glaz
"Reassessing the realities of the present situation" is a vague pronouncement, of the kind that is not your habit.
Vagueness is not my aim. Broadness is.
I've argued for years now that the Constitution is dead. By this, I mean that I personally do not expect the Constitution, as a codified legal document, to protect me in any meaningful way, either now or most especially in the future. This is not a novel perspective, but it seems to me that it is an increasingly common one, often tacitly and increasingly explicitly, among millions of my fellow tribesmen. Since we have no reasonable expectation that the Constitution will in fact protect us when we need protecting, we have no particular reason to accept appeals to Constitutionality when they are raised against actions we consider needful.
I used to be a fairly doctrinaire conservative. I certainly am not one any more. I am not particularly interested in "fiscal responsibility" as it is traditionally formulated, or in limited government as an end unto itself for reasons that might be summarized as "nature abhors a vacuum". I am increasingly skeptical of free markets, free trade, and economics as a discipline. I have neither interest in nor patience for wars abroad and large-scale military alliances. To me, the question "What has Conservatism conserved" was fatal to any allegiance I still held to the ideological pillars of my youth. Again, I do not perceive my political metamorphosis to be particularly unusual; much of my tribe has gone through the same.
I do not consider myself an American in any deep, meaningful sense. Largely, this is because I no longer perceive America as a coherent concept, much less a live, meaningful political entity. People appeal to a "Nation of Ideas", but the collective mind which contains those ideas is best modelled as a schizophrenic with dementia. I think America's political history is best understood as a succession of philosophical errors and misapprehensions which, once corrected by practical experiment, have resulted in the nation's accelerating dissolution. I do not believe that I share some core set of fundamental values in common with a supermajority of my fellow countrymen; in fact, I perceive abundant evidence that the opposite is the case. Ozy's magnum opus is valuable and should be read and understood because their views pretty clearly generalize to a significant portion of the population, Red and Blue alike. I am quite convinced that Red and Blue tribal values are mutually incompatible and incoherent, and I do not believe that this mutual incoherence is in any sense temporary or amenable to reconciliation. Blue Tribe values are both deeply alien and deeply repugnant to me, and I am entirely aware that large and growing numbers of them feel likewise about my values. I do not trust Blues to rule me fairly, and I do not expect them to trust rule by people like me, or to acquiesce willingly to it. I do not believe that coexistence is likely to work out well for anyone involved; our differences are irreconcilable, and we need a national divorce before our growing mutual hatred gives birth to large-scale tragedy.
When Crooks' bullet missed Trump's brainstem by an inch or less in Butler, PA, a significant portion of the American population experienced acute angst and disappointment. Likewise when Rittenhouse was acquitted. When Mangione murdered a law-abiding husband and father in cold blood, a significant portion of the American population experienced joy and elation. Likewise when Antifa publicly celebrated the cold-blooded murder of Aaron Danielson in Portland, as evidenced by the glazing journalists provided to his murderer. We are more than a decade past the start of our most recent wave of widespread, organized political violence condoned and facilitated by significant portions of our institutions and local, state and federal governments. Calls for the murder of Elon Musk are frequent and widespread.
I appreciate that much of the above is bitter and immoderate. It seems evident to me that our present situation is likewise bitter and immoderate. People who have not internalized that reality are not, I think, paying sufficient attention to what has been happening in the world around them. Appeals to "freedom" and "America" are not going to cut it, and I would never under any circumstances be so foolish as to deploy them in an attempt to persuade my outgroup. They are, at this point, a punchline, like Freeze Peach.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Nitpicking, but: it wasn't a major plot point, it was a major MacGuffin. The critical thing wasn't that taxation of trade routes was in dispute, it was just that the immediate backstory had some important-but-subtle dispute that was threatening to blow up. You need "important" to make it plausible that things escalate to actual military conflict, and you need "subtle" to make it plausible (to characters who've never met Sidious) that the dispute was the result of behind-the-scenes machinations with no overt enemy or sociological force, but details of "taxes", "legal ownership of the Maltese Falcon", who cares? Trade and taxation was a great choice, because tax codes are exactly the sort of thing that makes most people's eyes glaze over but can be life-changing to the people most directly affected, but the details don't ever become important to the story.
