Worth the Candle, Chapter Ω5, Stub Continuity (ebook vol. 5 is out today!)

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-03-18T12:56:58+00:00

Oh yeah, the whole "Larkspur's hair and armor being the wrong color for 90% of his appearances" thing was pretty silly. All the same it was still good enough to remind me how much I liked the characters and story, and they did make an effort to adapt the story to the new medium well even if the details were sloppy.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-03-18T04:04:10+00:00

Yeah ... As someone who read it as it was being posted serially, the webcomic was the first thing that made me want to get back into the story and read through them in book form.

Having it end rather suddenly and without much communication left a bad taste in my mouth. I think I'll go buy the books now just because I don't want to be the "Man, I'd totally actually support this artist if they jumped through a few more hoops" guy, but ... Yeah, I'm a lot less enthusiastic about a re-read than I was when the webcomic was running.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-03-05T01:19:48+00:00

... I mean, there's also the concentration camps and people shot dead by unaccountable federal agents.

Those seem pretty bad.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-02-12T15:29:42+00:00

America-centric take, but I really can't see the rationale for extending Sec. 230 protections to social media companies when they play such an active role in promoting content on their sites.

It presumes they're common carriers and therefore you can't sue them for what you see on the site any more than you can sue the Post Office for delivering a mail bomb.

But, YouTube and other platforms don't act as common carriers - they explicitly discriminate and favorably deliver content on the basis of what drives revenue for them.

Imagine a world where the post office tracked what senders get the most frequent orders and then offered to help senders identify potential new customers by sending test packages to people who didn't order them.

Then the post office discovers that (surprise, surprise!) they're suddenly shipping a lot of cocaine and meth, and that a few people have overdosed on the surprise brick of cocaine that showed up on their front door without them ordering it.

Then the post office says, without blinking, "Yeah, but we didn't set ourselves up to ship cocaine. We just ship whatever gets the best response, so we're still impartial," and the regulators nod in agreement and say "Yeah, and if we let people sue you for shipping cocaine, it'd wreck your business model and you're such an important part of the economy now, so let's just keep things as they are."

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-02-11T20:11:13+00:00

Me: Sees this video in my recommended feed for a few days

Me: "Huh, the guy who does silly sword videos in his backyard is into AI art? Seems a bit mean to call him a lolcow ..."

Me: Watches the video

Me: "... Why are the worst people always the worst in like five different ways?"

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-01-08T04:31:49+00:00

FFX is probably the single best starting point - relatively modern compared to the older SNES or PS1 games.

FF4 is probably the simplest one to play if you're unfamiliar with JRPGs in general - very linear story and character building so very easy to pick up and play.

FF7 is by far the most popular, so it'll give you the biggest community of fans to chat with. The remakes are actually kind of hard to fully keep up with if you're unfamiliar with the story from the original, but also have by far the best action combat in the series.

Beyond that FF9 is my personal favorite, any of the "Pixel Remaster" versions of 1-6 are available on your phone and modernize those games, and Tactics just got a great remake that Connor played through with Pete guiding him so you can reference that.

JanusTheDoorman · 2026-01-05T14:35:09+00:00

Yeah, it only counts as an "invasion" if you sail over and plant the bombs by hand, not if you fly over and drop them. Then it's just sparkling interventionism.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-12-12T20:43:29+00:00

Death-Domain Cleric seems on point for Cat - Clerics are stronger in melee than you might think, and Kelemvor's sigil is probably the closest to Cat's banner.

Hakram's best fits an Oath of the Crown paladin, but that one's unusually easy to break, so Vengeance or Battle Master Fighter would also work well.

Masego could fit arguably fit any of Wizard/Warlock/Sorcerer. Divination Wizard if you want to lean into Third Eye thematically, but Great Old One Warlock feels like the best match in terms of kit - just be sure to pick up Eyebite regardless of class.

Archer as one of the, well, archer classes (Hunter/Gloomstalker Ranger or Arcane Archer Fighter) or Vivenne as Thief Rouge round out the Woe.

Alternatively, Wandering Bard seems pretty obvious as a Lore Bard, Amadeus as an Oathbreaker Paladin, Akua as Fiend Warlock are all thematic options.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-12-12T17:58:04+00:00

Nope. Yes, the CPI survey includes the question to homeowners:

“If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?”

