site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2969 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 7, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I was taking a look at Hogwarts Legacy, watching someone play it with just the game audio, and something came to mind that many games may be guilty of:

They don't create a world that lives as and for itself, so to speak. There are many ways to fail at that. One thing may be really obvious level scaling where the entire world revolves around the player character and their weakness/strength. Or there's no inferred economy or power structure that makes any sense at all.

But what was obvious in Hogwarts, an otherwise quite promising and well-put-together game (on the surface at least, I know people have some complaints about its shallowness and repetitiveness) was how all the dialogue you hear between NPCs are not really shaped for the other NPC or that group, it's formulated and directed completely at the audience/player. They're just delivering a message and tone as part of informing you, nothing else. Their dialogues don't make sense as real persons interacting socially with other real persons. This hampers the suspension of disbelief that would elevate the immersion, for me.

It's fucking remarkable how nice people are in green bay. I was the penis at this game singing fly Eagles fly even though both teams sucked donkey dick this game. Regions continue to exist despite the best efforts of the media.

I was the penis at this game

I request more clarification and explanation of terminology. Were you the donkey in question too? I suppose getting sucked off would leave a good impression.

/images/17629017508949652.webp

Wow. I don't even remember writing this comment. I don't even remember thinking about it. Don't drink and post.

Yeah man, Packers fans are pretty chill people (as are most people in that part of Wisconsin to be fair). I know a few who get genuinely mad at opposing team fans, but for the most part we recognize that it's all in good fun and it doesn't go beyond some friendly talking shit.

It was an amazing experience. Everyone in Wisconsin was incredibly nice. People stopped in the street to ask me about Philly. They treated us like uncontacted Amazon savages. Drank together, talked trash, had a great time.

There’s a squeaky fan or something at my office. It sounds exactly like the ostinato strings in a certain track from Halo.

If I don’t comment in the next couple days, grab your shotguns.

Hey guys, remember a month and a half ago I pointed out that AI-Generated Music had fully crossed the uncanny valley?

I specifically claimed:

I think that if we did a double-blind test with randomly chosen people listening to AI songs vs. decently skilled indie artists, 80+% of them wouldn't reliably catch which were AI and which weren't, if we curated the AI stuff just a bit.

GUESS WHAT.

https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2025/11/08/an-ai-generated-country-song-is-topping-a-billboard-chart-and-that-should-infuriate-us-all/

I do think this either proves that the average country music fan has little taste, or AI music is as good or better than the average country musician.

Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but this absolutely still feels like we've officially entered a new state of play for the music industry.

I don't know if this has been mentioned in any of these discussions about AI-generated art, but on the off-chance it hasn't, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG and just about every other non-Harry Potter book you loved as a child), predicted the use of generative AI to compose fiction. In 1953 (probably a few years earlier, in fact).

I highly encourage you to read the linked short story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator": like most of Dahl's numerous stories for adults it's wickedly funny and creepily unsettling. A short synopsis: a talented mechanical inventor named Knipe harbours frustrated literary ambitions, and after yet another rejection from a publisher, he has an epiphany in which he realises that the rules of grammar governing the English language are almost mathematical in their strictness — hence, it should be trivial to design a machine which, once assigned some input parameters, can "compute" a passage of text in much the same way that a calculator computes a mathematical formula or equation. As a tremendous act of revenge against the publishing industry, Knipe sets to work building the machine and presents it to his boss, Mr. Bohlen, who is initially sceptical but eventually converted when literary magazines buy the short stories (attributed to pen names) produced by the machine. Knipe later sets about modifying the machine so that it can compose novels in addition to stories.

The most ingenious touch, I thought, was the end of the story, when the narrator explains that Knipe and Bohlen eventually expanded their operation to buy the rights to use real authors' names and likenesses, attaching them to books composed by machine.

But on the whole, it was a satisfactory beginning. This last year—the first full year of the machine’s operation—it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.

People often talk about how AI-generated art is soulless and lacking the creative spark necessary for authentic human emotion. I won't pass comment on whether this is the case. If someone hasn't yet been moved to tears by an AI-generated passage of text or piece of music, I have little doubt that such a thing will happen before the end of the decade. "So what? People have been moved to tears by Twilight."

Fair enough. But my question is this. Right now, you can get an AI to generate a sample of Taylor Swift's voice which, to anyone who isn't a professional musician or trained sound engineer, sounds indistinguishable from the real thing. As the technology improves and with access to more and better training data (say, exclusive access to Swift's own master recordings, archive of unreleased songs, and isolated vocal takes), even sound engineers are likely to be taken in. The technology to generate musical instrumentals is likewise getting better every day.

In a world where Taylor Swift goes into business with OpenAI and grants them the right to use her name and likeness on musical releases generated by ChatGPT (or whatever dedicated music-generation software they use), do you really think you could tell the difference? Or what about AI-generated novels attributed to James Patterson, with his permission? I mean, it's only one step removed from using ghostwriters, something Patterson is open about doing. Of the novels published under the Tom Clancy banner, a majority were written by other writers, and a significant chunk of those published postmortem, meaning Clancy could not have been involved in their composition even in principle (not even giving them a cursory once-over before typesetting).

Better yet — how do we know this hasn't already happened? Taylor Swift's latest album is her most poorly-received release since 2017's Reputation, with neither the album nor any of the songs from it receiving Grammy nominations (the 68th edition of the Grammys will be the first time Swift hasn't been nominated for anything since 2017), and many reviews commenting on it sounding creatively exhausted, predictable and lacking novelty or dynamism. Isn't a solid, pleasant but unremarkable and creatively sterile album exactly what we'd expect from an album generated using Taylor Swift's previous albums as training data? When Swift is rehearsing for the next album tour, isn't it possible she'll be learning to sing the songs on the album for the first time?

I'm not yet concerned about artists being supplanted entirely by AI-generated artwork: I think an author or musician's name recognition is still a vital part of what makes their releases commercially successful (which is why the names of James Patterson, Stephen King, Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel are always in much larger text on the covers of their novels than the title). But the ending of "Great Automatic Grammatizator" sounds eerily plausible to me: a world in which an author writes and publishes one or two hit novels the traditional way, a major publisher takes notice, and gets the author to sign a contract granting the publisher exclusive rights to publish AI-generated books under the author's name, in perpetuity. There will inevitably be gaffes in which the author is being interviewed about what their latest book is about, and it will become glaringly obvious that the author doesn't know what it's about, because they haven't read it, never mind written it. Or the author will be approached by a fan at a convention who'll ask them to sign a copy of a book published under their name, and the author won't have even heard of this book.

There will inevitably be gaffes in which the author is being interviewed about what their latest book is about, and it will become glaringly obvious that the author doesn't know what it's about, because they haven't read it, never mind written it.

Hah, easily solved by simply having any interviews of the author be completely AI-Generated videos as well.

Or the author will be approached by a fan at a convention who'll ask them to sign a copy of a book published under their name, and the author won't have even heard of this book.

This one's trickier, but I speculate that the studio/publisher might have an artist/actor/author whose whole body of work is AI, but they hire somebody to pretend to "be" the artist/actor/author for all in-person appearances.

Alternatively, distribute the stories as 'by' a collective name.

Just before AI music became a thing, Ted Gioia talked about a Spotify fake artist problem he discovered. Bascially, he noticed that playlists with titles like "Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon" wouldn't include any artists that he recognized (and as a jazz critic he would recognize more than the average bear), and further investigation revealed that the "albums" the songs were from would only have one or two songs. Looking into this even further, he discovered that he couldn't find much information at all about these artists, except addresses in the Stockholm area. The conclusion he came to was that since some music styles—jazz, chillout, orchestral, etc.—are driven more by algorithms than individual artists (by virtue of people telling Alexa "Play relaxing music" or whatever), it was cheaper for Spotify to hire studio musicians to record generic slop so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to real musicians.

In the 90s, I was at a discount store with my dad during Christmas season and he bought a CD titled "Jazz for Christmas Eve" for a dollar or something. It didn't have the name of any purported artist, just song titles. The music was entirely MIDI. A few years later the mother of a family friend was going into the home, and we were helping to clean out her house. I took the records, mostly junk, but there was one that stood out. It was called "The Hits of Nat King Cole" or something similar and had a picture of Mr. Cole on the cover. Towards the bottom, in relatively small print, it said "Performed by Bob Gigliotti" or whoever. The liner notes weren't extensive but mostly talked about Nat King Cole. The only mention of the gentleman who was actually performing on the album was a brief paragraph that said that he was, in fact, a singer, and that he does a good job with the material. When I played the record, I was hit with some guy doing an uncanny Nat King Cole impression.

The point I am trying to make is that cheap, mass-produced slop has existed in the music industry for as long as production costs were cheap enough to justify it. An enterprising music historian could probably do a book-length treatment of the subject, but in the end this has only been a minor footnote in the history of music. And even in the limited instances where it has historically gotten a foothold, tides shifted away from it. Consider Muzak. I hesitate to call it slop because, up until the 1980s, it was produced with a degree of professionalism and creativity that belied its status. But this was more for the pleasure of the people making it than anything else; it was always intended to be nothing more than musical wallpaper for stores, offices, and other public places, with orchestral arrangements of popular hits almost algorithmically selected to ensure the proper pacing. In the 1960s it was ubiquitous, but these days the only national chain I can think of that still plays this kind of music is Hobby Lobby. Retail started shifting to name artists in the 1980s, starting with inoffensive "soft rock" but more recently including practically anything that's been popular since the 1960s.

The AI doomers have tried to make the argument that because this music can be generated so quickly and so inexpensively it's trivial to just completely flood the market, and cash-strapped record companies would love it if they could generate product without having to pay the artists, producers, etc. While this may seem like a compelling argument the music industry could have always done this, but they haven't even attempted it in 100 years of existence. Making music is obviously a skill, and making music that people want to listen to (and pay for) is an even greater skill, but it's not a particularly unique skill. Any city is going to have hundreds of musicians who write their own material, practice in their spare time, play in bars in the weekends, and are good enough that most of the people in attendance enjoy the performance. If the record companies wanted to, they could have always signed as many of these musicians as they could, pay for a recording session, pay the musicians a low flat fee, and completely spam the market for little cost. If they get a hot or two out of the deal, great. If not, they're only out ten grand.

In reality, major labels are highly selective about who they sign, and those they do sign usually get significant financial backing. A local band recording at a local studio can get an album out the door for about 5 grand if they're well-rehearsed. A major label will spend, on average, $250,000 to $300,000 to record the album. The label will also pay for promotion, which can run into the millions if touring is involved. And they would always prefer to spend money on a proven star rather than a nobody. In other words, the model they operate on is the exact opposite of the one where AI takes over.

And it gets even worse. In an alternate universe where record labels operated by signing cheap labor and spamming the market, that at least allows for the possibility of being able to capitalize on the hits. AI doesn't even allow that, since there's no guarantee that you'll get output that's plausibly by the same fake band. Even big stars like The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, and Taylor Swift have had occasional flops; there's no guarantee that because an artist is popular that any individual release will be successful. But at least when you got The Supremes in the studio you were guaranteed a Supremes record. With AI you just have to keep generating and hope that you eventually get a Supremes record, and even that doesn't guarantee you anything.

