Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like “if you think you might lose, avoid doing that”, “being outnumbered is bad generally”, and “consider lying.”
My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity.
One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.
Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate “As per my last email” ever
I was trying to explain The Art of War to my mother recently, and I referenced The Prince, in that Machiavelli wrote The Prince both as a genuine guide on good governance* (as he saw it) but in its historical context it may also be understood as an acerbic political commentary on the issues he saw both with Italy in general and the Medicis who had exiled him specifically.
Some of Machiavelli’s advice also seems blindingly obvious - “don’t use mercenaries if you can avoid it, and if you can’t avoid it, most certainly don’t refuse to pay them,” “maintaining a balanced budget is a good idea,” “if you make alliances, honour them” etc. etc. - but if you look at what was going on at the time he was alive, you can see why he might feel it necessary to plainly state these things.
If stuff in a very famous book seems weird or obvious it’s probably indicating that you should consider the historical context in which such a seemingly obvious thing needed to be said.
the most elaborate “As per my last email” ever
[id: screenshot of tags: #DO NOT FORGET TO FEED YOUR TROOPS #this was a genuinely important tip but also the way he explained it was hilarious #you could HEAR this poor general trying desperately to dumb the idea down far enough #for some rich idiot who has never fed a horse in his life and doesn’t know how much they eat #to understand that there is a Fundamental Limit To How Far You Can Transport A Horse Before It Needs More Food Than It Can Transport #Yes Even In A Wagon #And soldiers are the same only more so #because they also have to carry weapons and so on #and aren’t very good at pulling wagons #please for the love of Gods And Physics try to grasp this concept I am begging you #FORAGING DOES NOT WORK ON THIS KIND OF SCALE #NO IT DOESN’T I PROMISE
My favourite thing about tumblr, that in my opinion makes it far superior to other social media sites, is that new posts live side by side with old posts. These days, there’s a prioritization of new content. It not only shortens the lifespan of people’s work, memes and such, but it also devalues the work that goes into making certain things.
Sure, a lot of posts are just random thoughts spewed into the ether, but some posts are carefully crafted videos, photos, artwork, prose, that take the creator a considerable amount of time and effort to craft. So, as a content creator, it’s nice to see that you can put work into a piece of content on here and it can have a life of its own. Unlike other platforms where posts live and die in a matter of day, sometimes, hours
I really like this website because somebody will be like “there’s nothing wrong with darting out from behind a parked car into traffic, bootlicker” and you can be like okay this clearly evolved from a valid point about how the US is too car-centric. But something happened to it.
Fascinated by the idea of the kind of deer that would call somebody a bootlicker as an insult.
A deer bootlicker is a deer that’s so bad at foraging and whose forage range is so barren that they must subsist off the grass stuck to the boots of hikers and farmers
i had a dream i worked in an underwater restaurant and people kept ordering ice in their drinks and then getting mad at me when it would float away. and i’d tell them beforehand that the ice would float away & they’d be like lol no that’s not how it works just give me the ice. I’m fighting customer service battles never seen before
fyi, Jan Smit is the paleontologist who originally noticed high levels of iridium in the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary sediments (now known as the K-Pg Boundary) and hypothesized the Giant Asteroid Impact Theory as the reason dinosaurs went extinct!
and as far as I know he’s still out there, looking at rocks.
One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on “AI” (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they’re interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It’s not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it’s not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it’s doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.
This is why you can ask ChatGPT “is mayonnaise a palindrome?” and it will respond “No it’s not.” but then you ask “Are you sure? I think it is” and it will respond “Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward”
All it’s doing is trying to sound like it’s providing a correct answer. It doesn’t actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn’t). It’s not “Artificial Intelligence” by any meaning of the term, it’s just called AI because that’s a discipline of programming. It doesn’t inherently mean it has intelligence.
So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that’s been made with careful thought or consideration, you’re gonna get fucked over. It’s not even a quality issue. It just can’t consistently produce things of value because there’s no understanding there. It doesn’t “know” because it can’t “know”.
its been just over a year since i posted this and i still encounter people saying things like “i asked chatgpt and…” or “i made this with chatgpt and…”. and these arent like teenagers or students they’re adult professionals using this shit for their job. i dont know how people live like this
I don’t know how to make this any more clear but if you use ChatGPT to do work you’re only hampering yourself.
If you stop using it (or Co-Pilot or any other bullshit AI helper) you will learn and grow more, develop new skills, and become a more valuable employee at work and/or do better at school. There’s no shortcut to developing useful skills, you just gotta keep working on it.
I mean not to espouse baby boomer rhetoric that shits on millennials and minimizes our real problems but social media really can contribute to general unhappiness and exacerbate mental illnesses, among other things. Social media can be very good for connecting people and learning about new things and perspectives but its negative effects and aspects should also be a point of discussion among milennials and genZ more imo
One notable way this has affected a lot of young people is in a way of body dysmorphia. Last year, plastic surgeons reported an increase of what they call “Snapchat dysmorphia” where people want to get surgery to look like their faces with Snapchat filters on. Among this, it can also aggravate eating disorders for people.
There’s also the instant gratification that our generation has increasingly become used to which worsens our dependence on our various social media platforms and can greatly increase dissatisfaction when we don’t get new notifications or interactions with a post we make. Which may have a negative effect on people’s self esteem when their posts don’t get enough likes or desired attention.
Another thing I think that social media has done is that it has normalized a lot of otherwise alarming and rare things. For example, images of gore or videos of death are just not out of the ordinary anymore. I’m not saying it’s everywhere you turn but it’s just not exactly as shocking anymore because of how common it has become.
Additionally, I think that social media has also normalized advertisements. Advertisements used to be confined in very limited spaces: billboards, television, magazines and newspapers, and radios. But now they’ve become more pervasive and we’re increasingly desensitized to it. I mean look at Instagram, half your friends are trying to. Convince you to buy things under the guise of being an “influencer.” Your favorite youtubers are constantly selling you things and we’ve accepted this as just fairly normal. But imagine what people trying to sell you things looked like pre-social media? It was the Avon lady your mom avoided at supermarkets or the telemarketer you hung up on; it was less invasive and we could opt out.
And don’t even get me started on our data being harvested and used to finetune our advertisements. And this is getting increasingly accurate hence why there are times that you were just thinking about something and bam, you see an ad for it and it feels like they’re reading your mind. Nah fam, their profile on you is just so precise that it can almost predict what you’re thinking and it’s only going to get more precise.
Am I saying social media is flat out bad? No, I mean I’m posting this on a social media website, hoping to reach and interact with people on this matter. But what I am saying is that I feel like as people more directly affected by social media then previous generations, we should really start having more conversations about how it’s potentially negatively shaping our generation’s society and subsequent ones before it’s too late to change things
tumblr may be a hell site full of nauseating discourse but at least they haven’t integrated a ‘stories’ feature like literally every other social media site
