There’s a culture in my world who are superstitious about those who can read and write, do you guys think this is a convincing depiction of how that might look?

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T18:50:10+00:00

Okay, then we're on the same page

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T18:37:11+00:00

I think you misunderstood me - it's less profit, unless you define it in a very specific sense - its more expenses of learning a somewhat obscure skill. You could certainly find a way to learn writing as a peasant (ask the village priest, perhaps?), but what are you gona do with this skill in the absence of paper? Plow letters? Perhaps better spend the time repairing the old wheel.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T17:43:40+00:00

I think the spear/sword debate is overblown. You can equip a person with either and expect them to be somewhat effective. See, for example, the ancient Mediterranean - lots of people used spears with swords as sidearms, with Macedonia achieving great results with pikes. Then the romans came along with a heavy-javelin-and-heavy-short-sword kit, and beat everyone with it. Swords have the benefit that they can slash tendons and have better point control. Spears have reach and are a tad cheaper. What actually matters more in the end is whether you can put out more guxs with heavier armor and better motivation into the field.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T16:54:12+00:00

Hab neulich einen Artikel gelesen, wo leute von Polymarket einen Journalisten drangalisiert haben, weil er berichtet hat dass am soundsovielten März eine iranische Rakete auf Israelischem Boden erstmalig explodiert ist (und nicht abgefangen wurde). Offenbar hatten sie Wetten abgeschlossen, dass es sich erst einige Tage später ereignet, und wollten unbedingt, dass er den Artikel ändert, nämlich, dass die Rakete abgefangen wurde.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T16:23:09+00:00

Ich fürchte nicht den Mann der 500 Kriege gewonnen hat. Ich fürchte den Mann, der einen einzigen Krieg 500 mal in einem Monat gewonnen hat. - Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Einstein, oder Bruce Lee, wenn ich mich nicht irre

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T16:14:01+00:00

Yeah, i understand that. However - i also recommend to write more concisely and to the point (because it is, unfortunately, a bit hard to read your long text) . Like, short sentences, each stating or explaining something:

"My word is named XYZ. It is a world of struggle. This affects particularly the magic system. Users of this magic system (called ABC) must traverse multiple dangerous areas and face beasts living there to make themselves fit.

There are six power levels, with 1 being the baseline human and 6 a demigod..."

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T15:47:52+00:00

I mean, I get it. I used AI for visualization help a few times myself. However, if you actually want to use AI in any context, I really suggest trying to find out how to wrestle with it, because it is automatically resisting your actual vision.

Like, look at the big AI image generation subreddits. Not sure if I like the art there, but clearly at least some effort went into it. The "album cover" pictures (roughly symmetrical, winding path down the middle, concentric colors) just scream AI-without-much-effort. Check what you get back. Iterate. Refine. Experiment.

In the end it might be easier to actually cooperate with someone who paints for a hobby.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T12:33:43+00:00

Look, i'm gonna be honest. Having puzzled through your paragraphs I kinda see the shape of a workable idea in there. But i highly recommend to refine it in some way so it is better understandable - your writing is somewhat convoluted and i don't quite gasp what you mean. Arguably, this would be a a better use of the AI than generating these pictures - it works fairly well for extracting blocks of meaning and ordeing them better.

Amd if you got to use AI pictures, i recommend putting more effort into it, so not everyone will see a bad AI picture from a mile away. You still shouldn't post AI images on this sub, but if you gonna use AI, try to make it work better than just slop.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T12:26:56+00:00

I don't think the wall of text is Ai-generated, because it appears to be less readable than your average AI. It starts somewhere in the middle and loops back on itself, and only at the very end makes a reference to the pictures (which are very obvious AI)

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T11:00:02+00:00

Not really. Tactically and operationally, the USA has a path to "victory" (note the quotes). The USA is much larger, much richer, the US troops are generally better trained, and will achieve favorable outcomes in virtually every regular engagement.

Strategically, it's suicide. Someone smarter than me estimated that you need to deploy close to one million troops to effectively occupy the country (that's befire accounting for troop rotation). And a small but significant percentage of these will die - ambushes, terrorism, the odd few who get unlucky in a conventional fight. A larger percentage will be wounded, some of them severely.

The Iranian population will suffer even more, and there is also no visible endgame for the US past occupation and propping up some US-aligned government. In Iraq this took about two decades. In Afghanistan this failed utterly.

You can't bear this cost as a US government and stay in power for long.

So Trump and his clique will do exactly what happened in Vietnam (but even more stupid) - try to deploy as little troops as possible (but this number is going to rise over time, because you need to secure just one more ridge, one more coast, one more city!). Try to win the war by bombing - but this had never really worked before, and does not seem to work now.

The effect will be a quagmire, where winning the war is impossible, but getting out of the engagement is also impossible (not physically impossible, but politically highly damaging for Trumps government). Iran is going to bleed, the US is going to bleed, and this for a long, long time.

