RoyalHenOil's recent activity
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Comment on Dragon Con 2026 in ~hobbies
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Comment on How to spot a psychopath: ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat’ in ~science
RoyalHenOil Link ParentWhat I mean is that it's not enough to recognize that Trump is fascist. It's important to recognize the precise psychopathic (or at least psychopath-like) tactics he uses so that you can resist...What I mean is that it's not enough to recognize that Trump is fascist. It's important to recognize the precise psychopathic (or at least psychopath-like) tactics he uses so that you can resist them. When he starts telling a "big lie", for example, the issue isn't (just) that he has bad politics, but that he's warping your understanding of reality — whether you agree with his politics or not.
Even if Trump had good politics, it would still important to recognize the ways he manipulates public discourse. There's nothing stopping a psychopath from getting into leftwing politics, after all. Someone as manipulative as Trump isn't married to the platform they espouse; their political alignment is just another tool they use to influence people.
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Comment on Post-tooth extraction diets! in ~food
RoyalHenOil (edited )LinkAbout a year and a half ago, I developed an esophagus problem that makes solid food very tricky to eat (my esophagus can't push it down very well, so it tends to get stuck inside my stomach and...About a year and a half ago, I developed an esophagus problem that makes solid food very tricky to eat (my esophagus can't push it down very well, so it tends to get stuck inside my stomach and never entersmy intestines). If I eat something gummy like rice, pasta, or bread, I have to go on a liquid diet for about two days after, because everything else I try to eat gets stuck behind the solid mass inside my stomach and can't pass through (causing nausea, acid reflux, pain on the left side of my ribcage, and constant burping because everything just ferments directly inside my stomach instead of my intestines). So I've been living on a mostly liquid diet ever since.
To make things even more challenging, I'm lactose intolerant, so eating yogurt, ice cream, milkshakes, etc., just complicates my symptoms.
Fortunately, there's a humongous world of soup and soup-related meals out there! At first, I was following recipes (egg drop soup, red lentil curry, etc., etc.), but I've made enough soups now that I'm pretty comfortable winging my own recipes and getting different texture and flavor profiles depending on what I'm in the mood for. Soup is basically the perfect food: the variety is endless, it's generally very quick and easy to make, and you can adjust it to the ingredients you have on hand.
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Comment on How to spot a psychopath: ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat’ in ~science
RoyalHenOil Link ParentThe article addresses this: The point isn't to diagnose public figures like Trump, but to teach everyday people how to recognize the tactics and behaviors that psychopaths commonly exhibit. Trump...The article addresses this:
It’s unfashionable to the point of being taboo in psychiatry and psychology now to ascribe personality disorders to public figures. “One of the perils of bringing psychology into politics is that it’s very easy for anyone with any given political perspective to look at their political enemies or rivals and say: ‘OK, well, they’re all psychopaths,’” says Koehli. There’s also the Goldwater Rule, which established as a psychiatric principle that professionals are not allowed to diagnose public figures they haven’t had clinical contact with or met (this was after 1,189 psychiatrists declared Barry Goldwater unfit to be president in the 1964 election). Viding, however, finds the fixation with diagnosis perhaps irrelevant in this context. “I always find the obsession with diagnosing these people interesting. You don’t need to diagnose them, there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognise individuals with those traits. If someone’s in political power, you can see those exemplified in behaviour, and most people are perfectly capable of making an assessment of what that signifies.”
Brazen lying in public life is a tactic Lobaczewski recognised – he called it the “reversive blockade”. Koehli describes it as: “When you tell a lie convincingly and it’s such an absurd lie, most people’s automatic reaction is that they can’t comprehend a lie told on that scale, so they try to find the ‘golden mean’ between the statement and the reality. But that, Lobaczewski says, is the intention of the big lie. They know it will sow confusion.” The impact on the population over which a dark personality presides is huge: some will try and find that golden mean; others will remain steadfast in calling it a lie and fall out with the first lot; others will try to adjust their own reality to make the lie true; while others will become inured to the new normal – that we just all lie now.
The point isn't to diagnose public figures like Trump, but to teach everyday people how to recognize the tactics and behaviors that psychopaths commonly exhibit. Trump doesn't have to be a clinical psychopath for you to pattern match his manipulation techniques and guard yourself against them — just like you don't need to diagnose the person you're dating to pick up on red flags like love-bombing or excessive jealousy.
