DanAndersen

Much of the moral outrages of previous decades came from groups that might be labeled 'moral majority' or 'religious right'; think of the panics about D&D being 'satanic'.

In the current era, the urge to censor is increasingly coming from elements of the Left, where socially or politically "problematic" material becomes the new "blasphemous". From the quoted article:

>"Unfortunately this also means they'll likely be taking a similarly hands-off approach regarding wildly sexist, racist or homophobic content."

That's my guess as to why this isn't yet a "solved question" -- the fringes of both sides have to get their attempt at busybodying in before a stable synthesis can result.

Good decision by Valve. Considering the sway they have on the industry (if your game can't be on Steam, suddenly you have a lot less exposure), this hands-off stance is the most fair and respectful both to devs and players. We don't need any more "curated app stores" by tech companies that want to be petty tyrants.

It's a smart move for Valve, as only an explicit commitment to principles of neutrality have any hope of shielding them from the ever-growing Culture Wars where various outrage-groups weaponize platform rules to chip away at others' ability to enjoy content on their own terms.

I wonder which other groups of people the Guardian would feel comfortable writing headlines about promoting killing for the good of the world.

For anyone interested in the development of LotR over time, I really recommend listening to the Signum University online lectures going through the History of Middle-Earth series. Dr Corey Olson is going through each of the volumes in turn and offering great analysis of how the story began to emerge, just as you describe.

The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... .

Notable things about Tolkien's writing process:

- LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take.

- When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity.

- Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered.

- Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).

Just to add on to your very good description, Tolkien himself wrestled with the question of the moral/spiritual nature of Orcs. Are orcs just soulless creations of Melkor/Morgoth? Are they twisted/mutilated perversions of Elves and Men? The latter is the interpretation the Jackson films go with, but it wasn't absolutely firm in the books and the legendarium in general. The question of the ultimate fate of Orcs and whether or not they can be saved or if they have good in them is something Tolkien tried to reconcile with his own faith and theology.

The following StackExchange post illustrates further the questions that Tolkien was trying to figure out: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/26725/what-is-the-...

Eli Schiff wrote a good review of TLJ a while back that similarly describes the dead emptiness/meaninglessness of Star Wars nowadays:

>The sequels, and in particular, Rian Johnson's latest episode, have now fully deconstructed the Star Wars universe, and shown the characters and their motivations to be vacuous. The only character remaining who really grasped the depravity of the situation is Kylo Ren. Now that there is no hope for heroes (even the Resistance doesn't believe in those anymore—after all, heroism reinforces a hierarchy that must die), we await the climactic explosion of an end to this universe that it deserves.

>More likely though, given that we're dealing with Disney, we probably won't get anything of the sort. And for that reason I now realize why fans of all stripes didn't like The Last Jedi. What they saw in the mirror was so horrifically disfigured and alienating that it couldn't be confronted. For though history is far from over, with everyone either too smart to continue living, or too stupid to die, it may be there's no one left with the will to make history anew.

http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death-dri...

Unsurprisingly, being near a corner helps one's chance of survival, as you need to defend on fewer sides with the same amount of resources.

If the concern is politicians without skin in the game, how about we instead forbid electing anyone without children? If someone is just an individual without a family or looking toward leaving a legacy for their future offspring, perhaps they're more likely to be over-individualist and not even think about coming generations.

The Chinese have a long memory of the effect that widespread drug addiction has on a nation and a people. It wasn't until Mao that the issue was addressed, and they were actually quite effective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China#Unde...

>The Mao Zedong government is generally credited with eradicating both consumption and production of opium during the 1950s using unrestrained repression and social reform.[9][10] Ten million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops.

I have my doubts that the West will be able to adequately deal with the issue. They don't seem to have the stomach for it.

As someone who has finished classes (and was firmly in the STEM camp while taking them), I do wish I had had something of the formal liberal arts that was taught historically. Does anyone have any recommendations for ways of self-teaching the trivium and quadrivium?

I've heard good things about "The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric" [0] but I haven't gone through it yet.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Trivium-Liberal-Logic-Grammar-Rhetori...

"The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" [0] also provides information to this effect. Yes, as the link you provide mentions, there's an optical phenomenon known as the Airy disk that suggests an incorrect apparent size of stars when looking through such old telescopes. It wasn't until the 1800s that this phenomenon was understood.

[0] http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... (part 1)

I take issue with your claim that Irish were "not considered white." Such an argument only makes sense given a prior assumption that "white" only means a vague definition of acceptability in society. Under that stand-in definition (and frankly a modern revisionist definition), the Irish immigrants who were considered outsiders would be tautologically "not white," but that's not how people at the time thought of it.

