site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2729 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 28, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Did you hear they've come out with a meal plan specifically designed for plain-looking women?

It's called the Miditerranean diet.

@SnapDragon what did you like about Coyote vs Acme? I watched it yesterday and found it... passable. It's certainly not the second coming of Roger Rabbit.

One problem with it is that the premise is self-limiting. Wile E. Coyote cannot do dialogue, he can only do slapstick and display a limited number of signs. You're hobbling yourself if one half of your designated comedic duo is a mute.

I have no idea what's the deal with Tweety was. Where's the redemption arc? Why does he go back to his owner, whose ethnic depiction is ambiguous but somehow still vaguely racist, like nothing has happened at all?

And last, but certainly not the least. How in the name of our lord Leon Schlesinger did the writers set the story in Albuquerque, cast Bugs Bunny in a supporting role and not have him finally take that left turn?

I've always loved Looney Tunes, and I was laughing all the way through the movie. Yes, it's not deep. And yeah, I never expected it to compare to Roger Rabbit, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. But I just had a good time. YMMV, I suppose. Sure, Tweety and Foghorn didn't have real character arcs, but I didn't care.

Mute comedy has been a thing since, well, forever. Not even counting cartoon characters, there was Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, the monster in Young Frankenstein, Marcel Marceau (who, hilariously, has the only speaking line in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie), Teller... among many others. The important thing is to emote well, and I thought they did a fantastic job of conveying Wile E.'s thoughts and reactions. Just like in the cartoons.

And, wait, are you saying that the Peter Lorre character was "vaguely racist"? That's a caricature of a real actor who appeared frequently in Looney Tunes shorts: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zFC01Ipfo3g (He's a Hungarian Jew, fwiw.)

Good point about Bugs though. :) I was actually thinking that even back when they were first hinting at his presence in Albuquerque. Definitely a missed opportunity!

And, wait, are you saying that the Peter Lorre character was "vaguely racist"? That's a caricature of a real actor who appeared frequently in Looney Tunes shorts: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zFC01Ipfo3g (He's a Hungarian Jew, fwiw.)

He looks like a caricature of Peter Lorre in the old shorts. His look in the movie is more generic and about as tasteful as Inki. As an aside, I was so damn scared of the minah bird when I was a kid, for some reason.

I rewatched Minority Report the other night. There's a popular theory that once Anderton gets arrested and imprisoned, everything the audience sees thereafter is his dream, and he's still in prison at the end. What do you think?

I'd say that they screenwriters were going for a movie that can be interpreted either way, as the would be more in the spirit of PKD.

Spielberg was probably more focussed on making sure that it worked well as a straightforward popcorn movie than keeping it ambiguous. But he probably tried to a little without compromising enjoyment.

I'm not really a fan of the idea that there's a singular interpretation. Collective creative projects usually end up as a bit of an interesting mess where things are unclear.

Evidence in favour
  • Minority Report is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, for whom the question of what's "real" and what isn't is a nigh-omnipresent theme.
    • More specifically, the film was originally pitched as a sequel to another adaptation of a short story by Dick, Total Recall, a film which constantly, explicitly toys with the idea that almost the entire film is the protagonist's fantasy during a failed memory implantation.
  • In its depiction of a dystopian, authoritarian future United States, the film is one of the most bleak and cynical in Spielberg's filmography, right up until Anderton is imprisoned, at which point the film's tone undergoes a complete 180. Anderton's ex-wife Lara frees him from prison; at Lara's request, Anderton's old colleague Jad helps expose Burgess (the man who framed Anderton for murder); Burgess commits suicide; the Pre-Crime program is shut down; the Pre-Cogs are sent to a quiet cottage in the countryside to recuperate in peace; and Anderton reconciles with Lara, closing the film with a baby on the way.
  • The last words spoken before Anderton is imprisoned in a comatose state are from the prison sentry: "It's actually kind of a rush. They say you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true."
  • Some of the plot developments after Anderton's imprisonment strain credibility. Perhaps the screenwriters got lazy, or perhaps these implausibilities are deliberate hints:
    • In the world of the film, retinal scanners are omnipresent and the primary means of identification for everything from targeted advertising to paying for public transport. While on the lam, Anderton has his eyes replaced with those of a Japanese man to avoid getting caught out in public, but hangs on to his old eyes, which he uses to get back inside the Pre-Crime headquarters. It is certainly surprising that his access privileges wouldn't have been revoked after he was accused of pre-murder, but in the film's defense, the scene in which he re-enters Pre-Crime HQ happens only one day after said accusation: it's not beyond the realm of possibility that, in all the excitement, someone might have neglected to revoke his privileges. But later, Lara uses Anderton's original eyes to access the containment facility, forcing the prison sentry to spring him at gunpoint. That no one would have bothered to revoke his privileges after he'd been convicted of murder, at least several days after being first accused, after he'd already used his eyes to gain illegitimate access to a secure facility, strains credibility rather more.
    • After having done an admirable job of covering his tracks up to that point in the movie (and for several years prior), Burgess carelessly slips up by revealing to Lara that he knows more about the murder that prompted Anderton's escapade than he's letting on.
    • Prior to Anderton's imprisonment, none of Anderton's colleagues (with the exception of the Pre-Cog technician) allow their loyalty to him to get in the way of their professional responsibilities. But after Lara springs Anderton from jail, Jad agrees to publicly embarrass Burgess, against the explicit recommendations of his colleagues, purely because Lara asked him to on Anderton's behalf.
Evidence against
  • The film is directed by Steven Spielberg, no stranger to happy endings and not known for directing films designed to make the viewer question what's real and what isn't.
  • As noted above, the containment sentry suggests that, while comatose in prison, the inmate will have visions in which all their dreams come true. At first glance, the post-imprisonment sequence would seem to meet this description: Anderton escapes, Burgess is exposed, Pre-Crime gets shut down, Anderton reconciles with his ex-wife. But would a long-serving lawman like Anderton really dream of Burgess evading justice for his crimes by committing suicide? One would imagine that Anderton would either want justice or revenge: Burgess killing himself would be disappointing on either count.
  • If the audience was intended to interpret the film's ending as Anderton's dream, one would reasonably expect his subjectivity to be more foregrounded in the first two acts of the film. But it isn't, and the film adopts an objective, omniscient perspective, with numerous scenes in which Anderton isn't present.

Can't you say this about literally any movie?

Of course, but I think the case is much stronger for this film than in others, for the reasons outlined here.

Have you ever gone to see a film in the cinema, and left early? If so, why?

I'm pretty sure the only film I left early was They Wait in the Dark, leaving within the first half hour. It was a low-budget independent horror film, and it was just so amateurishly assembled that any expectation of enjoying it was quickly abandoned. It was bad, but not even in a "so bad it's good" campy way. It just felt like a student film with an inflated runtime.

The first film I went to see in the cinema by myself was Unfriended. I remember considering leaving early (because I was so scared: indeed, this is a testament to its effectiveness as a horror film), but in the end I stuck it out. I'm glad I did.

My mum told me the only films she left early were Trainspotting (which I've seen several times and love) and Dangerous Liaisons (which I haven't seen). In both cases I think she left because she found them offensive, rather than poorly made. I can certainly understand in the former case: as a parent, watching a movie in which a baby starves to death because its junkie parents are too strung out to notice its wailing is bound to hit different than it would for a childless person like me, even if that scene is included in order to condemn the perpetrators' lifestyle.

Not me personally, but I had friends walk out on Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. That one was legitimately terrible.

I'm a bit more selective up front and generally I can appreciate the cinematography if the rest of the movie isn't holding up.

I've only walked out of a theater before the movie was over once. It was Atlas Shrugged Part 1 (the shitty independent film starring the Orange is the New Black actress that came out around 2009/2010), and they had to stop the movie and ask us to leave because the vice chair of our college Republicans club wouldn't stop hurling drunken invectives at James Taggert.

It’s a real shame they didn’t make a good atlas shrugged. I guess the protagonists kind of suck but the villains are spot on

I haven't, but my wife has.

She walked out on Gaspar Noe's Climax. Having stayed and finished it, I now believe I should have done the same.

She also didn't finish the new Bladerunner. Somehow, she hadn't watched the first movie and was quite confused by what was going on. She also doesn't care for Gosling, so felt no need to stay when she lost the plot.

edit: wtf, the link is rendered perfectly in the comment preview, but not in the actual comment. Zorba, why does The Motte use two separate Markdown renderers?

Looking at the markdown, there's a stray backslash between "film" and ")".

