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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3297 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A queer barbershop/salon opened near my flat recently. On the front window there's a mural listing all of the things which are forbidden inside:

  • No homophobia
  • No transphobia
  • No sexism
  • No racism
  • No facism
  • No xenophobia
  • No pozphobia* (U=U)

The fifth one isn't a typo: it really says no facism. I'm assuming they meant to say "no fascism" but misspelled it (pretty embarrassing to misspell a word which is presumably one of the most commonly used in your vocabulary). But now I'm wondering: maybe they really did mean facism (as in, no discriminating on the basis of facial appearance)? I remarked to herself that I thought that was just called "dating".

*In case you were wondering what this one referred to.

No phobia against HIV-positive people? In an establisment handling sharp objects that touches multiple people per day? Well, at least they had the decency to tell on themselves.

Well, people who they are targeting probably would like it. And people who think like me and get shivers just thinking about it wouldn't set foot in such establishment anyway, even without the HIV thing. So, I guess, the listing is doing its job very well.

I see your point, although my understanding is that the risk of contracting HIV from getting stuck with a contaminated needle is vanishingly low, and the risk of contracting it from a dirty scissor blade presumably lower still.

It's interesting that these people think it's perfectly legitimate to discriminate against prospective sexual partners on the basis of viruses of the mind; actual viruses, on the other hand, are off-limits.

I assumed that if they advertise as a barbershop they might be using straight razors.

queer barbershop

Surely not.

Alright, you know what to do. Go in there, think your most racist and sexist and phobist thoughts but say nothing, get your shave or haircut or whatnot, pay, and then smugly tell them what naughtiness you did right under their noses. Go, brave warrior, and fight the culture war!

I honestly wonder how they'd react if I started saying various racist, sexist etc. things while getting my hair cut. They'd ask me to leave, of course, but I can't imagine they'd have much luck physically removing me from the premises.

Well, getting your throat cut by a woke barber is one way to go out, for sure. Low probability of it happening, of course, it's only a handful who actually try to shoot to ICE agents after all, but consider: You'd probably make it to the Darwin awards, would be the talk of the town on the internet, and give a hell of an ego boost to the then-imprisoned barber.

Or, more realistically, you'd end up with half a haircut and the police escorting you out eventually.

Screenshot: Elden Ring looks spectacular at times

You should try Expedition 33 if you like this color palette

What do you mean when you say color palette? Lovely sunrises/sunsets? Or the default color grading? I've done my best to adjust ER using Reshade to get rid of the "depression filter" it ships with.

Yeah. It does not have the fidelity and sheer foundational quality of assets that a game like Cyberpunk has, nor is the Ray tracing good, nor is it well optimized (hitching, frame caps, etc).

That does not detract much from the amazing art direction, and great design. The vibes are great.

Yep.

You can use a very inexpensive program called Lossless Scaling (available on Steam) to enable scaling and frame generation in games (or emulators) with caps or performance issues. Elden Ring doesn't have DLSS or frame gen or anything. I tried a fps unlocking mod to bring it above 60 fps, but that introduced serious issues. With Lossless Scaling I can just adjust the output to bring it from 60 to 120. Works a treat.

Is this a record number of comments for a Friday Fun Thread? It's >300 at the time of writing.

Yes

Being shelled by artillery in a bunker seems like the optimal context for a life-changing near-death experience.

  • you have nothing to do but think. You’re not fighting or engaged in any other activity that could take your mind off of doom. You can’t go anywhere.

  • you’re usually in a small dim area, surrounded by other soldiers, creating a totalizing social environment of doom.

  • you’re not injured, so the adrenaline doesn’t tunnel-vision you toward survival.

  • the artillery strikes are inherently startling on their own, reminiscent of thunder. They occur unpredictably, which sustains its startling effect.

  • the sound and vibration of the artillery is a unique cue of your mortality, each time jolting your focus. Each strike renews the cognitive effect.

Maybe. The ready availability of shrooms or acid would probably help, however, though this would probably make it life-changing in a more negative direction.

Not that I'm against it, but where the hell did this come from?

The soldier in the linked video (super interesting channel) mentions that the feeling of nearly dying is addicting and lead to beneficial life changes. Naturally, you have to ask “how can this be optimized”, and I concluded that the bunker experience is effectively already optimized.

Now this is Friday Fun!

Recreational bunker shellings when?

I'm playing Elden Ring for the first time. It's fun and gripping.

I picked the noob friendly Vagabond class. I've upgraded the hp flask quantity twice and got my steed and killed three dungeon bosses. I've put some points into dex, str, end.

Can I get some spoiler free advice? :)

Should you focus on only one type of combat, or can you create a mixed build with success? It would be nice to have a good ranged damage option but I also want to kick butts with badass melee weapons.

Love this game so much.

As others have said, mixing combat is fine. Great, even. It’s really nice to have a bow or spell on hand.

What you want to avoid is conflicting Scaling. If you’re investing in STR for a hammer and FTH for incantations, and you get a bow that really wants DEX, then you have to split your points even further. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a bow that mostly wanted STR, too?

The good news is that Elden Ring is probably the best souls game for mixing and matching. There’s gear which suits (or can be made to suit) any combination of stats. The trick is finding it.

I recommend checking out that castle. You don’t have to clear it, but there’s some really useful stuff around there!

Btw... did you ever check this mod out? First Person Elden Ring

Ha. No, but it’s amazing what people can do to this game.

I did play through Elden Ring Reforged using the Seamless Co-op mod. Changes the game entirely.

Cool. :)

I'm in Castle Morne now, down south, after killing a giant firing giant arrows. Not sure what I'm supposed to be doing here.

Just looked it up, my build in ER was a str/fth hybrid with golden halberd + clawmark seal as the main hand weapons. Buffing, manaless short range, mana-dependent long range all in one neat package that scales with both attributes. Thanks to str I can use large shields in the offhand. Especially on higher lvls you can also branch into other seals/incantations for other dmg types.

But it's just one example, there's plenty of viable mixed builds.

What did you do for the late game? I'm a bit stuck: winged spear + (erdtree seal + lightning spear). VIG: 22, Mind: 22, Stamina: 20. Str: 16. Dex: 16. Faith: 45.

It did pretty well as a high damage-output glass cannon in the early/mid game but just doesn't seem to have the stopping power it used to once I get to Morgott, Astel, etc.. I've been considering rebirthing to make an int-focused build instead since they seem to have much more variety and fun. Lightning spear is the only damage incantation I've found that has decent range and cast time, although I've started using Rotten Breath for bosses.

I wound up using the golden halberd for my entire playthrough because there simply wasn’t anything better along strength/faith lines, except possibly magma sword. To be honest, it wasn’t the most pleasant experience, especially since I got the halberd immediately on starting the game. There was no real progression from then on, outside of some buffs. So I’m not sure I’d recommend it, even though it can certainly carry you through. Jumping heavy attacks are the key, fwiw. They knock the target down fast and give you free hits. I tried a couple of ranged options but never really liked them - the damage really wasn’t there compared to melee, especially considering that you have to drain your healing for the privilege.

If you’re really having trouble, use summons. I used them for the two bosses you mentioned, then tabooed them for myself because I got both of them on the first try and felt like I was missing out, then brought them back for a couple of the later bosses when I found I wasn’t particularly enjoying the game any longer and just wanted to hit the full clear.

  • Do you take advantage of buffing and utility spells? That's one of the major advantages of FTH vs INT. FTH direct dmg spells being a bit more clumsy is just evening the playing field. Imo it is FTH that has much more variety. Just golden vow + health regen spell before every boss as a default is great, and there is so much more
  • You use the wrong seal or have insufficient FTH, however you want to look at it. Godslayer has the best scaling at that lvl, or the gravel stone seal for lightning spells specifically
  • for bosses the black flame incants are great since they have a % based DoT that can burn through a boss quite fast. Otherwise you could go for high dmg variants of spells, but those generally need better timing
  • Do you mean the winged scythe? If yes, I also switched away from that for lack of dmg.
  • Spirit ashes? The right ones are quite useful for spellcasters to cast some of the more involved spells
  • talisman setup? Though generally better for def than offense

Edit: Also, be mindful of boss resists, -40% dmg matters! FTH has lots of possible dmg types, so take advantage of that. So, good that you are starting to use breath spells

Stats fall into two categories: generalist stats that can help most characters, and build-specific stats. Literally any build can benefit from more health and stamina, but faith is effectively a wasted point if you never use it.

This adds up because of how level rune requirements increase. You generally want to invest as little as possible in more offensively/build-oriented stats (strength, dex, int, faith, luck) that you are not using. The ones you do use are among the highest priorities. Each stat has their own benefits and shortcomings - probably pretty self-explanatory. The way I generally build my characters in these games is they pick one or two of these offensive stats to specialize in. You can go up to 3 comfortably in Elden Ring (eg a strength + dex + faith build). Some combinations (i.e. the worthwhile ones) have unique benefits (like int+faith spells), but spreading your offensive stats out is a choice between versatility and high performance. Simple answer: allocate levels based on whichever gives you the stat requirements you need to use a weapon you like, then level as needed to make that weapon's damage go up the most. If you get a very high offensive stat level, focus on the weapon's scaling damage over base damage if seeking new weapons.

My general suggestion is that vigor is your first priority, followed by your favored offensive stats. Add to the rest of the generalist stats as you need them, but try to only do so when you actually need to (eg "I think being able to attack more would help more than extra damage therefore more stamina") Note that most stats softcap around 40 or so (varies) which means diminishing returns, which makes other stats take priority.

Tips: Weapon upgrades are far more important than character level, though both are important. Be sure not to infuse your weapon with a modifier that reduces damage output.

Also, it you press start, you can choose items to quick select on the right side of the screen. Definitely put the horse on one of those slots.

Don't undervalue vigor. After meeting whatever attribute requirements for your preferred weapon you should level vigor to its soft cap of 40. Damage primarily scales through weapon upgrades before the late game so using your attribute upgrades for health is a good idea. It makes things far more forgiving and you won't be one-shotted, and you're not giving up much damage anyway.

Noted! And I'll try to get my hp flask's effectiveness upgraded too. It heals less than half my hp currently.

Dark Souls games (and ER is really just DS4) are generally designed so that they can be beaten with simple straight builds, broken weapons/skills and coop by even the filthiest casual, while a hardcore player can still challenge themselves with low LVL builds and meme weapons/skills. So absolutely everything is doable, it depends on how much work you want to put in. Mixed builds have a wide range from broken to meme depending on the details.

