Sunday, November 30, 2025

Deleted post

A post I made on my personal weblog, in December 2009. It was a like allegory: a very short story, which I can practically recreate from memory at much lower quality:

A village setting, before fossil-fuel-based technology, so 'medieval' or a typical fantasy setting.

Character 1 or characters, who are strangers, address Character 2, saying something like, "we have come to free your village from the dragon who has been terrorizing it."

Character 2 looks past them, at the peaceful village and fields.

In this analogy, I was Character 1, being upset at Mei, who was character 2, for things like her not talking to me.

I deleted this post at some point after, maybe within a few days, and I think also deleted some other posts that I don't remember. I don't think I deleted the one where I linked to an old post where someone talked about how they hated the word "blog" and implied that most writings in "blogs" were useless; but if no such post exists, then it's because I deleted it.

I wrote this post because by that point, it was possible that Mei knew about that weblog. One could imagine that after I wrote it, Mei could have read it and changed her interactions with me. Me deleting it followed from my conclusion that this had not happened. I don't know if she read it, before I deleted it, and so if she is alive and remembers my existence, this post about it might be the first she has heard of that post.

If I had left up this post, which appeared to be a fictional narrative with no conflict and no resolution, it could have been interpreted as a subtle critique of Mei. I think that, by this point, any possible negative consequences are now unavoidable, and I am, of course, to blame if not deleting this post would have avoided these consequences.

Regarding whether people are good or not

I just thought of two polls.

The first poll:

"Do you think it is ethical to vote for policies which take money from the poor and give it to the rich?"


The second poll:

"Do you think it is ethical to vote for policies which take money from the rich and give it to the poor?"

 

— which is really the first poll that I thought of, because it seemed like "Do you think that it is ethical to steal from the rich?" would not give a useful result, because the reasonable interpretation is that it's about an action which is illegal and usually dishonest (I was recently reminded of a rare example where someone stole money and posted a video online about what they had done), whereas voting is not illegal for most people.

Obviously, the objective is to show a difference in responses between these two questions; if the second poll (in which most people are expected to answer 'yes') was posted first, it would probably increase the number of 'yes' responses in the other poll, making the results of the two polls more similar.

(Note that stupid people might criticize someone who posted these polls, as they might interpret the order as intended to make more people answer 'no' in the second poll. Or in general, they might criticize these polls drawing attention to the fact that government policies do take money from the rich and give it to the poor, as they might feel this contributes to the weakening of these policies.)

(Confounding factor with these polls: most people do not vote for policies as in a democracy, but rather vote for representatives as in a republic, and a representative voting in a certain way could be seen as unethical if they

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Grading controversy

https://nitter.net/TurningPointOU/status/1994156726225129932

I can't comment on the quality of writing. I do know that one of the recommended and proven strategies for getting high grades on essays, like for the writing portions of the SATs, is to simply memorize a lot of rare words and use them in the essay. And so it's possible that simply mentioning religious works in an essay could also lead to a lower score: negative biases by graders instead of positive biases.

The way to determine if this was an unusually low score would be to release other essays graded for the same assignment and their scores. This is unlikely to happen, so everyone is just speculating. Maybe one side will 'win' as a result of all this speculating, and the other side will be at fault for not attempting to change this from a situation based on speculation, to a situation based on facts.

I am commenting on the fact that it was not just a failing grade, it was a 0 score. In my experience, the only way to get a 0 score on a subjective assignment is to not do it at all. This is what happened with all projects assigned to me in my 11th grade US history class, including group projects. I was too busy to do a good job on them, and so I just did not do them at all, rather than spend 10 minutes on a poor project that would receive an F score but still be worth at least half of the total points.

So, if the professor wanted to give a failing grade for this paper, with standard grading it would have been enough to give it 14 points. Instead, the professor gave 0 points.