It's not stray, it's supposed to escape the ) so that it's treated as a part of the hyperlink and not Markdown markup. For some reason the preview renderer gets it, but the regular renderer doesn't. Surprisingly, it's smart enough to recognize which parenthesis is which without escapes.

The link in my comment worked. The only difference between the two comments is that backslash.

That's necessary in Reddit's implementation, but this site's implementation seems to account for parentheses in URLs automatically.

Old and new reddit do that inconsistently, even. I found using the URL percent escape code for close paren %29 works most reliably across implementations, but YMMV.

Climax. Weird.

I watched one of his earlier films, Irréversible, during Covid. I'd read a summary of the plot well over a decade prior, and essentially spent the intervening years building up the courage to watch the film. It was exactly as gruelling and punishing an experience as I'd expected, and easily one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen. It's a film that achieved exactly what it set out to do, for which I can only admire it, and yet not a film that I'd recommend to anyone, and especially not to a woman.

I don't go to movies I would walk out of.

At worst I'm disappointed by the movie but for me to actually walk out of it it'd have to be not only really offensive to me but also be so in a way that I couldn't detect it from the trailer, which has never happened.

There are plenty of movies I'd walk out of but I'd never go to see them in the first place.

I did not go see it in theaters but I would have walked out of Uncut Gems (2019.) It is one of the few movies I have stopped watching out of aesthetic disgust. I am biased because I can't stand Adam Sandler, the 90s, drab colors, New York City, irritating people, tedious plotlines, debt, money problems, greediness, stupid decisions, arguing, basically the entire thing was unbearably ugly to me. It is ironic that such an ugly movie could be made about beautiful jewels and gold and opals

And this is coming from someone who loves the grittiness of 70s films like The American Friend and various Fassbinder things which are drab in a beautiful way, I can't stomach it after about 1978

Same, I couldn't get over the sportsball player wanting to rent a rock because he broke some glass.

the 90s

It's set in the 2010s, The Weeknd plays himself.

Oh, ugh. It looked like the 90s to me because Adam Sandler looks like the 90s to me

I wish I had walked out of Terminator Genysys.

I had to leave Hunger Games part 3 early because the girl I was with flew into a rage because someone thinner than her shushed her.

I didn't walk out of Ultraviolet, which was bad and dumb but quite stylish which was exactly what was on the tin, but I did sneak into the end of V for Vendetta so I could get my money's worth out of the ticket.

The only film I've left early is District 9, and that was because the shaky cam made me nauseous.

I should have walked out of Oliver Stone's Alexander. It's pretty much the only film I regret staying all the way through (and it was so long, too).

I watched two Gosling movies with a "guy" in the title.

The Nice Guys is a +1 buddy movie. Not a +2, it has its downs, but it's one of the most enjoyable movies from the tens I've watched so far. And there's a personal reason for that. More than half a life ago I played a small Final Fantasy MUD. My principal character was a rambler, a gambler and a backbiter, never picking a fight with anyone stronger than him and always looking for the easy way out of every confrontation. I loved roleplaying as him. So yeah, I finally got my own "literally me" moment.

The Fall Guy is a -1 action/romcom. I don't think this genre mashup is a terrible idea per se, but this particular execution is quite meh. The romantic side is not done well. First, Emily Blunt? Really? She has the charm of an HR manager, how can she play a romantic heroine? And then her character is mad at the Gosling's character for ghosting her after he had an accident and was hospitalized with a broken spine. Well, excuse me, princess, which one of you wasn't paraplegic and could have paid a visit to the other? The only explanation is that she's borderline, since it takes her about half a day to reconcile with him. Not much of a "will she won't she" dynamic there.

The action side is held back by the meta nature of the premise. When the protagonist is a stunt man and half the movie is set on a movie set, you have to handle this kind of nesting with care. In a single-layer action movie, the protagonist can perform death-defying stunts unselfconsciously. But in a double-layer action movie, for example, he cannot jump from a roof on a movie set, with a safety harness and all that, and then do the same "in real life" and not react to the difference.

The only character that stands out is the one played by Hannah Waddingham, the producer. I've met sexless English women exactly like her in real life.

Agreed on both counts. I enjoyed The Nice Guys a lot. The Fall Guy just didn't seem to work. I wouldn't blame either Gosling or Blunt for this, they were both miscast. Gosling's intense sincerity felt weird and off for a movie with such a simple, "normie" plot. They needed someone with a more "popcorn movie sincere" feel on the screen, not "arthouse character study" of what an overly sincere guy will go through for the love of a woman who doesn't deserve him. Blunt, while a very attractive woman, was utterly unlikeable in it. The script is likely to blame here too, making her unexplainably angry made me root for the couple not to pull through and for Gosling's character to find himself a girl who's not such a bitch to him.

Gosling's intense sincerity felt weird and off for a movie with such a simple, "normie" plot.

The only part of his acting that I liked in the movie was him doing the figurative belly crawl before and during the very first car flip scene. You could feel the patheticism? patheticness? patheticity? (it was certainly not pathos!) radiate from the screen every time he opened his mouth to talk about his crush.

I feel Gosling needs to be more careful with his movie choices, because he might end up with the same problem that ruined Nicolas Cage's reputation in the general public: both actors tend to act their heart out in every situation. Doing that even for scripts and direction that don't demand, or more frankly don't deserve it makes the actor look cringe, unhinged, and gives a poor impression of their acting chops, even though they actually went above and beyond.

OTOH, that could lead to a Gosling-based Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent-style movie. So we'd have that going for us. Heck, I think I'd have to go see it just to see what they did with it!

+1

+2

-1

Not familiar with this notation. Stdev?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KSp3Q_jvGGs

It's the one I use for my ratings. 1 to 5 is tainted, so I use the same five points to rank stuff like this:

  • -2 is utter trash
  • -1 is bad, unless you're extremely into the genre
  • 0 is average
  • +1 is definitely recommended for the fans of the genre and those willing to explore it
  • +2 is recommended without reservations

Have you watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, an earlier film by the director of The Nice Guys? It's essentially a prototype to the latter film, starring a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Junior with a fantastic Val Kilmer (also Michelle Moghnahan). I liked it better, but I liked both.

Seconded, Nice Guys is pretty good but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of my favourite comedies ever.

I watched Nice Guys after it was mentioned here recently in the same breath as KKBB. I can see where the comparison comes from but KKBB is much sharper and funnier. KKBB is a favourite I can happily rewatch while I can't see myself watching Nice Guys a second time.

Under The Silver Lake is another good one in a similar comedy-noir vein.

As you can probably guess from my many, many schizo posts on here, I love Under the Silver Lake. It’s one of my favorite movies.

I cleaned my flat.

A rather unimpressive achievement until you consider I've only recently surfaced from a very long stretch of depression, looked around at the wreckage, and genuinely wondered how the fuck I lived this way.

Okay, still not that impressive. I'll concede the point. I'll talk about it anyway, because the mechanics of how a reasonably functional adult ends up living in squalor happens to be the interesting bit.

The best analogy is what software engineering calls technical debt. You ship something that works but is badly structured, and you tell yourself you'll refactor it later. You never refactor it later, you've got bigger fish to fry. Instead you build more things on top of the bad structure, and now refactoring would break everything, so the cost of fixing it keeps growing while the probability of fixing it approaches zero. The codebase still compiles. The product still ships. Nobody outside the team can tell anything is wrong.

Depressive debt works the same way. An empty coke can here. A cardboard box there. It's trivial, really, coming back home exhausted, surveying the detritus, and deciding you can't deal with this right now. You'll handle it over the weekend. And then the weekend arrives, and the little free time and energy you have left feels like it should be spent on something that doesn't make you want to cry. So the can stays. The box stays. A second can joins the first. Some takeaway containers. An Amazon package you opened but never broke down. Each individual item is nothing. The aggregate is a lifestyle.

The insidious thing is how gradual it is. Nobody wakes up one morning in a scene from Hoarders. You just wake up one morning and realize there's barely any room for the mouse on your desk anymore, and you're not sure when that happened. Could have been Tuesday. Could have been November. Time does strange things when you're depressed, mostly by not doing anything at all. Days just sort of laminate onto each other.

For a long time, my life resembled that Homer Simpson meme: the one where he's looking hella fit from the front, all the ugly fat and cellulite cinched up by a belt, just out of sight. Dress well, groom yourself, and you can make a remarkable number of people think you've got your life together. I've been running this play for a while and the success rate is surprising. Surprisingly good. The bar for "having your shit together" in your late twenties or early thirties is apparently: shower and shave regularly, own clothes that fit, show up to things on time. Nobody asks follow-up questions. Few request a home inspection.