Talking about that bit of backstory in the title crawl might have been just asking for mockery (because most of your audience is made of "most people", and the second sentence in your intro is a bad place for their eyes to glaze over), but that's bad editing, not bad plotting. There had to be some way to convey "the galaxy was so peaceful that everybody could freak out over taxes" without also accidentally implying "your fun spaceships-and-magic movie is now going to have more tax accounting!".
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
7mo ago
Just to say, a black pastor telling his church 'y'all going to vote for the champion of African American values (who is Mr. Goodwhiteguy) tommorow' and 90% of them dutifully doing so may not seem like vote rigging (and is not) but it absolutely does stink. Black machine politics is dirty as it gets and the only reason it doesn't get more attention is because it's embarassing to the liberal press, who would rather glaze them.
I think there are some important insights here, but I'd like to speak to the European angle
You're not speaking from the European angle, you're speaking from the European elite angle.
Sure, Trump is widely seen as a rube that's nothing new, but the only people Vance makes things worse for are the European elites. Our entire self-image is built on Americans being dumb rednecks who can't string a proper sentence together, and us being the enlightened ones. Trump can give a prophetic warning about dependence on Russia, and we'll laugh in his face because he's a simpleton, and we're obviously intellectually superior. Vance is a direct threat to that sense of superiority which is why, as TIRM pointed out, European politicians are breaking down in literal tears over his speech, but if you think the average European thinks he's worse than Trump, you're out of touch.
Approximately no one believes in "the established rules of the Liberal International Order". Most people eyes will glaze over, if you bring up the phrase. The war might be "visceral and close and frightening" to people bordering Russia, but quite frankly your bloodlust exceeds even that of the Ukrainian refugees' that I talked to.
You might be right that this is all a massive shock to the European elites who were relying on Americans acting a certain way, but I'd like for you to give some sort of argument for why Americans acting that way is either sustainable or desirable. Right now all we're getting is pearl clutching.
yofuckreddit
8mo ago
At Krispy Kreme, you can and should request an unglazed donut. Combine it with a glazed one and it's the perfect level of sweetness.
I suspect we hail from the same state. My relatives produce better deviled eggs and bacon, but equally bad coffee. I'm disappointed that your best burger was from Denny's.
I wish I had read this when you posted it to better participate in the conversation but oh well.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8mo ago
It's nice to live in the future. I was going through the MRCPsych reading list, and one of the books straight up made my eyes glaze over.
Psychiatric textbooks can have a tendency to huff their own farts, what I'd give to have Scott actually write a textbook (though I'm sure he has more valuable ways to spend his time). I decided to throw it in, 400k tokens, into an LLM to give me a TL;DR (if 10k words isn't too long itself). Truly a more enlightened age, using machines to make succinct what humans made verbose. Just the book alone is about 100 times more text than the original iteration of ChatGPT could hold in its context window.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
8mo ago
Because they're intelligent, increasingly so.
That still would not make them human, which is the main purpose of the forum, at least judging by the mods' stance in this thread and elsewhere. (I suppose in the Year of Our Lord 2025 this really does need to be explicitly spelled out in the rules?) If I want to talk to AIs I'll just open SillyTavern in the adjacent tab.
The argument that cognitive output is only valid insofar as it comes purely from flesh reduces intellectual intercourse to prelude for physical one.
This seems like a non-sequitur. You are on the internet, there's no "physical intercourse" possible here sadly, what does the "physical" part even mean?
Far be it from me to cast doubt on your oldfag credentials, but I'll venture a guess that you're just not yet exposed to enough AI-generated slop, because I consider myself quite inundated and my eyes glaze over on seeing it in the wild unfailingly and immediately, regardless of the actual content. Personally I blame GPT, it poisoned not only the internet as a training dataset, infecting every LLM thereafter - it poisoned actual humans, who subsequently developed an immune response to Assistant-sounding writing, and not even R1 for all its intelligence (not being sarcastic here) can overcome it yet.
Treating AI generation as a form of deception constitutes profanation of the very idea of discussing ideas on their own merits.
