A sort of extended comment section

"I de dager kom det sjelden ord fra Herren, og av syner var det få."

[quonunc]

This is the closest I've gotten to finishing a jug of milk before the expiration date in the last three years

[esters-notepad]

You guys (=American supermarkets) should sell milk by the litre like we do. It's a much more suitable amount for small households, and those who need more can always buy more cartons.

[samueldays]

How far is purchase date from expiration date for you? Around here it's usually 2-3 weeks and I can drink a gallon of milk in 2-3 days.

[samueldays]

I've been using Claude to explore the chemical balance problems of the sci-fi trope "agri-world feeding city-world" (ecumenopolis) and hearing fascinating new things that I also checked from a non-LLM source.

Selenium, for instance.

The Food and Nutrition Board at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has established Recommended Dietary Allowances and Adequate Intakes for selenium. These values range from 55 to 70 mcg for adults and from 15 to 70 mcg for infants, children, and adolescents, depending on age and life stage.

It's a necessary trace element for human health in very small amounts; but it's toxic in slightly larger amounts that are still very small, and easy to get by accident from safe-looking foods like Brazil nuts.

In fact, one ounce of Brazil nuts (approximately 8 medium nuts) contains 544 micrograms of selenium, which is 777 percent of the recommended daily allowance. Recommendation: No more than one or two Brazil nuts in one day, eaten only occasionally.

The warning level for such things is often set very low to be on the safe side, but there's still reports of selenium poisoning from small amounts.

A 61-year-old female patient who presented to the emergency room with vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain accompanied by discomfort in the left hemithorax, with electrocardiographic alterations with ST-segment depression and troponin I elevation, with echocardiogram and coronary angiotomography without alterations. On direct questioning she claimed to have consumed in the previous days half to one Brazil nut seed per day to weight loss, after which, selenosis was diagnosed.

Caveats about low accuracy of self-reporting, people frequently underestimate how much they've eaten.

To maintain a healthy equilibrium, in general, the ecumenopolis has to filter out net imported substances from its waste and atmosphere, then send those and only those back to the agri-world for reprocessing. This is a massive undertaking of replacing intra-planetary atmosphere and water cycles with a manual chemical distillation system on an inter-planetary logistics chain. Authors like to handwave this by saying "The filters". Some of them forget the return supply entirely.

Some elements are a bigger problem than others. Selenium is perhaps one of the subtly worst, because: the healthy range is so small, most selenium ingested passes through humans into wastewater, it's very hard to filter out of water, and it's imported in kilotons per year but has nowhere to go on an ecumenopolis. Earth has large environmental buffers of soil and sea for selenium concentration. Most 'polises in fiction have only a few decorative lakes. Selenium also bioaccumulates, becoming even worse of a problem if the 'polis tries to supplement its food supply with concentrated local growth like aquaponics.

Some other issues that would arise from shipping food one way:

Source world would exhaust the easily-available atmospheric and soil carbon in about 400 years by binding it into plant matter that is shipped out, but well before complete exhaustion the field productivity would fall from lack of atmospheric CO2. If the planet has an Earthlike amount of fossil fuels, burning them all to refill CO2 buys about 500 years more.

(note: exact time varies with scale, these estimates are based on feeding an ecumenopolis world with circa 5x Earth's current population.)

There's a lot more carbon bound in Earth's crust, but putting that into the atmosphere fast enough means replacing a chunk of the Food Planet with Mining Country.

Phosphorus is probably exhausted on a similar scale of 600-ish years but academic sources have much larger error bars on bioavailable phosphorus.

Nitrogen has a different problem: there's lots of it in the atmosphere but natural processes don't fixate it fast enough for us, let alone for a city-world. Humanity is sustained by the Haber-Bosch process producing fertilizer to make up the difference, at scale.

Ammonia production via the Haber-Bosch process is estimated to comprise 2% of the world's total energy consumption.

Casually, an agri-world would need an Ammonia Factory Country, which in turn would need a Power Plant Country (maybe a second one, since the automated harvesters probably needed the first one).

