Any chance you could whip a quick MS paint-style image for me to make a blueprint for?

Here's a tileable unit

Imagine you needed 4 constructors running a recipe. You place that down. Tomorrow you need 8 constructors, so you just place down the same thing behind the existing one.

Here's an example of what not to do:

Why is this worse? Because you'd have to extend the orange line arbitrarily long before you can take outputs from it, to have space to place more constructors later. If you don't, and just take the outputs right from there, expanding the system would require refactoring your output line or your input line to make space. It's more troublesome.

OMG quadruple post hahahah sorry about that

gamesmanship

That's what happened to me before the game released, but they added a lot of quality of life that meant it was easy to expand factories outside of my tumorous growth of manifolds in the hub. Before, I had gotten to Phase 4 and had a small train network going, but I was unfamiliar with a lot of concepts that would've helped me make the systems more scalable.

FWIW I did make a small mistake here. The big monorail loop around the main base runs clockwise. That means that parallel rail lines going in and out of the loop cross over themselves (have to turn left to go in and turn left to go out, as opposed to turning right which wouldn't cross the lines) which is ugly and leads to more trains stopping. But on my first playthrough I had bidirectional lines, strange connections between factories, haphazard crossings instead of organized intersections with proper path signals, etc. because I was just not knowledgeable on the specifics of how rail networks are supposed to look.

being slick with it

It's understandable up to a certain point because most men are gross, we suck and there's constant evidence for that worldview. But I agree that it's excessive to bring that attitude to a thread where someone who is struggling with a social situation is asking for support and has given us next to no reason to think anything untowards has happened.

I'm sorry. I interpreted the OP as being pretty much completely benign, the typical overthinking you do when falling in love as a lonely person. If he does have thoughts that would push him to cross boundaries and make her uncomfortable or unsafe then that is a problem, I just didn't see anything that pointed in that direction.

Just put a on there why are we doing all this crap

I'm too young to have really ever explored music before reddit existed, but outside of reddit I went to /mu/ a few times before I realized just how many fascists were posting there, then I moved on to https://rateyourmusic.com/.

Read the description in the main poll. They consider allegiance to the Democratic Party as the only thing that makes you left wing, and allegiance to the Republican Party as the only thing that makes you right wing. The symbol loses all meaning, then becomes significant by itself, and the thing it originally represented is now distorted to fit the new significance of the symbol.

unlimited Godot tutorials on the first world

Now to build versatile frameworks, modular engines, and ACUs for Phase 3 completion

Hell yeah, Satisfactory rocks. So good.

::: spoiler backseat gaming

You'll find steel beams are a lot easier to scale up than reinforced iron plates.

Now that you have steel, make sure to get mercer spheres and research the Dimensional Depot in the M.A.M. It will allow you to have your factories upload materials to the cloud, then you can automatically retrieve from there to build wherever you wish, no need to make trips to restock building materials.

Also, always be mindful of adaptability. Leave enough space between your production lines to be able to expand them later. Build your manifolds in a way that makes them easy to scale up (usually this means building manifolds with inputs going in one direction and outputs going in the opposite direction, which allows for more production to be tacked on in the back). This is mostly relevant if you're building everything in close proximity, so for example set up your smelters such that the iron ore goes left to right, iron ingot comes back right to left; this way you upgrade your miners to mk2 and can just upgrade your belt lines, add more smelters to the right of the existing ones, and have more output to use for new production lines.

The layout of the factories you build in this period of transition from early to mid game is the most important part of the game. If you use these tricks, the midgame will be trivial and you'll be at phase 4 in no time. Once you're there it doesn't matter because you rebuild everything anyway and probably want to use trains to handle the massive load of items you have to transport.

:::

It's weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with "that's not true socialism." Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn't would say that, but anyone who's reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.

Which brings me to my next point: Socialism's biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It's the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants' daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.

Thinking about women is not problematic, friend.

