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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2264 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

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.

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Has psychiatry adopted to that there are highly online people now and even "normal" life or many jobs necessarily require smartphones? They could have developed some screening model which operates on patients message history (doesn't even require a LLM to do it).

Has discussion died out in the web at large?

I'm on X, Instagram, Threads, reddit, discord, 4chan, literally anywhere I can go, and people just don't seem to chat much anymore. Or rather, what I mean is that people rarely have long conversations about the things they love. I know that passionate people still exist because they make fascinating Youtube videos, Substack articles, and Twitter threads, and I've had conversations of deep interest with friends in private, but I can't get these to occur in public spaces anymore despite my attempts. Even joining communities for the things I like doesn't work -- all the discords are dead.

It's all so strange, considering the internet I grew up with had a very opposite mindset. If you browsed GameFAQs for example, you'd constantly run into people who had a very deep knowledge of whatever game was being talked about, and they'd casually list off stuff like enemy drops and spawn rates because they had it memorized, to the point it was hard not to passively learn things. You could start a thread with any random question, and it would get at least 2 random nerds together to discuss the game in detail for several posts and deepen your knowledge. This just doesn't seem to happen anymore. Back in the day, even if a person didn't like a game they'd usually give you the reasons WHY they didn't like it, such as "the battle system is too easy to exploit" or the level scaling is bad. Nowadays you rarely get that.

Does anyone know what I mean? Broaching a topic like this is awkward because there's always the sense of, "Nah you're just nostalgic! You're old! You're looking in the wrong places!" But the more I explore, the more it seems things really have changed. Like maybe even the concept of "fanbases" and "fandoms" is actually outdated, as the number of people who care enough to talk about a piece of art once they've finished it is a tiny minority. Like we're all familiar with how bored adults binge watch Netflix shows while zoned out, and forget all about them soon after, but is this actually happening with games, movies, anime, etc. now too? Could this be why nobody's eager to talk about things? I really struggle to make sense of all this.

I think it’s two things: school and work eat up more time for young people, and algorithms have gotten too brain-frying and addictive. So those ages 13-25 are more stressed than even a decade ago, and at an early age they’ve been driven into low-intellectual low-discussion online spaces. There was once a time you could have long discussions on even YouTube, like over weeks continuing the same conversation, but they changed the design to make it impossible long ago. The design on Instagram also actively prevents discussion. The new Reddit design has also heavily discouraged discussion. For addiction, think about how different the YouTube experience was in 2010 compared to today, not just shorts vs video, but the flashy thumbnails and formulas every large channel uses to maximize engagement. All those techniques increase the sense of novelty and reduce attention span, which winds up making reading and discussion laborious for zoomers.

There aren’t actually any private alternatives to the “old internet”. The closest are group chats and discords, which are qualitatively different and possess other challenges to maintaining discussion. Most of the internet that would have entered discussion in the past (to discuss news / social issues / politics / whatever) engage with the more surface-level apps like Instagram and tiktok and parts of x, usually for being performative and social and “engaging” and curating a vibe to reap social rewards — not really focused on discussion. And then there are the smaller users who just hang around these accounts. Even for film — why discuss film when you could post your lettrbox and put it in your social media profile to get laid? This appears to be the prevailing trend.

Also, I think a lot of boys who would be involved in online discussion are addicted to video games, which have gotten more addicting over the years, and are also probably making memes instead of discussing — at one point, memes and discussion were interlinked in image boards, but now you can post these in apps and gain a small following.

tl;dr cultural decline

There is a lot more incentive to produce now. Back in the day, high effort video essay style content was not a good idea because your odds of being rewarded were essentially nothing. It made more sense to post it on a forum. Now it's the opposite. The only way to have people engage with your ideas is by content-ifying it. And you can get money out of it now, too, as with algorithms that improve discovery of small creators, everyone has reason to follow this path

Lots of confounding issues - forums have died, CONTENT has risen, people hate interacting with strangers without derailing everything over Palestine or whatever.

The current ecosystem means the same thoughts will be rewarded better if packaged as CONTENT.

Anything like this that still exists on the internet has to be protected from "the web at large". These sorts of things worked in the past due to the filtering of all internet users for for smarter, more tech savvy, PC owners. Anything today that gains a reputation as someplace quality discussions might be taking place will be face a number of dangers from people and groups who would have been filtered out in the old system: bots, paid shills, culture war crusaders, and people who interact with the internet entirely through their smart phone. This has forced the older, higher quality users onto largely private Discord servers, Onion sites, or fora that otherwise apply a filtering mechanism locally, either through vigorous manual enforcement, like this place, invitation only membership, paid accounts, or other equally effective systems. While I don't think its been explicitly investigated or analyzed, I think its largely the case now that the dangers that the new cohorts of internet users present to thoughtful discussion spaces significantly outweigh the potential losses of smaller numbers of new quality contributors.