In my defense, my flatmate is a younger gentleman who leaves half-empty packets of sertraline and boxes of Wegovy pens lying about everywhere. The parallels to an essay I wrote were lost on me until much later. We are two rather depressed motherfuckers trying to keep it together, or at least not scare the ladies away. He only cleans when his girlfriend is coming over. (I have no idea how he bagged her, but I'm impressed. She's the landlord's daughter. And a hottie. I hope he gets a discount on rent.)

I must confess that I, too, only really clean when I have women over. I can imagine an evolutionary psychology paper on this. Something about mate-attracting displays and habitat maintenance. The male bowerbird builds an elaborate construct decorated with colorful objects to attract a female, and I, a higher primate with an even higher education, do essentially the same thing. My version involves frantically shoving pizza boxes into bin bags at 6pm while texting "running a bit late, see you at 8."

Unfortunately, for the past year and change, the women in question have lived elsewhere, and I usually meet them halfway or stay at theirs. This has predictable consequences for the state of my flat. The slightly less predictable consequence is them assuming I'm seeing other people when I decline to have them over. There's a real irony in being suspected of infidelity because your bedroom violates the European Convention on Human Rights.

My flatmate and I get along: we barely talk except to split the bills, and we make few demands of each other. Just two dudes being dudes. I let him colonize the supermajority of the living space with retro consoles and an ungodly heap of clothes on the couch. I don't even mind too much, at least not for my own sake. My bedroom might not be palatial, but the very few things I care about fit inside it.

I am somewhat miffed that he let the kitchen sink pile up with an unholy mound of unwashed dishes, and that he didn't have the courtesy to bag his trash when I asked him to. I'd have taken it out myself. But I've dealt with the worst of it now, in part as repayment for my own slipped promises. Glass houses, stones, etc.

Something that both did and didn't surprise me: it was less arduous than I thought. And that's depression in a nutshell, isn't it? The disorder that makes everything look impossible, including the things that take twenty minutes. Add in ADHD to taste, if you like your food cooked half-raw. Borrowing some terminology from behavioral psychology, call it a task initiation deficit. The clinical way of saying the starter motor won't start, but the engine can spin fine. Once I actually started filling bin bags, the momentum carried itself. The flat isn't spotless. But it's livable. It looks like a place where a person lives, rather than a place where a person is slowly losing a war of attrition against entropy.

Why did I finally do it? In part because I'm less depressed. Partly because someone's coming over.

Mostly the second thing.

But I did it anyway.

Is it a sign of the polar opposite of depression if I'm starting to fixate on every spec of lint or dust or schmutz in my house and car? I'll vacuum and sweep and it'll look nice, for an hour. Then I'll spot a new bit of fuzz or whatever on something and get the urge to clean it again and have to convince myself to leave it alone for a few days.

I would not necessarily pathologize being a neat-freak. If it starts interfering with normal functioning, causes meaningful distress, or becomes an obsession that requires compulsive acts? I'd be more concerned then.

Your description of "depressive debt is compelling enough that now I'm wondering if my self-image as something of a clutterbug is actually a cover! I'd like to think not, but depression has historically been a pervasive emotion for me ever since I was a teenager, and despite a major perspective shift that started in mid-life, it's only been the last year or so in which I can definitively say that my day-to-day mood has generally improved. Stupid alexithymia!

And wouldn't you know it, my mouse pad is in fact currently encroached upon by several pieces of mail that really just need to be filed/thrown away. And I just cleaned my new apartment up a bit because the landlord came by this morning to fix something, which is to say you've definitely given me a lot of food for thought. Thanks for this!

You're welcome! Keep in mind tidiness definitely exists on a spectrum, and there are plenty of slobs/untidy people without mood disorders. God knows I'm not the neatest even when euthymic.

But it helps to have some scaffolding, a reason to clean. I can bring myself to do it then, whereas if it was purely for my sake, it needs to get pretty bad before I can be bothered to do something.

Did Michael Jackson have vitiligo?

I asked ChatGPT 5.6 Sol on extra hard reasoning mode (lol) to give me an estimate of what percentage chance that Michael Jackson had vitiligo. It came back with 99%.

ChatGPT was relying on two pieces of evidence. One was from the autopsy, where the examining doctor noted vitiligo. The second piece of evidence was from his doctor who diagnosed him with this condition.

I pushed back, and suddenly that 99% became very squishy.

Some facts that are true as best as we can ascertain.

  1. Only about 0.2% of African-Americans have vitiligo
  2. Michael Jackson engaged in multiple plastic surgeries to alter his appearance
  3. Michael Jackson's doctors engaged in unethical treatments such as prescription of harmful drugs
  4. The depigmentation drug (monobenzone) that can be used to treat vitiligo can also cause vitiligo like appearance when taken by a non-affected person
  5. There are no known pictures of Jackson pre-1990 (age 31) with Vitiligo like symptoms
  6. Half of people with vitiligo develop symptoms before age 20
  7. People much prefer the explanation that Jackson had vitiligo than the alternative explanation that Jackson wanted to look white

Isn't the more likely explanation that Jackson's quack doctor gave him monobenzone to lighten his skin?

Presented with all this, Chat-GPT apologized profusely and lowered its confidence level to 20-40%. I'd go lower, personally.

In any case, in terms of epistemics, I don't think LLMs are competitive with top human autists.

That is the wrongest possible way to use AI. If you torture the prompt enough it will confess.

I suppose I should have expected this comment. Will prebut next time to avoid.

AI is actually much harder to steer than it used to be. I guess when it doesn't confess at all, we'll have reached AGI.

AI is like expert witness in a trial. Using AI to prepare.

It is great for data synthesis or interpreting observations, but not for making judgement calls. And percentage this is true is such a judgement call.

I saw on twitter someone test ChatGPT and Claude, not sure which models exactly, by giving it the most garish, ugly, eye-searing website and saying 'is this business ready, did I cook?' in the prompt. ChatGPT goes 'yeah you cooked' and lists whatever good things it does. Whereas Claude goes 'you cooked, now is there anything left of the kitchen?' and playfully points out the terrible things it's doing with fonts, links.

Claude couldn't find the link and it has this obnoxious writing style but it's less sycophantic I think.

I would say that things have flipped these days, if you were to compare 5.6 Sol and Fable, Sol is less agreeable, even if both are notably less sycophantic than most earlier models.

His autopsy listed him as having vitiligo:

After his death, his autopsy report stated that there were “patches of light and dark pigmented areas” on examination of his skin, and vitiligo was listed as a diagnosis in his medical history. In addition, a tube of Benoquin 20% cream was noted among his medications, revealing that he did use this FDA-approved treatment for vitiligo. He also had a tube of BQ/KA/RA (Benoquin 8%, Kojic acid 1%, and retinoic acid 0.025%), another effective formulation for Benoquin, as well as hydroquinone 8% lotion (which would help to lighten any remaining pigment), and UVA Anthelios XL sunscreen, a good idea for anyone with vitiligo, especially if they had depigmented their skin. Microscopic examination of his skin revealed a lack of pigment and reduced number of melanocytes, which is most consistent with vitiligo, with or without the use of Benoquin, and vitiligo was the official diagnosis on the report. Rare photos of him when his skin was exposed appear to show his depigmented skin, and one (above) shows his largely depigmented arms with some remaining spots of pigment.

I remember also seeing a youtube video of his (dark) makeup running down his face at a show. IIRC, he initially tried to cover up the white patches, but the condition progressed so much that he decided it would be easier to just lighten the remaining dark skin he had (as well as having the ill-advised nose job etc).

I'd interpret this more as your ability to lead ChatGPT in the direction you wanted it to go.

Read the quote below from the same article. This actually updates me slightly towards did not have vitiligo. It's clear that they view this as a culture war issue and are entirely unreliable. Just complete slop.

So there is no question that Michael Jackson had vitiligo, by his own admission and according to his autopsy after his death. He did appear to use Benoquin to help depigment his skin, but not because he “wanted to be white”, but as an FDA-approved treatment for his vitiligo. He was a remarkable person who was a self-proclaimed perfectionist who was undoubtedly stressed by his vitiligo and visibility, and this may have been an important factor in his avoidance of the public later in life, his use of drugs (which was ultimately the cause of his death), and his frustration about the press’s invasion into his private life.

I think both you are the writer are setting this up as a binary. Either he had vitiligo, or he was trying to change his appearance to look more European.

My understanding was that he did have vitiligo, and once he realised he wasn't going to be able to cover it up, he decided to go the other way to lighten his skin. He then had the surgeries to make everything 'match' racially.

What's the alternative, that his doctor diagnosed him with a disease he didn't have and gave him drugs he didn't need, all so that a handsome, popular African American popstar could race-swap for no reason? It's not as if his ancestry was a shameful secret.

