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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3222 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?

In what way? I don’t know of anyone who takes the idea literally in the sense that they think that there’s a literal perfect [object] in heaven that Al, similar things on Earth resemble. On the other hand the concept is used quite a lot in mathematics as mentioned below and in law. We have legal definitions of all sorts of things which is why tomatoes are vegetables in a legal sense. It probably happens in CS as well.

theory of forms

In a metaphysical sense, no. W/r/t consciousness, sure. Our brain 100% works in terms of forms and fetishes are the easiest/roughest example.

That's a difficult question! But I will attempt to answer it. Keep in mind that this is my own thoughts, not any specific theory that some other guy came up with. I don't believe in the theory of forms, but I can see how one could mistakenly believe they exist, and they might be useful either way (every model is wrong, but some are useful!)

I believe that everything is unique, finite and different, that there's nothing universal, and the desire to equalize and unify is a quirk of human perception (an attempt to dominate the environment). However, many things are similar! But noticing these similarities requires a great deal of intelligence. Being a shape-rotator myself, I can usually tell when things are similar in their mathematical structure, for example if something is isomorphic to something else.

And easy pattern is: A "branch" of government is similar to a "branch" of a tree. They both contain one-to-many relationships.

The more intelligent you are, the more abstract similarities you will be able to grasp. But these shared aspects aren't universal objects, we just recognize common structures (overlaps, redundancy) and start giving them names. At best "universal" will mean universal for our universe, with our laws of physics. Or perhaps "universal for humans". But this is a form of "universal" which is bound to a scope. But that makes it not universal, no? Many people don't believe in love/morality/meaning because they don't exist outside of humanity. But nothing can exist outside of itself, so nothing can be universal in such a sense.

The theory of forms might reveal how the human brain works, just like how the Buddha recognized how suffering functioned in humans. Both theories are about objective reality as it appears to humans. In fact, it's only about the "Appears to humans" part, as that's the only thing we can perceive. For human beings cannot break out of their own humanity. For the same reason that you can't write what's beyond words. It should also be noted that great pattern-recognition has limited value. It can't carry me in life. Everything has its own specifics outside of the shared patterns. You can't compress knowledge beyond a certain point. And everything is specific - even set theory. It's an axiomatic system, it's not the one true axiomatic system, such thing could never exist. You can create anything which doesn't contradict itself, but said creation doesn't contain anything but itself, it doesn't exist outside itself. I think "Sphere" is a category, many spheres can exist. But you can think up an infinite amount of categories, and these definitions can contradict eachother, so you can't evaluate one as more correct than another. Even if you use the laws of physics as your "base", an infinite amount of universes with different laws could exist, so our universe is also specific. The universe isn't real outside of the universe, so zooming in and out doesn't change anything.

This reply may be inadequate, but I believe the problem is beyond most people, possibly also beyond me. But in this case, I don't think it can be explained in a way which we can understand it.

Mathematicians are often basically platonists, because what is math if not attempting to gain knowledge of platonic forms?

I have no idea myself; metaphysics isn't terribly easy.

I'm ambivalent about Platonic forms (despite the prevalence of such views among physicists), but I'm definitely down with Aristotle's four causes. I even have a toy example I like to use involving an ordinary claw hammer, and how they are four different ways of answering the question "why is this hammer here?"

I even have a toy example I like to use involving an ordinary claw hammer, and how they are four different ways of answering the question "why is this hammer here?"

Its the final cause (teleology) that really gets people upset with Aristotle here. He believed you could meaningfully talk about a dog having sharp front teeth because:

  1. Material - Enamel
  2. Formal - "Tooth"
  3. Efficient - Genetic expression
  4. Final - To sever meat to eat

Whereas modern scientists are iffy on #2 and hostile to #4.

I think you're greatly overstating hostility to #4 here. This is my field and I'd say the majority of biologists is not only fine with it, but even frequently colloquially uses the language indicating #4 as the primary reason. Me included. Yes, it's more complicated overall, but "genetic variants associated with sharper front tooth developed because it allowed specimen to sever meat better and so they had more offspring" is more or less correct in my view.

Yeah, this is a point I keep making to people — natural selection the process may be atelic, but the products of evolution are consequently telic — that's what makes an adaptation an adaptation. Indeed, I argue that this, though oft ignored, is one of the key philosophical insights of Darwinian theory: the explanation of how you can get purpose without a Purpose-Giver.

I would say that things like the idea of a circle or the idea of a dog exist in some sense, even though ideas are not material things that you can touch. Maybe it's a feature of the human brain that it tries to find patterns with commonalities in everything that it perceives, and you can only mentally process physical things as representations of these patterns. If you see a rock that is approximately the shape of a circle, you can see and remember it as a rock shaped like a circle, but if you see a rock with a random shape then it's kind of like looking at something that's in the blind spot of your retina, it's right there, but it's difficult to remember what the shape is or to draw it on paper, etc. If you analyze your subjective experience further along these lines you may come to think that there is some other reality of pure ideas that is parallel to physical reality, because that's what it feels like from a subjective point of view.

Overview of Platonistic metaphysics, see especially the section on mathematical objects and the associated bibliography because usually when people talk about Platonism in a contemporary context it's in relation to mathematics.

Here is an introduction to some problems in the metaphysics of physical objects.

I'm less familiar with contemporary hylomorphic approaches but searching philpapers.org for hylomorphism turns up some results like this that seem relevant.

Yes. The Aristotelian understanding of essence and causality still underpins Catholic doctrine.

Why is it that even people whose ideological positions hold that at least in general some human lives are objectively not worth living (ex. abortion of fetuses with Down's syndrome) react negatively to anyone making such a claim in specific case?

You’re going to have to be more specific.

I would not expect that most such claims are made in good faith. So the reaction might be driven by rhetorical strategy.

He is talking about himself. Being upset at people telling him NOT to kill himself is a recurring topic of his. I don't know why, because he can simply go into any normal part of the internet and frankly present his political views, he'll get thousands agreeing that he should "unalive" himself as they'd say.

I'm afraid it's more like he's posting to try to get a steelman of the "don't kill yourself" position, and despite wanting to be, not being convinced by the arguments. If his brain is anything like mine, it does a good enough job arguing for the "keep yourself safe" position on its own two feet (two brain halves? two cortexes?) without going to 4chan.

One of the recent cases I'm thinking of is some of the reactions to this bit from Dr. Alok "Dr K" Kanojia, from his interview with Steven Bartlett of "Diary of a CEO." It's one thing to make a blanket condemnation of his position from a view of "all human lives are valuable and worth living," but another when you're someone who talks about "dysgenics" and laments the potential effect of Dobbs on America's future demographics.

I think Scott Alexander once sarcastically mentioned genetic testing for recessive disease(s) in Israel something along the times "yes, a nazi thing... practised as XYZ in Isreal". I fail to find the reference. What is the name and is it obligotary? Will some or all rabbi require testing before marriage?

I think he was referring to Dor Yeshorim. The organisation's database is used by the traditional Jewish matchmakers to avoid pairing up carriers of diseases like Tay-Sachs.

I think this is what was being discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim

AFAIK it's voluntary and mostly anonymous, they do offer counselling so obviously that can't be completely anonymous. Couples who don't do it just face judgement from the community if they have a child who dies a horrible death from Tay-Sachs at 4 years old.

My living room smoke alarm decided to go off for no reason at 3AM, and died of being crushed by a brick soon after. Are there any smoke alarm brands that aren't utter shit? Why have they gotten worse since I installed my first ones twenty years ago?

The screen on my nine year old iPhone just cracked, so I’m finally facing the prospect of purchasing a new phone. I’m very pleased with the longevity of my current phone, so I’m planning to stick with Apple (yes, I know Android is supposedly better, but I’ve never heard of an Android lasting so long without any issues). Anyone have an opinion on the benefits of getting an SE vs. a 13/14/15? I’m hoping to get a decade’s use out of whatever I purchase, but I’m also cheap, so I’d prefer to spend as little as possible to accomplish that. (I assume the cameras for any iPhone on the market will be head and shoulders above what I have now, so I’m not worried about getting the best camera available.)

Anyone have an opinion on the benefits of getting an SE vs. a 13/14/15?

The bog-standard one, which is "wait until the refresh of the SE comes out, then buy that". The current SE is an iPhone 13 in the shell of an iPhone 8, and has 5 years of support left (that's about how long its battery is going to last). The only real reasons to get a non-SE iPhone are the front LiDAR scanner for FaceID and the specialized cameras.

The only reason to go with Android is proper Firefox (with the good ad blocking) and NewPipe- but in my opinion, if your phone isn't your primary computer, those are negotiable. Android phones are fucking junk because Qualcomm sucks ass at CPU design and dominates the market enough that they don't have to care, which is why 2000-dollar Android phones get handily beat in hardware by 4 year old iPhones, and the OS being laggier doesn't help either.

Thanks! I don’t pay any attention to different types of phones, and I don’t really trust that anything Google would serve me wouldn’t be bought and paid for by some company or another, so I really appreciate the feedback.

One question: when you say that the SE has five years of support left, has Apple stated that somewhere, or is that just your best estimate?

has Apple stated that somewhere

I don't believe they ever explicitly state this, but every phone they've made in the last 10 years has had roughly a 7 year support window starting from the time it's first introduced. For example, the first gen SE was introduced in 2016, and went out of software support in 2023.

The problem with going 13 right now (I'd prefer a 13 Mini myself, all else being equal) is that it's quite expensive relative to that support window, since it's going to drop out of support in 2029 like the third-gen SE will. Sure, it's smaller and more modern than that SE is, but at twice the price it might not be worth it.

I Also have an SE like the other comments (this must be a case study for the type of person who buys an SE). But if I got to choose again I would probably go with the mini models or the latest regular stock iPhone. The total size difference is not that much but you are losing a lot of screen space.

Get an SE since the others are noticeably larger (and even the current SE is larger than the good old iphones used to be).

Get an iPhone 13 mini, the perfect combination of reasonable screen size and modern phone. Unfortunately it failed to sell so they didn’t make a 14 or 15 mini.

I would have but they aren't sold new anymore. My old iPhone SE 1 broke a while ago and I needed a new phone ASAP so hunting for a 2nd hand mini wasn't really an option.

Hey friends, I have recently started to read nrx blogs and hanging out on this corner of the internet. I realized I need to understand economics better to be able to make sense of the world around me. It seems overwhelming to start from scratch, what do you recommend would be the highest ROI way to understand the major principles and events in economics? as that is closely intertwined with the history of states

I recommend Khan Academy as an intro. They have video lessons, and built in problems for their website. And being able to actually solve some problems is necessary to really understand economics, stuff like macroeconomics can be pretty unintuitive to think about.

