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PaperclipPerfector  23hr ago (text post)   578 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

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Due to various circumstances, I sometimes (about 6-8 times a year usually) find myself traveling to various cities in the US and having a free weekend afternoon with no plans. I usually just went for a walk in a park, or to a museum, but lately my walking capacity has been diminishing (after an hour or so I sometimes start getting various unpleasant feels) and with the museums the ongoing wokification is starting to get on my nerves. So, I am looking for new ideas - what could be a fun way to spend an afternoon in a new city? I am an introvert, and the free afternoon usually comes after several days of interacting with a lot of people (that's usually the reason why I got there in the first place), which means my social battery is near depleted and anything involving meeting any new people and talking to them is just too much. And unfortunately I am completely indifferent to most sports. Obviously there's always spending the whole time reading or watching some movies, but I can do it at home too, so I want somehow to leverage being outside in the city. Any fresh ideas?

Depending on where you are this might not be an option but I usually go to some restaurant or café in the city center with outdoor seating and do some people watching while drinking a beer, eating or having a coffee. If there is a waterfront you can also go there.

Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics? Or generalize those tactics to the magic or tech or whatever makes the setting unique.

I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.

Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics?

That is an impressively vague question and one which I can only really answer by saying "yes" and "more than I could list in a single comment".

To start with there's the entire world of tabletop historical wargaming, which (as it says on the tin) is supposed to encourage historically accurate/authentic gameplay. Now, sometimes you end up with games like Team Yankee, which somehow managed to make a Cold War game look more like a Napoleonic one thanks to a business decision to use a miniature scale that is too large for the rules. Games I would recommend include Chain of Command for WW2, Warmaster is good for a fairly wide period of real world history, as well as fantasy. Speaking of fantasy, the Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth tabletop game from Games Workshop is actually great and does an excellent job of capturing the "heroic" but still quite grounded combat you'd expect from that kind of story and out of all the stuff I list here is most likely to be the kind of thing you're looking for. There are tonnes of other good games but those are just ones from the top of my head.

In terms of computer games you're slightly more limited but there's still a pretty decent selection, in terms of realism/authenticity I struggle to think of much that can top the Field of Glory/Combat Mission/Graviteam games. The last two are really not games for the faint of heart though, it turns out that in our modern age, real world tactics are actually quite complicated and unintuitive.

I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.

This is what really killed my interest in that game, it's all so incredibly over the top. It's more than a little silly how everyone seems to be able to do these incredibly over the top attacks and have these incredible abilities and yet it is still somehow a standard issue medieval fantasy world.

GURPS and ACKS generally try to be realistic. Regarding spears, GURPS Martial Arts has guidance for emulating multiple historical styles of spear fighting, and both GURPS Martial Arts and the ACKS 2 Revised Rulebook have rules for setting a spear in the ground against a charge.

Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI? For me, it just kind of seems "internet-of-shit"-like, both in that it often seems like a gratuitous application of technology and that it seems to combine multiple of the internet's worst problems.

Sure enough, I eventually tried to make an account for Claude, because I thought it might help me procrastinate more effectively. Despite Anthropic giving lip-service to privacy, they not only require a unique phone number per account, but wouldn't accept my VoIP numbers. And I couldn't even get that far in the process, without allowing Google's third-party javascript! Why not just make people go through a dozen recaptchas, if it's actually about spam!? I then decided to see if I could make an OpenAI account, but the page kept giving errors, even with a bunch of third-party javascript allowed.

Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI?

Because what would I use it for? None of the common use cases I hear people here put forth for AI are anything I do with any frequency.

It's not about spam. It's that the models they give you access to for free are expensive to run and they throttle you pretty fast. They don't want people creating tons of free accounts to circumvent the limits.

They should say that, rather than claim it's about spam. Also, don't they limit model choice and some proxy for "compute-per-conversation," anyway? What's the multiplier for the utility of n accounts, over 1 account?

Is there a clear quantification of cost/man-hour-replaced? Proton charges $9.99/month for proof-reading and shortening emails, which seems steep for such basic (presumably low-token-per-use) functionality, but they have to make things E2EE and their use-case doesn't really allow limiting per-month usage...

I was about to say that I've never used AI, but then I realized that would be a lie - I've used AI before to put together a long string of fluffy bullshit for work in order to save myself the aggravation of putting together said fluffy bullshit.

...and I will likely use it again this week to, yet again, put together a few paragraphs of fluffy bullshit to appease the MBA types in my office.

I haven’t and I don’t know what I would use it for.

That really depends on what you mean by "non-toy AI".

Do things like AI noise reduction and music stem separation count? I use both regularly. DeepL is very convenient for translating random languages to English.

