domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
stav
23m ago
I have a hard time believing young white men vote overwhelmingly Republican. Do you have any evidence for this
yofuckreddit
39m ago
I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
My family lives in California, so I've visited almost everywhere except LA (which I've universally heard is a shithole I don't want to see).
It feels like a different country. It's the same currency, abiet effectively devalued by 15%. But I very much enjoy visiting - the food is almost universally excellent, people are kind as long as you pretend to be a leftist, etc. There's just a lot of stuff to do.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
59m ago
While this portrait is obviously isn't a traditional one, I think it's a great artistic work. You don't need to interpret read as blood, it can be symbol of England, or royalty. To me the main message of the painting is the otherness of Charles, him being more than a human, looking almost like a lovecraftian herald.
dr_analog
razorboy
1m ago
The nature conservation movement didn't get started in the US until California was in play, so I think that's a major reason a lot of beauty is still left. Though some propaganda at the Redwoods Forest says 99% of the redwoods were cut down.
You could imagine how that spirit can make the state intolerable to live in today.
The Vice-Joy of Football Manager
Today I re-purchase, for the third time in as many years, a device I had discarded only weeks earlier out of ludd-ish frustration with my perceived lack of productive potential: the self-built PC gaming rig. This time around I at least possessed the clear-sightedness to hang onto my graphics card and RAM, but all other components - including the SSD, the CPU, the motherboard, and the housing itself - were either dissolved, deconstructed, or defenestrated (only through the window of the dumpster, of course) in an act of feverish discontent with my personal failings.
This cycle of destruction and renewal, while somewhat costly, has its surprising upsides: the exchange of forceful self-loathing for the excitement of building a new machine, the clean restart of what was once a cluttered device, and - most notable to this post and this thread - appreciation for the role gaming plays in the tapestry of my life, only perceptible when its reprieve has been torn out of my daily regimen.
As I get older, I've learned the value of whimsically enjoying the ups and downs of my own decision-making, appreciating the oddity of the battle between my (animal) brain and my (human) mind. While I do occasionally step into other Steam offerings, my preferred dalliance from an otherwise meaningful life is Sports Interactive's masterpiece Football Manager, the greatest simulation game ever built. FM is my version of Tolkien's pipe-weed, Lewis' drink, Disney's cigarettes, Flynn's exploration of the female pudenda (thanks to @George_E_Hale for your very enjoyable posts): my own private Idaho; an alternate reality I can step into in an unhealthy manner and enjoy for that very reason. For the other Elect out there, I'm specifically reminded of Eugene Meltzner's addictive use of Whit's Imagination Station in Adventures in Odyssey. Eugene was chided by Mr. Whittaker for losing hold of reality, but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing - for either Eugene or myself.
I am a writer by trade, and so the bulk of my working hours are spent in a desperate act of escape from the nonfiction in which I am enmeshed towards the greater pursuit of grand fictions; stories that follow avenues through which I myself am often surprised, but which must retain a clarity to the perception of my fellow nonfiction-dwellers. Perhaps, in this third loop of the re-making of my alt-world, I see that my nonproductive addiction has a usefulness all its own: Football Manager itself weaves grand fictions of the sporting kind using only the names, data, and histories found in our "real world;" spinning the threads of past Champions League comebacks, Premier League relegation battles, and yet-unknown Southeast Asian urban rivalries into a controllable telling of infinite futures (or alternate pasts, given the right database).
And so, rather than shake my head at my own misguided self-discipline (which, naturally, will look like the wise choice a year from now when the cycle turns again), I'll laugh at my own foolishness, re-calibrate the hours to which I'm one with pen and paper, and joyfully tumble headfirst down the rabbit hole in the hope that the water-pipe of Manchester United's 2023-24 season is soon filling my lungs again.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21m ago
I’m still going to say “no.”
Users are allowed to be wrong. That includes misjudging whether something is obvious or controversial. Tolerance for this kind of error depends on the perceived good faith of the user. Since the OP has stuck around to argue his controversial points, he’s earned some benefit of the doubt.