You may have had a point if @roche were talking about the internet as it existed in 1993 or so, but somehow I doubt that is the case. In the early days, there were hippies who thought that the ease of communication with like-minded strangers would usher in a new era of peace and understanding, as traditional barriers would come down. The nerds who ran the thing and comprised the bulk of the user base nodded along in agreement. A few years later the internet reached 20% of households and any ideas that this would be the case had vanished almost completely. The early adopters were all hippies and nerds and were basing their predictions on the idea that the general public was largely similar to them. As soon as the internet was being used by 14-year-olds to start flame wars on why Nailz sucked, the idea that the internet was an unalloyed positive force in social interaction went out the window. The "web at large" has been around for 25 years now.

This is why I guard against the idea that things have purely gotten worse over time, because from another standpoint 2009 or thereabouts was already well after the death of the 'net. So it helps a lot to define in clear terms what exactly you think the modern net is lacking, and in my case I'd say it's "learning and discovery". As a disclaimer, a young person is naturally going to have way more to absorb from their surroundings than an adult, so the kind of knowledge that impressed 15 year old me is now totally rote and mundane, and any space with that stuff will also seem really banal and empty. /caveats

What feels most different now is the lack of paths towards "secondary" or deeper knowledge. Once you discover something exists, that's usually it. The internet really used to be designed like a rabbit hole, where if anything caught your eye you could just go on a deep dive and find out progressively more about it until you exhausted the subject. Nowadays you can definitely still go down rabbit holes on Twitter, Insta, and Tiktok, but it's harder to learn things this way. I wonder if anyone gets exactly what I mean.

I'm going to see a performance of Hamlet next week. What are the best essays or YouTube lectures to help me understand the play or take an alternate view of it?

Shouldn't you look up stuff like that after? Just watch the play, it's not that complex.

I've seen and read the play before. I'm hoping to look at it with new eyes.

As mentioned, I'm currently reading Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success, his account of how culture shaped human evolution. It includes a chapter in which he argues that culture can impact on human biology without genetics being involved. Some of these seem straightforward and uncontroversial: London taxi drivers developing unusually developed memory centres because of the cognitive effort expended in memorising thousands of winding back streets was an example I'd encountered over a decade ago. There was also some breathless discussion of placebo, nocebo effects, and the phenomenon wherein a witch doctor puts a curse on someone and the person really dies because they expect the curse to kill them (all of which made me sceptical for the reasons outlined here: worth bearing in mind that this book came out nearly a decade ago, and probably took several years to write). But there was one example he gave that I was especially iffy on.

Henrich claims that men raised in "honour cultures" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)) have elevated cortisol and testosterone reactions to perceived slights. He goes on to argue that regions within the US which were colonised by Scots-Irish settlers (i.e. Borderers) still have vastly elevated rates of murder and other violence compared to other regions, even after controlling for other factors like race*, poverty and inequality. He argues that the explanation can't be genetic (i.e. people of Scottish descent are unusually prone to violence and aggression), pointing out that modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts. His explanation is that "honour culture" shapes human biology at the hormonal level, causing men raised in the South with no genetic predisposition to violence and aggression nevertheless to violently overreact to perceived slights which a more civilised man would brush off. (The obvious implication of such a causal explanation is that the South needs to be colonised educated on how to be more like their Northern betters. PERMANENT RECONSTRUCTION!)

I don't dispute the claim that growing up in an environment in which aggression and violence are valorised could cause your body to pump out more testosterone than it would otherwise - that sounds entirely plausible. And yet, for a book which is essentially all about selection effects, it strikes me that there's a potentially obvious selection effect that Henrich is overlooking. The Scots-Irish borderers who left the British Isles to colonise the United States were not a randomly selected cross-section of their home society: it seems plausible that those who left were disproportionately likely to be unsuccessful at home, perhaps unable to hold down a steady job because of chronic drunkenness or propensity to violence. Ergo, the elevated rates of violence in Southern states could have a (partly) genetic explanation after all. At the minimum, I feel like Henrich could have gestured to this explanation, or acknowledged it as a potential contributing factor. In a book entirely about gene-culture co-evolution, it seems like a missed opportunity to tell a story like "for genetic reasons, the people who colonised these regions of the United States were unusually prone to violence and aggression, and this helped to foster a culture in which it's seen as appropriate to react explosively to perceived slights, exacerbating the salience of traits which a different, more agreeable culture would have taken pains to ameliorate".

*So he's not explicitly denying the 13/52 meme, but rather claiming that it's ultimately caused by white culture rather than black biology or black culture.

The other explanation could be that proximity of blacks causes white criminality to go up too. Crime is infectious.

Borderers were not a random draft of Scotsmen- they were a specific ethnic group known for violence and outlawry, which was deported to Ireland and then from there to America. This isn’t Australia where the selection was straight up sending criminals(reversion to the mean would take care of that).

