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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2436 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 6, 2023

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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This is pretty un-fun (well for me) but too insubstantial for the main thread: Coffeezilla apparently reviewed Michael Lewis' book, and basically it seems like he had his mind made up/got hit with SBF's Rasputin-in-flip-flops aura and decided it was too hard to rewrite the book when FTX collapsed like a house of cards. The guy with the most access is also the most compromised.

Coffeezilla should know what he's talking about on this topic, but I did a sanity check with the grown-ups and NYT, FT and Fortune basically all come to the same conclusion. Even after his collapse in full view of everyone, SBF somehow has a residual reality distortion field. Also:

Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein — or at least that’s what Lewis suggests in the opening pages of “Going Infinite,” recalling how a friend who was about to close a deal with Bankman-Fried had asked Lewis to look into him. After his first meeting with Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021, Lewis says, he “was totally sold.” He called up his friend: “Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong?”

Ah-mazing. (Imagine how his friend feels lol)

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. I think I'm going to go find a book on cults instead now.

I keep seeing this take but I came away from the book thinking SBF is 100% guilty and probably going to jail. The book is an empathetic portrait of Sam yet there are multiple scenes that show outright and deliberate fraud.The book is more of a character study of Sam and less a laundry list of crimes, but I think the book is more interesting that way.

It's really unfortunate for Michael Lewis that this unforced error of a book was published at the same time as his prior work, The Blind Side, looks really messed up in retrospect because of the conservatorship lawsuit between the black athlete in question and non-adoptive millionaire booster quasi-familial adults covered in that story.

I'm actually inclined to believe him on the whole Oher thing (I think a certain sort of person already hated The Blind Side so leaped on the story of the white family exploiting the guy).

But yeah, the optics aren't good.

Reminds me of the guy who sued the director of Thin Blue Line, the movie that got him freed from prison. Not that I am all that confident in my assessment of that historical anecdote either.

If You Catch It, You Get $500..

Tldw; Youtuber offers 500 USD if you catch a tossed football. There's not much else to it really.

Why are people saying no? Unless your time is worth equivalent to that of Jeff Bezos's, I don't see how taking 10 seconds out of your day to attempt to gain 500 USD with 0 risk is debatable.

Am I missing something? Are people just untrustworthy of strangers enough that they think there is risk to attempting to catch a football?

I. DONT. GET. IT.

I was once approached by a really poor looking woman asking for money to buy her kids diapers, or just the diapers directly. I thought to myself, how can this possibly be a trick, what's she gonna do, sell the diapers on the street? And it's not like I had time to sit down and thinks this one through first. So I went with her to buy the diapers. She thanked me profusely, and I felt good about myself, but I'm naturally very curious. So I pretended to walk away until I was confident she wasn't looking anymore. She just went back to the same store and argued with the shopkeeper until they let her give back the diapers for 10 bucks or so. I felt very stupid.

Just because you don't instantly see a way for something to be scam doesn't mean it isn't one. "How can looking at a map be a scam?", well, until you're wallet is stolen. Maybe they talk you into putting your backpack to the side, so that it gets stolen. Maybe they "just don't have the money on me right now, let's go to the bank" and then you get robbed in an alleyway.

Are people just untrustworthy of strangers enough that they think there is risk to attempting to catch a football?

Yes. Why would anyone offer you $500 for catching a football if they didn't have an ulterior motive?

What would likely pop to my mind is that they're doing a study to see how many people would take the offer.

I'm not a performing seal and my dignity is not so cheaply bought.

Okay, I'm selling some dignity for 500 USD, you are free to buy it. It should be a steal for you.

Unlike matter and energy, dignity is not conserved - you would both be degraded by the act.

If you somehow was able to give me positive dignity equal to the inverse of me flopping about in slow motion and failing to catch a ball in front of a million viewers, then I probably would pay 500 USD for that, and I suspect a lot of people would too.

(Actually not even $500 – it's multiplied with the estimate that the person would actually pay up without any sort of trick or gotcha, which would be pretty low in that situation if you weren't aware that the person is some sort of moderately famous youtuber.)

Ideally I would live in a world where nobody felt the need to sell their dignity.

The issue here is that you can't actually sell your dignity in a way that Arnaud receives $500 worth of dignity.