___

Update 29 Nov 2025, 15:52

PETTAN PETTAN TSURUPETTAN (HQ)

Friday, November 28, 2025

People being lazy

I wouldn't really have much to say about this:

https://nitter.net/butterbooter/status/1994133109395345545

But after seeing it 10 times, I realize that there is an aspect of the situation that might not be obvious, and if someone was, for example, going to watch one of these videos that I bookmarked rather than watching,

The British Man Pretending to be Japanese | feat. Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper, Arin Yumi - YouTube

The definition of I just work here - YouTube

‘I’ll kill you,’ off-duty cop yells before fatally shooting man who tried to grab her gun - YouTube

No Rae, I respect you too much - YouTube

Japanese Kids Have no Filters #Japanese #FunnyKids #JapaneseVariety #japaneseshow #Japan #shorts - YouTube

The Most Shocking Japanese Speaker Ever - YouTube

PewDiePie Former Editors Conspired Against Him - YouTube

THIS Is Who Students Think Attacked Us on 9/11?! - YouTube

Elon Musk Just Doxed Everybody - YouTube

Yes, AI Will Take Your Job. But What Happens NEXT Is Worse - YouTube

then it might not be a waste of time to read what I have to say about this instead.

About using automated solutions: basically the way I re-learned how to play Age of Empires II was to the change the first player, me, to AI. When doing this, AI plays the game as normal, but you can also give commands to units. It can be a little frustrating at times due to the AI trying to countermand your orders, but it's sort of like an interactive tutorial, teaching general patterns that are broadly correct.

When I started, I remembered little: I would not have been able to name buildings like the blacksmith and university, or which buildings depend on what. Even after some months, I still thought it was a bug when I was unable to build a market, due to not having a mill. So the AI was much more competent than I was at first. And yet, using the AI did not prevent me from learning. (I still was never really able to play normally due to poor system performance, forcing me to constantly pause in order to e.g. make menus disappear that wouldn't otherwise disappear, or stop the screen from scrolling.)

About writing specifically. I don't think I ever read anything written by a classmate, or that any classmates read anything written by me. Basically, I never had a reference for the quality of writing other people could offer.

So if people's writing is bad when they aren't allowed to use 'AI', I don't know if it would have been bad even if 'AI' didn't exist. I know reading skills have been getting worse, and that Covid in particular led to people in the US having a lower quality of education during those years, but I don't know what the general trend was (for stuff like maths performance) before 'AI' and Covid.

Basically, 'AI' is available in every country with Internet. The availability of 'AI' has not stopped young people in Korea and China from being in classes for most of their waking hours. The trend towards lower classroom performance in the US is honestly not too different from something like young people being potty-trained at a later age, which has nothing to do with their native intelligence or 'AI', and everything to do with how their parents treat them.

I honestly think a more likely effect is that the use of 'AI' to write words simply results in more words. This includes words like the ones used when submitting job applications: someone using 'AI' will be (is) able to provide more unique words, tailored to specific job openings, which probably means more job offers. What if someone writing on their own can only apply to 50 jobs, but someone using 'AI' can apply to 50,000 jobs?

My perspective, basically, is of someone who saw resources like Sparknotes that were available 20 years ago as providing negative value. To be honest, I only struggled to read a book once: The Mists of Avalon, which was the required summer reading for my 12th grade class, but I neglected to start reading it until like a week before school started, and reading it (while taking notes) took so long that I only finished the essay hours before school started, so I spent the first day of school sleep-deprived. So just as I asked, "why would someone who has plenty of time for fun activities and hanging out with friends not just use that time to read the book that their English teacher has decided is important?", I would ask about 'AI', "why would someone not take the time to write their own words for an assignment?"

So, maybe someone could use 'AI' to learn how to write better by following its patterns. But if the goal is only to save time, then someone might let an 'AI' write for them without even reading its output themselves, and then they are not learning anything, but then I have to ask: what are the incentives this person has, such that they are indifferent to the possibility that they will not learn anything from school?

Not sure of title

(If anyone cares, my browser had the display bug after I checked Giggly aka Madison's account and investigated a Tiktok account that she had mentioned via a retweet)

I was thinking of naming this post Zelda, but that made me think of Robin Williams's daughter with that name. (I recently saw an image somewhere in which Robin Williams had been made to look like Link, and maybe Zelda looked like his daughter with that name but I don't really know what she looks like, so there is a non-trivial cultural awareness of her name.)

The song P. Tchaikovsky - Pas de Deux ('The Nutcracker'), used in a montage of scenes from the Zelda franchise.