[fishing-princess]

I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory

[leftcosine]

I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know

[trollfist]

I Successfully Overthrew The Demon Lord And Instituted Demon Democracy But They Voted For A Commie So The CIA Not Some Fantasy Equivalent The Actual CIA Who Have Known About Magic And Alternate Realms The Whole Damn Time But Won't Just Unisekai Me Launched A Counter Coup And That's When Things Really Went To Shit

[brazenautomaton]

I've seen this post a few times now and, like, seriously

Do you think that believing armies require leaders to function and removing their leadership causes harm to them is "a flawed belief in Great Man theory?"

[samueldays]

It's hard to know what unit to measure "greatness" with, but I find it helps thought to have at least some idea of a scale where Great Men can be measured in units, and one reframing for that is Value Above Replacement (VAR).

If a time traveler slips birth control to Napoleon's mom, how much worse is the 'average' French general who replaces Napoleon in the timeline? How much earlier does alt-hist-France lose or back down? How much less influential is the Napoleonic Code and accompanying legal reforms?

Or turn it around: are there Incompetent Men, or is everyone between average and helpless in the face of structural forces? If the alternative timeline imperator of France is tactically incompetent or isolationist, do you think the French footsoldiers are nonetheless destined to mutiny so they can subjugate half of Europe in spite of their commander? Surely not.

[brazenautomaton]

Listen Napoleon's VOR is one thing

But even if Napoleon had zero VOR, killing him in the middle of a military campaign would have a significant negative effect on that campaign and that is the part I'm talking about.

[samueldays]

Also valid

[fishing-princess]

I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory

[leftcosine]

I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know

[trollfist]

I Successfully Overthrew The Demon Lord And Instituted Demon Democracy But They Voted For A Commie So The CIA Not Some Fantasy Equivalent The Actual CIA Who Have Known About Magic And Alternate Realms The Whole Damn Time But Won't Just Unisekai Me Launched A Counter Coup And That's When Things Really Went To Shit

[brazenautomaton]

I've seen this post a few times now and, like, seriously

Do you think that believing armies require leaders to function and removing their leadership causes harm to them is "a flawed belief in Great Man theory?"

[samueldays]

It's hard to know what unit to measure "greatness" with, but I find it helps thought to have at least some idea of a scale where Great Men can be measured in units, and one reframing for that is Value Above Replacement (VAR).

If a time traveler slips birth control to Napoleon's mom, how much worse is the 'average' French general who replaces Napoleon in the timeline? How much earlier does alt-hist-France lose or back down? How much less influential is the Napoleonic Code and accompanying legal reforms?

Or turn it around: are there Incompetent Men, or is everyone between average and helpless in the face of structural forces? If the alternative timeline imperator of France is tactically incompetent or isolationist, do you think the French footsoldiers are nonetheless destined to mutiny so they can subjugate half of Europe in spite of their commander? Surely not.

[samueldays]

I once suggested that nonbinary "they" should conjugate as third person singular, whereas indefinite "they" should retain the third person plural. Being a perfect compromise, in that it would have annoyed absolutely everyone, it never caught on

Ah yes, the proposed "they is" to distinguish one person from "they are" of a group. I might have had more respect for singular-they if its users had followed through on singular-ness, rather than copying plural verb agreement and making English even worse.

Long tradition of that, really. You know the silent B in "debt"? The word used to have a sensible spelling of "det" or "dett" in Old English and then some people added the B to highlight the relation to Latin debit.

I checked on the recent post that I figure you're reacting to, and found @mereologic had blocked me. I will interpret this as him fleeing the field and conceding the argument.

[poipoipoi-2016]

But that means venturing into territory beyond all known lands, a wild and mountainous region filled with monsters, and dragons, and worst of all…Armenians.

REVIEW: Anabasis, by Xenophon

Anabasis, Xenophon (trans.

[samueldays]

Psmiths great as usual

[lilliankillthisman]

"it's a buffalo, it can't look that much like him-"

holy shit

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

[ranty-mc-rantface]

I've always been intrigued by how exactly leftists define "banned" books. I remember seeing some thread on twitter about how "the handmaid's tale" is a banned book

.. You know, the one that got adapted into an incredibly popular and mainstream TV series? That one, yeah

Like is it just a kind of "this book was banned in one primary school somewhere" technicality or what

[thathopeyetlives]

It's often that, or "somebody, somewhere, challenged this book as being appropriate for K-12 school at some point".

