domain:traditionsofconflict.com
RenOS
something is wrong
17hr ago
Dark Souls games (and ER is really just DS4) are generally designed so that they can be beaten with simple straight builds, broken weapons/skills and coop by even the filthiest casual, while a hardcore player can still challenge themselves with low LVL builds and meme weapons/skills. So absolutely everything is doable, it depends on how much work you want to put in. Mixed builds have a wide range from broken to meme depending on the details.
Generally, in DS games it's easiest to make builds by starting with a particular (upgraded) main weapon you like and maximizing its scaling + put as much as you need into survival. Then you can also use some supporting weapons, skills and spells that happen fit into that scaling, with maybe some accomodations for min reqs. There are also some melee weapons with ranged skills. Generally for lower lvls I like to put more into survival and use a high base dmg weapon with poor scaling so that I have more flexibility later on if I find a weapon I like. But if I remember correctly ER has some reskilling option so you should be able to switch entirely even if you chose poorly.
I can also give you some more concrete tips if you have something specific in mind. Later I might post my own mixed build for ER if I find the time.
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
Sounds like the streamers and their watchers really deserve each other.
Personally, I have never really gotten watching other people play video games. I can certainly believe that people, despite having literally an internet full of all sorts of porn at their fingertips, nevertheless prefer hot women streaming video games. I can also see a race-to-the-bottom dynamic happening where the best point to make money ends up being just shy of violating the content policy of your platform.
I think that the starting point of sex work is debatable. It is well known that people on TV are on average hotter than the general population. In the broadest sense, this could already be called sex work -- of you got a job reading the news because you are a nine rather than a five, then part of your job is just looking hot, and there is a continuous path from that into softcore and eventually hardcore porn. If you are streaming while wearing makeup and elaborate sexy clothes, then you are already accepting that part of your appeal is that guys will be aroused by your videos.
Presumably, a large part of your income will not be from the people who watch one or two videos of you gaming, but from the small minority which develops an unhealthy parasocial relationship with you. By not having a paywalled explicit channel, you are likely leaving most of the monetarization opportunities on the table. So getting an explicit account where you sell videos of your feet or tits likely has a big payoff.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18hr ago
FWIW, tramp stamps, especially the pointy "tribal" ones, have the much more accurate name of Arschgeweih in German. Ass antlers.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18hr ago
Also, it quit Warsaw Pact in 1968 due to its alignment with PRC.
Corvos
18hr ago
I’m not making a legal case. I’m observing how, in practice, events and associations change public perceptions. And of course those perceptions change most sharply in the violent and unstable.
I'm getting a 403 from the website
I wonder if it's a region-locked thing. Annoyingly, Internet Archive doesn't have it. Here's the full text anyway.
can we get a check on Coulter's law? The quoted parts seem a bit cagey about the identity of "the assailant".
Yeah, I'd be curious about that myself. I would be surprised if the assailant turns out to be a white Irishman, but I can't say it's wholly outside the realm of possibility.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
18hr ago
A quibble but Albania was just communist and was a member of the Warsaw Pact Member, so was aligned with but was never a part of USSR.
I am prejudiced against jews, for well covered , mundane rightoid reasons, my grandfather being a pretty devoted 'antisemite' about the only notable one. And so I am less likely to be open to Jewish singers.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
I'm getting a 403 from the website, can we get a check on Coulter's law? The quoted parts seem a bit cagey about the identity of "the assailant".
A few weeks ago, my dad quoted some Israeli politician (whose name escapes me) at me who supposedly claimed that his proudest achievement was drawing an equivocation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the public consciousness. I accept that the two are not strictly equivalent, but I don't think anyone can dispute anymore that the former can often serve as a cover for the latter,
Another way to look at is: if you can't be anti-zionist without being antisemitic, because someone decided to draw an equivocation in the public consciousness that they're extremely proud of, there might come a point when they say "well, I guess that means I'm anti-semitic now".