Look at the expressions of the people who did get it - they were really skeptical and thought they were being set up for something. The one guy who was into it was a Mr. Beast subscriber and fan himself. It's probably like 1,000x more common for a random person trying to get your attention in public to be trying to get something from you or harass you somehow than to actually give you $500 for a trivial low-risk task.

The same reason I said no to the guy who pulled up alongside me while I was walking down the road and offered to give me a Cartier watch: it reeks of bait.

I still don't know what the attached string was in that instance because I told him I already had a watch and walked away, but I'd guess it would get parlayed into helping him out with something that involved me handing over a sum of money on the basis that he'd already helped me and besides I'd still come out quids in so why not, fair's fair, thought you were a friendly person, is this how you treat people who want to help you, etc.

So yeah, he gives them $500. But he's still using them as a means to an end, so they're still at least half right in their scepticism.

Agreed on reasons below, and also: their mind is elsewhere, they don’t want to be put on someone’s tik tok feed and potentially insulted by tens of thousands (you see this happen all the time), there’s a chance they are getting pranked and the shame of that may outweigh the potential of $500 in a post-Putnam university setting.

I don't need my lack of hand-eye coordination immortalized on the internet for millions of people to see. Also there's a patronizing quality to the scenario. "Hey, you look poor. Dance for me monkey."

It's just weird, it's a significant breach of usual social norms, it just feels right to wince and ignore it.

You don't like game shows, you don't like MrBeast, you find the concept that a random guy's making you do something for some amount of money weird. Showing up in a popular youtube video feels weird.

You're on your way to a class, you're in the middle of thinking about something important, you're on a schedule, you just don't want to be disrupted by something uncertain.

(I'd be #2 or #3)

And all these outweight 500 USD?

I have a strong moral distaste for when one, especially one who's otherwise sensitive and competent, finds "STAND IN THE CIRCLE FOR THE LONGEST AND GET TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS" entertaining and spends a nontrivial amount of time consuming it. The challenges are enormously dull, chosen for mass relatability, and the financial reward serves as a hollow source of drama without any of the complex technical or social games that make IRL life or good fiction interesting. The video in OP is a minor case of that, and I just won't participate as a result. And it's just as bad to produce that content - you could be doing something interesting, and instead you're optimizing your facial expression to make 7 year olds click on the exploding train thumbnail. It's the same thing where I wouldn't work as marketer for a clothing or shitty mobile game company even if I were very good at it, and it paid well.

Whereas for a lot of people I really think 'this is super weird and unusual and cringe and I don't want to do it' plays a bigger role than you think, and they'd probably make a different decision in a different social context.

I'm not entirely sure the 'no guarantee it's for real' part is actually true? I sort of expect that, given the popularity of 'give you money for stuff' videos, a substantial fraction of things that look like 'yo i'll give you $500 if you catch this football' with someone filming are genuine (or, if something's rigged, it's that the challenge is harder than it appears, not that the money's fake). Just because there aren't that many big free stuff youtubers, but there aren't that many people doing fake challenges either.

The chance of 500 USD, maybe. There's no guarantee it's for real.

Most people are very leery of something that sounds too good to be true expecting some catch that makes it net negative value to anyone who accepts.

It's like the old joke about two economists who walk over a $20 bill laying on the ground. As one says to the other, it must be fake because if it were real someone would have picked it up already.

A mystery indeed

Mitchell and Webb are so great.

I would absolutely assume I'm being scammed. Would you not? Is someone giving away $500 for pretty much nothing common enough in your experience that you put that down as pretty likely compared to it being some sort of scam?

Kudos to the Asian girl at 1:10 though. Excellent assets.

How can you get scammed by catching a football? You didnt sign any contracts or give any money. You are in a university campus so its unlikely youll get stabbed or pickpocketed while distracted by the ball.

Even if it's not the dangerous kind of scam and more like a "you actually don't get $500" scam, it's a waste of my time and a frustration.

And the expected value of that checks out?

I assume it does, since value is subjective and the people who refuse have made their subjective judgment.

(No one ever made such an offer to me as far as I remember, but I can see how I'd behave in such a situation).

Is someone giving away $500 for pretty much nothing common enough in your experience

It's a very popular YouTube genre by now, including being the main gimmick of the most popular youtuber (MrBeast), so most people are familiar with the concept that it could end positively.

It's a nice sensation to notice yourself growing as an author.