As much as AI doomers talk about how it's going to take things over, it's not. It's going to replace slop, but slop has always existed. The business model doesn't really allow for the kind of dystopian future they're predicting.

Everything you say is also true of novelists. As with musicians, a publisher traditionally was more likely to make money on someone they cultivated and deemed to a potential bestseller than just giving publishing contracts to everyone in the slush pile. And while I'm not sure AI poses an existential threat to publishing, it's certainly a hell of a nuisance, and it's overrunning some genres (most of those litrpg and harem fantasies and monster-fucker books were AI-written or AI-assisted) and it's probably just a matter of time before an AI writes a bestseller.

The AI art discussion is old news at this point, but commercial illustrators and graphic designers are definitely being impacted. "Good enough" is definitely good enough for most companies. Pretty much the only thing preventing unrestricted use of AI at this point is the outrage unleashed on any publisher or other company caught using it, and that's not going to hold back the future forever.

I don't know about "dystopian" but I do think artisanal human-made music, writing, and art will become something of a niche.

Any city is going to have hundreds of musicians who write their own material, practice in their spare time, play in bars in the weekends, and are good enough that most of the people in attendance enjoy the performance

I know that this is something of a digression, but are you sure that's true? In my town, and the nearest two cities of any meaningful size, it feels like the live music scene has absolutely cratered in the last decade.

We used to have at least a half dozen acts playing on any given weekend. These groups would range from local cover bands all the way up to national acts playing at the college sports arena. These days you're not even guaranteed to find one act booked on a given weekend.

I play an instrument and dabble on harmonies and songwriting, and finding a new act is also harder than it used to be. In 2018, you'd usually have three or for "ISO $(INSTRUMENT)" posts on Craigslist and at least as many on Facebook (though there might be some overlap) at any given time. Nowadays you'll go days or even weeks without seeing one.

Maybe it's a local problem. Maybe I'm just too old to be hip to the scene these days.

But from where I'm standing, it sure feels like something is sucking all the oxygen out of live music.

I don't know how big of a town you're talking about but I checked Pittsburgh's (2 million metro) alternative weekly and, filtering out DJs, cover bands, and open mic, there are 136 music events in town this week. Some of these will be from elsewhere, and some of the stuff like Banjo Night at the Elks isn't really applicable, but most bands aren't going to be playing in a given weeks, so I would assume that it isn't an exaggeration to say that 200 bands in Pittsburgh would record an album with a major if given the opportunity. The point I'm making is that it's not like labels are having trouble finding people willing to sign.

I'm not that far from Pittsburgh. Maybe I should take another trip up sometime.

What's the name of the weekly?

The Pittsburgh City Paper.

I don't think I fully understand what you're getting at here. I mean I get the idea that record companies always had the option of hiring studio musicians to churn out whatever, but the effective cost to produce and distribute that kind of thing was never zero, the way it is now.

Get some random band together, put them in a studio, let them work for weeks, and if it sucks you're out "only" low five figures? What kind of Stone Age shit is that? Your competition is a guy with a laptop, his product is basically indistinguishably as good as yours at this point, and oh yeah he has no expenses, can never go out of business, and there are endless thousands of him.

If you're a record executive who has been given a 1 million dollar budget to develop an artist that the label expects to have a hit, what do you think is the better strategy?

  1. Scout someone whom you think has potential and spend the 1 million signing, recording, and promoting them.

  2. Sign 100 bands more or less at random and spend $10,000 signing and recording them, and just release the music and hope it promotes itself. You're going to pay them up front for the rights to the recordings so they're just making an album for hire and aren't under contract, and you won't even bother to keep their phone numbers. What they record now is it.

The artist you spent the whole million on might make the money back and might not, but the chances of that happening are much better than assuming that one of the hundred albums you just threw into the market with no promotion is going to be a big enough hit to recoup the costs of all the others is practically zero. The calculus doesn't get any better if you can record 200 artists for $5,000 apiece, or 400 for $2,500 apiece. At that level of investment it's akin to a lottery, and lotteries don't become better investments just because the price of tickets is cheaper. It's actually worse than a lottery because at least the lottery has calculable odds and a guaranteed winning number.

Acquiring the rights to potentially popular music and gambling on it in the form of promotional dollars will remain a viable business model, but that's really all we're talking about here. The "record company" of X years from now may well be one guy with a squad of AI agents trying to get his hookiest AI songs into the right TikTok cat videos.

but the effective cost to produce and distribute that kind of thing was never zero, the way it is now.

Yes it was, because people were willing to do it for free and studio space has also been available for free for decades.

Distribution became free at least 15 years ago and well before AI.

The thing that has been in limited supply is attention and interest, and that been true for like 50 years at least.

Maybe the point is that in making the next Taylor Swift probably 0.1% spend is on music (regardless of whether AI or human made) and 99.9% is on marketing, both standard and native.

Even for a mega artist like Taylor Swift, that's not entirely true. Marketing is certainly part of it, but there's a lot more that goes into it. Even if you cynically assume that pop stars are all marketing and no substance, labels pay a lot of attention to what gets released. The reason that people like 2Pac seem to have immortality is because they all record a lot more than the record company is willing to release, especially with pop musicians who use outside songwriters. If it were simply a matter of spamming the market with material then they either wouldn't record as much (to save money), or release everything they did record (to maximize revenue). The reason they don't do this is because they need to maintain a certain quality standard and avoid saturating the market. In the 50s and 60s artists were required to put out several ten song albums per year. By the end of the sixties, release schedules slackened, and by the 80s an album a year pace was considered pretty good. Now they can go years between releases, and this isn't due to lack of material in most cases; those 50s releases included a lot of filler.

So yes, they are paying attention to the music, and AI doesn't allow one to pay any attention to the music, especially when it's made by people with no musical experience. It's just spamming in hope they can make more money than they spend, with little control over the content. And marketing includes a lot more than what one typically thinks of as marketing. It includes touring, arranging press interviews, making sure critics review the album, making public appearances, having ins with radio stations, and all of that.

I don't claim to know how it's all going to shake out, but Joe Blow on his laptop doesn't really need to create the next Taylor Swift, does he? He just needs to capture a non-zero amount of the Music Dollars that exist in exchange for his investment of literally nothing. Once that's possible, and it seems like we're there already and only getting better, the fact that an endless supply of Joe Blows exist pretty much guarantees serious disruption in the long term.

Or maybe not, who knows, right? But when I see someone post something that sounds a lot like "sure this technology makes (thing) for free but it doesn't really suit how the (thing) industry works" my gut says that's it's the industry that's going to have to cope.

Some people capturing a non-zero amount of the market doesn't equate to upending the market to the point that it has to cope. Slop has always accounted for a non-zero amount of the market.

I would point out that the actual shocker here is that this democratizes the slop production. The labels need not be involved in this process at all.

As far as I can tell, "Breaking Rust" is just some person with a Suno subscription who used Distrokid to put the music on all the streaming services, and it ended up being used in some popular tiktok videos. Maybe they did some additional guerilla marketing or something, I dunno.

I've actually done it myself, to vastly less (read: zero) success, just to see how simple the process is.

As far as I know, it was exceedingly rare for an indie artist to make it to the big time while producing music in their garage alone, they needed the studio systems for, if nothing else, distribution/radio access.

It became semi-common in the streaming era for an artist to upload to e.g. bandcamp or soundcloud and get some traction there before they signed with a label.

This current case seems different from even that.

That's not really much of a shocker, though. We've had similar democratization with the streaming services for 15 years now, and while I'm sure somebody has had a hit by virtue of nothing other than having uploaded their music to Spotify, if you look at the Billboard charts it's almost exclusively artists signed to major labels. Even the artists you're referring to were only able to use Spotify to get enough traction to get signed with major labels. "Rich Men North of Richmond" is the only song I can think of off the top of my head that became a hit despite having absolutely no label promotion, and it's a good example to use because Oliver Anthony refused to sign with a label. Despite touring with name acts he hasn't had any real success since, and despite venting about his ex-wife on Rogan, the song he wrote about their divorce stalled in the lower reaches of the Country chart and didn't crack the Hot 100 at all. Zach Bryan is probably the epitome of the phenomenon you mention, as he was self-released until 2022, but none of his music actually charted until after he had signed with Warner the previous year. There isn't any evidence of a sustainable path to success for a self-released artist that doesn't involve eventually being picked up by a label.

And this is for artists who have at least some ability to self-promote, whether through social media, local radio, licensing to TV/movies/advertisements, or simply playing shows wherever you can. If the strategy is simply to upload as much material to streaming services as possible and hope something catches on, there's no way to engage in even this kind of low-level promotion, since it doesn't make sense to invest anything beyond the minimum that's required to get the song uploaded. It may happen occasionally, but there's no reason to believe that simply increasing the volume will turn it into a viable business model, or allow it to play a significant role in the industry.

AI music is as good or better than the average country musician

Popularity of music and the skill of the musicians was divorced more or less completely around the turn of the millennium with the advent of the trend to quantize and pitch correct everything and for the producers in general to remove every single sign of life from the music to be replaced by lines drawn in the DAW. The correct question statement is then "AI music is as good oor better than the average country musician producer" to which the answer is quite clearly "Yes, it very much is". This of course says just as much or more about modern producers than about the state of AI.

There is a genuine question, is this simply a logical outgrowth of Autotune and modern DAW?

And does the existence of The Gorillaz estoppel any complaints about the artist not technically existing?

And of course, we've had Hatsune Miku for YEEEEAAARS now.

And That Should Infuriate Us All

Ah, a reminder that I don't hate journalists hard enough.

Nostalgic recommendations from days gone by - Time Team videos up on Youtube.

It's so good to see these again, and I miss the old team. Educational, interesting, and fun pop archaeology broadcasting from the prime days of the 2010s (the show ran from 1994-2014). You can watch the cast members getting older over the years and it reminds me of happy days back in the 90s-00s watching the show with my late father.

Also, we talk about climate change today and hotter summers, but there were some blistering hot summers back in the 90s as well, and watching some episodes brings all that back!

October 2025 Book Round-up

1.Niccolò Rising by Dorothy Dunnett

One of my favorite books this year- you know it’s good when you find extra time to listen to it via audiobook: I’m not usually an audiobook person!

I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Dunnett for a long time. One of my other favorite historical fiction writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote a poem about her work that I connected when I was a teenager, and I found the fourth book in the Niccolò series in a used bookstore in England in 2023 and had been meaning to start the series ever since.

Niccolò rising follows the most unlikely of heroes, the dyers apprentice Claes, on the first stages of his meteoric rise from artisan to prominent businessman. Claes (who eventually comes to be known as Niccolò or Nicholas) is a genius who initially uses his intelligence to perform outrageous pranks in his home city of Bruges, but after a few chance encounters with two Scottish noblemen who are out for his blood, he decides to change his ways and use his mind to make his way in the world.