Generally, in DS games it's easiest to make builds by starting with a particular (upgraded) main weapon you like and maximizing its scaling + put as much as you need into survival. Then you can also use some supporting weapons, skills and spells that happen fit into that scaling, with maybe some accomodations for min reqs. There are also some melee weapons with ranged skills. Generally for lower lvls I like to put more into survival and use a high base dmg weapon with poor scaling so that I have more flexibility later on if I find a weapon I like. But if I remember correctly ER has some reskilling option so you should be able to switch entirely even if you chose poorly.

I can also give you some more concrete tips if you have something specific in mind. Later I might post my own mixed build for ER if I find the time.

I need to walk the line between clowning around aimlessly, and looking up too much info and taking the mystery and challenge out of the game. Giving myself some direction so that I might actually finish the game and not abandon it, without making it a paint by numbers affair.

Right now I don't know if I should head for that Castle that seems to be the main quest thing to do, or level up and get more equipment first. I've got some cool spirit summons but haven't applied any war ashes yet, don't think I have any worth using. I will not be using online mode btw.

I'm using the armors I started the game with, a sword that's a tiny tiny bit better than the default one, and I've got a flail (increased my dex to 18 to be able to wield it) for whatever situation might require blunt/strike damage.

I found Sellen(?) the Sorceress under the waypoint ruin in Limgrave (after beating the boss there), and bought a cheap spell that can send a glimstone projectile or something. I increased INT from 9 to 10 to be able to use it, and added the spell to a memorized slot, but it's still greyed out on the up-arrow and I don't seem to have a button for throwing magic...?

Stormveil Castle is a beef gate. The fact that you get pasted when you try and go through the lower gate is a sign that you need to do more exploring - there are at least two areas other than Limgrave to explore from your position, try playing around.

You need a catalyst to use spells. For sorceries that would be glintstone staffs or that one sword. But afaik sorceries always scale only with INT, so it's a difficult choice for mixed builds.

Oh. Balls. Guess I wasted those runes then.

So Faith is the way to go for combining physical with magic?

There's probably some way to play a high INT+secondary stat with an appropriate weapon that scales with both.

Edit: Just looked it up since I didn't quite remember it, there are INT+FTH and INT+ARC staffs, so these are technically hybrid, but not really relevant for you. No +STR or +DEX or others sadly.

Edit edit: The demihuman queens staff has high base scaling and low INT scaling, so that would be the correct staff for a hybrid physical build I think.

But generally FTH is easier for hybrid builds in two different ways: First, there are more explicit hybrid seals that make your incantations scale with another stat, and second there are much more utility incantations that have no or very little scaling. Golden Vow for example is a great generalist dmg/def % buff that has no scaling whatsoever, anyway.

I found the Golden Vow ash of war. Considering putting it on my sword or my flail.

It changes the str and dex scaling from d to e and introduces faith scaling: d. My Vagabond has 9 faith. And it reduces regular damage but introduces holy damage...? And has a hefty FP cost for its skill (40). Hmm. If I use that skill I wouldn't have FP left over for powerful spirits. Not sure what to make of this.

You can find the Sacred Blade ash of war in Limgrave. It’ll give you faith scaling and a medium range slash/wave attack for 19fp.

All riiiight! :)

That sounds like what I want. Thanks!

Should I put it on my Lordsworn's sword? I've already smithed it to +2, but I don't know whether I'll find a better sword soon and should thus save the ash of war for the next one...?

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Ah yes forgot about that! That's a great skill as well. It also gives a lingering buff which can be quite substantial. Best on weapons with fast attack speed, since the buff is a static 90 holy dmg.

Golden Vow is great! Early on 40 FP might be a lot so spirits are a better use if you don't have enough, but later it's not much and it will stay strong since it's a % dmg/def buff.

The scaling changes are also what you want if you play an hybrid build anyway.

Later on... You mean if I put around 10 points into Mind to increase FP?

I still don't know in what direction to take this character. He's now level 25 or so, and I've been putting all the points into Vigor for a while, because I was advised to prioritize that stat until it's at 40. Str is at 15, Dex 18. Still lacking a ranged damage alternative except some darts I throw on occasion.

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There aren’t any catalysts which directly boost spells based on STR/DEX, but there are plenty of weapons with the relevant scaling. Moonveil and Dark Moon Greatsword come to mind. If those don’t do it for you, pop on an INT Ash of War. Or do weapon buff.

Yeah, that's what I meant with the first paragraph. But he indicated wanting to actually use sorceries, so I didn't expand further on that.

Did anyone parent's play Tom Lehrer in the house growing up? I just read that he passed away at 97.

Weirdly, despite my dad being a pretty devout Catholic, he was a big fan of The Vatican Rag. I remember him singing it on more than one occasion.

Learned of him from HPMOR. Feels similar to Timur Shaov (but not as mean). National Brotherhood Week and The Masochism Tango stand out.

Not parents, but a friend introduced me to his genius. The Vatican Rag would have been scandalous when it came out but it was also packed with great lyrics and incredible rhymes. But I will always have twin soft spots for Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and Lobachevsky.

I liked National Brotherhood Week.

I happened on this performance good decade ago now, and been a fan since. Hard to choose a favorite, maybe Lobachevsky and Smut (love the "For filth (I'm glad to say) is in the mind of the beholder" line). Not surprised at your dad at all, I normally would not be a fan, his heritage and subversive themes, but the songs are too consistently catchy and funny not to override my bias completely.

What heritage?

Jewish, but I don't know exactly what he means by "subversive". Protestants were saying much worse things about Catholics in the 60s, and in any case, all the Catholics I know have laughed along with the song.

But yes, Smut is so good.

He was Jewish, I'm positive.

Why would his being Jewish prevent you from being a fan?

Listening to his dunking on Wernher von Braun was enough for me to know he's a shithead.

Well, hate for Wernher von Braun is a thing of its time. It's not quite "you had to be there", because if you were right there you didn't live long enough to hate, but maybe "you had to get news from outside the blast radius of there"? Even non-shitheads can become somewhat hostile after word gets out that "half off at Woolworth's" might now mean the other halves of the babies were still in their prams.

I am prejudiced against jews, for well covered , mundane rightoid reasons, my grandfather being a pretty devoted 'antisemite' about the only notable one. And so I am less likely to be open to Jewish singers.

For an established member, we might be okay with someone posting a portfolio in an effort to get work, but you're a fresh-rolled account and I literally don't know if you're just a random spammer, so I am not going to allow this comment out of the filter.

I was watching some clips from the Thick of It and it seemed slightly… off. The broad plot points and the characters seemed realistic enough but the overt and graphic threats, and the fucky fucky speaking style seemed to be very much written to pander to the audience rather than to be realistic.

(Who would be caught dead saying something like ‘fuck you very much’? It makes you sound like a five year old.)

I know some of us have experience in this environment (e.g. @SSCReader). What do you think? Which bits basically ring true and which bits don’t? Is TToI just outdated?

I have some experience but it’s all student politics on the one hand and dealing with civil service type people and procurement on the other hand.

I've heard it's considered such an accurate representation of UK politics that some of its phrasings have entered the vernacular e.g. "omnishambles".

I think I agree with the replies here that the broad themes are essentially correct (I liked the interview with the ‘Nicola’ politician, I think that sounds exactly right) but that the language and to a lesser extent the social dynamics that struck me as being off really are off, and a reflection of a fairly weird period in British TV writing.

Omnishambles on the other hand is a fantastic word, with such broad applicability!

Swearing yes, losing temper and screaming at a junior aide for an hour yes. Snappy profanity laced back and forth repartee, not so much. In my experience at least.

Thick of It

Watch The New Statesman. This is the best British political comedy.

Yes, Minister would like a word.

The swearing is overly snappy and convoluted, and Cim is right that it was an extra-sweary period in British TV that sounds very silly now. In real life people who try to swear like that sound more like Ollie than Malcolm. But the overall tenor is definitely accurate to British politics in the Blair/Brown years. A story about two very senior aides of Gordon Brown (names omitted and stuff paraphrased, since the story was told in private, but newspaper readers at the time would recognize both):

I'm in my office with X, and she's complaining that Gordon's been fucking up everything lately, that he can't come across like a normal person, etc etc. She's got her back to the door, and doesn't see Gordon walk in. He's standing in the doorway and I can see he's about to fly into one of his rages. Now, he would have these terrible rages, and I learned that the only way to get Gordon out of it was to get even angrier than him, enough that he'd start trying to calm me down, so I jump up, kick over the litter basket, and shout "I CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT THOSE BASTARDS ARE SAYING ABOUT HIM! I'M GOING TO KILL THEM!" And Gordon calms down, and he comes over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders and says "Calm down, [aide], calm down, it'll all be fine."

In the behind-the-scenes footage, too, the actors talk about the time they've spent with people in the civil service/government preparing for their roles. Nicola Murray's actress quoted one of them as saying "I don't know why we do this. It's not for the money, because we don't make any money, and it's not for the power, because we don't have any power. It's like you're working for charity... but a shit charity, that everybody hates." Who knows if that's real, but too good to leave out.

The Thick of It is like The Office (US version) in that it’s an idealized version of a ‘fun’ office as imagined by people from that particular culture. Leaving aside that even in the mid Blair era I doubt most of that kind of banter was tolerated all the time even from Alistair Campbell types (let alone random civil servants) there is an authenticity to it.

I would say that working in an office full of well-educated English people who like banter, at its best on Friday afternoons when everyone is comfortable with each other, has had a couple of drinks at lunch and is joking around then sure, it feels a bit like The Thick of It (at least to my foreign ears).

In the same way, Americans and some other Anglos identified with the kind of camaraderie and humor in the US Office because they experienced a lesser version of it, sometimes, themselves. The Thick of It lacks the maudlin sentimentality of most US sitcoms but a similar principle applies.

The swearing in particular seems like a remnant of the TV culture of that time, ‘The F Word’, Gordon Ramsey swearing, the growth of satellite TV without watershed, established networks being willing to have more swearing on later in the evening. This was, after all, when Little Britain was airing on BBC One. In addition, the main character is based on a notorious fan of profanity even today.

More interesting for the TV connoisseur is Veep, which while a less funny show highlights the subtle cultural differences between Britain and America by having American actors and characters speak dialogue clearly written by Brits and therefore always a little uncanny to American ears.

