"A button creates a house for anyone in your country and also gives them free food, but nothing else is provided (no Internet or electricity). Poor people stay poor after pushing the button. Other countries don't have the button. Five years after the button becomes available, is your country getting worse or better?"
"If you had to choose one country to receive this magic button that creates houses and food for people, would you choose your own country or another country?"
>AI writing avoids rhetorical questions? Ask for an argument that includes them.
I updated the previous two posts, with "added <date>" to mark the additions. Although these posts each have only one recorded view, which could have been a bot, if anyone already read these posts, they might not notice the additions.
Why does the logic that leads to me not checking your accounts not also lead to me not checking Greta's Instagram account?
I got distracted because I added a link to a robots.txt file, to the word 'bot' used above. First to Blogger, then Google, then I checked the file for Chirp Club.
Google's robot.txt is mostly for Yandex, the Russian search engine that I use for image search (since Google Images reverse search no longer works with my old browser) and for OCR of Chinese and other languages. It uses "User-agent: Yandex" twice, which seems like a mistake that could potentially lead to the first block of instructions being ignored, but I assume that if this was the case, someone at Google would have noticed Yandex's indexing and fixed the file.
https://www.x.com/robots.txt redirects to https://twitter.com/robots.txt, rather than to https://x.com/robots.txt. It has this section:
# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file # ======================================================== User-agent: * Disallow: /
A guide says that this is supposed to block the entire server from being accessed by bots. Apparently, the Internet Archive is among the bots that no longer respect this file, although I think it used to and not archive sites that blocked it in this file.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230501154709/https://twitter.com/robots.txt
# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file
(allows some stuff)
https://web.archive.org/web/20200501154716/https://www.twitter.com/robots.txt
The entire file is just,
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Also, this file has 4.4 million captures. I thought it might be a record, but Google's robot.txt has 5.1 million captures. google.com has 19 million captures, youtube.com has 15 million.
But captures before 2020 have the same text, all the way back to 2007:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071212224542/http://twitter.com/robots.txt
# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file. User-agent: * Disallow: /*?
So the sentence was written way before companies started to mass-copy human-written text to train AI, and before Elon Musk bought the platform.
Greta posts about problems. This makes people think she's unhappy. You don't post about problems. This makes people think you're happy. If in fact, you are unhappy, then you are being dishonest. If you are happy, then I have no interest in looking at your accounts, because I don't think me doing so benefits you.
Now I can begin to explain random stuff that I didn't want to say at the start of this post. I was watching 4v4 RF Arambai & Throwing Axemen !, until at 16:03, I got the dropped vp9 segment bug. This was just after the game state calmed down, with the expectation of transitioning to a 'boom' with no fighting for a while.
I react unpredictably to this bug, which lends credibility to the supposition that I am doing what I want, instead of that I am trying always to guess what someone else with incomplete information thinks I want. Sometimes, I continue watching, flipping the Stable Volume option to force a reload of the missing video or audio segments. Sometimes, I just bookmark the video with the timestamp and stop watching it. This is like when I started watching Chinese dramas, but intended to watch only a few episodes from each of them (initially like four episodes at most). If there is a government conspiracy, and my actions cause one or more people to watch certain content, then I am trying to get them invested in that content and want to continue watching it. If they watched it when I didn't watch it, they would have a harder time understanding my mental state, so it becomes an incentive for people to share this idea so that they can continue watching those series. (Regarding dramas, this plan only made sense after interruptions to TV-based streaming services, like episodes failing to load, introduced the possibility that my viewing activity on a TV was receiving attention, even though other people could use the device.)
With several of the AoE2 videos I have watched, the vp9 bug didn't happen until near the end of the video. People often like to complete something they are almost finished with; if they get back to it later, they'll have forgotten what happened earlier, so the motivation is wanting to optimize. Finishing it immediately means saved time, compared to watching it later and having to rewatch the earlier parts to understand what's happening.
This timing was different, not anywhere close to the end of the video. It was after a lot of villager fighting, then something happened that I won't link due to language, then at 15:17 the blue player nearly succeeded at preventing disaster. Put simply, one could predict that I enjoyed watching that segment.