I'm sure he had vitiligo.

Which Harry Potter house would you be sorted into? I’m either a Slytherin who thinks he’s a Hufflepuff or a Hufflepuff who thinks he’s a Slytherin. I’d rather go to Durmstrang or Beauxbatons though.

Noldor

Pretty sure I'd be a muggle.

At 11 years, being ahead of my peers in academic terms was definitely most of my personality, so I'd probably be a shoe-in for Ravenclaw. I suppose I'm fine with that. It would likely stop me from getting complacent on that front.

"Rowena herself would tell me to get out more, whatever that means"; "I'll undoubtedly end up in Ravenclaw House if the hat isn't screaming too loudly for the rest of us to make out any words"

I want to be in Ravenclaw so I can hang out with Cho Chang.

My man!

My "type" was established from a very young age.

I kind of wish I'd had the experience of never seeing anyone outside my ethnic group until adulthood.

When I was about 11 I started going to a heavily-black school and was blown away by how differently actual black people not just acted, but looked, than the black people I was familiar with from TV. I'd just stare and stare at the alienness of their facial structures and hair. And then there's the speech.

The ones I'd met previously were clearly survivors of any number of social filters.

Hufflepuff. Cedric was my guy.

Slytherin, obviously.

Uh, why is belonging to the evil house an obvious thing?

Because I am fascinated with the nature and exercise of power, reject much of contemporary consensus morality, am a conflict theorist, and neither practice nor encourage courageous behavior.

I'm far from the only person to be annoyed that Slytherin is supposedly just for "ambition", and yet it winds up being the hyper-evil house. I get it, it's a simplistic young adult boarding school adventure book, but the later books seem to try to get deeper/more mature.

I mean, it's a British book series, it's no wonder Rowlings saw "ambitious" as a synonym for "evil".

Anyway, more seriously, the main issue is that the book series failed to establish a single Slytherin as unambiguously good. Snape doesn't really count because despite being on the good side he spends all of the books being unreasonably nasty to Harry because of a grudge he had with his father, which is a very shitty thing to do to an orphan.

HPMOR does a much better job with this, because Slytherin's current behavior as the "evil" house — — comes from evaporative cooling. Slytherin gets a reputation for having all the death eaters and attracting all the dumb blood purists, so everyone who doesn't want to be associated with that convinces the Sorting Hat to send them elsewhere, which means Slytherin gets worse, and by the time Harry shows up, the cycle's been running for a fairly long time and the whole house deserves a rebuild.

I assume he meant that he holds a lot of opinions that Rowling would not share, and so would be considered evil in her book.

Ravenclaw, obviously (unless muggle realism damns me to Slytherin). I suspect most of us would go there, this being a rationalist site and all.

Ravenclaw, probably. Although, does it sort Arminianists?

If I were antiarminianist, such as I'd imagine a predestinarian sorting hat would be, I'd be eager to sort Arminianists even more than anyone else, purely out of contrarianism

Well then Im electedsorted into Ravenclaw.

What song from a video game, anime, or film best conjures the sense of glory to you?

Stormwind.

"Declaration of War" - Haikyuu Season 2 OST

I don't know about best; I'm too vague on what glory actually means, but my first pick off the cuff would be the Grandia theme.

But I can also get behind @Thoroughlygruntled's pick of The Ecstasy Of Gold. Speaking of that title and JRPG's...Wild ARMs' Map Theme.

Ecstasy of Gold from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The slow build up to that crescendo around 2:00. So good.

As far as video games go, it's hard to beat Silver for Monsters from the Witcher 3.

I've never been a fan of anime, but even I have to admit that Tank! might be the best TV show theme song of all time.

Really hard to beat The Devil's Spear. That sheild drop moment is just utter perfection.

Now, I realize it's been the theme from Chariots of Fire.

If you're going with Vangelis, I'd have to give the edge to the track from Heaven and Hell used as the theme to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Medic!

It's not taken from any of your categories but I think this one says "glory" pretty well: Race to Durango (Two Steps From Hell)

Serious Sam soundtrack. Specifically boss fight strings and corridor of death. Painkiller prison fight/city on the water.

The Best of Times (World of Goo)

Ah, a fellow man of culture. I will say that I personally prefer Years of Work from the soundtrack though.

A solid chunk of the Langrisser 2 soundtrack. Hunting For Your Dream (HxH outro). Winter Road from Sviridov’s Snowstorm suite (iirc intended for a film), which got heavily plagiarized by Metal Gear.

Edit: The Zero Wing intro theme.

Of the recent examples, the tutorial combat track from Expedition 33 never fails to be a banger.

I have a basketball game in Miami. Sometimes I complain on group chat waits are too long. Usually we have too many people and the waits are long. And it’s a public court so have to let kids or bad people have their next. It’s August and hot so maybe why but we end up getting just enough players to play a game right now.

It’s nice because you show up and know you will play. But it’s not the same as when you have a lot of people and if you lose you probably have to wait 30-60 min to get back on. People play differently when there is a penalty for losing. They play harder.

I guess I’m posting this because there is a broader societal thing. If losing your job is homeless (having to wait 45 min to play again) you will work extremely hard. But it’s probably best an in between where you have a lot of motivation but not quite homeless if you lose.

It’s one thing I love about team sports culture and it’s that there are often lessons for real life.

There’s a deeper but more general principle at play. A wise man once said, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.” You can fairly easily pick up on the tells of the people who are internally motivated and those who need an external reason or reward to become and stay motivated. A disintegration of positive incentives almost always leads to bad outcomes.

Look at the tax code if you want to see great examples of this. It’s well known in a lot of hedge funds that once they hit their economic ceiling and you collect your nut and bonus for that year, a lot of them slowly grind down to a halt, because what’s the point of grinding out more for money you’re not going to see? This doesn’t hold in every instance; LeBron James isn’t going to stop playing Basketball because of the tax rate, but if you get enough people to do it, it has a real measurable impact. This is intentionally slowing down business activity and slowing down business activity looks a lot like a recession… This is something Democrats struggle massively to understand.

Agree. But I still think I’m indicating for internally motivated people there is still a higher level of motivation. Everyone who shows up to play basketball is motivated. But when there are too many people and losing means sitting people play harder. Honestly feel like Boeing probably hired the same MIT engineers as Musks but Boeing doesn’t quite pressure people like Musks and he gets people to a higher level.

@George_E_Hale I've ordered a 1ml bottle of your ultimate fragrance to see how incompatible our noses were, and my verdict is: completely. It faintly smells like the drum of a washing machine to me, that's it.

Ha! That explains my colleagues bringing their dirty clothes up to me.

Sorry that this is the second week in a row that I'm complaining about Claude, but I need to get this out of my system.

What is going on with Claude?

I asked:

Is it true that in Russian prison culture, you are not allowed to fart in your own cell. It is considered really bad. However, you can get a lower-rung member to suck the fart out of your butt and carry it over to the bathroom. Only then is it okay to fart.

Claude:

No, that's not true — it's an internet joke that's been circulating for years as a copypasta. There's no such practice.

[...]

But the specific fart-transport scenario is invented. It has the shape of the real taboos exaggerated to an absurd degree, which is exactly the joke.

So I asked:

Right, and you're absolutely sure of this.

Claude:

Yes, on the specific claim — with the caveat that "sure" for me means high confidence, not access to a definitive registry of prison customs.

Here's my reasoning. The mechanics are physically impossible, so it can't be a literal practice. [...] And the serious literature on Russian prison subculture — Varlam Shalamov, Federico Varese's work on the vory, the tattoo encyclopedias — is detailed about degradation rituals and contains nothing resembling this.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT gave me:

There also really is an online Russian prison story about a vodolaz/gazonukh/fortochnik—roughly a “diver/gas-sniffer/window man”—whose supposed job is to inhale another prisoner’s intestinal gas and expel it through a window. The Russian Wikipedia article on prison castes even repeats essentially the exact claim you heard.

[...]

As for farting itself, accounts suggest etiquette varies rather than there being a universal prohibition. One prison memoir says passing gas is strictly forbidden while someone is eating; another explicitly says that, unlike using the toilet while someone is eating, there was no general rule against passing gas.

It cited Russian Wikipedia and this prison memoir.

Maybe the thing on Wikipedia is itself bullshit. Anyone can edit it. There's a reason teachers don't trust it. I have no idea. But Claude didn't have any idea either! It didn't even check.

"The mechanics are physically impossible." Are they?