I don't use LLMs as I have little use for very limited tools that require massaging long prompts that might or might not kinda-sorta do something helpful if I spend a lot of effort at it.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on the Iliad, Dialectic of Enlightenment and McLuhan's The Classical Trivium. Picking up Nudge: The Final Edition.

I've decided in celebration of the show being cancelled to re-read the Wheel of Time. It is just as aggravating, annoying, lengthy, and wonderful as I remember.

Didn't care for the first couple chapters, and given how much everyone complains about the series I've never really heard anything good enough about it to bother committing to all that.

I got to the middle of Use of Weapons and I am kinda doubting if I'm going to finish it. I've pretty much guessed the main reveal already (it became so painfully obvious at some point that I broke down and checked it and yes, it was exactly what I thought) and the story is somehow not that engaging for me, and in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases. I know a lot of people like The Culture series, would you advise me to persevere or try another book or just look elsewhere entirely? I read Player of Games before, and it was kinda obvious how it's going to end (I mean you don't set up the whole thing to lose at the end, right?) and there also were a reveal which I thought was kinda meh but overall it was ok, not super-excellent but also I didn't feel like I need to force myself to go on. With this one, I am kinda struggling.

I found that one a bit mid and kept skipping the flashback chapters.

My favorite one so far is Surface Detail. Player of Games was decent, I thought. I also enjoyed Consider Phlebas as a good introduction.

Definitely don't read the short story book.

People here say they liked Matter but I thought it was snoozeville and gave up after 3 chapters.

I'm reading Look to Windward right now that's going okay.

I've been reading the murderbot series after watching a few episodes of the show and deciding I liked it and didn't want to wait.

After watching the series and reading all the books I can definitely tell the books are better. Some cliches are there for a reason, I guess.

Alongside a re-read of Reverend Insanity, at o3's suggestion, I'm halfway through The Outside by Ada Hoffman.

The core conceit of the novel should be like crack to me. AI Gods? Said Gods fighting against eldritch abominations? Sign me the fuck up, I had independently considered writing my own novel along those lines before finding this one.

Unfortunately, the real deal is incredibly mid. The protagonist is a capital-A Autistic genius woman, written by an autistic female author, who hasn't heard of "show, don't tell".

If I have to read another line about her sensory issues and inability to function in normal or posthuman society, I'll lose it.

Beyond that, the pace is achingly slow, and the prose not very tight for the most part.

I'd call it a 6/10 novel, barely worth reading. I'm just out of the kind of hard scifi I normally enjoy, they just don't write those fast enough.

Still on The Perfect Heresy, which I'm determined to finish tonight or tomorrow so I can move on to something more interesting. Medieval history just doesn't seem to do it for me.

I just finished the United States Chemical Safety Board Final Report on the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery Exploision. I vaguely remember as a kid when this happened, but I had never realized it was the same company that caused the massive oil spill just a few years later.

The report hits all the standard beats for this genre, penny-pinching management, shoddy maintenance, "procedures" that exist only on paper and which may or may not even work, but all of it is cranked-up to 11 for 300 pages.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that at one point the call came down from London for all facilities to cut fixed costs by 25%. Most BP refineries realized that this was insane and didn't do it, but Texas City really did cut 25% and ended up running the facility into the ground.

CSB reports are pretty fun, if morbid reads, especially since they're a lot more willing to point fingers (contrast NTSB).

I will caution that they tend to put a pretty heavy thumb on the scales to favor as wide-ranging a possible conclusion as available from the evidence: even their own videos make it sound more like BP (or Amaco's) process engineering played a much bigger role than the page count would. The report notes that there were previous incidents involving the blowdown system, but most of these were from before the 2004 budget cuts, and some were from before the merger. Counterfactuals are hard, but with that bad a process design, and that level of normalization of deviance, I'm not sure better trained or less tired staff would have done much more than changed the body count for whatever inevitable incident happened.

I'm currently reading a deposition where the head of safety at the facility freely admitted that he had never actually looked at 29 CFR 1910.119.

I also really appreciate the one victim's mother who hired her own lawyer seperate from the ones representing the other plaintiffs just so he could ask if they knew that one victim in particular and to berate them especially hard for their failures.

Ah, you've read deeper into the incident than I have, then. Apologies.

Daring (Pax Arcana Book 2), by Elliott James.

@Titanium Butterfly, City was quite thought-provoking! Not at all surprising coming from Simak, and I'm really glad that someone has dedicated themselves to getting his stuff published. I've probably read at least one book that was directly influenced by it--don't remember the exact name of it, maybe Manta's Gift, but it was by Timothy Zahn.