Reading Polanyi’s Great Transformation was one of the most mind opening experiences ever for me when it comes to economic history.

Reading economics is like reading politics or history, there are many opposing schools of thought. Comparative advantage vs industrial policy and so on.

I'd just be wary of reading one book and thinking 'that's it, whew, I've got my economics'. Like politics or history, there's a great deal of it floating around, you're most likely to only find the orthodox versions. Yet orthodoxy changes! Tariffs and protection used to be despised and derided, yet they're coming back into fashion. Game theory is related and something to consider as well.

Thanks for realizing this. In general, people don't know enough economics.

When I took a class on microeconomics, which was one of my favorite classes, we covered, among other things, the following. I think these are worth knowing:

  • supply and demand (and graphs thereof)
  • opportunity cost
  • a good sense of just how much economic growth we've had, and the ways that has improved our lives
  • A robust sense of how the price system reflects the availability of goods and acts as a signalling mechanism for when resource usage is economically productive and incentivises innovation and entrepreneurship
  • Why "price gouging" can be good, actually. (Very brief answer: we operate in a world of scarcity, and when prices reflect that accurately, resources can be allocated more to those who need them, and incentivize mitigating that scarcity)
  • the effects of price controls, or cost-imposing regulation, including how minimum wage could reduce employment, or how rent control is "the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing"
  • deadweight loss (in taxation of goods, subsidies, and in monopolies, among other things)
  • how competition will force long-term-risk-and-opportunity-cost-adjusted profits to zero (in a sufficiently abstracted case: in practice, a bunch of things allow some, but not too much, profit to continue to be made, like economies of scale)
  • monopolies and cartels, why these are inefficient, why these are still better than the monopolists in question not existing, why cartels are better than monopolies
  • Pigouvian taxation
  • Coase theorem (keeping in mind also when it doesn't apply)

Public choice economics, and how incentives cause governments to fail, and how we often can't just trust them to solve any problems markets lead to. Some, among other government failures that happen are:

  • in general, politicians' incentives are not necessarily to produce whatever the optimal set of policies may be for the people
  • interest groups that would benefit policies that produce concentrated benefits to them, but impose diffuse costs on most others often can get those policies passed when it's inefficient
  • money spent on lobbying is wasteful: they'll spend up to the benefit of the good, increasing the cost to society
  • regulatory capture, and lobbying and weaponization of laws against competition

Also, read Bastiat's candlemaker's petition; it's hilarious.

I'm sure there's also macroeconomic things worth learning, but I, unfortunately, haven't really learned macroeconomics.

(Though I did watch one video from marginal revolution on the Solow model, which was definitely a useful concept)

It's probably also worth being aware of the whole situation with the US debt, and worth having a sense of some of the consequences of when we actually basically run out of money.

And that the ultra-wealthy usually have their wealth in the form of ownership of companies (and is exaggerated, as prices would fall as their stock sold), not giant vaults of cash.

The class I had used Gwartney et al's "public and private choice" as our textbook, so I assume that would be good, though it's possible that you might not want to spend money, and I don't know what the most efficient way to learn is.

What is the best stock screening website, or collection of websites/apps to help pick stocks and stay afloat of news?

Cost is very relevant. If you have to pay 15 or 30 dollars per month for each of many websites, you'll eat up whatever extra % gain you get from using them to inform your picks, unless you dedicate a huge amount of money for this type of investing.

There are only 3 public newsletters that I think gives you a genuine alpha over the 75th percentile trader.

Do they sound unreasonably dense and hard to parse? Yes, they are meant to be. You don't get an alpha by doing easy things.

Otherwise, the best way to be a stock trader is to become a rich person's golf buddy, and hope you overhear some stuff between drives.

The problem is that the 75th percentile day trader still loses money, if not absolutely then certainly compared to the market as a whole, and likely at higher risk. You have to be like a 98th percentile to make money.

It's easy to beat the market, you just need to be ahead of the curve. You need a thesis and then to act on it. You need patience and the mental fortitude to withstand losses too - losses are inevitable, some bets won't pay off, the unpredictable will happen.

Frankly I don't understand why more people here weren't riding the NVIDIA train up last year given how much AI talk takes place and how many AGI/singularity believers we have here. I vividly recall on the old site a fellow talking about how the 2020 release of GPT-3 might be bigger news than COVID when all was said and done (this was before COVID really got big). Why would you not buy shares in the obvious AI company, NVIDIA? And why not buy AI-related crypto as well?

Consider crypto. You identify that the whole market goes upwards in these cyclic patterns related to the 4-year bitcoin halvings - you identify trends in digitization of money and observe rampant central bank money-printing. In contrast, ethereum has programmed-in deflation and nearly all coins have fixed caps. Why not experimentally buy small/midcap altcoins looking for those big 10x, 50x gains that are so common in crypto but so rare in tradfi? Well, that's what I did in 2019 and that's what I got, explosive gains. I make it sound more casual than it is - it was an absolutely terrible experience in the COVID crash. -50%. Deep in the red. But I stuck to my thesis and was rewarded for it.

I don't claim to be a financial genius. I half-called the COVID crash and sold some but not all. I've made some serious errors with leverage. Leverage is very dangerous and should be avoided - mess about in crypto, mess about in stocks but don't mess with leverage. Nevertheless, I am way ahead of any index fund.

You don't need stock pickers. What you need is to formulate a thesis based on things you know that most people don't. You shouldn't be reading the news in a reactive way but a proactive way to form your thesis so you can then pick your own stocks. Don't day-trade, patience is everything. There will be random noise on the day to day level, 'support' and 'bear flags' and 'technical analysis' - this is rubbish. Trade over the span of months and years, buy and wait for the news to catch up with you.

Sorry about the late reply. I meant to get back to you sooner.

Thank you for the advice! This reinforces the belief I'm starting to have about this stuff; that there is no need to settle for being one of the herd. Opportunities keep showing up in the world, and the average person is either not quick enough to react to them, or overreacts or underreacts, or simply stalls and sticks with their well-trodden path. That last one is still my biggest weakness, being risk averse from a previous monetary loss many years ago, which led to much bigger errors of omission than comission.

The market is not fully efficient, because people are often not efficient. I'm reading a finance book that covers cognitive and emotional errors, and there are many, and they are highly prevalent. I recognize many of them in myself. As long as human nature remains more or less as is, Mr. Market will probably remain significantly irrational and bipolar. Like with NVDA as you say, if the growth was already 'priced in' almost immediately, it wouldn't have gone up another 400% from the point where ChatGPT powered by Nvidia chips was clearly a success, in Feb last year or so, until now.

"Buy the rumor, sell the news" is the old quote... Might work out for me too soon. I'm already decided on staying away from daytrading and leverages.

GJ on sticking to your thesis through the deep red time. That makes me smile. :D

If you don't mind sharing more - what is a thesis you are currently formulating or acting on? I'm not going to blindly follow anyone, but getting some food for thought from a successful investor might be fun.

The reason I wouldn't be a good financial planner is that I don't really come up with new ideas that often. If I was in an office people would just see me doing nothing 90% of the time rather than busily making new reports. But laziness can work really well. Imagine the stock picker who just said 'buy Apple' for ten years in a row, he'd beat SPY and the sweaty actively trading index fund managers.

Right now I am basically all in on AI and crypto, my theory is that it's still undervalued. I believe that OpenAI is cooking something big, GPT-4 is still a top-tier AI and it's a year old with a few updates. What are they doing with all their huge infrastructure spending if not producing next gen models? Just the other day I saw a paper about how you could push up accuracy by having AI models vote on the right answer, getting the wisdom of the crowd. The bitter lesson of AI scaling is that pumping in more compute beats clever fine-tuning, this is the kind of simple trick that works well.

There have got to be a tonne of killer apps yet to be produced with this technology. AI Dungeon for instance, what happened there? It was running off GPT-3 before censoring down to oblivion, there's clearly a market out there for it. Klarna is replacing its customer service people with bots. We've got Suno in music... Yes, NVIDIA stock went down 10% the other day - lots of people seem to think it's a bubble but I disagree. My AGIX went up 15% (what a brilliant name, AGIX, people are sure to buy in on press releases about AGI!). I'm happy to live with volatility, same with crypto.

I also think fossil fuels are undervalued. I have only a small position there since I think tech is worth more but since all the attention and prestige is going towards renewables, I think coal and gas deserve more love. Yes, everyone in the developed world is racing to decarbonize. But industrializing countries are raving about coal, Modi was boasting about reaching a billion tonnes of coal production: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422

China is building up more coal too: it's a reliable, cheap baseload energy source and you can place it anywhere you like, right next to the factory. It needs to be replaced in the long term of course but replacing coal is hard. Germany's been scrambling to get more coal and they've been a huge investor into renewables. DEI funds loathe coal and universities try to divest... There are also wartime price surges as we've seen with the Ukraine war and energy shortages.

Thank you. The thought of investing into planet-destroying fossil fuels put me off my feed a little, so I didn't reply at the time. I think you're right that a lot of killer apps based on AI will be coming.

It's interesting what's happening with BTC right now. A lot of ETFs have been started for it, and the halving happened, but the price is going down. Might reach 52k because there's no real support before that point, according to a technical analysis (lol) video I skimmed.

Yeah, I reckon people overhyped the halving. It's supposed to be a long term effect, it takes months for the bull run to really start in past cycles.

Nothing could happen for six months after the halving and that would be standard. Of course there have been structural changes, ETFs are now involved.

I had a possibly very naive thought about this. Now that the last halving of reward has happened, and nearly all the btc have been mined... is it possible that people will just sorta lose some interest in the whole thing? Move on to a newer crypto as standard? Or do you think btc will remain the gold standard of crypto and just become more and more valuable per btc as more people want to get into crypto (is this even a given, or could products from central banks or Visa/MC become most popular instead?)?

I don't hold any BTC, I only have alts. I was always vaguely worried about the 21 million cap for that reason, plus it's so high market cap that gains would diminished...

On the other hand, if things get bad, the miners will change the rules by consensus. Violating 21 million would make a lot of people very angry but there's no reason all parties can't be satisfied. We had this before in the block size wars. Miners decided they wanted to keep small block sizes with higher fees, thus bitcoin cash and BSV faded away into irrelevance. Bitcoin will persist in some form, in some fork.

