domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
BahRamYou
5m ago
I didn't realize that a casual date required as much effort as running a triathlon! Why does it have to be so rare and difficult?
2D3D
19m ago
Frankly the USA lacks a clean racial/cultural split across demarcated geographies to let a proper civil war play out. Gretchen Whitmer isn't rallying Dutch-German Americans in the Midwest to take up arms against the New Englanders of Hochul. There are too few concentrated natural resources or geographies worth fighting over in the USA because it is so large. The most likely failure point will be race based riots collapsing a major metropolitan area totally combined with a refusal by a governor to send in the national guard or said national guard rebelling. Think full riots of BLM and Rodney King with 0 law enforcement for a few weeks. A spontaneous violent mob horizontally coordinated along racial lines for ease of identification just to wreck shit. Less armed factions battling street by street Stalingrad style, more Harlem Riots with more destruction.
Civil wars really require geographically consolidated factions free of any local element capable of resistance. This is especially easy when the state institutions are token rebrandings of existing tribal or ethnic power structures. When the state falls, the militias simply swap out their patches and return to their old ways.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
50m ago
She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
Something's not adding up here.
Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead.
But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.
I certainly believe there are fates worse than death. But I also think that in the majority of cases where people say "rape is worse than death", it's just hyperbolic social signalling rather than a genuinely held conviction.
Well they can express that frustration all they want, so long as it's still illegal to implement the mechanisms of tradition, it's pointless.
Just recently the literal boy scouts switched to being gender neutral. This is a small symbolic final step that is but the culmination of the systematic destruction of an institution whose entire purpose was turning boys into men. Not an isolated case either, pretty much all male segregated spaces are gone, certainly most of the ones that would lend themselves to teaching.
I'm sure drunks are also frustrated with the quality of their livers. But unless they stop drinking, it's not going to get any better, however much they complain.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
54m ago
Kudos for actually putting in the work. It's not a proper study by any means, but at least trying to get an overview of broader tendencies is valuable.
FWIW, I've also never felt that this is a big deal if it's a modern setting. Even if the stats are slightly off, it's hardly unusual. What I really hate instead is the tendency for making every cast in all media a perfect match for [current year] US urban pop stats, independent of the setting, and for all morals to always reflect [current year] morality. If the setting is a rural backwater with an alleged clan-like family structure, concepts such as "blood money" you have to pay when your relatives screw up, etc. ... but then each clan has a perfect mix of distinguishable races from all over the world, absolutely everyone is constantly bitching about how blood money is unfair and actually, you can just trivially change families through adoption ... Why even bother? It's obvious the writers don't get how people who actually grew up in such a world would think, nor what the implications of different social structures and physical limitations are and how they would shape the world. It's all just "wouldn't it be cool if ..." but then keeping everything else bland and inoffensive.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12m ago
Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative (and accompanying discussion on HN):
We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.
Recently there’s been increasing interest in the integration of LLMs and video games. With currently available models, creating an entire living virtual world with an unlimited number of realistic side quests, characters, and interactions is now a “mere” engineering challenge. No more pre-scripted dialogue trees; instead you can simply converse with NPCs in natural language with no limitations (or at least that’s the promise, as models become increasingly efficient).
This is another step towards what appears to be the natural endpoint of the technological development of video games: the recreation of life in replica, a replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.
For a long time I thought that video games were the necessary next step in a development that could be described as “spiritual”. Games are largely an amalgamation of prior media - literature, painting, music, film - but they do introduce a new element (or at least they develop this element to previously undreamed of heights), and that is the element of interactivity, i.e. the ability to make a choice, to participate as the player in the creation of the art and to make the art be something other than what it would have been in your absence. I conceived of interactivity as the raw material out of which a new aesthetic language would be fashioned which would bring us closer to realizing the promise of art. But I have since begun to grow uneasy with this way of thinking.
In some sense I was too seduced by the possibility of finding something “new”, anything new, to detect the longstanding inconsistencies in my own thought. From a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice. I found the idea of multiple endings for a story to be distasteful. Yes, you can choose to save this character or not, you can choose to join the bad guys or not - but now that we’ve had our fun imagining all the what-if scenarios, can you tell me what really happened? Do you have the courage to tell me? Do you have the strength of vision to see the truth, the singular truth?