Also, the borderers as a group aren't representative of the broader Scottish society.

If Scottish settlers in that part of America we're disproportionately drawn from the borderers they should genetically more represent that than Scottish society in general.

Also, the borderers as a group aren't representative of the broader Scottish society.

That was essentially my point about the selection effect.

You describe individual dysfunction but that is rarely enough to poison an entire society. One might ask themselves why this didn't happen with other source populations elsewhere where presumably the same selection effects existed. The reason is that there was a large and culturally cohesive population of almost unique (in Europe) longterm dysfunction to pull from and transplant.

Generally individual failures didn't make it to America because emigration cost a fair bit of money. Nor did they necessarily procreate in their home country.

modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts

Are guns banned in Massachusetts?

Guns aren't banned in Scotland though either. You just need a license which is fairly easy to get for someone with a clean record. Handguns are banned though (with some exceptions). May not materially impact your point, but just clarifying as lots of people seem to think guns are banned in the UK entirely.

You could of course also look at murder rates among my Ulster-Scots brethren in Northern Ireland as handguns are legal there. Also getting hold of illegal guns is pretty easy. There are other confounding factors of course.

The old joke about Northern Ireland being the best preparation for any Brit moving to the US: guns, flags, religion and armed police on the streets.

They're described as some of the most restrictive in the US, but I don't know what that means in practice.

I see. My assumption would be that criminals are much less capable of getting guns in Scotland than in an American state (even one with restrictive laws) and therefore that this points to Scotland's murder rate being abnormally high. A comparison to Scot-descendant groups in Canada would be nice.

Canadian Scots were much less border-inflected in general, so I think the selection effect would be pretty different. Handgun availability is probably more like Massachusetts than Scotland, but nothing like the Southern states.

Scotland itself can be... pretty violent? Knife fights are I think statistically more deadly than handgun wounds...

It would also be interesting comparing rates of e.g. grievous bodily harm between Scotland and Scots-Irish-colonised regions of the US.

This might be confounded by presence of firearms. Getting close enough to someone for GBH is more dangerous if they might have a gun; conversely people might beat their opponent down harder to reduce the risk they draw a firearm when you look away.

I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.

If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning these skills authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little instruction on the techniques used seem to be available online. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).

As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here and here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through craftsmen willing to mentor people. To a lesser extent it's the case for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.

Even traditional European Renaissance painting (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) isn't being actively taught in many art colleges in spite of the fact it was the source of many codified Western artistic techniques. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't really focus heavily on classical painting skills but includes other super important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world. Of course there are plenty of resources on Renaissance painting you can read yourself, but still; one would imagine it would feature more in curricula given its importance to Western art. The situation for other less-known skills are far worse.

I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these skills are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice no longer covers them. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.

Thoughts? What do you think would be a good thing to try my hand at?

I don't know where you live, but in my neck of the woods pottery is accessible enough that there are multiple pottery studios within two hours' drive, and I know for a fact the closest one offers classes for both children and adults. Also, coincidentally, I was looking up pottery videos for my kids today so they could see the process, and there seem to be quite a lot on YouTube explaining all manner of techniques.

Now, if you really are totally unable to physically go anywhere and must therefore learn everything from books/videos/etc, I'd recommend woodworking instead, but if there's a pottery studio you can reasonably get to, I suggest you give it a try.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your problem, but the technical side of wood carving seems to be one of the more accessible art forms - since (modern, western) wood carvers like to write books about the topic. With 3 or 4 books, you'll get a broad overview on techniques and tools that will take you thousands of hours to master. If you want your first one hundred hours to be accelerated, wood carving courses seem popular enough that most larger cities will have one. If you can't get to one, there's a million youtube videos for beginners, seeing the motions in real time might beat books during those first one hundred hours. /r/woodcarving has some in their wiki.

This obviously will still get you nowhere close to making those Chaozhou wood carving masterpieces you linked, but (also obviously) chances for you to get to that level weren't very high in the first place, with or without a master mentoring you.

If you're really exclusively interested in historical, East Asian wood carving techniques, you will have a harder time, but I'm sure there are foreign language books about the techniques. AI translators will make those more accessible than ever before. A strong foundation in western wood carving will not hurt working through those books, so you might push that project a few years into the future.

I've always wanted to build a West Greenland skin-on-frame kayak, ever since I briefly owned an ancient stitch-and-glue wood kayak that was an absolute dream on the water. I'm not an experienced paddler or anything, but a well-crafted kayak just feels so satisfying to pilot, compared to the heavy plastic boats the rental companies operate. Unfortunately, I don't have the workshop space for this kind of project right now, but there's no shortage of instructional books/videos/blog posts etc. on the topic, and even kits if that's your level (but more fun to do it from scratch I would think). I don't know if you have a suitable body of water nearby, but you should look at some plans and see if they speak to you.

