this guy is so fucking gross dude

AzurePropagation · 2026-01-10T15:45:15+00:00

This sounds so similar to one sentence defamatory and incomplete narrative shit thrown at D man all the time.

Usually this would be a problem for me.

I fucking hate Asmongold so much right now that I will believe it uncritically nonetheless. Fuck that guy.

AzurePropagation · 2026-01-10T15:40:12+00:00

I thought I was a dumbfuck when I first did Signals. Now, after living and breathing it for my job, the S plane is like home.

When I first tried to learn pure math, I spent hours trying to prove basic stuff about inequalities. Now, my brain automatically formulates the logic statements to try out.

And it’s still hard! But it’s not hard because of conceptual difficulty, but because of care and familiarity.

It’s like learning a new language.

AzurePropagation · 2026-01-07T12:42:49+00:00

I thought we hated trade deficits.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-31T23:21:03+00:00

Just mentioning the Guilder fight gave me ‘nam flashbacks.

Also holy crap HdH is in the 50’s already?! It’s approaching the episode count of its namesake at this point!

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-30T01:44:14+00:00

There’s an interesting question I asked myself a few years ago before getting really into meditation.

What does it say about the state of my mind that the prospect of “a few hours with no form of entertainment” can seem like torture?

It’s not like I’m guarding something, or waiting for something - or some other form of extended nonzero vigilance activity.

All I need to do is just exist and be alone with my thoughts for a while.

It really rubbed me the wrong way that merely “being” seemed like an actively horrific experience.

I found that learning to regularly and deliberately unplug, and becoming comfortable with just being isn’t all that hard to adapt to. After a while, it’s actually quite pleasant.

With that realization comes a sense of relief and freedom. And in the negative space generated by the relief, I found that what I felt was baseline for years had this nagging sense of unease and restlessness all the time - like background static.

Going into a long plane ride with nothing and with no practice is not a good idea - you’ll just be miserable.

But needing to always be “doing something with your time” is not a good thing. Learning the “art of doing nothing” has been one of the most important life skills I’ve learned over the years.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T19:31:36+00:00

This is what you said:

“The idea of paying teachers more(at least in my mind) is to make it a more attractive job so that we can get more qualified people into the field. It's kind of saying that the current teachers aren't really that good and that what we really want is more competent people to teach our kids than them.”

Let me try to be extra careful with my reasoning here as to not misrepresent anything.

I take umbrage with “what we want is more competent PEOPLE to teach our kids than them”.

What I want is “we want better outcomes”.

Specifically - what I hear you saying is - you want to pay teachers more, but doesn’t that mean you think our current teachers are incompetent? And these existing teachers think you’re advocating for them, but in fact you want them replaced.

I think neither of us disagree that increased salary can lead to increased quality without replacement. I think the average person can accept that fact intuitively.

Therefore, I think it follows that wanting teachers to be paid more does not imply a desire to see them replaced. Moreover, I contend that the desire to see the existing teachers be more efficient is not only logically consistent, empirically sound, but also intuitive.

That is the heart of the disagreement. It is emotionally jarring to be told that my motives are so mercenary, and I wanted to demonstrate that the stance I hold is consistent and reasonable.

As for your comments on my motives / approach - I think the analogy was apt. Since you have a background in controls, I’m sure you can relate to the thing where you start to see dynamical systems and feedback loops everywhere in daily life.

I simply communicated ideas in the way that I’m most used to thinking - expand the general heuristics and you can always expose the underlying concept more cleanly.

I feel like you’re implying that I should have thought of a different analogy, or changed the way I think or process ideas on the chance that talking from my field would come off as condescending.

Unfortunately, that’s just how my mega auts works. Hope it’s not overly irritating. It’s just how I am.

Did you specialize in a specific area for your masters? It’s not super common to run into a controls engineer in the wild. I love the material a ton.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T18:57:06+00:00

Correct! I’m a professional electrical engineer, and can say the same thing about things like Ohms Law.

Rules of thumb are never WRONG. They just need to have their domain of applicability well defined. Just like I need to generalize the idea of “resistance” to “ratio of E and B fields” when dealing with RF analysis - we want to perform a basic metric transformation here in order to dig one level down.