I started my novel almost 7 months back, on a whim really, and picked it up recently after a few months of hiatus. I can already tell, looking at the older chapters before I edit them, that I'm better these days at plotting, pacing, all that good technical stuff. Better at introducing new characters and fleshing them out, noticing unfired Chekov's guns (that I didn't want to leave as a mantelpiece), and just a more competent writer overall.

I suppose around 200k words has to count for something, that's an effortpost and a half even by Motte standards haha.

Maybe I'm improving faster than LLMs can catch up, for now, GPT-4 certainly can't beat me, but I await eagerly for Gemini and co to reveal themselves. I still strongly suspect it won't be able to match up, but as always, the lines between competent amateur work and something publishable blur under a rain of compute.

I intend to make a Patreon soon, when I finally conclude an exceedingly long arc set in and around Mars, there's already a guy who slid into my DMs ages back who asked me, while on hiatus, whether or not money would motivate me further. I'm pleased to state that when I got back to him again, he was both happy to find that the work was continuing apace, and was willing to contribute enough for me to get off my arse and do the KYC needed, which I will get around to eventually.

Eyeballs are great, but money, ah, is there stronger evidence that people enjoy your work? I'm certainly not quitting my day job, that would be a very poor decision, but as always, anyone who subsidizes my biryani and previously undirected worldbuilding on the shitter is dear to my heart.

What’s your story about?

Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum

Dr. Adat Sen has been having a bad week.

You think you have it good, after the sudden appearance of superpowers into the world revolutionizes everything. Especially when your wife is a one in a billion teleporter, it's a cushy gig right until the draft notice arrives and she's forced into a war of apocalyptic proportions under alien suns.

The same star system where, every day, hundreds of trillions of dollars and the lives of millions of normal humans and metahumans alike are destroyed in a meat grinder, barely managing to hold the line against the K3 civilization that a superpowered research experiment accidentally brought to our doorstep.

Let's not forget that his promised pay raise didn't come through, or that someone's out for him to the extent of trying to trying to fry his brain with a Basilisk hack. Who would have thought that being a a cyborg psychiatrist for the UN could be this stressful?

Then there's the matter of publish or perish, handling nasty cognitohazards on a daily basis, convincing suicidally depressed superhumans not to take everyone else with them, all while living under the shadow of the hostile advanced aliens building a Nicoll-Dyson laser in the solar system next door. Oh, and the one Superhuman AGI that humanity produced might be out to get them.

Welcome to the world of ENNS, where superheroes have actual jobs and don't run around in costumes fighting muggers, humanity faces existential threats around every corner, and Adat has the bad luck of finding himself fighting threats way above his pay grade.

It's a hard scifi novel (superpowers exempted) that takes place 20 years in the future, about 15 years from an abortive singularity where humanity noticed one of their AI ascending to ~godhood and decided the optimal course of action was to drop a 50 megaton nuclear warhead on San Francisco.

Then superpowers start showing up in a small yet seemingly random segment of the population, and while things look better for a few years, an attempt to use their abilities to create a wormhole in Alpha Centauri ends up bringing some very advanced hostile aliens to our doorstep. The protagonist is a psychiatrist working for the UN, with a stint in the US Army before the old US dissolved with California and Texas seceding (well, if your own nation drops a whole bunch of nukes on you..). Then things only get crazier.

I wrote precisely the kind of novel I want to read, for what that's worth. Can't let GPT-5 do all the work, especially given it doesn't exist.

Before I read the blurb, and even a few sentences into the blurb, I would have given low odds that it would make me want to read it*, but I was wrong. And now I'm going to try reading it.

*I'm less enthusiastic about web fiction than most of you all, especially web fiction with superheroes.

You've fallen prey to my (financially dubious) plan to write something incredibly niche and specific, but highly appealing to whoever it appeals to haha.

Let me know what you think, I quite rightly believe there's nothing quite like it!

I have a suggestion for how to solve the problem of balancing the blog-length posts in the CWR with the more discussion oriented stuff a lot of people (like me) would like to see there, and I think I have a thought on why the confusion/frustration exists:

The original "culture war roundup" was meant as a containment thread for all of that weeks stupid culture war happenings. If some person showed up at a spa and insisted on exposing himself to a bunch of people in the locker rooms but insisted that he was just trans and this was just normal, instead of needing a lengthy blog post about this, you could post in CWR. It was a containment thread to prevent these sorts of common, repetitive posts from clogging up the more in depth discussions other people wanted to have.