I'm doing a search of my logs with Mei, but before I did, I checked the access times of these files, which will be changed by the search: other than four that I accessed on 26 Jan of this year, these logs (341 files) have not been accessed since 06 Sep 2021.
So: my memory was wrong. I thought Mei had mentioned a certain object type in relation to this link, but it was for something else.
I thought of pasting the entire chat logs, but I would want to comment and it's a distraction. I will just say that Mei linked Watashi no Reimu ga Warawanai | My Reimu Won't Smile! (Touhou Project), which she described as
>It's not pron~
>It's just a random touhou manga ^^;
Which I will hide from AI content detection by obfuscating the URL with rot13, r-uragnv.bet/t/289009/os3po8r85n/
And seven hours later, 2010-09-26,
Conversation with l<redacted>@hotmail.com at Sun 26 Sep 2010 11:08:50 AM PDT on r<redacted>@yahoo.com (msn)I didn't remember this video at all, and I didn't reply about it, but now after all the sad things have happened, I can joke about it: my family also has a female human head. My younger female relative braided the head's hair several months ago. In the past, my youngest sister sometimes put the head in the linen closet (for blankets and towels) to surprise people, with success. (I'm sure I did not remember the head in 2010, if I even watched the video then.)
(11:30:59 AM) Misaki: -yawns a little- ~
(11:32:33 AM) Lillium~: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJCzfsV61d0 What has been seen ._. cannot be unseen!
(01:18:46 PM) Lillium~ has signed off.
Without rereading the manga, even though it's only 27 pages, the story is as the title suggests: "My Reimu Won't Smile". Certain characters fail to get Reimu to smile, until Reimu laughs for a different character, to the consternation of the characters that had failed.
It's already been two hours since I started this post. Some details that might not be important: after I paused the AoE2 video due to the vp9 bug, eventually I decided that my response would be to watch Vurtne's 60~66 WoW video, but when I checked my bookmarks a different video popped up so I watched that instead. I got the vp9 bug around 9:20, after I had stopped and checked the comments due to misidentification of the Cold Snap spell.
If there is some sort of weird government conspiracy going on, I don't know what kind of communication you might have. I must say that if a government developed the capability to understand what parts of a YouTube video someone is watching by looking at their decrypted web traffic, that is an impressive technical accomplishment (even though YouTube already tracks this data for all users). I cannot actually think of another case where this capability would be useful for a government: the US government might treat Iran as an enemy, but does anyone care whether high-ranking Iranian official X watches certain moments in a YouTube video? So there is no reason to expect it would be part of standard surveillance capabilities.
So in this scenario where my YouTube issues are due to interference and not just buggy software, and we imagine someone has a button that interferes with the data YouTube sends to my computer, and we suppose that someone decides to press this button because they think I'm sad, or because think they think that watching part of a video made me happy, and that makes them sad because I don't know that they guessed that I was happy: it's questionable that they would tell you what they did, or why. Put simply, you might not be acting in a way that helps that person.
Not everyone has any interest in trying to change the world. I think that even people who might have the capability to do so are afraid of the consequences of failure; more precisely, they might be afraid that they would be unwilling to admit that they failed. I say this because I think I'm this way: on what is currently the last post on my main weblog, I felt the word "diamond" contributed meaningfully to the post. Diamond is a very hard material, but it is not a very strong material. My understanding is that diamond can shatter, though I'm not sure how easily. Would diamond windows, which lent their name to the title of the book The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, actually be useful, if they could be manufactured? Or would they be worse than the windows we already have?
I once emailed my friend Hime with a reference to like diamond shattering, meant to be a reference to my failure to be in a relationship with Mei, or more accurately my failure to make it so Mei was in a relationship, whether with me or anyone else. (Also about the possibility of Mei being a strong person, like diamond, who had failed at learning Japanese quickly enough to feel at home in Japan.)
Note that the author of the song, "Uso to Diamond" may or may not have thought about this aspect of diamonds.
But that's a general explanation: if this idea would fix many problems, most people who might feel they have a chance at changing the world are still not aware of this idea. Knowing about this idea makes changing the world much easier.