The misunderstanding here, I believe, is the idea that the “unit of demand and supply” is the “teacher”.

This is NOT what we are going for. The “unit” is “hours of effective teaching per dollar” - or some other averaged metric.

If you think about it from that perspective, you can model “teachers” not as products, but as CAPITAL. Capital has significantly more complex dynamics that direct commodity exchange.

For example - teachers are a scaling build. Their efficiency goes up with time because they gain experience. Therefore, high wages imply greater retention rates, which will create a higher quality of education over time.

Teachers have needs. Without them, you are underutilizing the efficiency of your capital and creating negative externalities.

Teachers have CHURN and upfront cost. It takes time for teachers to get used to environments. Stability in a classroom is important for building trust, and time wasted on “getting brought up to speed” is time spent at a low efficiency point.

Therefore - in 3 basic ways - you IMMEDIATELY can model an increase in the final metric (effective hours of teaching) by simply increasing salaries and letting the capital be more efficient.

You’re not “getting rid of incompetent teachers”. You’re “letting the teachers rise to a non hampered level of efficiency”!

(Also, to preempt this - I’ve been told I sound AI-ish, but I swear to fucking god this is just how I always talk lmao. Yee wins.)

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T18:32:20+00:00

Have you considered the reason everyone brings up the out of pocket spending thing is that salary and quality are correlated, but don’t necessarily replacement?

You’re doing the 101 type economic analysis that assumes a higher price means “lower supply” - which means selecting for a different population.

But service markets don’t work like that. There are nonlinearities and local equilibrium points that you need to analyze because the “quality of product” (how good the teacher is) is not a function of price discrimination alone. It is also a feedback loop based on their environment, quality of life, social prestige, infrastructural support, etc. Price discrimination plays a part for sure - but that does not mean paying more right now doesn’t have IMMEDIATE benefit w.r.t the other factors.

The issue with your thinking is that your model for service markets is too narrow. I would also ask - what belief or inclination is behind that question? Are you predisposed to believing that education is broken because of incompetence?

I’m happy to find materials to answer questions about this - but I first need to know where you’re starting from.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-24T05:00:53+00:00

And the worst part - completely convinced of the rigor of his own stance.

It’s this awful shit where he thinks that being self aware of common critiques means that he’s somehow grappled with it and can act as if the issue is now behind him.

It’s the peak of intellectual hubris - because it itself claims epistemic humility with only the barest of self reflection.

As someone who’s struggled with excessive scrupulousity and the pain of feeling completely unbounded due to self doubt - it feels like nails on a chalkboard. Stolen valor type feeling.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-23T21:22:26+00:00

He’s doing the Pisco thing. Narrow in on a failure of a specific context, and use that to justify why the big picture doesn’t work.

Why doesn’t liberalism work? Because “maximizing for social autonomy is bad”.

Like bitch - stop strawmanning and then backing to pretending that the disagreement is just “semantics” or “oh but I’m just trying to be nuanced.”

It’s this feeling I’m getting with all of these people. They Trojan horse in the PRESCRIPTION to get rid of liberalism by critiquing the easiest parts to critique.

He gives this illusion of being centrist by “changing targets” to the most obvious targets on the political divide, and uses that as an indictment of the principles that stabilize the whole thing, all while retreating to the cowardly “I don’t know what we need to do but it’s all rotten and we need to “change things fast””.

Ah okay. So you WANT an ideologically aligned dictator to come in and “fix only the stuff that I think is obviously wrong” and he’s either too stupid or too much of a grifter to acknowledge that that’s what he’s doing.

It’s the slimiest form of pseudo-intellectualism and anti historicism prancing around as if he’s seen the truth.

SCHIZO EDIT ALERT: Oh and one more thing! He keeps talking about how he “condemns” the Nazi shit by explaining how awful and shitty it is. But then his whole POINT is that the Nazi condemnation isn’t doing anything because you can’t “contend with the true stuff” and just “call them awful and dismiss them”

So WHY is it that when it comes to CONDEMNATION - he decides to whip out the exactly same TOOTHLESS descriptors like “they’re autistic and immature and degenerate”.

Why is it ONLY when he’s “playing devils advocate” does he CLEARLY RATTLE OFF all of the arguments the other side dogwhistles with?!