Succession (by much the same team) has a similar problem but skirts it by making the main cast half-English.

Your whole post is about left wing subversion in film, and yet you gloss over the most subversive film in the post. The Northman was ahistorical subversive garbage. I got 15 minutes into that film and it was looking pretty based and redpilled and then ^^^Anya Taylor-Joy^^^ showed up. So now we have to take a historically accurate film set in Scandinavia in the Eighth Century AD on Earth and cram an ayylmao actress into it in the name of “diversity”

—inb4 some onions boy is like “weeell ACKSHUALLY there were ayylmao minority populations living in Scandinavia back then, look at this article from ^^^Barbra Xorlon-Stygggaszzzt^^^ from the history department at ^^^University of New Mexico, Roswell^^^

I don’t care. One blurry UFO in one Viking woodcut doesn’t mean we have to take work away from human actresses and give it to ayys. This is human erasure.

I could have sworn we warned you for posting this exact meme months ago, but I guess we let it slide.

Please lay off the copypasta.

I should have known it was only a matter of time before the men in black came round to silence me.

Wait I'm confused what's wrong with Anya Taylor-Joy?

Look, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Anya Taylor Joy, I’m just saying it’s tacky and historically inaccurate to have an... “Extraterrestrial-American” actress in a movie about Vikings. It’s probably for propaganda purposes, even if she is a good actress.

where Peter Pan gets slapped by a girl in his own movie

My impression was that girls slapped protagonists a lot in their own movies in the Old Movies. It's what girls do.

So if I'm getting this straight, a person with a 'weird life,' as you're terming it, isn't capable of making good art? And being a "pariah" in high school is an explanation of Kathleen Kennedy's bad choices in making executive decisions regarding Star Wars? This seems like a very superficial, even adolescent take. Kennedy has, I agree, made a lot of poorly considered decisions, but they were probably driven by her personal sincerely held views. But let's not forget that she was in the same position when she greenlit both Rogue One and later Andor, which in my view rank with the first two OT films. And both contain strong female characters.

The issue isn't "feisty women" in film. Strong women are neither a myth nor something new in cinema. The issue is bad writing and caving in to unrealistic progressive norms, making women into stereotypes of men rather than writing them realistically--the points you made in your main post were rather more compelling than what you're suggesting here.

Headland helmed The Acolyte, which I have never seen and can't judge, but as you say that show was cancelled after its first season. She is hardly representative of the entire franchise.

I'm not sure what your definition of "a bad person" is when you relegate Kennedy to that position. She worked with Steven Spielberg on many of the classic films of my youth, including Close Encounters, E.T., and the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Just as an aside, your evisceration of the most recent film is I believe overly negative. I saw it and enjoyed it. It was clearly Ford's film from start to finish, he was never "outdone" by Waller-Bridge [whose relative beauty I might also disagree with you on], they brought back the very welcome Karen Allen--and John Rhys-Davies--from the first film, and generally Dial of Destiny was one of the best in the series apart from the first. As well, the vast majority of any action done by "80-year old" Ford was when he was young. The de-aging was the best on this film of any I've ever seen. Having said this, you are of course free to dislike the film as much as you like.)

Back to Kennedy: I completely agree with you that she has made some fairly disastrous decisions when it comes to the new-and-enlightened Star Wars films. The disappointment comes on two levels: 1) Woke nonsense that you so accurately pinpoint in your parent post and 2) so many had such high hopes after a general disappointment in Lucas's decisions about storyline in the prequels--this disappointment is less noticeable now, a barely passing odor in the air, as so many rageposting now cut their teeth on the prequels and see those films (and not the OT) as the best Star Wars. For a while, and maybe even now on reddit, you could/can generate many upvotes for yourself by asking "Wasn't Han actually an abuser showcasing toxic masculinity?" The younger fanbase is not what the older fanbase used to be.

I am not familiar with The Despot of Antrim that you mention in your last paragraph, but that's just because i'm pretty out-of-touch.

How.

A few weeks back, I'd gotten in touch with an old buddy of mine living down in London. We hadn't met for ages, and I offered to come visit during the last dying days of what passes as a summer around these parts.

You can see below that my experience catching a red-eye flight (one that threatened to give me pink-eye to boot) didn't go so well. A small price to pay, I told myself, as I landed at the airport an hour or so back, and caught the train towards where my friend lives. I dropped him a text letting him know I was on my way, and looking forward to seeing him in a few hours.

At which point came back a rather incredulous message. "self_made_human, you were supposed to be come visit next weekend."

Well. Shit. I have no valid explanation, barring chronic severe deprivation brought on by too many night shifts and dissolute living. He'd been very clear on the dates, I just ended up mixing them up, only remembering that I was supposed to see him the last weekend of this month.

He called to figure out what on earth had happened, and I was in the process of explaining the above when the train went through a tunnel and lost network. I made small talk with my fellow passengers, and took to heart their advice to make a picnic out of my misfortune. Call it self_made_human's most spontaneous (and first) solo day trip. Not kidding about that, I'm not one for travel, and I never go any significant distances unless it's on some kind of vacation or to visit someone. This is quite literally the first time I've found myself in a different city with no plans or fixed agenda.

I'm furiously asking ChatGPT for advice on how to kill the time until I hear back from my friend regarding his ability to accommodate my stupidity. I've already promised to come visit again next weekend, as he'd already made time and spent money booking things for us to do.

So uh, what do I do now? Any suggestions? Tottenham looks profoundly uninspiring, and I don't even know what sport the local team, the Tottenham Hotspurs, even play. Worst case I go to a pub. Or maybe I wander around Central London, with far more discretionary spending potential than the last time I was here.

(My family is never going to let me live this down)

Edit:

If it wasn't Anita Sarkeesian I saw at the Tate Modern, then this lady is her long lost twin. I should have said hi.

Edit 2:

Brother, they're playing a film where a bunch of clean-shaven Asian twinks are jerking off with/to plants. Modern and postmodern art outdoes itself.

Are you not a member of the Royal Society of Medicine? The lounge is lovely to drink in and the rooms are very affordable by London standards.

Am I? If so, they never told me haha. I'm a member of the Royal College of Psychiatry, but that's an entirely different organization, without any lounge or drinks I'm afraid. I'll look into their more uxorious counterpart.

You have to apply and pay a subscription. It's essentially a private members club though they do have a small museum. After we moved out of London it was very convenient and affordable accommodation.

The Royal Overseas League is lovely for lunch and drinks outside, also need to be a member.

The Goodenough College Club also had very reasonable accommodation, they had a receipricol agreement with with the RSM or the RSOL I don't recall which.

Dangit I wish we had royal clubs in America.

royal

America

Wait, why do I hear musket fire in the distance?

Tottenham play football, and they're shit at it (they're Arsenal's old local rivals). Besides, I believe the team is on tour in Thailand right now, probably watching Asian twinks jerk off with plants.

If you're still in the area, after the Tate Modern I recommend walking down the river bank towards Westminster Bridge. It's definitely the prettiest and most interesting part of the river to walk along, and there are some good pubs near Waterloo Station if the walk gets you thirsty (sadly, my favourite, a railway arch pub entirely painted with murals of the Battle, seems to have closed).

with plants

If you're in Thailand, you might as well take advantage of the legality of marijuana!

Appreciate the advice, but thankfully my friend did confirm that I can meet him for dinner and crash at his. I've found a cozy bar, the White Hart, and am nursing a second beer. I'd have ordered a fourth or fifth drink by now, but I'm afraid that Asahi at £8 a pint is too rich for my blood. What the hell are these prices dawg.

A decent pub is never a terrible spot to be, hope you and your friend have a great time.

London prices are mad for, well, everything. Though, living in the US now, it's always a pleasure to just pay what my beer costs and not end up with an extra ~30% from tax and tip.

If you're in Thailand, you might as well take advantage of the legality of marijuana!

It was recriminalized a month ago.

Late on Tuesday, Thailand's health ministry issued an order prohibiting the sale of cannabis for recreational use and making it mandatory for any retail purchase to require a doctor's prescription.

The new rules will come into effect once they are published in the Royal Gazette, which could happen within days.

Sigh. I guess they'll have to settle for just the twinks and gas station boner pills.

Start in St John’s Wood or Primrose Hill, walk down through Regents Park, past the rose garden and the outdoor theater, down through Marylebone and some of Mayfair, then into Green and then St James’ park, then walk down along the Strand, stopping by whatever seems interesting. Then either take the district or circle line west, back to Hyde Park, to Chelsea and South Ken, past the museums (V&A if you haven’t been), all of Chelsea is pretty nice in summer especially if it’s sunny this afternoon.

Or walk down to the Embankment or Westminster pier, take the thames boat (now branded “uber boat” due to sponsorship but its regular public transport) to Greenwich, see the Cutty Sark and the naval college and the date line, have a pint at the Trafalgar, take the boat back.

Thank you! I'm currently at Borough Market, suffering from sensory overload. I'll see how my legs hold up after I've had something to eat.

pretty nice in summer especially if it’s sunny this afternoon

The opposite, unfortunately. Tottenham was positively dystopian due to the overall bleakness and the rather concerning number of schizophrenics on the loose. Clouds as far as the London Eye can see.

Tottenham is one of the worst parts of London, sadly.

The Piccadilly area is pretty nice for shopping: it’s got a couple of good, big bookshops (Hatchard’s especially), Fortnum & Mason’s for food, and Jermyn street etc. for top-end clothes, jackets etc. (I think you were quite interested in fashion but maybe not that kind?)

Very crowded and expensive obviously, but nice.

Or there’s the historical stuff: go to Bank and see the old City of London, or to Westminster/St. James’ Park.

I'd be very leery about calling myself interested in fashion. I buy two, maybe three, articles of clothing a year, but I do try to make sure I look good in them.

Visiting the book shops might not hurt, but I haven't bought a dead tree book (that wasn't a textbook) in almost a decade. Libgen rules.

Thanks!

I caught my first Ryanair flight, heading down from Edinburgh to London, and holy shit.

I didn't have very high expectations (and I think I got scammed by paying for extra baggage), but the experience was abysmal.

The initial point of failure was informational. Upon checking in online, the website presented me with a series of warnings, escalating in their shade of digital red, that as a non-EU citizen (despite possessing a UK residency permit, a distinction the system seemed unable to parse), a printed, physical boarding pass was a non-negotiable requirement. Failure to produce one at the airport, it was implied, would result in some combination of fines, exile, or possibly being sacrificed to the god of baggage fees.

