domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
DirtyWaterHotDog
8hr ago
just the belly (╥﹏╥)
Mantergeistmann
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr ago
Big dick problems?
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
8hr 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.)
SkoomaDentist
8hr ago
10 pounds? Those are rookie numbers, son.
Unfortunately.
faceh
8hr ago
Game theory problems only emerge at scale. Smaller communities don't suffer from them nearly as much for this reason.
That's probably the only reason this community in particular can maintain some level of integrity in its core mission, in fact.
On the other hand, the internet means EVERYTHING social happens 'at scale' now.
Of course our coordination is getting worse. We're also becoming more lonely despite being "more connected" than ever. The reasons are more obvious the less educated one is.
Yeah. And the only big coordination 'win' that we've achieved lately is Bitcoin and cryptocurrency allowing trustless, decentralized transaction of currency.
And we've even turned THAT achievement into a casino full of rugpulls and fraud.
Jiro
8hr ago
You could start by asking if you already know the person involved (either the one you're talking to or the one you're talking about).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8hr ago
"Would you love me if I was a worm"
Ah, the God Emperor of Dune question.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Last one was April 2024. I was talking with Ymeskhout about trying for one in late March of that year, but even when we fired up the Discord call it didn't really go anywhere successful, and then his last post on the motte was last April, and he deleted his x twitter account somewhere around the same time frame. Still active on substack, so doing... well, I won't say okay, but still typing.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8hr ago
Women (or at least the ones I encounter in my British PMC social circles, excluding the blue-haired feminists) only think or say, "Would you love me if I was a worm?" if they are hot and know it. Women want to hear "I love you and you are hot, but I would still love you anyway if you weren't." "I love you because you are hot" is second-best. "I love you even though you are not hot" is something that might work as push-pull/negging/whatever, but doesn't validate a woman or make her feel secure in the relationship.
Don't PUAs hammer in over and over that the boyfriend's nice personality is only praise because it is predicated on him being the boyfriend in the first place?
Only because of the word "nice". The point of PUA is that women are attracted by certain personality traits which are not "nice" but are attractive - and indeed are attracted by these traits far more than they are by conventional hotness (hence why Mystery could get laid while looking like a tranny), and are turned off by a "nice" personality. Part of the promise of OG PUA is that you can get far more bangs for your buck by learning how to perform "alphaness" that you can by hitting the gym.
gattsuru
9hr ago
For retro or retro-like games, there's some advantages -- trying to play something like Megaman X or Legend of Mana on the standard Nintendo layout means either fighting with an analog stick that's either too eager to have you go diagonally or nonresponsive to small movements (or both!), or offsetting your left hand to get to the dpad and feeling a bit like a crab a couple hours later. There's even a few specialized retro handheld consoles that will let you switch what layouts are present for this specific use case (and to support six-button controllers like the Genesis on the right hand side).
But dunno if there's that much on the Switch market that's actually focused toward those games.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
9hr ago
The "Did you know" memes on twitter are glorious. Truly the peak of culture.
TwiceHuman
9hr ago
Game theory problems only emerge at scale. Smaller communities don't suffer from them nearly as much for this reason. I believe in the capability of exceptional individuals, humanity has advanced thanks to great people/'giants', the mediocre masses add very little value.
I also happen to have reverse engineered some of these dynamics, and probably better than 99% of researchers, for I have solutions that I don't see anyone else talk about directly. Granted, Jordan Peterson wrote a book warning about excessive order, but I don't think he realizes that he's mathematically correct in warning against that. And do you know that the definition we use for "rational agent" is one which always seeks its own advantage? If our ideal for how one ought to think is completely void of good taste (like that definition is), then we will run into problems which didn't exist in the past because good taste used to protect against it.
How do you get somebody to do 1000$ worth of labour, without paying them, and without coercion? It seems impossible mathematically, and yet, my grandma has sometimes done this, just because she enjoys helping people. By making people more intelligent, but less human, less things become possible. General intelligence might conflict with instincts, as learning logical thinking is all about suppressing your natural biases, instincts, emotions, etc.
Accurate world models aren't bad per se, but they're not sufficient. Being completely objective also puts you at a high risk of becoming a nihilist.
Of course our coordination is getting worse. We're also becoming more lonely despite being "more connected" than ever. The reasons are more obvious the less educated one is.
DirtyWaterHotDog
9hr ago
The stubborn 10 pounds that's spilling out of my pants. (╥﹏╥)
Do we actually think some people are getting a helping hand through a shiny new loudspeaker, with the twin express aims of promoting their ideas and drowning out ideas someone doesn’t like? Or is it just the case that people whose ideas get more reach have skilfully figured out the content algorithm game?
If you look at any public statements made by Google, pre-acquisition Twitter etc. they are absolutely clear that they are attempting to promote trusted, authoritative sites (as judged by them). There is a reason that google medical searches always route to Healthline and WebMD: ever since the 'Google Medic Update' google has routed medical, financial and disaster-related queries to trusted and usually governmental partners.
Google also engages in strategic banning, throttling and promotion of information:
Tackling misinformation online is an ongoing challenge that Google continues to invest in, including researching novel approaches to the problem. For the past several years, Jigsaw, a unit within Google focused on threats to open societies, has collaborated with researchers from universities of Cambridge and Bristol and American University to study the effectiveness of a tactic called prebunking. While a more commonly known tactic, “debunking” seeks to correct false claims already in popular discourse, prebunking helps individuals build psychological resilience to misleading narratives before they ever encounter them.