Choice is antithetical to the aesthetic sacrifice. The artist sacrifices all alternate possibilities to distinguish one thing and one thing alone, to say - this one, and no others! No matter how lowly a thing it is - a dirtied article of clothing (as in Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes), a completely ordinary sequence of events on a day in Dublin in the year 1904 (as in Joyce’s Ulysses) - he is now stuck with it. This is where he signs his name and stakes his wager, for better or worse. It is this seemingly inexplicable devotion to one law, one vision, one truth, that makes possible any kind of experience that may be called aesthetic. An artist who hedges his bets and does not accept the risk that accompanies his act inspires no confidence in us.
The receiver of the message too enters into a sacrifice, insofar as the message may be incomprehensible or even dangerous to him. In this way an oath is forged between artist and audience. The failure to foreclose the horizon of possibility is the deferral of the signing of the bond.
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities? Would Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates be better if there were a possibility of Socrates simply... not dying? If Callicles’s warning to Socrates, that his devotion to the “effeminate” subject of philosophy would be his downfall, might not come to pass? If Socrates might be able to eloquently defend himself at trial and avoid conviction? If he might escape from prison before his execution?
The deferral of the inevitable here would be nothing more than the refusal to establish the founding myth of philosophy, the myth that links philosophy with the sign of death. The internal law of Plato’s drama is clear (and the law of historical fidelity is irrelevant): Socrates must die. This is not to say that one is forbidden from creating new works in which new possibilities are imagined. Only that the unity of the original work should remain undisturbed in its repose.
Or you can just like, have fun with GTA6 when it integrates LLM-generated missions, I guess. Whatever.
Folamh3
20m ago
yellowgreenred
1hr ago
I just got around to reading last month's post about Noticing the increase in interracial relationships we're seeing on screen. @George_E_Hale was mercilessly piled on for supposedly feigning ignorance, innocently asking "what's the big deal?", and claiming that the white woman and black man pairing is not a new phenomenon. Given that I'm also in the camp of "what's the big deal" and "yes, there has obviously been an increase in such representation, but I'm not sure it's as dramatic as painted by most users", I thought I'd investigate all this is a bit more.
First, I looked at the most popular romance/romantic comedy flicks from last year. Disclaimer: I have only seen one of these (Past Lives), the list was compiled from various "best romance movies of 2023" articles, these are only films produced by Hollywood, and I determined the races of the on-screen couples by consulting the movie poster and/or a written summary. Therefore, it's very possible I missed a subplot in a movie that contained further interracial or interracial relationships, and because the list may be not a representative sample, I may be over-or under-counting the number of interracial relationships. Anyway, the list:
- Shotgun Wedding - Jennifer Lopez and white guy.
- One True Loves - Mixed race Asian-American (Chinese father & white mother) was married to a white guy who was presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Some years later, she becomes enagaged to Asian-American hunk Simu Liu only to find out that her husband is still alive. She ends picking the hunky Asian.
- Love Again - Indian woman who happens to be Nick Jonas' wife and white guy.
- Past Lives - Asian woman and white guy, but there is another Asian man in the picture who she might be in love with. Ends up staying with the white guy in the end. I'm not doing justice to a really great movie.
- The Perfect Find - Black woman and black man.
- Happiness for Beginners - White woman and white man.
- Red, White & Royal Blue - Ethnically ambiguous gay man and white gay man.
- Love in Taipei - Asian woman and Asian man.
- Bottoms - Diverse group of lesbians and Marshawn Lynch.
- Love at First Sight - White woman and white man.
- What Happens Later - White woman and white man.
- Anyone But You - White woman and white man.
- Shortcomings - Asian woman and Asian man.
- Rye Lane - Black woman and black man.
- Your Place or Mine - White woman and white man, might contain a subplot featuring black man.
- Prom Pact - Mixed Asian-American and white man.
- Beautiful Disaster - White woman and white man.
- Ghosted - Ana de Armas and Chris Evans.
- A Tourist's Guide to Love - White woman and Asian man.
- You Hurt My Feelings - White woman and white man.
- The List - White woman and Hispanic man wherein the Hispanic dude sleeps with someone on a "free pass list" and then the white woman cucks him by sleeping with a white guy, I think? Having trouble figuring out the plot for this one.