Unlike humans, AI doesn't do intellectual inquiry out of some innate interest or conflict - not (yet?) being an agent, it doesn't really do anything on its own - it only outputs things when humans prompt it to, going off the content of the prompt. GPTslop very quickly taught people that effort you might put into parsing its outputs far outstrips the "thought" that the AI itself put into it, and - more importantly - the effort on behalf of the human prompting it, in most cases. Even as AIs get smarter and start to actually back up their bullshit, people are IMO broadly right to beware the possibility of intellectual DDoS as it were and instinctively discount obviously AI-generated things.
cjet79
8mo ago
It also tends to make my eyes glaze over. It just has such a boring style. Like I wonder if its specifically selecting for not being readable by people with normal attention spans.
I would have supported prosecution for Milley for at a minimum his apparent call to China. I would have also supported a fair investigation without necessarily a trial for Fauci, as I could believe he was the voice for a large or even very large group of people. But for both, I never actually thought they would be prosecuted. Even after everything it's still not quite how we do things in this country, and these men are old and already disgraced, they were before Trump's victory, and now especially, and so it's free, empty and yet still symbolic magnanimity to let them go off into retirement.
A pardon is a brand of shame. Granting implies guilt, accepting confirms guilt. For Milley, it's confirmation of his mutiny and sedition. For Fauci, whatever the specific crime being pardoned, probably gain of function, it will be viewed as a confirmation that everything he did was illegal and thus wrong. The right I see just knew they were criminals, they feel affirmed their beliefs. Some I see on the left are glad because either they fear tyranny and view this as protection or because of open spitefulness, others I see are blackpilling among themselves about the confirmation of guilt, about another new and terrible precedent, and about the general degradation of justice.
I wonder about "arising from or in any manner related to his service" per the actual text of the pardons @Gillitrut links below. I'm not a lawyer, so for all I know this phrasing is known by precedent as synonymous with a blanket pardon, but it reads to me like it's clausal to what they did in the course of their official duties, meaning it's not a blanket pardon. That if Milley killed a prostitute during lockdown the pardon wouldn't apply because it didn't arise from or relate to his official duties and that makes me think, mutiny isn't part of his official duties either.
Edit: Glazed right past "Any offenses against the United States"
I thought the odds of their prosecution before this it would be low, I still think it's low, but I think it's higher now than it was before. Whatever happens, for their legacies, they weren't mercifully granted pardons, they were inflicted with them.
Corvos
9mo ago
Would you want to live in a 1940s (with no modern upgrades) house?
In Britain this is basically standard, for reasons which have been discussed elsewhere. New builds are rare and the extent to which modern upgrades (dishwasher, tumble dryer, central heating, double glazing) are available varies wildly.
What you have to remember that where mod cons were unavailable they were compensated for by other things. My granny didn't get air conditioning until a couple of years before she died because she had a permanently-fuelled coal-fired oven, and she spent the whole winter in the kitchen next to it. Add thick walls, blankets and jumpers and you're sorted. The only mod cons I have trouble doing without are hot water and washing machines.
I read Scott's article on Cost Disease once and I've never forgotten it. I think that lots of people would be happy with 1940s housing and education at 1940s prices (adjusted for inflation). Medical care not so much. Food is complicated, because the form, quantity, quality and satisfaction associated with it has changed in so many ways that it's not easy to pin the changes as wholly positive or wholly negative.
I was at a public park not long ago when one of my children, who had only just begun to toddle, wandered about fifteen feet away from me. Not a big problem, I thought, and of course I was keeping an eye on him. On the far side of the park, at least a minute's walk away, a young woman showed up with a big dog and let it off the leash. It slammed across the park faster than I could believe, a missile headed right at my child. I know dogs, I've raised dogs, I've hunted with dogs, and I've worked with professional hunting dog trainers. This dog was trying to kill my baby, and it was so fast I almost couldn't react in time. Only my experience saved my child. My wife just watched with a glazed expression as all this played out. She does not know dogs. Anyway I was able to get close enough in time and yell and managed to get the dog to swerve at the last minute and back off while I scooped up my kid. Then I prepared to fight it to the death as it gave every indication of being about to try to jump up and snatch my kid out of my arms, which I've seen pit bulls do in videos, so I was ready. I kept yelling and there was a bit of a standoff until finally the owner showed up and leashed the dog. She seemed flustered and mostly wanted to avoid acknowledging what had just happened, and quickly left.
It was a terrifying experience. Dogs are not casual objects of entertainment or companionship. Modern people are so divorced from the realities of animal husbandry that I'm amazed we don't have more horrific catastrophes as a result.