I know nothing about those hospitals and next to nothing about medical financing in general, but I would estimate the likelyhood of blaming hospital closures on whatever Trump just did a week or so ago being a lie as "extremely high". It's too fast to be a sole immediate reason. Could some cuts cause some hospital that has been circling the drain for years to finally pull the plug? Sure. But the "circling the drain for years" needs to be at least as important part of the story as Trump then. If it is not, I think it'd be fair to conclude no objective inquiry of the matter is attempted and the whole story is just another "orange man bad" bullshit.

Hospitals with a bad mix of patients (aka medicare and medicaid) have been dying at high rates for awhile now (this includes rural but also urban hospitals with a shit mix), it has been getting worse lately but that is perhaps more because these things can take decades to finish happening and because of growing regulatory burden.

It is possible that Trump is hastening the deaths but they were absolutely going to happen anyway.

Zooming out a bit, the UK has currently similar problems (exploding general healthcare/welfare costs leading to low-priority care being sidelined) despite an establishment politician winning, germany has similar problems despite an establishment politician winning, but somehow in the US it's Trump's fault. Even the specifics - rural hospitals getting disproportionally closed - are the same. Remember, healthcare cost graphs over time look like this, and this is % of GDP, so it's even more crazy in absolute terms. That growth is not sustainable, and indeed is starting to not getting sustained much longer. That doesn't mean Tump's cuts aren't higher than elsewhere nor that they have no negative effects, but the framing here is quite questionable.

No. From the long form:

Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.

I think the underlying op-ed is this piece, which is... not exactly coming across as a neutral evaluation of the facts, or this one, which is better, but still makes it hard for any plausible drop in Medi* use to even be the straw that breaks the camel's back:

In their financial statement for last available financial year (ending June 30, 2024), Community Hospital brought in 6% of their $62 Million in patient service revenue from Medicaid, with about $4.1 Million coming into the hospital from the program. The Hospital operated at a loss of $1.67 Million for that financial year as well. Figures were not available for the most recent financial year (ending June 30, 2025).

In an opinion piece published in the Nebraska Examiner in February, Nebraska Hospital Association President president Jeremy Nordquist said that Medicaid pays for 26% of all emergency room visits in rural hospitals, alongside 33% of all births and 44% of all services to minors. He also said that 54% of rural, independent critical access hospitals are operating at a loss.

A lot of the numbers are coming from that Nebraska Hospital Association, which has been giving worst-case or worse-than-worse-case numbers.

I can certainly believe that the Medicaid changes will have an impact, but Hanania's implication that this was a sole and direct cause that people can't deny only because The Cheetoh has a "spell over them" is about as well-founded as his normal sneers.

Should I buy a Model 3? I own a 2012 Fusion with 128,000 miles that runs fine but is almost 15 years old. The $7500 EV credit is expiring in September, so assuming that I like the Model 3 and it meets my needs, should I buy one before then or try to milk this Fusion another few years? It seems like really good value for the money right now, but I'm uncertain how much of the tax credit removal will be eaten by Tesla and how much will go into a straight price increase

pak chooie
Does it have to be a Tesla?
pak chooie

No but every comparable I've looked at is the same price or higher.

pak chooie

I think the typical English onomatopoeia for spitting is "ptooie" or "ptoo". It has a rather childish connotation, though, and I don't think I've ever seen it used for spitting in disgust. In such a situation, a native Anglophone normally would just write "(spits in disgust)".

It's a piece of Web 1.0 lore: https://www.somethingawful.com/icq-pranks/icq-transcript-space/1/

we are here to protect you
please go stand by the stairs

Humans must be shoved

You are mistaken, pushing is the answer

Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car? Quality concerns about Teslas aside, I think the main things to consider when weighing BEV or PHEV vs ICE are:

  • Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car?

  • Can you responsibly afford the upfront cost?

  • Do you like a car that's more "gadget" than "appliance?"

If "yes" to all three, you're probably better off with an electric car. If only the first two, it depends how much the "gadget" design ethos commonly used in BEVs annoys you. If you can't charge at home and/or the upfront cost is over a responsible budget, you're probably better off with a non-plug-in hybrid or ICE-only powertrain.

Yes, I own a home with a garage. I will need to upgrade the circuit for full speed home charging but it's not a big deal. I would probably pay cash or mostly cash. I'm just having a hard time figuring the opportunity cost of not buying sooner due to difficulty estimating the savings of driving old car and being unsure how much the price will actually rise.