If CBDCs take over, we enter the darkest timeline. What good is freedom of speech without the freedom to buy a website, pay for organizations?

Tbh if you're at that level, the answer is probably "Please don't buy stocks, you're gonna get ripped to shreds by the professionals'. There's basically just two reasons why I'd say it's a good idea to buy specific stocks by yourself:

  1. You're a professional who knows the ins-and-outs on how everyone else does their stock picks, where they get their information from, and generally plays on an equal footing with them

  2. You're a domain-specific expert who is extremely bullish/bearish on a certain technology by a specific company due to deep knowledge that traders can't reasonable have

In the first you already know where to look, in the second you only want to trade on a short list of companies you know well anyway.

Disclaimer: Not a trader precisely for this reason

Yeah but the 8% avg/year virgin fund is too boring. I need to use some (10%) of my money to just play around with.

I've been reading more of James Clavell's Asian Saga. I've also been catching up on cleaning and maintaining my garden tools.

In the books every peasant bows and scrapes at the feet of the samurai. My very limited knowledge of martial arts is that those same peasants developed ways of fighting with their gardening tools because they were forbidden from owning real weapons.

So... who were the peasants fighting?

The... samurai and their military leadership? At least in Japan.

Meiji- and Edo-era peasants (and especially hinin, which were somewhere between Indian dahlit and American homeless) had extremely minimal rights, at the same time that the samurai class had an explicit right to strike those who offended their honour, a rule that was of significant relevance and controversy in an incident involving Westerners that Clavell references. (Tbf, especially 1600s-era social and economic stratification meant that people sympathetic to the peasants or, more often, merchants, were often writing the histories.)

But that didn't stop peasant uprisings from happening: Chichibu is similar in time to Tai-Pan and_Gai-Jin_, and Jōkyō the best-known early Edo period peasant uprising that would have fit for Sho-Gun.

So... who were the peasants fighting?

If German history is anything to go by: Robbers, marauding soldiers, each other, their wives, their lord's enemies when something went very wrong in the levying process, and once every few generations, their social betters in some abortive peasant uprising.

Since people keep talking about/recommending them, how do you use an LLM? I mean, most everything I search online is paywalled, and the free "AI tools" I've tried weren't very impressive (and ended up either shut down or paywalled)?

Could somebody give some ELI5-level guidance and/or recommendations?

@self_made_human you’re the one I’d ask, here.

I have been summoned.

Well, Ranger has done a pretty good job, but if you particularly want GPT-4 (or a fork) for free, then you can use Bing Copilot, either through the Bing app or your browser.

You need to sign up with your email (I don't recall if it needs to be a Microsoft account or using Outlook), and there you go. You flip a toggle to make it use GPT-4, and you're set.

Pretty KISS, and it's the best free LLM out there, being on par with GPT-4 as served through paid OAI ChatGPT.

Everything else that good or debatably better requires money, or a willingness to find shady discord bots or sign up for research previews and so on.

I don't find them enormously useful, but two specific uses for me:

  1. when reading a textbook, ask it to explain some passage (e.g. on a weird C++ detail) (usually helpful)
  2. write code in some language/framework, given approximately that code in another language/framework (hit or miss)

Again, not what I'm asking.

What LLM do you use to do these? How do you access it? How much does it cost? How, in detail, do you do these things you list?

ChatGPT and Bard, mostly the former, unpaid version, through browser. Sample transcript on the diamond problem in C++ multiple inheritance: https://chat.openai.com/share/603e851e-daa0-4c4b-81d7-1b8332897694

Summarizing dense, relatively inscrutable material when I don't have the time to read it for myself.

Quick diagnosis of issues with minor appliances or mechanical issues. I don't trust them for medical purposes. Describe the year make and model of your car and any weird noises or behavior it is making.

Song recommendations (i.e. here's a list of songs I like, give me more on this theme)

Nigh instantaneous proofreading and editing of professional letters, documents, or similar.

Quick feedback loop for brainstorming ideas or quickly 'prototyping' concepts you have had difficulty envisioning or expressing.

Right now they don't have much 'agentic' uses (I'd really like one that can e.g. order pharmacy refills or schedule oil changes for me) but I think the basic capabilities are there.

I think you misunderstood my question. I don't mean a list of use-cases like this, I mean how do you do these things you list?

Explain like I'm five — or, alternately, a sixty-something Boomer. What URL do you enter in your browser, or software do you download. How do you use the resulting page or program?

Go to www.chatgpt.org/chat, you won't have to sign up or log in. Then type in the box.

Pick your poison, ChatGPT or Claude Sonnet. Go to their website, make an account with username and password, do a mobile verification and give them your email, promise not to do anything bad... and that's it. You just ask the machine your questions: "What are some good names for an enormously long armoured train?" and have a conversation with it: "Why do they [spiders] have eight eyes if their vision isn't so great, while birds have good eyesight with two?" You can ask it for code, stories, translation, just about anything you might ask a human (except anagrams and certain kinds of wordplay) and you get a pretty decent response, albeit it may make things up or give you blather.

It's like using microsoft outlook or gmail in your web browser, you're not downloading stuff unless you're an advanced user with a very powerful PC.

If you want the best models, you have to subscribe to Claude Opus or GPT-4, lesser models are free with ratelimiting. It's no harder than using netflix really.

do a mobile verification

Does that require having a smartphone?

It's no harder than using netflix really.

Well, given that I've never used them, or any other streaming service (particularly as my Internet isn't good enough to support them), this isn't exactly a helpful comparison.

Options:

  • Google's mainstay is Gemini (previously Bard) is free(ish) for now, if you have a Google account. Open it, start writing. Not private.

  • Anthropic pushes Claude. You can try Haiku and Sonnet, the lighter- and mid-weight models free, but Opus was more restricted last I checked. Tends to be one of the stronger fiction writers, for better or worse.

  • Chat-GPT3.5 is available for free at here, 4.0 is a paid feature at the same sight. The paid version is good for imagegen -- I think it's what a lot of Trace's current stuff is using. Flexible, if a bit prudish.

  • Llama is Facebook's big model, free. Llama 2 is also available for download and direct run, though it's a little outdated at this point.

  • LMSys Arena lets you pit models against each other, including a wide variety of above. Again, not private. Very likely to shutter with little notice.

  • Run a model locally, generally through the use of a toolkit like OobaBooga webui. This runs fastest with a decent-ish graphics card, in which case you want to download the .SAFETENSORS version, but you can also use a CPU implementation for (slow) generation by downloading GGUF versions for some models. Mistral 8x7B seems to be the best-recommended here for general purpose if you can manage the hefty 10+GB VRAM minimum, followed by SOLAR for 6GB+ and Goliath for 40+GB cards, but there's a lot of variety if you have specific goals. They aren't as good as the big corporate models, but you can get variants that aren't lobotomized, tune for specific goals, and there's no risk of someone turning it off.

Most online models have a free or trial version, which usually will be a little dumber, limited to shorter context (think memory), or be based on older data, or some combination of the above. Paid models may charge a monthly fee (eg, ChatGPT Plus gives access to DallE and ChatGPT4 for 20 USD / month), or they may charge based on tokens (eg, ChatGPT API has a per 1 million input and output token price rate, varying based on model). Tokens are kinda like syllables for the LLM, between a letter to a whole word or rarely a couple words, which are how the LLM breaks apart sentences into numbers. See here for more technical details -- token pricing is usually cheaper unless you're a really heavy user, but it can be unintuitive.

For use:

  • Most models (excluding some local options) assume a conversational model: ask the program questions, and it will try to give (lengthy) answers. They will generally follow your tone to some extent, so if you want a dry technical explanation, use precise and dry technical terms; if you want colloquial English, be more casual. OobaBooga lets you switch models between different 'modes', with Instruct having that Q/A form, and Default being more blank, but most online models can be set or talked into behaving that way.

  • Be aware that many models, especially earlier models, struggle with numbers, especially numbers with many significant figures. They are all still prone to hallucination, though the extent varies with model.

  • Long conversations, within the context length of the model, will impact future text; remember that creating a new chat will break from previous context, and this can be important when changing topics.

  • They're really sensitive to how you ask a question, sometimes in unintuitive ways.

Thanks! Maybe you'll mind answering two questions: About using local models, can it be tweaked so it doesn't forget context so easily? Maybe using learning runs on previous conversations? How does chatGPT retains context? I understand it does multiple processings for each prompt, and does lossy compression of previous chat history. How to simulate in in API?

You can finetune models on your personal data or information, but that only does so much. If you're more technically inclined, you can try setting up Retrieval-augmented generation, where the model queries and existing database and tries to answer based off the knowledge there and not just what it came baked in with.

Don't ask me how that can be done, but I know it's a thing. My PC isn't good enough to fuck around with the local models worth using, courtesy of Nvidia and their stingy amounts of VRAM.

How does chatGPT retains context?

I presume you're not talking about nitty gritty algorithmic details (which would be the self-attention mechanism IIRC) and instead mean how it continues a conversation or remembers details about a user?

Well, the official implementation has a "memory" feature where it gets to remember tidbits about your preferences as a user, as well as some relevant personal details like location.

The way it works is that the entire conversation is fed back to the model, with specific signs that tell it when it or the user was speaking, and it'll resume where the user left off. I think the API works this way by default, but my OAI credits expired ages ago, so if it seems to be treating each input as a fresh prompt, you need one of the many frontends available that use your API key and then handles the matter of copying back your entire conversation, which is tantamount to the model "remembering" it.

Is there no way to use Claude 3 Opus' web feature if you don't have direct access to it? I'm trying out Claude 3 Opus through openrouter.ai because Anthropic don't sell to European countries yet, but I can't see any way to get more than the usual text feature. There's image upload as well but it doesn't work perfectly.

Great post, but I'm consistently bemused that people forget that GPT-4 and DALLE-3 are freely available through Bing. I'm sure Microsoft is too.

Avian flu has started jumping to humans.

Hypothetically, if it starts transmitting from human to human easily, causing a pandemic which would be a lot more deadly than covid, how would you invest in order to profit, if you were to survive? What would be your "no use for money if I'm dead, but if I survive I'll multiply my savings" strat?

I have noticed that Bitcoin goes up in times of uncertainty, and then goes down when things get calmer. But the first rule of Bitcoin is not to buy it when it's back in the news, and it's been reaching highs. So probably don't buy Bitcoin now.

Might not be quite as true anymore. I think a significant reason why it went up lately, and why it might not plummet as much anymore, is because a lot of ETFs bought into it. And more are set to buy in over the next couple of years. It might be "here to stay" in a bigger way than before.

