@panickssery @thomashobohm I disagree with almost all of his views but can’t deny he’s a really good writer from the few essays i’ve read
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Charles
15.3K posts
Charles
@JiffjoffI
Research Scientist - FAANG; Film / culture / history / baseball / tech;
Katılım Temmuz 2020
1.1K Takip Edilen2.8K Takipçiler
you need to retake freshman comp my guy
Arjun Panickssery@panickssery
Sam Kriss is the writer that comes to mind most similar to the popular conception of an LLM, producing the form of writing but completely substanceless upon any inspection and sprinkled with random factual errors and non-sequiturs but very popular as light entertainment
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@razibkhan Dune is itself a historic blend - warring aristocratic houses on the desert outskirts of an Imperial periphery, explosion of Islam conquering post Roman fragmented empire, mixture of Arthur / Mohammad prophecies er
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there is a revisionist arg that Lucas retconned this and really it was herbert and dune and e e smith and the lensmen series
T. Greer@Scholars_Stage
This is true of many things. The last generation of Star Wars movies, for example, were clearly created by people who obsessed over the original Star Wars. The creators of the original Star Wars obsessed over Joseph Campbell and Wagner and Kurosawa.
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@CrisisFront @aakashgupta Stupid comment - plenty of civilizations before and after had slave labor without achieving this level of engineering precision
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@aakashgupta They had the luxury of double the water because half their population was enslaved and doing the actual work. It is easy to look like engineering geniuses when you have unlimited forced labor to build it.
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That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.
Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.
The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.
Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.
Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.
The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.
Ulises@UlisesDavid__
🚨| La claridad de un acueducto del imperio Romano, de hace 2000 años
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@_Useless_Tree_ @kjgillenwater @The4ourthBranch @blightersort “That’s not how i read that quote at all”
We know, the quote means something different if you completely fabricate additional context
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@kjgillenwater @The4ourthBranch @JiffjoffI @blightersort You must have gone to Yale as a DEI admission too.
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she has a masters in drama from Yale and “had no idea what the odyssey was”. not just “hadn’t read it” had never heard of it at all apparently. what a damning indictment of Yale.
Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@DrewPavlou
Lupita Nyong'o: “I really had no idea what The Odyssey was” 😭
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What's a video that defines Peak Cringe?
End Wokeness@EndWokeness
What's a video that defines Peak Woke?
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She didn't say she'd never heard of it...clearly she had or she wouldn't have been able to quote some lines from it. She just had never read it so didn't know the source material intimately. I haven't either. Does that make me incapable of ever playing a part in a book I haven't completely read and digested? Why aren't we all wondering about all the rest of the actors and if they've read it? Sounds as if she is now familiar with the whole thing, which should make you very happy that she cared.
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@Jayseki @eigenrobot @wil_da_beast630 Yeah iirc there was a scene where they’re raided by cossack cats or something, they seem russian jewish - the Mouskewitzes
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@eigenrobot @wil_da_beast630 the main family is eastern european(/jewish) as i remember it. it has been over 30 years since i've seen it though
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Isn’t Coke Zero just Diet Coke branded for men?
The Wall Street Journal@WSJ
As Coke Zero gets bigger, and threatens to dethrone Diet Coke as the most important diet soda property in the Coca-Cola extended universe, the feud between Diet Coke fans and Coke Zero drinkers is getting pretty fizzy. on.wsj.com/4wKhvI5
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@GrumpyFucc @usr_bin_roygbiv he means the contract not the home price lol
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@usr_bin_roygbiv I’m asking about acquiring a massive house with a 10pack of beer and a handshake.
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This is a feature not a bug. I love austin because I can make 7 figures a year and still go to walmart in a ratty t shirt with a loaded gun. I can get a massive house with a 10gb line for a firm handshake and a case of beer. noone gives a fuck here.
Nick Khami@skeptrune
Austin is where you go if you don't make it in NYC, SF, or LA and really that's a beautiful thing. we need a third space for the ngmi among us
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@CovfefeAnon @zuki_2024 @bronzeagemantis A woke more correct rendering would be eg trying to make odysseus unsympathetic bc he’s racist and sexist, where the left and right like it for different reasons but the anti-woke center is furious about the “inaccuracy”
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Right - Woke more correct typically pattern matches against highlighting broad agreements between the left and right where the right interprets as “and that’s a good thing” - with the center under a delusion / myth
Woke more correct here would be wokes saying the classical world was racist, sexist etc
Or highlighting black dysfunction with victimhood, proportionality arguments and so on.
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Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey is a situation of “woke is more correct than the mainstream” or at least what was considered orthodox canon of the past.
Are we ready to have that conversation tho @CovfefeAnon? @bronzeagemantis?
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I’m not against non-white immigration, but the scale and speed should be slowed down and balanced against demographic, political and cultural preferences. Obviously exceptional people should be allowed in, but the scale of recent waves (especially wrt Indians) spiraled out of control
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If you're against non-white immigration, just be honest and say so.
There's no need to make up reasons about personalities or traits or competition for your children.
You don't like people who aren't white, and that's your prerogative. No need to lie about it.
i/o@avidseries
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@criticlthinkr The number of physicians is limited by medical school / residency slots and licensing, so medicine is one area where there’s a clear zero sum aspect wrt who we give slots to
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The chud fantasy is that they could practice medicine despite not passing the MCAT, so we don't need immigrant physicians.
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@JiffjoffI anyone who claims to be chudless is morally bankrupt and lost all noblesse oblige. you are responsible for your chuds.
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the correct benchmark for the bottom 20% it a country isn’t the elite, it’s the bottom 20% of other countries. by that metric the american lower class is actually remarkable. i immigrated here at age 4, and i could never bring myself to look down on them like this.
SWAMPIST@swamp_ist
Imagine feeling safe to post like this in America.
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@MostlyMonkey That’s pretty high for tOSU , much more overlap than i would’ve guessed
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@jonatanpallesen @avidseries @davidcinema There’s a sense in which all serious (non frivolous) movies are existential
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@Jason @Geiger_Capital We do not need 1m+ every year, people who will actually make a difference (top entrepreneurs, ai / medical researchers etc) is like 50k a year at the most
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The best interest of America today is very simple:
1. SKIM THE CREAM: Recruit the smartest and most driven 1-3m people on the planet every year; < 1% of our population.
They create companies and jobs, while taking that economic growth away from our rivals.
2. POWER THROUGH SHORTAGES: Allow for a modest amount of workers based on our acute needs and the immigrants willingness to assimilate (as seen in say learning to speak English before arriving).
This is probably 100-500k a year on average… healthcare, agriculture etc.
3. STRATEGIC IMMIGRANTS: Allow dissidents and refugees when politically advantageous (ie from rivals)
And of course cut off all illegal immigration to accomplish this
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Before Hart-Celler in 1965 our nation's immigration system was severely restrictive with varying national quotas. Immigrants from many countries were outright banned. It was almost exclusively Europeans because the men before us wanted to preserve our own ethnic homogeneity, demographics, culture and social cohesion. They prioritized our nation and the economic interests of American workers instead of the feelings of weak men and cheap foreign labor.
The last few decades of third-world mass immigration has not been in our nation's interest.
@jason@Jason
Politicians make immigration decisions on what gets them elected — not what is in the best interest of the nation.
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Part of me is sad that i’ll probably never recapture that youthful wonder and spark of the imagination from reading Michael crichton / lotr / great experiences with books in middle and high school
I’ve heard great things about the series - seems obvious that more films should be made
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@JiffjoffI I've read the entire series 3x (approximately once per decade since I first read them in highschool)
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