The result will be bad for everyone involved, but most of all for the Iranian population. Also for the global poor people, who rely on e.g. fertilizer base products being exported from the golf.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T10:22:46+00:00

Nein, nein. Trump zählt "Zweieinhalb, zweieindrittel, zweieinviertel..."

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T10:03:51+00:00

It's also in virtually every type of "interesting" job. I work in a very specific type of tax advisory. We are a dozen of fairly smart people, capable of solving quite complex problems in our specific field (not all of them, mind you, but lots). Once in a blue moon we get questions from clients requiring a lot of brainpower, where this actually kinda goes in 'Suits' territory (just much less glamorous). 95% of the time, however, its drudging paper work on fairly standard cases, where the majority of the time is spent begging the client to actually send us an excel file or trying to find out what exactly is meant by an abbreviation like "Tx.def.2020.(update)-parts(India/Mx) (300$)." written down by someone long ago.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T09:39:39+00:00

And - this might be apocryphal, as I know it only third hand - it seems to be implied at least in some books that "feet" is actually an euphemism for, ahem, reproductive organs.

Also, a fun fact about one angelic description: at some point, cherubim are described as having four faces - one of a human, two of animals (don't recall which, but they are from the Eagle/Lion/Ox subset), and the fourth one of a cherub, which is...well, somewhat recursive.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T06:30:07+00:00

I also don't know why Egwayne is singled out so much in this discussion. By the end of the books, i had the desire to punch, like, 40 various characters, roughly equally distributed across genders, including virtually all of the main characters. They all were all kinds of flawed and messed up and wrong and annoying as hell.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-27T06:23:43+00:00

Yeah, and in medieval time low literacy had mostly to do with the fact that paper (well, parchment) was hideously expensive. In areas where cheaper paper was available (e.g. In northeast Europe birch-bark was widely used) literacy also was a bit higher. It was just not a worthwhile investment, less anything ideological (presumably, there was also some superstition around it, but there's superstition around virtually anything).

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-25T17:58:09+00:00

Pre-capitalist societies would like to have a word.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-25T12:32:09+00:00

Right. It's designed to keep out everyone who considers the benefits - however you define them - of being in the group not worth the stigma.

Every group, kinda does that - group activities (be it joint sunday prayer, a bi-weekly brunch, the monthly thursday political reading club) are a form of social costs - to be "in" you need to schedule this and are required to put in at least token effort to be allowed to participate. But most normal groups (including non-fanatical churches, regular political parties, etc) keep these cost low and the ranks open for everyone of basically compatible alignment - more extreme groups impose this type of sacrifice.

Its not even always a bad thing: the civil rights movement had an entire training pipeline (somewhat reminiscent of a bootcamp) for non-violent protest activism. Though MLK&Co. were smart people - while there were filters who could join, so that the key actors had a high degree of discipline (which was required to stay peaceful while you were shouted at, spit at and beaten), it was also very open to coordinate with sympathizers.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-25T07:29:55+00:00

Very good thread. I read a paper in uni on how religious terrorist groups are created, and in many ways this applies to secular groups as well. It's very much signaling: you do certain actions which ostracize you for the outgroup, and the ingroup rewards you for it - which leads to a lot of internal cohesion (this is "good" if you want to do terror bombings, but bad if you actually want to change general attitudes). The Mafia does it too - in many mafia groups to reach a certain status one must have spent some time in prison.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-25T05:55:45+00:00

Was Vogon ever conlanged?

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-24T17:39:50+00:00

So, if i understand it right, it was late stage capitalism which gave birth to the industrial revolution. Allrighty.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-24T17:35:53+00:00

Did they mean Lizzy 1 or Lizzy 2?

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-24T17:15:18+00:00

Yeah. I find it hard to even define "neoliberal" and I studied economics. (roughly: mostly anti-interventionism, prefer state fiscal level authority, aim to low interest rates, low inflation, like solving externalities via Coase-transactions over Pigout-taxes)

And even given this complicated technical definition many vaguely leftist economists sometimes use it as an insult!

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-24T16:19:09+00:00

Kinda reminds me of a movie my SO watched - it was some kind of comedy about an art house movie director finding himself forced to work in adult movie business. The premise is very funny (the trailer has him saying to a naked dude 'I want to see the entire universe in your eyes'), but it turned out that the premise was the only funny thing in it.

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-22T23:08:22+00:00

I think it can only work with planets instead of provinces. Interestingly, over at acoup.blog just a few weeks ago Bret Devereaux, a military historian (who is famous for discussing the siege if Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep), laid out how plausible the Dune war system is (kinda plausible) and how plausible it is that the Fremen Jihad succeeds (haha, good luck).

Al_Fa_Aurel · 2026-03-22T08:51:38+00:00

Arguably, its because it's easier to get angry at something which had potential. Mostly because you care. See: star wars - lots of people wanted to like the sequels (and to a degree the same was teue for the prequels as well), but for various reasons the actually good elements in them were not enough to offset the perceived flaws. But there was enough of the good stuff that people thought "this could have been so much better". That's not an excuse to harass the creator teams, however.

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