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Comment on Ahead of an all-digital future for PlayStation, Sony needs to prove in courts that players know they don't own digitally purchased games in ~games
RoyalHenOil Link ParentSo was Sony. The result: Everyone in the world gets Australia's refund policy when they buy from Steam, but only Australian customers get Australia's refund policy when they buy from Sony (and...The result: Everyone in the world gets Australia's refund policy when they buy from Steam, but only Australian customers get Australia's refund policy when they buy from Sony (and they have to jump through hoops to prove it, like providing an ACCC ticket number).
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Comment on Ahead of an all-digital future for PlayStation, Sony needs to prove in courts that players know they don't own digitally purchased games in ~games
RoyalHenOil (edited )Link ParentIs Steam a monopoly (from a consumer's perspective)? I've never had any issues buying games on GOG or itch.io. From a developer's perspective, though, I agree it's a lot closer to a monopoly.Is Steam a monopoly (from a consumer's perspective)? I've never had any issues buying games on GOG or itch.io.
From a developer's perspective, though, I agree it's a lot closer to a monopoly.
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Comment on How rigid/fluid is your LGBT identity? in ~lgbt
RoyalHenOil LinkI don't identify as LGBT because my birth designation (female) doesn't bother me, I'm exclusively attracted to men and male-bodied people, and I'm not asexual or aromantic. However, I'm not super...I don't identify as LGBT because my birth designation (female) doesn't bother me, I'm exclusively attracted to men and male-bodied people, and I'm not asexual or aromantic.
However, I'm not super confident in my non-LGBT status. The demographic that I tend to click with stronger than any other is trans men, and I pretty consistently slot into male social groups more readily than female social groups, kind of regardless of culture or subculture (e.g., even in rural, conservative blue-collar environments). However, my very closest platonic friends have usually been women (albeit women who, themselves, mostly have male friends).
I'm not sure why or if this is related at all, but I'm also very commonly misidentified as a lesbian, by both men and women, LGBT and non-LGBT. (To be fair, most of the men I've dated are frequently misidentified as gay. Maybe people just aren't very good at guessing other people's sexualities?)
My parents tell me that when I was a toddler, I would insist I was a boy, and as I got a little older, I regularly expressed a wish to have been born a boy (up until around first grade or so). I also mimicked my dad and my grandpa, not my mom or my grandma, even though I spent way more time with my mom and my grandma (my primary caretakers).
But as I got older (especially in my late teens), this softened and I stopped having any particular opinions about my gender. As an adult, I have no trouble finding women relatable, and I have plenty of female role models. I'm fine with my body and my social position — thus I identify as non-LGBT (although if the circumstances of my life were different, I suspect I would be equally happy as a gay man).
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Comment on Dolly Parton, country music legend, dies at 80 in ~music
RoyalHenOil Link ParentHa, when I first moved to Australia, I didn't have a good sense for what aspects of American culture would be well-known and what aspects would be obscure. I got a job working on a farm (as per my...Ha, when I first moved to Australia, I didn't have a good sense for what aspects of American culture would be well-known and what aspects would be obscure. I got a job working on a farm (as per my backpacker's visa), and when I was talking to my supervisor one time, I mentioned something about the American Civil War. I assumed he wouldn't know much about American history, since Americans broadly don't know much about Australian history, so I started to explain what the Civil War was, and he cut me off saying, "I know. My dad's a Civil War reenactor in Perth." Blew my mind.
Alas, for the most part, I think Australia mostly imports the bad stuff (the worst junk food, the worst corporate chains, the worst politics, etc.) and misses out on a lot of the good stuff. Dolly is a wonderful exception to that pattern.
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Comment on Dolly Parton, country music legend, dies at 80 in ~music
RoyalHenOil Link ParentAs someone who spent a big part of my childhood in East Tennessee (I practically lived at Dollywood), and now lives in Australia, it's really touching and honestly a little bit magical that her...As someone who spent a big part of my childhood in East Tennessee (I practically lived at Dollywood), and now lives in Australia, it's really touching and honestly a little bit magical that her reach extends all the way over here.
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Comment on What is the oldest file you still have? in ~tech
RoyalHenOil Link ParentOoo, thank you! After some mucking around, I ended up using deark to identify the files and get them converted to PNGs. So, here it is: the oldest file on my computer. I guess I'm not sure what I...Ooo, thank you! After some mucking around, I ended up using deark to identify the files and get them converted to PNGs.
So, here it is: the oldest file on my computer. I guess I'm not sure what I was expecting, lol.
