but the top 100 users.

FWIW, across /r/slatestarcodex, /r/TheMotte, and /r/theschism

  1. The top 20 posters authored 14% of comments.

  2. The top 100 posters authored 35% of comments.

  3. The top 200 posters authored 48% of comments.

  4. The top 1000 posters authored 79% of comments.

  5. The top 2000 posters authored 89% of comments.

Source

Obviously this says nothing about the quality of the content.

New redditors stumbling into the motte was by far the biggest problem with the old site, worse than anything the admins did. Every week was just a constant cycle of "'how dare you,' he explained" that got in the way of any discussion.

With the chaff came the wheat.

At-least there was a pipeline that didn't rely entirely on word of mouth or preexisting knowledge of the rationalist sphere.

Nonetheless I'm hopeful in that the forum started off with a good seed userbase and that so many people were willing to make the move with the subreddit.

Why do we have "private profiles" here? It seems to serve no function other than to make it obnoxious to look up someone's comments. Given that everyone can see your comments anyway right there in the threads, it hardly does anything for privacy.

Why do we have "private profiles" here?

The answer to almost every question about how the site presently operates is "because that is the codebase Zorba inherited." A number of alterations have been made by Zorba and a small army of volunteers, and all of it is well over my head, but there is a long list of code requests in the repository, as I understand it.

I’ve heard it said we shouldn’t worry about fertility because eventually those with pro-fertile genes will even things out. But this isn’t true, isn’t it? Pro-fertile genes are just “sexual desire”. The modern world takes the people with the most fertile genes and makes them infertile through artificial sexual outlets (casual sex, porn) and artificial intimacy outlets (parasocial relationships, pity politics). So there’s no optimistic evolutionary solution to infertility, there’s only a cultural solution. Or am I missing something? There’s genes for wanting to ejaculate when seeing a woman, but no gene for “wanting to ejaculate inside a woman and wait nine months to create a child”.

I'm still grappling with this body of issues myself. I think declining fertility, increasing male sexlessness, worsening gender relations are all serious issues that the mainstream is just burying their head in the sand in the face of. And it seems to affect just about all countries above a certain affluence threshold.

I suppose the steelman of the idea you are talking about is that;

Pro fertility memes can outbreed pro fertility genes. In a very low resolution view, the sex-negative Christian right might outbreed sex-positive left, regardless of how much drive you have to have sex, you still need to have and raise children.

Human societies compete on genes and memes (or inversely genes and memes are both competing evolutionarily and sometimes they butt heads). It doesn't matter if your tribe has the strongest warrior genetics if the other tribe invents gunpowder before you.

What ultimately scares me is that for a variety of reasons, I don't think a pro fertility society can be returned to (sans massive upheaval). The sex positive meme can just capture the minds of your children. It's encoded in almost literally all of pop culture.

A pro fertility society is easy in theory. Just ban abortion, contraception, LBGT, and pornography. Not going to happen without a totaliatarian regime with the current technology level, but if that's what would be required then it's tautological that the low fetility in modernity peoples will only survive in such a regime.

Not going to happen without a totaliatarian regime with the current technology level

The bigger problem is cultural.

illiberal is not synonymous with totalitarian. Many societies maintained and maintain bans and taboos against all of those things without totalitarianism. For example: I think it would be very bad for the cause if you simply removed any ability to sue for anti-LGBT discrimination. I think the lack of that protection alone disincentivizes a lot of activism in less progressive countries.

The issue is whether Western societies are willing to tolerate such actions.

I don’t really think there are pro-fertility genes except for “sexual desire” and “potency”. Sex negative is in fact more culturally fertile because such people tie sex to family formation through propaganda. So in this sense, yes, the conservative memeplex can outbreed the progressive one. But once they have children they lose some large percentage to the progressive memeplex, and conservatives don’t produce enough children to cancel this effect (unlike the Amish).

