Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.

the more things change, the more they stay the same

the peak of your civilization

I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life

The only outcome I can imagine is the brigade closing this write-up as a duplicate and dragging off the author kicking and screaming, never to be seen again, like what happens to the vtuber protagonist in The Waldo Moment. The idea has grown too powerful for even him to contain it anymore.

Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will – if they’re being honest – tell you: “Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick”, etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.

A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and ‘learn its lesson’ which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say “now that we’ve bombed you, let us uplift you” but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don’t care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion

that is so fetch

I’ve always viewed this as a politics problem in disguise.

The cook wants to oust the king. He has no allies and no claim, but swears profusely that once he is king, every person who failed to back him is going to pay. Do you back the coup? What if you say yes and the cook’s assistant, who overheard you, proclaims that whatever punishment the cook had in store for your lack of cooperation, he’s going to do even worse? Do you switch your allegiance to the assistant then?

What if this is a hypothetical cook, who the assistants are speculating they could bring over from abroad and are also speculating would mete out the punishment to end all punishments to his non-backers, because he is petty like that? They haven’t even met him, but they figure surely a petty enough cook to fit this description has to exist out there somewhere, and inevitably someone will find him, and bring him over, and he will surely attain power once everyone understands that this is inevitable? Do you throw yourself behind their coup and challenge the king? What if the jesters overhear you and proclaim “oh wait until you hear about our hypothetical jester, he is even worse than that hypothetical cook” – do you switch your allegiance to the jesters then?

If implicit, empty “once I have power!” threats were horses, beggars would ride

unauthorized bread

With turn-based RPGs being in fashion again now thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3 I would really like to throw in a recommendation for Wasteland 3. First of all it’s a riot (as the image demonstrates). Second of all it’s well-built and satisfying RPG-wise; usually in this kind of game you get fighters and wizards, and it’s refreshing to deal with a serious RPG system where all the roles are completely different and modernized, like hacker, sniper or brawler. Usually it’s either your characters are modernized or you have a proper RPG system, but not both. Finally, the game is notable for flipping every RPG cozy moral cliche on its head. The usual RPG rewards you by producing outcomes more optimistic and idealistic than what you’d get in reality; Wasteland inverts this, and produces equal and opposite cynical, pessimistic outcomes. Nearly every time you try to negotiate as an alternative to violence, this just results in the other guys shooting first. No good deed goes unpunished and you’ll say “come on, in reality that could have gone better” often. Even most other bleak RPGs respect your choice in some sense: “here, you got what you asked for, the good and the bad”. Wasteland instead says “here, you got what you effectively asked for, you idiot”. The moment the penny drops and you understand that you are operating in a crapsack world and start behaving accordingly, you are in for a very unique roleplaying experience.

Hey lurkers, the moment you see the phrase ‘everyone knows that’ stop reading and go look the thing up. Seriously, a single google search. Open a new tab and go google it. Click on a variety of sources. Be fair and also read the Al-Jazeera article, which last I heard still blames Israel. Don’t let some rando on a social media site tell you what ‘everyone knows’.

Now. Couples on the verge of divorce do this thing. ‘Who the fuck cares about the details or about who’s right in this particular instance. Let’s zoom out into the grand, very well argued, story of why I am in the right, and you are in the wrong and also an asshole. Fine, you didn’t snoop in my cell phone like I accused you when we started this argument, but you might as well have, and you’ve done worse before anyway’. This is very cathartic and gratifying, but it is not productive.

Why care about satire? Satire is a powerful force for exposing truth. All good satire has a grain of truth in it, and delivers that grain to the reader wrapped in a reductio ad absurdum: you believe X, but let’s take that to its logical conclusion. Not so reasonable now. In this case: You believe Israel’s denials, but let’s take that to its logical conclusion. Not so reasonable now. I suspect you know this. I suspect if a satire argument attempted to deliver a payload you disagreed with you would also suddenly concede that things like this are more than just a prank, bro.

I also sigh deeply at the attempt to make this about a psychoanalysis of me as a person. This is the year of our lord 2023. Everyone is angry. I am sure you are also angry about plenty of things. This is not meant as a general defense of Israel, of the Israeli government, of Israeli opinions about the conflict. Rest assured that I know plenty about the exact moral failings of the Israeli public and the current ruling coalition, and could write about my grievances with them at length and in great detail. But this “we’ve decided who the bad guys are, inconvenient facts not allowed” mode of thinking – no. I won’t stand for that. Fuck that noise.