Dunnett really makes Bruges, Milan, and Geneva feel alive, and the research that must have went into this book is immense in scale. Certainly puts Kay, and every other historical fiction author I’ve read to shame.

Claes’s relationships are the thing that made this book excellent, although the forced tensions between the noble and not so noble parts this nature was a little grating at times. There are some annoying parts of the book: one of Nicholas’s romantic relationships is clearly wish fulfillment on the part of the author, and some of his plots are way too complicated to be believable, but these are relatively minor quibbles.

4.5/5 Stars

2.The Nature of Training: Complexity Science Applied to Endurance Performance by Manuel Sola Arjona

Read this one in Spanish (you can find my original review of it in Spanish on my Goodreads). I checked this out because I’m a fan of Manuel’s substack, and his philosophy of training in general.

The central theme of this work is that most training plans focus on the wrong things. You can train and train and train and not get results because training is a complex system (because our bodies are). A plan might be very good, but no plan survives contact with the enemy. We need to listen more to our bodies and less to statistics or other fixed metrics.

All of this makes a lot of sense. As Gordo Byrn and Alan Couzens and others have said, the specifics of a plan don’t matter much. The amount of training is important, but compared to the rest of an athlete’s life, training doesn’t take up that much time. If there’s a lot of stress in the rest of our lives, we’re not going to respond positively to any plan. Period. What’s important is reducing the amount of stress in our lives and increasing the amount of daily exercise we do.

However, there are three major problems with this book. The first is that half of it isn’t about training but about complexity science as a whole. I didn’t buy this to read a recap of Taleb with examples about the environment and global warming, as true as they may be. I get that there needed to be an introduction of this stuff for new readers, but it went too deep.

Second, I think Arjona has too rosy a view of our sensations as guides. For an experienced athlete, I completely agree; RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) or perceived effort is the most reliable indicator of what we should do. But for inexperienced athletes, external markers, like heart rate, can be very helpful in learning what is too much and what isn’t. Heart rate training helped me between my senior year of highschool and first year of college for example, realize that I had been doing most of my easy days in the tempo zone.

Third, and what bothered me the most, is the focus on our evolutionary environment as a guideline for modern training. I have two problems with this. First, the goals of evolution and the goals of a professional athlete are very different. There’s not much point in using the former as a guide for the latter. Second, evolution (and this is something I see VERY commonly) doesn’t mean optimization. It means just enough to survive. Our diets and lifestyles weren’t optimized in the Stone Age. It’s possible to improve them (and also obviously make them worse), but we shouldn’t think of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as something to emulate directly. That lifestyle can provide us with hints as to what might be the right direction to take, but direct emulation reads much more like a just-so story, and much less of a practice that is strongly supported by science.

3/5 Stars

3. Harry Potter e il Calice di Fuoco by J.K. Rowling

I’m starting to work on my Italian again, and Harry Potter is my favorite series to work with when doing so. I got through the first three books in Italian last year, but put my work with the language on pause until I could pass my B2 Spanish test.

Harry Potter is a great series for me for language learning. I’m a firm believer in Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis: that is we learn language by understanding comprehensible messages. Since I know Harry Potter so well; up to a point in some situations where I can quote passages of dialogue verbatim with some prompting, it is much easier to understand its text in another language than it would be for another book. This effectively allows me to start reading much earlier than I would be able to otherwise, because if I can read the character names and understand some basic words, I can still follow the plot. even with only a sometimes ~20% understanding of the rest of the vocabulary.

The Italians, unlike the Spanish translators, changed around some of the names of the characters. Albus Dumbledore became Albus Silenti, Slytherin became Serpeverde and Professor Snape became Professor Piton. Apparently in earlier editions, there were even more character names changes, most of which are documented in the appendix. I liked this in general: it gave the books a little bit of a different flavor than reading them in English.

Goblet of Fire is the point in the series where the world of Harry Potter really starts to open up: we see other wizarding schools at the Triwizard tournament, learn much more about the wizard government, and Harry begins to deal with some pretty adult situations. Of course there are some problems with the book: the central plot is pretty unbelievable in hindsight and makes Voldemort look like an idiot, the foreign students are walking stereotypes of France and Eastern Europe, and the house-elf subplot never made anyone look good. However, that being said, this is still one of my very favorite books of all time, and I enjoyed being able to read it in Italian.

I basically learned Spanish by reading Harry Potter this way. I then tried to use Harry Potter to learn Korean (after >2000hr learning the language in other ways), and I totally failed. I took me more than an hour of looking up grammar points in the dictionary to make it through the first page. This was my sign that learning Korean was too much for me and so I decided to give up that dream :(

I've got the books in Attic Greek and Latin, and I'm toying with the idea of reading them in those languages, but maybe I should just re-read in Spanish.

I have them in Latin too, but I have yet to try. Too difficult without some other form of study, which I am loath to do right now.

Albus Dumbledore became Albus Silenti, Slytherin became Serpeverde and Professor Snape became Professor Piton

lolwut

Yea dude it's pretty interesting. Spanish translation did not do this at all, but apparently it's quite common in most of the other translations, especially in non-romance or Germanic languages.

The French version renames a lot of stuff too. Hogwarts -> Poudlard, Snape -> Rogue, Tom Riddle -> Tom Elvis Jedusor, Slytherin -> Serpentard, Muggle -> Moldu, etc.

Hogwarts to Poudlard is a truly bizarre change.

Serpentard seems on-brand to an anglophone ear.

IIRC Tom Riddle's name had to change in translations to maintain the plot-relevant anagram involving his name.

Serpentard

If only I had this word for pro-Slytherin edgelords back in HP's heyday. What do they call Griffindor?

Iirc it's « Les Gryffonchads »

Anyone else finding the new Kimi to be kind of overrated, at least by the standards of 'wow closed source is fucked' sentiment I see on twitter? I did a couple of creative writing challenges and found it significantly inferior to Sonnet which is perfectly reasonable given the price differential. I gave Sonnet an example of one of Scott's 'house party in San Francisco' and tell it to write a similar one, without plagiarizing the ideas from the first (which AIs seem to struggle with given that if you fill up the context length and tell it to draw inspiration from without plagiarizing they struggle). Sonnet could do that, Kimi didn't. Sonnet knows what a text adventure is and lets the user fill in the actions for the character, Kimi will make up its own actions. It's logical abilities were pretty good though, somewhere around Grok 4 and Sonnet.

Is this another coding-maxxed model? I gave it a little drawing with css test and it wasn't as good as Sonnet and much worse than Opus 4.1. In short I guess I don't really believe in the benchmark figures and I certainly don't believe in 'Artificial Analysis' which just aggregates benchmarks together. Kimi is cost-efficient and pretty good but not highly performant I think.

Opinions on Kimi Thinking generally?

Interesting turns of phrase and very good for atmosphere (or at least the descriptions are novel for now) but it gets details wrong and steers all over the place.

David Chapman has an interesting podcast out discussing the work of Jordan Peterson and how his book Meaningness relates. https://meaningness.substack.com/p/maps-of-meaningness

I don't like Chapman's casual dismissal of 'eternalism' or the idea of an ultimate Truth, but I do find him an engaging thinking. More thoughts here: https://x.com/Thomasdelvasto_/status/1986911832192229657?s=20

Much ink has been spilled here over the dreaded em-dash and other hallmarks of AI writing. But what other linguistic pet peeves do you have?

I ask because I just found myself fuming over the widespread confusion between "jealousy" and "envy." People tend to use them as synonyms (more often simply using jealousy for both terms), but the two words describe emotions that I think deserve to be distinguished. Jealousy is felt over things that rightfully belong to you, while envy is felt over things which do not. God is jealous; you are envious. Being jealous is still generally bad, but it's nowhere near as bad as envy. As a child who was bad at sharing but generally pretty good about being happy about the good fortune of others, it has always bothered me how few people seem to grasp the distinction.

Just thought of another one that I really hate:

"...but I'm bias"

Oh really. You're the concept of bias.

In the US they used to say "sitting Indian-style". Then that was seen as racially insensitive so they switched to "sitting criss cross apple sauce".

I grew up in an area that just said "sitting cross-legged" and I don't understand why they had to come up with a silly rhyme. Now I occasionally hear adults say it. It annoys me so much.

Malformed pop therapy terminology.

I've got mental health = I've got mental health problems
My child is neurodiverse = My child is not neurotypical
It gives me anxiety = It makes me feel anxious
He's anxious-avoidant = Either I'm anxious, or he's avoidant, or both

I've got mental health = I've got mental health problems

Possibly analogous to referring to someone with a fever as having a 'temperature'....

I’ve got a mental ‘elf.

'E work for 'elfin safety?

Pays better than Father Christmas :)

"Arguing in bad faith" means arguing dishonestly and using arguments you don't really believe, in which the goal is to frustrate or antagonise your interlocutor rather than engage in earnest truth-seeking.

Based on the way the phrase is used on social media, you could be forgiven for thinking it means "you believe something that I don't" or "you expressed a non-woke opinion".

An extremely niche one I've complained about before is members of the rationalist community using rationalist lingo in contexts in which it is obviously inappropriate, as part of some kind of weird cargo-cult approach to in-group membership. I once saw a guy saying that he had an "irrational prior" on believing X over Y.

If it's irrational, it's not a prior. Stop it.

Why? You can have beliefs and they can be irrational. If the situation calls for symmetry, but your prior is asymmetric because “something tells you it can’t be otherwise” then irrational could be a good descriptor.

In your link, you had other, more seemingly valid, complaints which people addressed well. This one feels like BEC.

If all you're doing is going by your gut, you shouldn't pretend otherwise. An "irrational prior" is indistinguishable from a "gut feeling", but it's draped in the language of dispassionate, disinterested analysis.

When I was in college, I noticed a lot of people using "excessive" to mean "a great deal". It means "too much". That one seems to have fallen out of favour, thankfully.

People tend to use them as synonyms (more often simply using jealousy for both terms)

If the average person uses a word to mean X, then the word means X, surely?

I've never heard of the distinction you're making, and apparently neither has the Cambridge Dictionary. Merriam-Webster says that they have always been used as synonyms, although jealous has the extra meaning of suspicious possessiveness.

If the average person uses a word to mean X, then the word means X, surely?

DESCRIPTIVISTS, BEGONE

Many common expressions only make sense if "jealous" has a distinct meaning from "envious". "To guard sth jealously" — how can you "guard" something if someone else has it? Likewise "a jealous husband".

I'm not claiming that jealous and envious are complete synonyms, I mentioned a distinction between them in my post.

I'm claiming that thoroughlygruntled's distinction is wrong. He's proposing a difference which could exist between them, but doesn't, and hasn't at any point in the hundreds of years that the words have been used.

Contrary to your claim that Cambridge recognises no distinction between the two terms, the page for "jealous" acknowledges a secondary meaning: "upset and angry because someone that you love seems interested in another person". This secondary meaning is absent from the definition of "envious". This obviously implies that the page for "jealousy" is incomplete, as for consistency's sake it ought to include a secondary definition along the lines of "the state of feeling upset and angry because someone that you love seems interested in another person".

