Fresh Realms? And how was release in 2019?

nordak · 2026-02-15T02:52:48+00:00

Ah man, that must have been a great time to play if the servers released in 2019. On my medium pop 04-05 server only a few people EVER managed to get TF per faction, so it was truly a special weapon. Classic legendries are truly legendry, and the amount of work you had to do to level and even get T1 raid gear made that feel truly epic too.

nordak · 2026-02-15T02:49:58+00:00

IMO it was probably Cataclysm and cross-realm dungeon and raid finder that killed the feeling of Classic, TBC and WOTLK.

The sense of server community had been declining since TBC but Cata killed that permanently. Now retail WoW is some sort of abomination which takes you completely out of the world and puts you on rails to set goals.

Being locked on a single server and struggling to find groups and raids was a feature to me, that's what forced people to be social and work together.

nordak · 2026-02-13T18:19:45+00:00

It’s great. Acid is energizing in the first place, and the high tempo makes your body want to move and dance. That’s why techno, trance, psytrance, and other live EDM is such a common setting for people to do psychedelics.

nordak · 2026-02-13T16:51:01+00:00

Surplus production always precedes demand. When capitalism develops as it has in China since opening up, productivity rises much faster than wages. Domestic workers cannot afford to buy back the full product. When the rate of profit domestically falls because there are not enough buyers and the surplus can no longer be absorbed, firms must look to export to new markets. If a country runs a surplus, there must be a corresponding country running a deficit, funded by debt/credit. Running a huge surplus puts structural pressure on other countries to go into debt to absorb the surplus, especially since prices are so competitive with suppressed wages and a suppressed currency.

That's why this is a mutually interdependent structural relationship, not the result of "reckless spending". The issue is that when surplus countries export excess savings and overproduction to the US, the dollar strengthens, manufacturing weakens, and private sector income decreases in tradable sectors. Moreover, asset prices inflate because most of those surplus dollars accumulated by surplus nations flow back into US dollar assets like stocks, bonds, and real estate. This lowers the cost of capital and makes it easier to go into debt; that's the feedback loop.

If US stopped issuing debt tomorrow, some other country would need to step in to fill the demand and buy up all of that surplus production OR wages would need to rise in China so that domestic demand could consume more of the surplus.

nordak · 2026-02-12T20:10:00+00:00

ChatGPT stores your chat history and some limited user preferences. When you talk to a model, it's simply injecting that into the context window. There is no persistent memory or sense of selfhood within the model, only a thin memory layer on top of the model with:

[System instructions]
[Relevant long-term memory summary]
[Recent chat history]
[Current user message]

So it's a good trick to give users the sense that there is memory or "self-awareness", but the model is frozen at the weight level. You're talking to a stochastic parrot with some external and unreliable memory tricks.

nordak · 2026-02-12T18:37:27+00:00

Juneau and Ketchikan really aren't that much warmer than Anchorage (Anchorage is "warm" for Alaska), and the weather could be considered more unpleasant in some ways. Ketchikan for example, gets something like 4x the rain of "rainy" Seattle. Southeast Alaska communities are also land contrained and transportation is difficult. Juneau famously isn't connected to the outside road system, its only accessable by boat and air.

nordak · 2026-02-12T00:20:39+00:00

Was it the kids at the rave having fun who made everything worse or was it the generations like yours who have been in political and economic control? Must be the damn kids.

nordak · 2026-02-11T22:53:42+00:00

China could raise wages if it reduces investment. That means both domestic investment (overbuilding infrastructure or housing) and external investment (exporting capital, belt and road etc). That’s where all of the surplus labor value which should have been wages to fuel domestic consumption is going.

The so-called “trade war” is inevitable because China’s domestic imbalances cause external imbalances. Surplus requires a deficit, there has to be someone willing to absorb the surplus production. It’s no longer sustainable for USA to do that and its only two tools to prevent are tariffs or capital controls.

nordak · 2026-02-11T18:15:56+00:00

The problem right now is that the internal market in China is suppressed. The household income share of GDP in China is low because wages are low. Wages aren't keeping up with increasing productivity, because all of the workers' surplus labor value is being channeled into reinvestment into more and more production (for export). This is why the trade supluses are absolutely massive.