Personally, I've been shopping for a car recently and the aspect that I found was useful was to model all usage modes. I've been looking for BEV at start, mostly because of the way they handle, and because we have reasonably priced options in the used market now. Lots of people are afraid of used BEV, PHEV or hybrids because of battery degradation, but all the info I find from people with experience with it say that if the car was designed with a buffer, it's not really an issue for many years. I was interested in a BEV with a pretty high battery range but pretty low charging speed (Chevy Bolt) and when I calculated a trip to the town I'm from (a roughly 500km trip), I found that the car would force me into two charging sessions, over 30 minutes (probably more around an hour each), one of which would be a "make it or run out of gas" stop at the single waystation in a giant provincial park, where everyone stops to charge so I might have to wait for a charging spot to open, and where last time I went there was a power outage. So I decided against a BEV. Then I calculated my expected daily commutes and I find that they would pretty much all fit within or almost entirely fit within a PHEV's electric range.

So basically, BEV is superior for frequent medium distance driving (within your metro area), infrequent long distance travel in well-served areas. PHEV is superior for frequent short distance trips, semi-frequent long distance travel. Standard hybrid is superior for frequent long distance travel.

I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.

I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.

Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.

You've made a profound and insightful point about online discourse in the age of generative AI. Let's break it down.

/uj you might be able to get away with emdashes so long as you steer far away from sycophancy

FUTO Keyboard has this as well, plus swipe typing, minus Microsoft selling your input data. Worth checking out. I can just long-press H and the em-dash is the first symbol option.

It certainly looks promising, but looking at the reviews suggest it's not as polished as SwiftKey, especially in swipe typing and autocorrect. SwiftKey has a very useful clipboard manager I can't do with too, and I'm not particularly fussed about the privacy concerns.

I always use all of the various hyphen forms. It got drilled into me in legal writing. Since some poorly written legislative codes include hyphens (e.g., "section 1-a" instead of "1(a)"), it's important for readability of citations to always distinguish between hyphens and en-dashes. And I was always taught separating a clause with em-dashes was for important elaborations, while parentheses were for asides that weren't necessarily vital to the meaning of the sentence. This seems a useful enough distinction to keep the em-dash in my repertoire, despite the AI connotations.

I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease.

How?

See that 123 symbol in the left corner? Then you'll see the - button in the middle of the keyboard, long press it and the em-dash is right in the middle. It's got 3 options ¯ — -, or as I like to call it, the stroke emoticon.

I use - and … all the time.

I’m unsure my random thoughts will be picked up as AI.

I use ... all the time

Ok boomer

Goshdarn whippersnappers… they used to have RESPECT for proper punctuation⋮ back in my day the teacher would hit the back of your hand with a ruler if you put spaces inside your ellipses⋱

Using regular dashes is fine, one of the reasons that em dashes are so indicative is that no human ever bothers to use the proper type of dash

Real punctuation:

  • Hyphen-minus: -

  • Ersatz em dash: --

Mental illness:

  • Hyphen: ‐

  • Minus sign: −

  • En dash: –

  • Em dash: —

t. sufficiently mentally ill to use everything but the hyphen

Hot take: If it's not part of ASCII, it's not a real character; Unicode was a mistake.

I'm ok with Unicode to the extent that it is used to contain actual languages. But emoji can fuck right off from my text encoding, especially now that they have been hijacked for political purposes.

I thought I was the only one who felt this way.

ℝ is perhaps the most real character.

UTF-16 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But having typographically correct characters and the ability to casually mix languages are very nice.

−10,000 social-credit points for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.

I had to check the page source to see how you did that. So now I can do arithmetic 7−5=2 and number ranges 1914–1918 and — wait for it — felis‐parenthesis :-)

More of these "HTML named character references" can be found here.

I also use the correct punctuation when writing in LaTeX, though not anywhere else. The mental illness label is accurate, though.

LaTeX users will probably type three hyphens for an em dash.

I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.

I, for one, find this highly disappointing, because — as many of you probably have noticed — I tend to use em-dashes quite often myself. It's partially a combination of how I was taught to write — particularly in college — and them being rather easy to type on my Mac (option+shift+hyphen, with option+hyphen being the en-dash). But, being the old, new-technology-hating curmudgeon that I am, I will not be changing my writing style because of this.

My girlfriend has noticed ChatGPT's predilection for em-dashes, and now she can't unsee it. Whenever she sees a passage of text which uses them, she assumes ChatGPT was involved in the text's creation, up to and including Teams messages sent by her colleagues (which is honestly not an unreasonable assumption, in my view).

But my concern is the same as yours: I do use em-dashes a fair amount (mostly in fiction rather than non-fiction or blogging), and with exactly one exception I've never used ChatGPT as a writing aid. I'd hate to be accused of doing so without cause.

Occasionally you'll encounter albums where the liner notes include a notice specifying that no pitch correction (e.g. AutoTune) was used on the album, or no synthesizers (more common in the seventies and eighties, less common nowadays). I wonder how soon it'll be before the first novel is published which includes a notice in the front matter to the effect of "No generative AI was used in the creation of this novel".

Your girlfriend still beats the average. I've seen a lot of clearly LLM generated text in circulation on Reddit, and the majority of the time nobody seems able or willing to call it out. Given the average IQ on Reddit, that might even be an improvement.