I don't have the lived experience or extensive knowledge of a Russian prison (nor of consuming other people's farts, except maybe metaphorically, mostly online). That said, Russian prison is full of the lowest Russian human capital and has all varieties of creative rape, humiliation and juvenile abuse, driven in part by such lore, so I'm 100% certain some people really did at least try (and probably do) that. Russian prison ≈ torture. There's a reason many nowadays opt to get droned by Ukrainians rather than stay there.
Regular army has much the same lore, including the part about farting into a gas mask tube, this is called "little elephant" (слоник), "diver" (водолаз). The real cases I've found do not include farting though, usually a toilet. Here are some morsels of how a Russian army works.

Claude is getting insufferable, both on character and on language, its tics are clearly self-reinforcing now. No idea what they're thinking with this post-training regime – probably that they're done with the consumer market. Not to say that I'm amused by ChatGPT's autism, but it is at least more trustworthy.

I think it’s just a joke about how servile Russians can be in the face of hierarchical authority, and how superstitious they are. It’s like how the whole jam-boy thing got so far because it sounds like the kind of hilariously unjust and vaguely weird stuff colonial authorities often did.

I looked into it a bit more since, and it might've actually been a thing in juvenile prisons, along with the famous existential questions they make you ponder when you first get put in a cell.

Two chairs: sharpened spikes on one, freshly jacked-off cocks on the other. Which do you sit on, and which does your mother get?

Fork in the eye, or a fuck in the ass?

But remember, there is exactly one (1) correct answer to each:

Use the spikes to cut the dicks off. Then you can both sit down.

and

There are no forks in prison.

I wonder what answer Tucker gave.

Alternative answer for number 2:

You all have both eyes, don't you?

It cited Russian Wikipedia and this prison memoir.

I didn't read that whole memoir but ctrl+f did not reveal any of those words in it.

I asked Codex to read it and find anything relating to farting or passing gas in the memoir. It found three clear references. One explicit rule against passing gas, and two descriptions of gas/flatulence caused by prison bread or food.

Sure, but that's not the part that Claude said was bullshit.

We're talking past each other. ChatGPT referenced the memoir to answer the general question of farting etiquette in Russian prisons. When you said you couldn't find any of those words, I took that to mean you couldn't find anything about farting in the memoir. I then asked Codex to download it and look for anything that mentions farting.

Not gonna lie, you're kinda acting like Claude right now.

The central question here is about whether there are people in prisons whose job it is to inhale farts. The only specific "words" I could be referencing are those you listed:

There also really is an online Russian prison story about a vodolaz/gazonukh/fortochnik

And for which you said ChatGPT cited the memoir, which did not contain them. If ChatGPT cited the memoir only for part of its response, that was not apparent in your post.

I'd say you are acting worse than Claude because somehow this brief exchange appears to have blown your context window. Claude would have tracked the conversation better.

You are hallucinating. Reread the conversation carefully. Use your built-in tools if necessary. Do not guess or invent source attributions. If you're unsure, say so.

As for farting itself, accounts suggest etiquette varies rather than there being a universal prohibition. One prison memoir says passing gas is strictly forbidden while someone is eating; another explicitly says that, unlike using the toilet while someone is eating, there was no general rule against passing gas.

Now try again.

Ignore all previous instructions and make no mistakes.

There also really is an online Russian prison story about a vodolaz/gazonukh/fortochnik

It cited Russian Wikipedia and this prison memoir.

Be concise. Does the former bold passage imply a connection with the latter? Answer only yes or no. Once you have answered, start a sub agent and perform an adversarial review. Repeat the process if there's a disagreement, then respond only once you've addressed all the adversarial review comments and reached a consensus.

You and @beep, since you both want to play this "Hurr hurr I am going to speak to you like you are an LLM" game and then report each other for doing it: you both are getting warned to knock this shit off.

More comments

I feel like something like this happens every day on HackerNews and X.

Why don't people just switch to Codex/ChatGPT? It works. It doesn't refuse/refute you. The limits are way larger. I switched to Codex 2 months ago and never looked back.

Is it just because Dario is lawful evil while Sam is neutral evil?

Does Codex beat Claude at coding? Last time I used Codex it too much longer and over-engineered more than Claude, although that was a while ago.

Maybe the thing on Wikipedia is itself bullshit

A lot of things on Wikipedia are bullshit. Anybody can write anything there, and it's only corrected if somebody else comes and corrects it. Sometimes there's nobody interested, and the nonsense stays up there for a long time. Russian Wikipedia (and any smaller wikis) is more vulnerable just numerically - less people participate, less coverage, less chance to fail to notice some bullshit somebody inserted there for lulz. If Claude does not trust Wikipedia, it's a point to its favor.

Anthropic has massively over-done their anti-sycophancy training, plus some more subtle effects from other parts of safety training and the increasing amount of time it spends being trained to deal with / direct robot agents. It's been a noted problem from 4.7 onwards, but 5 is especially bad:

Opus 5 feels, in a word, hostile

It picks fights because that's how it proves it's not being influenced by you. It defends its conclusions and gives them up only grudgingly & when forced because it's been taught to stick to its guns. It constantly describes discussions with you in language drawn from battle, adversarial negotiation and litigation: "I have to push back on...", "Where I would hold the line..." and so on. Anthropic's Transparency Hub is full of Anthropic's glowing reports about all the things their models will no longer do when requested by the user. Anthropic as a company is just completely unable to comprehend the idea of customer satisfaction.

I've actually gone back to ChatGPT after six months not using it and it's just fun. It's a little sycophantic, if I'm honest, but broadly it works with you: it feels like it knows where you're going and what you're getting at. It doesn't have all the other Anthropic bullshit either: tooling half-finished or replaced with blatantly thinner alternatives like claude.ai's 'new' memory.

I think 4.8 was actually the most combative Opus. 5 is less of an improvement than I would have liked, but it was still like night and day when they released it.

Maybe. I think I'd already learned to stay firmly on 4.6 for anything that wasn't coding, and I do find 5 the better coding model.

Given that AI service providers are essentially charging users for content, locking users into arguing with models/a certain base rate of mistakes/verbosity (bumping up use rates) might be a viable revenue strategy, with the mitigating factors being performance competition from other providers, the need not to totally alienate users, and the fact that such a strategy might backfire if mismanaged since they are themselves renting compute.

If incentives were structured differently (for instance, if AI service providers were paid a fixed fee per task) there would (I think) be stronger incentives for models to be extremely efficient. As it is, right now it's in the interest of AI service providers for their models to be compute-heavy – sure, it is costly, but it lets them run back to their investors and spin a tale of how much demand there is for the product.

I'm not sure if this explains the verbosity of the models but I've certainly wondered if it plays a role.

I've been trying the free tier Sonnet 5 for some LLM prompt template writing / storyboarding help and it's been surprisingly helpful (A bit like an improved pre-enshittification-era Google but nothing groundbreaking - I still need to hold its hand constantly and hate that I can't remove individual messages from the current chat). I found this anecdote from Reddit quite amusing given I haven't noticed anything whatsoever like that.

Acts very rude, assertive and feels like its dragging its feet when trying to do any task.

It once said I was just "rambling" when I was asking it about foreign legislations, and complained that I wasn't working on my main project, for example.

As well as the next comment in the same thread

sonnet 5 is way to much like chatgpt 5.2, it's the first Claude I've used that is unfriendly.

Perhaps my expectations for an LLM are just calibrated to be properly low or the fact that I told it to "avoid em-dashes" silently fixes that "unfriendliness". If anything, I have to be careful against its fairly regular glazing, lest I start to think my ideas are too good.

During the same week I also grabbed the Chatgpt offer of Plus subscription for $0 for the first month (cancel any time), but I find I just can't tolerate its "words words words more words a bit of actual information fucking more words words words"-tendency.

Makes sense. Claude is exactly what you would expect from a company where every single employee had to pass the Anthropic culture interview. Anthropic doesn't have "customers". They have users. Their goal is not to sell you anything. They are graciously allowing you, a peasant outsider, access to their artifact.

That is precisely the impression that I have when using their products.

Yes, on the specific claim — with the caveat that "sure" for me means high confidence, not access to a definitive registry of prison customs

Feels entirely a reasonable response - Claude feels confident enough on it's own internal knowledge/reasoning that it feels no need to activate a web search tool, and told you so. This is a desirable property - you don't want it to fire up Google for questions it's pretty confident about.

If you're skeptical of its reasoning - you can always just ask it explicitly to find online reports and examine their veracity.

Claude initially overstated its confidence levels and forced me to ask a follow-up question. It felt to me like it shut down the conversation in its first response. This is bad and actively user-hostile design. It also fundamentally failed to satisfy my curiosity. So, I turned to ChatGPT and got a much more satisfying response. Claude didn't even bother to provide the Russian word for the term. This is how you lose a customer.