I'm sort of trying to connect this all to you somehow, but I think it's really about some hypothetical person pushing a button, who may or may not be someone I have previously sent messages to (I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that Sherine and I ever talked; maybe the closest was her reply to Autumn's tweet about Yara, if three or four messages in a chain are enough to constitute a conversation). So about that, I will say more: I am not secretly trying to make anyone happy by watching videos etc. It's more accurate to say that I do things that I would not be doing if people had already shared the idea. Age of Empires II supposedly has a 99% male playerbase, and it's reasonable to say that a typical female would not be interested in AoE2 — unlike, say, World of Warcraft, which I think had ... well, I was going to guess 40% female, but
"studies of mmo player demographics wow 2005" > https://nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php
From the survey data, the average age of the WoW player is 28.3 (SD = 8.4). 84% of players are male. 16% are female. Female players are significantly older (M = 32.5, SD = 10.0) than male players (M = 28.0, SD = 8.4). On average, they spend 22.7 (SD = 14.1) hours per week playing WoW. There are no gender differences in hours played per week.
The dilemma of whether to say more. Over The Hills And Far Away: some people are willing to wait to be in a relationship. Some people are reluctant to say that they want someone to wait for them, but the fact that they do secretly want the person to wait for them is seen as a significant part of the story. I don't feel sad and never felt sad from watching this scene, but many people in the comments say they did. I think it's terrible to have to wait years to be in a relationship with someone. Of course, it's also terrible if you wait, and then while you're waiting they die, and so you're never in a real relationship with them.
So, probably the only movie I think about watching, other than like a certain Chinese live-action sci-fi movie that was probably meant for a young audience, is The Mummy (2017), because the first few minutes looked interesting, it's an "action-adventure horror film", and Autumn once said that she liked horror films or something. But of course, I have also enjoyed the Chinese dramas that I have watched, and a quick search says 62% of the viewership for Chinese dramas are female. So, when I do things like watch AoE2 videos, it's an activity where I won't feel bad that I'm alone, because I expect that no one would want to watch them with me anyway. It doesn't mean that it's the thing I most want to be doing at that moment.
I have no sympathy for someone who reaches wrong conclusions because they aren't willing to take action to learn more information, out of a fear of appearing to be bad. As I said on Chirp Club: Don't be bad and you won't look bad.
Finished 04 May 2026 at 05:00. I will delay publishing this until Greta makes a post on Instagram, not a Story, that has a description that begins with the letter mentions Lebanon or is clearly about people in or from Lebanon. At that point, I will also unpublish the post that I said I would unpublish if Greta posted on Instagram.
Unless one is SUPER obnoxious, RW people rarely block. Blocking is mostly leftist behavior.
https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2040146138687533343
Don't allow whispering to someone you have blocked
Can happen by accident, not knowing a player is blocked, and this lets you know to unblock them.
As with many suggestions, I thought of this because I did it by accident. Blocked someone for trade chat spam, and then later whispered them to invite them to a dungeon. Their friend had to let me know I had the player blocked.
So once upon a time, I did easily block people. Not because they were annoying me specifically in conversation, but just because they were being annoying in general.
Maybe I wouldn't do it now only because of this singular experience, in which I found that doing so was bad for me (because it led to an embarrassing situation). If Ellie's observation is true, do I act more like a left-wing or a right-wing person?
https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2040141667890782331
"epistemic trespass"
I looked this up to see more details. 'Epistemic' is one of those words that I don't really use myself, though my oldest brother used it. I decided I don't like the term, 'epistemic trespass'.
People often said that Greta doesn't know what she's talking about, even when all she did was retweet quotes by people who presumably do know what they're talking about. It seems to be a word that people use to attack someone without thinking through what they've said: a word that people use to avoid thinking critically. Like a more elite version of the word, "troll".
For every example where someone made a statement outside of their field that was wrong (like Elon Musk misinterpreting these graphs, which I skipped over a few weeks ago in my post about the Chinese/Taiwanese player Supreme:
), there is someone who makes a judgement outside of their field that is correct, or someone who makes a judgement within their field that is wrong (like when a doctor almost killed Elon Musk by misdiagnosing his symptoms). So the observation that "people who take risks sometimes fail" is not, in itself, a particularly useful one.