A few of the others I converted: 1, 2, 3 (I think my mom must have helped me with the hands on this last one, since it turns out she was shockingly good at drawing with a mouse in 1988.)
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Comment on What is the oldest file you still have? in ~tech
RoyalHenOil (edited )LinkThe very oldest file I still have on my computer is also the first file I personally created (albeit with my dad's help!). It's a drawing I made on May 7th, 1988, when I was two years old. My...The very oldest file I still have on my computer is also the first file I personally created (albeit with my dad's help!).
It's a drawing I made on May 7th, 1988, when I was two years old. My parents bought their first computer, a Mac Plus, that year and this is probably one of the first files any of us ever created on it.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what program it was made in and no idea how to open it.
I have 11 other drawings I made in 1988, plus two I made in 1994, and I have no idea how to view any of them (except as plaintext, which is gibberish). It's a bummer, but I keep hanging on to them just in case I ever figure out what file format they are.
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Comment on AI text watermarking is free and good in ~comp
RoyalHenOil Link ParentAccording to Anthropic, there will be less watermarking in code, but you're right that it will show up more strongly in places where there's more leeway in which tokens the LLM can choose, like...According to Anthropic, there will be less watermarking in code, but you're right that it will show up more strongly in places where there's more leeway in which tokens the LLM can choose, like comments:
As we noted above, AI watermarking takes advantage of decisions where either choice of a word would be equally good. Where an exact output is required—where there isn’t a choice, and something would be factually wrong or a piece of code would break if a different term was chosen—the watermark isn’t applied.
For example, once the model has written “2 + 2 =”, there is a very clear best choice for the next token (if the model is completing the sum, there isn’t an answer that’s equally as good as “4”; if it’s talking about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, there isn’t an answer that’s equally as good as “5”). The “nudge” of the watermark wouldn’t be applied here. For the same reason, code—which in very many cases has to be exact—has generally less watermarking than some other forms of text.
Having said that, in areas where there is an arbitrary choice between particular words or terms within the code, the watermark can be used, such as comments within code. But by definition, it will have a negligible effect on the actual code produced.
I imagine that the more strict the syntax has to be (e.g., if a company requires a very uniform code style), that harder it will be to differentiate Claude-generated code from human-written code. Which makes sense, because these constraints also make it harder to tell one human writer from another.
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Comment on AI text watermarking is free and good in ~comp
RoyalHenOil (edited )Link ParentIt's a weird article, and it suggests to me that the author fundamentally misunderstood how LLM technology actually works up until the watermark thing forced him to look into it. Strangely, he...It's a weird article, and it suggests to me that the author fundamentally misunderstood how LLM technology actually works up until the watermark thing forced him to look into it.
Strangely, he still seems to think that Claude and other LLMs use some completely different, non-LLM method to generate code. It's true that an LLM's code output is going to be more constrained than, say, its poetry output, but that's because LLMs are trained on code examples that are written in a highly constrained way and poetry examples that are written in a far less constrained way — because the level of constraint is a pretty inherent difference between code and poetry.
This means the watermark would be easier to detect for LLM-written poetry than for more highly regimented text, like a legal document where there just isn't much room for randomness. It has little to do with how much AI companies care about generating legalese versus poetry.
If you crank up the randomness on an LLM, you start getting some really weird gibberish that's a mixture of code, creative writing, technical documentation, slang, etc., etc. because the LLM doesn't actually "know" that these are all different kinds of text. They all go into the same training pot.
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Comment on What's something that's more challenging for you than it is for others? in ~talk
RoyalHenOil Link ParentI found going to sleep at regular times much, much easier when I was working a physically demanding job (farm work). Now that I have an office job, my bedtimes are all over the place. I just don't...I found going to sleep at regular times much, much easier when I was working a physically demanding job (farm work). Now that I have an office job, my bedtimes are all over the place. I just don't feel that tired at night, and then I pay for it in the morning.
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Comment on What's something that's more challenging for you than it is for others? in ~talk
RoyalHenOil (edited )Link ParentThis is it for me — except I think I do actually remember things, because I'll randomly recall the most obscure things at oddest times. I just don't have any way to reliably retrieve memories. I...This is it for me — except I think I do actually remember things, because I'll randomly recall the most obscure things at oddest times. I just don't have any way to reliably retrieve memories. I feel perpetually like everything's on the tip of my tongue, even things that are extremely familiar to me, and I have to do a lot of extra work logicking through problems I already know the answer to because I just can't get the right neurons to fire.
When I was in school, for example, I was always the very last one to turn in math tests because I'd inevitably forget some of the formulas and had to derive them from first principles. And when I wrote timed essays in German class, I always took longer and wrote much longer essays because I'd forget basic vocabulary (like the word for "airport") and have to use complex grammatical structures to work around it (like "the big place where airplanes fly to", which is grammatically trickier in German than most languages). My teachers were always simultaneously impressed and flustered with me.
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Comment on Seedless blackberries and cherries that grow on bushes vie to be the future of food in ~food
RoyalHenOil Link ParentSure thing, check out my reply to BigBadWolf! (I did tone down the ranting-ness.)Sure thing, check out my reply to BigBadWolf! (I did tone down the ranting-ness.)
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Comment on Seedless blackberries and cherries that grow on bushes vie to be the future of food in ~food
RoyalHenOil Link ParentSo the problem with vertical farming is that there's a limited amount of sunlight per acre, which means there's a maximum amount of sugar/calories that can be produced on a given block of land. If...So the problem with vertical farming is that there's a limited amount of sunlight per acre, which means there's a maximum amount of sugar/calories that can be produced on a given block of land. If you're growing in natural light, vertical farming is not a space savings; you're just building an expensive structure that casts a shadow behind it, so you have to space your crop rows out more widely, and so it ends up being the same productivity per acre, just at a higher cost.
To work around this, you have to use artificial light, and that's very expensive. Your artificially-lit vertical farm is competing against thousand upon thousands of naturally-lit horizontal farms, and they're all going to be able to undercut your prices by a lot. The economics just doesn't work. Maybe you can use the vertical farming thing as a marketing gimmick and scrape by, but you're definitely not upending the industry.
There are some scenarios where vertical farming can make sense. For a backyard gardener or a restaurant or something, vertical growing a great way to take advantage of a sunlit wall, for example. Or if you're leading a country with extremely limited land, but you still want an agricultural industry as part of your defense strategy (e.g., to resist blockades), it could make sense to subsidize vertical farms. But these kinds of farms will never be economically self-sustaining on a commercial scale, and they are wholly inappropriate for VC funding. There are also very few places where this kind of investment could make sense — perhaps Singapore, for example, but definitely not a country where traditional farming is feasible. The US, as one of the top agricultural producers in the world, is a particularly silly country to try to jumpstart vertical farming in.
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Comment on Seedless blackberries and cherries that grow on bushes vie to be the future of food in ~food
RoyalHenOil Link ParentThey're just traits you can find in the wild variants of your backyard vegetables. Domesticated plants are extremely specialized and exhibit a very limited selection of traits compared to their...They're just traits you can find in the wild variants of your backyard vegetables. Domesticated plants are extremely specialized and exhibit a very limited selection of traits compared to their wild counterparts. For example, lettuce is in the thistle group, so wild lettuce is usually pretty spiky, and tomatoes are in the nightshade group, so wild tomatoes can contain nightshade toxins. These unpalatable traits have just been laboriously bred out of domesticated plants over hundreds or thousands of years.
The company I worked for was always looking for more obscure genetics, so whenever our resident plant collectors found a plant that looked particularly odd (like the floppy celery and the hairy tomato), they jumped all over it — because if a plant has one unusual trait, it probably has a lot more.
They particularly liked collecting from islands, deserts, hidden-away ravines, etc., because they were more likely to find isolated populations of plants there — and they spent a lot of money on funding nature preserves in countries around the world (especially countries that don't usually do much for conversation) to protect these diversity hotspots.
These collection trips were almost entirely focused on breeding more robust, weather- and disease-resistant plants, but I do remember a bit of excitement around a wild melon someone found growing in some roadside weeds because its stem turned red when the melon was ripe. It can be pretty tricky to time melon harvests correctly because the perfect harvest window is very narrow and there aren't a lot of external tells like there are with most other fruits, so a red stem would be a useful flag to the farmer. (I have no idea if this trait was successfully transferred to any melon products, since we didn't breed melons at the subsidiary where I worked.)
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Comment on I love Tildes in ~tildes
RoyalHenOil Link ParentI have a few of those old forum contacts floating around as well. There's one that's particularly entertaining to me: Some guy I initially met on LiveJournal probably around 2001, and we've been...I have a few of those old forum contacts floating around as well. There's one that's particularly entertaining to me: Some guy I initially met on LiveJournal probably around 2001, and we've been randomly/unintentionally running into each other on assorted websites ever since. I've yet to encounter him on Tildes, lol, but I'm not ruling it out.