Only rarely do they get into things that were ever limited in availability commercially.

You do get the idea that without resistance, or even with it, some schools would have very sanitized curriculum.

[noobnoob814]

A belief I've long held is that the whole Banned Books thing in schools was an attempt to reverse-psychology kids into reading more of their own volition. Not even that sinister really, I don't think any librarians setting up "Banned Book Week" shelves thought the kids would actually take the kayfabe literally.

[isaacsapphire]

Yes. I’ve said it before but the only books you would ever see on those tables that was banned by any government was by Salman Rushdie. And actually historically banned books that the library had, like The Bible or Fanny Hill or Das Capital weren’t on that table. None of these people were ever going to go to bat for The Turner Diaries.

“Banned Books” to librarians and booksellers is a hype thing and, kind of punishment/reward for a parent somewhere questioning if it should be part of the compulsory curriculum or in the school library. It’s about school required and recommended reading and culture war, not censorship.

Actual banned kids books… are mostly racist. Eg. Little Black Sambo, the original Dr Doolittle books, To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.

[samueldays]

To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, which I enjoyed when I was small, is about a boy who sees a horse and wagon on Mulberry Street, and thinks that's not going to be cool enough to tell a story about (book is from 1937 when there were a lot more horse-drawn wagons around), so he begins fantasizing about exaggerating it on the way home.

Step by step, the horse becomes a zebra, the wagon becomes a racing chariot,

the zebra is in turn replaced by a reindeer, and then an elephant, and the kid keeps imagining more and more things to fill out a parade down Mulberry Street, until finally it's this:

I feel like something has been lost in translation when using the word "racist" about this. The Chinaman is not an object of hate, he's presented as someone it would be fun to see. This is a collection of cool things. The Chinaman's costume is perhaps unrepresentative, but so is the ten-foot-beard and the elephant rider and the dangerously low-flying airplane and it's a fantasy parade. There is nothing wrong with it.

Nonetheless, the book was withdrawn from circulation by Amazon, Ebay, the Seuss Estate, and their publishers, thanks to a pressure campaign which amounts to much more of a "ban" than the average "banned book" media campaign about a book that one school removed from its school library.

[mereologic]

it's always okay to use they/them pronouns for someone, even if they say it isnt. this is because they/them pronouns are not gendered, so you aren't misgendering them.

[mereologic]

"what about respecting people's preferences" if someone told you that they never wanted to be referred to as "someone" and always wanted to be referred to by their name when being spoken about, we'd rightfully recognize this request as absurd. it's not any different when they insist on being gendered. they are looking for reasons to be angry at other people and have learned that making unreasonable requests is a way to do this. just ignore them.

[samueldays]

I heard the same thing said about he/him/his pronouns some years back, that he/him/his pronouns are not gendered so it's okay to use those pronouns for anyone. There was a funny example that it's valid to say "Man, being a mammal, suckles his young." There may be a connotation and a habit of using those for male pronouns, but English has a singular nongendered pronoun and it's "he".

This did not stop a lot of queers and queer allies from objecting to the so-called misgendering anyway, and demanding other pronouns.

Now part of the problem I see here is that there's two conflicting impulses which came from the same direction: 1) the increasing demand for a quasi-singular specific "they" as the new nongendered pronoun which could apply to everyone, 2) the rise of "nonbinary" and "third gender" and similar self-identification from people who demanded to be described as exclusively "they", thereby re-gendering that pronoun.

And so we come round again to the supposedly non-gendered pronoun having a gendered connotation anyway, and people objecting to being called the wrong pronoun.