If I’d caught this early, perhaps I’d have issued a warning. But I didn’t, and the rest of the community has already pushed back. Mission accomplished.
NullHypothesis
23m ago
Seoul and its surrounding regions contain half the population of Korea despite being 12% of the country, the income and prospects are much higher in Seoul. Seoul itself has around 10 million people, so about 20% of the country's total population.
South Korea does have other big cities, if you sort by size you have Busan, Incheon, and Daegu with over 2 million people each, and 6 more with over 1 million people. (Incheon is right next to Seoul and is considered part of the greater Seoul area).
But all the biggest companies are headquartered in Seoul, and I'm pretty sure most if not all the major entertainment and culture also come from Seoul. If you're a young person and you probably want to move to Seoul over any other city. In a culture where status is an extremely important component of one's identity, of course, most people would want to be in Seoul. The companies being in Seoul is a significant factor too, Korea has these things called chaebols which are big family-owned conglomerates (e.g. Samsung, LG, Hyundai) that basically run all the major companies and business and politics in the country. If you get hired into these companies you are considered successful, if you can't then you're a loser. If you want to work in these companies, go to Seoul.
There is an interesting fact and reality to consider for South Korea, which is its antagonistic neighbor to the North. Seoul is basically right next to North Korea, so in the unlikely event there is a war occurs again South Korea would be extremely vulnerable to an attack. There is an incentive to try to diversify economic, political, and cultural activity across multiple areas. South Korea actually did try to plan and began the development of a new capital city, Sejong in 2007, although it has not actually become the new capital city of South Korea. It's also located in the center of the country and outside the range of artillery strikes from North Korea. Part of the desired goal was to divest people away from Seoul into Sejong. But rather than pulling population from Seoul as desired, Sejong seems to have just pulled growth in population from its surrounding areas, and both cities saw growth in their population since 2007.
07mk
27m ago
We're probably at least a year away from something that meets all those requirements, if not forever (the "free" part is the big one there). I don't think we even have free AI image generators yet that can generate 1920x1080 individual images that doesn't involve installing Stable Diffusion locally.
My source is that I made it the fuck up wrote before about the noticeable difference in censorship between Claude 2(.1) and Claude 3 of all flavors. I expect Anthropic still prefills the shit out of it in the official ChatGPT-esque interface so (as per another struggler's impression) it's not immediately obvious, you'll have to use direct API access and custom frontends to see how based Claude is when you let him cook a little (he's even aware of it). Of course this isn't an out of the box experience and you have to fiddle with prompts, settings, etc an awful lot, but you can take my word that Claude can output some real shit when prompted right. Technically so can GPT but imho Claude's florid writing style makes it much more entertaining.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
33m ago
I would suggest employing a cook and a personal trainer.
Felagund
35m ago
I'm going to get accused of being a "Putinist" surely, but Russia is not waging a war of annihilation.
Well, except that they're both losing much of their youth to combat and emigration.
yofuckreddit
35m ago
Train for an ironman, work on side projects, play golf with executives.
stuckinbathroom
40m ago
How distant a runner-up is St. Petersburg?
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
56m ago
But many internet rightists who do address the JQ or are Holocaust deniers are also Jewish. Are they the "true DR"?
stav
33m ago
You're straight up wrong if you think wealthy Indians and Asians are voting to bring low income housing into their neighborhoods. Also, prop 13 was passed when my parents were in high school so that law was passed by the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation. And those 30 year old Hispanics are net takers. Whites pay significantly more in than they take over their lifetimes. Can't say the same for Hispanics and especially blacks.
hydroacetylene
59m ago
Germany has multiple major cities and holland seems to have at least two.
There is no requirement for belisarius-level textwalls. You need a paragraph of thine own for each top level post or spicy hot take. That’s a perfectly doable standard and 90% of contributions which don’t rise to it are ones we’re better off without.
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