domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
Superficial just means surface level or shallow so far as I typically use it. Lots of superficial attributes are important in achieving various outcomes. We haven't elected a president shorter than 6 foot since Jimmy Carter,
Ok, if you want to make this point about the things you listed before, you'll have to show me similar statistics about work relationships breaking down due to cullinary choices, etc.
There's significantly more baggage that comes with being American than just being born in a particular place
Correct, which is why they're not both "American". Or at least not the same kind of American
And whether or not an American wants to be an agent for the empire, they are
Completely irrelevant to the point being discussed.
gattsuru
5hr ago
Fair. I'm assuming a USB device going into a computer has a power supply has enough current limiting to prevent wires or PCBs catching on fire, but that was an actively bad assumption back in 2005.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
In a competitive environment where new models are getting released about monthly, your idea is to stop developing new models?
HermeneuticsOfVibes
5hr ago
Superficial just means surface level or shallow so far as I typically use it. Lots of superficial attributes are important in achieving various outcomes. We haven't elected a president shorter than 6 foot since Jimmy Carter, there's about a 0.04% chance of that happening by random chance if that superficial characteristic is unimportant to electability. Google's "41 shades of blue" experiment likely cost millions in developer time for a superficial change to hyperlink colors. And so on.
There's significantly more baggage that comes with being American than just being born in a particular place. And whether or not an American wants to be an agent for the empire, they are. They spread their American ideas, American perspectives, and other products of the American culture, as effortlessly as they breathe. When most people in the English speaking world go online, they feel like they are digitally transported to America. Not only the people but the structures, the dominant ideas, etc, are all American. Americans on the other hand, almost never seem to experience this sensation.
TheFooder
5hr ago
I is minor and insignificant suggestion. I think Barbarian jsut fits better with the other three super-positions. A barbarian is a political superposition or a job, whereas a caveman is more of a species. anyway, cool idea nonetheless.
gattsuru
5hr ago
Okay there's a large antenna in there, but that just raises the question of why the antenna is larger than the antenna in a wifi dongle? And why add a 2m cable for a wireless dongle?
They badly overengineered it. Both these things significantly improved reliability, because all other things being even a larger antenna will have much better signal characteristics than a smaller one of the same general design, and being able to place a receiver on the front of a computer rather than the back had a pretty massive difference. Some of those decisions weren't even crazy for the time -- the 360 released in 2005, where a lot of people still owned big CRT and plasma TVs designed for play from 6+ ft and built into furniture, and even for desktop computers CRT hadn't completely gone the way of the dodo yet, and especially major vendors will still big fans of making PCs (even gaming PCs) cases big thick piles of steel
There's a lot of more subtle goofiness like this : it uses a custom wireless protocol that was a lot less funky than bluetooth of the time in order to reduce latency from retransmits, for example.
The fuse existing is mostly a problem downstream of how the USB standard evolved. Originally, there was a hard 500mA@5V limit per USB port in the standard, but this was held more in principle than the breach; even by 2000 you could find cheap USB chargers that would put out 2A@5V ish, gfl. Wireless dongles were only supposed to use around 400mA, but even slightly sketchy source (eg, powered usb hubs) could push enough voltage to get at the fuzzy edge, and even if the dongle could tolerate that wider range, the wires (and some sources) wouldn't be able to supply it permanently without damage. As time went on and those skuzzy chargers became more common, it was just accepted (and saved money) to use fuses a lot less or with a much higher tolerance than the official rating, under the presumption that devices which could be damaged by sourcing more power would have safeties against it.
Why it failed is unfortunately probably more boring. While there are some potential weird cases (Five Below-brand USB hubs, badly implemented cell phone chargers, putting it on top of a wireless pwoer charger), chances are pretty good it's just time and entropy. Fuses, especially older SMD fuses, are both temperature sensitive and relatively fragile devices, since they work by breaking. Over time, a 500 mA fuse will become a 470 mA and then 450 mA, until eventually the intended current passing through the device will bust it. That's worse on wireless devices, since the antenna is basically an inefficient hot plate, and worse still with big PCB antenna like that particular dongle made, and worse still on devices like this that were pretty close to the edge of their power envelope to start with. The new fuse, especially if you bought it recently, is almost certainly going to be much more reliable, even under the same conditions. If you want to be extra-safe, I'd unplug it when you've got long periods where it's not in use, but it's probably going to be good for another 10 years.