Your honor, my client only attacked that 7 year old girl to pre-emptively defend against the violent terrorist she may have grown up to become.

Pfft, they already think that Haitian immigrants are pet eating savages, why would they even bother to act like the pogroms are a negative?

The Gift of the Magi but it's a husband who gained 200 lbs to cosplay as Nikocado, his husband, but Nikocado lost 200 lbs to live a longer life with his love.

The saline solution is used to control the body's chemical balance. Regular water would technically throw off the balance a little bit, but in the quantities you inject it's not a big deal. Remember that blood is mostly water anyway, so you're just diluting the other stuff slightly by adding more water.

Surely Kamala wouldn't do the same thing again and let 2026 midwest pogroms render the Haitian diaspora homeless

Biden would send in the national guard at that point, even though he obviously doesn't care about winning the election for Kamala he still has to maintain the federal government as the top dog, especially in a Dem stronghold.

"When Obama was elected, that was a very important victory,” Davis said when asked about the advance of Black political figures in the U.S. “It was not a victory in relation to what he actually accomplished during his presidency, but rather what was significant was that young people organized and accomplished something that was considered to be impossible."

To what end? To continue the brutalization of Africa, South America, the Pacific, etc. under the new shining sun of a Black president?

“When we engage in electoral politics, it can’t be just because a particular individual is running for office,” Davis told the crowd, “it is to enlarge the terrain of mass struggle, to guarantee a space for the trade union movement to win victories, for the women’s movement to win victories, for people of color to win victories, for working and poor people to win victories."

Funny she should say that Kamala L3Harris would enlarge the terrain of mass struggle. Maybe starting WW3 and helping Israel annex Lebanon and Syria are enlarging the terrain of mass struggle? Lenin told us to turn the imperialist conflict into class conflict, and Davis is being incredibly myopic not to see how the imperialist rhetoric here does the opposite, distracting the American masses from their exploitation by aligning them against America's geopolitical enemies, the workers of exploited periphery nations.

It's shameful that someone so respected is missing the forest for the trees so hard. Kill your heroes.

It is used to "create jobs" (open up new spaces to exploit labor), though. They're constantly investing the capital to make more money later, that's what capitalists do. The trick is they do that indirectly by exporting capital to the periphery, where the capital is realized into means of production and more extraction of resources.

Aljazeera coverage of today's attack on Lebanon

Good on him for not taking arsenic.

I watched I Saw the Devil (2010) and really didn't like it.

::: spoiler Rant/review

It's a shame because it was a very polished movie, clearly made with a lot of skill. But it also went so incredibly far with torture porn scenes without using them for any good reason. The dark tone from those scenes in the first act is nullified by the time we enter the second act with the goofy fight scenes. Soo-Hyeon is an unserious character whose arc doesn't feel justified: he's a tragic hero who becomes a monster with his ceaseless quest for revenge, except he never harms an innocent person in the whole movie, and the main thing that communicates his downward spiral is his escalating violence against Jang. But how are we supposed to feel like the violence is ramping up when we already started all the way at the extreme?

Speaking of Jang, kind of a garbage villain, right? I think the movie was going for an interesting concept: a villain who isn't really all that smart, motivated, or strong. He's not a Lee Woo Jin or an Anton Chigurh, not a mastermind or a force of nature. He's just plain evil. And that's cool! But the movie fails to actually deliver on making that evil convincing. They just show him being very cruel to his victims, but there's no smart usage of visual cues or anything like that until the shot in the third act where he looms in the closet with his face half lit and the other half submerged in pitch blackness. If there had been more similar shots sprinkled in the scenes where he was torturing and killing, he wouldn't have felt like such a flat character.

Overall, the movie felt like it only cared to use maximalist horror to shock the audience and then excite them with action scenes, never trying to deliver anything deeper than "revenge doesn't make you happier" and failing to make itself congruent with even that simple theme. IMO it's totally cool to try to cross the line and make very transgressive movies but you gotta make good on the promise of being transgressive, you shouldn't waste the opportunity to tell an extraordinary story like that.

