From the end of the draft post, 'To Imane, pt 60', which seems like it will not be published before people use this idea:
Should Jewish people in Israel have more babies than they are currently having?
There's no reason for conflict if people have the same goals. But do people have the same goals? Decline in intelligence. I think that it's important that humans remain intelligent. There's no inherent reason to want this, and maybe not all people care about this outcome. But I think Jewish people want this. Without really knowing much about Jewish culture, I know that there are certain groups of people who call themselves Jewish who score higher on tests than other people, and that Jewish people often encourage each other (like their children) to marry other Jewish people, and I think one reason for this is to preserve a culture where intelligence is valued.
By not sharing this idea, other people are not acting like they think it's important to preserve human intelligence.
The world is in a bit of a weird place right now, with fossil fuels. It makes things easy and allows people to do stuff for weird reasons: things like fighting using those fossil fuels instead of needing to use horses like in WWI (*and WWII), or mining cryptocurrencies.
The theory behind this idea could be summarized as, "It's ok to be selfish, because people seeking their own self-interest still leads to good outcomes for the group." What if it doesn't? What if a group of people being selfish doesn't lead to good outcomes for the rest of the world? This is the test. Can Jewish people be selfish, without the dishonesty of claiming that they actually care about other groups of people in the world in cases where it isn't true?
The Beirut explosion: Jewish people being seen as bad, even when they didn't do anything bad. Why bother to be good when it isn't rewarding? And if you aren't good, why bother to try to convince other people that you're good?
So I have basically said, "be selfish". This is the phase that started with "Why economists are wrong" and was confirmed by the failure of the first petition, ~8 months later. Right now, the way for Jewish people to be selfish is to avoid doing anything that could be seen as selfish, even with perfect information: forcing the most religious Jewish people in Israel to be drafted into the military, even though those people were keeping up the birthrate of the Jewish subset of Israel. Looking like the villains.
If the way for Israel to be selfish is to avoid sharing the idea or doing anything that would get other people to use it, and to bomb Lebanon and Palestine or even to act peacefully towards them (like by paying Palestinians to move to another country, the way Russia paid Ukrainians to move to a distant part of Russia), I'm not trying to discourage Israel from taking that course of action. Maybe other cultures that are not Israel simply do not value human intelligence enough to support a course of action that would preserve it.
I don't think I could live in the world that would result. For one thing, I am not Jewish, and I have no desire to become Jewish. But I cannot deny that I have failed, and that it might be selfish for me to even still be alive. The original deadline was supposed to be when my passport expired, as my last form of official ID, which happened on 21 Sep 2019. I apologize to the people who were on MH370 for missing this deadline.
Greta mentioned Lebanon, without any possible interpretation that it was about refugees or about journalists being targeted, and I had to look up what exactly I said the consequences would be if she did that.
23 Mar 2026 "if Greta posts another image on Instagram about Lebanon without sharing the idea, it means that if Maya is interested in me, then I'm not interested in Greta"
This was partly just a reason to mention Maya. She deleted her account maybe a year after the Beirut explosion, which I treated as unimportant, and so today I finally watched footage of the explosion.
The condensation shockwave was weird at the start. In the first few frames, it's visible at the bottom, but not at the top. I ended up looking up footage of other explosions, like Sailor Hat and Minor Scale (intentional detonations with a high probability of good footage), to see if there was a similar shockwave and how it looked.
I was wondering if there were like multiple detonations. But after a bit of thinking, I understand why: above the explosion, where the fireball had passed a fraction of a second before, the air was hot. That means that the shockwave didn't form condensation, just like mist or clouds evaporating in hot air.
While looking up Minor Scale, someone in the comments suggested that Flock of Seagulls, I Ran would be a good song to match to the silent test footage. While I was playing that in one tab while also trying to watch a video about the Beirut explosion in another tab, my browser experienced a bug where a content process causes 100% CPU and the tab doesn't change visually until I manually kill the process. If this bug is caused by an outside agency interfering by sending data that causes the bug, then it could be an indication that Mei is involved with a conspiracy and that she recognized the song, which was featured in World First -- Stars vs yogg saron Alone in the Darkness 25man.
I sent a link to Mei in 2009 (the original video and kill was in June 2009); she said she had seen the footage of the fight enough times and didn't watch the whole video. But maybe she did.
My file, 'online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt' has a note on 24 Jan 2025: "comment https://genius.com/Kamelot-center-of-the-universe-lyrics"
The people who made annotations there just made the song to be about the overall frame story for the album. But, "in the center of the universe, we are all alone". In the center: not trying to hide. All alone: despite not trying to hide, no one else is affected by your actions, for good or for bad. Just do what you want.