(If you're out there, pavel_lishin, I'm using a different username here but it's meeee!)
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Comment on Seedless blackberries and cherries that grow on bushes vie to be the future of food in ~food
RoyalHenOil LinkOne thing that makes this trickier is that the big names in plant breeding also have access to CRISPR. I started working for a major international seed company in 2012, and CRISPR was already a...- Exemplary
One thing that makes this trickier is that the big names in plant breeding also have access to CRISPR. I started working for a major international seed company in 2012, and CRISPR was already a huge topic there by that point.
We used traditional pollination to do all our breeding (it's a no-GMO company). This means we spent a lot of time collecting wild plants, genetically sequencing them, breeding them in a controlled way to isolate and transfer specific genes, and then genetically sequencing all the progeny (many hundreds of plants) to pick out the ones with the exact right combination of genes we were looking for. I personally grew a lot of weird plants — poisonous tomatoes covered in hair, lettuce covered in spikes, celery that grew as sprawly vines across the ground, etc. — as intermediate steps in the process transferring desireable plant genes (like assorted disease resistances or climate predilections) without transferring the undesirable ones (like being poisonous or covered in spikes). This is a process is that CRISPR could help speed up.
I don't work there anymore and I don't know whether the company uses CRISPR on a commercial scale (possibly not, if they assume it will face legal complications in the future like GMO technology has), but I definitely know they were experimenting pretty heavily with it, and I imagine that all the other big seed companies were as well. That's pretty huge competition for a little startup — and it doesn't help that most of the major seed companies have also formed patent-sharing collectives (as a competitive workaround for all the insidious patent laws that Bayer/Monsanto has managed to get passed in different jurisdictions around the world), which makes it even harder for little guys to break in to the commercial framing industry. They won't be invited to the club until they can contribute meaningfully to the patent pool, and that's not easy for a small, young company.
It's not impossible, though! A small seed company can definitely upset bigger competitors in the ag industry (it's happened many times before, and I know the big players are all worried about it happening again) if it's managed cleverly. I'm not sure that the VC route is the ideal way to get there, though, since VCs tend to expect faster results than the ag industry is likely to provide. This is a business where a single crop variety can easily take 10+ years to develop, have its heyday for maybe a year or two, and then be superseded almost immediately. (Note, this is just based on my knowledge of the vegetable industry. I don't know much about orchards, grains, etc.)
...and technological fixes like vertical farms, artificial-intelligence-driven tractors, and less resource-intensive meat substitutes forged from plants or animal cells have struggled in the marketplace.
I found this part kind of funny. CRISPR is not like these other things. Some of those, like AI tractors, are solutions in search of a problem (something I have ranted about before) and some, like vertical farming, are downright laughable (something I will happily rant about here if anyone cares to read it but, if not, just know that vertical farming defies some principles of physics and economics).
CRISPR can absolutely be used in equally silly ways, and I have no doubt that VCs will jump at the silliest ones (silly ideas like these practically exist to convince starry-eyed VCs to fork over their cash), but it can genuinely help solve some pretty hard problems as well. If this company's founders are smart, they'll toy around with seedless blackberries or whatever to placate their investors, but they'll pour the bulk of their resources into the "boring" problems that farmers actually ask for.
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I used to go every year in my teens and early 20s, back when it was just in two hotels (the Hyatt and the Marriott, though the Marriott was kind of dead back then). I remember when they added the third hotel as well, but I never spent much time there.
I was active in Atlanta's Rocky Horror Picture Show scene, and we'd all volunteer to work DragonCon security together, so most of my memories are security-related. The ones I remember most: the time someone set up an illegal tattoo parlor in their hotel room and were tattooing drunk guests, the time someone dressed as Spider Man was climbing between balconies on the outside of the Hyatt, the time some cosplayers were carrying around a bunch of illegal guns and got super pissed when we told them to get rid of them quick before the cops saw them, and the time James Marsters cut his hand on a sword belonging to one of my friends and the chaos that caused over the radio (we didn't have a code word for that type of incident, but we used the term "package" to refer to VIPs — as in, "I delivered a package to X" meaning a VIP has been successfully escorted somewhere — and my friend improvised with, "Uh, I have a damaged package" and we were all freaking out in the security room trying to figure out what that meant and how serious it was).
I don't live in Atlanta (or even the US) anymore, but I've been sporadically a few times since then, as a regular guest. My favorite event is the robot battles. (I never got to go to any events when I worked security, unless you count guarding the door.)