This sent me on a quest through the Edinburgh airport for a Ryanair helpdesk, a quest which revealed that the designated helpdesk was less a "desk with helpful people" and more a "suggestion of a desk, currently unburdened by the presence of staff." (This is presuming someone's half eaten lunch doesn't count). The system, it seemed, had a single point of failure, and had failed.

An airport assistance employee who, taking pity, escorted me through a staff channel to a hidden check-in line. Here, the ground-truth epistemology contradicted the website's stated doctrine: no, of course I didn't need a physical pass. The dire warnings were, apparently, just a sort of generalized, non-binding advisory. This was my first lesson: the Ryanair informational layer operates on a different plane of reality from its physical one.

It only got worse. After getting to the terminal, I found myself boarding a perfectly normal airport bus. Tad bit crowded, when I got there, but no biggie.

And then people kept coming. And then more showed up. The bus showed no signs of readying for departure. Yet more people kept being shoved in, and you can tell that even the legendary British tolerance for minor inconveniences was taxed beyond its limit. We were semi-apologetically informed that there was only one bus operational today, which didn't really make things better.

People were loudly asking if they couldn't just walk to the plane, others made comparisons to being sardines in a can, and I added my own take by simply questioning why they didn't just do two trips if they had one bus?

Why didn’t they? One might hypothesize that the marginal cost of a second five-minute bus journey (fuel, driver time) was calculated to be greater than the cumulative disutility experienced by 180 passengers compressed into a human brick for thirty minutes. Or perhaps it's a form of signaling: you wanted the cheapest flight, and this is what The Cheapest Flight feels like. You are not a customer to be courted; you are a parcel to be shipped, and parcels do not have preferences about packing density.

Eventually, the boarding staff ceased their efforts, which had begun to resemble viral videos of shinkansen "pushers" in Tokyo, though with less efficiency and more audible sighing. Whether this was due to hitting a hard physical limit or a soft limit on potential passenger revolt remains an open question. The ten-minute journey to the plane was a miasma of condensation and shared misery, followed by another ten minutes of waiting in the poorly ventilated bus at the foot of the stairs before we were permitted to ascend.

The aircraft itself was a masterclass in apophatic design. An angry wasp, and just about as comfortable to ride. It was defined not by what it had, but by what it had aggressively stripped away. The cabin was a symphony in hostile shades of yellow and blue, a color palette that seems optimized to discourage any sense of calm or well-being. The seats, clad in a thin, sweat-inducing pleather, were clearly selected for ease of cleaning over any consideration for human comfort. The legroom was a theoretical concept, not that the seats could recline and take any more of it away.

I had paid a non-trivial fee to place my modest backpack in an overhead bin, a transaction that now felt like a failure of game theory on my part. Observing the general chaos and the apparent lack of rigorous enforcement, I suspect the Nash equilibrium for a frequent Ryanair traveler is to simply ignore the ancillary charges and bank on the operational entropy being on your side. The airline is running a tax on the risk-averse. They won't pull the same trick on me again, I promise you that much.

This flight can't leave soon enough, but now I half expect them to charge me if I use the toilets in-flight.*

(I promise you that even the most budget airlines in India don't cut as many corners. It's frankly quite impressive.)

*I fucking knew it. Their CEO had actually floated the idea of coin-operated toilets a while back, but was stymied by airline regulations. I'm no longer a minarchist or libertarian.

Their CEO had actually floated the idea of coin-operated toilets a while back, but was stymied by airline regulations.

Michael O'Leary is famous for playing the media machine like a fiddle, making outrageous announcements for Ryanair's latest cost-cutting measure which he has no intention of enacting but which get the company's name in the papers for a press cycle.

Ryanair is a meme. Their CEO, O’Leary, is a kind of pantomime villain, always willing to bait the press in a symbiotic relationship because, as he knows, the passengers always come back.

It is never worth flying a budget airline in Europe unless it’s a last minute flight (when the legacy carriers jack up prices to accommodate urgent and unplanned business or personal travel; in part this is because of the unusual way intra-European business class works where the seats stay the same, they just don’t sell the middle seat, which means that they can sell as many business class seats as they want up to the day of departure).

Book in advance and regular airlines (which are bad enough) are barely more expensive once you account for all the fees, the fact that you’re going to a normal airport instead of some dump 90 minutes away from the city with cheap landing fees, the psychological burden of encountering one’s fellow passengers etc.

I, uh, fucked up. I was supposed to be here next weekend. Now I'm in London, and unsure what to do with myself.

(I'd like to blame this on Ryanair too, but that's a stretch. It's probably chronic sleep deprivation and forgetting how to use a calendar)

I'll take your advice to heart, and if I come back again next week, it'll be on a carrier that isn't going to nickel and dime me to hell and back.

Protip: If you ever find yourself out of medication and the pharmacy says they are out of stock of your prescription, tell them that you are about to call your insurance company to inform them that their in-network pharmacy is unable to provide nessesary medical care to patients. Suddenly, "it's 3-4 days out," and, "this is just our procedure," becomes, "I'll check the stockroom," and "we'll have that ready for you sir," in about 2 minutes. Dangerous professional voice is a superpower. Obviously you must only use this power for good.

"Dangerous professional" is a term popularized by Patrick Mackenzie (@patio11 on X): https://x.com/patio11/status/1162561822248992768 about a particular mode of communication (usually written, because Dangerous Professionals make paper trails, but sometimes verbal):

Memetically, being a Dangerous Professional means communicating in what might be a slightly adversarial context in a way which suggests that a bureaucracy take one’s concerns seriously and escalate them to someone empowered to resolve them swiftly.

The idea is to convey that one is not going to bluster at relatively powerless individual bureaucrats, but to credibly demonstrate that one is willing and able to keep good paper trails (e.g., keeps a log of how the issue evolves and uses tools like certified mail to corroborate the paper trail) and is familiar with bureaucratic norms and procedures (e.g.: "counting to 30 days and calmly escalating to a Regulator or Ombudsman" on day 31). Such a person will reliably cause problems for the institution as a whole if it doesn't get its act together.

X link goes to post #1 of a thread, https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-reports/#form-letters-and-the-inadvisability-thereof also has a good section on this.

Besides paper trails, the other key is knowing where to apply pressure. Pharmacies don't care about patient reviews. Every pharmacy is below 3-stars on Google. You have nothing to threaten them with from being pissed. The entity the pharmacy can't afford to piss off is the insurance company, and insurance companies have a legal obligation to provide medical care to policy holders. If their in-network providers are unable to provide medical care to patients, that's the insurance company's problem, and in turn they will quickly make it the pharmacy's problem.

Despite having already signed a contract to have a custom house built, I remain obsessed with designing houses. On Monday, I managed to get my coworkers to participate in a house-design contest by offering prizes for the winners (a one-ounce silver coin for first place, half-ounce for second, and quarter-ounce for third). Is anybody interested in having a contest on this website as well?

Curious what your process looks like for designing, more interest in unique exterior architectural sketches or floor plans?

I personally draw plan and elevation views, on the basis of the IRC, the IPMC, and ICC A117.1.

I made some very bad houses in the Sims 1, 2 and 3, and some mud huts in Minecraft. What are my odds?

I don't have a creative bone in my body, but I can read the codes well enough to put together crushingly boring designs in infinite variety. Presumably a person capable of reading the DSM would fare no worse.

Like artistic drawings or AutoCAD style?

However you want. Let the voters decide which style is best. (As long as compliance with codes is determinable.)

There has been a discussion of Death Note lately, and I feel obliged to shill my favorite fanfiction of it: Silent Partner, Unfinished Business, which is the best thriller novel I've ever read, including original literary works. And a few days back one forum participant was disgusted by the canon's treatment of Naomi's death — here she survives Light's sadistic execution, and... well, that would be spoilers. But to that forum participant (I honestly don't remember the name): it could be to your liking, and wouldn't even require knowledge of the original series past the episode with Naomi.

That was me, thanks for the rec! I'll definitely check it out.

Excellent! I’ll check it out.

Here’s my one and only experience with death note fanfiction THE HIT AND RUN. Don’t bother with the “post that inspired this” tumblr link; the premise should stand on its own.

Why are there not loitering counter-drones above troop movements in Ukraine? I’m seeing footage of surveillance drones with high-fidelity video recording, zooming in 16x or 32x onto targets. What’s stopping the development of drones with video recording that feeds into AI and surveils for incoming enemy drones? Ai should be able to determine if something is a drone from visual signature + movement. Then you’d simply have to equip it with some kind of birdshot or have it launch a smaller drone.

Search time is directly proportional to range. The more you zoom, the longer it takes to scan the whole field of possible approaches, and the more data you’re funneling to your GPU.

How far away do you want to make the decision? How much of the image needs to show a drone before the AI flags it? How closely does the countermeasure need to get to secure a kill? What’s the false alarm rate?

It’s probably possible. It’s definitely not trivial, and I would not want to be the guy testing it out in the field.

I think IFF would be a nightmare in the face of ongoing jamming and other e-war. The autonomy of the drones in this war is quite constrained, and we're only seeing semi-independent hunter-killers.

Intercepting drones with other drones isn't easy either.

They’re using fiber optics drones now which is insane

I can’t think of an easier way to give away the position of your troops than having a large drone right on top of their location.

It does not appear that either side has figured out a way to hide from enemy drones. If you are in the settlement that they are attacking, you will eventually just die.

There are special cloaks that camouflage you in both visible light and IR, but they are still too rare to hand out to every trooper.

Not that expensive, though. 50 bucks if you buy them wholesale.

I saw a /r/combatfootage video in which a Russian wearing a large poncho was blown apart by a drone. The commenters speculated it was meant to make it harder to spot him in IR by spreading out the heat more evenly. But like many Russian soldiers he was wandering around by himself during the day and was clearly visible in regular light.

like many Russian soldiers he was wandering around by himself during the day

I know you said "many", not "most", so I'm not really contradicting you, but I still can't resist the traditional reply image.

Even if it's almost a tautology that the Russian soldiers we see are the ones we can see, though, you've got to wonder why those ones didn't learn better. My theory is perhaps a stupid one, too informed by my having tried out Project Zomboid recently: you make what seems like a little mistake or you get a little unlucky, your position is revealed, and you find yourself someplace that seems (and probably is) too unsafe to stay, no matter how unsafe it also is to try to carry too much equipment somewhere else while there's a horde right outside. Then you take what turns out to be the last walk of your life, but it's not the walk that killed you, it's the circumstances that pushed you to it.