- After Everything - White woman and white man.
- The Other Zoey - White woman and white man.
- Somebody I Used to Know - Alison Brie and black man.
- No Hard Feelings - Jennifer Lawrence with white man (kid).
- Challengers - Zendaya has sex with two white guys.
TV shows would take too long to go through, but just eye-balling the posters on Rotten Tomatoes, I don't see any immediately obvious black man and white woman pairings, though I do see a several white man/non-white woman.
I am aware that most of the complaints are about an increased in interracial relationships in advertising. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any research that quantifies this increase. There is one story from 2021 that quotes a professor who says "70% of interracial commercials from the past four years show a white man with a Black woman", which is the inverse of this pairing in real life. If true, this wouldn't be surprising: WM/BW is less controversial than BM/WM. As I was looking into this, I was reminded of that rather infamous Cheerios commercial featuring a white mom and a black dad. Turns out the original intent was not to make the family multiracial:
This wasn’t storyboarded as a multiracial family,” said Doug Martin, chief brand officer for General Mills and in 2013 associate director of Cheerios brand marketing. “With kids, the most important thing is getting the right actor, and this girl (Colbert) just blew everyone away, so we chose the kid first. With kids, sometimes you get a kid that’s one way off camera and on camera you get something totally different, so getting the right kid is key. And Gracie, she’s biracial, so then we went about casting adult actors that would be a match for her."
Also turns out that her parents mirror the races for the mom and dad in the commercial.
Finally, a note on the left's "desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities". It seems to me that if anyone should be concerned about their racial group "disappearing", it should be black Americans given their numerical disadvantage. If the black-white interracial marriage rate were to significantly increase, we would see a corresponding decrease in people who look "black", even by American standards. The best recent example I can think of Isaiah Hartenstein. No one would ever mistake him as anything other than white, just like no one would would ever mistake his father as anything other than black. Black Americans already have an average of 20% European admixture, so generationally, it wouldn't even take that long. Is this the answer to all our racial woes?
All this makes me wonder if the conversation we're having here is being played out on other forums except it's black women discussing how they're often cast alongside a white man love interest.
No_one
just now
pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities.
Pretense? Tuvans and Chechens both seem very favoured, moreso than ethnic russians.
Awarenesss
5m ago
I do have housemates now which has substantially helped with paying the mortgage (and I’d recommend to any single person with a home!).
I want to move to area X because a) I like the environment, and b) that’s where I spend a lot of my time, allowing me to save an estimated 100 hours per year of driving (one-hour round trip twice per week). Housemates don’t help this much, even if I save a bunch of money.
Ditto6687
1hr ago
I've asked my gf about this.
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Women seem to assume that "in the forest" means "without social consequences, ever". Meaning, they suspect that some significant portion of men do not actually have an innate problem with rape and violence towards women, they simply do not do it most of the time out of fear.
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She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
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She also claimed that most wild animals leave you alone if you are not a threat.
I'm pretty sure (3) does not mean you have a high chance of surviving a bear encounter. I would shit my pants and start running away the moment the bear started approaching me, make myself a threat, and get caught and mauled.
And while this may sound crass, I think getting mauled by a bear is worse than rape. I would rather be raped as a man that get mauled by a bear.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
54m ago
Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain. Imagine if a minority group in China pulled an LA riot or a Floyd in response to police brutality, let alone a CHAZ. They'd be whisked away, never to be seen again. The police would launch an orgy of repression and re-education. China is super into historical grievance narratives, patriotism and Chinese nationalism (as opposed to Han nationalism or multiculturalism). The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.
Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.
If Central Asians desecrate Russian symbols, they and their families are expelled. Russia takes national pride very seriously, to a quasi-religious level. There's a lot of intense patriotism and nationalism, people (Strelkov and co) who'll go volunteer to start a tough war in support of their national beliefs.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-uzbek-boys-expelled-eternal-flame/32726911.html
Russia and China - civic nationalism. USA and West - multiculturalism and wokeness.
AvocadoPanic
32m ago
Yes, but they deserved it this year.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
58m ago
The "man or bear" meme has not really seemed to have caught on that much in Finland, probably since going to the forest (to pick forests and berries, to hunt, just to walk around, even if you're walking from place X to place Y and the quickest route is through a patch of forest since there are patches of forests even all around cities etc.) is genuinely a very common activity to both men and women and you tend to typically run into other men and women all the time without consequences when you do it. (Encountering a bear is very rare, the numbers of the large beasts are strictly controlled.)