[edit]: It's probably my fault for being unclear here. I am giving this as a historical example of the type of things which would get caught in the CWR, not as an example of the type of things which should be looked at as ideal posts for the CWR. I clarified in a response below that at least historically these types of posts stopped being made organically because people stopped interacting with them due to their repetitive nature. My general point, also made in that clarifying post, is that allowing users to organically enforce the culture of the community is a good thing, and I contrast this with what I perceive now, which is micromanagement. My response to the 'well tended gardens die to apathy' blog is that it is also possible to over prune a garden.

I think the problem is that the CWR thread has become a place where people go to post their blogs, and that they're trying to emulate the style (or more specifically the length) of SA's posts. In my opinion this results in lots of really, really unnecessarily long, usually pretty terribly written posts about long passed culture war topics. This is fine, and just like everybody else I've of course written tens of thousands of words of blog posts myself. So here's my proposal:

Split the blogs off into their own thread, call it "longform motteblog" or "the bailey: blogs from themotte" or something like that.

Allow the CWR to return to its roots: a weekly roundup of culture war topics.

Still remove low effort trolling, sneering, etc.

For reference, here is a link to the CWR from a random week in 2018: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9sabky/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_29/

Notice how most of the posts here follow the form of: here is a current event, here is a couple of sentences either describing it or giving a jumping off point for analysis, and then lots of discussion. The longer posts/discussion type stuff is usually contained beneath one of these topics.

Here we can go back to 2017: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5z5dm1/culture_war_roundup_for_week_of_march_13_2017/

Almost every top level post made in there would be removed from the current themotte CWR thread.

Maybe this type of thing is just explicitly not what themotte is trying to do, and the name is really just a holdover. Hopefully this explains my frustration (which I believe is shared by others) with the way that length seems to be getting used as a proxy for quality. I hope this also explains the recent post (which I was banned for making) demonstrating that length is not a good proxy for quality, and is easily fakeable using LLMs. (Of course like most people who get banned for anything: I think this was completely unfair, I think the point I was making was obvious, I think it was on-topic, and I think I even made clear that I wasn't trying to deceive anybody, just demonstrate that length is a bad metric for judging quality, especially now that LLMs are cheap and available).

I value the CWR threads, obviously value themotte as a discussion forum, and it makes me sad to see something I value seemingly go away. I have enjoyed the CWR roundup threads for a substantial amount of time (at least 6 years), and I think my recent posts expressing this frustration are an attempt by me to keep that type of (imo valuable) discussion alive.

I agree. Some of these long posts are very good. Most are not. People need to learn how to write if they're going to write things that long, starting with learning to use hooks. The most common problem I find is that I get through the first paragraph and still have no idea why I should care what this person has to say or where this might be going.

I initially thought the temp ban for that top level post was a little excessive. But it does appear to be the case that it generated a lot of low-quality noise and very little good discussion. And I'm not super thrilled to have a lot of top-level posts that are basically, somebody please tell me more details about interesting happening X.

I'm not sure what really happened. Maybe the original SSC sub had an audience that was smaller and more connected to Scott's vibe, so low-quality posts were more likely to lead to high-quality discussion. But that doesn't appear to be the case here and now.

There's always the "be the change you want to see" option - try to post higher quality responses ourselves even if the original post or thread parent is bad.

The value of brevity is that you can scan many comments for valuable information in the same amount of time as reading a single long post. And I actually enjoy the long posts that are filled with dense/valuable information, when that’s the simplest way to convey complex information. So maybe there should be a rule to encourage brevity because it’s better for the reader.

I don’t know if it’s just me but I would be interested in more original / creative ideasmithing related to culture, even if that’s not an original intended purpose of the forum.

I still think there’s room for a Link Roundup. Maybe a thread one day a week that’s only open for one day a week would be a good balance between the concerns of “not wanting to discourage effort posts” and “y’all have some interesting links saved I want to read”. We can call it the sunday sneaky link thread or something.

I don’t know if it’s just me but I would be interested in more original / creative ideasmithing related to culture, even if that’s not an original intended purpose of the forum.

Amen! Too much negativity and snark, too little creativity and true seeking of understanding when it comes to Culture.