The Merriam-Webster article you linked cites no sources for its claim that the two words have always been used interchangeably, but quotes multiple scholars who argued that the two terms are not synonymous.

Wikipedia claims that "jealousy" has always been distinct from "envy", and notes that the original root of the word is the biblical "zeal" which at the time meant "tolerating no unfaithfulness". Another claimed root is the word "gelus" which likewise meant "possessive and suspicious".

Another one. I absolutely despise “kiddos,” “doggos,” and “puppers.” I instantly and significantly downgrade my opinion of anyone who uses any of those words.

This is way more of a plague in Slovak because there's a regular rule for producing lesser or greater variations of nouns and some people, I suspect women, abuse it greatly and every second or 2/3rds of nouns in certain texts are diminutives.

E.g. dom - house diminutive: domček - houselet (?) augmentative domisko - huge house (not really used tho)

One Latin dictionary lists "domucula", "domuncula", and "domuscula" as diminutives of "domus" ("house"; only "domuncula" has any examples found by the same website in texts), but does not provide any augmentatives. Romanuli ite domunculam?

I am Count Domuncula! Fear my warm fireplace and comfy armchairs!

Add "birb" to that list, too.

Is the hooman getting angy about words?

I'm more sympathetic to those, since they're being used for things that can pretty reasonably be infantalised.

Veggies on the other hand, drives me mad. A food group does not need a childish pet name.

“Kids” and “puppies” are already infantile language though. The proper terms are “children” and “dogs.” Honestly, where does it end with you people?

What's infantile about "kid"?

"Puppy" and "dog" don't even mean the same thing. Feel free to attempt a revival of "whelp" though.

For some reason, overuse of ellipses is as big a giveaway of someone's age as overuse of em-dashes is for ChatGPT.

Many people I know over the age of fifty seem constitutionally incapable of writing "I'll buy some milk on Monday" or "I'll buy some milk on Monday.", instead feeling this weird compulsion to jazz it up with "I'll buy some milk on Monday..."

I'm far from the first person to notice this peculiar generational touchstone. I have no idea what this is intended to convey but it creeps me out.

Even worse is those people who haven't realised that an ellipsis contains three full stops, no more, no less, so you end up with even weirder constructions like "I'll buy some milk on Monday.." or "I'll buy some milk on Monday............."

an ellipsis contains three full stops, no more, no less

Ackchyually, an ellipsis at the end of a sentence can contain four dots, the last being the period.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

becomes

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur....

Damn, I didn't know you could do colour formatting here.

I remember distinctly having issues with this use of ellipsis when writing comments on forums back when I was but a wee lad in ye olden dayes of the World Wide Web 20+ years ago. No matter what sentence I wrote, it just felt better to end it with an ellipsis than a period, and I couldn't tell why. But when I encountered other comments using ellipsis like this, I could tell how terrible it was for readability and forced myself to just end sentences with singular periods even if every cell in my body was telling me to add 2 more.

I think it's the same sort of phenomenon as uptalk, where someone who isn't confident in what they have to say and wants to hedge their bets makes a declarative statement in the same tone as if it's a question. The ellipsis gives the sense that there's more to it there than what the person has stated, something left unsaid that shows that the person is still thinking and unsure about the contents of what they wrote. And I think that's more common among young people (and women, to allude to Skeletor's response below) than the alternative, which is why people notice it as a a phenomenon among them. So whatever generation is the youngest generation at the time will probably be seen as doing this.

I think the typical way Millennials and Gen Z signal uncertainty in their declarative statements is by dropping punctuation entirely ("Trump is a Nazi." sounds a lot more definitive than "trump is a nazi"), peppering them with Internet initialisms (likewise "trump is literally a nazi lol, but w/e idk") or textual recreations of uptalking ("umm, did you miss that trump is literally a nazi??"). I agree that this a phenomenon more closely associated with women and gay men than with other demographics. But in my experience, I haven't really encountered young people using ellipses in this context so far as I remember: with only a handful of exceptions I can recall, they're always used by people significantly older than me.

I have quite recently taken up the use of ellipses mid sentence, though I've always been fond of using them for trailing sentences. I don't think I'm a Boomer, though it is an association I make, for American Boomers at least.

Haven't seen it much in the UK or India, though I must admit I don't text near-pensioners much.

This is just my own experience talking and probably doesn't generalize, but I've learned to interpret it as womanspeak for "I am letting you know that I am leaving something unsaid but I'm doing it in a plausibly deniable way."

"I'll buy some milk on Monday" means she's going to buy some milk on Monday.

"I'll buy some milk on Monday..." means I'm going to stop and think really hard about whether I forgot to buy milk.

In this case it's a colleague of mine in her fifties. We have a rota in which each department is responsible for buying milk for the office each week, and my colleague (who we'll call T) was offering to do it on behalf of our team next week. I don't think any passive-aggression was intended or implied, which makes the choice of punctuation all the more baffling.

God damn creepy olds..

Nice post ftttg....

I hope I’ve peaked your interest.

That’s a mute point.

Quite a few! Most hated:

could of/should of

not getting their/there/they're right.

when people misspell the names of people they supposedly look up to.

not getting their/there/they're right.

What do you say to comfort an English teacher?

There, their, they're.

Hah. :D

when people misspell the names of people they supposedly look up to.

Also when people keep persistently misspelling names that are spelled out properly right there just a few lines above.

I understand my real name may be slightly difficult (but far from impossible) for English speakers to pronounce but seriously, guys, it just can't be that difficult to spell a 5 letter name written in all ascii correctly in written text.

The female version of my real name is significantly more common in Ireland than the male, and is so common in the broader Anglosphere that I'm sure many Brits and Americans would actually be surprised to learn that it's an Irish name, whereas my name is practically unheard of outside of Ireland. As a consequence, I routinely get emails addressed "Hi [female version of my name]", even if they're direct replies to emails I sent them in which my name is clearly indicated in the From field, the email signature, and the profile photo is of a tall, bearded man wearing a shirt and tie.

This is bad enough when it's Brits or Americans misgendering me: it's inexcusable when my fellow Irish do it.

Does it rhyme with ocean?

No comment.

Did you date a doctor that was hit by a car? She was fine, more or less.

Not that I recall, no. I went on two dates with a doctor a few years ago, but I don't remember her mentioning anything about a car accident.

Funny story, there. I read Themotte with a screen reader. I kept hearing it as "Scuba Dentist". One day, I decided I really needed to check—that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and all. Such profound disappointment that you are not commenting between sessions of treating tuna toothaches.

Khajiit has fish if you have coin.

“Can you spell… GHEY?!”

In all ascii...?

Meaning no diacritics. I’m not gonna be upset if someone drops an umlaut.

-People are forgetting past perfective. You can find oodles of Youtube videos titled "What I wish I knew before I started (whatever undertaking)" and every one of them means "What I wish I had known."

-Fewer vs less. "I got less chances in that game" is not a thing. Makes you sound like a 5-year-old, right up there with "How much couches do you have."

And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again! SEIZE THE MEANS OF INFLECTION!!!!!!!!

One more: "Have a good rest of your day" is rampant in Canada and has almost completed replaced "Have a good day" among customer service workers under 30 years old. To wish anyone anything implies that you wish it for the future. Are they worried that I might think they're wishing that the past of my day, up to the point of our interaction, had gone (or more likely "went") well? What happened to these people?

One more: "Have a good rest of your day" is rampant in Canada and has almost completed replaced "Have a good day" among customer service workers under 30 years old. To wish anyone anything implies that you wish it for the future. Are they worried that I might think they're wishing that the past of my day, up to the point of our interaction, had gone (or more likely "went") well?

I'd still take that over "Have a good one.", which has been plaguing us for nearly a quarter-century.

And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again!

Well aksHually,

I'm someone who tries to get "less" and "fewer" right, and gets frustrated by people using "got" rather than "gotten". But I don't get alarmed about the "we're losing clarity in our language" argument, for two reasons:

1/ Most supposed examples of this happening (such as the ones you gave i.e. "I knew" vs "I had known" and "less" vs "fewer") don't actually involve any extra ambiguity or loss of meaning.

2/ English has lost a tremendous amount of complexity during the time it evolved from Old English (and before that, from Proto-Germanic). If we're worried that further simplifications are bringing about loss in communicative power, then we should logically seek to undo all the other changes that have taken place over the last several thousand years, but no one seriously suggests that.

My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought

I'm really skeptical. Do English speakers, who only have "they" as a third-person plural subject pronoun, have blurrier conceptions of mixed-gender groups of people than i.e. French speakers, with their "ils/elles" distinction? I doubt it.

People are forgetting past perfective. You can find oodles of Youtube videos titled "What I wish I knew before I started (whatever undertaking)" and every one of them means "What I wish I had known."

This is so funny to me. I remember being a 10 year old kid taking extra english lessons, getting those tenses drilled into my brain only then to move to America a few years later and never experience anyone use them outside of english class. I'm pretty certain 12 year old immigrant me was more knowledgeable about english grammar than some of the teachers.

My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence).

What is the blurring of meaning in a sign at the supermarket saying "10 items or less?"

it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific.

What thoughts is it possible to express now that "corn" refers to a specific new world crop rather than to all grains that were impossible to express before?

As a Canadian former customer service worker who has said that exact line, here's what's going on:

When you work one of those jobs, the set of polite greetings and goodbyes all reach semantic satiation. You've said "Have a nice day" a thousand times across a hundred shifts. The words are no longer communication. They're a button you press to process a customer, like the code to unlock the PoS terminal, or the lever to open the cash register. eye contact, fake smile, take card, tap card, print receipt, pass receipt, pass bags, eye contact, fake smile, "haffaaniceeddaaaaay", greet next customer. eye contact. fake smile..

and every so often, something shakes you out of this dissociative trance and you realize your limbs are working on autopilot like they're connected directly to the gears of capitalism, and you've been saying "haffaanicedaaaay" the last 63 transactions (more? you can't remember). With a jolt of existential horror, you scramble to just wrest control back and say something, anything else. "Have a" (oh no. you can already feel your tongue slipping back into the well worn groove) "..good rest of your day!". Sure, a little awkwardly phrased, but you hope they appreciate the fact that you composed it just for them. You give them a real smile, real eye contact. Did you do it right? Did you do a good customer service?

You probably did. Pat yourself on the back. That was a nice. Maybe you'll say it to the next customer..

Weary.

No, you're not tired, you're wary.

I only ever see people use it wrong in one direction, and it's infuriating.

This and risky instead of risqué are the only times word/spelling mistakes really get my goat. I think because it becomes quite hard to parse the intended meaning.

They're probably thinking of leery.

Oh man I have several.