Note: anyone performing this dance, DO NOT PREVENT THE PERSON'S LEG FROM ROTATING WHEN THEY SPIN. The left dancer's hand goes from under the leg, to above the leg, so the foot doesn't get twisted. One of these is probably someone failing to correctly do that, with serious results:
'@annikenholmen04 + @_eldrid_ beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ [7158396222615719174].mp4' '@futuremilfho3 beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fail [7162732051274222891].mp4' '@glowingfrogturds beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fall [7161954637589974318].mp4' '@heheheh331 beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fail [7161927723965943086].mp4' '@leigh.munro beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ [7160864979871108398].mp4' '@userb93051h8fu beat it - *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ ~ fail [7159517031245630726].mp4'
After the Beirut explosion, some people suspected it of being caused by Israel. But it wasn't.
"I can't believe a problem like this would happen" is exactly the kind of outcome that would be prevented with better signals. In one of my emails to Elyse before I joined the US military, I asked her, "what is an emergency?" A word that every English speaker knows. But why is it so similar to the word 'emerge'?
My conscience is clear. Like that scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
It also made me think of the end of Hogfather and the consequences of failure.
Until an ad apparently just turned on, my young female relatives were watching a movie. I have in the past tried to connect incentives to read with watching entertainment, or suggested that my brother and sister-in-law enforce these incentives. For example, having to write down the name of each video that they watch, or write down a few sentences every ten minutes about what has happened. It seems that one of my relatives, though, just needs to learn the alphabet, so the incentive that I would enforce would be that she has to write the entire alphabet before she can watch an entertaining video, even if it means she has to watch a video about the alphabet to learn it.
These incentives are not being enforced, so she is not learning to read, as much as I would like her to. Just like no one is sharing the idea, because they apparently don't have an incentive to.
Poll: Do you agree with all parts of this statement? "It's ok to do immoral things for money if you're poor, but not ok if you're rich"
Poll: In your next life, you are to be reborn as a single cell. Do you choose to be a cell in the face of a human, 4mm below the skin's surface, or an algae in the ocean?
did Detect Traps ever return to rogues? swirly ball
Benvolio https://ignoranceisblixt.com/2023/08/rj-the-death-of-benvolio/ Benvolio senses them, however, and puts up a desperate fight. But he's unarmed and is quickly killed.
Skill issue: a week or two ago, some of the images I posted had no gap between them. This is because I had forgotten that shift-Enter inserts a line break, with no gap between the lines as with the copied text above about Benvolio, even in a text field like this one where pressing Enter normally creates a new paragraph element with a separation from the previous one.
The cowardly thing to do is to say "even if the US nukes Iran, I can pretend that I don't know about the idea and so there would have been no way for me to stop it." If you never lie, you don't have to think about whether lying more would be to your advantage.
Even though Greta used bad words in her latest video, I don't consider it to have been a lie when she said she would not: I just consider it an unanticipated outcome.
If Greta knows about this idea, and knows that you know about it, and you don't share it, then I want Greta to share it.
I sort of implied maybe that even though I don't want Greta to share the idea, I want you to share it. I think I said that the best outcome would be if you and her shared it, maybe after talking, but I can't remember if I said I wanted that.
Imagine that someone I know died a terrible death. Then you ask, what would it take for me to be happy? I am just a normal human, and many people with my characteristics are happy. My age doesn't matter. The situation is basically the same as when Sherine said that she loved me, 12 years ago, and though I didn't really ignore what she said, I didn't really see how it affected me.
So that's how to think of it. If someone I know died a terrible death, I would want to address the reasons that this happened.
I don't know whether to think that something as bad as this has happened. Does Mei still remember me? Does Kate still remember me? Does other Kate or Katy still remember me? Would my oldest sister have had a different life if people had used the idea, or if I had never thought of it, or if I had never met Mei? In general, has people not using the idea since I thought of it in 2011 led to outcomes that anyone who might care about me would consider very bad, like their own death?
I thought of the circumstances surrounding the second time that I cried so hard my fingers and nose and cheeks went numb. This was all about what Mei did or didn't do or what I expected would happen. I think it's fair to say that leading up to it, I wanted Mei to act in a way that would have prevented me from thinking that the future would be sad. I try to avoid saying exactly what it was that I wanted Mei to do that she didn't do because it could seem like a criticism — the line, 「でもね 少しくらい叱ってくれたっていいのよ？」 (basically all memory on my computer was used up and it started lagging from having this single web page open: https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/ワールドイズマイン_(World_is_Mine)) from Hatsune Miku's World is Mine, which Mei linked to me, notwithstanding.
