Agree the essay has a suspiciously Claude/ChatGPT-like organization. This comment perfectly articulates my distaste for AI-generated text with words I've been struggling to find.
This is a pretty essay, but it also reminds me of this meme[1]. To paraphrase:
Wheel is invented...
"bro, the whole world is a wheel!"
Books are invented...
"bro, the whole world is a book!"
Gears are invented...
"bro, the whole world is a mechanical clock!"
Computers are invented...
"bro, the whole world is a simulation!"
As a scientist, it definitely easy for our current context to seep into our perception of science. Maybe our perception of metascience too.
The barrier of entry is admittedly high for playing the game, but it's tons of fun. You have to pick an army, start collecting models (which aren't cheap), then you have to build them and at least sort of paint them. Honestly the best way is just go on to a local store on they 40k open play night (most have one weekly) and ask around. Folks are extremely kind and generous and will often loan you some models to play against them and try out the game. Some stores even have loaner armies in stock for this purpose.
The "pay to win" feeling is really just in the competitive scene. You can choose to chase the ever-changing meta or just enjoy playing more narrative games.
ps. you can learn the basic mechanics of the game pretty quickly by watching "Battle reports" on youtube. Search for 11th edition specifically as it just came out in June and the rules changed a good bit.
I don’t know anything about it, but I imagine there’s an STL file about any W40K figurine out there by now. And, probably, even more fan-made variations.
With hi-res resin 3D printers costing about as much as a W40K starter set, how can Wizards’ biz model hold?
Once you paint the figurine there’s no way to tell if it came from a store or from an at-home 3D printer.
I imagine Wizards may ban such things from official events and tournaments (if those are even a thing).
But do W40K hobbyists frown upon 3D printed figurines?
Really curious how the socio-economic dynamics of this are playing out. Figurine-based games seem to the the one area where consumer 3D printers can produce a 1-1 replacement.
For casual play you can absolutely use 3d printed models, and the STLs are out there in spades. Heck, you can use cardboard or rocks. But yes, for tournaments the rules are stricter. Big tournaments are the most strict. My local store allows 3d printed models but has a max % that can be printed vs authentic.
Are they doing an edition a every couple of years now? I think I have the 4th edition rules, but haven't painted or played in like 12 years. I do have some of my nicely painted models on display in a cabinet. I mostly stopped buying models when GamesWorkshop stopping letting the UK stores sell online as their models were really cheap compared to what they sold them for in Canada.
I recommend the Eisenhorn books if you want to get into the lore. It's a good story and covers a lot of ground without expecting a ton of prior knowledge.
There are multiple legs to The Hobby (tm), the painting and modelling, the game, and the lore.
For me, painting is the fun bit. I find the game broken and totally driven by marketing. Horrible pay-to-win stuff.
Gaming you need people, you gotta get down a shop and say hi. I prefer independents, as they sell other games, but what's available depends on where you are. Even without shops, finding a group isn't that hard, there's an organised one in my very small town. Facebook etc. can help.
For painting, it's easy, just find models you like the look of, the official site can suggest paints, and have a crack. Your first ones won't be great, but it's the progress that's fun. There's an absurd amount of YouTube content. My crew like Cult of Paint.
Lore, I know least about, I find the books unreadable, but the Black Library is vast. The Horus Heresy is the canonical backbone.
A friend actually writes some short stuff on the fantasy side, do him a favour and grab a collection with Jake Ozga.
Despite writing most of my procedural code in Python, I've always preferred doing my data analysis in R. For all of R's warts, the ergonomics of the dplyr + ggplot + the rest of the tidyverse are very tough to beat. My few attempts to use Pandas and matplotlib/seaborne have always proved frustrating. Based on this cheatsheet though, it seems like Polars addresses some of the friction of Pandas. Looking forward to trying it!
Agreed, as an R and polars user. The fundamental advantage R holds over other languages/libraries is expressions. The ability to reference columns directly AND interoperate with vectorized base ops in R is unfair. Of course, this super power is equally confusing to learners, fraught for production code, etc.
I looked briefly, but is anyone aware of the differences between Yew[1] and Sycamore[2]? Presumably they are both Elm-influenced(?) Rust web UI libraries named after trees, but it's unclear to me why I should use one versus the other.
They differ in a similar way to how React differs from SolidJS.
In react when state changes the component functions that depended on that state are rerun to compute what the component should now look like. Then react diffs the new output with the previous to touch only the parts that changed in the DOM.
In solidjs the component function runs only once (when the component is instantiated), when state changes signals will trigger and cause the specific parts of the DOM that depended on them to change. This is generally more efficient.
It's disappointing to see the myth of the "Christian Dark Ages" still repeated so often.
It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.
Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
To me the difference is, there seems to have been way more freedom of thought in the pre christian societies. Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god. This is for me what dark times means, and the age of enlightenment when it was possible again to dare to think in new directions and not be afraid of the inquisition anymore.
How to do real research, when you have to align every insight with some old book or face the stake? Only very restricted, in secrecy and not in open exchange.
So also in non christian societies people were killed for having the wrong ideas, but comparing greece or early rome with the christian empires, it seems obvious to me why progress was slowed down for so long.
Consider why the Roman public, commoners in particular but not exclusively, were so ready to abandon the religious beliefs of their forefathers and throw it all away, even defacing the old temples, to adopt some jewish desert hippie's promise of simple salvation. Perhaps you'd like to think this conversion of Rome was all by the sword, but in reality the early christian converts chose despite very credible threats of state violence, and the state itself only converted when the critical mass of common christians could no longer be denied or ignored.
Rome's culture and traditional was fundamentally broken; it no longer served the needs of the Roman people, and if Christianity hadn't popped up, it would have been some other system of reform instead. The status quo was unstable, rapidly deteriorating. You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?
" You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?"
Rome in the end was a decadent, but brutal empire full of slaves. And to a slave christian salvation sounds great.
But before there was a empire with emperors taking up the idea of becoming gods themself, there was a republic. And also after it became an empire, they did not have a institution like the inquisition shaping thought and banning heresy baked into their system.
This is the fundamental difference that I see.
In medieval times being expelled from the church was pretty much a death sentence. In roman and greek times for most of its existence not really.
The demise of the Roman Republic was an inevitability. It could have been Sulla rather than Caesar, and if not Caesar it could have been another, but one way or the other the situation was fundamentally unstable and the public was deeply discontent. Would be reformers like the Gracchi were finding enormous popular traction only to get assassinated.
Also, the Roman Republic were prolific slavers too. I say this because you speak of the Empire and slavery but then go into a "But the Republic.." This isn't Star Wars, you can't divide it into good guys and bad guys, the Republic and Empire were both imperial sons of bitches who conquered territory and took civilians as slaves. The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born.
"Also, the Roman Republic were prolific slavers too. I say this because you speak of the Empire and slavery but then go into a "But the Republic..""
My point here was about freedom of thought. And that seems to have been way more valued in the republic, than in the empire. (In general, good and bad are relative terms to me)
"The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born."
And maybe so. But christianity in general was not really about freeing slaves, either.
I’m not sure there necessarily was that much progress before that, though? With some exceptions ancient societies were highly stagnant especially technologically in contrast to high-late medieval Europe.
Also plague, climate change and demographic collapse kind of directly kickstarted the dark ages.
> Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god.
This is a modern view with hindsight bias. In the ancient world, the existence of many gods did not imply peaceful co-existance, but very heated rivalry and politics.
Ironically pagan authors of late antiquity were the "conservatives" in our modern sense. Pagan literally means "farmer" - it might have similar implications to how we would call someone a "redneck" today. At the time, they were opposed to foreign gods and new influences on their traditional and respectable Pantheon.
If anything Rome was a little too open to foreign dieties. Titus performed the right of Evocatio at the siege of Jerusalem, a custom where the god(s) of their foes were enticed to abandon their current patrons in return for a home and worship on Rome.
Eh, even those polytheistic societies had their own inquisitions. Socrates was executed for defying the gods, and lots of Christians and Jews were persecuted because they refused to accept that the emperor was a god.
There were many attention grabbing things (Cold War escalation, civil unrest, etc.) in the world when Feynman wrote those papers. I can't find the exact clip, but I remember seeing an interview where an older Feynman reflected on that time. He described a sense of hopelessness and impending doom hanging over him for years after his involvement with the Manhattan Project. Here's a similar quote to that effect[1]:
...I can't understand it anymore but I felt very strongly then. I'd sat in a restaurant in New York, for example and I looked at the buildings and how far away, I would think, you know, how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. How far down there was down to 34th Street? All these buildings, all smashed, and so on. And I got a very strange feeling. I would go along and I would see people building a bridge. Or, they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things, it's so useless?
Our times are certainly challenging, but I hope we can muster the strength and focus to keep building as others did in the past.
I'm totally on board with this, and I've heard that quote too. But I think the OP was talking more about how our "distraction environment" today prevents us from having even 5 minutes of continued focus, unless we go through herculean efforts. Thus limiting our ability to do deep thinking, create deep work and make deep choices.
But for sure there were many EPIC distractions of a more general nature in that time.
In addition to all of the craziness going on in the world at the time his wife was hospitalized and dying of tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan project.
There's a certain category of people who cope with stress by becoming absorbed in work so that they can shut everything else out. Those people likely do their best work because of the tragedies surrounding them.
Yeah but we're worse today. On top of all the impending doom we have vastly superior weapons of mass distraction in our hands and every computer/phone screen. Our attention spans have decreased.
