And don't forget the inevitable graffiti. The uncreative will simply spray random words and letters, but the deep thinkers among us may have the wit to draw a penis on it.
I also think more accurate. The opening sentence of Neuromancer is one of the most beautifully perfect metaphors I've ever read - one that's also chock full of symbolism. It may be the single best line of writing I've ever read.
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
Russia is neither forcibly conscripting nor are they preventing anyone from leaving the country should they wish.
Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.
The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.
For things like this I don't think you can view it as a destination, but rather a journey.
Your mind, body, and any skill will deteriorate over time if not regularly trained, so it must become a part of your life.
And because of this, the answer is easy - do what is permanently and realistically sustainable for yourself. It doesn't matter what's best when you're only going to really keep with things that are personally satisfying for yourself.
Further claims from Ukraine: they've had 30,000 total deaths, are inflicting casualties at a 10:1 rate, have a 'Ghost of Kyiv' single handedly flying around taking on Russia, Russia is out of missiles, and so on endlessly.
Probably driven in large part by the expansion of the voting pool. Great political thinkers have no more appeal to the masses at large than Beethoven, Dostoevsky, or Linux.
So we get entertainers and silver tongued devils for politicians whose primary skillset tends to overlap heavily with that of conmen.
Speaking of figures with no mainstream appeal, Plato wrote extensively, and utterly prophetically, about this phase of democracy in The Republic, and how it will inevitably lead to tyranny. It's playing out as if from a script.
This is complete nonsense. There's no shortage of low still, low wage jobs - most of which would pay better in the longrun, have opportunities for advancement, and so on.
But they don't come with the freedom that gig jobs do which is their primary appeal.
There is again no need for first person pronouns there.
E.g. 'File not found' vs 'Sorry I could not find the file you were looking for.' Same stuff, but one just adds an artificial and unnecessary anthropomorphization.
I think you may have misread his post. He was not speaking of being born and raised in an area but his thought experiment was swapping out people explicitly from different cultures, and seeing at what percent the 'host' cultures would change.
He believes people would simply change their values, but I think this is an incorrect assumption, as the example should make obvious.
And so if you went to Saudi Arabia you'd pretend to be down with executing people for apostasy?
Obviously it's an extreme example but many of the norms of a Western mindset would be no less offensive to billions of people in this world.
What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values.
And if e.g. economic opportunity drove you there you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.
This is commonly stated but seems more driven by ideology than science. People's racial identity is near to perfectly correlated with their genetic identity as can be ascertained with a very limited number of genetic markers.
And essentially all of species related biology would be a 'social construct' by such logic. The difference between entire species is often poorly defined. Different species can even interbreed and produce fertile offspring such as a liger. Or take the Australian Dingo which is literally just a wild dog, but it's not classified as one for quite arbitrary reasons.
Similar experience/perspective as the gp. People in different places are, in many if not most cases, just fundamentally different in countless ways.
I think both genetics (personality, among endless other characteristics is significantly to majority heritable and going to have different distributions in different areas) and environment/culture play significant roles.
But an interesting thing is that by the time people are adults, perhaps even before, the environmental factors have irreversibly changed them so marginalising cultural factors as "just" environmental doesn't really paint a fair picture.
For a person who's happy to travel/live just about anywhere this makes having children doubly fun, because you basically get to decide the 'cultural mold' for your children, which is really neat!
He's implying causality the other way. A desire to not want to die paired with a desire to avoid traditional religion leads people to indulge ideas and concepts they would otherwise dismiss as nonsense - singularity, simulation, medical immortality, and so on.
We want religion, but we don't want it to be called religion. I'm not just mocking others either. I'm quite compelled by the simulation hypothesis, but have the self awareness to realize my personal biases are likely playing a huge role there.
A nice 'scientific hypothesis' that I can comfortably discuss or debate with the benefit that I can convince myself that when I close my eyes for the final time that's not necessarily the end of the journey. Ahhh feels good.
There's obviously many more long tail games, but with few exceptions games, even long tailed, tend to be heavily front loaded. The list, in terms of games from e.g. 2018-2023 will likely look identical, so far as the games included, in a decade.
The reason the reflects on AAA games is because AAA in modern times is much more about budget than depth or quality. AAA games are dumping massive amounts of money on titles with the hope of a quick turn-around, but sales for these games are increasingly meh, because the games are increasingly meh.
Even the same studios do a poor job of rehashing stuff.
There are currently something like 10x as many players playing Skyrim as Starfield. It's quite pathetic.
It set the standard for online matchmaking, had exceptional (if not revolutionary) AI for an FPS, phenomenal level design, and is a definite competitor for the best game soundtrack ever. It is probably Bungie's magnum opus.
So it makes perfect sense that contemporary AAA devs would have no idea it even existed.
Think about what you're saying - the majority of those games are at least 16 years old.
That itself is fairly damning but what puts it over the top is that there are wayyyy more gamers nowadays than there were 16 years ago.
Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad. Games made on a conveyor belt just don't work, at least beyond a point - and that point, wherever it may be, is well behind us for just about all AAA studios.