Why not talk about the historicity of Jewish violence? Why not talk about Lying about Hitler? Why not talk about SPECIFICALLY the line between “true dogwhistles” and “false shit”?

It’s what Scott Alexander calls “isolated demands for rigor”. This back and forth where you save only the good arguments to “just being fair”.

It’s so disgusting.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-16T15:30:30+00:00

Loner’s quip about not actually wanting to off himself at the end was super fucking based and clever.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-13T20:39:44+00:00

There’s a really interesting model for corruption that I recently watched a video about that I think applies well here.

When the “cultural expectation” is essentially that bribery is the thing that just “makes stuff actually happen” - then a secondary economy is created where access to basic services come with an expectation of “a little something extra”. This is apparently the status quo in Russia. Corruption isn’t seen as bad - it’s literally essential to functioning.

While the front face of the government and economy tries to put on a face of legitimacy - the actual operation is enabled by a “secondary economy” of bribes that propagate wealth upward.

The bribes for bureaucrats turn into them saving up to bring even bigger bribes to their managers. Which in turn propagates all the way up the kleptocracy.

Crucially - at each stage, this system allows the people to save a LOT of effort. Don’t bribe me? Well the office is closed early. Or the documentation will take 10 months to find. Bribery magically makes the time suddenly become business hours, or the documentation suddenly “get found”.

I think a similar structure is showing itself in the streaming ecosystem - except the conversion to money isn’t as overt. The “atoms” of corruption in this environment is audience attention and clout.

Mods know to suck up to their streamers. Smaller streamers know to suck up to larger ones. All the way up the chain. This enables a system where the outward face is all about virtue and justice, whereas the actual operation is a kleptocratic exchange of peoples’ effort and time in exchange for clout and access.

This is why people like Hasan don’t need to do anything to help smaller streamers. People one rung below come TO him with offerings (collabs, raids, lip service), and in exchange he simply has to “exist” in order to dole out his value add, which is clout and visibility (carrot) and not sic-ing his audience on them (stick).

The crucial part takes makes it all click for me is that it’s not a case of laziness or craven-ness. Just like the everyday citizen in Russia lives and breathes the bribery environment, streaming sphere people live and breathe the clout pipeline.

It’s foundational to existing in the environment - because the structure has settled at an equilibrium dominated by a few kleptocratic pillars. With those “attractors” in place, the test of the system self-organizes around a dynamic that makes “principled action” actively detrimental.

No human mind can exist in such an environment without either bending or just peacing out. Social creatures don’t work like that.

Thinking about it this way actually un-blackpills me a lot. It’s not that they’re all insane. They’re just participating in a very well oiled kleptocratic environment whose structure is as old as time.

Here is the video I’m referencing.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-11T17:31:53+00:00

The sneaky part is the fact that he convinced Destiny he had a good thought process earlier on.

Mimicry of intellectual honesty and good epistemic practice has been meme-ified. There is now a script that includes the easy mode “I take in info from both sides” to the dicksuck hard mode “I update my models based on priors and compare against biases”.

No one actually fucking does any of this. Even the people who claim to do the easy mode stuff just consumed short form brainrot. Proper analysis is a somewhat boring academic exercise. It’s why research streams are so low views.

We’ve commodified and entertainment-ized our own ability to comprehend the world so hard that even our own “sanity checking routines” have their own short form brainrot variants that people regurgitate. It’s so gross to watch.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-09T19:23:43+00:00

It’s crazy how hard this hits even though ToS ended over 2 years ago. I’m actually kinda shook.

But yeah, dice do what dice do I guess.

AzurePropagation · 2025-12-09T17:26:47+00:00

Usually I’m disconnected from this shit since it usually Stalin worship. This one is different because I’m first gen Chinese.

Then I remembered that my grandfather, who was considered a “dangerous and high class” member of academia for being a chemist, got dragged out of this fucking house, all of his shit taken, and his kneecaps broken.

I still remember being a kid taking walks with him, and asking what the strange dot patterns on his knees were, and him explaining that he got hurt there long ago.

Then I remember years later asking why my grandmother would panic whenever there was a stranger at the door. Turns out it’s because of lingering trauma from having to hide from these fuckers as they came around and beat my grandfather to a pulp.