It was ever thus. in 1802 if your unit dressed in buckskins like an American Indian, it symbolized that you were an elite ranger. The paratroopers that jumped into Brittany during the D-Day invasion shaved their hair into Mohawks and painted their faces with Iroquois war paint. MAC-V SOG units in Vietnam wore the Mohawk also (that’s what Travis Bickle’s hair in Taxi Driver is a reference to, in Paul Schrader’s original script he was a former Green Beret). Special units always try to aesthetically distinguish themselves from the rank and file, and taking on the characteristics of former defeated enemies is often a way to do that. In the 19th and 20th centuries that was the aesthetics of an Indian brave; in the 21st it’s the keffiyeh and beard of an afghani mujahideen.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
I'm pretty sure "important" and "superficial" are antonyms. I'm not saying it's impossible for, say, food to be the focus of an irreconcilable difference of values (see: "I will not eat the bugs"), but whether one person eats Itallian and the other Chinese won't affect their ability to cooperate, so declaring there's a smaller gap because people eat the same just sounds bonkers to me.
And even in terms of ideology, MeanRedMan and MeanBlueGuy are most critically, promoters of the American cultural hegemony and distributors of various propaganda.
"American" here only means "originating on roughly the same continent", and it's not even clear how many people of either tribe even want to be cultural hegemons of the world.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5hr ago
You got a better plan for how the Red Tribe can utterly crush the Blue Tribe, and erase Blue culture from the face of the earth?
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
This sounds a lot like "any snow flake is free to slide down the mountain, it is the avalanches that are the problem".
Suppose there is a baker who runs an "Aryan Bakery" with a swastika in the logo, which is something which is very permissible from a freedom of speech point of view.
A lot of potential customers would make the personal choice not to do business with him, because they find Nazis repugnant. Most of these people would probably also unfriend anyone whom they saw using a branded bag from that place, which admittedly is a more concerning indirect effect, but imho still fair.
Overton windows are a feature of basically all societies. Liberal societies generally limit the repercussions for speech acts, e.g. they will mostly not put you in jail for speech unless you are directly inciting violence. But unless you are already on the outermost edges of society, it is likely that speech acts outside the Overton window will have some repercussions for you.
This is not always ideal. I am sure that there are good ideas whose adoption took and continues to take longer because most people who had them knew that they were icky ideas, and a significant fraction of their society would consider them a bad person if they voiced them publicly. Atheism, gay rights and embryo selection would all be such examples, from where I stand.
Still, this is unavoidable. There are a lot of sellers in the marketplace of ideas, so that no person can carefully examine all the ideas every vendor has on offer. So people need some heuristics. And one such heuristic is "if someone promotes what seems to be a terrible idea, you should adjust your estimate of their average idea quality downwards."
thejdizzler
5hr ago
Interesting take on time blocking, think you are right. I have pretty strict blocks on my computer (internet will block itself after 9pm for example). But the blocks don’t really deal with the fundamental problem, which means I’m always looking for ways around them.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
5hr ago
A critical third leg of Liberalism is contractualism. There must be a set of rules that limit those with great amounts of power, such that the common people have some inalienable cloister to retreat to. Neither Assad's Syria or Somalia in the 2010's were liberal states because you had to live under the constant threat that some powerful psycho would ruin your life on a whim with no reprisal.
This leg is probably the most collapsed of the three, and generally three begets two begets one.
anon_
6hr ago
I think I didn't communicate it clearly. People that profess pedophilia should be ridiculed and shunned. It's not a matter of accepting the idea, it's the very fact of openly brandishing that constitutes the harm to the social fabric.
The rules of The Motte are not applicable to society at large, any more than the rules of the Oxford Debate Club or the Japanese Parliament.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
6hr ago
People spend the majority of their waking lives largely doing these things, they are important regardless of superficiality. Most people's impact on the world is primarily what they do, not what they think. And even in terms of ideology, MeanRedMan and MeanBlueGuy are most critically, promoters of the American cultural hegemony and distributors of various propaganda.
DirtyWaterHotDog
6hr ago
That's the plan! Been alternating between weightlifting and swimming. I'll report back end in December.
Speak for yourself, I want my output to be part of the machine god.
Its funny, for years and years, even before LLMs started to speak to us, I was mindful of the digital footprint I was leaving, lest some future intelligence (human or otherwise) radically misjudge the type of person I was.
I've been extremely selective about the content I engage with on the internet and the sort of records about myself that I leave behind on these sites. I don't give out 'likes' or 'upvotes' or similar flippantly. I wouldn't "like" a piece of content unless I could see myself enjoying that type of content for eons in a digitally simulated afterlife. I take 5 star rating systems seriously, would never give something 5 stars out of custom or convenience (same reason I wouldn't give out 1 stars that often). I want 5 stars to mean I REALLY like something, and I hope that's how it gets interpreted.