Glad you liked it. Simak was so far ahead of his time. Particularly the part where everyone goes off to try another mode of existence and nobody comes back stays with me. But the whole book has such a vibe to it and I think it ages well. Definitely one I'll be getting my kids to read.

A few years ago I was up in Seattle on business and found a first edition in fantastic shape at Twice Sold Tales. Very happy with it.

Meanwhile I'm on book 2 of 12 Miles Below. So far it feels not quite as good as the first but definitely willing to give it time. Thanks again for the rec.

Why is that the bars with the oldest clientele are by far the most boisterous in the UK? I'm surrounded by pensioners playing weird card games, and they're bringing the house down haha.

They don't give a shit. Their social circle is other pensioners, and what's gonna happen if they make a drunken ass of themselves in public? They're not going to be fired, they're not going to be shunned by their social circle, they're not going to deny themselves future opportunities. They basically can do whatever they want (within limits of the law, presumably) and not care. So they are doing that.

Bars/pubs with an older clientele tend to be regulars who mostly all know each other, instead of small groups of young people there to talk with their friends. Same thing in the US, at least in terms of being welcoming. I once dipped into Chicago neighbourhood dive to charge my phone, and an old lady came over with a shot and said "now, son, we don't like to see people sitting alone here, less they want to." Spent two hours yukking it up with the old-timers telling me about the good old union welding days.

The younger blokes are socially stunted, simple as.

sips craft beer while googling "how to join conversation at pub"

Is the art market in trouble? First I see Patrick Boyle's video https://youtube.com/watch?v=dvcg1ytmtVA and afterwards I start seeing youtube sponsorships everywhere for masterworks.com which is clearly a service in search of a greater fools.

I would hesitate to use targeted advertising as evidence for any particular trend.

Does Mr. Boyle have some special insight into the art world?

What are the odds of a global recession given ai spending. Where's your Ed at by Ed Zitron is a decently rigorous left leaning newsletter that covers ai and his posts made me worry about a real collapse. Large firms like Microsoft are already pulling out by not allowing openai billions in credit and Apple came out with a paper against reasoning models not actually thinking.

The vast majority of comments on twitter about the paper are negative, ofc not one engages with the actual paper. The ones that do mostly agree. Given the s and p 500 being so tech heavy, tech being so ai happy and ai not providing results, is a recession likely? Ed's reporting states that openais dependent on smaller firms that are taking loans for their datacentres. He details this out better than me so please do check it.

The extreme amounts of money aren't justified given current rate of progress. Llms and their usage has gotten better but if it were worth a trillion dollars, the consensus would have been far more unanimous. Plus every single anthropic employee appearing publicly including their ceo isn't doing this any favor. You hear them say that this will take away all jobs etc etc, agi is here in 2026, which 's a year late compared to openais estimates.

I like llms, people get a lot of help from them but Ed's reporting and Microsoft and Apple conceding ground looks bad.

I don't think it will lead to a global recession, since it isn't even a real business making real money. I think it will lead to a recession in the tech industry though. The problem as I see it is that they've probably reached the limit of how much cash they can shovel into research and development without seeing any real results in terms of people actually paying for the product, and so much has been invested thus far that the product will have to be fairly expensive to recoup those costs and actually generate a profit on the whole venture. The whole business model relies on them being able to give it away for free, and companies seeing enough potential that the productivity gains make it worth it for them to start paying. But while you hear about billions of dollars tech companies invest into it, you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases. The whole thing is unsustainable.

Keep in mind that single sectors leading to huge recessions are rare. The tech bubble in 2000 is one example, but that was a relatively mild recession, and the amount the overall economy was invested into tech at the time was far beyond what we're seeing today with AI. Back then any company that was somehow related to computers was getting massive financial investments, and ladies' investment clubs were investing in IPOs. Most of the AI bubble is centered around a few big players, and big players see stock price dips due to localized circumstances all the time, we just don't think too much about it. I used to work in the energy industry, which saw pretty big collapses in 1999, 2014, and 2019, but they didn't lead to national recessions, let alone global ones.

For another example, the US housing market actually crashed in 2006, but and it did cause a global recession, but only because the mortgages had been securitized and the banks had a ton of exposure. It took a full two years for this to play out, and no one payed much attention to the crash at first because it was initially presumed to be localized to the mortgage industry. And then there's the farm crisis in 1985, which wreaked absolute havoc in the Upper Midwest, particularly Iowa. Farmers were committing suicide in the barn, having lost farms that were in the family for over a century, while the banks that foreclosed on them became insolvent due the inability to resell the land. A new chapter in the US bankruptcy code was created specifically to deal with family farms. Yet the entire thing only gained national notice once musicians started raising awareness and holding benefit concerts. I see an AI slowdown having local effects, with limited influence on the wider economy.

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