I mean, you don't have to hover right above them. Both sides know where each other is, at least to around the precision of a grid-square. There's literal trench warfare going on, it's not like they're not going to be manning those.

You could have drones screening the perimeter or roaming the front-lines.

What’s stopping the development of drones with video recording that feeds into AI and surveils for incoming enemy drones? Ai should be able to determine if something is a drone from visual signature + movement.

Because surveillance drones are small and practically invisible in a wide angle view from distance. Realtime (or near realtime) computer vision operates at surprisingly low resolutions and only ”zooms in” once it has identified the area that has the target object.

I did a quick test with a camera and assuming a 20 MP sensor (possibly slightly optimistic) and typical DJI drone lens, a drone size target at 100 meters away would fill roughly an area around 20x20 pixels size - and that’s when fully digitally zoomed in!

You know how the stereotypical bird photographer carries a huge ass lens that resembles a bazooka in size? There’s a reason for that and it’s called ”small target far away” (except no bird photographer would imagine getting a good shot from 100 meters away even with a massive lens)

But how far away do you need to be to shoot out buckshot or something? Or netting? Drone kill zone is maybe 20 meters.

You have to be able to find the drone and guide the loiterer close enough fast enough.

I finally got around to using ChatGPT Agent and it is actually, finally, tingling my "this thing has reasoning and problem-solving capacity and might actually be sentient" senses.

Used it for creating a delivery/pickup order from the Sam's Club website. It hunted down the items, navigated challenges that I intentionally threw up for it, and successfully completed the task I gave it, with very minimal prompting to get it there.

Yet another "Future Shock" moment for me, which is happening every two months nowadays. My benchmark is very, very close to being met.

Anyhow: Anyone have any ideas for some non-mundane, but also non-illegal and non-dangerous ways to make use of a slow but reliable personal assistant that can navigate the internet?"

I haven't tried agent, and thought I didn't have access till I just checked. So consider my thoughts preliminary:

I lack the confidence that the Agent will be able to do much actually useful work for me, a likely cause being stymied by CAPTCHAs (which I believe it's intentionally designed to not solve even if it easily could), or simply because it doesn't have access to my computer. That's where all my credentials and login details live. I feel like I'd babysit it enough to not make it worth the hassle, and would rather have o3 make a plan or guide me if I ran into hurdles.

If you think it can do better than that, I'd be curious to know.

If it encounters captchas or similar blockades, it politely stops and alerts you so you can help solve them before it continues.

How this will impact website's security measures going forward, I do no know.

I have never used a captcha solving service, but I know they exist and claim to be very cheap per solved captcha. Less than a penny cheap.

Yes. I'm very pedantic about my music collection and I insist on having exact dates of release. Often, though, the exact release date isn't easily available, so I have to conduct research to determine an estimated release date. If ChatGTP can imitate my research process I'll take back everything negative I ever said about it:

  • For major label albums released circa 1991 or later, an official street date should be available. This gets first priority.
  • If a release date is provided by a reputable source such as RateYourMusic, Wikipedia, or 45Cat, use that date, giving 45Cat priority.
  • If a reputable source only provides a month of release, use that as a guideline for further research, subject to change if the weight of the evidence suggests that this is incorrect.
  • For US releases from 1978 to the present, use the date of publication from the US Copyright Office website if available.
  • For US releases from 1972 to 1978, use the date of publication from the US Copyright physical indexes, images of which are available on archive.org, if available.
  • For releases prior to 1972 or are otherwise unavailable from the above sources, determine the "usual day of release" of the record label, that being the day of the week that the majority of the issues with known release dates were released. Be aware that this can change over time. If no information is available regarding the usual day of release, default to Monday.
  • If ARSA chart data for the release is available, assign the release date to the usual day of release immediately prior to the date of the chart. (ARSA is a website that compiles local charts from individual radio stations).
  • If ARSA chart data is unavailable, assign the release date to the usual day of release the week prior to the date when the release was reviewed by Billboard, first appeared in a chart, or was advertised in Billboard.
  • If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date (ARSA will almost always be earlier unless there was a substantial delay between release and initial charting).
  • If neither ARSA nor Billboard data is available, use a similar system with any other trade publication.
  • If no trade publication or chart data is available, determine the order of release based on catalog number. Assume that the items are released sequentially and are evenly spaced. Use known release dates (or release months) to calculate a reasonable date of release based on available information, including year of release (if known), month of release (if known) and usual day of release.
  • If none of the above can be determined, make a reasonable estimate based on known information.

The following caveats also apply:

*For non-US releases, domestic releases often trailed their foreign counterparts by several months. Any data derived from US sources must take this into account when determining if the proposed estimate is reasonable.

  • If the date of recording is known, any estimated release date must take into consideration a reasonable amount of time between recording and release based on what was typical of the era.
  • For independent releases, dates of release from Bandcamp may be used provided they don't conflict with known information (i.e. sometimes Bandcamp release dates will use the date of upload, or the date of a CD reissue).

There's a ton more I could put here if I really wanted to get into the weeds, but I don't think ChatGTP can do what I've asked of it thus far.

Honestly I think you probably could get it to work okay right now with current models. However, for something like this, you really need to have some above-average skills in prompting. You'd find it helpful to read something like Anthropic's prompting guide, although that one's specialized a bit more for Claude than OpenAI's stuff. Some of the advice is non-intuitive, and you might need some tweaking. For example, for Claude (has some unique preferences like wrapping sections in XML tags), they recommend something kind of like the following in terms of general structure, and yes, before you ask, order can matter. If you don't want to read through it, here's my abbreviated notes for a good prompt structure for something like this:

You are __. The Task is __ (simple one-sentence summary).

< context to consider first, including why the task is important or needs to be done this way. Yes, telling the AI "why" actually does improve model outputs in many cases >

< input (or input set) to take action on; at least for really long inputs, it should be near the beginning, short outputs this can go later >

< details on how to do it, guiding the thought process. This is where you'd put some version of your bullet points. Your layout seems reasonable but it's possible scaffolding or flowcharting a bit more explicitly, including perhaps what to consider, could help >

< explain how the output should be formatted, and the expected output (possibly repeat yourself here about the original goal) >

< optional: 3-5 diverse examples that help with interpretation of goals and reinforce style and formatting. Also optional is you could provide the thought process to reach those answers in each case, mirroring the logic already outlined >

< any final reminders or bookkeeping stuff >

Did you know that Anthropic actually have a whole tool for that process? If you follow the link, you can get a prompt generator (literally, use AI to help you tweak the prompt to find a better one), auto-generate test cases, etc. It's pretty neat. You can also somewhat mitigate confabulation here by adding a bullet point instruction to allow it to return "I don't know" or "too hard" for the more difficult cases. Also, it's possible that, depending on the level of tool use and thinking needed per bullet, that applying it to a giant music library would require some real money.

I will note that OpenAI's guide has some slightly different advice, but still pretty similar. The main difference is a lack of XML tags, and also, OpenAI recommends this structure:

< identity, style, high-level goals >

< detailed instructions >

< examples of possible inputs with desired outputs >

< context that might be helpful >

As you can tell, it's actually pretty similar overall. Yes, you have more control (as well as more complicated stuff to manage) when doing it programmatically via the API, but I think you could probably try via the normal chat interface with decent results. I should also note that if the AI doesn't need to use very much "judgement", you might actually do better with a well-prompted 'normal' model instead of a simulated-reasoning model.

Thanks for the ideas, but I tried this out and prompting doesn't seem to be the problem. I gave a more detailed response to the below post, but the issue was that while the AI seemed to understand the instructions well enough, it wasn't able to access the necessary information. It seems like it can find stuff on html text pages fine, but if it requires looking at another format (like an OCRed PDF) or a database query it just can't do it. It also doesn't seem to understand how to do certain things absent specific instructions, but that's a subject for another time.

Do you have a paid plan? If not, I can try and ask o3 to give this a go, if you tell me a name and have the ground truth handy. I'm reasonably confident it can do this.

I don't and I can give you a couple if you think it would help, but I tried it with 4o and o4-mini and it didn't work well. I've done hundred, if not thousands, of these manually, and I checked several that terminate at different stages of the analysis to see if any would correspond with what I determined originally. I would add the caveat that the actual algorithm would be more complex; I was writing this as I was leaving work on Friday afternoon and there were several rules that I failed to consider that came up when I ran it, most notable that if there are two conflicting months of release then use the last usual release day of the earlier month (assuming the months ore consecutive or otherwise close together or that there's no reason to believe that the earlier month is wrong). There are also a bunch of edge cases that I didn't put in, like singles that are released locally before being given a national release some months later (occasionally happened with smaller labels in the 1960s who had local hits that would get picked up nationally), and specifying which country of release to use, and a bunch of other stuff that's too uncommon to even mention. That out of the way here are the trends I found:

  1. The Reputable Sources: There were no problems accessing Wikipedia (duh). 4o couldn't seem to access 45Cat for some reason, while o-4 mini could. Neither accessed RYM, though I also dabbled with Claude a bit and it could. It was good at identifying other reputable sources I didn't list, like Discogs and AllMusicGuide, although these are unlikely to have anything the other sources don't.
  2. Copyright Data: Nothing could access this. The 1972–1978 data is scans of bound volumes that archive.org has available in various formats, but the AI couldn't access this. It also couldn't access the computerized data from 1978 onwards, even though the copyright office just created a new website that's easier to use than the old one.
  3. Chart Data: Both AIs could determine the date a release first charted. However, most charting releases were reviewed or advertised prior to charting, and it couldn't access this information. I suspect that's because there are various databases that contain chart information, but finding dates of review or ads requires looking at the physical magazines. There's still no reason why AI can't do this, though; all of the back issues from the 1940s onward are available online and OCRed well enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for by searching Google Books. Google is missing some issues so I sometimes will go to a dedicated archive that doesn't have a global search function, but I can still search each issue manually. Additionally, 45Cat does occasionally include a note with review or ad information, usually in the form of BB 4/17/1967 or whatever. I don't know how realistic it is to expect AI to know what this means, though it's obvious to anyone who uses the site and there's probably an explanation somewhere. There are also occasionally users who comment about release dates and chart info here. No AI was able to access the ARSA data. The website does require a free account; I'm not sure how much of an impediment this is.
  4. Estimating based on sequential catalog numbers: It did this occasionally but unnecessarily since every release I picked had a better estimate, and this happens rarely enough that I couldn't think of one to use off the top of my head. I didn't check it to see if it was making reasonable estimates, though they seemed reasonable.
  5. Last resort estimates: If I'm asking AI to make a reasoned estimate I'm not going to argue with it because at that point I'm just looking for a number to use. It got to this point pretty frequently.