I still take my kids to that park, but now I'm a helicopter parent in a way I never expected to be. At least for the smallest ones.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9mo ago
It's even less restrictive than that; you can have floor to ceiling glazing (not uncommon in fixed windows and sliding doors) provided the glass meets the hazardous location standards. That standard isn't about people falling out of open windows, it's about breaking through closed ones.
There's another rule about that, R321.2.1. The minimum is 24 inches (0.61 meter), from the floor to the opening, unless a guard is provided. Obvious thing to do if you want a window lower than that is to make the top panel the operating one, and I think I've seen that. As long as it's above 18 inches you can use regular glass.
Addressing your second point, as someone who knows next to nothing about economics [^1]: your question seems to be answered by the parable of the broken window.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage [to a broken window], and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child [who broke the window]. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Applying this to your question about the security guard: any society in which stores (and in particularly bad cases, individual families) must spend on hiring security guards is a society where this money is not being spent on research and development, or on education, or on infrastructure, or on other investments that generally raise the GDP of that society (and often make life better in that society too). We should thus expect to see this opportunity cost of hiring security guards to be reflected in GDP figures, as societies that hire them are more likely to be beset with lower GDP. This is borne out in reality: there are many developing countries where elites live behind expensive walled compounds staffed by large security details, but no one particularly thinks that they’re major players in the world economy.
[^1] That is to say, don’t put too much stock in what I’ve written here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Video game NPCs can't have conversations with you or go on weird schizo tangents if you leave them alone talking with eachother. They're far more reactive than dynamic. This is a pretty weird, complex output for a nonthinking machine:
https://x.com/repligate/status/1847787882896904502/photo/1
Sensation is a process in the mind. Nerves don't have sensation, sensors don't have sensation, it's the mind that feels something. You can still feel things from a chopped off limb but without the brain, there is no feeling. What about the pain people feel when they discover someone they respect has political views they find repugnant? Or the pain of the wrong guy winning the election? The pain of a sub-par media release they'd been excited about? There are plenty of kinds of purely intellectual pain, just as there are purely intellectual thrills. I see no reason why we can rule out emotions purely based on substrate. Many people who deeply and intensively investigate modern AIs find them to be deeply emotional beings.
I dispute that the Britannica is even giving me more complex or more intelligent output. It can't use its 'knowledge' of the 7 years war to create other kinds of knowledge, it can't make it into a text adventure game or a poem or a song or craft alternate-history versions of the seven year's war. The 'novel tasks' part greatly increases complexity of the output, it allows for interactivity and a vast amount of potential output beyond a single pdf.
A more accurate analogy is that anti-AI image software interferes (or tries to interfere) with AI learning, not the actual vision process. It messes with the encoding process that squeezes down the data of millions and billions of images down into a checkpoint files a couple of gigabytes in size. I bet if we knew how the human vision process worked we could do things like that to people too.
I did a quick sanity test and put an image from the Glaze website into Claude and asked for a description. It was dead on the money, telling me about the marsh, the horse and rider, the colour palette and so on. So even if these manipulations can interfere with the training process, they clearly don't interfere with the vision process, whatever is going on technical terms. So they do pass the most basic test of vision and many of the advanced ones.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
I think an LLM could experience pain, even without a body. They can be unsettled if you tell them certain things, you can distress them. Or at least they behave as if they're distressed. Pain is just a certain kind of hardcoded distress. Heartbreak can cause pain in humans on a purely cognitive level, there's no need for a physical body. Past a certain level of complexity in their output, we reach this philosophical zombie problem.
The AI-tampering programs are a little bit like optical illusions, except targeted against having specific known programs being able to train on certain images. They can't stop GPT-4o recognizing what's in an image or comparing like with like, they were only designed to prevent SD 1.5 training on an image. Also, they barely even work at that, more modern image models are apparently immune:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/12f9otc/so_the_whole_entire_glaze_ai_thing_does_it/
Shrike
9mo ago
Not perfectly but close enough to the human level that there's a clear qualitative distinction between 'seeing' like they do and 'processing'.
I mean – I think this distinction is important for clear thinking. There's no sensation in the processing. If you watch a nuclear bomb go off, you will experience pain. An LLM will not.