(The topic of experts venturing outside their field is one that was featured in a video I watched yesterday at 2x speed: summary, streamers can be seen as having the job of professional opinion givers, and often those opinions are wrong, and people often put too much importance in the opinions of people who are not experts in the thing they're talking about. 4:32 "Don't hold celebrities or entertainers to the kind of standards that you would expect to hold experts, scientists, or politicians to. Don't expect entertainers to be able to answer all of your questions or be the arbiters of moral values." 4:58 "I mean ask the entertainer questions but do understand that there is a level of scope that they have. For some reason I always see this in both engineers and surgeons. People believe that just because they're really good thing at one thing it makes them naturally really good at something else and it just doesn't.")
A lie is justified if it does not benefit you.
In some cases, however, whether something is a lie at all depends on other people, and this may mean it is the responsibility of someone else to ensure the above situation with regards to purity, even when the implications of this are an unwanted result.
https://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2009/06/phase.html
https://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2009/11/greatest-adventure.html
Greta posted stories about support for transgender people.
When I was on Guildcafe (site started by people who played Guild Wars, but intended for people from all MMOs and maybe other game types), there was a female person who posted on the forums about how, in her work, she encountered many people who physically or genetically did not fit into traditional gender classifications. Out of the small pool of people who visited the site, and the even smaller pool of people who used a photo of themselves as their profile picture, she was the most attractive person.
The second story Greta posted, from @transgender_together, says,
Transgender people are increasingly targeted.
The number of anti-trans bills proposed around the world has steadily increased in recent years.
Trans people, particularly transgender women of color, continue to be targeted with violence and killed.
I'm not linking the original post by @transgender_together because it's a multi-image post, and Instagram has decided that since my browser hasn't been updated in four years, it doesn't need to serve a webpage that allows me to view more than the first image. But I will link this:
https://www.instagram.com/transgender_together/reel/DWFR-Rfje9o/
I didn't bother watching to the end, and Instagram doesn't let me see its full duration so I don't know how much I didn't watch. This is honestly something that has been lost in the discussions by people like J.K. Rowling. I have no idea what she thinks about this, because I have never seen it come up in the Chirp Club posts she has responded to or in replies to her there.
I mentioned in the only 2013 post that's currently published (which of course, I republished after having hidden it, in order to show Greta that I had mentioned climate change that early on) that a male player had protected my female paladin Jinsuu in World of Warcraft after I acted like I was AFK after losing an item roll. We had earlier done the Verigan's Fist quest chain together, going to places like Blackfathom Deeps and killing the elite mobs outside of the dungeon, although we probably needed to recruit additional players for the Shadowfang Keep portion of it. And I think he was part of a PvP raid I organized on Sun Rock Retreat in the Stonetalon Mountains, which would have consisted mainly of me and him killing guards, as no other players in the raid were high enough level to do so. (We would have been in mid-40s, I think the guards would have been lvl 40, so it was not at all easy to kill more than one guard at once, and the flight master and his enraged wyverns were too high-level for us to threaten.)
Would he have protected my character if she was not female? He asked me at least once if I was female in real life, and I did not give a clear answer. I sent him mining ores and stuff, without ever asking or expecting him to give me any items. So if I was dishonest by not telling him my real-life gender, I did not benefit from my interactions with him.
In Aion, there was a male player who sort of made an 'advance' on me. It was brief; I don't recall the details. I think he asked if I was female in real life, and I said no. The next day, he claimed not to remember anything that had happened. I sent him an in-game mail with an apple (worth almost nothing) and a million kinah, the in-game currency: a healing potion was worth 1k~3k kinah. I vaguely remember that I referenced the apple at some later point, like maybe with a letter with the subject 'apple'; I just remember that he got higher level and so started grouping with higher-level players, and maybe wasn't having too much fun, while I had basically stopped leveling except through the unwanted experience that I got from crafting items. (My in-game status was, "I am a turtle desu", referencing my lack of leveling.) He might have voted in at least one of the polls I made on the forums, about fixing PvP and making the game more fun (so that it wouldn't die, but it did). Once again, if I deceived someone by playing a female character, I made sure that I did not benefit.