Miscellaneous Notes: It made a few odd errors along the way. It wasn't able to determine a typical release day for any label and always defaulted to Monday, except in the case of British releases, where it defaulted to Friday. These were the most common release days in the 60s and 70s for these territories, but they were by no means universal, and I specifically tested it with labels that released on other days. It also made some errors where it would give an incorrect date, e.g., It would say June 18th was a Monday in a particular year but it was really a Wednesday.

Conclusion: It's capable of producing reasonable estimates that are relatively close to my own estimates, but are nonetheless almost always off. If I don't have a credible release date, almost all estimates will be derived from either copyright data, trade publication review dates, or ARSA chart dates. Since the models seem incapable of accessing any of these, they are functionally useless. They're limited to finding dates I can already find more easily without AI, and estimating release dates based on chart data. I'm not familiar with o-3 or how it compares to what I was able to use, but if you think it could succeed where the others failed, let me know and I'll give you a few to try out. I don't want to waste your tokens on a vanity project for an extremely niche application, but I understand you might be interested in how these models work. Also consider that I'm an AI skeptic who would pay for a service like this if it could reliably do what I need it to do. A lot of my skepticism, though, stems from the fact that it seems incapable of accessing information that's trivial for an actual person to access.

Go for it. o3 is far more competent than either of 4o and 4o-mini. It will probably look for better sources, and spend tens of minutes at the task if it deems it necessary.

A helpful analogy is that 4o is a smooth talking undergrad with lots of charisma and some brains. o3 is an autistic grad-student, far more terse, but far more capable in return. It justifies the price of subscription for me.

I want to make a todo list that automatically makes each item concrete:

You type in ‘buy flowers for anniversary’ and it whirrs for a bit, does some research and turns it into ‘buy roses from Mr. Weds’ Flower Emporium ten minutes away’.

Likewise for ‘find language Meetup’. ‘Make lamb curry’ automatically retrieves a recipe and list of ingredients.

Basically just reducing the cognitive load and bar for taking action to be as low as possible.

Have you tried goblin.tools?

Funny enough, this was my second impulse after I tested its capabilities.

I have an account with the list/organization app "Remember the Milk," and it has a web interface, it is very handy.

I should be able to get GPT Agent to enter list items, and sublist items, and relevant notes, as part of relatively simple prompts.

"Book me a haircut this Sunday" should lead to reserving the appointment at my preferred barbershop, adding the haircut to my to-do list with the start time set for the appointment time, and adding a reminder enough time in advance for me to drive over, and setting aside the approximate amount of time it should take to get the hair cut.

And more generalized stuff, as you say. "Add a reminder to cook [specialized dish] tomorrow evening, find a highly rated recipe, and make a list of all relevant ingredients, and prepare a pickup order for those groceries from the nearest Aldi." Then I can just remove the items I already have, submit and pick up the order.

And if I can get this thing to take over the more arduous steps of planning events with friends, I'd be ecstatic.

If Full Self-driving cars are actually solved now, we're getting very close to a point where I can do this entire operation without once seeing or interacting with a real person. Terrifying, but also very appealing.

Oh, and if ChatGPT adds on digital avatars like Grok (plz no), we can ask our digital waifus to do this stuff for us. Very Trad.

FU

TU

RE

IS

HE

RE

Great minds ;) Would you be interested in collaborating?

Does anyone here know their Myers-Briggs type or ever tried to figure it out?

Ok yes I know it's pseudoscience, I know it's not much better than a horoscope, but it's the fun thread gimme a break. If we can talk about tarot we can talk about MBTI. (MBTI at least is willing to talk about the weaknesses and negative aspects of different personality types, which makes it a little better than a horoscope.)

I think I'm an INFx (never quite sure on the last letter). Or at least an INxx. Probably most people who enjoy long internet arguments are an INxx of some kind.

Most people think you're supposed to just mix and match the four letters (decide if you're an introvert or extrovert for I or E, thinker or feeler for T or F, etc) but actually what it's really "about" is the "cognitive function stack", the cognitive tools that you use to process information and make decisions. The four letter personality type is just a code for a specific function stack. So for the INTP for example, their functions (from most dominant to least dominant) are Ti Ne Si Fe - introverted thinking, extroverted intuition, introverted sensing, and extroverted feeling. The "introverted" functions are more private, more about determining the texture of your inner experience, more about how you generate thoughts and ideas internally, and the "extroverted" functions are how you interface with the outside world, those are the aspects of your experience that you want to share around and make public, you're more likely to want to know how other people are experiencing that same function, etc.

If nothing else, I think the idea of different individual aspects of your cognition being introverted or extroverted, rather than introversion/extroversion being a single trait, is interesting and may have some use.

I score INTJ half the time and INTP half the time, so I'm like right on the threshold of J/P, but the INT are pretty strong.

It is obvious that it's NOT just pseudoscience (in the way that astrology is), otherwise we wouldn't see so many real correlations. Also every woman I've ever been seriously interested in beyond surface level attraction, including my wife, has been INTx.

What it isn't is some sort of scientific causal phenomenon where your brain is somehow biologically born as one of these types and they then cause you to exhibit external behaviors. It's a classification scheme. A compression algorithm. It asks you how introverted, extroverted, emotional etc etc you are in a bunch of ways and then condenses that into four letters so you can communicate more concisely without sharing your entire 50 question response with everybody you meet. I can just say "INTJ" and someone else says "INTJ" or "INTP" and I'm like "oh, we probably have a lot in common" and then we do.

I actually was required to take Gallup's Clifton Strengths test for my business communications college class (at a discounted cost) which I actually found pretty good and a step above the other tests I've taken.

For example, one of my top traits was "Context". Basically, that I enjoy thinking about the past, like to think about cause and effect, etc. This is helpful for I think some obvious reasons, but also a weakness, because change can be tough, and it can sometimes slow me from looking for current opportunities. I think that's actually pretty spot-on for me, and at the same time it's not true of all people (a lot of people find the past boring) so it suffers a little less than some of the other tests from the generic-advice trap common to astrology and horoscopes. Most of the traits highlighted has some kind of pros and cons list, with the idea being to better understand yourself and to double down on what you're good at (and be aware of the blind spots for what you aren't good at).

Or, "Harmony" was another top trait. It can be helpful for sensing conflict beforehand, finding common ground, staying practical, etc. but also means that I might sometimes avoid conflict, seek too-easy band-aid fixes, or get stressed when people don't agree.

Now, I will say that it's oriented towards corporate-like utility, rather than some kind of 'accuracy', and any system of personality with cleanly separated domains with suspiciously similar numbers of sub-categories is a little suspect, but I also kind of like that aspect of it. Also it's identifying the top "strengths", but really it's just saying these traits are your strongest traits, somewhat divorced from if they are good/bad or on some kind of sliding scale. In that sense it's a bit more honest because it's not so much about "you are X category" but more "this blend of traits represents you best".

INTJ, every time. The amusing thing is, while I peg the I and T scales quite hard and am always comfortably N, I'm always around 51% J to 49%P. You'd think at least once I'd take the test on a day when P was up but, nope, never happens.

INTP this is the first Internet forum I've ever been on where a solid majority of the commenters aren't INTx, that's quite interesting.

My vague recollection of the online MTBI test I took was that every question boiled down to "are you stupid, Y/N?" and if you answer no you get INTP or INTJ, and if you answer yes you get something else.

I was INTP of course.

Oh, you don't feel like saying "Strongly Disagree" to:

Complex and novel ideas excite you more than simple and straightforward ones.

You are not too interested in discussions about various interpretations of creative works.

You prioritize facts over people’s feelings when determining a course of action.

You actively seek out new experiences and knowledge areas to explore.

Or "Strongly Agree" to:

You usually feel more persuaded by what resonates emotionally with you than by factual arguments.

People’s stories and emotions speak louder to you than numbers or data.

You favor efficiency in decisions, even if it means disregarding some emotional aspects.

You are not easily swayed by emotional arguments.

Congratulations, your personality type has been determined to be mottezan!

It sounds obvious to us, but to other people it sounds like "are you a heartless robot". T vs F is only like a 55/45 split.

INTx might be 75% or whatever of Mottezans but it's only around 7.5% of the population.

I can see that, actually. And the reality is that my own worldview can sound very "F", depending on the context. That said, my general view of the world is that we should be making reasonable decisions based on logic -- and accounting for people's emotions and the real fallout of a decision on people is a part of that. I read "You prioritize facts over people’s feelings when determining a course of action." as referring to, not taking people's actual feelings as a result of the action into account, but "making a gut decision based on people feel at the current moment rather than actually evaluating whether those feelings will reflect how they experience the fallout of the decision." Other people might read it differently, and that's a big ambiguity!

That's my problem with the T vs F dichotomy -- it's not real. People who are so far in the extreme that an emotional argument from their partner or their child would not persuade them barely exist. And people who are so extreme that they'd rather make a feelings-based argument over what kind of mortgage to get also barely exist. People are both feelers and thinkers. I agree with @Primaprimaprima on this.

I'm not a utilitarian, but I guess I sound like one in this context. But my values on these kinds of questions are shaped by the fact that my feelings and emotions are very flighty and unhelpful a lot of the time: if I made decisions based on how I feel right now I would make horrible, impulsive, and often extremely avoidant decisions! I couldn't function. My life has been a long struggle of using the "heartless robot" to override the useless emotions that can't help me in the moment, to try and develop a path forward that will lead to the best emotional state I can possibly expect and to proper functioning. I have to think in terms of telos, because I need some kind of a star in the East to walk towards in the desert.

What? The majority of people here are either INTJ or INTP…

(Ok among the self reports here it’s only slightly tilted to INTx rather than super strongly tilted but I still think INTx is a solid majority)

I’m an INFP idealist. I want to see everyone saved, rescued, loved, and a part of me hurts when they aren’t. I want everyone to comprehend and never to argue.