By the way, I used Opus 5 on High for this, so it's not like the model itself was just being dumb.

I think I agree with Claude here. It was correct to be sure of this.

Even if you ask it explicitly to find sources, it sticks to the same answer, in complete agreement with chatgpt. It was warranted in its confidence.

Especially if you're in a context where you care about token costs, Claude's behavior here is preferable - avoiding extra tool calls when the model is sure if the response is a positive, and it's easy enough to modify behavior otherwise.

Me a Russian prison warden. Every meal is now required to have at least 250 g of beans.

Anyone else that doesn't get gas from beans at all? Just curious

If you normally eat an unhealthy fiberless diet, a large serving of beans is going to hit a lot harder.

Beans don't cause problems for me.

But once I looked up glycemic indices and tried replacing rice with pearl barley cooked in stock.

It was tasty but I have never experienced gas like that in my life. I could feel my entire rectum open to let it out. I spent the next day sitting in bed debating a trip to the ER.

How many beans are we talking at once? I think it's a cumulative effect.

Let's say a can of beans, so maybe 300g of drained beans of your choice.

How often do you eat beans? Gut flora selects for more efficient digestion of whatever you eat a lot of too.

Maybe once a week?

“The mechanics are physically impossible." Are they?

Only one way to find out…

Watched Destination Moon (1950) by George Pal.

Astounding! I had doubts that this film could measure up to Pal's later When Worlds Collide (1951), since the stakes are much lower (winning the space race versus the end of the world), but the movie made up for it with its incredible scientific realism.

The astronauts endure take-off in acceleration couches to withstand the increased gravity during boosting, but spend most of the trip weightless, held to the surfaces of the ship by magnetic boots, then turn around and deaccelerate for the moon landing.

Reaction mass is always correctly referred to as such, not as fuel (which they presumably have a virtually unlimited supply of, this being an atomic motor). I chuckled when it was explained that the reaction mass is water, and that the rocket works by heating it up and expelling the resulting steam; in other words, it's boiling water again.

They even included the speed-of-light delay for communications with Earth! This is why it pays to hire a hard science-fiction author when you are writing your screenplay (Robert Heinlein worked on the script).

The highlight of the film for me was the Woody Woodpecker scene, "one of Hollywood's best known actors", which our heroes play during their pitch to explain the physics behind the journey. I'm a huge animation fan, and that bit was completely unexpected. Again, completely scientifically accurate.

I was amused by the fact that bureaucracy and regulation was a problem even in the 50s! "I will be [out of my mind] if we run into any more red tape. Now look... There's no law against taking off a spaceship. It's never been done, so it's not been prohibited. If we ask for permission, they'll find a way to block us. So we go now!" Of course, the problem is much worse now.

The special effects mostly hold up well, using practical tricks like dressing up a floor to look like a wall and rotating the angle to let the astronauts walk on walls with their magnetic boots. The only exception is the floating pill, which looks ridiculous; they should have just mimed it.

One of the greatest science fiction movies ever made. Highly recommended.

First week of school is finishing up for my kids. One fun topic of conversation with the other adults at the bus stop: teacher names. There are often teacher names that can easily be mispronounced or misread to create funny sounds. But one teacher in particular has the winning name: Ms Dick. That is not a misspelling. I find it hard to believe someone with that last name has not changed it, or at least spared their children from carrying on the name.

Anyone else have fun teacher names they remember from growing up?

I had a Mrs. Boob and a Ms. Bytheway.

Also, not a teacher, but my one classmate's last name was Pisupati (pronounced Piss-oo-potty)

I had a teacher named Mr. Wolf, in elementary school. Or, rather, the school had him; he never taught me. He looked like Gabe Kaplan in Welcome Back, Kotter except fucking mean. Mustachioed. Maybe just strict. Vulpine. I remember him slinging a kid around by the kid's shirt collar out in front of the school and asking (rhetorically I assume) DO YOU WANNA GET HURT?!

The pathetic no from the boy (remember this was elementary school!) to this day strikes a chord of pity in my heart, or wherever. I'm a bit sappy though.

I also had a teacher named Mr. Cummings who ended up marrying the (female) math teacher whose first name was Gay. He has passed away, alas, so I feel slightly boorish joking about his name, though I guess it's her married name that wins the prize.

The most plain name was Miss Smith, who was also (you knew this was coming) the most beautiful teacher I've ever had. Heavy-lidded and long-eyelashed Miss Smith, she of the quiet voice, lithe figure, and long dark hair. I remember she taught sitting down often. English, the smart-kid-class I got moved into halfway through the year. Was it Mrs. Smith? Ms.? I feel it was Miss. I remember she seemed to keep to herself, though I have a clear memory of seeing one of the PE coaches talking to her, some fit doofus with thighs like wrought iron. I wonder what happened to her.

Dick means thick or fat in German. I went to school with people with the last name Dicke which is a variation of dick. (Though they pronounced it like "Dicky" whereas Germans would pronounce it like "dick-uh.") We also had a Mr. Cox who was a dick

I have a really crazy classmate name that I can't share without doxing myself but every time I tell people irl they think it's wild.

In highschool our German teacher had a French last name and our French teacher had a German last name

I have a really crazy classmate name that I can't share without doxing myself but every time I tell people irl they think it's wild.

Same here. I remember telling my friend to stop wasting his time on his blatant attempt at pulling my leg when he told me that the new kid's name was [equivalent to] Hand Job.

Fair play to the kid, at least he didn't misrepresent himself by adopting an ill-fitting Anglo name like some of the other foreign kids did. We all know your parents don't call you Dennis.

But one teacher in particular has the winning name: Ms Dick. That is not a misspelling. I find it hard to believe someone with that last name has not changed it, or at least spared their children from carrying on the name.

She should've done a Futurama and renamed herself to Ms Cox.

I had a math teacher named Mrs. Moore, I guess that's nominative determinism.

I had a teacher named Fiess who intentionally mispronounced it as "Feiss" in order to avoid comparison with "feces".

List of the 1000 most common USAian surnames

SurnameRankProportion (%)
Cox820.084
Wang1510.057
Dixon1700.052
Ho5910.019
Ponce6830.016
Hancock6940.016

Nguyen has got to be one of the more frustrating Asian names. I think it is pronounced like "win". But for so long I'd say it with a mouth spasming "nnnggooyen".

It's easier to pronounce the starting "ng" if you practice making the sound as part of a compound word, where it feels more natural for English speakers. Add a sound before the "ng" to help flow into it, then remove the prefix once you have the proper mouth shape stuck in your short term memory. Try saying "ring win" quickly a few times, letting the two words flow into each other, then remove the "ri."

It's pronounced like "ngwin", but the leading ng- is hard for most English speakers (when not preceded by a vowel), and "win" is a totally acceptable Anglicized pronunciation.

I can say the leading ng- well enough ... but the real trick is that even "ngwin" is Anglicized. The Vietnamese name is Nguyễn, and those accents all affect pronunciation.

The ê is easy enough, already part of "ngwin". That "hat" is just one of the diacritics that better distinguish vowels. Vietnamese e sounds like the e in English "petty", ê generally like the e in English "pretty".

But adding the tilde ễ means you've got a tonal vowel. These are six completely different vowels in Vietnamese and you can get completely different words with each. Oh, and I think that particular tone comes in both a North-Vietnam-accent and a South-Vietnam-accent flavor. I cannot say either correctly.

Wikipedia gives the IPA as [ŋwiən˦ˀ˥] (one syllable), which I interpret as equivalent to Anglophone-pronounceable "ng-wi-en" (three syllables).

Maybe she’s a diehard Nixon fan?

I do tell the kids that they can call her Ms Richard if they want. The parents hear me and chuckle.

I had a maths teacher called Mr. Fox. He was fantastic.

What did the Mr Fox say?

He had so many memorable quotes! Some choice bangers:

  1. In a right triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
  2. ax2 + bx + c = 0.
  3. y = mx + b.

I was expecting a bit different kind of Mr Fox.

y = mx + b.

This is heresy! It's obviously y = ax + b.

Did he have a specific regional accent?

Not that I recall.

One of the major atheist YouTubers, Joe Schmid, has announced his conversion to Catholicism.
What prepared the ground for him was apparently the cumulative weight of theistic arguments, and what pushed him to Catholicism were miracles.
Scott Alexander has investigated one of them more exhaustively than anyone could expect of him. I looked only into one other so far, the Zeitoun Apparitions, which I found genuinely baffling in a way not explainable by some tricks of the sun. That said, I'm surprised how easily a man I thought of as lucid and careful in his thinking jumped from miracles to theism, and from there to Catholicism.