Noting that the person who had a female character in Aion named Caelasa knew that I had a female character (necessary to mention, because our characters were in different physical locations most of the time we talked) and still 'made a move' on me. My response to this was to say that I was 'taken', which is passive language that would more typically be used by a female, and it turned out that this was false: I was not 'taken', shown by Mei's refusal to meet me about six months later. So I could be said to have made an implied lie here, that I was female, and also the unintentional lie that I was 'taken' when I was not. I sent this person Caelasa a thousand health potions with the subject 'For the war effort', but I still don't consider the matter resolved, even though my character has been renamed due to activity, I don't know if friend lists would still be active even if this person's character still exists, and in general it would be difficult — but not impossible — for Caelasa and I to communicate again. So I have done my best to ensure that if I lied to Caelasa, by possibly suggesting that I was female and by saying that I was 'taken', that I did not benefit.
A lot of the violence that transgender people receive is because they benefit financially from acting as the gender which they say they are. They do not always benefit from acting as that gender: for example, Justine Tunney, who created the website occupywallst.org, in 2012 or 2013 posted a photo of herself holding up a sign, but also posted credit to the person who had taken the photo. If a photographer takes photos for free, without receiving publicity in return, it is a favor to the subject of the photos, but giving the photographer credit makes it more transactional: the photos for publicity. If Justine Tunney had received a favor in an unbalanced transaction, there could have been the possibility it was because of her gender.
Transgender people have to consider the possibility that people will think they are lying. This is just their situation.
I think a bigger problem is the 'love makes you evil' meme. Is it bad to want to have children? Is it bad to prefer that someone you fall in l*ve with is not transgender, which could preclude the possibility of later having children?
Greta's latest posts on Instagram.
This is like how when Israel accuses groups in Gaza or Lebanon of using human shields, and putting military assets close to civilians. Storing arms in civilian buildings instead of on military bases away from any civilians.
These groups do this because they are weak. (Whereas when Israel obliterated entire families because they stood on the roof of their home to prevent Israel from bombing it, only to get bombed anyway, it did not mean that Hamas was using them as human shields, just that people did not want to lose their home.)
What was the law that Hamas used when it reportedly executed people after the truce, a few months ago? People who had cooperated with Israel or whatever.
Israel has not executed anyone because of the new law, and it's unclear if they ever will. The images mention a German who was executed after being illegally abducted and then put to trial; if Israel executed someone under the new law, then it would no longer be possible to mention that German as the last person to be executed. Why call for nations to break ties with Israel because of this law, but not call for them to stop supporting Palestine due to Hamas's (purported, I did not look into it) executions of traitors?
Calling it "based on ethnicity": Hamas, or whatever group is in charge if the agreement that Hamas would no longer be in charge was followed, cannot execute Israelis for trying to destroy Gaza because Palestine is weak. Although it captured many Israelis, it was more beneficial to keep them alive. Israel can easily capture more Palestinians and so they hold no value as captives for the political equivalent of ransom. If Palestine was strong, it might be just as willing to execute Israelis captured under circumstances which would not qualify them as prisoners of war (for example, commandos who don't wear military uniforms are generally recognized as not being afforded the status of prisoners of war). And so, because of weakness, Palestine does not do one bad thing (threaten to execute prisoners) but does another bad thing (hide military among civilians).
Killing 50k or whatever civilians is certainly worse than threatening to possibly execute prisoners who have been convicted (fairly or not) of particularly bad offenses. People just move on to the latest problem, which is exactly why Israel thought that it could get away with taking over a bunch of land, 80 years ago.
Discussion here: https://youtu.be/aI7J2wJw3u8?t=1184 (19:44)
"How do I keep on living and putting effort into every day knowing I will probably not live in a couple of years because of a looming invasion the inability to change the situation all while the environment [becomes worse]"?
— the fact that I edited that reminds me of when Greta promised not to use bad words. It might have been her willingness to use bad words that brought attention to her. So it could have been interpreted as saying she was not trying as hard to get influence that could be used to fix problems.
Anyway. There is a long discussion, like I disagreed when at 23:02 he said,
"You will not be punished for not actively trying to solve all the world's ills. Solve what you can, but don't beat yourself up if it's not everything."
But then he says at 24:43,
"If you want to do that heroic thing, go for it. If you want to take on the world's ills, go for it. The world is not — we are not hurting for people that want to help. We are hurting for people that can. [...] We are short on people who actively actually do things that do change the world."
