Conrad Bastable

Black and white and read all over.

Building things. Writing things. Winning things.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

NEW ESSAY: Forsaking Industrialism: The Most Expensive Thing You Didn’t Buy.

Europe had leverage and squandered it, fueling China’s rise while gutting its own industry. Why tariffs can't save you, VC hates hardware, and the post-industrial dream grinds the middle class to dust.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@StarFox6441 🫡

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

Pre-having a kid, Anakin vs. the younglings was an edgy “OMG he really went there!” scene that emphasized his turn to the dark side

Post-having a kid, I find the scene retroactively invalidates the Vader redemption arc at the end of Return of the Jedi

[MT @MT_6226]

Why would Padme say “help me raise our child” immediately after confirming that Anakin just slaughtered the younglings?

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

The two genders

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

To be clear, this post is about how having a child of my own changed my perception of a pivotal scene in a way very different from the abstract “he has a high body count!”

A few responses suggest that he was always irredeemable regardless of this scene, but I don’t really agree

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@kyletheblind My tweet is literally about the relevance of this point, which i did not appreciate before becoming a dad

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@skepticalone44 From my new vantage point as a parent, I see it as literally and spiritually different to be a part of a side in a conflict that does a mass murder vs. to personally chop a bunch of kids up with a sword.

I get why this might not be apparent to others as i didn’t see it before.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@kyletheblind Do you have a kid?

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@guy_pharm Yeap.

But i was kinda willing to buy it before tbh. Not anymore.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@BecomingCritter I love arguing with nerds that Goku was actually a great dad

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@powerbottomdad1 If you’re already doing a fair amount of supervisory work, the experience of working with the ai stuff can be radicalizing

I think a lot of tech people would rather do 2hrs extra work talking to ai over 30mins extra people management

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@eigenrobot We have a hill in the backyard that works similarly for hill runs. I join in too.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@theRealJohnPeng 😂 @edgefills

🫡

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

I totally get that what they’re running from is the large share of the electorate that wants to proscribe them, and that such things don’t exactly endear the demos to our elites.

But there’s also a sense they leave behind the only geopolitically meaningful support base they have when they ditch America for Singapore, New Zealand, LatAm, and so on.

Upwardly mobile aspiring elites who want to make it but have not yet ascended are left to figure it out alone, “abundance” politics left DoA. The “Chud Veto” is rewarded with indifference, at best. L

> “The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.”

- the Groans of the Chuds.

The reply now, as it was then from the Romans, is silence.

I’ll reiterate what I said in the recent long article I posted: I view China as an adversary. But. Xi Jinping’s first wife wanted to move to the West. Xi’s family was destroyed by the cultural revolution and he was sent to live in a cave hundreds of miles from them as a teen. You can understand why someone who’d seen all that would want to just bug out.

Many did. He divorced her and she went to the West.

There is nothing comparable to the Cultural Revolution over here. 2020 was insane, yes. There are naked expressions of barely-political group-based bloodlust now throughout our discourse, yes. These things are bad. It would be nice, for those of us who just want to build great things, if we had strident elite support for crushing these things.

Alas. Instead we get…all this.

The last thing I’ll say, though, in their defence: elites should be worthy of their people, yes, but the people must also be worthy of their elites. The people feel insecure & thus betrayed by their elites, but perhaps the elites also feel insecure and betrayed by their chuds.

It’s not easy to bootstrap such bonds from nothing. Caesar had Alesia, we’ve got…401k’s?

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

Under critiqued how sad it is that all our new money elite spend their idle time talking about how they're gonna bug out & watch the sun set on civilization from a New Zealand bunker instead of rebuilding the nation in their own glorious image

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@theRealJohnPeng Absolutely.

And then, upon contact with the people after already having succeeded without them, the two options appear to be: i) stoke their resentments but hope to point them at someone else, ii) exit the system

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@quachelsey @Empty_America To be fair, i think we have plenty of that in new england too…

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@StevenGlinert winning is winning

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

Conversely, i recently made a game for kiddo and had wife demo it. One of the puzzles was traditional (no in game visual yellow paint, but contextual text based clues around how to interact). Wife aced the puzzle.

Showed to a gamer friend. He spam skimmed through text, ran in circles looking for yellow paint, eventually gave up and asked me what he was supposed to do.

Modern gaming ruined us.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@SealOfTheEnd @ZenkaiGoose This tweet & the long form video essay it links to capture my views in great detail.

There’s nothing else like it on the market these days

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

The old Halo games were special and captured a moment in gaming right as "online" hit the masses. Its gameplay was accessible but complex and rewarded awareness of lines of power projection. FPS Chess. There's nothing much like it these days.
https://t.co/96PEUqPosY

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@edgefills @stefanodimeraa When i smell Sonnet or GPT 5.4 in text it makes me so mad.

Opus can be good sometimes. 5.5 is not offensive but not good.

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

@Kfloz @ZenkaiGoose that's cool

sadly infinite is a terrible game