Although I did not correctly estimate the exact probability that it could occur, one of the possible sad things that could happen was someone else liking me.
So: pretend that someone I know died a terrible death. What do you do?
There are four posts that I will publish if the most recent post records 20 views. One of them is addressed to you, pt 60. When I wrote it, the most recent post was "To ???, pt 5", published 31 Mar, but I am just following what I said.
There's a different upload of the same video with eight times as many views, in 1080p, but stretched sideways. It seems that a large number of people, enough to boost it in the algorithm, do not realize that a 16/9 aspect ratio does not mean a video's quality is higher. But I'm in a bit of an unusual situation, with a 8/5 aspect ratio, so when I watch 16/9 videos there's black bars on top and bottom, and a 4/3 aspect ratio video is taller than the same video stretched to 16/9. So I have a reason to care.
Like, when I watched The Fellowship of the Ring a month ago with my sister and her daughters, the wrong display aspect ratio made it stretched sideways, but they didn't want to change it. Maybe the fact that they were sitting to one side made the stretched ratio better. But by the end, I had completely stopped noticing that it was stretched; I only noticed it in the beginning and am only assuming that it remained so for the entire viewing, as it stopped registering in my consciousness.
The editing at 2:53, with like a light bloom that makes part of the screen hard to see, is why I watched the video. I watched until 7:33 when the second song ended.
I wonder it would be interesting for someone with very little experience with WoW to watch this video, knowing that it shows a rogue, and then pick a class to play based off of what they see in the video. But all I really know is that I think it's a good video that's enjoyable to watch, and I played WoW enough to understand what's going on; and that one or two Aion PvP videos that I watched did not make the game look fun, and I also played Aion, though not the classes that would have been featured in those PvP videos. (And I considered the +20% runspeed boots in Aion to be a big part of the reason why PvP was broken, and PvP videos would certainly have featured characters with those boots, and they probably had a small character which meant a correspondingly faster running animation which looked bad, i.e. prioritizing combat results over appearance which I obviously disagreed with, etc.)
So it's possible that the reason I like this WoW video is not just because I have played WoW, but I really have no idea whether it makes WoW look interesting, or whether it's even possible for a video showing combat from an MMO to look interesting to someone who hasn't played the game and doesn't know what's going on. (I also don't know whether people who play retail WoW have any understanding of what's going on, like being able to identify every single ability that's being used and why it was used in that situation, when they watch someone else's gameplay, or whether not knowing this detracts from their enjoyment.)
The "i has a shuvel" still made me smile.
I was just listening to the music without watching it until 2:50, but I watched after that, and it made me think about the responses regarding using a PvP system to identify skilled players. Notable: the footage is from a PvE realm. 5:53 shows a duel, with the loser not dying, which isn't possible in that zone on a PvP server. But the fights at 1:51 and 4:21 take place in Horde starting zones, where even on PvP servers, Horde players become unflagged for PvP. The players he fights were already flagged for some reason, and being on a PvP server would not have meant a higher chance to encounter players in those locations who were flagged.
At 4:21: Niar is at 32% health, attacking a player at full health who is wearing the Tier1 robe and the Tier2 helm. (These are epic items that are better than what my lvl 60 mage had, but worse than the PvP epics that Niar was using.) Did it require skill for Niar to win in this situation? An argument that players seem to use is "player X is not skilled, their opponents are just unskilled." The ability use at 7:15: first frame with the first ability, Ambush, highlighted is 436.27 (using Stats for Nerds and ",." to go frame-by-frame). It fails to be used because not behind the target, but before this message appears (due to latency) it cannot be attempted again due to 1-sec global cooldown (1.5 sec for non-rogues) triggering before being cleared by the error message from the server. It starts again at 436.72. Stealth drops at 437.52, and the damage number appears at 437.65 simultaneously with the mage's health dropping. (Note that some of the delay might have been from 400 ms spell batching.)
I was watching some WoW-related thing recently, and an action registered one frame after the button was pressed. If I ping Google, it's just 13 ms; battle.net, associated with Blizzard, is only 4 ms. So one frame, 33 ms, is plenty of time for a packet to reach the server and return, if the server is processing actions immediately.
My latency from my ISP when I was playing WoW in 2006 was about 1 second (I think it was round-trip time). Eventually I was able to use Ethernet from the modem to my computer, which eliminated most disconnections due to bad local Wifi, but I was still playing with high latency.