I have almost certainly never watched the entire Nutcracker sequence, as a film or otherwise. Simply put, it lacks an engaging story, and I believe the prince is killed when fighting the mice near the start, before being revived or something. My youngest sister's favorite movie is probably Amadeus, and in contrast to The Nutcracker I have seen the film Amadeus more than once.

I did learn the Russian Dance Trepak from the Nutcracker on piano once, and maybe another song from it, but most songs from it, including Pas de Deux, never particularly interested me.

I don't like to say this, but it is conceivable that someone who cares about me could have the logic, "it is good if more people care about me, the person writing on this weblog. If other people don't share this idea, then I (the person writing this) will contact more people, and some of them might be female, and some of the ones who are female might end up being attracted to me (the person writing this)." So if Giggly aka Madison does not like me, it shows that people causing delays is not helpful for me.

___

Update 28 Nov 2025, 19:00

So about a Chirp Club post I won't bother to link; a quote of a post about the word 'parasocial', which got an order of magnitude more engagement than the original post itself and is apparently responsible for 80% of the original post's views by embedding it.

"A connection that someone feels between themselves and someone they do not know."

Interestingly, Wiktionary's definition,

"One-sided (especially of a relationship, as for example that between a celebrity and their audience or fans, whom they do not know)"

is saying that the celebrity has the parasocial relationship, rather than that the fans have the parasocial relationship.

Chinese version of Three Body, maybe the first episode. The detective asks the scientist if the female scientist whose casual photo he took was someone he knew, and then the detective corrects his question to state, "someone you did not know, but someone you wanted to know."

They did not know each other, but both knew the other existed. When the photo that started the story was taken, the female scientist saw that it was taken and who had taken it.

To state the obvious, it showed that the male scientist thought the female scientist was comfortable with having her picture taken, as she was an important person who received a lot of attention. Sometimes people are not comfortable with having their picture taken and they verbally object, or they ask to have the photo deleted (抖音街拍穿搭 _ Mejores Street Fashion China TikTok _ Tiktok China Thời Trang Đường Phố Ep.19 [JhrtW0iFKLs] at 2:47, +unrelated), but this did not happen.

Thursday, November 27, 2025

Suzuran

That story, In a Grove, which Rashoumon is based on. I have neither read the short story, nor seen the film. I am just referencing the fact that the husband or fiancé was angry at his wife when he was summoned as a ghost, for reasons he did not explain. And it just shows how people will hide the wrong actions of other people.

Topic: Clannad. (Why didn't I want to put this as the title? Because I didn't like it?)

This shows up on lists of top animes; did I link such a list? It shows some people being happy; then one of them dies; then the other one is unhappy.

Mei seemed to use the story as a reason why it would be better if we didn't meet. The fact that in the story, the person who dies is female and she dies during childbirth isn't important; it seemed possible that she viewed me as similar in temperament to the female character, and so she was concerned with the possibility that she would be unhappy if I died.

And there is no argument against this. I cannot control whether other people are happy, especially if I am dead.

This might be why I do not have a feeling that anyone is going to do anything to get people to use this idea. Is it about someone acknowledging their mistakes? I don't know. But if someone acts in a certain way, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to continue to act in the same way.

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Zero views

For anyone who cares, the last three posts have 0 views.

Really, all I want is to download the Douyin videos that I have bookmarked, primarily from yana826. If yt-dlp worked with Douyin, I might be able to do it in less than an hour. But it doesn't, at least not for me, so downloading them is slow and often involves a process of seeing other videos and investigating them, which is like a virus spreading where if the infectivity constant r is 1.001, it's drastically different than if it's 0.999.

It also means convincing Douyin that I'm not a bot, which meant watching random videos, including this one about the building fires in Tai Po, Hong Kong: https://v.douyin.com/0Elygm9xZFc/

You said something today, which means that it will be two days until I check Giggly aka Madison's account.

I would like to not say anything about this, and therefore gather more data on whether you have access to knowledge which you should not.

If you have such knowledge, and if Giggly aka Madison has such knowledge, then one cannot avoid asking whether other people have such knowledge.

I tried to email Pokimane around the start of last year. I didn't describe or link to this idea.

But, what if she has knowledge that she should not?