It was 4chan that taught me to have a thick skin and give as good as I get, here on the Internet.

Usually it feels like 90/10 among people who comment with the 10 being NTs of another flavor.

I was first introduced to myers-briggs in a religious ed class. I've noted before that Catholic school religious education is essentially useless- not from an it's all fake perspective(I am not an atheist) but from a 'there is no curriculum and so we learn nothing but the teacher's personality' perspective. We had guest lectures on the ancient aliens theory. We watched movies. We learned interesting, but not particularly relevant, facts about church history. Once a year, we picked a saint and wrote a biography. I submitted the exact same thing every year; so did half the rest of the class. Nobody ever noticed. If there was something on campus, we got out of religion class to go to it. If there was a project to do, we had study hall. If the teacher had some sort of personal idiosyncracy, 'the intersection of a vegan diet and the Catholic faith' could eat up several class periods. I liked the older teachers better than the theoretically better qualified ones.

Anyways, one of the projects given to absorb classtime was to research myers-briggs and write about your temperament in connection with faith. This was incredibly vague and, as I recall, like one half of one paragraph. It's interesting that every myers-briggs temperament corresponds to aristotelian temperament combinations, but there's not much of a pattern as to which to which. That tells me there's a there. It may not mean much but it surely exists.

It's interesting that every myers-briggs temperament corresponds to aristotelian temperament combinations, but there's not much of a pattern as to which to which. That tells me there's a there. It may not mean much but it surely exists

Myers and Briggs were reading Jung, who was almost certainly reading Aristotle (along with all the myths he could find), so it makes sense.

ENTJ

I just did the Meyers-Briggs a few months ago at the suggestion of some people I work with. Unknown to me at the time, the office consensus had settled on ENT already and was only undecided on J or P.

Once I got my results, J seemed pretty obvious to me, but I guess I hide it well or come off differently to people in real life.

We were made to go through a test and an interview with a psychologist when I started out as a management consultant as part of the onboarding process. They said I was ENTJ which fits well enough but the E wasn't very definitive.

Pretty much everyone they hired were NT, most E but with a pretty even split on P/J. Being NT seemed like a hiring requirement.

If you want personality pseudoscience I recommend the Enneagram over Myers-Briggs. It has a lot more depth. Myers-Briggs is focused on being descriptive, while Enneagram is more focused on being prescriptive. As in, "If I have this kind of personality type, what should I do to be a healthier and happier person?" And the advice is very good in my experience! At least for type Fives, I have not tried the advice for other types and can't testify to their accuracy and effectiveness. But if you're the kind of nut who finds categorizing by personality really fun, then you're probably a type Five anyway.

Based on the descriptions, I'm more of a Four. (...and that's exactly what the test gave me, 4w3. That probably should really be 4w5 though, because I have rather idiosyncratic conceptions of "status" and "success" that probably don't line up with what the test authors had in mind.)

I think there's a difference between, do you like to categorize people because it's another interesting data point about how they work, or do you like to categorize people because you want to know the color of their soul.

do you like to categorize people because it's another interesting data point about how they work

This is basically the thing that got me interested in psychometrics. My problem is I have a bad tendency to categorize people in my head as lab rats with identifiable characteristics and try to predict what they’re going to do. It can make it a little hard to actually connect, because I’ve already formed an impression of what box someone fits it, and my box is oddly specific.

That said, what you said earlier about the most interesting part of Meyers-Briggs being the type functions is also my view. I think the categorizations are bogus, but I’m definitely the sort of person whose most conscious experience is thinking through things like I’m making a logical argument, pulling in information from the environment to try and enhance that logic, and then dragging my feelings along.

Except when anxiety hits and the processor gets interrupted by the amygdala. That’s when things go off the rails.

I’m definitely the sort of person whose most conscious experience is thinking through things like I’m making a logical argument, pulling in information from the environment to try and enhance that logic, and then dragging my feelings along.

That's really interesting! I didn't have you pegged that way based on some of your other posts, but I suppose it does fit.

The idea that someone could experience "logical argumentation" as their default mode of conscious experience is definitely very interesting to me. I mean I understand intellectually that there's no reason why that couldn't be the case, and I know that there are many people who would report that they think this way. But it's rather foreign to me, because logic to me is a tool, it's not where I live. The urge to typical-mind is so strong, so when people report to me that this is how they are by default, I always have a little urge to ask... really? Do you actually not experience your mind as a buzz of images and sounds by default? It's quiet and "logical" up there? Really?

I didn't have you pegged that way based on some of your other posts, but I suppose it does fit.

That's actually my big issue with the MBTI: Thinking and Feeling aren't so alien to each other. I could probably be equally described by the INFP functions, making decisions based on values, following what's right, working on refining values, trying to take others' perspectives into consideration. I do both. But I'm distrustful of my 'gut,' and I want to expose it to logical argumentation to see if what I'm doing is actually in accordance with the logical way to pursue my values and preferences. I'm a big believer in cooperation, but because I believe it is logical.

I also have a strong romantic identity, which does somehow slot in to that frame. But by far the most important thing in a relationship to me is that I can explore ideas with my partner -- my girlfriend met me because I gave a lecture about history and she felt, according to her recollection, that "this is the kind of man I need in my life!" 100% of my partners have either identified with the Tumblr phrase "sapiosexual" or could fairly be described with it. That's not to say I'm not affectionate in a traditional sense, because I have also been described as romantic, but for me a relationship needs both aspects. For me, my idea of an amazing date is a discussion about the concept of justice over dinner and a reflection on the future of commerce as pillow talk.

That's also a problem with the MBTI -- it doesn't have anywhere to put the logician who's also a hopeless romantic!

But it's rather foreign to me, because logic to me is a tool, it's not where I live.

I think in words. Have you ever used Spreeder? I hardly know her! That's what my mental imagery often looks like; words scrolling through my head against a black background. I often feel punctuation, when I wrote "feel" just then I felt kind of like I needed to lean, and when I write a full-stop period, I feel like I need to jolt forward like a typewriter. (*jolt*)

Basically 85-90% of my internal experience is me thinking about what I would write in an essay or say in a lecture about my experiences or whatever I'm thinking about; for instance, today, I was thinking about how the prisoner's dillema applies to dating and the kind of argument I would make for cooperation in a world where so many people feel like defecting. I don't necessarily think in syllogisms, but I do think in logical, well-flowing arguments. So what people read on the motte is extremely close to just what I'm doing in my head most of the time. That's why my motte posts are often so long. This, right now, is literally my stream-of-consciousness.

I have "absent-minded professor" vibes, and I frequently make wrong turns when driving because I was thinking about personality theory instead of navigating. Fortunately my cerabellum is pretty good at keeping my foot on the brake when it needs to be.

I also like listening music to crowd out distractions so I can get into my flow of words, and sometimes I pace while thinking to also occupy my body and 'get it out of the way.'

Do you actually not experience your mind as a buzz of images and sounds by default?

Well, maybe not unless you count the sound of my own voice, or music. I don't experience many mental images, and I find fiction hard to read if it has a lot of description, because my imagination can't keep up with the imagery they're trying to get me to experience. I prefer dialogue.

My internal conscious experience is highly verbal, and I've occasionally found myself thinking about a phrase so intensely that I say it out loud accidentially. My chief mode of internal experience is to imagine that either I'm doing what I am now -- and writing something -- or to imagine myself with my partner, or in front of a crowd of people, explaining to them what I'm thinking. When I was in school I often imagined giving a class presentation on whatever was interesting me at the moment.

I hate smalltalk, but I love public speaking, because to me it's like writing an essay out loud, and with more opportunity for humor.

It's quiet and "logical" up there?

It's logical, but not necessarily quiet. Like I intimated, the logical processing I go through has to compete with the anxiety feelings that often try to crowd it out -- tightness in the chest, lightheadedness, shaking, impending sense of doom. I guess you could maybe think of the logical thinking as a way to compensate for the fact that my emotional experience is so intense and unreliable.

I resonate with so much of this, except for finding fiction hard to read - while I also vastly prefer dialogue, my imagination has no trouble generating imagery to match the narrative. But I've always also thought that was the part of reading that was like exercise and years as a slop vacuum have made me farm strong at it. That's why visual novels and comics can be wordy as hell but nobody is impressed when you tell them you read them.

Anyway, do you ever worry when you find yourself saying "Ha ha now you're Tolkien!" (when you just read a cleverly written passage) or "Just fucking shoot me already" (infinite applicable situations) out loud that that's how hobos get started? Because I do, all the time.

Thinking and Feeling aren't so alien to each other.

Right, I'm always trying to explain this to people. The "logic vs emotion" dichotomy is clearly overly simplistic and not really tenable. But at the same time, I think it's pretty clear that different people do think and experience in fundamentally different ways, and we need some kind of language for talking about it, even if we end up not using those terms specifically.

If you're the kind of person who writes things like "the color of their soul" then yes, I would agree you are a Four. :-)

Enneagram "tests" are pretty hit and miss, I find the best way to type someone is to teach the types to them and let them type themselves. But based on your comments 4w5 sounds pretty likely for you.

I tried looking into Enneagram for a while (recommended by a Five, I think), but just couldn't. It seemed like everything that might have been interesting was not just paywalled, but sold as "retreats" and "experiences." I came out type nine, and I think it had super generic advice one would get from a generic check-up, like getting more exercise, which seemed actually worse than a horoscope.

Call me crazy, but I think bring advised to get more exercise is quasi-universally applicable, and beats the advice given by the average horoscope. Just because something is universally applicable doesn't mean it's worse!

Sure, it's good advice. It's just good advice in almost all contexts, hardly anyone gets enough exercise nowadays. It's worse for the purposes of differentiating various personalities.

It's true that most of the stuff online is either fluff or paywalled, and there are a lot of expensive workshops out there. You can skip those. If you want to get into it, you really just need to read one book: Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self Discovery, by Don Riso. It has 90% of everything you would ever need to know about the Enneagram, packaged up in a very readable format. You can probably get it at a used bookstore for $10, and it will likely be at your local library.

(Or you can read it online here, if you don't mind being a pirate)

Here's an excerpt from the book on Type Five:

Like the other two members of the Doing Triad, average Fives tend to have problems with security because they fear that the environment is unpredictable and potentially threatening. Fives protect themselves by being extraordinarily observant so that they can anticipate problems in the environment, particularly problems with other people. Their curiosity, their insight, their need to make sense of their perceptions — and eventually, their paranoid tendencies — are all attempts to defend themselves from real or imagined dangers.