But it is something I've observed as well. People want gold and the biggest crypto when a crisis happens.

How much more deadly would it be than COVID?

No one knows yet, but 30-50% death rate has been mooted.

Heard the same claim about covid at the end of 2019. Fool me once...

Even 30% is major unpredictable transformation of society level, I think investment advice is hard in that scenario.

Yes, there wouldn't be a recognizable civilization left. Guess those without land where they can be self sufficient are screwed in that case.

Apparently it primarily affects children and young people. Older people above 50 are very rarely killed (just like Spanish flu). I think in that case civilization would probably survive since that leaves the people who are primarily in charge and can maintain things for a couple more decades. Obviously losing so many young people would radically transform many social dynamics. I think total collapse likely needs in excess of 80-90% mortality rate.

The problem is that medium ground where things can change in unpredictable ways but it isn’t the end of the world.

So the Black Death, which was a catastrophe but didn’t cause civilizational collapse.

For the record, I don’t believe this report without much better evidence.

I think based on the COVID response, go with online services— instacart, Grubhub, online streaming, Zoom type online services, basically anything that replicates an in-person service at home. I would anticipate at least an attempt at a lockdown if the flu is bad enough.

In the initial phase there will be huge wealth-destruction as industry, logistics and so on get hammered. You want to be shorting travel, energy and such or at least in cash, ready to buy low. Then you need to follow the moneyprinting and fiscal support wave.

Keep enough small tokens to decorate my day-day living space with pleasant memories and entertaining anecdotes, then give/throw the rest away. Curate the collection on a rolling basis, trading put the least meaningful for new tokens as I collect them. That's essentially what I do now. You can't keep everything. And you can fit a whole lot of memories in a relatively small scrapbook.

Plausibly, if my personality is that unstable, my tastes in archiving old things will also change. I'll go through a minimalist phase, throw everything out, then go through a nostalgic phase and regret it.

I have a bit embarrassing question to ask: what is the functionality of following users for? I thought that if I followed some users, I would get the notifications of their posts, but apparently it doesn't work that way (or at least not for me). Would someone be so kind and explain it to me?

I think that's exactly how it's meant to work l, with the note that comments aren't posts, so you don't get notified of them.

I'm pretty sure it worked in the past, but people I follow aren't so prolific, so I haven't seen any recent notification.

Now I understand, thank you. But barely anyone posts something on the Motte, so I don't find this feature as useful as I previously thought. But it can be useful in the future, thanks once again.

Posts and comments aren't the same thing. Posts are the submissions that appear on the front page; you'll get a blue notification when a user you're following makes one.

You are right, by writing 'posts' I meant post and comments, but it's not clear. So I get the notifications only for posts and not for comments?

Yes.

Thank you.

I agree it's weird. Most people do not make top level posts here, so it's largely pointless to follow people.

I still find it somewhat useful as a quick link to the people whose profiles I can check for new comments.

If we updated it to also count top-level comments in the culture war thread, that would be an improvement, I think.

But yeah, currently it doesn't do too much.

A thought was pursuing me for a long time, and visited me during Scott's poll again. What if we polled a large number of people about their SMV (e.g on 1 to 10 scale) and their SO SMV, and then check those whose estimates match estimates made by another people. It's very well known that people of both genders greatly overestimate their SMV. What if amongst people with no SMV self-bias we could find some people who are superforecasters without them having to spend tens of hours to play a game. And if you want answer to some difficult ethical question, it might be wise to ask them, they are more likely to give correct answer than people who can write long texts with links to "peer reviewed" articles.

This would all be so easily solved if dating apps published ELOs. But that would probably cause a spike in suicide rates for the entire week, so I can't quite endorse it.

The point is getting ones who correctly estimate their rating, just publishing it serves no reason.

Well, I can't imagine an ELO calculated from views and match rates wouldn't serve as the "ground truth", regardless of how they rate themselves.

I'm not saying it woudln't. Yours publishing ELOs is like leaking answers to exam before giving it to students. I am wondering about identifying people who have unbiased estimate of their own SMV. If they can read it from app, they can copy-paste it and pretend they have correct estimate of themselves.

I'm going on a 3.5 hour drive tomorrow to get to the centre of the path of totality for the solar eclipse. I have the solar glasses. I have solar binoculars and regular binoculars. I know about shadow bands and am thinking of bringing something to make them easier to see. Is there anything else I should do to take full advantage of it that I'm probably not thinking of? How hard are shadow bands to see? I saw videos of people using white sheets to see them. I'll probably be on a beach if that matters.

UPDATE: I saw the shadow bands in the snow. They were very faint at first but very clear right before the eclipse. Overall, an amazing experience and totally worth the trip. It's hard to describe the impression it made. A few minutes before the eclipse, it got noticeably darker, slowly at first and then faster and faster. Then, very quickly, it's as dark as night with a full moon, and you can suddenly see this back orb where sun was a moment ago, ringed with bright light and extraordinary white whisps of still smoke coming out of it. I am not a religious person, but angelic is best descriptor that comes to mind.

I’m driving 5-7 hours across however many state lines to do the same. Skipping my check-in with my parole officer for this. For me, just my regular aviators and a revolver in case things get dicey. White sheets seem to be for recording equipment. Just take it in and keep an eye on traffic and erratic behavior (both others and yourself). Stay safe.

I can't tell how much of this is a joke.

I chuckled

I expect all of it and this kind of sarcasm in my view belongs elsewhere.

parole officer

revolver

Separate from the odd juxtaposition here, I don't think aviator glasses are sufficient for staring at an eclipse. Is this a troll post?

Edit: Almost certainly.

I was able to see shadow bands on the ground after the eclipse, but I didn't know they were called that until now. To me, they resembled low-quality video game lighting, like how Minecraft lightning used to work long ago. It was pretty cool.

I was able to see them in the snow just before and after the total eclipse. They were interesting. They were like waves of faint shadows all running in the same direction as the moon.

What's your favorite piece of architecture ever?

Sagrada Familia, hands down. Maybe my favorite manmade work, period.

Roman aqueducts combine elegance and practicality in a way that I really like. St Peter's Basilica is on the other end of the spectrum but easily the most awe inspiring thing I've ever seen.

I'm a fan of the Milwaukee Art Museum, but I don't exactly have a list of favorite buildings on hand.

Saint Basil's Cathedral, might be pleb tastes but I just love the textures and colors on the domes.

Really partial to the Biltmore House. I don’t care if it’s gauche. It looks rad and makes for great tours.

What a funny name.

And accurate.

Perhaps a bit cliche but I have never not been totally awestruck walking into the Hagia Sophia.

Probably the Duomo in Florence. I lived next to it for a time and walked by it everyday. It always looked like a movie set.

I’m not really sure if this counts as small but it’s definitely been on my mind and id like some advice on whether or not I am thinking about this clearly. I have lived in the Las Vegas metro area for the past two years and plan to remain here for the foreseeable (at least 5 more years) future, im thinking of buying a small house in a nice part of town and can just barely afford to do it.

I find myself hesitating on actually pulling the trigger because it would result in my current housing expense increasing from the 1.9K a month I currently pay to rent to 2.8-3.3K a month depending on what I actually end up buying.

I just can’t shake the sense that I would be buying at the top. This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue (I think its unlikely I would be laid off except in a case of extreme economic hardship) except that I am concerned that if the economy does dump I will be stuck in a high interest (looking at around 6.5%) loan which I wont be able to refinance if my home value drops enough.

The thing that’s annoying though is that this really is just a feeling and I cant find any actual evidence to suggest this area is actually about to undergo any kind of correction. Prices have increased a lot in recent years (up 40-50% since 2021) but this has happened in a lot of places, the regional unemployment is low and houses that get listed are selling.

Does anyone know what kind of metrics people who follow single-family real-estate sales actually follow? I appreciate that very competent people working at large financial institutions spend a lot of time and $ trying to price real estate accurately and I don’t expect to develop an institutional level understanding of these things. Im just trying to enter this with my eyes open and want to feel slightly less clueless, before making what will be my biggest financial decision to date.

Here are some metrics I have looked at:

  1. Regional unemployment https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.nv_lasvegas_msa.htm (which is basically flat).

  2. Permits for new construction https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LASV832BP1FHSA

  3. Case Schiller index calculated for Las Vegas metro area https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LVXRNSA

Is that housing cost after taxes? I assume you'd itemize after buying the house? If so, what's your marginal bracket?

Are you putting 20% down or something closer to 3%?

How plausible would getting a tenant be in the house if it made you more financially comfortable?

We are kinda in an anomolous time. The ratio of median home price:median income is in uncharted territory. Granted, this is a national ratio, so local market movement is a huge factor.

Without major amounts of extra supply coming on your local market or an exodus when Lake Mead runs dry, I don't see a regression to the mean happening any time soon. It's a hard choice, given your increase in housing cost.

In a similar position. Have stronger personal reasons to buy so I will buy regardless, but really difficult to shake off the feeling that it’s financially a bad decision. Prices are already ridiculous how can they go up any higher?? But then I had the exact same idea 3 years ago and here we are. I just really really hate that housing became a speculation vehicle that can go up or down in value in big unpredictable swings. It must be the most boring low return low risk investment ever

Rent vs buy math is difficult to impossible. If you can budget the house, and it'll make you happy, do it.

I got sick of landlords and wanted nice versions of things (air conditioner, kitchen appliances), so I did it. I also (correctly) assumed it'd make me finally put more effort into meeting people instead of moving cities constantly optimizing my career. Was it the right move financially? I won't know until I sell, and even then it's hard to include everything.

I just tell myself that it's at least non-disprovably a good choice and that the (uh, overly generalized) efficient market hypothesis says it should be similar to renting.

So, what are you reading?

I'm on Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. The writing is smooth and the character is great, though still hoping it will be more than just entertaining.

Finished When We Cease to Understand the World the other day. Fascinating, absorbing and concise. Well worth checking out if you have any interest in the luminaries of quantum mechanics (Schrodinger and Heisenberg in particular).

Still reading Life Worth Living. I found the chapter "Who do we answer to?" very interesting — it gets at something I've often found myself gesturing toward when arguing with more liberal or relativist people on the topic of values.

I just finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I have to say it is nearly perfect as a book, for me. It's the perfect mix of literary, philosophical, enough action to keep moving, enough sex to be fun without becoming grating or disgusting. The length is perfect, it doesn't drag beyond the material, and at no point was I reading just to get the book over with, but it's a sufficient length to explore a lot of ideas and really dig into the characters. It's obviously political, but not overbearing. It's about a time and a place but it is timeless, it neither holds your hand explaining things nor requires so much background that you need a history degree to get it.