  • "I could care less"
  • "For all intensive purposes"
  • Misuse of "literally" to mean "figuratively"
  • Saying "an homage". My brother in Christ, the first sound in "homage" is an H, not a vowel. You should say "a homage". Technically this one is more the mispronunciation of "homage" than the grammar rule being used wrongly

All of those get under my skin quite a bit. I just ignore it because nobody likes a grammar Nazi to correct them, but they do annoy me.

There's another, more recent misuse of "literally" that really annoys me: when people use it to "clarify" a statement that no one could possibly interpret in a figurative sense, essentially using it as synonymous with "simply".

Yeah so you literally just export it as a CSV and open it in Excel.

Oh, I do that literally, do I? Thanks for clarifying, for a moment I thought this was all a big extended metaphor.

Yeah so you literally just export it as a CSV and open it in Excel.

I think the "literally" here is modifying the "just," to clarify that those 2 steps really are the only 2 needed. I think people often use the word "just" figuratively, where they say "You just have to do X, Y, Z to accomplish A," when, in fact, you have to X, Xa, Y, Ya, Yb, Z or something like that, and so the "literally" here clarifies that there are no implicit hidden steps in between that you aren't choosing to communicate because you assume that the listener can just figure out those in-between steps.

you assume that the listener can just figure out those in-between steps.

Note the lack of "literally just"! There are implicit hidden steps to that task that you aren't choosing to communicate.

Ahhh. That's actually a valid point! "Literally" as in "there are no hidden steps I'm eliding, that's all there is to it". Damn. I've been wrong all these years, it's an entirely valid usage of the word as originally defined.

1 and 3 bother me much more than any of the others, because they actually mean literally the opposite of what you said. If you say "for all intensive purposes" it's basically clear what you mean. Language gradually drifting, or people using casual slang is tolerable in bits and pieces, because you're still effectively communicating. Multiplying by -1 and saying the opposite of what you meant to say is just confusing nonsense, and hinders the ability of people to know what your words mean. If the word "literally" means literally 50% of the time and means figuratively 50% of the time then people have to deduce the meaning entirely from context, in which case the word provides no signal whatsoever.

Similarly, I know the word "inflammable" is hundreds of years old, but it's still a bad word because it hinders the ability to easily refer to objects which are not flammable.

an homage

Using "an" for any h word. I feel like I've woken up in a different universe. Saying "an", like in "an 'ot cup of tea", fine, but I frequently see it happening in professional writing now.

Homage is maybe the least objectionable one as people tend to French-ify the pronunciation anyway.

When you say, “any h word,” do you mean any word that starts with H, or just the ones that start with a voiceless glottal fricative? Surely you don’t mean you’d write “a hour” or “a honor”?

You're right, I immediately started thinking of the exceptions after posting. Thanks for linking to the proper terminology.

Wait you pronounce the h in homage, brother? I never have. But I can remember many instances where I spoke a word that I had only ever seen written down and was immediately ridiculed.

If you don't, presumably you don't say "A honest man?"

I do, and so does everyone that I've seen in the other situations you might use the word. For example, I've never seen someone say "pay homage" and pronounce it with the "o-mazh" pronunciation, it's only with "a homage" that they French-ify the pronunciation for whatever reason. I do drop the h at the beginning of "honest", as one generally does.

That's interesting, because with "pay homage" I've also heard it "pay HAH-midge." But in all other contexts I've heard it as "Oh-MAHJ." The dictionary suggests both can be correct?

In my experience, the French pronunciation is reserved for specifically artistic contexts. You pay homage to the King of France, you pay 'ommage to Jean-Luc Godard.

I don't always use the phrase pay homage, but when I do I prefer to pronounce the h as a voiceless glottal fricative. I can't even consider the words in my inner voice being pronounced like house or hot.

I always hated when I'd ask someone the time and they'd say "quarter til," "half past nine," "ten before din'," "twenty before honey," "forty-six before the shits," etc. Just tell me the fucking time, damn it.

This connects to a pet peeve I have, about social media companies all changing date formats to "1 hour ago," "5 hours ago," "1 day ago," "last year," etc. Usually there are ways to change it back, but often there aren't. Just give me the precise timestamp in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format and let me figure out when that was relative to now. Right now, on 11/11/2025, the knowledge that some comment was made on 11/4/2025 at 16:03 GMT means far more to me than the knowledge that it was made "last week" or even "1 week ago." Because I can far more easily cross-reference other events and comments around the time of that comment based on the former information than on the latter one.

It would be pretty funny if you were to submit a pull request to make such a change on this very website.

the first sound in "homage" is an H, not a vowel

No, it’s not. At least not if you’re American.

I'm an American, and yes it is.

I'm also American and it's not. I've literally never heard the H pronounced, including online, so it's not a regional thing.

There's a special place in hell reserved for people who write "could of" instead of "could have" and they should be sent there right now.

For the record it's not "rock, paper, scissors," it's "scissors, paper, rock." Whoever it was who duped the new generation to say it backwards should be caned.

In *guu, chokki paah" (janken, the Japanese version, used I sometimes believe to make every decision of import throughout Japanese history) the order is actually "rock (guu) scissors (chokki) , paper (pahh, or the outstretched hand)"

They should of been sent there a long time ago.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

You evil bastard!

Yeah, they're all total looser's.

that Lose versus Loose grates my eyes everytime i see it.

For two hundred years people like you have been trying to squelch English speakers' opportunities to feel like fancy snooty French people once in a while. Well, you see the trajectories at the end of that graph? No more! Our time is now. We're not even saying "OM-idj" now, oh no, you lost that chance at compromise. Our speech will now be a full-throated "oh-MAHZH" to the romance languages!

Very well, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Let there only be enmity between us from this day forward!

Saying "an homage". My brother in Christ, the first sound in "homage" is an H, not a vowel. You should say "a homage". Technically this one is more the mispronunciation of "homage" that the grammar rule being used wrongly

You're mistaken. Those people are saying "an hommage".

I mean... maybe in some cases, but people do write "an homage" all the time. So either they are pronouncing "homage" wrong, or they are getting the grammar rule for a/an wrong.

FWIW, default Voiceover TTS says /amədʒ/. So English -age, but French silent h.

It irks me a tiny little bit that literally everyone uses the hyphen-minus (-) rather than the actual hyphen (‐), which Unicode did expend the effort to disunify.

Because of its prevalence in legacy encodings, U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS is the most common of the dash characters used to represent a hyphen. It has ambiguous semantic value and is rendered with an average width. U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN represents the hyphen as found in words such as “left-to-right”. It is rendered with a narrow width. When typesetting text, U+2010 HYPHEN is preferred over U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS.

The Arial font doesn't even have a hyphen character!

On the other hand, though, the two characters seem visually indistinguishable—far from the significant difference between hyphen-minus (-) and minus (−).

If they want me to use it they can put it on the keyboard.

Not only am I going to continue using - for everything, in most of the webpages I've written, in the backend there is a nasty regex chopping off everything not in the Basic Latin block.

I was going to quip that I don't have two different keys on my board, but I absolutely do. I have both - and -, from the number line above the keyboard, and the numberpad on the right. Still, I don't see much difference. See if you can see anything:

-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|


-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|


-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|

They're both hypen minus, aren't they?

They're both hypen-minus, aren't they?

Yes.

The caveat here is that if you're using anything other than a system font (as you should be), the actual hyphen is going to be mapped to U+002D and U+2010 won't be used. In fact, the only two fonts I could find that preserve this distinction were Calibri (used here) and Times New Roman. U+2010 generally shouldn't be used as most word processing programs treat U+002D as the actual hyphen, which means that any time the program needs to recognize a hyphen for formatting purposes it will look for U+002D. And if you're have a justified right edge with hyphenation on, it's going to insert U+002D anyway, so if you're going to be a purist you'd better be prepared to hyphenate manually. Especially since the software will naturally break at the hyphen, which could theoretically result in two consecutive hyphens or a hyphen on either side of the break if you insist on using U+2010. The differentiation is a relic of early Unicode moving away from the old ASCII system, where, with only 127 characters available, you had to double up. But nobody uses fonts that were designed for ASCII anymore, and there's no reason to make a slightly beefier hyphen for use as a subtraction symbol. The distinction has been deprecated by modern technology.

I would also not that the same is more or less true for the actual subtraction symbol, though the proper substitute is not the hyphen-minus but the en dash (U+2013). I'm more of a purist about this one, but like U+2010, it's also available only in a limited number of system fonts. It generally rides a little lower than the en dash, and if they look similar enough and you're that particular you can sub in the subtraction symbol from Times New Roman (Calibri's is too rounded to match most fonts), but in some of the newer fonts that are a little more daring, like Signifier, it's best to just use the en dash.

What's a "stochastic parrot"? Well, it's something that talks like this, basically.

The user wants me to reverse the word "ENTROPY" step by step. The word is: E N T R O P Y Reversed means: Y P O R T N E Let me do this step by step: Start with the original word: ENTROPY Reverse it letter by letter: The last letter is Y The second to last letter is P The third to last letter is O The fourth to last letter is R The fifth to last letter is T The sixth to last letter is N The seventh (first) letter is E So the reversed word is: YPOR TNE (wait, let me check that) Actually, let me list it more carefully: Original: E N T R O P Y Position: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Reversed order (position 7 to 1): Position 7: Y Position 6: P Position 5: O Position 4: R Position 3: T Position 2: N Position 1: E So the reversed word is: YPO R T N E (no spaces, just YPORTNE) Let me verify: E N T R O P Y Y P O R T N E Yes, that looks correct. The reversed word is "YPORTNE". Now I need to show this step by step as requested. Step-by-step reversal: Identify the original word: ENTROPY Count the letters: 7 letters Write the last letter first: Y Add the second-to-last letter: YP Add the third-to-last letter: YPO Add the fourth-to-last letter: YPOR Add the fifth-to-last letter: YPORT Add the sixth-to-last letter: YPORTN Add the seventh-to-last (first) letter: YPORTNE Final result: YPORTNE Here is the step-by-step reversal of ENTROPY: Original word: E N T R O P Y Step 1: Start with the last letter → Y Step 2: Add the 6th letter → YP Step 3: Add the 5th letter → YPO Step 4: Add the 4th letter → YPOR Step 5: Add the 3rd letter → YPORT Step 6: Add the 2nd letter → YPORTN Step 7: Add the 1st letter → YPORTNE Reversed word: YPORTNE

The only model I bothered to try, the new Kimi K2 Thinking, one-shotted this, using the prompt "Reverse the word ENTROPY step by step."

Ergo, LLMs aren't stochastic parrots. I'm glad we're all on the same page here.

Well, it's a variation of the goat fucker problem. You can be an upstanding citizen your whole life, but if you fuck one goat, you're still a goat fucker. Similarly, it doesn't matter how many complex problems you can correctly solve; if you say that "entropy" spelled backwards is "yporrrtney" even once (especially after a long and seemingly lucid chain of reasoning), it's going to invite accusations of stochastic parrotism.