I know it didn't really go anywhere, but I wanted to thank you for this post. The discussion on what makes good posting quality ended up being more interesting than I expected. These examples from a few years ago make me even more salty about that time I scanned and transcribed an article from a 1968 issue of the Time Magazine, and it got deleted because I posted my commentary in the comments instead of the top level post, but ultimately I think I also agree with the others. These issues became too routine to allow "look at what just happened"-posting, and would effectively turn us into KotakuInAction, or something.

I've had this conversation a lot lately.

Go through my old posts:

  1. The amount of effort we are asking for is super low. Just like two paragraphs.
  2. The point of this website is discussion. If you can't be arsed to start a simple discussion about something you brought up what makes you think other people want to talk about it? I often see low effort posts around fundamentally boring topics.
  3. It comes off as demanding content from other people cuz you are too lazy to think for yourself on a given topic. Let the content creators pick the topics they care about.
  4. There is a crowding out effect with discussions. If one person takes the time to write up a long post where they think about it deeply and another person just rushes to post the story and get hot takes, then all the discussion happens with MrHotTake. So that system would reward people who rush posted and didn't think through a topic.

Previous versions of CWR did not have this length requirement, and yet fostered many, fantastic discussions for half of a decade.

What did precious versions of the CWR have that allowed them to be so high quality, and yet not require the length requirement you are outlining here?

As far as demanding content etc. again I just ask you to look at previous CWR threads back on SSC. These seemed to follow a traditional discussion style where a topic is introduced, and as you go down the tree the posts become deeper and longer. There were many, many, many really good discussions that happened in these spaces.

Those were valuable and I think we have lost something now that they’re not allowed to happen in that form. There are a LOT of places to write the type of blog posts that have taken over the CWR threads.

I understand you have had this discussion a lot, but I think that’s because there are enough people who found value in the types of discussions that were previously allowed, and miss that. Originally when themotte splintered off of the SSC sub, and then finally off of Reddit, it was proposed and grown as an extension of those existing communities and the move was being done for practical reasons, not to change the format to more blog like posts.

That could be where the frustration is coming from. If the pitch had been to move away from the existing CWR style and towards the current blogpost style, I suspect there would have been more pushback.

My first point in the list is how you don't really need that much effort to meet the minimum standards. If two paragraphs is hard for you to write, what are you doing here? It took you what, 5-10 minutes to write this response to me, and its double the length you need.

The longer posts have happened organically.

I think we are just going to go in circles on this forever.

I don’t believe that length is a proxy for quality, and I think they enforcing length requirements for a discussion forum results in people writing extremely low quality posts so as to avoid being banned or having their discussions removed. The noise has gone up substantially, and the signal has gone down. While I understand the intent, I think that the effect is obvious.

You’re right that I don’t have a problem writing several paragraphs to accompany submissions. The reason I don’t like the length requirements are not because I’m unable to fulfill them. It is exactly as I keep saying: this policy drives the quality of posts down because it incentivizes bad writing.

I think this is a bad thing. Obviously.

It's not a length requirement, it's a requirement to start a discussion and invest some amount of effort. Length is easy to quantify and generally people say enough things within certain lengths that I can give that as guidance.

We have a general policy of not removing discussions. If you see disappeared posts it's cuz the user deleted them.

Ban lengths are pretty light for low effort posting. Usually no ban at all. 1 day recently.

I am not asking for length I am asking for some/any signal. Not a signal from the outside world but from the poster, the one who is supposedly posting because they are interested in a discussion.

I am typically trying to stop posts that have no signal at all.

I don't get why writing two paragraphs is destroying quality. It barely takes any effort, and if it does take a bunch of effort for someone, then I don't get how the rules forbidding them from dropping bare links is somehow preventing a quality contributor from being here.

I'm not incentivizing long posts I'm disincentivizing content-less posts.

This post is longer than it needs to be. I do this all the time when I write. I make the same points in multiple ways. I have found over many years of online discussions that this is sometimes the most efficient way to get through to someone.

If I don't say it all up front it just ends up coming out over multiple posts. But by the end of it those posts are long buried and the casual readers have dropped off. That's if the other participant even wants to bother having a multi day back and forth.

I think what is happening is that we are asking people to say something, and they are realizing it's hard to say things in a short and concise way. So they have longer posts. Or they start saying something and realize they have a lot to say.