Well. Would Imane have shared the idea before I stopped emailing her, if she had known I would write almost 60 weblog posts addressed to her? Perhaps me saying "you shall be rid of me" was deceptive if she thought that I would not start writing these posts. But I stopped watching dramas as a consequence of her not sharing the idea: a consequence I imposed on myself, not one that she asked for, but if she did read my emails then I consider it fair to blame this slightly harmful outcome for me on her. If she had demonstrated that she cared about me being able to continue watching dramas, she would not have had to deal with the consequence of possibly being unsure of whether I want her to receive these messages, since I'm not emailing them to her.
30 Mar 2026Pey hasn't streamed WoW in 25 days. I'm not too worried, looking at the stream she did a week later. But suppose she reads this site, and posting here was a valid way of communicating with her, and suppose she shared this idea. I think she would fail to get people to use it.
"I checked Imane's Chirp Club account by accident since the tab reloaded because the process associated with it was gone, and I won't check her account again unless I think that Ellie thinks that Imane reads the weblog for the idea"
31 Mar 2026
"in three days for real, if nothing interested has happened, I will check if the person on Reddit replied to me and post about WoW there, and probably also say something to Camille Cooke" 01:23
post Token DKP on classic plus, how to fix leveling in retail
story coherence
Result: people would look stupid for not sharing it. A result that would not have occurred, or at least not to the same degree, if someone more famous had shared it. Every day that passes that someone famous doesn't share it, it gives people with less influence this dilemma: share it and risk making everyone look stupid, or don't share it and have a 100% chance of more people being killed in Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, Myanmar etc.?
So I was even thinking of trying once again to get Ghostcrawler aka Greg Street to share it. His MMO shut down:
Fantastic Pixel Castle (Project Ghost) will be shutting down as of November 17
I had just posted this on wowclassic.plus, and like a lot of the suggestions I've posted (without saving them locally) I think it's broad enough to be relevant to other games:
Turn the PvP system into a way of identifying skilled players
Classic is lacking this at the moment. 80% of players in the survey want arenas, 66% want rated BGs, 66% want Heroic dungeons, 50% want Mythic dungeons, and 40% want multiple raid difficulties, but the problem is that these are all instanced content. You are not really helping other players, and interacting with other random players is — for many players — what Classic is all about. Helping those on your faction, and fighting with those on the opposite faction, which creates a problem for players on that faction which they then can solve by helping each other.
So all of the above systems, that are present in retail, could give a way to identify skilled players, but it would be measuring players doing activities that don't help random players on the same faction the way that participating in world PvP helps them.
Players want to be seen as skilled. If the way to do this is to queue up for instanced content, then retail has shown that players will do it. But why not make the way to do it to find and defeat difficult opponents in world PvP?
Players are used to thinking of the honor system as just a way to get gear. This is certainly what it becomes when everyone can eventually get to Rank 14 by doing battlegrounds for 2 hours per day. But what if we remove gear as the main reward from getting a high rank, and make the rank itself the reward? Gear could still be earned from PvP, just don't associate it with PvP ranks.
The most obvious problem is that the PvP in the Classic phase before BGs turned into roaming death squads. This is because the honor calculation doesn't care about numerical imbalances in fights. It's hard to penalize people for grouping: people already complain about XP from mobs being split in groups, even though there's a bonus, so a group of 5 players that kill a mob worth 100 XP each get 28 XP (140 XP total). If a 5v1 kill of a player worth 100 honor is split with no bonus, it's 20 honor, and having a penalty would make it seem even worse.
But if the honor system is like a ratings system, where points decrease for losing or dying, then grouping can have a penalty of more points lost on death (and fewer points lost if outumbered). It's just too complex to describe in this already-long post.
What with him temporarily renaming his Chirp Club username to @occupygstreet, a clear reference to Occupy Wall Street, it felt he wanted this idea to be used if it would, in fact, reduce inequality, but he was presented with the dilemma mentioned above, as well as maybe the complication of Sherine's involvement. Considering that Sherine deleted her Chirp Club account, I think it's safe to say, 13 years later, that Sherine is not going to publicly share this idea.