When the story was that this was a lethal attack by the IDF with hundreds of casualties, there was nothing funny about this. Now that most credible sources in the first world agree that the IDF was probably not at fault for this particular atrocity (yeah yeah death to the first world and hail Xi & Putin etc, if you’re one of those people just kindly stop reading), now it’s suddenly time to turn this into a joke and short-circuit people’s critical thinking. “ha ha, ‘we didn’t do it’, sounds like a made up claim that the person who did it would say”. What a genius master stroke of insight.

You know what, I now have newfound respect for the people who at least put in the work to argue that the rocket geolocations were fabricated, the Hamas operative convo discussing the malfunctioning rocket was by paid actors, etc etc. At least they are making an argument, which a reader can evaluate and decide whether they believe. This headline is exactly as productive as if they’d written “Hamas reports deadly Israeli airstrike with 3000 victims at the house of You, The Reader”. What a disgrace.

1. f is a real function from the xy plane to the reals
2. draw a horizontal-ish band (that is, two lines) creating your favorite wobbly band shape
3. the integral of f along a single vertical line within the band is itself a function of the line’s x coordinate. Call the function g(x)
4. What is dg/dx in terms of df/dx? lf the band were perfectly horizontal, it would just be the integral along the vertical line of df/dx within the band. But it’s not, so you add a term to account for the band lines moving
5. all this assuming f and the band are pretty enough (this is 80% of the theorem statement)

I did some thinking about which political faction would stand to gain from making up a story such as this, and now I can confidently say that I am more confused than I was before

Based on the 1 shitty course in applied mathematics I nearly flunked, I imagine the velocity of wind is a solution to some kind of differential equation induced by the temperature, and since the sun’s heat is moderately spread around (like you don’t get a hyper-heated cmxcm square or something) these solutions have reasonable continuity properties, so that with ‘one step to the right’ you can feel slightly less wind, but not a huge difference. Maybe five thousand of these can take you from strong wind to no wind at all.

Red Ed Redemption 2

After Liz Truss’ 50-day tenure I truly believe anything is possible

One of the things I hated the most on reddit was that every subreddit eventually converged to this bullcrap. TIL that go blue team. YSK that go red team. ITAP of go blue team. AITA for thinking go red team? Back stupid blue tram, win stupid prizes. And on and on and on, it’s exhausting. I care plenty about politics and current events, and when I want to be politically prostelyzed to, I go to one of the appropriate communities for that.

Reading this comment section is so strange. Skepticism about generative AI seems to have become some kind of professional sport on the internet.

Consensus in our group is that generative AI is a great tool. Maybe not perfect, but the comparison to the metaverse is absurd: no one asked for the metaverse or needed it for anything, as opposed to several cases where GPT has literally bailed us out of a difficult situation. e.g. some proof of concept needed to be written in a programming language that no one in the group had enough experience with. With no GPT, this could have easily cost someone a week. With GPT assistance – proof of concept ready in less than a day.

Generative AI does suffer from a host of problems. Hallucinations, jailbreaks, injections, reality 101 failures, believe me I’ve encountered all these intimately as I’ve had to utilize GPT for some of my day job tasks, often against its own better judgment and despite its own woefully lacking capacity to deal with the task. What I think is interesting is a candid discussion: why do these issues persist? What have we tried? What techniques can we try next? Are these issues intractable in some profound sense, and constitute a hard ceiling for where generative AI can go? Is there an “impossibility theorem for putting AI on autopilot”? Or are these limitations just artifacts we can engineer away and route around?

It seems like instead of having this discussion, it’s become in vogue to wave around the issues triumphantly and implicitly declare the field successfully dunked on, and the discussion over. That’s, to be blunt, reductive. Smartphones had issues, the early internet had issues. Sure, “they also laughed at Bozo the clown” and all that, but without a serious discussion of the landscape right now, of how far away we are from mitigating these issues and why, a lot of this “ha ha suck it AI” discourse strikes me as deeply performative. Like, suppose a year from now OpenAI solves hallucinations. The issue is just gone. Do all the cool kids who sneered at the invented legal precedents, crafted their image as knowing better than the OpenAI dweebs, elegantly implied how hallucinations are a cornerstone in how the entire field is a stupid useless dead end – do they lose any face? I think they don’t. I think this is why this sneering has become such a lucrative online professional sport.

Just because I’m calling it “hype” doesn’t mean I’m bashing the game,

Motte and bailey

The real beauty was reading the entire comic first, and only then getting to the title