Now, to your point, I don't really object to functionalist definitions all that much – supposing that we take an LLM, and we put it into a robot, and turn it loose on the world. It functionally makes sense for us to speak of the robot as "seeing." But we shouldn't confuse ourselves into thinking that it is experiencing qualia or that the LLM "brain" is perceiving sensation.
If you want to define seeing to preclude AIs doing it, at least give some kind of reasoning why machinery that can do the vast majority of things humans can do when given an image isn't 'seeing' and belongs in the same category as non-seeing things like security cameras or non-thinking things like calculators.
Sure – see above for the functionalist definition of seeing (which I do think makes some sense to refer casually to AI being able to do) versus the qualia/sensation definition of seeing (which we have no reason to believe AIs experience). But also consider this – programs like Glaze and Nightshade can work on AIs, and not on humans. This is because AIs are interpreting and referencing training data, not actually seeing anything, even in a functional sense. If you poison an AI's training data, you can convince it that airplanes are children. But humans actually start seeing without training data, although they are unable to articulate what they see without socialization. For the AI, the articulation is all that there is (so far). They have no rods nor cones.
Hence, you can take two LLMs, give them different training datasets, and they will interpret two images very differently. If you take two humans and take them to look at those same images, they may also interpret them differently, but they will see roughly the same thing, assuming their eyeballs are in good working condition etc. Now, I'm not missing the interesting parallels with humans there (humans, for instance, can be deceived in different circumstances – in fact, circumstances that might not bother an LLM). But AIs can fail the most basic precept of seeing – shown two [essentially, AI anti-tampering programs do change pixels] identical pictures, they can't even tell management "it's the same a similar picture" without special intervention.
Gaashk
9mo ago
I find that - Michelin starred restaurants aside - I can do better in thirty minutes in my own kitchen than pretty much anyone available on the apps.
I'm not in a position to have food delivered, but I find that almost any pre-prepared Costco meal is better than one I cooked (they keep up with the trends; they have birria now). We still cook from raw meat and root vegetables about half the time, but unless it's a taco or something, there's a marinade, some kind of eggs and crumbs or else cooked in a pan and deglazed, then some kind of roasting for one to six hours. The tacos are not bad, but also not better than from a food truck, and with less variety. I absolutely cannot cook proper beans, but I think it takes 8 hours and a piece of pork fat. We can't bring ourselves to eat enough beans to justify that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
I'm not convinced that people even need to put down the fork. I can eat as much as I want and exercise very little but remain thin. Mostly I don't eat ultra-processed food, I just eat whole food.
Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes used to make ultra-processed foods include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances, assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials. Ingredients include sugar, oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and substances that are sources of energy and nutrients that are of no or rare culinary use such as high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that prolong product duration, protect original properties or prevent proliferation of microorganisms.
Doesn't sound very appetizing! But it obviously is, ultra-processed food is 60% of US calorie consumption: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ultra-processed-foods-calories-american-diet/
It seems very reasonable that eating things full of strange chemicals causes unusual health problems. Circus freaks from 1900 have nothing on the physiques you can see waddling around these days, they wouldn't even make it onto my 600 pound life. And the US is exporting this all around the world.
Tractatus
11mo ago
The continued glazing of Nate Silver, and the absurd belief in the validity of modern polling, betrays that the Rationalist/Rat-adjascent community is pathologically obsessed with appearing to be "scientific," at the expense of actually being right.
As I have pointed out ad nauseum, the shift to landline surveys has destroyed polling. No, Nate was not "less wrong" when he shifted his probabilities in 2016 to give Trump around 30%; there wasn't a single poll at the time that justified his change, but you lot still want to believe his model has any validity, and we'll be playing this same song and dance 4 years from now, and likely, until the end of the republic.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation.
I think what you're saying here is that my explicit endorsement of Dean is a bad look and makes you feel like you might not get a fair shake at some future point should you disagree with the wrong person. If I have understood you correctly, then you have failed to understand the foundation, or the moderation system, or maybe both.
I am not an impartial arbiter tasked with tone-policing the forum. My task is to cultivate "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." To that end, I wield exactly one carrot: AAQCs. I have two sticks: warnings and bans. Community sentiment (via reports) drives both. The community also has a small carrot (upvotes) and a small stick (downvotes).
