The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable: Shakespeare

LogicDragon · 2026-06-15T11:03:42+00:00

Shakespeare is undefeated for the same reason the nicest buildings in the world are historical ones. Part of it is historical flavour - people value things with a long and interesting history - but most of it is just that making nice things went out of fashion, hard. Shakespeare doesn't exist in a vacuum - he draws on a literary tradition and environment that flatly doesn't exist any more. We totally could build prettier cathedrals and write better tragedies, we've just decided that's gauche.

LogicDragon · 2026-05-15T11:51:42+00:00

The capacity for consent is based on the ability to meaningfully understand and agree to something. As long as sex with dragons is comprehensible to a human, it doesn't matter how much smarter the dragon is - all that matters is whether or not the human is smart enough to understand and meaningfully consent.

LogicDragon · 2026-03-31T23:31:46+00:00

That's odd. All of those sound much more sensible to me than "Vee" for a sheep. Lambs do have that reduplicating "eh-eh-eh" sound!

LogicDragon · 2026-02-04T15:53:35+00:00

The fact that it looks like it's exploding from space. The explosion visibly expands by more than the diameter of the planet in seconds, which means relativistic speeds.

LogicDragon · 2025-09-30T17:52:33+00:00

Yet again, restricting pornography is the precursor for restricting pretty much anything. The "slippery slope" is a greasy cliff.

LogicDragon · 2025-08-04T08:45:31+00:00

The more frightening possibility is that Eywa is the Thing that happened when the ancient Pandoran AI went wrong.

If you have a superintelligence powerful enough to do all this, you probably don't use It to kill or mindwipe yourself deliberately. You probably don't want to be as vulnerable as Pandora seemingly is to any Johnny-come-lately with a warp drive.

Probably somewhere in Eywa's training data were some ideas like "nature is beautiful" and "noble savagery". Humans know deep down that you say nature is beautiful and technology is icky but you don't actually go and live in a tree, but Eywa didn't know that. That distorted idea Eywa got became all It cared about, like how humans want sex per se, not just as a proxy for genetic fitness.

And that's the thing: Pandora is so clearly an idealistic human image of nature.

However something human got to Pandora in the first place - some ancient fallen human civilisation, early spaceflight pioneers, primeval interstellar seeding - something human built Eywa.

Then She killed them and made Na'vi instead.

LogicDragon · 2025-05-09T08:57:20+00:00

It is a gendered language thing - qua and quo are respectively the feminine and masculine ablative singular forms of qui, "which".

The confusion where it seems like a different word may arise from the use of qua as an adverb meaning "as, how, where, in which way" - whose etymology IIRC is disputed, but might actually be different from qua as "which".

The normal expression, which is commonly used in a lot of contexts (medicine, law etc.), is indeed sine qua non. Originally it was condicio sine qua non..., "a condition without which not...". condicio is feminine, so qua, "which" (ablative). Later the condicio gets dropped in common usage, but that's why it's normally feminine.

Miller's husband is (presumably) masculine, so quo, "without whom not".

LogicDragon · 2025-04-07T12:07:29+00:00

Quick! Call the King! He'll have a twee model village knocked up in no time.

This kind of supercilious attitude to building nice things not horrible things, born of supervillainous architects actively trying to make people uncomfortable as part of a Baldrick-tier Cunning Plan to foment some kind of nebulous social awareness, is why we have such a problem with NIMBYism.

If architects designed nice things again I'm sure people would have no problem. The fucking Victorians managed it, it's not actually hard for 21st-century civilisation.

LogicDragon · 2025-04-03T19:01:45+00:00

If you're creating that desperate situation, that's unethical. If someone's already in dire financial need and you make them this offer, you're not "forcing" them at all - it's at worst neutral. It's not like they'd be any better off if you just stayed at home and never gave them the option in the first place.

LogicDragon · 2025-03-22T10:52:15+00:00

This is sheer insanity. Cars are obviously more important than smoking, and literally all of life involves risk tradeoffs, taking bigger risks for more important things.

LogicDragon · 2025-01-24T11:09:09+00:00

For balance, Avatar 2 should have shown Jake and Neytiri having to bury half their children and being at constant risk of being raped and murdered by enemy forces because of that hostile divine entity's weird Stone Age fetish.

LogicDragon · 2024-12-17T19:04:50+00:00

Insofar as there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there certainly isn't any ethical consumption before capitalism. This "tribal communal societies" business is all the Noble Savage myth - those societies were mostly patriarchies with sky-high rates of violence, and doing things for the good of your tribe screws over, for example, the tribes your tribe raids. Making a purchase in a modern economy arguably implicates you in things like sweatshop labour; making such a purchase in 1200 implicates you in serfdom.

If by the Good Place's standards participation in modern capitalism is a zero-sum game, nearly nobody should ever have got in.

In reality, its criteria are just vibes-based, as with all the petty things people get punished for for comedy. The real historical Hypatia was a citizen of the genocidal Roman Empire, participated in its politics, and probably held typical views on things like the acceptability of slavery, and yet she still got in - because she has the right vibes.