Humans make mistakes too, all the time. But LLMs seem to make a class of mistakes that humans usually don't, which manifests as them going off the rails on what should be simple problems, even in the absence of external mitigating factors. The name that people have given to this phenomenon is "stochastic parrot". It would be fair for you to ask for a precise definition of what the different classes of mistakes are, how the rate of LLM mistakes differs from the expected rate of human mistakes, how accurate LLMs would have to be in order to earn the distinction of "Actually Thinking", etc. I can't provide quantitative answers to these questions. I simply think that there's an obvious pattern here that requires some sort of explanation, or at least a name.

Another way of looking at it in more quantifiable terms: intuitively, you would expect that any human with the amount of software engineering knowledge that the current best LLMs have, and who could produce the amount of working code that they do in the amount of time that they do, should be able to easily do the job of any software engineer in the world. But today's LLMs can't perform the job of any software engineer in the world. We need some way of explaining this fact. One way of explaining it is that humans are "generally intelligent", while LLMs are "stochastic parrots". You're free to offer an alternative explanation. But it's still a fact in need of an explanation.

Of course this all comes with the caveats that I don't know what model the OP used, a new model could come out tomorrow that solves all these issues, etc.

what model the OP used

I'm >80% confident that OP didn't use an LLM, and this is an attempt by the Mk 1 human brain at parody.

(Since I'm arguing in good faith here, I won't make the obvious connection to n>1 goatfucking)

The version of the stochastic parrot you describe here is heavily sanewashed.

In the original 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, Bender et al. use “stochastic parrot” as a metaphor for large language models that:

  • are trained only to predict the next token from previous tokens (string prediction),

  • stitch together word sequences based on learned probabilities from their training data,

  • do this without any reference to meaning, communicative intent, or a model of the world or the reader

The first two points? They're just how LLMs work. The third is utter nonsense.

We know that LLMs have world-models, including models of the reader. In some aspects, like "truesight", they're outright superhuman.

Of course, even Bender's version isn't the same as the more pernicious form polluting memeplexes, that is closer to:

People saying “it’s just a stochastic parrot” to mean “this is literally just a fancy phone keyboard, nothing more,” full stop.

Or, a claim they can't reason at all. This ignores that even a pure next-token predictor trained at scale develops nontrivial internal representations and systematic behavior, whether or not you want to call that “understanding.” once again, there's real structure in there, and things that, if you aren't allowed to call world models, I have no idea what counts.

What I find the most annoying is the form that can be summed up as: "by definition any next-token predictor cannot understand, so anything it does is parroting.”

That is smuggled in as a definitional move, rather than argued from empirical behavior or cognitive theory.

If you look closely, none of these objections can even in principle be surmounted by addressing the issues you raise.

LLMs stop making mistakes at higher rates than humans? Nope.

They stop making "typical" LLM mistakes? Nope.

The Original Sin remains. Nothing else can matter.

Another way of looking at it in more quantifiable terms: intuitively, you would expect that any human with the amount of software engineering knowledge that the current best LLMs have, and who could produce the amount of working code that they do in the amount of time that they do, should be able to easily do the job of any software engineer in the world. But today's LLMs can't perform the job of any software engineer in the world. We need some way of explaining this fact. One way of explaining it is that humans are "generally intelligent", while LLMs are "stochastic parrots". You're free to offer an alternative explanation. But it's still a fact in need of an explanation.

Just because some words/concepts are fuzzily defined isn't a free pass to define them as we please. The "stochastic parrot" framing is nigh useless, in the sense that it is terrible at predicting, both a priori and posteriori, the specific strengths and weaknesses of LLMs vs humans. All powerful systems have characteristic failure modes. Humans have aphasias, change blindness, confabulation, motivated reasoning, extremely context dependent IQ, and so on. We allow this, without (generally) denying the generality of human intelligence. I extend the same courtesy to LLMs, while avoiding sweeping philosophical claims.

Once again, I can only stress that your definition is far more constrained than the norm. Using the same phrase only invites confusion.

Also illustrative is the fact that OP (very likely) didn't use an LLM to produce that. Because LLMs from the past year generally (or near certainly for SOTA) wouldn't do that. It's nothing more than a shibboleth.

The first two points? They're just how LLMs work. The third is utter nonsense.

The first point is not how any production LLM has been trained for years now. Post training is not next token prediction.

Video game thread

I'm still playing BG3. Around 17 hours in. Progress is kinda slow, not because it's really difficult or boring but because there are so many items to inspect, notes and books to read, traps to spot and disarm, morals to ponder, battle decisions and build decisions to make. I'm enjoying it though. I killed one of the goblin leaders before heading downwards. I'm doing lots of stuff in the Underdark. Picked up a sword that can sing, and killed a bunch of minotaurs and duergar dwarves.

I'm playing Sins of a Solar Empire 2, still.

In my general opinion it is shaping up to be a masterpiece of the 4x/RTS genre.

3 different factions, each with two subfactions. Each faction has different specialties and the sub factions tend to be focused on either aggression or defensive strategy. So you have ample options for choosing your preferred playstyle for a given match.

Each Faction/Subfaction has an array of ship types and a decent selection of capital ships, and a dizzying number of techs to research to boost those ships' performance. And each faction has very different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to economy.

And the devs are set to release a new fourth faction, as well as the LONG-anticipated campaign mode, which will finally answer one of the core questions of the lore from the original game.

Finally, the true core combat mechanic being battles between "Fleets", and the fact that EVERY projectile a ship fires is actually simulated in 3D space, and some surprisingly complex damage calculation means there's some extra strategic depth in which ships you've chosen to compose your fleet(s) and which techs you've chosen to optimize their performance.

This means its not quite a "Rock-Paper-Shotgun-Laser-Nuke" situation where every attack has a direct counter and you just keep leveling your units until you win. It is possible for a giant deathball fleet to lose to a smaller force if the smaller force is optimized precisely enough to defend against the ship types its facing. And there's several mechanics to allow you to quickly augment your fleet's strength at opportune moments.

The upshot is that the outcome of battles can be relatively unpredictable, and you do NOT need a higher APM to micromanage your way to victory if you are successful at scouting out the opponent and predicting and countering their strategy. Although high APM helps. And in any situation with 3 or more players, the exact mix of factions and ships being thrown around can force a complete mid-match re-evaluation of said strategy. Finally crushing the guy who was pumping out dozens of cheap ships to harass you feels great until the third guy rolls up with a wall of heavy cruisers backed by support ships to start wrecking your infrastructure.

My one main fault with it is at present is the unwieldy and un-intuitive state of tech tree which makes it hard to learn for new players and kind of 'forces' a certain playstyle on you until you can get enough research to unlock the techs you actually want/need.

Yet the variable scale of the game means you can play a quick 30 minute-1 hour match where the later techs aren't even needed, or you can do a 6+ hour epic with hundreds of planets and multiple star systems that ends with planet-killer railguns, Hundreds of ships duking it out at once and beastly Titan warships that can delete whole fleets in short order.

Anyway, its a very fun game, and I'd host some sessions for Mottizens who would be interested. Its sadly not as popular as it truly deserves.

I adored Sins 1’s concept, but was let down by certain aspects. Stances, squadrons, the rather important “hero” capital ships…I’d have rather delegated those choices to an empire-wide doctrine or something. Same for parts of the economy. Felt like they hit a similar pitfall to a lot of RTS in that era and included stuff because SC2 had it.

How does Sins 2 approach that?

They've kind of amped up the variety of everything. More ship types, more planet types (also, the planets can have orbits and shifting phase lanes now!), more potential 'paths' you can take when optimizing fleet capabilities and strategic approaches.

The latest DLC added a completely new ship type that is basically a "SuperCapital" that is more affordable than a Titan so it can come online a little earlier.

The TEC Primacy version is interesting in that its modular and you can choose its weapon loadout specifically. So its still kind of 'hero-ish' but you can directly adapt it to the situation at hand as you go.

I've also played games against friends where they sort of eschew capital ships altogether and just build tons of a particular type of unit and that can work if you're not prepared for the sheer number of ships they bring to bear. Although I doubt that's the most efficient use of fleet supply.

The downside is that Capital Ships have items that can be added to kit them out for more specific purposes, and these items have to be researched then individually added to each ship... and replaced if they're expendable. And there's no 'templates' for automatically adding the same loadout to a new ship. So it adds to the Tech tree clutter and requires extra attention to a detail that probably could be automated.

Makes you not want to lose capital ships even if the situation might call for it.

So there's no way to set just general "strategic stance" to automate much of the management of the empire and fleet production. But it is more viable to manage your economy and planet and ship production from the general empire management screen, and only get involved with your fleet's actions in the most pivotal battles.

I'm glad others are playing! Sins 1 was a masterpiece, and my basic verdict on Sins 2 has been "it's more of the same and that's perfect". The only change I don't like in Sins 2 is the removal of the pirates mechanic - while they still exist, I just don't find the current form as fun as the way they worked in the first game. Otherwise it's the perfect sequel in my eyes.

I'm curious, do you have any good guides on the strategic considerations of fleet composition? It's unlikely to be necessary for me (as I only play AI matches and don't touch MP), but I'd be interested to learn more about the game. My fleets tend to be a random mishmash of ships without any real deep strategic consideration behind it, so I'm sure I have a lot to learn.

Man, I'm still struggling with optimal fleet composition for TEC myself.

You can delve into like full-on spreadsheet mania with it, but I genuinely think the number of possible combinations ultimately makes it impossible to really calculate once the game hits a certain size.

One reason I like TEC is that by midgame if your economy is running well, you can spit out whatever ships are needed to deal with the current threat very quickly, so you're replacing lost ships and optimizing your composition on the fly. "Oh shit that's a lot of strikecraft, better send some Flak Frigates in."

You want your fleet's pierce to be able to overwhelm their fleet's durability. Here's the basic rundown. You can sort of kind of ignore the "supply" number if you can tell at a glance that the ships they've sent in don't have the requisite pierce to focus down your ships' health given your ships' durability. That is, even if you were to start losing, you can likely retreat and not take too many losses since their effective DPS is low.

If they've got a lot of durable ships in their fleet, you gotta bring as much pierce as possible.

If there's any stats in the game worth memorizing, its the durability rating of each ship. I mentally have them sorted into buckets of "High, Medium, Low" durability so I don't have to do actual math in my head.

So I'll share my basic approach.

I like to have a wall of higher durability ships as the 'core' of my fleet. I tend to rely on Carriers in the early game, which is to say I have them sit back and send strikecraft in to do the dirty work, so I just want to have a physical shield to keep the enemies at bay.

Then I have to make some decisions, based on what it appears the enemies are fielding. If I'm dealing with strikecraft, the aforementioned flak frigates. If they've got high DPS capital ships, I will probably produce a TON of Corvettes since those help keep the Caps occupied and not killing my more valuable ships (note: doesn't work as well on human players). If they're fielding tough ships with a lot of support: Missiles. Lots of missiles.

Then pick your own caps based on whether you're being more aggressive or defensive. Or, if you like, if you're focusing on killing as much as you can as fast as you can, or if you need survivability (i.e. you're sending a fleet deep into enemy territory and it needs a lot of repair capabilities).

Then add in ship items for your capital ships based on what the enemy is likely to throw at them.