I sometimes go back to my record of old movie ratings and reviews just to check that I still hold certain movies in the same esteem. I almost always do. So if the AI is either force-feeding me all the old media it thinks I like or generating new entertainment for me endlessly, I can be sure it got my preferences right.
My preferences in general seem extremely metastable, even if my interest in something or other waxes and wanes in a cycle.
People like to joke "if I die, delete my browser history." I might say something more like "If I die, scrape the entirety of my browser history and all of my account data from every website I used with any regularity AND the entire contents of all my hard drives and phone and use that to create a digital facsimile of me."
I wonder if the many people who consistently falsify their preferences (or never figure out their actual preferences) might end up getting shoved in personal dystopias for a while while the AI God is trying to figure out how to maximize happiness for everyone.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6hr ago
When in doubt, get fucking jacked. I suck at losing weight. But if you can't shrink the waist to keep that classic V shape, you can increase the chest, back and shoulders.
DirtyWaterHotDog
6hr ago
This is year I get fit. (he said for the 5th time.)
No but really. I look great at 185lb and look fat at 200lb. The 15lb makes all the difference.
I've started doing cardio again. I'm cautiously optimistic. (What is this, wellness wednesday?)
(My Rothfuss-esque pathological need to reveal my inner monologue in brackets is unbecoming of a middle aged man. But, such is life)
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
Ideal answer would involve a PTZ self-resetting fuse
These at least used to have a failure mode where they failed short when abused often, and I've typically seen them paired with a real fuse that handles that case.
DirtyWaterHotDog
6hr ago
just the belly (╥﹏╥)
Mantergeistmann
6hr ago
I've been really tempted to get a GameSir for my laptop. I hear the back bumpers are surprisingly intuitive, and have a coworker who swears by them.
5434a
6hr ago
Appreciate your sharing some details of the manufacturing trade-offs. It's more the size of the thing that baffles me, although it did make it much easier to work on. Okay there's a large antenna in there, but that just raises the question of why the antenna is larger than the antenna in a wifi dongle? And why add a 2m cable for a wireless dongle? Anyone who needs the extension could use an extension lead.
I'd also be interested in any speculation for why the fuse failed. As you say I had left it plugged in when I wasn't using it (I don't anymore), and even though I now have 9 extra spare fuses on hand I'd prefer to avoid any need to repeat that type of soldering. Other than loose connections I've never had any other USB devices fail whether they're high draw like charging a battery or low draw like a USB stick, or a wired controller.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6hr ago
Big dick problems?
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
7hr ago
In general I support the basic tenets of PUA/TRP but I think they kinda get it wrong here.
Women actually love men who are nice*. The lovable himbo who's good around the house and would take a bullet for his beloved is a common enough trope in female-gaze content. The issue is that being nice on its own is not enough. You have to be nice and also attractive. Where "attractive" is a combination of 1) physically attractive (enough) and 2) a certain je ne sais quoi which is not strictly reducible to confidence or competence or dominance and etc, but is clearly related to them in some intimate fashion.
"Being nice" gets a bad rap because the types of low value / socially awkward men who make "being nice" their primary conscious sexual strategy 1) tend to have a poor model of how social interaction works to begin with, so they interpret perfectly benign actions (like mild negging, or well-timed sexual advances) as "being an asshole", when actually those actions are perfectly as "nice" as any other and are interpreted as such by the woman in question, and 2) the men who go all in on "being nice" unfortunately tend to not be attractive to begin with. There's a certain type of sperg who naturally sends out waves of female-repellent radiation. It's a je ne sais quoi of its own, but it's a negative vibe rather than a positive one. For these unfortunate men, "being nice" is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Their fallacy is to blame their failure on the fact that they were too nice, rather than on their own intrinsic unattractiveness.
(* Of course there's a wide range of tastes, there are hybristophiles, etc, but that doesn't detract from the basic point that both men and women enjoy interacting with people who are pleasant to interact with, almost by definition.)
Just little things like character and virtue. Do you lie, steal, cheat? Do you work hard, help people in need, participate in local communities?
I will take 100 honest retards who are happy to watch a Fourth of July parade down main street over 1 IQ-dork post-quantum-researcher who never leaves the basement and is running a crypto scheme on the side.
"Elite human capital" is a term used by people, mostly, who wish we could still, ya know, create assets out of people.
More options
Context Copy link