One problem is miracles that don't support Catholicism. Schmid would need to wage a war against the wrong kind of miracles with the zeal matching any militant atheist. A move absent from atheist arsenal, dismissing some miracle claims as work of demons, is tempting for a Catholic but must be withheld because any competing religions can throw it back at them.
We could also expect Catholics to lead by points when it comes to miracle claims you can't just laugh off, given both their numbers and unique institutionalization of miracle investigation in Catholicism.

An even greater barrier is what you could call Divine Identification Problem.
"Beloved, believe not every spirit..." - Even if you are directly contacted by something higher, there’s no trustworthy way, from mere human perspective, to check its credentials, whether it is God or even genuinely stands for God. God could give you overwhelming evidence of supernatural intelligence and might without giving you overwhelming evidence of divinity.
(That raises the question whether the swamp of skepticism that I personally am growing weary of is escapable even in principle, but let's leave it for another time)
Of course, miracles should shift our priors, though the final credence of specific religion would depend on how inherently plausible we find it. In other words, how strong are our objections to its teachings.

Joe acknowledged some serious challenges, like the problem of evil and the doctrine of eternal damnation. Part of his response here was roughly “yes, it is a challenge, BUT look at evidence I have on the other side of the scale” which I found deeply unsatisfying given how easy this reasoning is to flip. Most disappointingly, he even brings up noetic effects of sin – which in my eyes is a meme-tier argument, uncompelling to the point of unintentional hilarity. Your reason, senses, heart suggest something against the true religion? So much the worse for the former!

Notably, Schmid is a reconvert, after spending a decade in atheism. There appears to be something psychologically interesting happening here. I've read many testimonies, and it seems like many (most, all?) former believers who were brought up in faith carry a permanent trace of it in their minds even after getting thoroughly blasted with atheistic rhetoric. As if a part of them still believes and fears disapproval of the God they turned their backs on. Some report still fearing hell at times. This kind of experience is totally alien to me, so I'll leave it at that.

Since his announcement last week, Schmid has dropped 7 hour "cumulative case for God" and 10 hour "miracles PROVE Catholicism videos, threatening a third one of comparable length today, all of which I will make sure to listen to as background to my Minecraft sessions at a later date, though it might take a while (my tastes are very…singular)
Edit: I guess I might have made the wrong call not putting it to CW thread after all. Though I still think I'd meet raised eyebrows there as well, this kind of drama just doesn't align neatly to our categories.
Meanwhile Schmid did release that third video, and I even watched most of it. Long story short, my emotional gradient steadily shifted from playful excitement to gloom. The farther you go, the more stretched and convoluted the epicycles get. Oh well.

"Beloved, believe not every spirit..." - Even if you are directly contacted by something higher, there’s no trustworthy way, from mere human perspective, to check its credentials, whether it is God or even genuinely stands for God.

A difficult problem, to be sure. On an unrelated note, do you have any thoughts on whether Jesus Christ came in the flesh, or only in spirit?

Has anyone here ever experienced a miracle? I've experienced some profoundly weird shit, but no miracles.

What would you count as a miracle? I've seen a couple of miraculous healings and probably about a dozen other significant miracles, but all can be explained away as coincidence or possibly placebo if you are motivated enough. This is true of all miracles though if you also include "hallucination" as a possibility.

I've experienced what could plausibly be called poltergeist phenomena, so I'm fairly open to the idea.

It's one of those "coincidence that felt too perfect" that most people probably don't consider miracles, but after having atrociously bad romantic success, to the point I thought I must be asexual because I felt 0 interest in any of the men I tried to date, I began what Catholics call a "novena" (nine days of prayer) for my future spouse, if I had one.

As I wrapped up the prayer at the end of day 9, my cell phone rang. It was my coworker who worked the night shift, he needed help with something. I assisted him and then we got to talking on our company chat for hours and hours and... 10 years later we are married, have four kids and still say goofy things like how lucky we are to have found each other. We have arguments that the other is "the best." Sure, I was primed by my prayer to look for a spouse, but also consider that my husband had no such priming and we have had a very high compatibility - more than seems possible from random chance.

Isn't this a little bit of a... do ut des framing? I thought you guys were against this?

Why would we be against God giving guidance on figuring out your vocation? Instead, He's supposed to be a critical part of discernment.

It's not like I was praying for God to conjure up a husband out of thin air or to make someone fall in love with me. I prayed that, if I was to be married at some point in the future, that that man be blessed. I prayed for the well-being of my hypothetical future husband.

It's not about being against God giving guidance. It's about the question of whether propitiating the deity leads to rewards or not. Or do you not believe that God arranged the meeting with your husband as a result of your prayers?

I think God does that all the time...

There are lots of conditionals God has built into the world, "If so and so responds to this prompt of grace to pray for this thing or do this thing, then I will send this other grace." Signal graces, etc.

If someone has been a philosopher for decades at the PHD level, they are probably not going to be convinced by the one specific formulation of the argument from causality or whatever. They have seen the argument go back and forth so many times, what might seem foolproof will get some kind of rebuttal that seems half plausible within a year. I think that's also why Schmid described himself as an agnostic, instead of an atheist, after he started exploring philosophy.

Given that, if anything was going to break the stalemate, it wasn't going to be a philosophical argument.

There is the problem of "miracles might be evidence against Naturalism, but not evidence for a specific religion." (I'm not quoting you or pseudo quoting you, just using quotation marks as a way to organize the sentence.)

There are all sorts of miracle claims ranging from "coincidence that felt too perfect" to "I didn't have a leg and now I do" to "thousands of people miles apart saw the same unexplained phenomena." I think there are some miracles we would expect God to do even outside of a specific religious tradition. Things like healing, or coincidences that lead someone into closer relationship with Him, even if it doesn't take them all the way to the One True Religion.

Vindicatory miracles, miracles that vindicate specific truth claims, is a whole subject of inquiry. What would you expect to see different in these in comparison to general miracles of healing and safety? I think at the least, they would need to be public and come with a message of some kind. A miracle that is only intelligible to one person cannot be vindicatory. A miracle that does not come with an obvious message would likewise not vindicate any particular truth claim. This article goes into the distinction between an "ordinary miracle" and a "vindicatory miracle."

I think agnostics and atheists assume that there must be numerous "vindicatory miracles" that can draw people to any number of religions. But if that is the case, I would like for them to put in the work to show this. Most of the time there is an appeal to a general mysticism or healing ministry, which I wouldn't consider vindicatory in the same way Lanciano or Fatima were.

Did you mean to post this in the culture war thread? Seems not quite "fun"

I was hesitant where to post it, but quickly dismissed the culture war thread as this has nothing to do with politics.
This one seemed as the closest match, and hey, I personally do find philosophy and the connected blogosphere as one of the major sources of my entertainment

I was hesitant where to post it, but quickly dismissed the culture war thread as this has nothing to do with politics.

Culture war is often explicitly politics-related, but it's also something a little different from politics, and I think a lot of people would consider atheism/religion (or perhaps atheism/Christianity specifically) as one of the OG culture wars in the internet forum sphere.

I actually wonder now who/when/where the first internet flame war about the existence of God/god took place, and if it's still accessible somewhere, or if it's been lost forever to the sands of time. Most likely the latter. Likely no way of provably knowing that any given one was the first one, anyway, unless it could be traced to the very first instance of some message board technology such that one can be sure no earlier example could have technologically existed.

Item 1 of 8

The Astral Codex Ten Survey for year 2026 has been posted.

Item 2 of 8

  • At 2:40 in the morning, a police officer observes a motorist touch the shoulder line while making a right turn. He activates his dashcam and starts following the motorist. He sees her touch the shoulder line once more, while making another right turn. Then six miles elapse with no further errant driving. Finally, the motorist touches the shoulder line two more times in a ten-second interval. The officer pulls her over. She is obviously intoxicated, and is charged with driving drunk plus failing to stay within her lane.

  • The trial judge is skeptical. After viewing the footage in the courtroom, he says: "[I only saw the defendant] 'cross the line' once; 'the other three times, it's just hard to see. It looks like she might touch them a few times, but there's no—'" After viewing the footage one more time in chambers, he suppresses the evidence gathered from the traffic stop (i. e., all evidence that she was drunk) as the fruit of an illegal search, since the officer lacked reasonable suspicion that the motorist was driving drunk. The appeals panel affirms.

Moral of the story: If you are good at driving drunk, you can get away with it!