What stimulating discussion do you expect to get from “trans bad” link drops?

Consider the halcyon days of internet atheism. When someone made a post about “look what those theists did this week, I don’t believe they generated high-quality intellectual output. I think they got a seductive burst of outgroup bad! and went on their way. It’s a recipe for echo chambers.

The atheist-adjacent communities which stuck around, including the ones which would eventually give us this site, took a harder stance against point-and-laugh posting. At the very least they had to couch it in an elaborate Theory of Human Rationality, or something.

What stimulating discussion do you expect to get from “trans bad” link drops?

If this is what you think my post said, then I don't believe you read it, and I certainly hope you never advocate for continuing to enforce the post length limits that are being enforced here.

If some person showed up at a spa and insisted on exposing himself to a bunch of people in the locker rooms but insisted that he was just trans and this was just normal, instead of needing a lengthy blog post about this, you could post in CWR.

I'm saying the other solution is to not have this. Which is my understanding of the current rules and the current lack of Bare Link Repo.

For what it's worth, I think the bar for a top-level is not actually that high. You are correct that people are likely to sprawl out as wannabe Scotts, but I think that fear of getting modded for low-effort is rarely why. There are a lot of reasons why a community of regular SSC readers--ones with a monthly tradition of picking the longest, densest posts as Quality--would feel the urge to sprawl.

In the context of a forum, I prefer shorter posts (1-2 paragraphs max) as they leave more room for interpretation and discussion, and are good writing prompts. Long, engrossing reads are better a stand-alone blog posts.

I will acknowledge that it's rare to see someone respond to the entirety of a long post, like really craft a response of equal depth that addresses all the main points in the parent post, simply because it's a lot of effort and most people won't want to spend the effort unless it's one of their pet causes. But a lot of times with long posts people will pick out one or two points and just respond to those, and that can generate a lot of interesting sub-threads.

balancing the blog-length posts in the CWR with the more discussion oriented stuff a lot of people (like me) would like to see there

Blog-length posts generate tons of discussion!

If some person showed up at a spa and insisted on exposing himself to a bunch of people in the locker rooms but insisted that he was just trans and this was just normal, instead of needing a lengthy blog post about this, you could post in CWR.

Posts like this are frankly just not interesting anymore.

How many incidents have we seen like this over the past decade (it's been almost a decade since GamerGate!)? How many more outrage-bait links do we need? Trans person did this, woke corporation did that, liberal college gone mad did this that and the other... is anyone in 2023 not informed that these sorts of things are going on? This is just normal reality now.

The metagame for culture war discussion has evolved. If people want to keep discussing these issues that have already been beaten into the ground many times over, I don't think it's too onerous to stipulate that they should contribute something original and substantial.

Split the blogs off into their own thread, call it "longform motteblog" or "the bailey: blogs from themotte" or something like that.

Well. I wouldn't prefer that. The blogposts are the main reason I enjoy TheMotte and I like that our current formal and informal standards nudge people towards more longform posting.

I take your point that this isn't necessarily concordant with what the CWR thread was historically. But thankfully, the mods' current vision of how the CWR should be run are more in line with my own than those of the BLR supporters, so I have less of a need to justify myself!

I value the CWR threads, obviously value themotte as a discussion forum

Then just... write a paragraph sharing your thoughts on a news story before you post it? I don't understand why this is so burdensome. I can't remember the last time someone got modded under the effort rule when they had written a complete paragraph. Certainly by two paragraphs I don't think anyone's ever been modded.

Posts like this are frankly just not interesting anymore.

I agree. I don't think you are understanding the point of this example within the full context of my post.

Then just... write a paragraph sharing your thoughts on a news story before you post it? I don't understand why this is so burdensome. I can't remember the last time someone got modded under the effort rule when they had written a complete paragraph. Certainly by two paragraphs I don't think anyone's ever been modded.

Look at the current CWR thread. It's getting about 1-2 topics per day of discussion. Again I'm not saying this is bad, I'm saying that it has replaced the CWR, which was a good thing to have.

I like (many of) the blogposts. More posts that are less dense would probably good, but I'd worry it'd run into the same reason we removed the BLR.