Prebunking works by alerting individuals to attempts to manipulate them, along with the false claims or tactics likely to be used to do so, coupled with a thorough refutation of those claims or tactics. The approach is highly flexible and can be adapted to a wide range of media, from a simple billboard to long-form narrative content. Academic research has shown it to be effective against a variety of false narratives, from white supremacist hate speech to COVID vaccine misinformation. In the fall of 2022, Jigsaw ran a large-scale trial of prebunking seeking to counter anti-refugee narratives in Central and Eastern Europe following the mass influx of Ukrainians in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the country.
We will continue to fight this pernicious problem by taking a flexible approach to tackle misinformation across different products, taking action at scale, elevating trustworthy information* and equipping people with skills to detect misinformation.
Google literally says here that they are promoting some material in order to drown out and make ineffective other material. I can't even say that all of this is wrong, I am not necessarily keen on a laissez faire approach to e.g. selling medical products in all cases. But it is absolutely manipulation of the discourse by promoting favoured voices and banning, shadow-banning or drowning out others.
The Dept. of Health also cites communiques from Facebook, Twitter and TikTok to state that:
Some technology platforms have improved efforts to monitor and address misinformation by reducing the distribution of false or misleading posts and directing users to health information from credible sources
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf (page 6)
gattsuru
9hr ago
A 'blade'-style automotive fuse housing costs 50-75 cents at scale, and a glass vial-style fuse holder costs 30-50 cents, and the fuses themselves cost money on top of that. A single 0606 500ma fuse is cheaper at unit one digikey prices; at scale, they're basically free. They're probably only included at all because they're part of the USB standard -- overdraw could and does kill older motherboard USB ports, and rarely even entire motherboard USB controllers! -- not that it stops designers in other cases.
Ideal answer would involve a PTZ self-resetting fuse (though they're not great options for USB devices people are likely to leave plugged in indefinitely, and usually end up 5-10c), or a through-hole conventional fuse that could be fixed by anyone with a soldering iron and patience (though mixing SMD and through-hole parts gets stupid expensive, esp for boards with SMD on both sides). But it's not as nonsensical as it looks at first glance.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9hr ago
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
How is that a far lesser divide? These things are completely superficial.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
9hr ago
For what it's worth, the cultural divide between red and blue America is still far lesser than the divide between the two great bay colonies that would eventually unite against the crown, even if current levels of general contempt for the other are about the same.
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
Its easy to pick out salacious examples of this not being the case, but how much of this is driven by:
a) The various outrage optimization engines, and b) One's own human tendency to remember the remarkable and aggregate exceptions, ie to over pattern match
5434a
10hr ago
I have a Microsoft wireless Xbox360 controller I bought to use with emulators on my PC. I very rarely game so it sat around for a couple of years, and when I came to use it again the dongle was dead. The giant dongle. The giant dongle with the ~2m wire (why?!). I have a wifi dongle that is barely larger than the USB port it plugs into and that can handle bi-directional network speed data transmitted to the other end of the house, but a receiver for what amounts to little more than single key presses sent from the chair towards the screen has to be the size of a 240V wall plug for some reason.
Anyway after a little reading around I prised open the giant dongle's case and replaced the microscopic fuse component (why use such a small component when there's so much space?) and restored it to working order. Apparently this is a common fault. Imagine how many people have resorted to just binning it and buying another. Probably not many at the price they charge, the size they make it, and the frequency with which it breaks.
TwiceHuman
10hr ago
Good thing you bring up those two terms, they're making the difference. I'm saying that the internet is privately owned, and that the fact that real life isn't, is the main reason we have any sort of freedom at all. The rest of the difference is purely mentality. It doesn't feel weird for people to say "We shouldn't allow people on the sex offender registry on our website", and yet, you don't hear of sex offenders being banned from walmart, or blacklisted from electricity companies, and for some reason, this doesn't lead to either company being accused of aiding sex offenders. If we ran the real world like we ran the internet, then you could easily kill people just by making them unpopular. They'd be unable to buy food, to drink water, to find a place to sleep, to get a car, etc, with the argument that anyone who provides a service to criminals are criminals as well. Which is why that idea is insane.
I recall reading that a company should either act like a platform or a service, rather than try to enjoy the advantages of both but admittedly not in dept.
thejdizzler
10hr ago
Thank you for the words of encouragement.
thejdizzler
10hr ago
Thank you for this! It’s what I’ve been thinking as well. I really need to earn more money so I can provide for a family (which would also help me escape from the college student lifestyle).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
I did a detox fairly recently and I think the key is to find some other activities that you replace scrolling with to help ease the cravings. I found if I had things like books, puzzles and art supplies or writing supplies close at hand you can choose to scratch the itch in more useful ways.
It’s rough because I’m discovering that the screen itself is a hyperstimulous and therefore when you use a screen for an activity it creates a sort of craving for more screen time. Even switching to a soduku app instead of a paper book makes a difference— I’d crave my iPad to play soduku where I could take or leave a soduku book or crossword book. Realizing this is valuable to me, and really kind of scary. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s hard to get away from the idea that screens are generally the worst way to handle anything, and that they really need to be treated like any other potentially addictive stuff.
I’m personally skeptical of time blocking because of this addiction aspect. Making rules around how you use an addictive substance not only isn’t recovery, but is often used as a way to say “I don’t really have a problem.” If you have a drinking problem that you’re pretending to control because you only drink after 5pm or only on weekends, not only are you still addicted, but you’re impeding your recovery. TBH I’ve often used such things as a quick test of addiction— if you are saying something like “not me im in control because I …” that’s a huge red flag.
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.
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