As evidence I present the Naturalization Act of 1790 [0], which restricted US citizenship thusly:

>That any alien, being a free white person,Alien whites may become citizens, and how. who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof

Note that this was far before the period of "mass immigration to the US." The "free white" requirement remained in US law until the mid-19th century. I've never known of any case in which an Irishman was denied US citizenship during that time period on account on "not being white" (I would be happy to be proven wrong here). There were several signers of the Declaration of Independence that had Irish ancestry! [1] An outsider group, yes, and one that took time to be integrated as a full part of the in-group, but the idea of people of the time looking at an Irishman and saying "he's not white," would not have made sense.

You're right that the concept of "white" as an identity group is relatively recent (on the order of several centuries) and was largely born in the American colonies as a way to distinguish an in-group from an out-group (mainly, colonists from various areas of Europe wanted something to distinguish themselves from the Indian tribes and black African slaves). But that's the way of all these categories ("black" can be similarly deconstructed as a recent American ethnogenesis).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790

[1] http://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/blogs/the-irish-american-...

I'll latch onto your post to also recommend the podcasts "The Fall of Rome" [0] and "Tides of History" [1], both by Patrick Wyman. He's a PhD who specialized in Late Antiquity, and often looks at Roman history/society from the lens of networks, trades, and the movement of people and goods over time. The one caveat I have is to bear with him in terms of the repetitive/boring ads he sticks into the middle of his episodes. I like to imagine his podcasts as an audio version of a History Channel show -- at least what the History Channel was supposed to be rather than what it's devolved into.

[0] https://fallofromepodcast.wordpress.com/

[1] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wondery/tides-of-history

In contrast, I (and perhaps some others?) find the world of gritty "down-to-earth" genre-subversions that GoT encouraged somewhat overplayed and tiresome at this point. Give me earnest stories, high fantasy, heroic and noble!

(I fear the upcoming Amazon Middle-Earth series will be a GoT-style abomination that tries to fit Tolkien into something it simply isn't.)

>Every person has their own opinion

Perhaps this is also a too-general claim :)

Has anyone written "rationalist fiction" about a zombie setting? Something like what Worm [0] was for superheroes. Something that isn't just a genre-savvy parody of the flaws of characters in zombie films, but a serious exploration of a band of survivors working to build a community/society to survive and thrive against the zombies. It's probably hard to make it entertaining if one is in the mindset of mainstream tropes, but there's probably a way to make it work.

[0] https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

In times past, skilled professionals were more sensible and had guilds and trade unions to protect their value. It's funny to see how tech megacorps are easily able to subvert programmers' "passion" and "hacker attitude" to promote programs that devalue their labor.

Some thoughts:

1: The WHOIS entry ( https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=altright.com ) seems strange to me:

>This domain name has been suspended due to invalid Whois information.

Is this a normal WHOIS message for sites that get shut down for ToS violations of the sort being described in the Twitter link? Does anyone know if the WHOIS data for the site was actually invalid? Regardless, that rubs me the wrong way as sounding like finding a technicality to shut it down. I wish they'd be more open about what they're doing.

2: Sites like this have had to change webhosts before, that's nothing new. Politically extreme content has always had issues with that (to be honest I'm wondering what Spencer was thinking going with GoDaddy rather than one of the hosting services out there that tends to be more resistant to outside pressure). The real question is what is going to happen to the domain name itself, if these people are going to be able to set up shop again with a different registrar. "Host it on your own server" is different from "start your own domain registrar company" as excuses for censorship, no matter how legitimate it feels.

3: No matter the content, we should be treating these events as canaries in the coal mine. The tech world has rightfully focused on countering censorious efforts by governments, but that's not the only source of censorship. Censorship doesn't just happen by governments; it can be done by private entities as well in the form of 'deplatforming.' This tactic has been proven to be effective, and there will be very little outcry because -- well, look at who's getting shut down. But it's not going to stop there.

I'm a free speech absolutist who thinks it's a culture and not just an 18th-century legal document. Censorship in the 21st century isn't going to look like what it looked like in the 20th century; it will be a new form that is harder to counter, harder to argue against with only outdated definitions as ammunition. I hope that in the future, the tech world finds ways to make "deplatform-resistant" content feasible at all layers of the stack.

I remember living in China for an extended period of time and never seeing raw vegetables as part of a meal; locals I spoke with found the very concept unsanitary.

It's unfortunate that some are advocating just abandoning chapters of our local cuisine as being no longer viable in our era. I'd rather we more strongly enforce regulations so we can hold onto our salads.

This is an important part of the equation, and it's unfortunate that the article doesn't go into sufficient detail about the actual mechanisms by which the infection can happen. If anything, the article's mentions of "people are simply eating more fresh produce these days" and "some contamination can still slip through" foster an attitude of helplessness, as if this is a new normal we need to get used to.

Poor living and working conditions for migrant farmworkers is a contributing factor to outbreaks like this. Workers who are present illegally or are otherwise marginalized and taken advantage of, even if they are part of legal guest-worker programs, suffer conditions where poor housing facilities or the need to work under great time pressures leads to inadequate sanitation.