I'm probably going to go back to Tolstoy for a few hundred more pages. Get at least to the start of the second war.

REQUEST: What are great graphic novels I should read? I've read and enjoyed Watchmen and V for Vendetta in the past, and read Tezuka's Buddha last year and found it to be as such a book goes very fun. I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it, kinda feel like it's something I should explore, now that I live in a world where I could get that from a library or get it off LibGen.

Sandman, if you haven't already. The other graphic novel I would recommend is Batgirl (2000—2006). It stands on its own and is quite beautiful.

Sandman, of course. Nausicaa, The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, and Red Son are all classics. From Hell might be worth reading, especially if you can find a collected edition with all the notes in the back where he explains his process. Astro City (intermittently ongoing) is a favorite of mine, but some people don't get into it.

Lost Girls is a fun bit of erotica from Alan Moore you could finish in an afternoon. The Sandman is another good Alan Moore piece but as far as I know it's a full length comic series rather than a self-contained graphic novel, but maybe there's a compendium.

For something not involving Alan Moore Transmetroplitan was good fun and from what I remember would probably appeal to the Motte crowd for it's cyberpunk / absurd culture war aspects (sexy Sesame Street!) but it's another full series.

I will caution you that if you buy a hard copy of Lost Girls, do not read it on the bus. People will assume that you're reading child pornography, and with good reason.

Finder by Carla Speed McNeil is a distant-future graphic novel series. It features gorgeous black and white line art, transhumanism, and cultural commentary on a possible future of race, gender, and wealth. It has a focus on personal relationships within a society, and comes at anything political from oblique angles. The character art would make Walt Disney swoon with McNeil’s action lines and liveliness.

The eponymous Finder is a young man named Jaeger, of a lower caste ethnicity whose tribe has become involved with a lower upper-class household in one of the domed cities. He has a talent for finding what’s needed, but whether that’s a gift or a curse is left grey.

Cerebus the Aardvark by Dave Sim was a monumental undertaking, one of the first independent comics to hit 300 issues, contemporary in the 80’s with the TMNT and The Tick. It features insanely amazing black and white crosshatched backgrounds by Gerhard, and the character work by Sim is top notch with a caricaturist’s eye. His comic lettering is a phenomenon.

Cerebus himself starts as a funny-animal parody of Conan the Barbarian in the lost civilizations of ancient Europe, but things shift into a high gear when Cerebus gets involved with a mayor who looks a lot like Groucho Marx. It evolves into a poignant and piercing examination of second-wave feminism, the effects of church on society and vice versa, the nature of civilization, the ephemerality of sober and drugged spiritual experiences, alcoholism, masculinity, rapey incels before we had a name for it, being bros, and failed dreams. By the end we’ve met caricatures of dozens of twentieth-century celebrities and parodies of superheroes and sword-and-sorcery fantasy heroes, each one shaping how Cerebus is (or plays) the hero. Skip the text sections from issues 200-300 if you find them weird or boring, the author has something to say in them but most people won’t grok it.

In many ways, these series are diametric opposites, and visions of the future and the past respectively which will haunt you. To see if you want to read the whole series, read volume 3 of each: Finder, King of the Cats, and Cerebus, Church and State.

Here's a few more ideas, not really "classics", but not quite as fluffy as they might seem.

Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley. You probably already know if you're going to like it. The comic is deeper and more layered than the movie (and show), but still very much the same feel.

Zot! by Scott McCloud. There's collections of the original series, and a sort of encore called Hearts and Minds that I think works best on the web. You can read that first to see if you like it - there aren't any real spoilers.

ElfQuest by Wendy and Richard Pini. I recommend the first 8 books, up through the end of "Kings of the Broken Wheel". After that the quality becomes variable, and I don't remember what's any good, and I haven't read the later stuff. But those first 8 volumes tell a sprawling epic, from cave-men to star travel, and bring it to a good-enough stopping point.

Thieves and Kings by Mark Oakley. It stumbles around just short of being transcendently good, but never quite comes together, at least IMO. But I'm fond of it anyway. There was a decade-long hiatus, but apparently he's started up again.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

One of my handful of 10/10s. Absolute aesthetic perfection. Kundera's other pretty-good book is Immortality, which also explores the self as an experience versus the self as others project values onto. But this is the novel he lived his life to write, so the rest of his work ends up disappointing.

What are great graphic novels I should read? I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it

Berserk. Koe no Katachi if you feel like a good cry.

I enjoyed Scott McCloud's The Sculptor quite a lot. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea but it made me feel things.

Seconded.

Seconding all of fishtwanger's recs.

Astro City is very much a comic fan's comic book, but it (and to a lesser extent, Common Grounds) are great not just by the low standards of superhero works, but more broadly as explorations of the human spirit. Nextwave takes things the other direction, and despite that is the only Warren Ellis work I can stand -- hilariously zany, completely shredding the ideas of superheroic human spirit, absolutely all the more enjoyable for it.

If you like Moore, Promethea isn't perfect in a lot of ways, but it's generally underappreciated work.

Ursula Vernon's Digger is a weirder work, but fun.

For Eastern works, Kino's Journey is better-known for its anime (good) and light novel (outstanding), but the manga iterations are still pretty strong.

I've read and enjoyed Watchmen and V for Vendetta in the past

I recently re-read Moore's From Hell (a fictionalised account of the Jack the Ripper murders) and think it's superior to both (if admittedly a lot slower), so check that out next. As noted by @fishtwanger below, try to find the edition with all the notes in the back. The notes offer interesting insights into Moore's creative process and demonstrates just what an exhaustively researched work From Hell is.

  • With the exception of his earlier Optic Nerve comics (which are "promising" rather than "good"), I cannot recommend anything by Adrian Tomine highly enough. Marvellously funny and sad slice-of-life stories about modern America, which often provide a penetrating insight into the Asian-American experience. Particularly recommend Shortcomings.
  • Charles Burns's Black Hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_(comics)) is so absorbing that I read it in one sitting. A wholly unique blend of 70s nostalgia, teen angst and Cronenbergian body horror.
  • Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_(comics)) is a fascinating memoir about growing up in Iran after the Ayatollah came to power (later adapted into an animated film by Satrapi herself, also well worth checking out).
  • Blankets by Craig Thompson. Read it years ago and can't remember it in detail, but remember thoroughly enjoying it. A memoir about the author's first love as an adolescent, while wrestling with his repressive Christian faith.
  • The Sculptor by Scott McCloud. An engaging story about the sacrifices artists make in pursuit of their muse (kind of like a comic book Whiplash). Moving and powerful.
  • Hyperbole and a Half. Not strictly a graphic novel: these originated as blog posts by Allie Brosh posted on the eponymous blog, in which Brosh recounts amusing anecdotes about her life interspersed with impossibly crude, Rage Comic-esque illustrations rendered in an MS Paint knockoff (one such illustration was actually memed to death in the early 2010s). The best of these posts were compiled into a paperback collection in 2013; I'm not exaggerating when I say this book made me laugh so hard that I was often struggling to breathe. In spite of the presentation, the book contains a two-parter about Brosh's struggles with clinical depression which is moving and profound. Brosh later followed it up with Solutions and Other Problems in 2020, which is worth checking out even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of the previous volume.

I just read a good chunk of The Mystery of the Kibbutz. I'm not reading more because it got to be an awfully repetitive book, but the first few chapters were pretty interesting about how Jewish communes were relatively successful despite how one might expect a society without free markets to fail.

I read one of each of the gentleman burglar character books (Fantomas, Arsene Lupin and Raffles) and from what I remember Arsene was the best of the bunch.

Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.

The Brother's Karamazov was much more comprehensible. I did have some confusion with the names, not just because of the Russian naming conventions but because apparently none of the readers could agree on a single pronunciation of 'Ivan'.

Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.

Were you listening to the Kenneth Branagh version? I think his reading is amazing but I haven't heard any others.

I'm only listening to what I can find for free on Spotify, mostly librevox recordings. A good reader can make a difference so maybe that explains it.

Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.

That's a book I truly never got. I read it and just zero percent got the point.

How can self worth not be a self defeating concept?

The human being is a social animal, and interacting with others is very important to them. A person's happiness, access to resources and even physical safety is determined by both their belonging to a group and their social position within that group. When a person feels that they have little worth and are downbad because of it, others around them will respond with platitudes such as "you need to improve your self worth" or "you to be confident!" Yet often, a person has low self worth or confidence because others assign low worth to them. This treatment need not come in the form outright abuse - if a person is repeatedly ignored or passed over then they end up attaining a low level of worth simply because they can see that others are recieving positive affirmations when they themselves are not.

Most things people do beyond fulfilling their immediate biological needs, such as eating and urinating, is to work to increase their social standing, which may happen immediately or over a long period of time. A person aware of their low worth must convince themselves into believing that if they perform certain actions they can accquire greater worth from the positive reinforcement provided by others. For example, that they dress in a way that will be more accepted by others, or that they act in a happy and upbeat manner even when they are not feeling so. A person must not act as though they have a high worth when this is not valued by others - you cannot for example go to a job interview and say that you are worth some 6 digit salary if this is transparently not the case. This is the fastest way to decrease the view of oneself in the eyes of others.

Hence, a person's motivations cannot ever concern themselves alone, unless you have the strength to withstand spending large parts of your life alone in very bad places. What good is prefixing self to worth if, for a healthy, adjusted human being, worth comes from places other than the self?

By feeling inadequate, some people start sending signals associated with low value, and other people pick up on these signals and assume that they're true. Other people don't know the real you, they only get what you show them. So the worth of a person is sort of a collective agreement, and every individual has some influence in what the conclusion is going to be. People who are more based/grounded in themselves, and more certain without external approval, will paradoxically get more positive external approval. Those who need it the most won't get it because they ask (and in extreme cases, beg). This is why fishing for compliments fail. Bragging fails too (we recognize that it's a desperate attempt for validation). Some people even give up getting a girlfriend, and then manage to get a girlfriend because they stopped looking desperate.

Real confidence comes from within. But it may be dangerous to have much more confidence than actual skill. There's also advantages to being pitied. Some people stay in the victim mentality basically forever, they're held to low standards, and other people rush to tell them how everything is going to be okay. This can be addicting, and taking responsibility for yourself requires throws away this advantage.