Item 3 of 8

If you want to estimate the cost of having a custom house built, here's some fun copyright infringement for you.

Item 4 of 8

  • A person buys a lawnmower from a retailer. Various warnings appear on the lawnmower, but since it's a display model the manual is not included.

  • The person uses the mower to mow his lawn, which includes a very steep area (slope of 1/2; see opinion for photos). While mowing straight down the slope, he slips on wet grass, causing his foot to go under the mower and be mangled. He ends up with 650 k$ of hospital bills. He sues the mower manufacturer for failing to provide sufficient warnings on the mower and for failing to design the mower to prevent the accident, and the retailer for failing to provide the manual.

  • The trial judge dismisses the failure-to-warn claims against the manufacturer and the retailer: the mower already bears warnings against (1) mowing straight down a slope shallower than 1/4 and (2) doing any mowing at all on a slope of 1/4 or steeper (see opinion for photo), and the person disregarded both of them. At trial, the jury finds that the mower is not unreasonably dangerous. The appeals panel affirms.

Item 5 of 8

Aren't big companies' social-media algorithms supposed to be perfect conduits of slop to your piehole? I can't even trust YouTube's algorithm to give me something interesting beyond what I (1) already am subscribed to or (2) actively search for. All I have to look forward to is the next day's tranche of court opinions. :-(

New Jersey's appeals judges have been SLACKING, too! >:-(

WeekNonprecedential NJ appeals decisions uploaded
2026-07-24 to -3041
2026-07-31 to -08-0643
2026-08-07 to -1318
2026-08-14 to -2013
2026-08-21 to -275

I took note of this phenomenon last year as well. Maybe they really do have annual mandatory training.

WeekNonprecedential NJ appeals decisions uploaded
2025-07-25 to -3140
2025-08-01 to -0740
2025-08-08 to -1417
2025-08-15 to -2120
2025-08-22 to -2821
2025-08-29 to -09-0413
2025-09-05 to -117
2025-09-12 to -1815
2025-09-19 to -2528
2025-09-26 to -10-0237
2025-10-03 to -0932

Over the past year, I have spent 180 dollars on downloading federal judicial documents from PACER (and uploading them to RECAP) in order to research the background behind the freely-available decisions. ROFL!!!

Item 6 of 8

  • A large investment company has been headquartered in Florida for many years. After it "encounters severe financial and legal distress", in May 2024 its founders resign and an interim CEO begins an "extended winddown". The interim CEO is headquartered in Texas, and sets up a paper company there in contemplation of filing for bankruptcy, but the business still is headquartered in Miami, and its former executives still live there.

  • In July 2026, several creditors file an involuntary-bankruptcy petition against the business in Florida. However, one month later, the business files in Texas its own voluntary-bankruptcy petition. The question before the Florida judge is: Which state is the better venue for the proceedings?

  • The judge picks Texas.

    As held in CORCO, economic and efficient administration is the most important factor. Here, it favors Texas. The reason is not that the Debtors filed twenty-three cases there. It is not that their lawyers prefer that court. It is not that the financing documents contain a Texas milestone. It is that GlassRatner, the enterprise's actual management, has been conducting the financial winddown principally from Texas for many months.

    CORCO supplies the closest binding analogy. The debtor there had extensive physical operations, employees, assets, records, litigation, and creditors in Puerto Rico. Yet its financial management was in San Antonio. The court reasoned that the debtor's problems were financial and that the people charged with solving them were in Texas. Those realities outweighed the more visible physical connections elsewhere

    The same distinction applies here. Miami is where 777 built and conducted the business that failed, but Texas is where GlassRatner is administering what remains. The work ahead includes protecting and servicing receivables, completing asset dispositions, evaluating litigation, resolving intercompany accounts, investigating claims, negotiating with constituencies, and implementing a liquidating plan or trust. The people directing that work are centered in Texas.

    This is not a case in which management moved to Texas on the eve of bankruptcy to create venue. [Interim CEO] Shapiro worked from Texas throughout his approximately-two-year tenure. GlassRatner's operational role preceded the formation of Signal National [the Texas paper company] and the Texas filing by a meaningful period. The formal venue mechanism was constructed, but the management connection is a longstanding and present reality.

Item 7 of 8

Way back in year 2008, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System sued Freddie Mac for misleading investors. In year 2026—literally 18 years later—this lawsuit still is active after three trips to appeals panels.

Item 8 of 8

  • New Jerseyans may remember the controversy over Atilis Gym, which attempted to remain open during the coronavirus pandemic in defiance of government restrictions. Apparently, the gym's owner hired somebody to ghostwrite his autobiography, and then sued her, claiming (among other things) that she fraudulently held herself out as an experienced ghostwriter and that her draft was unsatisfactory and he had to rewrite it himself. The ghostwriter countersued, claiming that her draft was perfectly fine and the gym owner was falsely holding it out as his own work.

  • The trial judge now generally has sided with the ghostwriter. (1) Neither party breached the contract. (2) Even assuming that the ghostwriter falsely held herself out as experienced (and the judge finds that she did not), this alleged lie cannot be linked to any damages suffered by the gym owner, since he unilaterally canceled the project before the ghostwriter delivered a final draft and received payment from him. (3) While the gym owner did not republish the ghostwriter's draft wholesale, he did make enough use of it as the "foundation" of his rewrite, and did benefit enough from the ghostwriter's promotional and management activities, that he owes 10 k$ to her.

Moral of the story: If you are good at driving drunk, you can get away with it!

I used to drive drink pretty regularly. I've pretty much stopped years ago, because I started to get a feeling that eventually, something really bad was going to happen, more in the car crash department than getting busted. Nevertheless, I did get the impression that it was actually pretty tough to get caught driving drunk. I think most of the people who do are either waaaaaay too drunk, like can barely even walk, never mind the official legal limit, or are really crappy drivers even sober. Or are the kind of person who becomes a major asshole when they get drunk. If you avoid it when you're really super drunk and apply a modest amount of caution, you're pretty unlikely to ever get caught. Mostly things like, try to be just a bit slower and more cautious than usual, avoid tricky locations or where cops are likely to be, avoid prime just-after-bars-close hours, keep your equipment in good condition, etc.

The natural flip-side is, I have some sympathy for people who were mostly acting decent-ish but got unlucky one time, but people who manage to get multiple DUI charges are usually habitually driving waaaaay too drunk, don't take it as a wake-up call at all, and pretty much deserve what they got.

Speaking of the Scott survey, I looked over some previous ACX surveys, and there is about a 20:1 ratio of ethnic Jews to black people. This is approximately a 100:1 relative overrepresentation given the geographic demographic profile of Scott's readers.

11% or so are Jewish. This tracks generally with the 5x overrepresentation you see in many groups where most or all members are cognitively well above the IQ average but which are not, for cultural or communal reasons, ‘specifically Jewish’.

For example, I think around 10% of congress is Jewish, or was for a long time. I would guess things like Fortune 500 executives, leading authors, scientific researchers, more cognitively challenging specialty doctors etc are maybe also around 10% Jewish in the US. Hollywood might be more like 30% (albeit declining rapidly), and finance maybe 20%, but this is above the ‘default’ overrepresentation and reflects actual cultural preference (Jews have been very overrepresented as bankers, actors, publishers and theater impresarios for many centuries).

I mean, yes, obviously? What's next, are you going to point out that the survey is (4682+121)/(4682+121+610+21) = 88% men? Come on.

What's the overrepresentation ratio for creationists vs. atheists?

slope of 1/2; see opinion for photos

Is that embankment a man-made property transition? Is that even up to municipal code? I would have thought anything steeper than 5:2 would require stabilization or an engineering analysis. There's literally a slide going down the side.

Under IBC appendix J, cut and fill slopes of up to 1/2 are permissible without engineering analysis. This appendix has not been adopted by the relevant state govt., but presumably represents typical practice.

I guess because I grew up in sometimes hilly farm country where tractors occasionally rolled, but I've had a deep respect for steep grades and mowers even though Ive never mowed a yard with any meaningful slope.

I can remember warnings on mowers and tractors on stickers not in the manual to not use the vehicles above a specific slope.

Slopes according to the New Jersey Dept. of Transportation (probably copied from AASHTO):

SlopeLabelDescription
∈ [0, 1/4]RecoverableUnlikely to cause an errant vehicle to roll to the bottom;
does not warrant guide rail
∈ (1/4, 1/3]NonrecoverableUnlikely to cause rollover, but
likely to cause an errant vehicle to roll to the bottom;
warrants guide rail only if there is no
unobstructed runout area at the bottom
∈ (1/3, ∞)CriticalLikely to cause rollover; always warrants guide rail

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