I find it quite helpful to submit my drafts to the better class of model, they're very good at catching errors, raising questions and so on. I do this for fun, so it's not like I have any plans to pay for a human editor.

When writing non-fiction on my blog, models like o3 are immensely helpful for checking citations and considering angles I've missed. There's nobody I know who could do better, and certainly not for free and on a whim.

You'll find that a lot of artists go out of their way to head off accusations of AI. In some circles, it's standard to submit PSD files or record a video showing you drawing things. Writers and readers don't seem quite as obsessed about it, but I'm sure someone has probably tried.

In running text, it's reasonable to use an em dash without spaces and an en dash surrounded by spaces the same way. The latter may get you your typographic fix. Em dashes on screen often collide with the adjacent words anyway.

I'm used to using the en-dash in the manner you've described, I just find em-dashes somewhat more aesthetically appealing. If em-dashes aren't supposed to directly connect with both words/collide with them, then I wasn't aware before you mentioned it and don't mind the look!

This may be a personal aesthetic thing. I don't like the dash to connect to the strokes of the adjacent letters. Depending on the individual letter shape, that may require a touch of kerning.

I wouldn't use em. It's the main thing in the normie pattern recognizer for calling out AI texts now.

Em dashes are only a part of A.I. pattern recognition; sentence structure, vocabulary, and grammar are also considered. Em dashes are still safe to use.

I guess I have to agree. How could I not, when just a few weeks back I correctly called out our friendly neighborhood Count for using it? The normies have a point there, few people who aren't journalists or pretentious literary types use them by default.

(I wonder if I could get away with large disclaimers left, right and center saying that these are artisanal em-dashes, produced only by my hands with the assistance of Markov chains at most)

You have to become a pretentious literary type, then.

A faith truly worse than death. I'd rather be a j*urnalist.

Now let’s not be hasty. Surely you have some less evil alternatives such as a high ranking Scientology cult operative, North Korean prison camp guard or perhaps a mass murderer?

I bought a Daylight Computer (review: it's fine, clearly an early adopter product, competitors look a lot more polished, screen reads great but android is a real pain), and I'm looking for a stand for it to prop it up while I write on a bluetooth keyboard. Any recs for a robust, lightweight, flat-foldable stand that will work with a 10x7" tablet?

I have a few friends that use https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3146835 with good results.

What would be the best way to legitimately gain access to shopping malls at night? I want to walk around at 2am and just take in the vibe. I’m too busy to become a night guard so I was thinking of finessing some contractor thing. Doesn’t need to be consistent.

I worked for an inventory service when I was in college and mall stores did their inventories after close, which any day other than Sunday was 9:00 pm. So a typical inventory would last from 9:00 to 1 or 2 am. Some stores would do there's before open and those would start at six so the sales floor would be done around 10. Take this advice with a grain of salt since it's been 20 years and my memory isn't great, but I don't believe security ever had to let us in for any of the early stores. We were always told to park near the "main entrance" of the mall, which is almost invariably the entrance into the food court if the mall has one. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think there was always one door that was open near here where you could just walk in; I don't remember having to ever call security or anything like that to be let in, though since I had a legitimate reason to be there it's possible that security just left a door open for us, though that wouldn't make a ton of sense because in that case I'd imagine they'd leave the door close to the store open.

It's also worth keeping in mind that in this situation you'd stick out like a sore thumb. Actual employees have keys to service doors that allow them to access corridors that run along the perimeter of the building so they can get into the back room of the store. I believe this is strictly necessary since the security gates will only unlock from the inside, though I'm not entirely sure about this. I do know that when we left a late store in the middle of the night, the last group to leave would always exit through the outside door. The point is, though, that the risk of detection is pretty high, since the parking lot will be empty and you'll be wandering around aimlessly in an area that is pretty highly surveilled.

While @self_made_human's recommendation of a hard hat and safety vest is generally correct, there are better ways of getting in (not to mention that it's become a bit of a meme at this point). My recommendation would be to dress in business casual and carry a computer bag. Show up around 6:00 am or a little earlier and try the main entrance doors. Your cover story is that you're from Boschini, Miller and Associates accounting firm there to supervise the inventory of a store that's located in the mall. You will only need to use this if you get accosted, though if you're bold you may be able to use this at a security intercom or something if there aren't any open doors. Make sure the store you pick is a national chain with a different location in a nearby mall. If security somehow knows that there's no inventory scheduled for that day, get out some paperwork that has the name of the other mall on it and get flustered and embarrassed that you somehow got it in your head that it was at this mall and you obviously have to go now because you are late.

