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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2507 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

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

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I can think of a few examples of how better resource optimization can make things less good.

  1. There used to be a lot more friction around moving people around; someone who is a top 0.01% engineer might not have ended up with Google or NVIDIA or whatever due to not being as keenly aware of their level of skills. As such, you tended to get more talented people in more diverse spaces (as opposed to concentrating them all into 1 or 2 big companies). By the inverse token, people tend to be a lot more interchangeable in jobs themselves, as anyone better will have gone to a better paying position, so you are necessarily stuck with a bunch of people who are approximately the same level.
  2. I'd argue that there is less room for disruptors too; for example, card and tabletop games (like, say, Magic the Gathering), or even early PC games (like, say, Starcraft) did not have as much penetration as to what the "best" choices were at any time. A very popular thing amongst CCGs currently is the presence of the "netdeck" - as in, someone who buys the exact deck that the pros buy, then plays exactly that. In ye olden days, it was much more likely to find someone who had simply been playing games in a different circuit than the pros were, and had completely different tactics and builds.

Overall, very good post.

I very much like both of these examples. I'll respond to reach.

  1. On careers. I will attribute to this my inability to find a good plumber. Here is my hypothesis. 70 years ago I imagine that if you were the son of a plumber there was a good chance you ended up a plumber too even if you had an IQ of 130. Today if that's your IQ, all you have to do is do well on the SAT and you'll get whisked away on a scholarship to NYU or something. And after that, well, how you gonna keep em down on the farm? The point being, if you shopped around enough 30 years ago you could probably find a pretty damned intelligent plumber. Sure, even back then most plumbers wouldn't have been the sharpest, but there were at least some. Today with the much more efficient sorting of people, how many common residential plumbers have an IQ of 130, approximately zero?

  2. The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example. I played Vanilla World of Warcraft and loved it very much at the time, and I remember awaiting the launch of WoW Classic with great hype. Unfortunately I found when they relaunched it, it just wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't the game that had changed, but me, and us and how we approached it. I and other players were no longer content to bumble around in dungeons and group wipe repeatedly all night. We weren't 12 but 30 and we expected dungeons to be a polished and professional experience, and generally at the first sign of a wipe we were abandoning the group and finding something better to do with our time. But in our greater desire for time-efficiency in game we had somehow removed all the magic. My experience in WoW classic lasted a couple months before I gave it up, the magic just wasn't there anymore like it was when I was 12 and naive and just fucking around.

The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example.

I don't play much but I've noticed people have very strong opinions on The One True Allowed Way To Play a game and what sorts of game types others should even be allowed to play at all based on their preferred play style. This is exemplified by the assumption that anyone who isn't a hardcore competitive gamer who's willing to invest in a $5000 gaming computer should only ever play ultra lightweight casual games. I think it was even on /r/themotte some years ago where I pretty much got jumped on for saying I'd like a version of Starcraft 2 that nearly completely eliminated "actions per minute" as a relevant metric in single player game (which is to say, a version of SC2 with the artificial stupidity of unit AI removed and some basic action automation features added).

I'm not quite sure if it's about the one true way to play, so much as it is fear of losing something people like. Take your SC2 example: I personally quite agree that SC2 would be a better game without the focus on APM. But to someone who loves SC2 as it exists today, they probably hear that and envision a world where vanilla SC2 is replaced with a version of SC2 where it has all the unit automation. So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

I understand people who like the multiplayer aspect wouldn't want to play like that and I have no problem with it. Any implementation could essentially be just another variant of easy level difficulty purely for the single player campaign.

That wasn't what the comments said, though (in that and some other similar conversations elsewhere). They were all about me supposedly playing an entirely wrong game genre (as if single player RTSes are somehow inherently about braindead unit AI and twitchy mouse clicks) and I essentially got told that I should just play turn based strategy games (a completely different genre that I have zero interest in). Essentially that only people who people who have play with "proper" meta should be allowed to play games like that and everyone else should stick to simple casual games.

Everybody sees the dangers of cultural appropriation once it's their culture.

In an ideal world "StarCraft 2" and "SC2 but with better AI" would just be two different game variants, and a vanilla-SC2 player wouldn't complain about the AI options any more than a blitz-chess player would complain about someone else preferring to play without any clock.

But everybody's attention is a scarce resource vied over by competitors, and in a world where network effects make it much more enjoyable to have everybody else's attention go to the same target as yours does, it's actually reasonable to worry about whether an alternative is going to stop that from happening. If you actually preferred Betamax over VHS, HD-DVD over BluRay, etc, it sucked to be you.

I thought SC2 was popular enough that nobody should need to worry about splitting the player base, though; surely both sides of any split would be able to find online matchups easily for years to come? At the very least an experienced player who eschews better AI should be able to find a game against a noob who doesn't. Maybe video game fans have just been through so many iterations of the of "Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo" fight that getting worked up about such things is a reflex now.

So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

If you want to see these sorts of fights played out on Hard Mode, look at the worries some people have over driverless cars or vegan meat substitutes. The bailey is that driverless cars are unsafe or that vegan pseudomeats are unhealthy, and that no amount of technological improvement will ever make them good enough, but I think the (occasionally explicitly stated!) motte in each case is the risk that, once the new alternative actually is better for most people, there'll be pressure to make the traditional alternative outright illegal. Nobody's ever going to ban anyone's preferred versions of Star Trek or StarCraft, but animal rights groups or public safety groups might actually get some traction against real meat or human-error-prone cars once the main argument for them is pared down to "Freedom!"

The higher stakes version of vegan meats and driverless cars is going to be embryo selection

As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.

Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.

These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.

Come down to DFW. It sucks here but there’s a whole lot of STEM work. We’re basically trying to underbid California.

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