Basement Whatever
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Category: Post
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There is an interesting distinction between what the actual professional military people want out of these games and what they find successful in them, and the kinds of things that hobbyists pursue in wargames. Clara: The hunger for wargaming fell off after World War I and World War II. You also make this point about…
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When the economist Tyler Cowen was in Chicago last month, I asked him why he keeps talking about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). He said it’s because it’s abundantly clear, after his conversations with government officials over the years, that they have files on things they don’t understand (he basically says the same thing here). So…
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Their fate [secretaries] is the subject of this essay, and a lens to think through the implications of AI for work with a bit more nuance than “LLMs are a scam” or “white collar work is doomed.” Perhaps those all-or-nothing predictions will turn out to be right! But honestly I doubt it. Instead I think…
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The patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, a major figure in the drive for Italian unification, described the Italian family as the “country of the heart.” In his typically prophetic voice, Mazzini wrote, “There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less…
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…I came to know Kurvitz and Rostov, the creators of Disco Elysium. We were idealistic back then and wanted to live this romantic life, having an art collective and a political commune, etc. But in reality, some of us moved in together as flatmates and started a blog; it was like 2010 when blogs were…
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Benedict Anderson claims that newspapers created national identity. Specifically, the development of print capitalism meant that suddenly people across the country were reading the same words over their tea and coffee in the morning, and (per Anderson) this massive shared ritual created a sense of kinship across millions of people who would never actually meet…
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…there’s a strong affinity between the pulp fantasy story and the picaresque, which is probably no accident. The picaresque is a clear antecedent of “adventure stories” of all sorts and many pulp writers latched on to the Picaro archetype as an ideal vehicle for telling lurid, sensationalistic tales set in far-away lands. I contend that…
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“Robbie and I were sittin’ on a plane an’ like it’s first class, so you get a couple o’drinks, an’ I said to Robbie, ‘Y’know, there are these Apollonian people…like, very formal, rational dreamers. An’ then there’s the Dionysian thing…the insanity trip…way inside.’ An’ I said. ‘Youre an Apollonian…up there with your guitar…all neat an…
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sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them. We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels. Like in Slovenian, some vowels prefer particular tones. Like in human language, there’s a lot of coarticulation (a process when you say “tense” but the word sounds…
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About a political group underrepresented in the Trope Land of garbage that passes as major media discourse these days: For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight…
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More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith offered a simple way to think about economic growth. He argued that prosperity depended less on grand strategy, and more on a small set of conditions that allowed ordinary economic activity to proceed with confidence. He summarized them as peace, light taxation, and a tolerable administration of justice.…
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Nobody’s saying things have been going great in America over the past quarter century. Instead, the right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes. But it’s not some huge secret why it seems…
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Nietzsche believed that life denying philosophies were inferior. This included Platonism, with its rejection of Homeric morality. Christianity, as the dominant force thousands of years prior, got particular attention. Nietzsche believed the ideal was life-affirming: Accepting one’s fate, accepting reality as it is, and still finding joy in it. And I think that according to…
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Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.…
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Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes — Read…
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Black holes are a logical place to look for advanced quantum computing by other civilizations, and we have the technology to spot if this is happening, according to a new paper. The paper argues that any sufficiently advanced civilization would use black holes for quantum computers. Full paper here. And speaking of advanced civilizations, understanding…
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The Church of Graphs is dedicated to the meta-belief that knowledge must be formalized and quantifiable to be worthy of consideration. It demands that its adherents reject the evidence of their own eyes in favor of official facts and figures stamped with the imprimatur of a priestly expert class. And: I’m here to argue that…
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“No parents, no babysitter, no iPad to Facetime Mom. No Ring doorbell for check-ins. You’re just alone.” Was this the first time in history this happened?
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You are a skeptical media analyst with decades of experience spotting spin. Provide a critical daily news summary for [today’s date or past 24 hours]. First, list the 6–8 biggest stories dominating headlines. For each: Highlight any clusters of similar stories that suggest coordinated messaging. Rate overall media hype level (low/medium/high) for the day and…
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E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb “to be,” has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. And: …one can indeed write and speak without using any form of “to be,” calling this subset of the English language “E-Prime.” — Read on…
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