I think it's alright to evaluate people based on their character, but evaluating "worth" as how much productivity you can provide society seem like a consequence of the rat race. I don't think it's a healthy way to think since the priority is so disconnected from social life. And I can see the point with the idea that a king is only a king if other people believe that he is. So even if you're a great person, people around you might not have the judgement to realize it.

But the question you've asked is essentially about the nature of social hierarchies and coherence between living beings. A proper answer requires everything from psychology and neuroscience to game theory and complex systems. It too large to even put a dent in it, so I just shared a few interesting things which came to mind.

Edit: It's worth a mention that Jordan Peterson uploaded a video about Self-esteem not existing. It may be a poor concept better explained by other things. If you're interested the video ID is watch?v=9f3qyNNtpQk

A lot of complexity here. IMO: there are contexts where high confidence is beneficial even if it is not externally-administered, for instance in making friends and finding partners where people gravitate to confidence. Similarly, you can have high external valuation and yet have a low assessment of yourself, causing a shyness that is unwarranted and unbecoming, which leads to problems in social life.

There’s also the question of proportionality: you can be confident and have reasonably high self-worth and yet still feel pain at social defeat and feel pleasure at social victory. The default self-worth can buffer against unwarranted catastrophizing. If you’re a chess player and go into hysterics at every loss you will probably not play chess for long. Self-confidence is also (counter-intuitively?) judged as good by others, for instance when a defeated opponent keeps a stiff upper lip and praises the winner.

The ideal is a reasonable amount of sensitivity regarding your external persona, which is guided by a reasonable amount of self-respect and self-judgment that filters and optimizes longterm social sensitivity. You don’t want to commit sepukku every time you fail at an obligation. Neither is it necessarily advantageous to primarily judge yourself by some narrow and fleeting social obligation.

Religious language can offer some insight here. God judges every deed, while both loving and disciplining as a father. This is an archetypally correct mode of social feedback because nothing is more optimized for behavioral shaping (the psychological term of art) than how a loving Father/mentor teaches his Son/student. This is how evolution has guided the best possible identity-formation / behavioral-shaping, through love and loving chastisement (which is very cool actually). So we see for instance that a child who feels socially secure is most adaptive to learning in school. That’s the correct balance of self-worth [forever loved by the Eternal Father] and reasonable social sensitivity [humility, growth mindset, interest in others].

Frankly I do not find the term self-[worth / judgment / assessment] ideal. How can I be the one negatively evaluate what I myself am doing? Why would the problematic me negatively evaluate the exact same problematic me, and why would problematic me listen to problematic me when evaluated? In what sense can I be disappointed in myself when I am the same person through and through? I am disappointed in myself being disappointed? What’s really happening in any self-judgment is that we imagine a hypothetically reasonable and perfect Judge and how that Judge would feel about us. We then internalize this judgment and measure our action against it. It is at least quasi-religious. It is more healthy to admit that I myself suck, and that there is instead an independent, omnipresent judge who I answer to. In ages of old, when a person felt the watchful eye of their deity over them, what they are really doing is what we would call “self-judgment” today. This is very optimal, because we have a built-in instinct of external administration that can be sublimated in the imagination, whereas there is no “self-judgment” instinct so it gets confusing and paradoxical and unhelpful.

Hence, a person's motivations cannot ever concern themselves alone, unless you have the strength to withstand spending large parts of your life alone in very bad places. What good is prefixing self to worth if, for a healthy, adjusted human being, worth comes from places other than the self?

The way I see it, having a strong self-worth is a matter of remembering the variety of audiences that provide worth to you, rather than allowing your self-assessment to be constantly buffeted by the last person you talk to or the room you are in.

My major objection to the way a lot of TRPers talk about the concept of someone being "Alpha" or "Beta" is that they fail to talk about context, Alpha and Beta are inherently ordinal rather than absolute concept. Within a closed space, like a wolfpack or a high school, the alpha male is the biggest and toughest male present. He isn't in any absolute sense Big or Tough, he is the biggest and the toughest. The beta is defined by being smaller, and less tough, not absolutely Small or absolute Cowardly. If the Alpha dies, a Beta moves up.

Using the classic fictional stereotype of an American high school as our pet model, the Alpha male is the star quarterback on the high school football team, right? He's the best athlete, the leader, the chosen one. But if the QB dies in a DUI accident, or transfers schools, or breaks his leg, somebody else becomes the QB. A guy who didn't used to be the best athlete on the team, who used to be second best, becomes the best. That's the nature of an ordinal system of worth.

The problem with the modern world is that very few of us live in a closed system, and so it become scrambled, hard to understand. We live in systems way beyond our Dunbar Number, we live in anonymized urban societies where we feel judged by strangers, or in fake online worlds where we never even see our interlocutors.

People with weak self worth are constantly buffeted by the opinions of strangers, by the ordinal rankings in each room they find themselves in, by a vague sense that an indistinct group of people are better than them. They walk into a room with people better than them, they become servile; while if they are around people worse than them they become tyrannical. They rate themselves around the last interaction they had, forgetting all the good things they've done or all the bad things they've done.

A person with a firm sense of self worth remembers, regardless of what room they find themselves in, the people who love and respect them. Yes there are people better than you, but there are also people worse than you, the fact that you are now in a room with someone better than you doesn't mean you are the worst person in the world. The fact that the last thing you did was wrong doesn't erase all the things you've done right. They rate themselves not on the opinion of the audience in front of them, but on the broader audience, all the world, all the universe, and how they should respond.

Realistic self worth is about steadiness, humility, and honor. As Tony Montana told us, "All I've got in this world is my word and my balls, I don't break them for nobody."

I MADE IT

FUCK THE HATERS

Ahem. Sorry. Got a bit too hyped up, but I've gotta be my own hype man, it's 11 pm at the hospital.

@Throwaway05, @TheDag, @AhhhTheFrench, @faul_sname, @whoeveritmayfuckingconcern (there's a lot of people who've egged me on over the years, I'll get to you all):

I got a match offer in psychiatry! While Scotland might be a little bit on the dreary side, well, endless exams are even drearier.

I was in an awkward position. If I'd done a lot better, I'd be confident in an offer. If I'd done way worse, I could have washed my hands of it and resolved to grit my teeth to prep yet another year of my short life. But I did well, but not so good that I wasn't on tenterhooks.

Most British doctors don't match on their first try, barring the least craved options like GP.

But psychiatry went from having a competition ratio lower than 1, to 9:1.

The exam got ten times harder since I began planning for it. Doubled in the span of a year. Yet I beat it. Beat all the bastards.

No more wannabe psychiatrist, upgraded to shrink-in-training. Then, barring an act of Satan, a bona fide shrink and not a LARPer

I might hold the current offer in the (mildly vain) hope that I get an upgrade to somewhere less rural, but I'll still take it. (Hmm, it seems that the hold window is already over, it seems to be take it or leave it, but I'll still ask around)

Fuck yeah. Gonna drink a lot of scotch and fuck a lot of bitches. I'm getting out.

Now, it's shame I've got 9 hours left at work, and while its going to be a slow night, I'd rather not lose my Indian license by drinking on duty. That can wait till the morning.

This is, of course, amazing! I would be happy to drop in and celebrate if you're up for that kind of madness, I'll have to bring my brother. I would have been on this sooner but there was a killjoy circling and banning me for being an annoying atheist. I'm literally beside myself with joy for your victory here man! Just was able to work today on my busted knee and it is also amazing to connect on this level across the world.

Mf, you need to tell me how's your knee doing too btw.

But definitely, I feel like it's much less of an imposition to ask you drop by Scotland than come to India haha, and at least I can offer some hospitality of my own, in the form of some nice scotch. Btw, I spoke to another Indian doctor who was in the same boat with the whole ECFMG thing, and they told me it took them almost 2 years to finish when they got the ball rolling, so even if I busted my balls over it, that's almost the duration of my residency anyway. But I'll see what I can do while I'm still here, and my juniors seem keen too.

I appreciate it all my dude. And if you're too preoccupied to come, well, a dear friend of mine is probably getting married in the US, so I have reason to visit soonish myself!

Ahhh! We'll make it over, I've been meaning to visit and this gives me a good reason.

I watched that whole horrible india video, I'm surprised you guys are letting that pure putrid propaganda piece just moulder on the front page like that. You could clip together gross shit from any country and put Attenborough's voice over it. Shoot, I've done that while filming my friends.

Is Kulak like a thing now?!? I always have a knack for underestimating dumb stuff becoming very popular. Typical minding is my biggest blind spot.

I watched that whole horrible india video

I didn't.

I'm surprised you guys are letting that pure putrid propaganda piece just moulder on the front page like that.

As opposed to... what?

It has a thumbnail of a haunting dead person on it, it makes the front page of themotte look like a gore site. I know you don't care that much, weren't you literally a boogaloo boy?

It has a thumbnail of a haunting dead person on it, it makes the front page of themotte look like a gore site.

I'm pretty sure everyone here has seen worse. I'm pretty sure ~95% of people here or visiting here has literally paid money to see worse in movies, games, shows, etc.

I know you don't care that much, weren't you literally a boogaloo boy?

..."weren't"? More generally, I have no idea what the chain of logic you're pointing to here is.

I didn't watch the video because I don't find the premise interesting or edifying enough to be worth discussing. The question remains: what's your proposed solution, and why is it better than "don't touch the bait"?

were you not...idk where weren't came from, my bad I guess, some people think it is grammatically correct.. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/532254/is-werent-you-considered-grammatically-correct-because-expanded-it-would

I think it is beneath the dignity of such an august body to have that kind of dreck populating the front page. But maybe it is just my delicate sensibilities. In regards to the boogaloo reference, I just figured your race ideals were in line with the video, maybe I am wrong.

Your grammar is fine. I'm objecting to the use of past-tense; I do not believe our current society is legitimate and think large-scale violent conflict is both likely in the near-term and preferable to other likely scenarios.

I think it is beneath the dignity of such an august body to have that kind of dreck populating the front page.

I think a lot of things that are posted here are beneath the dignity of this "august body". The mods are committed to not imposing their aesthetic standards on the forum, though. This is actually what HlynkaCG got banned for: he found the presence of many objectionable people here too repugnant to tolerate.

In regards to the boogaloo reference, I just figured your race ideals were in line with the video, maybe I am wrong.

You are wrong. I don't endorse HBD, much less whatever you want to call... that whole mess. I've spent a fair amount of time arguing against Kulak in the past, when his extremism was less race-based than it seems to be now, and our views are not converging.

More comments

Congratulations!