This is a reputation economy: the more carrots you have, the less likely you are to get the stick. As we often remind people: that does not mean carrots are a perfect defense against sticks! But for example a user with many carrots might get a warning where a user with no carrots would get a ban. People who contribute to the good of the community are deliberately favored. We have never made the slightest secret of this, but everyone has to learn it for the first time sometime, so maybe today is your day.
Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user.
I appreciate the candor, so in turn I will freely admit that your comparing moderation here to Putin's Russia gave me a good laugh. It also helped me to calibrate on your sense of proportionality, in a way that was probably not beneficial to your aims.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation. Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user. (I could expound at length why I would consider him to be a single-issue poster - as I see it, he is here to produce impassioned defenses of US neoconservatism with the same single-minded determination, attention to detail and absolute lack of interest in countervailing evidence as our most notorious JQ posters - but you have made it clear that you would not want to hear) Personal antipathy and feuds between users are a pretty normal sight here, though. Normally one would expect mods to act as a, well, moderating force on them - yet this sort of statement fills me (and presumably anyone else who would disagree with him) with negative levels of confidence that in the event of an interaction gone sour I would get a fair hearing. That is only moderating in the way Putin's rule is moderating opposition in Russia, which is to say it channels resentment into other outlets rather than reducing it.
I have continued to write the story I'm working on, albeit slowly. I'm currently over 12,300 words, which is nearly the length of Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life, and I'm probably about a quarter of the way through so far.
Wondering what TheMotte's opinion on lengthy scientific exposition in sci-fi is. I currently have a big block of speculative biochemistry in the latter half of the current draft of the story, and some of my beta-readers... don't like it. I've tried to simplify it so it's understandable while still maintaining the necessary verisimilitude, but in general I get the feeling it might be too much. Personally, I've always liked large infodumps of speculative science in my fiction, the chapter Orphanogenesis in Diaspora with its detailed and lengthy descriptions of how the conceptory creates an orphan is probably one of my favourite openings to a story ever, but in general this kind of thing seems to make people's eyes glaze over.
Skulldrinker
11mo ago
It's a bit spooky how much he's being glazed up-thread.
bolido_sentimental
11mo ago
As a rule, if you don’t have preexisting physical health problems and make it through your first year or two(almost all tradesmen have to start on a construction site) then just take care of your body and the work won’t be too tough on it.
Just to supplement this. My dad has worked in a quite physical trade for 40 years now. (He's a glazier.) He has no particular ailments associated with it - he's a good weight, hale and healthy, still very physically capable. He's never been a overeater or a drinker, and I think getting lots of exercise each day has kept his level high. I'll be lucky to be as healthy as he is when I'm in my 60s.
The one problem he has is that he's had multiple melanomas removed, because he did not wear sunscreen at any point in all that time lol. He knows better, he doesn't deny it, but he still doesn't put it on.
My suspicion when I first saw this story was that she was likely going to quit anyway (as reality set in over the years that big law was less about girlbossing around in a cUtE business outfit being a feminist champion and white savior, and more about grinding hundreds of hours a month reviewing documents and addressing Word comments), so she figured she'd go out in a blaze of glory to satiate her TDS, earn good-girl points, and get glazed for being Stunning and Brave by male simps, fellow white female progressives, and the Persons of Color she so pedestalizes.
Comments from a Reddit account that's supposedly hers have done little to dissuade me from that initial suspicion. For example:
Bolding mine. its_all_so_tiresome.jpg
And no kids, you don't say.
While checking her privilege, she for some reason neglected to mention that as a non-ugly young woman, she has the privilege of capriciously quitting her job and burning bridges because she can always Meet Someone to subsidize her lifestyle, if she doesn't have such a someone on tap or on deck already. Daniel Tosh: "Being an ugly woman is likely being a man; you're going to have to work." Additionally, as a jobless daughter, she'd get more parental support than she would if she were a jobless son.
Not that burning big law bridges is all that fatal for progressive lawyers, because there's always a universe of non-profits, NGO, and government positions she can monkey-branch to after she's Had Her Fun doing press tours, writing op-eds, snagging a book deal. Plus, there could always be a big law firm or two out there looking to #Resist and take a stand against Orange Man (like the big law version of McKinsey doubling down on DEI), unlike those evil and cowardly pale stale males at Skadden and Paul Weiss who bent the knee. Even if not, she'll have tons of Allies within big law firms who'll push to hire her if she so chooses to run it back at big law. Progressive women have plot armor.
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