• 17 Posts
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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2025

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  • Perplexity does those weird runtime errors all the time. Just hit refresh. It eventually wakes up.

    OP, LLMs don’t “know” shit.

    You’ll find me making this exact point, incidentally, right here in this forum. I’m well aware that LLMbeciles know literally nothing. And that the “reasoning” models don’t do anything that even slightly resembles reasoning.


  • I did one better!

    Give me an elevator pitch of the top 10,000 works of literature and philosophy throughout history. Ima speed-run me into a sage this afternoon.

    Humanity wrestles with meaning, morality, power, suffering, love, and the search for truth—across every age and culture, we tell stories and ask questions to understand ourselves, each other, and the world, forever torn between hope and despair, freedom and fate, reason and mystery.

    I’m now a sage!



  • This guy made a joke that reads identically to the kinds of things people have been saying without a hint of humour since the ignoble days of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books up to, yes, people saying almost exactly the same thing as he said here and people took him at face value. This is despite knowing that Poe’s Law is a thing.

    How terrible.

    Generally if people don’t “get” your joke, there’s one of two things likely happening:

    1. Your joke wasn’t funny.
    2. This was a Schrodinger’s Joke: serious until someone says something bad about it after which it becomes “Gosh, all y’all just can’t take a joke!”

  • OK, I’m taking it all back. This really works!

    Country Work & Author Elevator Pitch
    Russia Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) A married woman’s passionate affair shatters her life and exposes the hypocrisy of high society[5].
    Nigeria Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) A proud Igbo leader’s world unravels as colonialism and tradition collide.
    France Les Misérables (Victor Hugo) An ex-convict’s quest for redemption transforms lives amid revolution and injustice.
    Japan The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu) A nobleman’s romantic adventures reveal the beauty and fragility of Heian court life.
    Colombia One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez) Generations of a family grapple with love, loss, and magical fate in a mythical town.
    United States To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) A young girl confronts racism and injustice in the Deep South through her father’s courage[5].
    Germany Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) A scholar makes a deal with the devil, risking his soul for ultimate knowledge and pleasure.
    India The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) Twins recall a childhood tragedy that forever alters their family in postcolonial Kerala.
    China Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin) A noble family’s rise and fall mirrors the fleeting beauty and sorrow of love and fortune.
    Italy The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri) A journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise reveals the soul’s path to redemption.

    I am now a great knower of literature from all around the world!

    Who knew that 石头记 was so simple in the end?! Why did 曹雪芹 spend so much effort writing such a simple observation!?








  • You’re missing a key point here.

    Of course there’s more people travelling to neighbouring countries than non-neighbouring ones. Simple cost explains that.

    But there’s no real meaningful increase in costs between flying to Europe and flying to Asia, say. Doing a quick eyeball check, ticket prices from NYC to Seoul, for example, are about $400-500. Flights from NYC to Frankfurt are about $200-300. South Korea, however, is significantly cheaper than Germany for tourism. Depending on whose numbers you go by, SK is anywhere from 33% to 50% cheaper than Germany for tourism, so the extra $200 for the tickets is more than made up for in literally two days of actually being in the country.

    Costs scale roughly the same across Europe, and SK is kind of the middle of the pack costs-wise for Asia, so it’s a decent proxy. (Japan is more expensive, China and Vietnam are cheaper.)

    Yet far more people fly to Europe, when they bother going beyond North America, than to Asia. Meaning far more people are flying to places that are culturally not that different from their own, comparatively, despite the fact that the latter is cheaper. By far.

    (How far? A friend of mine in Canada came to visit me for two months one summer and worked out that they’d turned a profit, despite the then very high air fares, after the first month just in savings on electricity and food costs living at home.)

    USAnals are very parochial (40% never having had a passport), and when they do step outside of their parochial bounds, they go to places that are very similar to home anyway, even when places that are actually different cost less.





  • Most USAnals live within 160km (100 miles) of their place of birth. 40% have never had a passport which is an increasingly accurate proxy, since the border tightenings of 2007, for having never left the country. Of those who’ve actually left, an overwhelming majority have only gone as far afield as Canada or Mexico. A significantly smaller fraction have gone as far afield as Europe. A very tiny fraction have gone anywhere truly distant and alien, culturally speaking.

    And yet these are the people who think they should rule the world.