I don't think that anyone should care about the question of what kind of behavior I might consider attractive. Even though I am not in a relationship, it seems likely that if any specific person is interested in me, then whatever makes them interested in me also makes at least one other person who knows about me interested in me, which might matter if people used this idea and I was no longer poor.

But I think that in general, people like intelligence. That many types of behavior are of interest because they indicate intelligence (and that certain behaviors indicate intelligence when used in one situation, while also indicating a lack of intelligence in another situation, so it can be hard to advise someone on which behaviors they should demonstrate).

So, I am commenting about Pokimane because I watched a video from ~7 years ago in which Pokimane shows her gameplay, and also because I learned that she bought an engagement ring for herself. (And because of the fire in Hong Kong, and the fact that in checking BBC for whether this fire was an international news topic, I saw an article from today about Nigeria that linked to a 2024 article about the Chibok girls, according to which the government is paying at least $180 in education per month for each of them, but only giving them $15 for their own use.)

I think the best scenario is that Pokimane does not have knowledge that she should not have; no one who reads this post takes it seriously; and nothing happens.

I deleted or made private (probably deleted) the posts that mentioned Demi Rose Mawby. I think it's fair to say that when she acted in a way that suggested she has knowledge she shouldn't, I was a little annoyed. Before I started writing this, I was thinking of making a Reddit post, about another hypothetical scenario: something like, there is a button that will help other people, even save lifes, and your romantic interest knows this and is not pushing the button, even when you tell them to. Do you reach past them and push the button, implying that they did not do something they should have done?

For me, there is no button. But I don't think I would hesitate to push it if there was one; and based on my limited knowledge, I cannot rule out the possibility that this post will accomplish something, so it's like pushing a button that probably doesn't work.

One might say that it was hard to truly get upset at Sherine or anyone who might have been able to influence what Sherine did, like Yara or Autumn. Although I said I would move on to other actions if Sherine had clarified whether she had shared this idea, these actions are what I ended up doing anyway, years later; like using arguments that did not mention someone who committed a serious crime, and trying to get you and other influential people to share this idea.

Sherine's ability to influence other people to share this idea was always in doubt. In that sense, if Demi Rose Mawby has knowledge she shouldn't, then, it was a test: how would I act if someone who had the ability to cause change, did not?

And so I acted annoyed, and I said I was happy that her father had died, but if she is aware of my existence at all, I did not try to make her think that I was truly angry at her (distinct from annoyed).

I don't know how Demi Rose Mawby would score on a standardized test, like college entrance exams. Just that she didn't much like school, and I guess the scene from the original Addams family movie with Wednesday at the dock; I don't really remember its relevance. I say all of this out of the concern that someone would interpret my actions as that I think Pokimane is smarter than Demi Rose, based on what I saw of Pokimane's gameplay.

So: if Pokimane has knowledge that she shouldn't, I think that she should share this idea. I don't think she has such knowledge, and I think that if she does, and even if she became aware that I wrote this which would not necessarily follow, that she would not share this idea.

If Pokimane had participated in the second season of OnlyFangs in WoW Classic Hardcore, I would have watched her gameplay and perhaps reached a conclusion about whether she read the emails I tried to send to her. But she did not, and so I know almost nothing that she has done since she moved from Twitch to YouTube at the start of last year, until the recent drama resulting from her Chirp Club post on the topic of drama. (I know that she went to Japan with other female streamers.)

It's obvious that dumb people sometimes act in a smarter way than smart people. One can, for example, reach this conclusion whenever smart people are systematically targeted, as they might have been during the Cultural Revolution in China. So in general, while a stupid person with no influence won't accomplish anything by sharing this idea, a person who might not think they are the smartest, but who has influence, could cause change, and by not doing so they would be acting in a stupid way, even if they are doing the same thing as other people who scored highly on tests or on other metrics (such as Nobel prize winners, like the female Nobel prize winner in economics, now deceased, whom I tried to contact in 2011).

I would like to reiterate that there would seem to be no reason for anyone to care about what behaviors I might find attractive. I view the question of whether I could get someone to share this idea through romantic means to be answered: first by implying to Sherine that I would be in a relationship with her if she shared it (if I didn't die), and then explicitly when I offered to marry Catherine Rampell if she shared it, not knowing she was already married. (One of the very few cases where I know that someone actually read my emails, although she did not directly reply.)