Oh, I'm so happy for you! I've always enjoyed your posts, and I'm glad you now have more time to dwell on other thoughts, rather than exams. It seems you get down on yourself at times, and I hope this gives you a boost of confidence.

Thank you.

I was certainly in a pretty bad place, the combination of stress from work, interminable exams and my relationship falling apart was leaving me feel like a shallow husk of a person. But at least my grinding paid off, I built back up and better. You'd think bring "just" a doctor would be good enough for your self esteem, but in most places, you're not going to get much in the way of respect from other doctors unless you've gone through the other hoops (flaming and spinning) needed to become a resident and then specialized. And I stand on the shoulder of giants in my own family, so it's good to see them actually fucking proud of me (not that they weren't, but now I've done something properly impressive). It was all a lot to take in, but I haven't been this genuinely happy and optimistic in a while, for all that I grumble about the UK at times haha.

I'm glad you liked my posts, you can certainly expect even more hot takes on psychiatry, and they'll be better informed to boot.

And once again, thank you. Pseudonymous strangers on the internet have done a lot for me, and I'm glad that I haven't disappointed them either haha.

Congrats!

Thank you!

Hell yeah man. As we say in the states: P=MD.

You can always catch up on whatever you feels is lacking once you have freedom to move, the hardest part is getting to the spot you just got to.

Scotland seems beautiful anyway.

I'll keep working on the USMLE thing in the background. Assuming in the 3 years it takes for my Core Psychiatry Training to end, it'll be worth the headache. I recently spoke to another Indian doctor in the same boat, and it took the ECFMG about 3 years to finish the process when he got the ball rolling, yet another reason not to sit around.

At least I don't have to give the NEET PG, fucking cursed exam, like a quarter is bullshit histopathology on top of that, and while I did learn ECGs eventually, those bastards are still pink blobs to me haha.

I appreciate you listening to me at my lowest, and I'm sure you're glad that me burning my mental health from both ends did pay off!

And yeah, I checked the rough geographic location, since in the UK training is rotational over rather large areas, and it doesn't seem to be an utter backwater. Close enough to Edinburgh that it's a short weekend drive I'd say, country roads allowing.

Fuck. I need to get a drivers license already.

Fuck. I need to get a drivers license already.

Yes.

Also do keep in mind that the USMLE is a total horror show, my suspicion is that the switch to pass/fail for Step 1 probably puts "not entirely committed" people in a bind because it's harder to tell if they are excelling at the level they will need for still scored Step 2/Step 3.

That's still a headache for the future, but you can bet it's one I'll gladly accept if I'm given the chance. And that I'll pick your brains about it whether you like it or not haha.

Congrats !

Thanks g. If anyone wants controlled drugs from a shady psychiatrist, get your orders in.

(For legal reasons, that's not me)

Nice! (Though don't let them find out about this place, given the recent Scottish speech laws.)

How permanent is this? Is there much of a chance that you'll have to leave?

I'm scared my OPSEC is irredeemably compromised, but I'm quite small fry tbh.

This is a 3 year training program that would be equivalent to an MD (completing a residency), both in the States or in India, however the UK has the option of an additional 4 years of training to specialize further into narrower aspects, at which point you're given "Consultant" status. For now, I'm interested in specializing in ADHD later, but this is the degree that lets me call myself a credentialed psychiatrist when I'm done.

Once you're in, well, unless I do something truly idiotic, I don't see any reason I'd have to leave. It's a normal residency program and they don't kick you out of one without damn good reason, and I already do hold a license to practise with the GMC after all.

Well done!

Appreciate it, I just hope I don't shrivel up from the lack of sunlight, then again, it's not like I leave air-conditioned, closed climate controlled spaces all that much here.

Your first winter will be extremely depressing, make sure you go on vacation somewhere sunny (maybe India) halfway through if they give you the time.

Well, there's a reason everyone in that country is supposed to be on Vitamin D supplements. Even the gingers.

They probably won't give me time, but I likely have the option of working less than full time if I wish, without discrimination, especially since I can make a convincing case with my ADHD. That would however involve a small paycut and longer training, but I'll worry about that when I'm there. At that point, maybe I can summer (winter?) in warmer climates.

Congratulations!

Most of my ancestors are from Scotland, which is why myself and all my relatives sunburn absurdly easily everywhere else.

I only hope your upcoming boy comes out with an intact soul 🧐✝️

If not, there's always hair dye and sunscreen haha.

Thank you, I appreciate it. I suppose Scottish chicks are kinda cute, not that I'm particularly picky about ethnicity if they're hot haha.

LOL. None of us are true gingers, so he should be good on that front.

What's the deal with 3-4 day email customer service response times?

Had a warranty issue and emailed the brand, which replied with an auto responder that I should expect a reply in 3-4 days.

For the sake of this question, let's assume for this question that the autoresponder is telling the truth, and that it's been at this wait period for months now.

Email accumulates and does so asynchronously, so a 3-4 day backlog doesn't disappear if you don't get to it quickly. Hypothetically, if the entire team got together and crunched through the queue, then theoretically they could shave the response time to 0-1 days in perpetuity. Similarly, if the team all took a vacation for a week, then the queue would become 10-11 days in perpetuity.

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like there is no good business reason for an email queue to be 3-4 days steady state. It would either stretch to infinity due to understaffing, cut down to zero if there is excessive staffing, or be managed into a 0-1 day queue with a one time crunch push if staffing is accurate. In what universe could a capably managed team have to deal with a 3-4 day email response time on an ongoing basis?

There's nothing inherently contradictory at all about what you describe, because you are calling it a queue when it is really a pipeline, and process pipeline's length is not directly related to its capacity. For example, you could have a process pipeline that contains certain things that just inherently require time, such as review by multiple people who process daily batches.

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like there is no good business reason for an email queue to be 3-4 days steady state.

Your question is reasonable. I've always assumed (without evidence) that "steady state" isn't perfectly steady, and overprovisioning to get to zero backlog constantly would be expensive. Both short-term day-to-day noise and seasonal effects (few warranty claims on snowblowers in July) could make volumes unpredictable, and a couple of days slack would let you schedule shifts based on volume.

Although as Oracle pointed out, it could be a contractual obligation. I've certainly had interactions with, say, insurance where I've been quoted 60 days to evaluate a claim, but gotten a response within a week.

It's the SLA (Service Level Agreement) that the customer service company set up with the brand.

I don't know what company you're emailing, whether it is large or small, but it is likely they outsource some of their support to a multi-client service desk that can handle tier 0 or tier 1 requests. The company is paying for a 3-4 day SLA, and if the service desk goes over that length of time there are penalties. Because the multi-client service desk has a multitude of clients, each with a different cadence for emails, the service desk will prioritize emails according to SLA, ensuring all emails are answered with the least financial penalty to the service desk.

I don't have any experience with 3-4 day SLAs (that seems excessive to me) but I have seen emails sit in a queue all day, getting answered by the night guys at 10 PM, because the SLA was 24 hours and other companies had <2 hour SLAs.

Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?

I assume that Spotify (and the rest) has all but killed the idea of 'keeping' music on your local computer or phone amongst the youth.

As someone who has a music collection going back to when I first started obsessively ripping CDs to my PC in my teens, I find that I mostly keep doing it through force of habit, and the slight fear that things I like might disappear. Some of the older files in my collection are hard or impossible to find online these days. But with so many different streaming options and, now, an AI that can produce radio-quality music in seconds it seems like there's really no point to keeping a large local music collection unless its related to your career in some way.

So if you DO still store music locally, what are your reasons and methods?

I used to do that up until something over ten years ago, but then the giant HDD I kept it all on broke and I just gave up on the concept.

Nothing in life is permanent, and holding on to anything requires continuous effort and attention. Can't hold on to every piece of data that seemed remotely interesting at some point. The internet is ephemeral, but so is all existence.

On the one hand I agree, on the other, I have had a few occasions where the ability to pull up some vaguely-remembered file I made 12 years ago has been useful, it not critical.

My own policy on destroying data I need but don't want is to wait 7 years, since that's the longest statute of limitations on most crimes in most jurisdictions, barring like rape and murder.

I think I genuinely expect that if a sufficiently powerful AI were to review the contents of my hard drive(s) it could use them to form an accurate approximation of my personality and preferences and thus, if it is friendly, use that to optimize my life for maximum fun and happiness.

So perhaps I'm making a long-shot bet on immortality via being simulated by the future superintelligence thanks to the echoes of my consciousness I stored on my computer over the years.

Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?

Yeah, I use ytdl with the GUI mod.
It's very convenient.

What do you do with the music library itself?

Mostly just leave it on the harddisk and listen to it whenever I feel like it. I've uploaded a few songs to my phone but I spend most of my time in front of my PC anyway.

what are your reasons ... ?

I own all my music.

Yes. Almost compulsively. I like being able to have my music organized the way I like it, and to be able to listen to it on my own terms. If I have financial hardship in the future I don't have to give up music entirely because I can't justify the cost of a subscription to a streaming service. While that isn't likely to happen, I generally don't trust the subscription model as a practical matter (though I admit this has nothing to do with why I don't use a streaming service). We kind of take it for granted that these services have a fairly representative collection of the entire musical corpus, in the way video streaming doesn't, but that's being held together by rights agreements that may or may not hold in the future. As we've seen with video streaming, the motivations of the streaming services and the content producers aren't necessarily symbiotic — Netflix and Amazon want to produce their own original content, while NBC and Disney want to run their own platforms. This hasn't happened in the music industry yet, but Spotify's exclusive contract with Rogan might portend the future. What happens when Taylor Swift signs an exclusive contract with Apple Music or whoever? What happens when Universal music decides to stop licensing their catalog and make it exclusively available on their own service? What happens when half of an artists discography is on one service and half of it on another, because different rights holders own different albums? Since you don't own the music, you only own the right to listen to whatever the platform has available during the month you've paid for in the subscription. If your favorite bands bolt, then you're out of luck for the future. This has the potential to be even more annoying than with video because even if you're willing to pay for multiple services, you won't be able to make playlists as easily. I'm not saying any of this will happen, but given how cheap hard drive space is I'd be wary of dumping my entire collection I already have just to have the privilege to pay for it, and be at the mercy of whoever is hosting it.

Back when there was a bug allowing you to download tracks from a number of streaming sites, I programmatically downloaded the full discography of ~every artist I'd ever liked on Pandora/Youtube Music. Stored on ZFS, served via plex, and, naturally, totally ignored in favor of Youtube Music.

I believe there is still a way to download from something like Deezer in high quality, although I haven't tried it. As in download actual tracks, not how it works with Spotify.

I don't know of any app or tech that lets you play your own local music collection but intersperses songs from a given streaming service for better variety and to emulate a more radio-esque experience. That'd be a pretty neat use case.

Last.FM scrobbling can track your music preferences across different players, that much I know.

I like using streaming services for discovering new music, and I would like to implement one-click way to download a good song and rip it to my library. I probably use youtube music more than youtube itself these days.

But I'm increasingly questioning the goal of having such a library. Pass it on to my kids? A backup in case the internet goes down? Am I the equivalent of a boomer hoarding 8 tracks or something?

Not even joking, the main goal of having such a library might be for the Friendly AGI overlord to find my hard drive and divine my music tastes so it can produce ideal songs for me to enjoy for eternity.

I got my first MP3 player in about 2004, and never changed technology for listening to music. To this day I still use SanDisk MP3 players daily. My reasoning for doing this is:

1.) I like being able to listen to music without being tied to my phone. I can put my phone away, or not take it with me, and still listen to music. The MP3 players have long battery life and are pretty tough, but are also inexpensive; so I can take them into any situation and not worry about them.
2.) I desperately hate advertisements, so during the phase of my life where I didn't have much money, using ad-supported streaming services held no interest for me.
3.) I listen to a lot of really obscure music. For track which I got from some individual's Bandcamp, or from a private sharing forum, the MP3 player is the most practical option.

In terms of organization, though, I don't really have that. I just know where everything is, and if I forget, I find it using Everything.

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

I don't really have that. I just know where everything is, and if I forget, I find it using Everything.

I read a book a while back that suggested when it comes to computers, almost ZERO actual organization/sorting is needed if you have a sufficiently powerful search engine.

I don't really buy it completely, but I do often find that organizational schemas that made sense for me at the time become less scrutable later, so when I try and find, say, some videos I saved from a vacation in 2014, it's just 'easier' to sort by date and manually check files than to even try to remember the folder I stuck them in.

Music has lots of automated tools for sorting, so I've remained diligent in that respect.

I don’t have Internet at my house, nor do I have an unlimited data plan, so I make reasonably extensive use of my song collection. I also don’t trust that everything I like will always be available, so I greatly prefer to have locally saved recordings.

I…what? How are you here? Phone internet?

Yes, static, mostly text-only sites like this one don’t use much data, so it’s not a problem for me to participate here. If I want to stream anything or otherwise use the Internet more extensively, I either stay late at work or go to the library. It isn’t a huge imposition given my lifestyle, and it saves me hundreds of dollars per year.

It is funny, but I know people like you EXIST who live mostly 'unplugged,' but it is still pretty surprising to find one in the wild, happily outside of the angry egregore that most of us inhabit.

Eh, I’m here, aren’t I? I’m clearly not that happy.

I will say that I enjoy the absolute bafflement on some people’s faces and in their voices when they learn just how disconnected I am from large sections of modern life. I don’t have home Internet, I don’t have a TV, I refuse to download all but a very few mobile apps, I’m forever forgetting my phone at home or in the car, and these days, I’ve almost entirely given up radio as well. Other than news I pick up from IRL conversations, my connection to the modern outside world is mostly through a handful of websites, including this one.

There are some things I am not happy about in life, but my voluntary semi-seclusion from modern life isn’t one of them.

Synology NAS with a RAID setup for any media I regularly return to or like having on-hand. Music is the most regular use case, but I also use it for films and shows.

Is it worth the bother? It is for me, but I'm also a 'techy' that slightly gets off on this stuff. I'm also tinkering with Syncthing across multiple devices for accessing retro ROMs and save data no matter where I'm at - and I've maybe spent more time getting that together than consistently using it. I also daily drive with Linux for about half of the year for the sake of it. As I think is typical for my type - my PCs are far more organized than anything in my local meatspace.

I don't have any streaming subscriptions and my media pool is a little narrow. I hate ads, I hate things becoming suddenly unavailable due to corporate agreements expiring, and I don't get any benefit from the exploratory aspects of these platforms. I spent more time scrolling through Netflix/Prime for something to watch than actually watching anything, and I'm picky enough with music artists that 90% of the 'Artists who sound like X' recommendations don't pass muster to my ears.

Long-term, my plan is to backfill my digital copies with physical media when budget and interest permits. Even if I rip them once and never pull them out of their cases again, there's something to be said for a physical collection for reasons of aesthetics and conversation. But ultimately (and perhaps naively), I like the feeling of having control despite the risks. And since this all replaceable media, I won't feel too hard if an HDD ghosts.

I do still use free Pandora for 'radio' occasionally. There's a Skip limit, but I haven't heard an ad in years since using a VPN (not quite sure HOW that worked out, but I won't question it).

I'm also tinkering with Syncthing across multiple devices for accessing retro ROMs and save data no matter where I'm at

A while back I had set things up so any music added to the library on my PC that I rated as 4/5 stars or higher would also get loaded to my laptop and phone.

But again it seems to be largely obviated by the ability to set up a playlist on a streaming site which can contain all your favorites and then some.

There's even playlist migration services so you don't have to keep remaking them on new services.

I hate ads, I hate things becoming suddenly unavailable due to corporate agreements expiring, and I don't get any benefit from the exploratory aspects of these platforms.

Ultimately I think I just like the concept of being 'independent' of any given streaming service, and that nobody can deny me the enjoyment of music on own hardware.

And yes, if the streaming cos. have their way, they WILL wedge ads into every single service. I'll take the restricted library over having my auditory senses abused for products and services I don't need or want. I still have angry memories about some extremely repetitive ads that I was harangued with like 10 years back.

Long-term, my plan is to backfill my digital copies with physical media when budget and interest permits. Even if I rip them once and never pull them out of their cases again, there's something to be said for a physical collection for reasons of aesthetics and conversation.

I have a boxful of DVDs jammed in my closet, and I don't think I'll ever get rid of it because almost all of them are movies I love or loved and the absolute state of video streaming is such that I can't be sure which of them might be available at any given time, and on the same logic as above, I like the idea that nobody can control what I can watch on my own hardware.

This is hampered by the fact that I don't have a DVD player anymore.

Amazon Prime just put ads into their video streaming service, which can be disabled for a few bucks a year. But I think I'll be putting my foot down on this and cancelling prime altogether if they don't get the message that I will not tolerate ads now any more than I did with cable.

I do still use free Pandora for 'radio' occasionally. There's a Skip limit, but I haven't heard an ad in years since using a VPN (not quite sure HOW that worked out, but I won't question it).

With the advent of Song Recommendation AIs (also, ChatGPT does a pretty good job!) I find it less necessary to have a radio function at all, since I can seek out new music in a much more targeted way by telling the AI what I like, what I am searching for, then review the options it presents me directly.

The Pandora Radio option is there mostly for car trips with other people. I'm not really a George Michael or Prince fan and wouldn't acquire their albums. But 80s pop hits are the best pop hits, and they're definitely more palatable to others than, say, Autechre. I don't mind firing and forgetting a playlist there as long as we're having a good time.

I think what made me pull the trigger years ago on setting up my own media server and foregoing streaming was deciding one Thursday that I was going to watch David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' that coming weekend. I saw it on Prime, noted its availability, played a little bit just to have it at the top of the queue, and made the plan. Friday night rolls around and it's gone; 'Unavailable in your region'.

15 minutes may seem like a lot to some folks these days. But that's all the time it took to download a blu-ray rip, fire it away, and put this nonsense behind me.

I've been willing to pay a couple bucks to rent a film for a movie night, but I do feel utterly betrayed when something I've bookmarked for later consumption is pulled when I actually go to watch it.

My habit now is if there's a series or something I'm watching with friends, I'll download local copies just in case.

Yes, absolutely. I do so because I think the idea of renting access to your media is insane, and it baffles me that so many people seem to be ok with it. Similarly, I also buy and rip physical versions of any movies or TV shows I really enjoy.

Also as far as music goes, I have no interest in discovering new music. I've been listening to the same music for about 20 years now, so Spotify has no actual value to offer me.

For methods, either I buy a digital download or I rip the CDs I own. Tag them, and then put them in Plex media server. They make a pretty good player (Plexamp) for mobile, though the desktop version was dog shit when last I looked. On desktop I use the web player. It works pretty well, and basically fills the use case I had for Google music back before Google killed that off.

I do so because I think the idea of renting access to your media is insane, and it baffles me that so many people seem to be ok with it.

Seems like there's just SO MUCH media out there that people accept that there's no way they can actually keep up with it all.

Imagine what it might be like owning 100 different cars when you can only drive one per day. It would make more sense to rent/lease than to just have most of them sitting unused all day.

Yes, I know storage costs round to zero for digital music. I'm mostly referring to the mentality. "I will watch this movie maybe twice this year, why bother keeping it around any longer?

I buy a digital download or I rip the CDs I own. Tag them, and then put them in Plex media server.

I'm so devoted to not relying on centralized services I went with Jellyfin instead.

I'm so devoted to not relying on centralized services I went with Jellyfin instead.

To be fair, Plex isn't inherently centralized. They offer that, but it's perfectly possible to not ever hook your media server up to their centralized service.

Yeah and probably best practices to not do that.

https://www.pcgamer.com/plex-says-controversial-service-that-emails-your-anime-habits-to-your-mates-is-opt-in-actually-pointing-at-a-screen-where-you-still-have-to-turn-it-off/

I don't quite follow. If one never uses the centralized service then surely there's no problem? Because then there are no "friends" for it to share your data with.

Yes, I'm just saying that the software is maintained by a company that may not make the best decisions for the end-users because incentives aren't quite aligned.

I store my music locally, but it's not a big collection. I do not consider myself a huge music enthusiast, usually I listen to some jazz albums or to obscure post-punk or post-cold-wave music. I do not enjoy radio and listen to my music only when the mood strikes, not very often. Some of the albums I like are semi-amateur, I doubt if many people even know them. I don't like the experience of streaming, too much of a fuss, a lot of distractions, I don't want any recommendations, I don't like working while music is playing, heck I even rarely drive with music.

And I like the experience of playing music locally, no distractions, just my music and me. I put myself into the state of day-dreaming, and I can play it anywhere, just need to take my mp3 player (yes, I use mp3 players, they are ridiculously cheap now). Mp3 players are very convenient at night, when I don't have to reach for my phone, just a little, discrete device only for music. It helps me a lot with my sleeplessness. And I'm sentimental about some archival recordings that are nowadays barely accessible anywhere, certainly not on youtube. So, the sum of my idiosyncrasies I guess.


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