When Fives are healthy, they observe reality as it is and are able to comprehend complex phenomena at a glance. In their search for security, however, the perceptions of even average Fives tend to become skewed. They come to premature conclusions about the environment by projecting their faulty interpretations on it. They begin to reduce the complexity of reality to a single, all-embracing idea so that they can defend themselves by having everything figured out. And if they become unhealthy, Fives are the type of persons who take their eccentric ideas to such absurd extremes that they become obsessed with completely distorted notions about reality. Ultimately, unhealthy Fives become paranoid, utterly terrified by the threatening visions which they have created in their minds.

Their problem with anxiety, one of the issues common to the personality types of the Doing Triad, is related to their difficulty with perceiving reality objectively. They are afraid of allowing anyone or anything to influence them or their thoughts. They fear being controlled or possessed by someone else. Ironically, however, even average Fives are not unwilling to be possessed by an idea, as long as the idea has originated with them. Nothing must be allowed to influence their thinking lest their sense of self be diminished, although by relying solely on their own ideas, without testing them in the real world, Fives eventually become out of touch with reality.

The upshot of this is that average to unhealthy Fives are uncertain whether or not their perceptions of the environment are valid. They do not know what is real and what is the product of their minds. They project their anxiety-ridden thoughts and their aggressive impulses into the environment, becoming fearful of the antagonistic forces which seem to be arrayed against them. They gradually become convinced that their peculiar, and increasingly paranoid, interpretation of reality is the way things really are. In the end, they become so terrorized that they cannot act even though they are consumed by anxiety.

I may have underrepresented how much I tried getting into it, though it's been most of a decade. I bought and read a book (not sure which), had coffee with a neighbor who was a certified counselor and used it in her work, who also lent me a book, and put probably about 20 hours into it, with no results, just confusion. Meanwhile, MBTI people say things like "use your second function more," which is much more actionable.

ISTP

I was really into it for a while, due to having a less common personality for a woman, and hearing a lot of "women ___" statements that don't really apply to me, and trying to express why.

My main objection, in comparison to OCEAN, is the Sensing/iNtuition dichotomy. I'm both high openness and a concrete (rather than more abstract/symbolic) thinker. For instance, when I paint, I prefer plein air or studio painting rather than stories -- I want to capture the thing in front of me. But I also spend a lot of time reading people theorizing and predicting, so shrug, I think high Openness/concrete captures this better than S/N

Yeah, I think part of the reason why I'm so drawn to this stuff is that I'm always looking for language to describe why I feel so different. I'm both highly abstract and also feelings-based, which is... just unusual in general I think, but especially so for men. When I read the description of Ni-dominant thinking I was just like, yeah, that is what it feels like (subjectively speaking anyway).

I agree that MBTI can be overly restrictive and has a hard time describing people who are blends of different traits. It's a bit silly that according to MBTI you can't have both introverted thinking and introverted feeling for example, I think it's pretty clear that there are people who fit the descriptions of both. But I still think there's something illuminating about it regardless.

I just took one of these online tests and got INTP. Not the first time I've taken it; I tend to oscillate between INTP (Ti-Ne-Si-Fe) and ISTP (Ti-Se-Ni-Fe), though a far larger amount of the time I score as the former. Even as a participant it's pretty apparent just how low the test-retest reliability of Myers-Briggs is. Introverted thinking as my dominant function and extraverted feeling as my inferior function seems to be a consistent characteristic though.

I think it is better than a horoscope or tarot, because it's based on the actual individual patterns of behavior, instead of something that has no relationship to the actual person. But of course attempting to reduce the infinite human diversity to a handful of broad classes would be very imprecise and frequently misleading. That said, there are people that can be described as "phlegmatic" or "sanguine", and that's not entirely wrong, even though nobody believes in the humoral theory anymore. It's clear that there are some patterns in people's behavior, and those can be to some measure classified. My type on MBTI comes out as INTJ and it's roughly matching my behavior and is probably useful to a certain measure - you wouldn't know everything about me, you won't probably know any of the important things about me as a person, but you would understand roughly how my thinking and approach to things works. I think that is useful, though one must always understand that this is very imprecise and not to put too much into it like "I know how you think now, you're totally transparent to me". No classification system is ever going to do that.

MBTI is binary big5 (ocean) without neuroticism and with German pseudo-science for spice.

Yeah, whenever people come out of the woodwork to say things like "Meyers-Briggs is complete nonsense" I roll my eyes, because it's not. Like you, I am certainly willing to believe that the framework is not perfect. Not only is any framework going be imperfect for the reasons you said, but with MBTI specifically some of the categories seem poorly defined. The introvert/extrovert and think/feel axes are really strong in their ability to gauge what a person is like, but the others not so much. So yeah, the system is flawed. But on the other hand, most people I've known tend to get consistent results on tests, and people with similar results truly do behave similarly. So despite the flaws, there is truth to be found there, and the "Meyers-Briggs is complete nonsense" claim simply does not withstand scrutiny under the available evidence.

I think "nonsense" applies a little to the pop-culture version of MBTI, where you're either e.g. "a T" or "an F". That's like having a tape measure with only one marking that tells you if you're "tall" or "short". That's not how to measure samples from a unimodal distribution! But it's still not complete nonsense, any more than our hypothetical tape measure would be; height and personality traits are still real things.

The more sophisticated tests that return results like "60%T 40%F" probably aren't as useful as OCEAN, because if you want to find the principal components of a low-dimensional manifold then Factor Analysis outperforms Jung Plus Guessin', but they're vastly better than horoscopes.

I think Judging Perceiving is just as strong in gauging what a person is like, but not named very well!

INTP. You are aware that MB is a load of shit, so if you want horoscopes but actually rigorous (standing up to a factor analysis), then OCEAN is the one for you.

One use I have for MBTI (InTx btw) is safely demonstrating diversity. Not on a forum like ours, where INTJ/P are dominant, but in a more normie company it can be eye-opening how different people are. Like, a guy you are buddies with tells you he's an ESFJ and you're like "woah, he should be the complete opposite of me, he has answered every question on this quiz wrong and yet he's still a human being I enjoy working/studying/hanging out with".

I think this is too harsh, MBTI has value if you understand its limitations. For example managers can use it as a shortcut to understand management styles until you get to know your staff on an individual level.

In a healthcare context you can use it to understand a little bit about what interventions, therapy, explanations and so on will work for a patient until you get to know them better.

Most patients won't know that they prefer a logical style of consenting over an emotional one, but if they tell you they are an INTJ you can be pretty sure, etc.

I don't think I've ever seen it applied, certainly not in a healthcare setup. If someone's getting utility out of it, it's not happening where I could see them. Which isn't the same as saying it has no utility, it just doesn't seem to come up.

I think that's mostly a skill issue lol. Most managers are bad, most conversations with patients are low skill and meant to check a box before moving to the next thing. If it's not a tool in your toolbox it isn't necessarily worth making it one, but I have seen MBTI used to great effect in a way that you can't with say the Big 5.

I've heard of the Big 5 being used in management, but mostly as a hiring screen, to try not to hire people who are too low in conscientiousness. Which is of course a zero sum game, so not useful for society at large.

Sorting the people best at some trait into the jobs that most benefit from that trait is useful for society at large, even if every job would show some benefit.

Just because good engineers must communicate well and good journalists must understand math doesn't mean we could swap them around with no problems; the priority order differs from job to job.

And conscientious isn't quite a trait with no downsides like communication and math skills are. I've seen many a conscientious person buckle down to spend hundreds of hours brute forcing the implementation of a poorly conceived idea that a less diligent person would have pushed back on.

INTP, reliably. I think the "horoscope" comparisons are nonsense propagated by an unholy alliance of IFLSciencers ("Don't you know THE SCIENCE says you are not supposed to use it?") and people who are vaguely aesthetically annoyed that its fans have some intersection with the horoscope crowd (people who just like labels). The questions the classification is based on ask about real and reasonably stable personality traits - why would the classification that results not capture personality? Is "people who said in a questionnaire in ten different ways that they are not perceptive of others' feelings will be seen as insensitive" comparable to "people born in October will be seen as insensitive"?

The only potentially valid objections are that it doesn't categorise along principal components or "cleave reality at its joints".

I'd bet that INTP and INTJ is 5-10x overrepresented on this forum compared to the general population. I'm INTJ personally.

Oh yeah for sure, anyone who identifies as a Rationalist in the LW sense or has an affinity for that style of thinking is basically an INTJ or INTP by definition.

More than zero rationalists are extroverted. Not gonna dispute the NT part of that though.

IMHO the best rationalists (unlike myself) are extroverted. But if you interpret "in the LW sense" as "prone to endless navel-gazing akrasia on online forums", which IMHO is only a little unfair, then that selects for introversion too.

Does anyone here know their Myers-Briggs type or ever tried to figure it out?

Ok yes I know it's pseudoscience, I know it's not much better than a horoscope

Is it actually any worse than mainstream psychology?

Academic and high-class psychologists use Big Five, your average crunchy psychotherapist on the street is more likely to use the Enneagram.

Yes. Because mainstream psychology abandoned it ages ago in favor of the Big Five/OCEAN.

I was under the impression that it was never part of psychology, but was developed by two housewives for some popular magazine or something. Like 4bpp the claims of it being like a horoscope feel like cope. If psychology has a better test, fair enough, but I'm gonna need an RCT betwwen M&B and Big Five or whatever, before I actually believe it.

Well, I'm not a psychologist, so I might have misremembered that factoid. Never heard MB being used in a healthcare setting, last I heard, it had been a mild fad in HR.

Even OCEAN is of limited utility.

This is a really big area that I’m largely ignorant of. Here’s an overview of the historical development of the Big Five model with copious citations, particularly with reference to studies on cross-cultural validation of the Big Five categories.

I note that the paper notes that, methodologically, research into the Big Five “originated in studies of natural language trait terms […] For the layperson, personality is defined by such terms as friendly, high-strung, and punctual. These are the basic ways in which individuals understand themselves and others”. I sense an effortpost in the future on the relationship between ordinary language philosophy and this approach to psychology.

INTJ, every damn time. I found the whole bit about extroverted sensing being my inferior function quite interesting, as it explained a few of my RW peccadilloes like driving fun cars.


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