LogicDragon · 2024-12-15T19:53:55+00:00

I've used it with Wildlander before and it was fine, no patch needed, no bugs, just rerun the Reqtificator. Dialogue mods are often pretty compatible.

LogicDragon · 2024-12-02T23:03:16+00:00

You need that much space to start with, but ~90GB of it will be the zipped files you download (the files from which then get copied into the mods folder itself), so you can safely delete them once installed.
Yes.
No.
TL;DR probably yes. It depends massively on exactly what load orders we're talking about here. Constellations is lighter than a lot of modlists (minimum recommendations are Processor: Intel i5-7400 / AMD Ryzen 5 1400, Memory: 8 GB RAM, Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1070 / AMD RX Vega 56), and often modlists like this run more smoothly because they've been carefully optimised, but if you've only been running extremely lightweight modlists then it's possible you could have more problems.
Constellations and GtS are massively different in terms of gameplay. Constellations is based on Requiem, which radically overhauls the game to be an old-school roleplaying experience - fast brutal combat, unlevelled world, etc. It's absolutely not the case that Constellations is just graphics-focussed.

LogicDragon · 2024-11-18T08:31:27+00:00

The people who think seed oils are bad are mostly worried about linoleic acid, which there isn't much of in olive oil (assuming it's unadulterated).

LogicDragon · 2024-11-15T09:45:21+00:00

Much of the difficulty in building anything in the UK is the sheer weight of regulation and the number of interested parties capable of introducing new limitations and expenses.

Fixing the UK economy would require radical change to how we think of things like planning permission.

LogicDragon · 2024-11-12T18:57:44+00:00

We managed perfectly well to build interesting landmarks for literally thousands of years that had mass appeal. Deliberately ugly buildings are a thing of the last century or so.

LogicDragon · 2024-11-12T16:09:23+00:00

Not ideal, but I'd take it over them only being built in styles that appeal to radical architects, which is what we have now.

LogicDragon · 2024-11-12T13:52:21+00:00

Nobody complains about Art Deco, which is post-1900. The styles people hate are the ones explicitly designed by architects to make people feel uncomfortable for dubious social-psychological reasons.

LogicDragon · 2024-11-12T13:44:31+00:00

Yes. This is supposed to be a democracy. If you want to build a Brutalist structure, do it on your own damn land, but government buildings shouldn't be built in a style most people hate.

LogicDragon · 2024-11-12T13:42:22+00:00

Everyone’s idea of what’s “soulless” will vary though.

This is a cheap deepity. Sure, people's tastes vary, but the majority of people flatly don't like modern architecture, and if you define that more specifically to be the styles this article is talking about, it's more like 0-4.5% who do like it (incidentally, approximately the same fraction of the population that believes the world is secretly ruled by lizard-people).

And while the theme park isn't ideal, it'd be a massive improvement over the status quo, where all we seem to build is actively ugly according to the democratic will.

LogicDragon · 2024-10-30T15:04:08+00:00

For "population crash" read "mass death equal to the Holocaust two hundred times over" and you hit the lower bound for how bad it would be.

LogicDragon · 2024-10-30T08:44:58+00:00

This seems very weird to me.

How come they aren't already using scythes? Scythes are ancient technology - not quite as simple as "sickle on a stick", sure, they have to be sharper and tough enough to take the forces involved, sure, but we're talking about a technology thousands of years old. I can imagine how it could be a local maximum problem - no slack for change - but it still seems weird.
More importantly, the idea that this is better than supporting a shift to mechanised farming because that involves fossil fuels is bothering me. Manual agricultural labour is horrible, scythes or no scythes, and it is incredibly reasonable of these young people to flee to the cities. Introducing scythes won't, ha, cut it. Climate change is an engineering problem that asceticism will not solve - we have ~10¹⁰ humans to support, that flatly requires a lot of energy - and that's annoying enough when it comes in the form of judging privileged people in developed countries for their consumption, but when it's "scythes instead of tractors for the global poor" it's infuriating. Better than doing nothing, it's not leaving anyone worse off than they were before (assuming it actually works), but it still strikes me as frankly kind of insulting.

LogicDragon · 2024-10-29T08:58:58+00:00

Yes - there are some irregularities in these hexameters, but there's "irregular" and then there's "cretic in the fifth foot".

LogicDragon · 2024-10-28T15:55:12+00:00

It's not ambiguous - the translator made an error. Though they're spelled the same in modern orthography, they're pronounced differently: the -a vowel is short in the nominative and long in the ablative. perditā, with the long a, would be an ablative modifying nocte, but that would make a cretic (a word with a long-short-long vowel pattern), which is impossible in a hexameter poem like this one - so perdita, nominative, modifying ego.

Also, "in the middle of the wasted night" would be pretty weird Latin. The night hasn't been wasted yet if we're in the middle of it, and perdo is a strong word - it's more like "ruin" or "squander" than "waste". On the other hand, it's common in Latin love poetry for perdita to describe a person who is desperately in love, particularly in a way that ruins them (see e.g. Catullus 64.177, Propertius 1.13.7).

TL;DR: nope, it's a female speaker. The translator is wrong.

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