I'm not sure we want to see (from your links)

It boggles my mind that people are taking seriously the argument that cracking down on campus protests is about promoting free speech: http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges

History is being rewritten by SJW activists to take minorities into account, while the right-wingers oppose this as communism. (link to now-dead post)

I don’t suggest getting rid of the blog posts, simply creating a containment thread for them, or better yet: allow them as top level posts below the stickies.

If some person showed up at a spa and insisted on exposing himself to a bunch of people in the locker rooms but insisted that he was just trans and this was just normal, instead of needing a lengthy blog post about this, you could post in CWR.

I think the whole point is that this kind of outrage bait is best suited to /pol/ or various other online forums or subreddits, rather than to this place. Another story about woke trans activism (something I’d say 95% of regulars probably take issue with) without commentary is just a space for people to affirm their beliefs without really saying or discussing anything. It’s like /pol/ collages of migrant crime stories, they just exist to make people mad and lower the quality of discourse; everyone there already agrees with the poster.

The value here (I’d say at least) is in interesting and civilized conversation with smart and often eloquent people who sometimes know things the average person doesn’t, I’ve learnt a lot here from people’s commentary. Another piece of evidence that something we all know is happening and all disagree with is happening isn’t necessary.

The CWR was originally a containment thread specifically for those types of posts. There is utility there if the CW is something you are interested in because you can come in and get a general sense for the current state of affairs. I think that the CW is radically transforming our society, and am thus interested in it, and having meaningful discussions with smart people about it.

Posting the 9000th “look at this trans person maybe this is actually autogynophelia!” take will just naturally receive less interaction, which is generally what the people posting are seeking.

The mods here are, in my opinion, engaging in the most common mistake that people with power make: believing in the idea of central planning or central authority. An individual mod (or small group of mods) cannot effectively plan or micromanage the discussions between thousands of people. The innovation that allowed Reddit, and digg before it, to succeed was the idea of distributed or decentralized moderation. Upvotes and downvotes actually are (with appropriate, hands off moderation to remove spam etc) actually very effective.

Discussion quality on both Reddit and digg took an obvious hit when overbearing moderators tried to micromanage the discussions. It is why Reddit has become such an awful echo chamber, and unfortunately (sadly, again because I value and have valued this community for so long) the signs of this are starting to show here.

Look at the CWR, the latest post is almost a full day old, and is about a sort of meta take on the CW in general not really a roundup of the weeks events.

Well tended gardens of course die due to apathy, certainly a blogpost we all have read and repeated to each other hundreds or thousands of times.

But overtended gardens never bear fruit.

Edit: as of now there actually is a new post in CWR, the previous one was 19 hours ago. The current post is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It is essentially just a blog post about a realization the poster had about how good being a landlord is. Not exactly a bad post, but again really just a typical blogspot/Facebook style blog post.

Is Le Monde Diplomatique a decent choice of a newspaper for someone (I'm European and left-leaning but not a woke-cultist) looking to become more informed about various goings-on around the world, in a somewhat unbiased and in-depth manner? Or should I look elsewhere...

I am a subscriber and it is generally good. It has in-depth articles about a really broad array of topics. Its viewpoint is mainly something like old school French liberal-leftie. So they haven't gone cuckoo yet but there is certainly a plethora of "human-rights-activist-viewpoint" on any topic they approach.

Guess that's about the best we can hope for at this point. :) I'll try their 3 month offer.

Well, I'll kick things off.

I finally achieved a long term fitness goal I've had for a few years. With my 40th birthday coming up, it lit a fire under my ass to more seriously commit to achieving it. So for the last 4 or 5 months I've been pushing hard to do 5 sets of 5, 40 kg turkish get ups. On each side. So 50 total.

Not me in that video BTW.

It's been a journey. The school year starting got everyone in the house sick for a spell which derailed me. Then I started having some pretty debilitating stomach pain out of seemingly nowhere. Couldn't eat, could barely sleep. Spent a day in the ER where they ruled out anything that would kill me that day, then spent a month waiting on the gastro to scope me, who found nothing. Had been on Prilosec the entire time which I suspect seriously fucked up my workouts, because I was failing a full rep before my previous max, and couldn't even do a 5th set on it. As soon as I got off that and moved to Pepcid AC I was good to go again, with a bit less than 2 months to go, and getting a single set of 5 in on a good day.