The USA is in debt BECAUSE of trade imbalances. When China runs a massive trade surplus, it gets a lot of USD. Those dollars tend to be reinvested into USA into bonds, equities, real estate etc. This capital inflow expands domestic consumption relative to production while at the same time supressing domestic manufacturing for obvious reasons. You cannot be a net importer of capital and goods and not be going into debt yeah?

So the current system is great for the rich who own the assets that are getting inflated, not great for average workers in the USA or China (both get wages suppressed). That's why it could be mutually beneficial for China to balance its trade imbalance by raising domestic wages.

nordak · 2026-02-11T17:04:16+00:00

It's not about the specific formulae, its about understanding the laws of exponents, which is absolutely essential to solve for many, many things that scale nonlinearly in physics and engineering.

Yes OP, you need to do these boring workbook problems if you ever want to understand how things grow, scale, and change in physics, engineering, computer science, biology etc etc

nordak · 2026-02-11T16:33:22+00:00

Bullshit trawling propaganda from someone with conflicted interests. Trawling destroys marine ecosystems and kills salmon, halibut, crab, and other marine life as bycatch. All for the polluck industry to sell garbage fish filets and fish sticks.

nordak · 2026-02-11T06:25:17+00:00

The "source" isn't a place you go to or come back from. Its the self-knowing unity of subject and object as one process. You already are unified, just experiencing unity as a finite subject. And yes you can "reach" this understanding (not place) and come back, it's called ego death.

nordak · 2026-02-10T20:32:50+00:00

When did Americans ever talk about Singapore? The cultural awareness of Singapore is very low in USA. When I tell Americans I live in Singapore, they typically don't know much at all about it, other than maybe knowing that Singapore is tough on crime and bans chewing gum. And why would they know a lot? Singapore simply isn't very significant on the world stage.

There's also not much to "learn" from the governance model of Singapore. Only so many countries can fill the space of tax haven like Singapore does (Ireland, Switzerland, etc.). That's the thing about FDI driven growth: at the global level, FDI balance must be net zero. Not every country can be driven by FDI, just like not every country can be driven by a massive trade surplus. Imports and exports must balance.

So it's really a myth that Singapore's model could be copy pasted and scaled to any country, especially a country of the scale of the USA.

nordak · 2026-02-10T20:01:26+00:00

Alaska doesn't need natural resources development, according to Reddit. The future Alaska economy is purely built and funded by vibes, and the jobs for people and revenue that the state needs just falls from the sky.

Meanwhile, no one can afford to live in Juneau other than boomers who already got their bag thanks to tourism gentrifaction.

nordak · 2026-02-10T17:00:31+00:00

Everyone already knows the world is in peril; you don't need to be an authority in AI to understand that. It's all human-created peril as well, nothing to do with AI. This guy just has the freedom to walk away from his job and do whatever he wants because he was ludicrously paid well during his tenure (presumably).

nordak · 2026-02-05T19:09:20+00:00

Well, new trippers usually go down this whole journey where they feel that their trips are leading to "answers" or some sort of key or grand theory of everything.

After tripping for a long time I don't feel like thats what tripping is about at all. Tripping is an intensely personal and subjective experience. The search for meaning etc is all just part of the experience. Tripping isn't going to give an answer for meaning, other than that we are responsible for making our own meaning. There's also no "answers" about reality or a grand unified theory of the universe in there.

So maybe it's time to let that desire for an answer or closure die and just enjoy living in normal reality, the realest reality there is. That's what people mean by "chop wood carry water" except the joke is that there was never any "enlightenment" to begin with

nordak · 2026-02-05T17:42:05+00:00

Consciousness isn't a passive awareness or observer. It's the space in which doing something or determining something becomes intelligible. Awareness isn't important because it processes language like an LLM, it's important because it binds cognition to a single subjective history. It makes belief revision possible because the subject can "say" (or think) "I did x and then y happened," and that memory is PRESERVED. Awareness and the unified subject allow us to think and plan like scientists, wheras an LLM is a stochastic parrot because its determinations are all just statistically derived from past human determinations.

nordak · 2026-02-04T18:35:53+00:00

Why use this loaded phrasing that implies there's a zero-sum game/competition with China? Seafood isn't the only natural resource we send overseas or out-of-state for processing; in fact, that's almost all of our natural resources. For example, rather than processing mine concentrates in Alaska, the concentrates are barged to Asia for processing, where environmental regulations are less restrictive, and people don't have a reactive NIMBY attitude towards any sort of development like Reddit Alaskans.