[cherrypikkins]

Time to clean the blorbo! Pick an action

gently run a lintroller over them

steam clean

handwash only

machine wash hot, longest cycle

use a power washer

sandblast them

let them stay filthy

other

Voting ended onJun 3

plz reblog for sampo size

[owenbroadcast]

[samueldays]

A Factorio Game

My currently active game (run? campaign?) of Factorio is a multiplayer game, played in weekly sessions like many RPG campaigns. Two of us are veterans of beating Space Exploration; if you put us in a normal Space Age game we'd steamroll it. So we modded it, turning up the difficulty and adding some new content that I'd like to share.

Science Stinks. Labs are increased from 0 to 100 pollution per minute; biolabs from 8 to 30. Research triggers waves of attacks. Lab quality (+30% speed) is now effectively -23% pollution per science pack.

Quality Biters. Adds a second form of scaling to Biters based on evolution percentage. Makes them tougher, deadlier, longer range, and synergy with Science Stinks. Be warned: Normal gun turrets will get outranged by some rare spawns as early as 0.5 evolution.

Explosive Biters and a few other variant Biter mods like Toxic and Armoured. The Explosive ones in particular are immune to fire, so defenses can't be flamethrower-and-forget. Oh, and they appear on Vulcanus too.

Fulgoran robot enemies. Now all four basic planets have enemies that build spawners and expand over time. Bwahahaha! Nowhere is safe! Well, actually, some of the other modded planets from...

Kry's Planet Mods Lite. Too many to list here and it changes over time, evaluate what you want from the pack, it's a good list. Some of my favorites: Moshine, Rubia, Neumann V (from Metal and Stars), Pelagos.

Research Cost Curve. Allowed us to gradually scale up to 5x science cost multiplier for mid game, without being overrun by biters on the second tech.

Carbonut Agriculture and Demolisher Agriculture and Demolisher Scales. Because adding biters to Vulcanus wasn't enough, it was IMO the easiest planet and we are giving it Problems.

Those are the big changes. There's also some minor conveniences like Milestones and Squeak Through and Even Distribution and Quality Down-Binning and Mined Inserters Don't Leave Items and others, some weapons and some map setting changes.

It's been a blast. The combination of polluting labs, science multiplier and biter scaling means that enemies stay threatening on Nauvis much longer. We couldn't simply rush to artillery, because artillery is a Vulcanus tech, Vulcanus is moved behind Gleba by the agriculture mods, and Gleba is not a good first planet to expand to with the difficulty turned up. So we fought on Nauvis for a while. Just getting to space was slower, which meant biters scaled further, which meant we needed more combat power, which slowed us down again, etc.

Quality turrets become relevant to outrange higher level enemies. We added quality modules to miners and furnaces to stockpile plates and ore, resulting in the screenshot you see at top, so that we could consistently produce stacks of high-quality items from high-quality ingredients rather than just a few gambles. In retrospect, I wish we'd subfiltered each tier of quality, but you know what they say about starter bases and "good enough". We have dedicated duplicates of laser-turret-assembly minifactories that take iron and copper plates of various quality levels and output turrets of that quality level.

Debug mode reported >3000 pollution concentrated in a chunk of map containing laboratories before we switched to biolabs. The ❌structure lost! alert was continuously beeping from the massive attacks on every side. Mostly walls, but losses at our defenses were at one point being measured in laser-turrets-per-minute, and we did napkin math on the relative value of putting Productivity modules or Efficiency modules in laboratories because the latter would reduce attacks triggered by research. Later, after visiting Gleba, we instead placed >1000 agriculture towers on Nauvis to grow and harvest trees for the purpose of absorbing pollution. Also, we managed to make labs not be the single largest pollution source on the planet. (Drills and electromagnetic plants compete for first now.)

Here is our enormous nuclear power plant, using a tileable layout. Unrevealed chunk for scale, because the interior is so large and so far from roboports that it only intermittently gets radar scan coverage. 87 reactor-equivalents producing up to 10GW of power.

("Reactor-equivalents?" 84 reactors but 10 of them are Uncommon Quality with +30% output.)

It doesn't fit on my screen if I zoom in.

("Where are your power poles?" Electric Tiles.)

[northshorewave]

Oh, so the bubble is bursting bursting.