That said, yeah, I feel the vibes have shifted on this, and it does feel kind of spooky.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
19hr ago
Yet another advance of the digital panopticon justified by anarcho-tyranny.
You'll get digital ID for the same reasons, you'll see.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
19hr ago
I'm well aware Americans have a longstanding hypocrisy about pornography not being art along criteria that even their Supreme Court refuses to explain, but if documenting historical machineguns or how to build 3D printed guns doesn't count as speech, then this conversation is indeed over, because all that's happening is that you don't like when the tools of censorship apply to things you like.
It's a popular position, but don't come and pretend to have any attachement to free speech as a concept if speech is narrowly restrained to the content you approve of.
FtttG
19hr ago
Does the existence and behaviour of Israel/Mossad etc. push more people further towards such behaviour? Also yes.
How exactly does one Irish Jew minding his own business on a Dublin bus bear any responsibility for the actions of Netanyahu and Mossad? The implication that all Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of any individual Jew is about as close to a textbook definition of "racism" as I can envision.
TowardsPanna
19hr ago
I'm playing Elden Ring for the first time. It's fun and gripping.
I picked the noob friendly Vagabond class. I've upgraded the hp flask quantity twice and got my steed and killed three dungeon bosses. I've put some points into dex, str, end.
Can I get some spoiler free advice? :)
Should you focus on only one type of combat, or can you create a mixed build with success? It would be nice to have a good ranged damage option but I also want to kick butts with badass melee weapons.
Corvos
19hr ago
I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
Sadly, no one ever does. Woke activists in the 2010s had absolutely no interest in finding out your exact views on race and sex before calling for your firing as a white man. As with Chinese Cardiologists, humans free-associate and they do it with a broad brush.
Broadly it seems that there is a cycle of persecution:
- Jews feel under threat.
- They take unusually stringent overt and covert actions to defend themselves.
- This makes them increasingly unpopular.
- Rinse and repeat.
Does the existence of Jew-punchers on the bus suggest that they need their own state and should do whatever it takes to keep it? Yes.
Does the existence and behaviour of Israel/Mossad etc. push more people further towards such behaviour? Also yes.
quiet_NaN
19hr ago
If the management is ok with cashiers wearing cameras, they are very likely also willing to use visible video cameras for the same purpose.
If I was a manager, I would not want employees to record continuous footage on private devices. Their interests are not aligned with the store's interests. E.g. it is in the "creator's" interest if a video of fat people buying tons of unhealthy food goes viral. It is not in the interests of the store.
About a year ago, in a discussion of Ireland's rabid support for the Palestinian cause, I argued that it's primarily caused by misguided post-colonial solidarity and that "I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country".
That's a position I'm now revisiting:
A Jewish man was hit by a stranger shouting antisemitic insults on a Dublin city bus on Friday [the 18th of July], according to a video circulating on social media. The assailant shouted “genocidal Jews” and other slurs at the man.
He also said he recognized that the man was a Jew “because of his face.” The Jewish man – who recorded the incident – can be heard saying, “I get used to it; they are all like this.”...
The assailant then slapped the Jewish man in the face and tried to take his phone.
Comments on social media said the driver called the police and that the man was arrested.
An officer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it does not comment on material circulated online by third parties but confirmed that “shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday, 18 July 2025, [police officers] from Rathmines responded to reports of a disturbance on a bus in Rathgar, Dublin.”
For reference, Rathgar is a very posh suburb, with houses going for €1 million at the minimum.
A few weeks ago, my dad quoted some Israeli politician (whose name escapes me) at me who supposedly claimed that his proudest achievement was drawing an equivocation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the public consciousness. I accept that the two are not strictly equivalent, but I don't think anyone can dispute anymore (in Ireland or anywhere else) that the former can often serve as a cover for the latter. I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
As an aside, I can't help but marvel at how self-defeating this behaviour is. Whenever you assault someone because they look like they might be Jewish, you are precisely demonstrating Israel's entire raison d'être, the moral necessity of its existence.