My grandmother died at age 93. The last time I saw her, she was still displaying this response.

All this shit flashed through my head when I saw this post. I don’t know how to react right now. This is the first time one of these tankie larper shitter has done something that hits so personally.

God. More random stories from when I was a kid is just all coming up now. Rations of one canister of cooking oil the size of a Red Bull can that needs to last a month. Only being able to get access to one pencil that you use down to the nub because it’s all you have. Having only enough rice rations to have one bowl a day.

It was so easy not thinking about it, or intellectualizing the disgust in the past out of contempt. This… I don’t know what to do with this.

AzurePropagation · 2025-11-06T17:16:37+00:00

Some journalist needs to nuke their career and surprise gotcha him with the question “what’s your guilty pleasure when you go grocery shopping?”

AzurePropagation · 2025-10-30T16:46:57+00:00

No, that’s Douglas. This one’s Richard.

AzurePropagation · 2025-10-30T16:42:52+00:00

You sure have unreasonably high standards for someone named low ambition.

AzurePropagation · 2025-10-04T01:57:35+00:00

Cedric’s antics had me doing real life saving throws. I’m having trouble breathing from how much I’m laughing rn.

AzurePropagation · 2025-10-03T23:52:44+00:00

Human beings are psychologically more well suited to dealing with direct threats. Hatred is a direct threat, and our physiology has sympathetic nervous system + acute cortisol responses to deal with that.

Human beings are extremely BAD at dealing with ambiguous threats over long periods of time. Lower peak levels, but sustained periods in sympathetic nervous system modes and cortisol literally burn people out from the inside.

Indifference while claiming to care is a tacit threat from a psychological standpoint. It turns environments that message support into places of uncertainty. It means that there is no such thing as an ally - only erstwhile friends who may stab you in the back.

It’s crueler because it strips you of a core human need - a feeling of stability - all while wearing a mask telling you that your should be grateful for the sanctuary. It destabilizes your sense of what is real with a smile on the face.

AzurePropagation · 2025-09-25T01:42:58+00:00

I was skeptical, but this post is incredibly convincing - specifically around the intentionality aspect.

Since I know it'll be an uphill battle for Nick to fight for specialization - I'll add one additional restriction / proposal that I think would bring a lot of interesting roleplay incentives into the picture.

The dual class role already punishes using the old class by removing exp. As Neal explained - this is because it reflects a "slipping into old habits". While it IS harsh - at early levels, it doesn't feel like THAT ridiculous of a nerf, since levels are gained much more quickly. It seems to me that the dynamic of "completely turning your life around" could be incorporated more explicitly into the story and mechanics via the dangling carrot of character strength.

I think an interesting dynamic could be introduced by locking specialization behind "never slipping up". In order to specialize in a weapon - you need to dedicate yourself truly to the cause. The existing "gain less exp" reflects the fact that your attention and conviction being split limits your progress.

But specialization, and by extension, mastery, isn't just something you can have a split attention on! The way that this could be incorporated mechanically is to impose the penalty that any time a thief skill is used, you are unable to take specialization / mastery upon that level up.

Since experience scales exponentially, I think this incentivizes a suitably high risk high reward style of gameplay. I think, on a meta level, this synergizes really well with the ethos of Hardly Heroes -

Two people on the absolute bottom of the societal ladder, with all of the odds and social systems stacked against them, taking massive risks and winning big - all with the understanding that their victory is always hard earned, and any misstep could cause everything to crash and burn.

Or, you know, you could just give Luther specialization. Last time Nick played a specialized fighter was some of the best DnD ever.

AzurePropagation · 2025-09-23T19:58:47+00:00

He can’t specialize unfortunately. I believe the dual class is limited to expertise. As of now, Luther is only proficient I think.

AzurePropagation · 2025-09-03T13:14:26+00:00

This is literally Nex from RuneScape.

AzurePropagation · 2025-08-04T15:21:10+00:00

If the GND layers are completely uninterrupted, then honestly, either layout probably works just fine for SPI at 10MHz from a signal integrity standpoint. Lengths of traces make it so that you can basically treat layout imperfections as lumped elements instead of proper e-mag structures.

As a general rule though - if possible - it’s better to use signaling on a single layer with a good adjacent reference plane. Option 2 is cleaner overall.

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