The one big 'insight' I've had that I THINK was fully intended by the Devs was that they have made the default supply cap pretty strict to prevent overuse of "Ball of doom" fleets that can just overwhelm anything, and require harder decisions about where to send your forces, knowing that you also can't hold a lot in reserve.

But in exchange, they've added numerous ways to augment fleet power that doesn't hit the supply cap. Like using influence points to call in NPC factions on your side, or the TEC Enclave's ridiculous(ly fun) garrison system.

So its actually kinda smart to divide up your forces between more than one fleet, and keep them mobile, so you don't have all your valuable supply caught in the wrong spot at the wrong time. And if you notice your opponent has a singular large fleet, you can both prepare to face it by setting up heavy defenses in bottleneck areas, or you can try to harass behind their lines and force them to keep said large fleet on the defensive. Calling in pirate raids on their planets basically demands they send a large force to counter it. Pirate raids are pretty damned expensive in influence, however, so timing is important.

So I think the Devs want players to try different tactics than "make the biggest fleet and dive at the enemy's homeworld."

I've been experimenting with setting up two fleets early on. "Hammer" fleet and "Anvil" fleet.

Anvil is made up of the high durability ships, and is intended to be the first one that encounters the enemy, and is able to stand there and slug it out for long enough for Hammer Fleet to arrive, which is the high DPS, high pierce fleet that can start whittling them down faster, HOPEFULLY while they're distracted with Anvil fleet.

If we get overwhelmed, I can order Hammer to retreat while Anvil covers for it. If we start winning, I can push Anvil forward to take more territory/cut off retreat while Hammer finishes the job.

It's been interesting to keep things managed this way. It feels like this more flexible approach is rewarded so I do think I've uncovered aspects of the game's design that the Devs intentionally added but didn't call attention to directly.

But its still great fun to build up a fleet as large as you can make it, built around what you expect the enemy to field, then smashing large fleets into each other and seeing what happens.

DEFINITELY learn how to get your ships to focus fire on high-value targets, though. They tend to do sub-optimal targeting on their own.

Thanks, this is good stuff. As it happens I also play TEC (Enclave, so far), so this is perfect for me. Right now my basic approach is to spread my fleet comp around - I have some corvettes, some light frigates, a few flak frigates, some LRM frigates, and so on, plus one of each cap. That has been working pretty well against the AI, though sometimes I do need to make use of the garrisons (offensive garrison is a hell of a thing) to win large engagements. I definitely do focus down priority targets - titans and capital ships mainly, but also starbases when I'm tackling a fortified enemy system. It helps a lot because I had noticed that ship targeting is pretty lackluster if you just let them do whatever they want.

With TEC, I think you can afford to overproduce anything you might need. If you think you need missiles, build MORE missile frigates than you think you need. If you need strikecraft, build MORE carriers than you think you need, and use the extra strikecraft items on your Capital ships to make even more.

Literally, just think of your fleets as 'units' and the ships as the HP, and your factories as 'healers.' Replace losses as quickly as you can. Don't bemoan losses as inherently bad if you're trading damage at approximately an equal rate.

And of course use Garrisons to bolster your "HP."

If you've got the resources pouring in, you should NEVER have idle factories, especially as enclave. Oh, and build more factories than you think you need, too.

Once you're finally running up against the supply limit, then it pays to get more strategic. There are ships that are more 'efficient' uses of supply than others.

If you've got the exotics, don't be afraid to scuttle your frigates to free up supply, even making a fleet ENTIRELY out of capital ships if you want.

There's a strategy of "Rollin' Kols" which is to send in nothing but Kol battleships with Experimental Beam upgrades and just obliterate any given target in the gravity well.

This has my interest. I heard about SoaSE from a friend, I saw #2 come through last year, but $50 is pretty steep for a game you say "still" about.

Playing Sins of a Solar Empire is "still," playing #2 is just regular playing a game that is 15 months old. I eat food that is past its printed date by more than 15 months. I still play FTL, and that's 13 years old.

you can play a quick 30 minute-1 hour match where the later techs aren't even needed, or you can do a 6+ hour epic

This seems like a major flaw if I can't tell which one I'm getting into ahead of time. Although I suppose the answer is you sign up for a 6 hour epic, and sometimes it ends quick. A twelvefold difference in time is extreme.

If you do host, I'll try to play.

I mean, I played the first game in the series for over 10 years.

When I say that the Second has improved on the first in almost every conceivable way, I want to establish that it had a high bar to clear.

This seems like a major flaw if I can't tell which one I'm getting into ahead of time.

Generally you can tell from the game settings at the outset. The Size of the map is the primary determinant as to how quickly you'll come into contact with the opponent, and whether there's even enough resources to build an economy or if you just hop straight to fighting.

And you can set the game speed higher for ship movement, tech research, and resource accumulation to ensure things end quickly, or lower those speeds to stretch the game out and force a more strategic match.

The largest maps start to feel like playing Stellaris but with just the space battles and economics and less of the tiddly empire management.

And there is a contingent of players who seem to not really want to play competitively at all but instead just set up the largest fleet battles possible then just sit back and watch them play out.

As mentioned there's a steepish learning curve for the tech tree alone, knowing what to research and when is a critical factor and the game will NOT hold your hand to show you which path is ideal.

So it is a bit much to ask of someone who isn't familiar with it to start playing with you right off rip.

Soccer management game Football Manager 26 released this week after two years of anticipation.

No installment was released last year following complications from the transition to Unity; the two releases before that (2023 and 2024) were announced as half-developed games because of parent studio Sports Interactive's purported all-in focus on this year's release (well, last year's, as it was then). FM26 was to be the ultimate Football Manager: enhanced match graphics, a tile-based UI no longer evocative of a spreadsheet, improved "newgen" (game-generated future player) faces, and... women's football.

Then came the leaks and reluctant announcements from the studio as the clock ticked down to what should have been the release date of FM25. Despite years of insistence that neither the engine transfer nor the addition of women's football would cause any complications, the game was in trouble. International management, a poorly developed (and therefore rarely touched) aspect of previous games, had been entirely removed rather than improved. In-game manager-player interactions (known as "shouts") had been entirely removed rather than improved. Most controversially, player weights had been removed for obtuse reasons pertaining to "women's body types" being "very different from men's" with their weight fluctuating "a lot more, often weekly." This, of course, somehow resulted in all players having their weight measurements removed, including male players.

Cue this week's release... a calamitous, bug-filled, poorly-optimized catastrophe. Sure, the bedrock is there in Unity for a game that will eventually surpass its predecessors, and patches over the last 48 hours have taken Steam reviews from "Overwhelmingly Negative" to "Mostly Negative", but it's simply unclear what the SI team was working on for the last five years of claimed development on this game. User mods slapped together in a week's time have outdone in-game graphics and processing times; the two most recent patches included hundreds of fundamental basic features and fixes that... somehow no one thought to include in the base game upon release? The whole saga has been a fascinating public showcase of mismanagement, procrastination, incompetence, and a bizarre hierarchy of priorities.

That last component is most interesting to me as an observer: who is benefitting from all these video games devoting time and money toward the implementation of women's sports? EA Sports, 2K Sports, and now Sports Interactive chose to limit development elsewhere so they could include slapdash, poorly-planned women's leagues. Are their marketing departments manufacturing idealistic projections of future female fanbases? Have they all been Pied-Piper'd (or Don-Corleone'd) by Sweet Baby Inc.?

I think you're overblowing the women's football stuff massively: you might ask who benefits from the addition of the Ethiopian league or the Romanian second tier or the myriad other tiny leagues you can rock up to as a manager. Adding women's football is largely a matter of expanding their database and I can't imagine it was some big programming challenge. Other than the dumb weight issue, I can't imagine any of their problems were due to women's football compared to the general engine change and their overall incompetence at designing a UI and graphics engine.

As for the why, then yeah I think you're correct:

idealistic projections of future female fanbases

Games like FIFA and FM have pretty much maxed out the male audience, so what better way to please growth hungry execs than promising a whole new female audience to exploit?

At least for FM, it makes sense because of the aforementioned matter of just expanding their database (compared to modelling hundreds of new players and new animations in FIFA, for example)

EU5 has been released. I'm getting too old for grand strategy games, especially when they run as slow as this one. I played as Muscovy and got to 1390 in two evenings. That's three extra hours of intense gameplay after nine hours of my regular job each day. I need a better CPU at the very least.

Playing Dispatch. It's by the Critical Role people, has nice animation, music, writing, etc. The bulk of the time playing is selecting dialogue options and watching your character make it sound snappier than you ever could pull off. There are real time events you can turn off, and otherwise two different games - resource management/hero leveling and a "hacking" puzzle game.

Unspoilerly Plot - It's a superhero setting. You are someone without powers but who has extensive experience around heroes and villains. You get a gig as a Superhero Dispatcher (think 911 dispatcher for subscribers to a corporate super-hero service.) You basically become the life coach for this universe's version of the Suicide Squad. Shenanigans ensue.

It's fun. My one complaint is that I wish there was an option to just do the Resource Management game without watching all the unskippable cut scenes. You can make different choices which makes replaying the game less tedious, but it's still tedious.

Played it on your recommendation and it has easily the best directed video game cut scenes I've seen, by a good margin. Its barely a game but hey, it's still pretty good, with some scenes being really good.

As for your complaint, are you aware that you can choose to replay specific scenes, including the resource management game?

No, I'm not sure how to do that. I know I can make a new save slot from a chapter, but not how to drill down to a specific scene.

There is a button in the bottom right corner when you're in the menu where you select which episode to play. I think it's 'y' on a controller or tab by default.

All the cutscene stuff looks good. You find the actual gameplay fun too?

The game play is fun. It is another medium for telling the story. The level of urgency, planning ahead, thinking about and picking the right options, is just right. It feels very smooth. That said, I haven't noticed that the performance in the game-play impacts the story. The reward for doing a good job in the gameplay is to be told at the end of the episode that you're in the top 20% of players or whatever. The plot goes on regardless.

Unspoilerly Plot - It's a superhero setting. You are someone without powers but who has extensive experience around heroes and villains.

Ever read Steelheart, or its sequels, by Sanderson? That's my canonical no-power-superhero story.

Featuring an all-star cast from every corner of entertainment
Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad, Westworld, Black Mirror)
Laura Bailey (The Legend of Vox Machina, The Last of Us II, Marvel's Spider-Man)
Erin Yvette (Hades II, The Wolf Among Us, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon) \

MoistCr1TiKaL (Charles White)


Jacksepticeye (Sonic Prime, River City Girls 1 & 2, Bendy and the Ink Machine)
Travis Willingham (The Legend of Vox Machina, Critical Role, Lego Avengers)
Alanah Pearce (V/H/S Beyond, Cyberpunk 2077, Gears 5)
Lance Cantstopolis (Karate, Dancing, Actor)
Joel Haver (Filmmaker, Actor, YouTuber)
THOT SQUAD (Musician: Pound Cake, Hoes Depressed)
Yung Gravy (Musician: Betty (Get Money), oops!)
Matthew Mercer (Critical Role, Overwatch, Resident Evil 6)
and Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction, The Batman, Casino Royale)

I really did not expect to see that name here. Not exactly what I'd expect for a VA.