Ironically, the bigger risk here is that the security guard buys your story, because now you have nowhere to go but you can't really leave. You'd be limited to making a beeline for the store and then a beeline back to the entrance, telling the guard about your mistake if caught again. Other than that, it's a good cover because it admits that you aren't supposed to be there. It also means that the guard will be disinclined to pursue the matter further or make additional inquiries because the apparent situation is now that you're running extremely late, and any nervousness on your part would be expected considering the professional bind you are now in. I can say from my years as an inventory taker that it isn't unheard of to go to the wrong store. Aside from that, I don't know why you'd want to go to a mall in the middle of the night. Whatever vibe you're imagining is so unimpressive that I can't even remember if they kept the music on, or if they turned off any house lights. As far as I can remember it's just a bunch of closed stores and no people. Just go to a dead mall around closing time and the vibe will be the same.

A hard hat and a safety vest will get you in most places. If taking up an entirely new line of work isn't in the cards, maybe you can hide in a toilet? Or befriend someone with legitimate reasons to be there?

At a large institution? No, you’ll need to be on a contractor list, with proof of insurance on file, with the contractors scheduled to be there following minimum notice.

So, what are you reading?

Adding Who Killed the Berkeley School? Struggles Over Radical Criminology to my list, another open access book. It's from a radical left perspective, and sadly spends more time on the struggle than the Berkeley School itself, but its a good read.

This week I finished Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See, which a friend had suggested we read together, I hated it, spoilers ahead.

For most of the book, Doerr adopts a tone that felt very Scholastic Book Fair. The two kids existing in parallel, the Marie-Laure blind French girl, and Werner the German radio nerd who ends up in the wehrmacht despite not being all that enthusiastic about Naziism, bumble along through WWII running into mild oppression along the way. No concentration camps, just trains running through. We get wartime privation, but not starvation, and it impacts Germans as much as the French. Werner does go around killing partisans by tracking their radios, but they were partisans. Marie-Laure's father is taken prisoner, but he was concealing a priceless diamond. It's constantly hinted that the German soldiers will do bad things, but they mostly don't. Then we get to the end of the book and there's a fairly explicit gang rape scene when the Red Army gets to Germany.

And it was a real tone shift, and I'm left kind of stumped as to why the author made that choice. The book as a whole is too anti-German to be trying to smuggle in that Stalin was the real villain here and Hitler did nothing wrong, and it's not anti-German enough to be cheering on the vengeful rape of German shiksas like the Hebrew edition of Night. It just felt gratuitous.

Though I disliked the book as a whole, it was well written so I see why it got a Pullitzer, but there was nothing much going on for too much of the book, just not my thing. He does a decent shift at creating a blind protagonist without making her completely useless, but at some level I was still like "Ok, she's blind, the bombs are falling, there's no way out of this that isn't Deus Ex Machina." But the ending fell flat for me.

I also read the novella Fat City by Leonard Gardner after seeing it recommended as a classic boxing book. It's a picaresque of mid-century Stockton, through two struggling bums vaguely trying to make it as professional boxers. It did a good job of capturing the feeling of training and competing in fight sports, and a general sort of struggle of masculinity in the main characters, who have big dreams and minimal capability to reach them. Also a lot of long scenes of farmwork for those of you thinking about illegal immigrant labor jobs. Highly recommend this one, it's very short and tightly written, no extraneous pages.

I've now finished 18 books this year out of a goal of 26. My wife getting me a kindle, combined with LibGen, has been a huge improvement in reading for me. I still love physical books, but I also love the infinite access to a huge number of books. On a trip I'm not limited to what I brought with me if it turns out it sucked, if I finish a book at 9pm I can start the next one without even getting up. I'm ahead of my targets, so maybe I can afford to get stuck in on Infinite Jest soon, though I'm now onto On the Marble Cliffs by Junger which is another short one, I'm curious to get more into his mature work after how amazing Storm of Steel felt.

I've now finished 18 books this year out of a goal of 26.

I'm one behind you, out of the same target.

Great work! I've included some real lightweight shit in there this year so it's been easy.

Still on The Secret of Our Success, after getting no reading done over the weekend. It's still fascinating, but I miss reading fiction. Going to read an Agatha Christie next just to cleanse my palate.

I've been reading Ar'Kendrithyst on the recommendation of a few people here / another friend.

Book One started off really slow but I was enjoying the system exploration and the worldbuilding up to Book Four.

I'm in Book Five now though and I'm starting to drop off the novel. It feels too early to end the titular Ar'Kendrithyst, which kept getting hyped and foreshadowed as the greatest threat to the world, and which was imo the most interesting part of the word building. The "Worldly Path" arc feels a bit aimless since Erick is pretty much already a minor deity with every relevant god already in his rolodex to back him up, I'm getting a bit bored of this book pretty much just being him going around curbstomping everything.

I'm looking to read:

"America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights Hardcover – Nov. 23 2020 by Bertram Levine (Author), Grande Lum (Author)"

The DOJ CRS was created by the civil rights act back in the 60s and by statute is immune to most FOIA requests. This is one of the first insights into the organization.

I'd also be interested if anyone has a detailed review or analysis, because I don't think I'll have the time to read it properly.