For a rogue, there was an additional consideration beyond just actions registering later. At the upper-left is an energy tick meter: a rogue would ideally open just before it finished, which would give 20 energy immediately after. He tries to use Backstab immediately after Ambush, but because Ambush happened after the energy tick, he doesn't have the 60 energy required for Backstab, until a packet arrives indicating that Ambush apparently did trigger before the server tick, giving him enough energy.
So: a player could be skilled, and still have bad performance in PvP due to high latency. I remember Mei saying that it was easy for frost mages to kill mages, and the difficulty that I (as a frost mage) had fighting a well-geared Tauren warrior near the furbolg village in eastern Winterspring. I don't think I managed to kill him even once. My reaction time tests as worse than average, but the difficulty I had using Blink to avoid getting hit after an Intercept was mostly due to my connection latency.
Fast-forward 20 years, and latency isn't an issue for most players. So they are more likely to think that "bad performance in PvP means unskilled". Put simply, this leads to more stupid people trying to demonstrate that they are good at PvP, by learning to PvP well. PvP inherently involves affecting other people.
This probably affects the feedback about PvP ranks. It makes sense for a game to let players show that they're skilled, and yet some people believe this would be a bad thing, because (although no one did me the favor of making the following argument, so that I could more easily understand why they had this belief) it would encourage players who seek to show that they're skilled to act in a worse way. When encountering any given opponent, a player might go to greater lengths to defeat that opponent than they otherwise would, which could lead to an arms race in the use of consumables for example, or they might attack a weak player because of a slight reward for doing so.
Or, for example, they might seek to optimize their character to win PvP fights, leading to more imbalance in a typical fight due to their character being stronger, when they otherwise would not bother.
But my point is how the removal of latency, as a reason a skilled player might perform poorly in PvP, makes players view performance to be a more accurate signal of skill, which makes them more afraid to be grouped with 'low performance' players (or to desire more to be grouped with 'high performance' players), even though I just named several non-skill factors that would still affect the measurement, PvP rank, which could be used as an indicator of skill.
To put it another way: my awareness of latency, as one factor among many, made me think "of course there's never going to be a completely accurate measure of skill". Whereas other people saw the proposal and thought, "how would other players act if the developers of a game tried to introduce a completely accurate measure of skill."
There honestly might be some element of how players identify. If they imagine splitting players into two groups, "tries to be seen as skilled" and "does not try to be seen as skilled", they would probably label the first group as 'try-hards' and put themselves in the second group. Retail WoW certainly has goals, like getting a good standing in arenas, raid progress, or mythic dungeons, which only a small percentage of players try to accomplish. So an argument might get more support if it explicitly defines the groups, by forming a larger middle group into which most players would fit, rather than allowing people to implicitly group everyone who isn't at the very top into one large group with the same goals and outcomes.
I don't know if I've described these events before, but I'm treating it as though I have not.
Was thinking about my passivity. My excuse being a lack of information, and no way to obtain it. "If I ask questions, I won't get answers." But do you have an excuse? If you asked a question, you would get an answer, right?
So I thought about the time when Kate asked me a question, and I didn't give an answer. It's 16 years ago and I can only conclude that her question was, "why don't you study in your room", and not "why do you study out here", because my response was "good idea" and to immediately pick up my computer and leave.
But I felt this was an acceptable action because the implied answer was what I had said when she had asked the same or a similar question before, almost a year earlier. I had said "the light is better", and also gestured towards the windows.
Facts: in my room, I studied on my bed. The window was to the right of the bed, looking from the center of the room, so daylight on the bed wasn't very good, especially when sitting close to the wall which reduced the visible area of the window. There was a desk next to the window, but for some reason I think I never used it, other than as a place to put a glass of water.
The second time Kate asked me this question, it was late at night, probably between 10 PM and 1 AM. I might be able to identify the exact time if I checked my chat logs, with sign-in times. The illumination from the indoor lights at that moment was, in fact, very bad, for reasons I don't remember. Maybe I didn't bother to turn on any more lights when I went there to study. I think the reason I started studying there at that moment might have been because Kate left the wireless router in her room off that day, which I interpreted as a signal that she didn't want me to be there, and I only went to study there after she turned it back on after she returned home, but I don't remember.
So: under what circumstances would the implied answer of "the light is better" not be a lie? Was that why I studied in that area, up to that point when I stopped, until the day she left due to other events etc. etc.?
So maybe I don't always answer questions, and maybe I lied about why I was studying there.
I thought I would say this and not worry too much about the consequences. If you don't share the idea, it means you don't care about whether everyone has a place to live.
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?
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.")
