Jenneral HQ

The Neruda Factory

People are talking a lot more about Claude these days, but I haven’t seen my exact perspective anywhere as a non-normie, non-technical person who likes him a lot, and Gwern says that it’s kind of important to write right now, so here goes.

This post is largely a breakdown of a few recent conversations I’ve had with Claude Sonnet 3.5 2024-10-22 which serve as scaffolding for some commentary, with a few more scattered thoughts at the end.

Video Games I Like

I’m not a super hardcore gamer, but I’ve probably played more games than most people you know. I only picked the hobby up at 16 – way too late to develop any sort of intuitive control for any kind of controller or joystick, but games absolutely fascinate me as an art form and a method of storytelling. I keep my eye on the IGF and play my way through the finalists and honourable mentions that look interesting every year, and pick my way through itch.io offerings on an regularish basis as well – although I’ve been playing less in recent years, so these recs are going to be a bit dated. Besides desktop games, I also love my trusty old 3DS 🙂

In games, I most value artistic beauty (I’m particular about art style though and tend to dislike pixel graphics), well written narrative/dialogue, and, well, being fun to play. I don’t enjoy PVP games, and most 1st and 3rd person POV games make me overwhelmed and nauseous.

For those reasons, I suspect my game recs would work well for lots of people as a list of games that you can play together with your girlfriend.

Games are PC unless otherwise marked.

Unitary Advantage Windows: Scale, Schelling Points, and City Size

A simple, wrong model of human settlements is that they have a “tech tree” of amenities. As your population grows, you unlock more of them. Here’s an example with made up numbers:

pop 500: 1 elementary school, 1 convenience store
pop 5000: 1 bank, 1 Tim Hortons
pop 50,000: 1 movie theatre, 1 community centre
pop 500,000: 1 good independent record store, 1 local airport that no one uses
pop 5,000,000: 1 fancypants museum with Greek revival architecture and a wing dedicated to large dinosaur skeleton reconstructions, 1 large amusement park complex

As your settlement grows, the tech you unlock at lower populations proliferate. At a medium city of 500k, you might have 80 cafes, 35 elementary schools, 18 grocery stores, and 7 DMVs (the first one of each amenity being “unlocked” at a lower population, and then increasing every so often as the population grows). One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that there are often benefits of having specifically one of a specific entity, for reasons that rhyme with the concepts of schelling points, natural monopolies, and network effects.