At first I was worried I'd lost too much time to illness. But at some point I punched through, and pretty quickly went from a set of 5 on a good day being impressive, to rather reliably getting in 2 or 3 sets of five. Then a 4th set of five with an extra long rest period. But getting that one last rep in proved elusive for about 2 weeks. Until yesterday. So I finally pulled it off, with about 18 days to spare.

So yay. Carved out some new strength headroom coming up on 40. Think I'm gonna try to maintain this, and work towards a 5x5 40kg clean and press.

Not me in that video again.

Congratulations! That's a serious demonstration of strength.

Yeah, I don't have a personal trainer, or goto the gym, or watch workout videos. I just like the turkish get up, heard 5 sets of 5 was a good goal years ago, and held it out as something I wanted to do. I strongly suspect doing a workout regimen like that is not really a thing people do. I've kind of done a bit of looking around now that I've pulled it off, and I mostly see videos or blogs talking about using them as warm ups or mobility exercises. A few talking about doing 10 sets of 1 when you go that heavy.

But, I don't think I did anything that destroyed my body, especially my joints. My shoulders, wrists, knees and hips feel better than ever.

I love fun personal challenges like that. The Bulgarian Lite joke/system is this idea semi formalized.

Maybe I'll finally follow you at a junior level with my 36kg

Do it! I highly recommend lots of heavy turkish get ups.

Been playing Quake coop with some discord buddies. Its awesome. We tried nightmare but the 50 hp cap proved too punishing with some of the nail trap hallways. Went with hard difficulty, but with friendly fire. It was glorious chaos. Played through the first three episodes in a row last night.

Baldur's Gate 3. It's amazing. Not finished yet because it's a beast of a game but I'm in obsessed with it.

To me it's one of the best games ever made.

TF2, same as always

I've been jumping between Vintage Story and Space Engineers as different extremes of the voxel sandbox decade-long-development approach. Neither are really complete, yet, but they're an interesting contrast.

Vintage Story is slowly-paced and (often hilariously) small-scale, with clear inspiration from modded Minecraft survival-focused setups like TerraFirmaCraft or early SevTech. You can easily spend the better part of an in-game week working your way so you can break stone at all, and a day past that to unlock the mystery of sawing logs into planks. Getting even small mounts of iron or steel are mass resource investments. In turn, though, there's something incredibly satisfying about finishing a clay pot, or quenching some newly-forged tools, and even 'simple' things like beekeeping or finding salt are very rewarding. The implementation, at a very deep level, of microblock chiseling and varied mechanics gives a ton of opportunities that are seldom available in other block games; food management is surprisingly deep and has a lot of room to be made deeper and broader (and VS has a decent modding community: ExpandedFoods and A Culinary Artillery alone do a good job). And a lot of the weather and worldgen and even crop behaviors give lessons about Germs, Guns, and Steel-style arguments that were hard to grok as completely without.

(On the other hand, the combat suuuuucks and there's some jank the custom engine's still trying to shake out, mostly due to stuff like texture atlases or memory management.)

Space Engineers goes pretty hard the other direction. At the extreme end-game, you can absolutely grind through a (somewhat small) planet, but even the early-game is spent focused more on considerations like power supply or whether you want a wheeled rover or a small mining shuttle. There's some progression, but it's things like building a uranium reactor or a faster-than-light drive, and most of your construction materials are available with very little effort. As a result, while you can do some impressive stuff at small scales, much of my attention gravitates to larger scales

(On the other hand, the build controls and especially block selection options make me want to smack their UI dev over the head.)

I'm playing through the original mass effect trilogy, about a third of the way through the first one. It's an amazing game so far.

Elden Ring, except randomized. It’s chaotic nonsense that I wouldn’t recommend if not for the seamless coop mod, which makes it collaborative nonsense.

Hearts of Iron IV, as always (on and off). Still trying to learn my way around the naval production game.

Since the release of the free-to-play game Gundam Battle Operation 2 on PC (Steam) at the end of May, I have accumulated 170 hours of playtime. 80 percent of its reviews on Steam are negative, so your mileage may vary—but I personally find it to be quite fun.

The game also is available on PS4 and PS5.

Im playing CP2077 and loving it

I'm saving it as a treat for a later time. I've heard a lot about how good it is, especially after all the patching and with the expansion. I might hold off on playing it until I have a monster gpu. :D I could play it now just fine, but that would be without raytracing. I've waited this long, I may as well wait another year or two, lol.

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