:::

I don't think it would help much, let's look at CNN's coverage of the pager attack to see what I mean.

So, starting off with the headline, the article is already biased in a way that an LLM couldn't detect: the headline claims the attack was targeting Hezbollah, which is already contradictory with the facts shown immediately below, and contextual information from the real world. As humans, we can think about what it means for pagers to be rigged with explosives and detonated simultaneously at scale. We can understand that there's no way to do that while "targeting" any specific group, because you can't control where rigged consumer goods go. But an LLM would never know that, because an LLM doesn't reason about the world and doesn't actually know what the words it reads and writes represents. The best an LLM could do is notice something wrong between the headline saying the attack targeted Hezbollah and then the body showing that most injured people were civilians. But how could an LLM ever know that, even trained on better data? The article has this statement,

NNA reported that “hacked” pager devices exploded in the towns of Ali Al-Nahri and Riyaq in the central Beqaa valley, resulting in a significant number of injuries. The locations are Hezbollah strongholds.

that an AI would just have to know to mistrust to still identify the problem. As far as the AI knows, when the article says those towns are Hezbollah strongholds, that could literally mean those towns are... Hezbollah strongholds, in the literal military sense, rather than just places where they have strong presences. How would an LLM know any better?

Similar argument can be made about the information the article gives about the context more broadly. It mentions the tit for tat battles since Oct 7 but has no mention of Israel's history of aggression against Lebanon. Could an LLM identify that omission as a source of bias? It'd need to be very sure of its own understanding of history to do so, and if you've ever tried to have an LLM fact check something for you, you'd already know they're not designed to hold a consistent grip on reality, so we can reasonably say that LLMs are not the right tools to identify omission as a source of bias. Much less fabrication, because to identify that something is a lie you'd need a way to find a contradicting source and verify the contradicting source, which an LLM can never do.

Those might be comparable in the sense that if someone called me a terrorist, I'd sooner try to challenge the assumptions that led them to make the claim than the claim itself because I understand why they'd call me a terrorist (or an antisemite) but I believe those reasons are frivolous and easily dismissed. But I'd be much more careful trying to lean into being called an antisemite, when called a terrorist I might say "and I'd fly those planes into the towers again" but I would never say something similar when called an antisemite.

Hasn't Roger Waters been getting called an antisemite for ages for the same things as Corbyn?

gonna have to give it to Hasan on that one, that's a good take

https://gnosticnomad.substack.com/p/capital-as-demiurge

Nothing good has ever come from that cursed nation, except maybe Godard and Alice Chappelle.

Yeah WTF is this antisemitism from Hasan, plagiarizing the Belden program? Unreal.

I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that an AI can't know truth from falsehood, or when things are being omitted, overtly emphasized, etc. The only thing it can actually evaluate is tone, and the factual, objective affect that all news reporting tends to use is gonna read as unbiased. It'd only register as biased if they started throwing out insults, used lots of positive or negative adjectives, or other kinds of semantically evident bias. You'd basically need an AGI to actually evaluate how biased an article is. Not to mention that attempting to quantify that bias assumes that there even is a ground truth to compare against, which might be true for the natural sciences but is almost always false for social reality.

Honestly, it's not even an unreasonable conclusion to reach when politics is presented as it is in US electoral politics. There is such a small substantial difference between the parties that you can take any infinitesimal part of that difference and extrapolate it to mean ridiculous things like OOP did. Not only that, but take away knowledge of history and materialism, and you wouldn't distinguish between Republicans' opportunistic appeals to populism and anti-war rhetoric, versus their actual praxis of warmongering.

The good news is that it makes our job as socialists pretty easy when we can show those people that the symbols, cultural markers, and ideas they are being imposed are distinct from the political positions of bourgeois politicians who choose to associate with those superficialities. It's hard to get people to make that break, because the positive alternative doesn't actually exist yet.