Yes, Steelheart was pretty enjoyable, though Dispatch plays the Superhero things much straighter.

I've become really addicted to my 3rd play through of Owlcat's Rogue Trader CRPG, staying up until 2am on work nights to play it. I'm doing this run as dogmatic priest and am very much enjoying the RP. I just wish the game had a more creative difficulty setting. I play on unfair and don't use an officer(gives lots of extra turns) and combat still only lasts 1-2 rounds. Meaning most builds are just about pumping for 1-2 turns of play knowing that any downsides from consumables/items/abilities will unlikely to affect the combat. The recent 1.5v update added some new talents for less common play styles and I love them.

I haven't gotten the new Arbites DLC but i hear its not very good, unlike the Void Shadows one which is excellent.

I haven't gotten the new Arbites DLC but i hear its not very good, unlike the Void Shadows one which is excellent.

I thought that Lex Imperialis was also excellent. The story is well done, has some very fun moments, and Solomorne is a great party member. YMMV though.

Curious, my understanding is it felt very much like side act, you just go do some optional quests but very little impact on the story. If you think it's worth it maybe I'll check it out on my next run. Can you convert Solomorne to not dogmatic?

I mean, I would say that is exactly how the first DLC works to be fair. You get to go on quests for Kibellah's story but they are self contained and don't have any implications for the main story. That is also how Lex Imperialis works, but the side quests are generally engaging (and they cooked up some interesting combat encounters, which is always nice). The only thing which ties back into the main story to any real extent is that you get to spend more time with the Administratum prefect from the base game (she even gets a portrait now!), and she will have some tasks for you. No idea if you can make Solomorne not dogmatic - I wasn't aware you could shift companion alignment at all, I thought it was set in stone.

Well.. no implication isn't true. They're non-negotiable. You can't fail them, that's a game over and they're fairly tough, some of them.

As a huge BG3 fan and off and on Warhammer painter, I picked up Rogue Trader a few months back but haven't really gotten into it. I feel like a lot of these games take a couple of hours of being confused by systems before they really grab you, and I haven't pushed through that yet (to my great nerd shame, I also wandered away from my PC after 45 minutes of Clair Obscur). Seems like Rogue trader is worth the effort to learn, though? Should I play with the DLC enabled for my first play through, and do you have any other relevant tips?

I enjoy it but yes there is quite the learning curve to push past. I'm not even truly degenerate about builds yet and I try to stay away from reading build guides as it sucks the fun out of it for me. The story is good, its fairly responsive to your choices. The romances feel great, the core set of characters have good arcs and potential. You can push your followers towards Chaos/dogmatic/humanism in ways that make sense. Overall it's a very enjoyable game.

Void shadows is a must. It seamlessly integrates with the core story very well. Technically the core story left side missions with references/hints prior to its release which makes it feel like it fleshed those out and made them immersive. The classes it adds are unfortunately very OP and very fun. 1.5v was a balance patch that mostly just hit them.

The gameplay tips if you are starting out is to abuse office mechanics via Cassia, you get extra turns on your heavy hitters allowing to scale up the needed buffs to be monsters. Late game they generally start fights with the buffs so its less relevant, but at low levels the power fantasy hasn't taken off yet.

Appreciate the advice! Other than this I'll try to go in blind, and we'll see if I succumb to the lure of build guides at some point.

The DLC integrates well into the main game, so I would enable it (and did for my first playthrough this past year). I'm not great at character building so I don't have a ton of tips, but one thing I found is that RT is very much a game of stacking buffs. 3% damage here, an extra attack there, and when you add them up the character becomes a killing machine. And speaking of extra attacks, look out for things that say they do not count against the one attack per turn limit. They are generally very powerful options to take.

I know that feeling. I’m reminded of the mod for D:OS2 which rebalanced combat to make health more relevant. They had to move heaven and earth to let it serve as a valid resource instead of a last resort.

But then, RPGs have always suffered from that tension. Real humans have a nasty habit of dying horribly when they take one bolter round to the face. Not easy to reconcile with slower, attrition-based gameplay.

My brain feels modded every time I read your handle. I keep seeing "nutsack" whenever I scroll past you. Do people ever call you that in multiplayer?

Unfortunately, yes.

I picked this name back in the Xbox live days. My mother had seen my existing handle and asked “isn’t that kind of…gay?” Since I’d been playing (and honestly, reading about) the roguelike NetHack, I swapped out the H and damned myself to a career of scrotal comments. How ironic.

Oh man. That is great. We’d have loved you back when the lot of us played the original StarCraft on Battle.net. It was a paradise of vulgarity, immature teenagers and young adults.

Oh DOS2, I have fond memories but yeah very much same feeling. I always hated how you pretty much had to spec your party towards one armor type strip or bust. I remember using the hell out of mods to try and fix it, make combat more interesting to some success but it was just a lot. I haven't tried modding Rogue Trader yet.

RPGs have always suffered from that tension. Real humans have a nasty habit of dying horribly when they take one bolter round to the face.

Funny enough this still happens with high level parties in Rogue Trader, which is part of the combat problem(on unfair). If you aren't alpha striking the enemy they are alpha striking you. I'm not sure what a satisfying system looks like. Thinking back idk if I've run into an rpg system that does it well.

EDIT: on further thought, its the power fantasy that probably causes the combat problem.

Will do!

I almost beat Ys Chronicles 1. Got to the final boss, decided it was bullshit I'm too damned old for, and watched the ending on youtube before I started cussing at it.

I think I just should have played the game on easy instead of normal. It has some awkward difficulty spikes that after a few tries I was able to overcome, and for 99% of the game normal felt about right. But the final boss was just too much bullshit. Constantly drops meteors on your head to dodge, they explode into more bullets turning the scenario into a bullet hell. Then whenever you hit him, he deletes the part of the boss arena you were standing on when you did it. After 10 or so hits, while dodging all around the screen, while trying to chase him down as he's bouncing all over, you tend to find yourself boxed in.

Watching the final boss fight on easy, it took few enough hits for that to not be an existential problem. But you can't switch the difficulty, so if I want to beat the game on easy, I have to start over.

I'm just too damned old for that. Alas.

So I read The Master Mind of Mars, the 7th story in the Barsoom/John Carter series. It was aggressively mediocre. Each of these stories has pretty boring, one dimensional characters that are either all good and honorable or all unrepentantly evil and consummate liars. The redeeming quality of Barsoom is usually at least one, single good sci-fi hook or mystery, and some slightly above average action. The hook for this one was a scientist who can swap brains in bodies. It was not his best hook, and the by the numbers "Go and save a girl" story was only complicated by the fact that the hero was trying to save her body to put her brain back in it. Would not recommend it really.

By 1911, around age 36, after seven years of low wages as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler, Burroughs began to write fiction. By this time, Emma and he had two children, Joan (1908–1972), and Hulbert (1909–1991).[15] During this period, he had copious spare time and began reading pulp-fiction magazines. In 1929, he recalled thinking that:

"[...] if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."[16]

The mediocrity of the books makes sense in context, I think.^^

SM Stirling wrote a peculiar homage to that idea of Mars that's both cringe ('hero' getting saved by the princess yawn, strong womyn chars) and kinda awesome for the worldbuilding & and the unimaginable amounts of low-key heresy(explaining why the womyn is so strong) for which he wasn't cancelled. Spoilers on the link. A good read I think, Stirling can write adventure stories just fine.

Fixed link

Court opinion:

  • A particular business has been operating since year 1902, first as a fruit-and-dairy farm, later as only a dairy farm, and now as a timber farm. It consists of 1100 acres (1.7 mi2, 450 ha, 4.5 km2).

  • In year 2018, the business pays 112 k$ for a used Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV. It claims a sales-tax exemption since the vehicle will be used in farming. But in year 2020 the department of taxation disagrees and imposes a penalty. (1) The exemption requires that the business be engaged in farming. However, despite claiming to be a timber farm, this business has never actually sold any timber, and indeed has reported no sales, income, or labor expenses since year 2011. (2) The exemption requires that the vehicle be used directly in farming. However, this vehicle is used merely to transport people and equipment through the forest, not for a farming activity like plowing. (3) The exemption requires that the vehicle be used primarily in farming. However, the business failed to keep mileage logs as proof of how the vehicle was used, and even involved the vehicle in a minor crash outside a post office outside the forest. In year 2024, the board of tax appeals affirms.

  • In year 2025, the state supreme court reverses. (1) The business has implemented a forest-management plan and has spent thousands of dollars on hiring contractors to remove invasive species that can damage the trees. Since trees take decades to mature into harvestable timber, this is enough to show that appellant is engaged in farming even in the absence of much activity at the moment. (2) "Property may qualify as being used in farming even though it is used to perform an intermediate step in the process of producing crops." "Just as a tractor provides the means for conveying a plow through a field where it can act upon the ground, the vehicle in this case provides the means for conveying chainsaws, marking tools, herbicides, and workers through [appellant's] forest." And the word "directly" is not in the statute. (Wikipedia describes the G-Class as a luxury vehicle, but the business in this case testified that it combined the off-road capability of a Jeep Wrangler with the cargo capacity of a Chevrolet Silverado, and both of those properties were needed in the forest.) (3) Mileage logs are not required by the statute. The business testified that farm-related use of the vehicle was around 95 percent, and that testimony was not rebutted by the department of taxation, so it stands.

Claugus! I never thought I'd see that name on here! When I was doing oil and gas law I spent months working on the Claugus 1 unit and did title reports for several parcels comprising the farm in question. Those were the days.

However, despite claiming to be a timber farm, this business has never actually sold any timber, and indeed has reported no sales, income, or labor expenses since year 2011.

Correction: it sold about $490K of timber during Murphy’s tenure as forester, which ran until 2008. Without that fact, the operation sounds a lot sketchier!

Mileage logs are not required by the statute. The business testified that farm-related use of the vehicle was around 95 percent, and that testimony was not rebutted by the department of taxation

Insane they didn't fight on this point

How? There are no mileage logs or (AFAICT) hard evidence of another sort. It would be pure he-said-she-said where one party is literally and completely ignorant.

Yeah if there's no milage logs for the thing you are claiming to be a taxable expense then you get fucked and can't claim it as a taxable expense?

Putting aside the cartoonish scenario of "oh yeah we totally need the g-wagon for our tree farm", my understanding of tax law has always been you are guilty until proven innocent and they onus is on you to prove it.

If you don't do your homework, if you don't have logs, etc, you get fucked

I'm not saying I agree with this, I'm just saying I'm surprised the IRS didn't lean on this harder in court. They really need to have logs.

Like if you can just show up to court and say "but it's just he said she said so why even bother having logs your honor?" and then win, why does anyone keep logs for vehicles ever?

They really need to have logs.

It is after all a tree farm!

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats