Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement

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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • “Reliable access to food” as in “rowing bands of bandits won’t burn your crops, in exchange, you have to pay tax to the king”

    Not just that. Centralized settlements allowed for pooling resources, better grain storage, and easier production of high-calorie items such as bread.

    at first it was at eye level “we grow food, you fight”

    I don’t think that’s how it came about. At first it was “we build our houses together and pool our grain so we can better defend ourselves against aggressors”, then “oh those guys at the temple are pretty good at keeping count and dividing the food among us”, then “oh this organization helps us produce surplus food so now we can have dedicated guards who train instead of growing food”, then “oh the priesthood sure became powerful now that they control the guards”, etc…

    The monopoly on violence is an extremely modern concept which is easy to oversimplify, especially in historical contexts which can be very varied. The things you mention are really local to medieval Europe and don’t necessarily translate well to other settings.







  • I don’t know any AI artists (as in someone who prompts a model and then calls the result a work of art), although most traditional artists i know have come to incorporate AI one way or another in their process.

    You don’t really hear about it because it’s all intermediate material used during the production phase. For example, as a hobbyist writer, one thing i struggle with is writing action scenes cause i don’t have visual memory and i tend to forget a lot about continuity and “spatial realism” (“this guy starts in this corner of the room so there’s no way he could grab that object at that point”, shit like that). With AI I can generate some kind of “story board” of my scene, which helps me write it much better. It’s just laid out visually in front of me and i catch a lot more details.

    Sometimes when i’m toying with an idea i’ll also have a model generate a few variations on it, with different points of view, writing style, focus etc… Even if the writing is mediocre, it gives me a really good idea of how each version could pan out, and whether an angle works or not. I’ll then select the angle that works best and rewrite it entirely from scratch.

    There’s nothing innovative about it, people have been using assistants to avoid tedious work forever. It’s just that before AI you had to, you know, be rich and able to actually pay for the labor.





  • In french, the most common name is probably “beu” which is a contraction of “beuher” which is verlan (a type of slang where you reverse the word) for “herbe”.

    This was distorted in a movie to “beuze” , which was then given the verlan treatment again (this happens often) to “zeb”, hence my personal favorite “zebuline”. Mind you, that’s not a common name that’s a personal one I use often.


  • That’s why i call it “a bitter adolescent thing”. Building identities and communities about “bad behaviours other people supposedly have” is very common in children.

    Nobody really cares about what you do with your life. What you identify as “wild personal attacks” is probably benign behaviour which you choose to interpret dramatically. If people actually attacked you for these topics you would remove yourself from them. The only people who cannot remove themselves from the toxic people in their lives are children.