I agree on sex positive mind virus point.

We already have the horny gene. But we could have higher time preference or a stronger paternal love for children or greater disgust for gamers and wine aunts. Or maybe just a stronger proclivity to religious thinking.

The selection process can be cultural too, e.g. subpopulations with memes resisting modern anti-fertility technology, such as the Amish or fundamentalist Christians/Jews/Muslims out breeding all the atheists and feminists.

I’ve heard it said we shouldn’t worry about fertility because eventually those with pro-fertile genes will even things out.

I think there's very little risk humanity will go extinct because of this. Evolution will find some way to keep humans alive. But we could have big problems with declining population before we get there. But I also think we'll probably perfect human cloning before that is an top level issue. For now, some more tax credits for having children and providing government funded day cares are probably fine solutions for the next ~20 years.

the desire to feel a family would be a gene governing in-group preference, and corporations are already adept at finding ways to give consumers this feeling without having a real family.

Notice how everyone is now part of all sorts of "communities" (either tied to their immutable characteristics or online fandom) that aren't actual communities?

The latter totally exist. We dress them up as socially acceptable proxies like "reliability" and all the other traits which make for an attractive mate.

Think of it as an economics problem. If most of the human race is leaving $20 bills on the ground, someone gets to pick it up. It doesn't require a specific gene to be flipped--if there is any reasonable combination that will help, it will naturally be selected for more representation in the next generation.

There’s genes for wanting to ejaculate when seeing a woman, but no gene for “wanting to ejaculate inside a woman and wait nine months to create a child”.

There are genes for everything, if you squint hard enough. Liking children and big families can be as heritable as any typical behavioral trait, which is to say, moderately-to-strongly heritable. Then again, that's not how heritability works: the environment determines how specifically slight biases in neural wiring and biochemistry will play out, projected onto the adult behavioral repertoir. It's just that we cannot very well control environmental cues.

Some people can. Some cultures are better at this than others, more austere and accepting of paternalistic authority and explicit social engineering. What will happen in practice, I believe, is that the observed contemporary selection on traits genetically correlated with high fertility (low IQ, ADHD, high BMI, high time preference, addictions... undesirable stuff, to be blunt) will somewhat degrade the average quality of the population – and then cease, as benefits of childlessness grow, contraception becomes easier and technical surrogates of sex and companionship improve; the very traits currently making them «genetically fertile» will flip-flop into encouraging functional infertility, without any change in those traits' biological foundation.

Meanwhile, traditionalists who succeed at dodging the secularization pipeline will grow, polish their cultural and genetic adaptations to self-sufficiency, and eventually constitute the majority of humans. Then, analyzing the general population, one will see that traits promoting adherence to traditionalism – heritable too, of course – are genetically correlated with fertility, despite being orthogonal to any sex-related behavior or aspects of reproductive biology. Speculating further: it'll be stuff like rigidity of emotional attachments, tolerance for noise and cramped conditions, fascination with children, visceral distrust of strangers, perhaps even disgust and fear of companion animals, high clannishness, high agreeableness, lack of open-ended curiosity, and general mental health (whether or not contemporary P-factor amounts to a real thing).

This is, IMO, the parsimonious and conservative model which isn't discussed enough.

Incidentally, I think this is also a good example in favor of @tailcalled's Phenotypic Null Hypothesis argument, which was poorly received here.

A more systematic overview of the field can be found here.

Saying you shouldn't worry about fertility because the fertile will repopulate the earth is like saying you shouldn't worry about a hypothetical hard eugenicism regime sterilising people, because after all they encourage other people to breed.

It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of. A sane and sensible person will dismiss such words as munitions fired in a 5th generation memetic war of genocide in all honesty.

*Edited to fix phone typos.

It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of. A sane and sensible person will dismiss such words as munitions fired in a 5th generation memetic war of genocide in all honesty.