Awarenesss
9m ago
Yes, taxes. It went up by $400/mo last year, and I expect another $100/mo again this year. That’s not minuscule to me. But you’re right—long-term it mostly washes out.
ace
17m ago
Yudkowsky believes:
- Human-value-aligned AIs make up a miniscule spec of the vast space of all possible minds, and we currently have no clue how to find one.
- We have to get the alignment of a super human intelligence AI right on the first try or all humans will die.
- Coordinating enough governments to enforce a worldwide ban on threat of violence of AI development until we learn how to build friendly AIs would be nice, but it's not politically tenable in our world.
- The people who are currently building AIs don't appreciate how dangerous the situation we're in is and don't understand how hard it is to get an aligned super human artificial intelligence aligned on the first try.
Given these propositions, his plan is to attempt to build an aligned super-intelligent AI before anybody else can build a non-aligned super-intelligent AI -- or at least it was. Given his recent public appearances, I get the impression he's more or less given up hope.
zeke5123a
19m ago
Let’s say you have 50 dollars. Let’s say investor X has 30 dollars but can borrow 70 at 5% interest rate.
You both invest and get a twenty percent return over two years.
You end up with 60 dollars. X ends up after paying off the debt 43 dollars. That’s over a 40% return on X’s 30 dollars.
Now of course X took on much more risk. The question in your fact pattern is how much risk are you taking on. if there is decent equity cushion in your home and given that the rate so low, the answer is “probably not that much risk.”
AvocadoPanic
20m ago
OP doesn't sound like he's only looking for a shag.
OP may have to die before the truth is revealed. Cyrano as a service.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
59m ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
More than a few times when this has come up I've looked at the top-grossing ten films of the past years in the US and there generally tend to be more "main pairings" of white men and non-white women in them than the other way around. Of course many of them are with Zendaya with whomever the male lead is, but the sheer amount of complaining about how Zendaya is too ugly to be paired with Hollywood men should by itself indicate that this happens quite often.
Unless there are indications to the contrary, I'm fairly convinced that the "they're pairing black men with white women!" complaints have quite a bit more to do with the complainers themselves remembering such pairings due to getting incensed about them than the ones other way around.
2D3D
1hr ago
Ethnic self flagellation happens because progressives do not view normal whites as part of their tribe, hence denigrating white people and white supremacy does not diminish the interests of white progs. Gutting the promotions of white Royal Air Force and forcing new hires to be uninterested and unqualified blacks stationed in some isolated northern airbase has zero impact on a Ministry of Defense desk jockey in London whose tribe is oxbridge peers in the city. The institutional capture by progressives to advance value negative minorities is to crush the vile bad whites, and at no level do these progressives view themselves as vulnerable because the championed classes can only survive under their stewardship.
This is the big difference between western style progressive championing of minorities and Russian/Chinese style 'wokeness'. The Russians and Chinese have no internal enemy they need to weaponize a minority against, so they can make a pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities. Moreover these are neither market dominant minorities whose presence upends the socioeconomic dynamic nor violent separatists who need to be clamped down on. Let the minorities have their food and costumes so long as they do not cause violence or upend the dominant order; the Hui have always had minimal trouble compared to the Uighur or the Yunnans for the Chinese, as the Buryats have been ignored compared to the Tajiks for Russia.
I see, well I certainly did not mean it that way in this case. I'm talking specifically about threats to a given established regime. What distinctions or origin we draw I don't really see as relevant. I'm talking about how power treats its challengers writ large.
Anyone who is a political enemy of the United States. In the Obama iteration that means mostly islamists, known or suspected, and their friends and family.
Certainly not friends of your average westerner, but they're not granted trial or human rights.
And it'd be foolish to think that this is exceptional, given the US has engaged in arbitrary internment and burned civilian dissidents alive even in quite recent history.
At this point I want to stress that I'm not trying to tarnish the reputation of the US in particular, it's a very nice country indeed, but it is still a country. And power works there the same way it does everywhere else in the world, however much we want to delude ourselves that magical dirt or pieces of paper make it otherwise.
Vae victis.
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