(Non football fans, for "Jets" read "most incompetent self-defeating fuckup you've ever known, swearing he's gonna turn it around for real this time")

[samueldays]

My workplace is giving presentations on our pivot to AI this week ;_;

[samueldays]

(from joelgrus on X)

[femme-foucault]

Gentiles/non-Jews of Tumblr, how well did you do in the quiz on Judaism 101 linked below?

0

1-4

5-9

10-14

15-20

21-25

26-31

32 :)

I’m Jewish/show results

Voting ended onMay 20

This is the quiz and I did not come up with it, credit goes to @iswearbyalltheflowers on this post.

Absolutely no judgment, I’m genuinely really curious and I figured more people would answer anonymously here than on the original post.

[samueldays]

26/32, slightly annoyed by missing this one: (spoilers)

Which of the following is a common Jewish teaching about the afterlife? ❌ There is no afterlife of any kind. ✅ The afterlife exists, but the details are debated and our focus should be on living according to God's law

I thought this might be a trick question with 2 right answers, because I have the impression both of those are common.

[samueldays]

Factorio, the nerd game of sometimes wondering "Why the heck do I have 90K spare railroad segments in storage?"

The top three items are intuitively reasonable: Wood gets sent to storage a lot when I dispatch robots to auto-clear large swathes of forest and build machinery there. Copper cables are a very common intermediate product, used for a zillion other things. Processor units ("blue chips") are an advanced intermediate product, used for slightly less than a zillion things but more valuable things.

But I have no memory of these 90K rails.

[nuclearspaceheater]

Actually I find the rails substantially less baffling than a lot of other things there. I've had that happen when a botched circuit -> logistics limit transition let rail production run continuously for a while. But how are copper wires getting into storage instead of direct insertion or intra-line belts? They'd get picked up in removals but did you really remove enough things to get to 104k of them? A lot of other intermediates are things that I'd put storage removal blocks for (requestor chest for iron ore in front of the iron smelters, for example), but I can see someone not bothering with that. Except, processor units are expensive enough that I'd still expect those to be pulled from storage automatically before they got to 98k. But maybe those are all just habits from some combination of playing to efficiency as aesthetic goal and from before infinite mining productivity (and before it was available pre-post-game).

[samueldays]

Thought process went something like: "I want to supply blue chips in bulk to the many rocket silos for orbital throughput. Bots are bad at bulk transport in a megabase, a long-distance belt gets unwieldy, let me use a train so it can share rails with other trains. The train has travel time between production and consumption areas, so instead of unloading directly to local belt, I'll unload the train into chests that serve as a buffer to belt." and then I had 3 cargo wagons unloading into 18 chests that are full of blue chips. In retrospect, that buffer was overkill.

[eschocat]

Whenever I read about language evolution I can’t get over how instinctually wrong it feels that language get phonemically simpler as time goes on. How Old English had more phonemes than we have now, and even contemporarily phonemes are converging and merging. Language just feels so complex that I am not sure how they could’ve began complex and simplified over time. It feels as if language should have began very simple, and complexity later emerged. Seems counter to Wittgenstein too. The builder’s game of four words is described as “primitive.” Our first games as children are simple, like tag or hide and seek. We only learn chess later.

[blogofex]

Languages also gain phonemes over time. English has several phonemes right now that Old English lacked. Most of the Romance languages have more phonemes than Latin did.

[o-craven-canto]

All languages must be able to convey the same information, so what complexity is lost in one set of features is gained in another. Romance languages lost the Latin case system, and began to convey the same syntactic relations by using word order, which in Latin would have had little grammatical meaning. When English shed almost all its inflection system, its duties were picked up by modifying particles and word combinations.

There is a typological spectrum of languages arranged to how much they use juxtaposition of words (analytic) vs. inflection of words (synthetic) to conveey information, and over time they may change between types. Common combination of words get fused together into inflectional affixes, and then as they keep eroding they are replaced by new auxiliary words. Ancient Egyptian might have gone through the whole cycle over 3000 years.

[samueldays]

All languages must be able to convey the same information

Why would this be the case?

All speakers want to be able to convey similar information, that I could accept as a driving force why languages evolve towards similar conveyance capacity, but your claim seems too strong.