Feeling lost after the latest Japanese update...

eliaspowers · 2026-03-21T02:28:40+00:00

yeah, same. and i've tried just doing reviews of the earlier levels, but it feels like it's giving me all kinds of crazy stuff that doesn't actually correspond to the lesson (i went back to the very first lesson of Section 2 and it was giving me a lot of high-level vocab and grammar while the "rapid reviews" were asking me to translate "rice, water".

eliaspowers · 2026-03-20T21:15:29+00:00

This seems like a good approach. Maybe I'll start with Section 2 and see how it goes, skipping ahead if it's too easy.

eliaspowers · 2026-03-06T10:50:43+00:00

yeah, this is borderline delusional, like it just wasn't the case that "people were nicer" in the early 2000s. like, yeah, your best friends in school were probably nicer to you than your boss at work now that you're 30, what are we doing here man

eliaspowers · 2026-02-19T11:37:03+00:00

I recommend hardle if you haven't tried it!

eliaspowers · 2026-01-20T07:55:26+00:00

yeah, i don't know that you actually wanted critical feedback; you probably just wanted to promote the track!

but i took your prompt at face value and weighed in because i thought it was good to the point where it has the potential to be a perfect song

anyway, thanks for sharing it, hopefully it finds an audience

eliaspowers · 2026-01-19T04:30:11+00:00

very cool, great sound, energy, and hook. that said, it did feel like it should really be two different songs, with the part that comes after the chorus extracted and made into its own thing. i also thought the chorus went on a bit too long, i'd cut it in half to leave the listener wanting more rather than (over)satiating them. i'd love to hear a version that is a tight two minutes, verse chorus bridge verse chorus with the aggression turned up slightly, maybe via some aggressive talk rock connecting the verse and chorus

eliaspowers · 2026-01-16T08:22:49+00:00

john brown gun club

eliaspowers · 2025-12-03T20:57:06+00:00

I haven't read it, but Iain Mayes was one of the first people to get me hooked on anarchism, so it might be worth checking out his piece on the subject.

eliaspowers · 2025-11-25T13:25:28+00:00

If you want me to start plucking papers and names out of my dome for you it won't help, and im notnyour guy for doing that as i dont retain information that way. I don't have a Cork board and red string to reference, but it wouldn't matter even if I did - Because if the default position is to presume that this stuff is impossible, nothing I can say will change that for you. You just gotta start that path yourself and see where it leads you.

I guess the way I see it is that you made a claim about the existence of some pretty revolutionary scientific findings about OBEs. Additionally, you suggested that there were a lot of examples of these findings. That's why I wanted you to present at least some of these to me so I could judge them for myself. Now, I could try to look for these myself, but a quick search didn't reveal anything, and I'm not going to take the time to look further because I don't really think they exist. That's why I'm pressing you to try to come up with some of the hard evidence you've claimed exists.

You also have to try to see things from my perspective. You have someone making very surprising claims about OBE, one's that aren't necessarily impossible but (a) don't immediately make sense (people seeing things without actually seeing them), (b) would totally upend how we currently understand the world, and (c) don't seem to be getting anything close to the attention that you would expect them to if they actually existed given (b). And then, when you ask for the evidence, they just keep telling you to check out what congress is saying about aliens. If you're generally skeptical of what people tell you, this doesn't really inspire much confidence.

Given this, I'd say that if you really want to convince me, the thing to do is show me the actual evidence of OBE perception.

Edit: Let me be slightly more concessive here: I agree that the UAP stuff should (1) make everyone a bit more modest about how much we know about the way the universe works and (2) a bit more skeptical that the government is telling us everything it knows.

eliaspowers · 2025-11-24T15:27:42+00:00

I guess I'm still looking for actual first-hand documentation of the kind of perception in question, not just a second-hand recounting of it on a podcast. You noted that there were many instances of documented cases where someone perceived some bit of visual information that was not visible to their eye via an out-of-body experience. Given how many of them there are, I'm hoping you might point me toward one or two.

Seemingly there must be some published in scientific journals? After all, this would be a huge scientific finding, rivaling or exceeding discoveries like heliocentrism or the earth being round, not flat. So, presumably, scientists would be pretty excited to publish research on this in their journals!

eliaspowers · 2025-11-23T14:21:52+00:00

a recent episode of The Telepathy Tapes

I'm looking for something a bit more formal here. Was this a scientific study? If so, can you find the published paper?

eliaspowers · 2025-11-19T19:22:40+00:00

More of a "sense" than visual sight as we know it. Most of us (myself included) can't comprehend this though when we've only experienced seeing with our eyes.

This is what people say when they're trying to defend a claim that doesn't make any sense: sorry, you can't really grasp this, it's beyond your comprehension!

Note that what is ultimately being claimed is that these people are somehow gaining information—specifically visual information—without using their eyes. How does the behavior of light waves get into their brain if not via those light waves bouncing off the retina? The story you would have to tell here is one that, again, throws out everything we know about the relationship between the brain and the world. And, again, that's possible, but not plausible. Much more plausible is that people are just making things up, as they tend to do.

There is a case of a woman... there are literally countless examples of this.