I probably should have defined "meaningless" better and generally articulated my argument more systematically, that's my bad; I was writing down my first reaction to the passage and had not yet properly distilled how to explain my point. What I mean by "not meaningful" is that there might be no way to prove or disprove the statement, and as such it can be considered an example of a statement that's not even wrong. In terms of its utility in shining light on the world around it, it's not particularly helpful; this is the case due to the fact that it has not been and perhaps cannot ever be evaluated through reference to formal logic, mathematics, or any natural sciences. Marcuse has presented a statement of fact without proof or rigorous logical argumentation as to its validity. He's not even built his conclusion based on reasoning from other assumed priors (not perfect, but better). As such it is a bare statement.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Right, I think that this elaborates the difference between our epistemologies and our opinions on the standard that academic scholarship should ideally strive towards. I generally adhere to logical positivism (very INTP of me, I know /s), and while I don't act like this all the time in practice, I do believe that principles of falsifiability and offering up proofs/disproofs are the kinds of standards that scholarship should exemplify. As Scott describes it: "The truths of science are verifiable empirical claims and ... the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies. These two constitute the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else is nonsense."
Something like "Death Note was not that good" is an evaluative judgement of quality, not a statement of fact. Every argument surrounding aesthetics will be vibes based as a result, and the point of it is not to get closer to any truth; rather, it's to impress upon someone your subjective experience and make them viscerally feel it on a deep level. The point is to impose your personal feelings on someone. The reason why people structure it like a rational argument is specifically because we assume that other people believe certain things are good too, we assume other people share our own cognitive characteristics. We create premises and then we can possibly use logical (more often, pseudo-logical) argumentation to show how these premises result in an inevitable conclusion.
Of course, there is a point beyond which you can't get much closer to agreement through this method of argumentation. Say a film critic enjoys films that are talky and philosophical and idea-based and the ordinary viewer enjoys stuff that's more action-packed. There isn't really a way for these two parties to come to any consensus on the quality of films. While it's possible to try to argue it if there's some other related point of commonality you can reason from, a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level. Discussions surrounding aesthetics proceed with the inherent assumption that truth is not what is being discussed, and as such they do not need to meet the criteria for evaluating a truth-claim. (There is a way to discuss aesthetics which is amenable to proof or disproof by appeal to the majority or analysis of human neural structure, but when most people discuss aesthetics they're not trying to make a claim about whether most people like something or not but instead getting someone else to adopt their own subjective evaluations of a piece of media.)
On the other hand, assertions such as "Art that emphasises subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" aren't of the same nature that "this show was bad" is, in that they are not value judgements. It is a factual claim about the effects of a certain course of action. This automatically raises the bar for the kinds of arguments that should be accepted when evaluating these statements. Because when you agree with that statement, you're not agreeing to adopt a certain personal evaluation of things. You're agreeing to a statement about how the world operates. Discussion of such things needs to proceed among logical or empirical lines, and if it cannot, all you are doing is relying on your own emotion or personal bias to try and divine a fact. When discussing this one cannot subject themselves to the same criteria that one would subject a movie review to.
The kinds of statements I consider meaningful are exemplified in this quote from Scott in his post about logical positivism. "[W]hat is there such that, using reason rather than emotion or made-up pseudologic, we can actually change our minds about and correctly judge as having one probability of truth rather than another?" It really doesn't matter much to me that the majority of philosophers seem to think the Vienna Circle has been invalidated; if I'm to judge the effectiveness of these principles I distinctly note that these institutions that operate under things that look and sound a lot like positivism do far better.
Perhaps that makes me a pragmatist instead.
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3.
Correct, I think Marcuse's claim is level 3 as presented in your list. It contains a clear statement of fact that can be pretty straightforwardly understood. I do believe this is true for much continental philosophy, though they fail other epistemological criteria and sets of standards.
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
I think we've talked past each other on this point, I don't mean to say it's mystical. What I mean is that people would accept Marcuse's claim not on the basis of formalised reason or empirical proof but on the basis of the fact that it resonates with them and they deeply feel it is true; they think it sounds right and seems reasonable in spite of the lack of concrete reasons they should believe it.
Also, the distinction I've made between a value/moral judgement and a statement of fact, as well as the different burdens of proof which should be placed on them, rears its head here. Statements such as "I base my values on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" and "You should not base your own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" are value judgements. "Emphasising subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" is a statement about how the world works.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
20hr ago
Moose
Meese
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
20hr ago
There is massive latent demand for sex in the economy.
Yeah, imagine all the sex people are having with each other for free. It's definitely an inefficient system, a massive untapped market that is worth billions or even trillions if you can achieve perfect price discrimination.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
20hr ago
I think they're the only 2 women in the top 50
There's also #25 AriGameplays, #29 Rivers_gg
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
21hr ago
Well, okay, yes I will grant you that statistical awareness of anything more complicated than a surface level understanding of Pearson's r is more rare than it should be, so I can see that.
Helpful video link of Hinton, definitely illuminates a bit of where you're coming from (and I was pleasantly surprised to see him talk, essentially, about my exact point regarding memory when he talks about "time scale" as something he thinks is an area that could be fruitful; a memory approach the cartridge cache idea, while neat, isn't really, though we'd need to get into an extensive tangent about neuroscience, and likely a little more linear algebra than I'm up to, to tease out why). I will say that genius scientists having major realizations after they are old and their careers are over don't have the greatest track record, but he's still got a point. I think upthread I alluded to a group of scientists who think that what is happening behind the scenes in LLMs is true understanding, and Hinton as I understand it falls into that group (and thus has an above-average P(doom) to use the cliche'd term). But, as I noted then, that group is still the minority view in the field. So I think epistemically it's solidly in the realm of 'reasonable people can disagree'. I lean against, but I'm still a bit agnostic about it. From a statistics perspective, we're in a little bit of uncharted territory, where we have a bit of the scaffolding but the setups have some novel traits, so the lack of total clarity for "higher order" relationships doesn't really surprise me.
I do think you're a little too unkind to self-directed learning. The AR-Zero paper is exclusively looking at if LLMs can, essentially, teach themselves to code if they have access to a Python environment and its output... and already went through pre-training. That's just replacing the RLVR, amplifying a pre-existing skill in a closed, human-built, rules-ruled system, which is impressive as a practical matter but not really what I was getting at. And not very similar what most of the forms of learning we'd want would look like in practice, either.
He also touches on and as you elaborate (I enjoyed reading your thoughts about the numbers), yes there is definitely a difference in parallelism and throughput and metrics like that for brains vs LLMs, and this is part architecture but part the simple decisions of what the 'market' is investing in and exploring. I too wonder what might emerge, or might end up being impossible.
It's interesting to me that you think these differences on the whole aren't very relevant to an (abstract) understanding of intelligence, however. Do you think human perceptions of intelligence are essentially one big conflation because we happen to be "solitary mobile embodied agents" that are also, as a group, quite clearly different in scale and perhaps nature from the rest of the animal kingdom (thus we ascribe too much of this difference to intelligence)? I tend to think that these things cannot be easily divorced; intelligence only ever makes sense to think about in a human philosophical context, rather than a more abstract criterion. As you say, the human form of learning and intelligence is very intrinsic to us, why fight against the natural desire to evaluate it this way?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
21hr ago
You can override WD, though. You're making the choice not to, because you think it might be malware.
Windows has gotten significantly worse about anti-user features since 10, but you can still run code MS doesn't like AFAIK (can't speak to Win11, as MS is on my hatelist since they started bankrolling OpenAI).
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
21hr ago
Meritocracy is, in some very real sense, "discrimination against dumb people"
And in that same sense, countries that grant their citizens broad liberties and freedoms discriminate against the stupid and virtueless.
"Ruining it for everyone" is the excuse to socialize your private virtue for those people.
Like somewhere between 20 and 40%
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