Starting to dip my toes into Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, to be followed up in the case I don’t lose interest by another book that extends reconstruction through the Gilded Age. The most interesting part of American history I know the least about, in my eyes!

Though I also have this Ben Franklin autobiography hanging around that sounds interesting and of course my regular diet of fantasy stuff.

Speaking of, I’m going to throw out a recommendation for Guild Mage: Apprentice, which is free to read (serialized) for another month or so. Has that classic fantasy feel, with good writing and with an interesting world and magic. Very enjoyable read.

My own novel. I'm performing a much-needed edit pass on certain chapters, which necessitates close reading, to excellent effect.

(And Reverend Insanity, as usual. I wasn't kidding about it being a whopper, I've been at it again for around a month and half already.)

Despite my plans to the contrary, it's He Who Fights With Monsters 11, by Shirtaloon, as book ten ended up being a massive setup for a boss battle book. Stupid cliffhanger endings! :/

I've been reading What hath God Wrought (Oxford History of the US from 1815-1848) and one thing I'm finding quite confusing is the animosity towards the Federalist Party in most of the country? What did this party stand for, and why did it become so hated outside of New England?

It’s easy to forget with how much the revolutionary era has been romanticized, but John Adams (the only Federalist president) was seen as an authoritarian during his presidency. The Sedition Act almost neutered the first amendment in the crib.

My memory is that the Federalists were very pro-national banking (and pro centralization more loosely), which led to pro-international finance and trade links, which at the time in America was a big, big deal and created a lot of dissent, not only between the “rural” vs “urban” areas but led to some foreign policy disagreements. Some New Englanders almost became pro-British, not super popular between Revolutionary aftermath and the later war of 1812. But more of it was the original rural-urban split, and Federalists were seen a bit as elitist. Doubly so when some states started expanding suffrage to non land owners. Circling back to “money” of course - at this time there was no centralized currency, and attempts to do so were seen as promoting corruption and stiffing farmers. After all if you’re a farmer at the time, how can you tell you’re not getting ripped off by exchange rates and early financial instruments? So Federalists being hated doesn’t surprise me at all. These banking issues by the way would persist as very potent forces in elections for at least another 50 years. And understandably so! You needed a catalyst like the Civil War to fully get on the nationalized paper money train, and even then gold and silver standard stuff would persist as issues.

Fun fact: I read yesterday that from the start to the end of the civil war, the federal budget went from 60 million a year to 1.3 billion per year. Not to mention the debt load created by the war and pension plans. But before that, it’s a totally different era.

The Federalist Party's primary achievement (at least arguably, as the party itself didn't officially exist until after the Bill of Rights was adopted) was the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. If anything, the Federalists would have preferred an even stronger Constitution. They were the faction of wealthy Northern elites who wanted the nation to function in stable concert, at least militarily and economically (and under their leadership, naturally). They were broadly abolitionist and accommodated slavery within the Constitution substantially under the view that by doing so they could be instrumental in bringing about its end; consequently, they were not friends of "states rights." They were also much more interested than their opponents in healing the rift with England, to the point where some New England Federalists began to advocate for secession during the War of 1812 (although it might sound a bit like California or Texas "threatening" to secede today, depending on who is in the White House, the War of Independence was still in living memory). Siding with the enemy during a war is a good way to accrue a lot of populist hatred really fast.

Texas does not threaten to secede. The far right in Texas threatens to secede regardless of who is in the white house and gets some measure of popular support when the white house has a democrat in it.

And that is, functionally, what Texas nationalists are- it's just the native far right. Some are russiaboos and some are white nationalists but all of them are goldbugs. Some are ruralists; none of them believe in global warming. Lots of them have conspiracy theories about pedophile rings controlling the federal government; none of them will countersignal those theories. Some are balanced budget hawks, most are christian nationalists, all of them think all gun control except maybe you can't bring a gun physically into a prison ground is unconstitutional. There's a lot of hyper-red tribe signaling about meat and pickup trucks and indie country and open carry. But the common threads in the movement are red tribe cultural supremacy(and this is, in their view, an explicitly assimilatory identity, Hispanics should learn American football and blacks should learn country music but they don't have to change their skin color), hyper-Austrian economics(this does not necessarily imply libertarianism), and extreme skepticism of the federal(not necessarily state) government. Lots of similarities to Ron Paul, but few if any of them would eg point to marijuana prohibition as government overreach. It's just a far-right movement and for much of it secession should be taken seriously but not literally. They really do have strong grievances on cultural, economic, or anti-federal overreach grounds. Daniel Miller really does believe these mean Texas needs to be an independent country, but his rank and file may not; lots of them are just there for the grievances. It's kind of similar to explicitly pro-militia sentiment in red areas of blue states.

I'd like to thank you for posting this, and note that most of this describes the Alaskan Independence Party pretty well too.

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