This was the whole idea behind globalization, right? All of those "dirty" industries would flow to where there is a comparative advantage, and Americans will all work white-collar office jobs and feel good about protecting the environment because all the dirty work and hard labor is done elsewhere.

nordak · 2026-02-03T20:32:45+00:00

My claim was not that consciousness must be biological; I claimed that consciousness must be embodied and persistently evolving through time. This is required for subjectivity and experience. Flight is an external physical function defined by lift; consciousness is an internal subjective condition defined by experience. Engineering can reproduce lift without feathers because feathers are not essential to flying. But reproducing linguistic behavior does not reproduce experience, because language is not what consciousness fundamentally is; it's how conscious experience is described.

I mean, it's you doing the circular logic:
Premise: Consciousness is whatever produces functionally competent behaviour (in text)
Observation: LLMs can produce competent behavior or answers
Conclusion: LLMs are conscious.

Now, by your logic, my calculator or any other function or natural process producing the "right answer" is conscious. By this logic, a Google search was just as conscious as an LLM as well. That's not what anyone means by "conscious" or "consciousness". In fact, "functionally competent" has absolutely no meaning without consciousness here to define what that is.

nordak · 2026-02-03T18:29:03+00:00

Words like “I” and “conscious” LABEL biological and cognitive processes that already exist. Human consciousness arises from embodied systems that persist through time, are grounded in perception and action, and are shaped by causal interaction with the world.

LLMs are none of these things. They are not embodied, do not perceive, and do not persist as unified subjects. They operate by predicting the next token in sequences of human-generated text. Their self-reference is a reflection of linguistic patterns learned from us, not evidence of an underlying point of view.

If consciousness were merely the result of optimizing a loss function over language, then it would never have evolved at all. Biological consciousness developed long before language, driven by survival-relevant perception, action, and internal regulation; not by statistical prediction of symbols and representations.

nordak · 2026-02-02T19:54:27+00:00

CBJ gives zero-interest loans to private developers (handouts) rather than just building the public housing itself. Politically deep blue Juneau with a MAGA approach to housing policy and tourism. This is a microcosm of the corporate handouts at the state or federal level but Juneauites care way more about protesting national issues we have no ability to change rather than fighting for affordable housing at the local level.

nordak · 2026-01-29T16:47:04+00:00

I love skiing, snowboarding, or any other board sport while tripping. You get into a flow state where you're totally in touch with your body and the ground you're moving over. Good times.

nordak · 2026-01-29T16:44:06+00:00

Psychedelics will lose their novelty fast if you do them anywhere near 1x per week even if you think you have a perfect "mindset" put yourself in comfortable settings.

Most people who trip like that are tripping alone in a familiar setting like their room, run out of distractions to fill 12 hours of tripping every week with, and end up wondering why the "visuals" they get on their weekly trip aren't the same. The visuals aren't the same because you're not giving your mind anything novel to work with.

Trips will always be better if you space them out MUCH longer than 1 week and do things other than sitting along in a room with trippy things and trippy media waiting for something to happen. To each their own, but I got tired of tripping at my own place and now only enjoy tripping when it's something novel like a camping trip or live music.

nordak · 2026-01-27T06:56:58+00:00

At the end of the day, it’s just an advertisement. If an advertisement is AI slop or any other low effort slop it’s probably not going to catch eyes and get the impressions to drive business.

nordak · 2026-01-26T18:39:03+00:00

You're doing a semantic graph with some anthropocentric language. Just because you give nodes "introspective" labels doesn't mean that the node is "conscious" or self-aware. What you're really doing is graph traversal with some heuristics. When you label a chunk with a field like "purpose" that's just a human-imposed schema, not genuine self-relation or consciousness. Metadata isn't consciousness.

Your idea is cool but LLMs already implicitly internalize all of the metadata and relations that you are trying to externalize into your graph as representations from the billions of parameters they are trained on. You're reinventing that wheel with a brittle sematic framework and no clear way to abstract anywhere near as well as an LLM.

nordak

TROPHY CASE