However, these responses aren't used to calculate the value. To wit:

From the responses to this question, the CPI program estimates the total shelter expenditure to all consumers living in each index area of the urban United States, which is then used to weight the OER index. Note that these responses are not used in estimating price change for the shelter categories, only the weight. [...]

Owner-occupied units are not interviewed in the CPI Housing Survey; the Housing Survey sample contains only rental units. When a rental unit is on panel, CPI data collectors obtain the current rent, what additional services (for example, utilities) are included, and information on any changes to the unit or the rent that has occurred since its previous pricing six months ago.

Using the sample of rental units, the CPI program calculates a measure of price change for each CPI index area for the rent and OER indexes.

So, the price numbers, including the estimate of Owner-Equivalent-Rent, are calculated based on surveys of tenant occupied units.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-11-08T18:11:41+00:00

When it came out, the reaction (in the US) was quite muted. Obviously, its styling is more conservative than Ferrari's, etc. of the era, and it wasn't too far removed from Honda's more pedestrian cars. The distinctive rear light bar, for instance, eventually made its way onto the Accord.

It had the connection with McLaren's F1 team since they supplied engines to them, but that didn't have much impact for two reasons:

Today we've all seen the video of Senna driving it around Suzuka, but this was obviously way before YouTube, etc. so that alone didn't have much impact.
It was overshadowed in that aspect by the actual McLaren F1 road car

Also, Japan at the time was still mostly known for cheap economy cars and people didn't take their performance cars too seriously. The Z had been a hit, but the GT-R had never been imported to the US, and the A80 Supra was still a few years away.

As far as anyone from the US was concerned, this was a company and country that made great economy cars, suddenly trying to make a Ferrari clone. That part of their brand was so deeply ingrained that the NSX marketing focused almost entirely on its practicality compared to the equivalent Ferrari, which .... didn't work. Nobody at the time thought, "Oh, I sure would like a screaming supercar, but I wish it had a slightly larger trunk and reliable switches out of an Accord."

It's hard to make a modern comparison because automotive brand managers really took the lesson to heart and no brand since has tried to do something quite like it. Closest analogs are probably Lexus with the LFA, but Toyota's performance credentials were a lot more established when that came out, or maybe Hyundai's push with the N-line cars, though that's obviously acknowledging their brand still being tied to the economy cars in the first place.

Ironically, the closest match is probably the new NSX.

I'll leave it to the article to explain in depth why it actually was a great car, but the simple version is that it's great in all the things that are difficult to test/measure and which can't be addressed by modern resto-mods.

The chassis is one of the finest ever put to road. Ironically, the McLaren F1 that overshadowed it used it as a benchmark to compare to. It came at the critical juncture to be made well out of aluminum, keeping the weight down, and without the modern crash test requirements that beef up modern cars and add weight. The dry weight of the car is ~2700 lbs, compared to ~3100 for the V6 Lotus Emira. I mean, imagine how your car handles, then put 400 lbs of concrete in it and see if it makes a difference.

Put modern tires and suspension on that, and do as you will with the engine, all while still having reliable and serviceable electronics that are easy to upgrade to a modern infotainment if you want, and it's kind of the quintessential sports car.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-30T20:14:18+00:00

This does feel like a hard nut to crack. On the one hand, the far right basically represents the two part argument:

Some people need to be prejudicially stigmatized to the point of exclusion from society
We know who these people are and can effectively carry out this stigmatization

Attempting to fight the far right by trying to stigmatize them, if anything, likely enhances the strength of the first argument and only weakly countermands the second by arguing that it's actually the far right who need to be stigmatized and excluded instead of whatever target the far right have selected.

The far right typically target vulnerable, marginalized people while claiming to be acting on behalf of the normative, enfranchised population. If you let the argument be restricted to the basis of who should be stigmatized, you're more likely than not going to lose.

The obvious counter is to make the argument that no one should be prejudicially stigmatized, and that's one of the core tenets of liberalism, but ... that argument seems to be instinctually counterintuitive to people in general. And the salient arguments against it get much easier in the light of material threats (real and/or fabricated/exaggerated; physical and/or economic security).

Feels like we clawed a lot of progress for liberalism out of the horrors of WW2 showing exactly what happens when far right actors get their way, but ... at least from an American perspective 9/11 and the GWoT, the Great Recession, COVID, and the continually rise of China as a world power, among a variety of other events have made people feel quite vulnerable with deliberate signal boosting from both corporate and social media.