He talked about AI in Oct 2025:
AI may one day accelerate game development. But it’s not happening today. All of these layoffs are just to cut opex and make the stock prices go up. It will lead to empty portfolios for the next few years. https://nitter.net/Ghostcrawler/status/1983346428983554501
I mean layoffs happen for lots of reasons. But if a company is claiming they don’t need workers because AI is going to make their games or movies or books today, that’s a little premature. (It’s better at music.) https://nitter.net/Ghostcrawler/status/1983351116097359965
I’m sorry for my friends at Amazon who were trying to keep the MMO dream alive https://nitter.net/Ghostcrawler/status/1983351685784518744
He says 'the' MMO dream, not 'their' MMO dream; compare all the videos I've been watching about modern MMOs being bad.
I do think it's remarkable how 'AI' has gone from inventing fake court cases in a lawyer's thing that they submitted in court without checking the references, to being used by software engineers to call functions from libraries that the programmer doesn't know about, due to the vast number of available libraries.
https://nitter.net/yokoono/status/2020589254208827400
I understand the purpose of the game mode.
I wanted to create a new chess game, making a fundamental rather than decorative change.
You've heard the story of Napoleon playing against the mechanical Turk?
Shortly thereafter, Napoleon attempted an illegal move. The Turk returned the piece to its original place and continued the game. Napoleon attempted the illegal move a second time, and the Turk responded by removing the piece from the board entirely and taking its turn. Napoleon then attempted the move a third time, the Turk responding with a sweep of its arm, knocking all the pieces off the board.
You wrote in 1966,
There comes a moment when you feel like maybe you want to cheat, or you want to convince your opponent which pieces were yours.
Who invented the rule that you can't move white pieces that start on the other side of the board? Is this rule listed somewhere that players can see it? Just because the setup looks like the setup in a traditional chess game, why should players assume that rules, or even goals, are similar?
It immediately dispenses with the idea of war and a battle, because if you are the same, you don’t have a war. Who are we fighting? And why?
You start to really understand that it doesn’t matter. We’re together. We’re on the same side. You realize that it’s not important to win.
I just think of the scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance that begins with this, and ends with an explosion:
Mari Singing Scene in English & Japanese
The video description links to an upload of the full scene in English. It's a stark contrast to the attitude of the main male character leading up to his first battle, best described as 'unwilling'. This is, of course, partly an intentional subversion of expectations: people expect males to want to fight, and males expect females to shun fighting.
Rather than linking a video of monkeys fighting in Thailand after tourism decreased during Covid lockdowns (they look the same but still fight as two big teams), I will just say that I have written (in emails, not necessarily here) about how war is related to the 'hidden problem', causing people to fight when they otherwise wouldn't want to.
But most people already understand it to some degree. Just like they would agree that it would be better for an economy, and it would create more jobs etc., for someone to distribute $1 billion to 100 million poor people, giving them $10 each, than for them to give it all to Elon Musk, who apparently now has $840 billion.
Another video that I didn't watch, but a comment:
Random videos that I clicked on:
Gen Z's Baby Bust — I watched about a minute, until it showed the survey with 60% focusing on improving their financial situation.
Have not watched:
Gen Z men want babies. Gen Z women don’t. | The Gray Area
Why Black Teen Takeovers Keep Happening Everywhere
Note similarity of players in WoW not being able to get groups if their predicted performance is 5% lower than some threshold, to people in real life not being able to get jobs. Each person sending hundreds of job applications or maybe dozens of college applications, and job openings receiving thousands of applications per posting. In both cases there is some limit on the number of openings, and there has been an increase in the ability to filter for 'ideal' candidates, according to an imperfect measurement process. Maybe good candidates now spend less time finding a new job after they leave one, precisely because other people (perhaps those without 5+ years of experience) are less likely to succeed in their search.
If someone gave me your phone number, I wouldn't call you. (I don't even have phone service, but supposing I did.) If someone called you on a phone and then handed that phone to me, with the ringing tone interrupting to suggest you had answered, I wouldn't say anything. If you said "hello", I would say it back and then fully expect you to hang up. If it was a video call, I would immediately try to cover or hide from the camera.
Just kind of funny when this is the 58th post addressed to you.