Exactly. There's a powerful drive to remove leftist genes (yeah, yeah, I'm extremely oversimplifying it) from the gene pool, and that's a good thing that we all should support bipartisanly.

Ah but it's not so simple. Msny genes and many interactions with the environment.

Maybe you'd be removed from the gene pool too if society encouraged you to drink leaded petrol as a child, and while that's an exaggeration the selection bottleneck of people able to withstand all of society is very worrying.

It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of.

In that horrific (or funny) podcast with Tyler Cowen feminist author Srinivasan basically says the quiet part out loud: that worrying about fertility is and should be seen as right wing and therefore suspicious, and people shouldn't do that because anyways immigration is a better solution (conveniently, as you can guess by her name, Srinivasan is an immigrant herself).

So it's not a problem but, if it is, you're not allowed to attempt to fix it in the most direct way, you have to actually accelerate some of the negative features of low-fertility states you don't like. Those're your options. Convenient for the other side no?

Given that I see similar tendencies elsewhere on the Left, I'm not inclined to trust that "don't worry about fertility" is something people only come to after hardcore, objective analysis.

We know this isn't true because fertility is about 30% heritable, which means there has to be some genotypes that increase fertility unless the studies that have found this result are wrong.

More important than sexual desire is probably just liking children. There are genes for liking being around taking care of children, as anyone who has seen a young woman around small children knows.

no gene for “wanting to ejaculate inside a woman and wait nine months to create a child”

Sure but there are genes for personality traits that, in the current social and cultural environment, make you more inclined to make babies. And who knows, maybe they are the basis for future adaptations that will eventually evolve into direct utilitarian urge to maximize one's inclusive genetic fitness.

The personality traits that used to lead to fertility in the past, like a love for cute /neotonous things, a desire to be a “parent”, all now have cheaper and most accessible satisfactions, like watching anime and owning a stuffed animal or pet. I don’t know of a personality trait that leads to fertility as its most expedient satisfaction

I don't think having stuffed animals and pets comes close to satisfying the maternal instinct.

I do. And I'll demonstrate with a personal example.

My sister has wanted a baby very, very badly for as long as anyone can remember(I would expect her to have about 4 children and have well founded reasons that I don't think need to be explained in any significant detail to be considered reasonable). My parents thought getting her a cute dog would be a good way to scratch that urge at the beginning of adolescence but no, she regularly got mistaken for being the mom of, say, little cousins or occasionally kids she was babysitting... even in the presence of that cute dog.

Having 3+ children is not the done thing in her social circle and she went against her in-laws pressure, and to a lesser extent, our mom's, to take actions which militate in the direction of having 3+ children, largely because that is what she wants to do. If this personality trait is genetic(and, anecdata, but one cousin decided to practice his French by moving to Louisiana and getting a job at a Cajun-French revival preschool, turning down an internship in his chosen field to do so, and I occupy a volunteer position coaching fundamentalist boys, and mom's an elementary school teacher, and one aunt will nearly get into knife fights to hold the baby at social gatherings).

Yes, it's an anecdatum. But I don't know that anyone has actually done any high quality studies, so YMMV.

Pro-fertile genes are just “sexual desire”.

I would dispute this. Lots of people really want to raise children- not dogs, but specifically children, and not 'have sex' but specifically raise children- and I would be very curious to see if there's any genes or sets of genes overrepresented among the subset of parents of large families, elementary school teachers, coaches, and scoutmasters. I would also be curious to see if housewives who have prevously been teachers have a higher fertility rate.

There's lots of women who go way out of their way to get the opportunity to babysit and a smaller but still very substantial number of men who go out of their way to take youth mentorship roles, and I'd have to imagine these people are probably underrepresented among both the extremely promiscuous and among terminal coomers.

It's totally possible that outside of certain conservative religious groups society does a bad job of guiding these people into actually reproducing. But the idea that pro-fertile genes are indistinguishable from just being horny seems pre-falsified.