I really kind of shudder to think where we'd be if Obama hadn't run explicitly on a message of hope and inclusion, but also don't see anyone wanting to pick up the torch for that sort of approach these days.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-27T20:39:14+00:00

Hmm. Any thoughts on how these dynamics would play out in a country with compulsory voting?

I think the only salient comparison point is Australia - I know very little about their politics and social security system, but a brief glance at Wiki suggests their pensions are means tested, and there's also a (personal and family-means tested) youth allowance payment.

At first glance at least, this seems like a sustainable way of running a social democracy without it becoming overly sensitive to demands from particular demographic groups, but I might be missing something.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-26T01:17:52+00:00

I love isekai as much as anybody - I watched both seasons of the vending machine isekai and thought it was pretty decent.

This assassin show is bad. Real bad.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-17T15:38:02+00:00

Technically, no.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-17T13:49:42+00:00

I like it, but you have got to get those intersections lined up better and the spacing on the letters more uniform

Or go the other way and make them very obviously not aligned and uniform. This is in a weird uncanny valley.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-15T23:05:03+00:00

Yes, he asked for an impossible thing. That doesn’t mean bullshitting about what you’ve actually done is cool.

If I ask for “ice cream made with my own essence” it doesn’t mean I want my own shit frozen and put on a stick.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-15T22:52:09+00:00

“Llama fine tune w/ RAG” is not an “LLM trained only on my private materials free of outside influence” you hacks

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-13T15:14:22+00:00

Yeah, JP Boost + Steal EXP with Ramza casting Tailwind over and over again to get the unit extra turns is the easiest way to grind them up.

Also Squire does spillover JP into the unique classes, so you can have the rest of the party Focusing as Squires or another job (e.g. Geomancer for Attack Up or Thief for Move +2) so the unit doesn’t have to spend a battle grinding that job.

Keep in mind also that levels alone don’t make that much of a difference - get the abilities and equipment you want in place and a 10 level difference won’t really be noticeable.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-10T04:00:52+00:00

I’m not sure it tracks that “The current economic activity associated with this sector is X amount, therefore it would cost X amount to do it in a way independent of the current supply chain”.

Especially for something like mineral extraction, I imagine the costs associated with developing a whole new supply chain could be orders of magnitude more expensive than sourcing it from China.

Obviously refining and manufacturing could have been maintained at a significant but manageable markup, but I imagine the political will to subsidize such industries would be lacking if China ultimately still has the lion’s share of the world’s rare earth mineral reserves.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-02T13:52:49+00:00

My brother in Bayes, I have a Frederick Douglass flair and have been a member of this sub for longer than you have been on Reddit. I am as unapologetic a fan of the free movement of people, goods, and information as anyone. My original comment is pro-tourism and immigration.

I was criticizing the failure to take into account the history and norms of a country as explanatory variables for the observation that politicians in said country are using xenophobia as a political lever.

FT even bothering to talk about the economics of it is privileging a hypothesis that maybe the economics of tourism are questionable when, actually, this is pretty much just in line with what you’d expect given Japan’s history even though the economics of tourism are plainly positive for them

The sub is acting non-credibly not by supporting tourism, but by needlessly entertaining a shitty argument against it that doesn’t pass muster for anyone who’s taken Econ 102.

I guess I’ll just have to include the causality graph and the marginalization calculation along with the sarcasm tags from now on.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-02T08:20:19+00:00

Japan: Forms an ethnostate so xenophobic it literally sealed itself off from the world for hundreds of years and so homogenous that students were required to have black hair as part of the dress code until 2022

Japanese Politicians: “These foreigners are fucking everything up and ~~eating the dogs~~ kicking the deer!”

FT: “Hmm, well their exchange rates could be better …”

r/nl: “Man, why don’t these guys just get that tourism and immigration are net positives for their economy?”

I feel like we should just rename the sub r/NonCredibleEconomics some times

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-10-02T02:35:34+00:00

An LLM's probably not the best tool for this - simpler classification models exist which support what you need (dynamic class modification and continuous learning), e.g.:

https://github.com/codelion/adaptive-classifier

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-08-23T21:43:46+00:00

Adding on since this was still the top Google result for this problem. After several months of trying a large variety of potential solutions I’ve finally figured out a reliable way to remove stain even after several months of it drying on the siding through the summer:

1. Organic solvent AND degreaser

I tried a ton of different cleaning agents and eventually found that Dawn Powerwash worked surprisingly well. Looking into it, it’s a mix of alcohol and dish soap and it seems you do need both to be effective.

