Polymath just means “knows a lot of subjects”. (It was easier to be a polymath back in ancient times.) Zhuge Liang was a philosopher, a general, a skilled warrior, a poet, an inventor, a …

🤷‍♀️ If you insist.

But you’re wrong. You’re just atrophying your ability to think in exchange for hallucinations. Still, you be you.

I’d go back to about 222CE to the period of the Battle of Yiling. Not for the battle itself, but for the aftermath.

See, the novel Three Kingdoms mentions an incident where famed genius general Zhuge Liang ambushed an army chasing them down near Yufu, which is near present-day Zigui County, Hubei Province.

There are two versions of the story. In the first he uses a “Stone Sentinel Maze” to trap the pursuing army of Lu Xun of Wu while his own and Liu Bei’s troops escape. They wandered, lost, in this bizarre arrangement of natural stones until they were guided out by a local elder, but by then the people they were chasing were long gone.

The second version has him using an “Eight Trigram Formation” to confound and trap the Wei army commanded by Sima Yi, before magnanimously releasing it, demonstrating both that he could have destroyed said army, but chose not to.

These are fiction, I stress, but they’re fiction based on folklore, and folklore often has a basis in tenuous, grossly distorted fact. (For example the story of Hou Yi shooting the ten suns is very credibly a story based on a calendar reform that introduced China’s solilunar taking ten days off a month to bring the calendar in line with the novel creation of the 24 solar forms. The shooting of ten suns may have been a folkloric encoding of a calendar change.) So for the facts of this clear work of fiction:

1. The Battle of Yiling is documented very well, and is supported by physical evidence.
2. Zhuge Liang is a historical personage who was noted as being a polymath genius, including, but not limited to, military strategy.
3. The Battle of Yiling did not go well for Liu Bei (it effectively destroyed his army) and he was, in fact, chased by Lu Xun mercilessly after the fact.
4. The territory around Zigui has some of the most confounding terrain imaginable with weird rock formations and treacherous nearness to riverbanks.

So it is not out of the question that Zhuge Liang in desperation misled or trapped a chasing army in the weird terrain around Zigui giving the remnants of Liu Bei’s army (and Liu Bei himself) the opportunity to finally escape. Then, over time, as history faded and mythology grew around the giants of the Three Kingdoms era, a desperate, last-ditch effort to escape turns into a brilliant military plan in which Zhuge Liang toyed with a rival general in a catch-and-release program.

I want to watch and see what really happened. I want to see the truth behind the millennia of myth.

Only after it got really, really, really, really bright. 😄

You must have been eating rolled or, worse, coarsely ground oats if you got the texture of boogers. If you want a completely different experience that tastes great and has a nicer texture, try cut oats instead. They take longer to cook, but they’re MAGNIFICENT.

This is a problem with vegetarians and vegans in general: they try to pitch “meat substitutes” that are absolutely filthy-tasting with terrible mouthfeel. They show off the absolute worst side of the ingredients instead of selling the ingredients where they’re strong.

There are tofu dishes that shine (like mapo doufu): make those, don’t try to gaslight people into thinking that a tofu burger “tastes just like the real thing”. It doesn’t.

The key to tofu that tastes good, rather than being a carrier for whatever sauce or spices you’re using and nothing else, is freshness.

When I lived in Canada I hated tofu (to my mother’s eternal anger). It was tasteless crap and if I wanted the taste of the sauce or soup or whatever, I’d drink the sauce or soup or whatever without the tofu. Nowadays I get tofu that, if I time it right, is still hot from the process of making it. When it’s like that it has its own flavour that’s actually quite nice. (Which makes sense: it’s made from legumes which, you know, have flavour.)

Oh wow. Wait until I tell you how (proper) sausage is made, what part of the body the casing is generally made of, and what goes through that for animals’ whole lives… 🤣

True. The people left behind are even worse: cryptobros. 😂

I’m close to Renewal. The red gem is about to start flashing. So the fiery ritual of Carousel is going to claim me soon enough. I’m at peace with that.

I’ve also arranged that I have nobody whose existence I’m responsible for that has to contend with the rather depressing future ahead of humanity. (Read: I have not procreated.) So I’m at peace with that as well. If humanity wants to obliterate itself in an orgy of stupidity and greed, that’s not my concern.

…

Unless.

…

They choose to do that before my Carousel. So that’s my main fear: that humanity will be in such a rush to fuck itself up that my palm won’t be blinking before WWIII or whatever starts. That I’ll have to witness what I’ve sadly come to accept as inevitable: the extinction of human civilization and the nigh-extinction of the human species.

AI is just humans but faster and more efficient …

Let me repair this for you:

AI is just humans (on some really stiff drugs) but faster and more efficient (at bullshitting with absolute confidence) …

I know, right? It’s amazing what kind of perfidy is done out in the net!

I’ve never seen AI slop that withstands any inspection of detail. Like clothing detail that makes no sense, or things weirdly merging one into another for no observable reason.

That’s a stupid question anyway.

I can’t fly a plane. I can still tell when a plane has crashed. I can’t play a sousaphone. I can still tell when someone’s played an incorrect note with one. I can’t cook Beijing roast duck. I can tell when one has been burned nonetheless, somehow.

It’s almost as if the question isn’t being asked in good faith.

Almost.

looks left

…

looks right

…

张殿李 isn’t my real name.

🙃

Both. My father had dogs. I had cats. I got along with both; I just think cats are better for city life.

AI doesn’t solve any problems.

It creates new ones. With the self-assured confidence that only a techbrodude billionaire could project.

(This is probably not a coincidence.)

That’s really weird to me.

If I’m playing a board game (like Xiangqi/Chinese Chess) what’s cool is when I spot an opportunity and exploit it. This is playing according to the rules of the game.

If I’m playing a card game (like Fight the Landlord) what’s cool is when I assemble a good combination of cards that drains my hand with inexorable play. Or when I find just the right timing to interfere with someone else draining their cards. Again this is playing according to the rules of the game.

In sportball, presumably when the audience is going wild at a cool play by some player they’re playing according to the rules of the game. (I can’t attest yeah or nay to this because sportball isn’t my vibe.) Is this not cool? (I’ll let sportball fans answer here.)

So why would RPGs be the exception to this? Why do you have to break the rules of play to do cool things?

That’s really weird to me.

He’s not talking about the touchscreen kiosk things. He’s talking about the drive-through AI order-takers. Which have pretty much been a disaster no matter where you go.

I’m talking from the global take on the economy, yes. This wave of AI will go the way of every previous wave: some niche products will use it effectively and the rest of the world will look back with keen embarrassment at this phase of history when people took LLMs seriously.

I mean there’s still practical uses for '50s-era “AI” out there. (“Symbolic AI” was it called?) But it is so tiny a segment it is basically nonexistent.