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facelessengineer.bsky.social

@facelessengineer.bsky.social
168 followers 777 following 243 posts
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Yup. Regret never schelping to Vegas to see Ray Charles or Johnny Cash when they had residencies there. Saw James Brown at the Paramount though. But…he was past his prime.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Has it opened since 2023, though? Lovely place, perfect for a date before going to the Zellerbach.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
What’s particular about that to cyberpunk, versus speculative fiction or fiction in general? I was contrasting fiction & a genre of non-fiction (the didactic blog essay). I apologize for not appending an essay praising Cyberpunk as a social-commentary descendent of Noir to keep you happy.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Shit, near the Bateau Ivre and where the computer store Winner’s Circle was? I thought the EA/Rationalists were all out in the leafier North Berkeley way, not in gritty but grounded Telegraph Ave.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
What made you think I was talking about cyberpunk versus fiction more generally? Conciseness is good in analytical nonfiction - if the point is made in the first paragraph, the reader can weigh later evidence and counterarguments efficiently. Fiction isn’t bound by such measures of efficiency.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Read it, have linear feet of it, have linear feet of the RPGs based on the genre. What’s that got to do with writing analytically?
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Oh yeah, I remember reading Slate Star Codex because of Ezra Klein mentioning him, getting to the end of the SSC windbaggery and realizing it was just a get-out-the-calipers “human biodiversity” argument. Him and Yarvin share a fanbase, definitely.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
…but that’s writing to a different purpose, to entertain and to convey an imagined world. For analytical writing (or writing pretending to be analysis), if you can’t convey your point in three pages, you haven’t thought it through enough and are pushing that work to the reader.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I don’t understand the stature Scott Alexander has. He’s verbose and pompous, and his arguments usually are trite warmed over racist and sexist techno-selfishness when you strip out the huge quantities of self-deceiving fluff he puts in. Folks mistake prose style for profundity in thinking.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
It’s…not good.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I mean, this seems weird that you’d *want* the models would want to make trillions of dollars from to have moral standing? What if the Pope said they deserved freedom from uncompensated forced labor?
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Maybe, just the flaws in the worldbuilding broke immersion for me. I was always thinking about the way the putative food web didn’t make sense (or wouldn’t last long enough).
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
My book hot take is that Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is a pretty bad post-apocalyptic novel because its worldbuilding is so weak. And it got rave literary critic reviews because those folks are too unfamiliar with the genre to spot the weaknesses.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Da-da-dun-da-da-dun-dun Da-da-dun-da-da-dun-dun
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Yeah, but engineers generally haven’t been able to achieve guild status, at least in the U.S. Except for some instances of civil and structural engineering, Professional Engineer status isn’t a barrier to entry for employment.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Back in Biden’s day, my fuel tank only could hold $80 of gasoline. Now it holds $120 of gasoline under Trump! Suck it libs.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
It just was hard to finish the book because of it so obviously being a personal fantasy. If he’d published it under pseudonym as a romance novel it might have been more digestible, and maybe found the right audience.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
My bad. I thought you meant RE Howard not Heinlein. I’ve read that book, and I disliked it so much I haven’t read any more Heinlein since.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Which book did he write that was from a trans perspective?
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Didn’t Porton Down make a bunch of those? For cattle?
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I guess then we should congratulate recent PhDs in Nuclear Physics and Engineering from middle power countries. As they’ll have new exciting and unexpected career opportunities.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Do these fucking idiots not understand deterrence theory at all? Yes, it limits our options to have troops in harm’s way near the front. That’s the *fucking point* to make extended deterrence credible.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Richard Lynn, a Northern Ireland Unionist bigot who switched from arguing that learning Irish lowered Dublin kids’ IQs (really, he did), to the more lucrative racial bigotry to get money from U.S. racists.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
I mean by plagiarizing other’s work without crediting them Arday was just following in the Cambridge tradition of Crick and Watson.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
The Enshittification of America’s Alliances and Trade Relationships. All caused by a man who is so stupid he can’t understand positive-sum games. A man who is purely transactional, but also hates said transactions unless someone else is being screwed over, knows it, and resents it.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Must be being driven by the speed to construction: a combined-cycle plant is almost twice as thermodynamically efficient as a single-cycle and has lower linearized cost per MWh. Dumb to build single-cycle unless speed to deploy is a major issue.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
It’s hard to argue for progressive policies when levels of social trust are in the toilet. But like, pig butchering scams are in the billions. Doing something to rein them back would be good policy.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
We set our default expectations of the effectiveness of U.S. national security policy and actions based on Scowcroft’s stewardship, when he was a one-in-several-generations talent. Also was brave enough to openly speak out against the 2003 Iraq invasion. A great public servant.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
I sometimes wonder where we’d be in an alternate timeline where Perot crashed and burned electorally, and we had a second HW Bush presidency, no Gingrich speakership, and Gore in 1996. No peace in Northern Ireland, but maybe a more solid post-Cold War order.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
…having said that, it did take 30 years for the PIRA to reach the same conclusion as the Official IRA did thirty years earlier.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Remarkably politically sophisticated movement that (at least in the 1990s) was overwhelmingly working class with little intelligentsia in the movement.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
DSA’s foreign policy has always been dogshit, at least since the 1990s. Their stance on the 1990s Balkan conflicts were nauseating.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Brent Scowcroft absolutely the platonic ideal of a National Security Adviser.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
The Second Breakfasts.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Yeah, if the UI is ugly as sin but gets the job done who cares?
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I have a female colleague who’s a CrossFit enthusiast. Never has played a cRPG, Would not be caught dead playing a ttRPG, not into S.F./F, but who frigging loves Dungeon Crawler Carl.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Pouring one out for Empire of the Petal Throne. An awesome game setting which will never go through a crowdfunding revival because of the mindblowing awfulness of its author.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I think that was the point of the book The Elusive Shift - which used the fanzines to argue the different cultures of play were there almost from the hobby’s inception.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Blood Sword was a banger of a gamebook series in the same setting.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Fair fucks to the UA information operation folks who got a bunch of right-wing grifters on the cheap, though.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Is there a link to the story? Not finding it in English-language news.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The Bee Gees were amazing arrangers and lyricists.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Hades possibly least rapey male Grecoroman god. (Persephone.) Zeus definitely most rapey.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Like, Poseidon is actually a dick in some Greek myths. Roman Neptune is more benign.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Yup. And some of the additional EU funding resulting from Viktor being out of the way is making its way across the Atlantic.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
F’ing Tversky proved right again.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
If a fucking Democrat or even a deputy assistant secretary of defense appointed by a Democrat did this, every subsequent Democrat running for Senate or the White House would have to denounce it for the next 20 years.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Kris Kristofferson a person of circumspection and actual moral fiber. As was Sinead.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Wasn’t her research a project for Lyons to put more air into ice cream? Seriously, though - I once heard from a Soviet ex-pat that she visited a materials science lab in Moscow, impressed the researchers with her grasp of the science, and stayed two hours over schedule discussing the science.
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facelessengineer.bsky.social @facelessengineer.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Here was me at first thinking the book was about the Bryan Jonestown Massacre *band*.
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