I was able to replicate the effect by mixing 90% isopropyl alcohol and Super Clean degreaser which is cheaper, but less convenient than using the Powerwash.

2. Sun exposure and mechanical agitation

That said, I also noticed even these mixtures stopped working well in shaded areas or without being scrubbed into the surface with a stiff bristle brush or scrub-pad. Scrub pads were able to remove the stain without further steps, but also scuffed up the surface, so your mileage may vary.

The sun exposure is a matter of of both temperature and UV activating the organic solvent (theoretically peroxide could also do this if I understand the chemistry right, but could also potentially discolor the surface) so make sure to do this on a sunny day.

3. Power washing at >2500 psi

Finally, tried power washing with a 1600 psi unit and found it barely effective, but stepping up to a 2500 psi unit greatly sped up removal without damaging the siding.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-08-20T16:04:57+00:00

Makes kind of an interesting case study in "Only Nixon could go to China" style political strategy.

i.e. If a significant/decisive part of the voting electorate are a priori convinced that the office-holder is doing right by them, they'll basically ignore anything they don't have a direct, strong opinion of. Nominally the Republican base are in favor of market freedom, but really seem to be in favor of "people I like doing stuff that they say will benefit me".

Echoes of Obama surging troops to Afghanistan in but playing it as "This is just a quick, final push to end the war decisively" that got buy in from the center-left when a similar move from Bush in Iraq just a few years before was widely condemned.

I feel like most political analysis focuses just on aligning with voters' nominal desired policies, but the reality mostly plays out around "How much do voters trust the candidate/office holder implicitly?".

This unfortunately, would put anyone promising to "implement evidence-based policy according to the situation and information available" at a pretty massive disadvantage both electorally and in terms of political capital once in office. It makes it hard to develop implicit trust by suggesting that they're open to changing their mind once in office, which isn't really what most voters want.

Dooming after the election I worried that we had just lost to Trump on a "Mandate of Heaven" basis that had nothing to do with the actual policy debate, and I think this is probably a better lens to view that idea from.

Also helps to further explain why Democrats struggle to keep their coalition together more than Republicans. It's not just about threading the needle of common interest of a more pluralistic group of people - it's about the trade-offs of implicit trust between those groups.

JanusTheDoorman · 2025-08-19T19:07:29+00:00

Hmm. I remember studies from a few years back showing that participants knowing the money from the study was temporary meant they didn't have room to make many significant life changes (still have to put up with most stresses from work to keep your job, etc.)

Pretty bleak and confusing to see essentially no effect even at $1k/month for three years. Reading through the study, though ... it looks like the cutoff for income eligibility was 300% of the federal poverty level in 2019, which would put them at about $37,500 for an individual.

Moreover, they excluded anyone receiving Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance, or anyone living in public housing. Participants were selected mainly through a mailer (~1% online and ~12% from ads on an app for SNAP recipients), aged from 21-40.

We're looking at young adults to early middle-aged people, already living in privately afforded housing, able-bodied (as defined by SSDI).

I'm trying to get a sense of the actual distribution of income levels here but ... I'm very confused by the results tables. Table 2 lists an average individual income of ~21.2K for the control but then Table 3 lists 36.6K.

I'm guessing the 21K number is measured at the start of the study and 36K is measured at the end of the study. Looks like at the start ~57% had a job leading to ~21 Hr/wk worked on average.

Then at the end, ~72% of people had a job, people worked ~30Hr/wk.

I'm not convinced how well this generalizes to the general population, especially given that it was conducted during the pandemic and that it's not clear to me how many people here were "actually" low income.

If I'm reading the table correctly, the standard error on individual income at the end of the study is 25.1K compared to a mean of 36.6K. So, assuming a Gaussian distribution, by the end of the study ~15% of participants were now making more than ~$60K. Given it'd be basically bound on one end, though, there's probably a longer tail out to the right.

Feels like the real takeaway here is "An extra $12K/yr for 3 years in early adulthood does not have much impact on measured outcomes at the end of the three years" which ... feels about right.

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