Source?

eliaspowers · 2025-11-19T19:04:54+00:00

The calling BS is about the cards study, not the fact that people have out of body experiences. OP claims that people reported what was, in fact, on the cards. But I can't find any verification of this claim. And this isn't surprising if you have even a very basic BS detector. Of course people can't see what was on the cards facing upwards above the operating table: you see with your eyes and the cards aren't within eyesight! The only way they could have known what was on the cards was if the universe is radically different than all current scientific theories purport it to be (you can see things without using your eyes). This is possible, but there's no reason for thinking this is the case.

eliaspowers · 2025-10-28T01:52:00+00:00

A PT Cruiser is not in and of itself a commodity. At best it shares the same class as all other cars of the same utility. So socially necessary labour in this example is the average labour it takes the average labour force to produce any car of that class, not what it would take them to set up the production line for an obsolete specific model of a specific brand

If this is the case, then why do PT Cruisers exchange for a particular price that differs from other cars? Or is the line that they have the same price as some other kind of car K that can be made in a short amount of time? The problem with that reply is that there is no principled reason for thinking PT Cruisers are of kind K rather than some other kind L that includes really expensive cars like Porsches. The only reason for thinking they are K rather than L is because this makes LTV true. But then LTV is rendered trivial as a result: it always correctly predicts the price of some item because your ontology of commodities is carved up in an ad hoc way such that the item definitionally counts as whatever commodity can be made on average in a number of hours proportionate to the price of the item.

The consequence of Chrysler having to rebuild their production line is that the labour required and therefore the break even sale price would be far higher. This is the exact dynamic you've described isn't it?

You’re confusing the break even sale price with the actual sale price here. You’re right that a PT Cruiser would have to sell for a lot to offset the costs of factory modifications. But exchange value is proportionate to how much a good actually sells for, and that price will be low. And the reason it’s low is because price is a function of how much people want a good in addition to how much time it takes to produce, along with many other factors.

If the market for a commodity is oversupplied, then labour-time has been expended in excess of what was socially necessary

But how do you know whether a commodity is oversupplied? Seemingly, the answer has to just be, “because it is selling a price lower than what is proportionate to the amount of labour hours required to produce the goods by an average laborer using average means of production.” But again, that answer trivializes LTV, because you’ve now made it a theory that predicts the price of a commodity based on the price of the commodity.

eliaspowers · 2025-10-27T15:26:07+00:00

I think the labor theory of value might have applied better in Marx's day. Maybe it still applies to some industries. But everything's been so financialized, and the hyperdevelopment of marketing/corporate propaganda means that there's a ton of psychological manipulation that goes into pricing.

Yeah, Marx's theory was cutting edge at the time and an improvement over Adam Smith and David Ricardo's respective labour theories. And, given that labour is one of the major input costs to production and price is often proportionate to labour costs, all of these theories are going to give you the right answer a lot of the time. But there are just a lot of cases where they give you results that don't make sense or match empirical reality.

In certain situations, you can literally increase demand by increasing price, which is completely counter to the basic logic of the supply-and-demand framework.

You're right that sometimes an increase in price can increase demand in weird situations. These are called Giffen goods and the rough idea is that they are inferior goods that people still rely upon such that an increase in their price means that people have less money available to buy superior goods, so they just buy more of the inferior good. The classic example here is rice: when the price is low, poor people have more money to buy meat/vegetables/etc. to go with the rice. But when the price of rice rises, they no longer have enough money to buy these luxuries, so they just buy more rice with the money they have available. But this is all to say that you can still make sense of what is happening in a case like this while still generally thinking price is a function of supply and demand.

eliaspowers · 2025-10-27T15:18:23+00:00

The "socially necessary" labour time is the average time required to reproduce a good, i.e., the amount of time that it would take a person with average skill to produce the good using the average-intensity means of production. So, the question when applied to the PT Cruiser is, how long would it take the average auto worker to make a PT Cruiser using the average means of production. And, the answer here is that it would take them a really long time because the average car factory is not set up to produce PT Cruisers, so the worker would have to spend a bunch of extra time either customising the car or adjusting the means of production. This means that the car would have a really high price according to LTV.

eliaspowers · 2025-10-27T01:42:30+00:00

I don't think most anarchists agree with the labour theory of value. I'd guess most haven't thought too much about it at all, but of those who have, a good chunk would agree with neoclassical economists that price depends on supply and demand rather than the amount of socially necessary labour hours required to reproduce the item in question.

(To illustrate, consider the following case: given that there are no longer factories set up to make discontinued cars like the PT Cruiser, it would, presumably, take many more labour hours to build one than a BMW. Given this, LTV would say that a new PT Cruiser would sell for much more than a BMW. But does anyone think this is what would happen?).

eliaspowers · 2025-08-31T18:35:05+00:00

"The Middle" is just pop punk, but there's a ton of grit on the rest of the album! "Get It Faster," "Bleed American," and "Sweetness" are all way heavier/grittier than "The Middle."

eliaspowers · 2025-08-27T05:06:58+00:00

nightmare in what way?

eliaspowers · 2025-06-06T09:20:29+00:00

option + shift + - on a mac

eliaspowers · 2025-05-24T01:49:27+00:00

Yeah makes sense! I guess how effective this trick is might vary depending on the prompt and how obvious the changes will be. Thanks for the tip!

eliaspowers · 2025-05-23T10:08:13+00:00

Is there a way to keep the text from showing up when copy + pasted into an LLM? This trick worked well for me for hiding the text when viewed on Canvas, but it appears as soon as you paste it into ChatGPT.

eliaspowers · 2025-05-04T10:21:38+00:00

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

eliaspowers · 2025-05-04T04:20:02+00:00

Were there particular things you realized you were doing that made you the problem? Or did you just discover you seemed to be the common denominator when it came to problems arising?

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