A 2017 story [0] illustrates this:

>Kristina Espinoza, a labor department investigator who recently visited the farm, described a "makeshift labor camp" that was "dangerous" and "unsanitary," according to court documents. [...] Gonzalez had workers shower in nine stalls inside a cargo container; there was no functional sewage system, so wastewater accumulated underneath the container, Espinoza said. The electrical cord used to light the facility was exposed to standing water, posing a risk of electrocution, according to court documents. The workers shared one toilet in the trailer and had access to port-a-potties.

[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-farmworker-abuse-20170...

The arxiv paper [0] shows some further examples, which include some non-white faces. Your point is a fair one in the case of this application, since the goal is to do 3D reconstruction of the face. The project's YouTube video [1] shows one example (around 0:44) of the reconstruction run on test input of a black woman, and the reconstruction has some troubles modeling the wider nose common in black populations. More varied data (or an ensemble method that attempts coarse racial categorization and then further refining ethnicity-specific face models) might get better results.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.07835.pdf

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXTgLSyIha8&feature=youtu.be

The Oculus subreddit seems to have a decent writeup:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/8g7ypb/the_answer_t...

Done!

Yeah -- my actual area of research/work is VR, hopefully for practical use cases, and it's hard to see anything in current VR tech that would help for remote working. For those who do remote teams, having something like Slack helps more, where casual channels for chatting can serve as the virtual water cooler.

I wonder if there's any potential in building VR-based telepresence tools specifically for those doing graphics/gamedev/VR work itself. When working on complex graphics-related projects, you still have to download and build someone else's code; nothing yet that's as easy as just going over to someone else's cubicle and looking at their build on their monitor. Maybe one day we'll have a distributed multi-user layer on top of the Unity Editor or its equivalent.

The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point in the world's history we're clustering in tech hubs.

Thanks for mentioning this -- though the Adam Ruins Everything video still falls into the same Modern view of the whole thing (for the sake of humor of course :) ). For an exhaustively detailed account of the history of heliocentrism and the Galileo affair, I've not found a better resource than Michael Flynn's blog posts "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown":

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

If anyone is looking for frugal yet meaningful gifts for Christmas, etc, I found great success by making gifts of my sourdough starter to some close friends and family. Some time beforehand, I started to split up and increase the amount of starter I was growing, then printed little laminated labels with instructions for feeding the starter (and an example recommended bread recipe that was easy to make), and attached it to the mason jars in which I was storing the starter.

I recommend Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which did a few episodes [0] examining the questions of human sacrifice and ritual human cannibalism. The episodes were a companion to Daniele Bolelli's "History on Fire" episodes [1] about the first contact between the Spanish and the Mexica (Aztecs), but whereas Bolelli focuses more on the narrative drama of the events of these two incompatible cultures clashing, Cooper's episodes are more psychological explorations about the human condition that try to examine just where in our human minds arises these primal urges toward cannibalism and sacrifice of other humans and how early cultures dealt with the trauma of it in the form of rituals.

There's a progression to it too, where cultures tend to move between different phases (cannibalism to human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to purely symbolic sacrifice) where those 'psychic urges' can be played out in more and more abstract ways. It's reminiscent of Dan Carlin's episode about gladiators and public executions [2] and how our modern culture still wants to see the violence but to have it be virtual.

The MartyrMade podcast's analysis does a great job of juggling the two opposing ways of looking at these cultures. On one hand there is a human universality in that every culture and every people almost certainly has cannibalism and human sacrifice somewhere in its deep past. On the other hand, it's too easy for us in modern Western societies to try to interpret these other cultural behaviors in rational ways as if deep down they're just like us. Culture shapes its participants fundamentally; truly alien ways of being are the norm.

You can't read the account [3] of a young women ritualistically standing in for a Maize Goddess, being beheaded, flayed, and having her too-small skin being stretched and worn by a priest dancing before a crowd without being reminded of the quote "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." When people talk about the "cultural iceberg" [4], this exemplifies just how deep those icebergs go; it's not just language and food and dress and dance.

---

[0] http://www.martyrmade.com/tag/human-sacrifice/

[1] http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/?tag=Aztec

[2] https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-61-blitz-...

[3] http://www.bartleby.com/196/146.html

[4] https://sokokisojourn.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/the-cultur...

I use http://hnapp.com/ to set up a custom RSS feed to filter out various topic keywords I find uninteresting/irrelevant, and then use Feedly to view the RSS feed.

If you are looking to reduce the amount of time you waste, I've found some success in using the Strict Workflow extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/strict-workflow/cg... ) which combines a browser blacklist with the Pomodoro timer.

There's a similar anticlimax when looking at the big flashy publication videos at graphics conferences. Some new technique looks absolutely amazing, then you start to notice the hand-picked best conditions shown in the video (oh, this method only works in static scenes, when there's no motion blur, etc etc).