07mk
16hr ago
That is wild. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and that seems well over sufficiently advanced.
07mk
1d ago
I’ll just take the funny hot take. He’s 100% gay (or bisexual) if he said he would rape a male home intruder. I even have some dominant kinks. At no point have I ever had a thought of raping a guy because I am dominant.
I have a distinct memory of being in high school dorm in the early 2000s and watching the Red Sox play the Yankees and excitedly yelling to a friend something like, "Look, the Sox are raping the Yankees!" Which got me a talking to by one of the adult counselors about how I shouldn't use the word "rape" like that because normalization or trivialization or glorifying or whatever. But to my teenage brain, before that, "rape" had been just another way to refer to mercilessly dominating someone else, usually in a competitive environment. I'd probably picked it up from being a big competitive online Quake/Counter-Strike/Unreal Tournament gamer in middle/high school. Being charitable, I could believe someone like him having that same mentality with respect to the word "rape." I certainly wasn't trying to invoke the idea of Pedro Martinez holding down Don Zimmer and forcibly sticking his dick into him when I was using that same word.
07mk
1d ago
I'd absolutely say that John Wick is super high status, even before you account for the fact that he's, in-universe, famous as the assassin that makes other world-class assassins shit their pants. Ie even if he were some "everyday" assassin with just enough assassination skills not to be killed on the job, he'd be super high status. Men and women who are protagonists in fictional works are almost never very low status and often very high status, and even the very low status ones, like, say, Forrest Gump, are exceptional in a way that makes them relatively high status compared to similar people - it's exactly their exceptionality that makes the fictional story worth telling, because a loser being mopey and suffering and then dying without ever making anyone's life any better, including their own, is a really boring story.
But more to the point, perhaps you can argue that "apex" is the wrong term, and I would probably agree with that argument. It's a very broad "apex" being used to describe the slice of people in that genre who are high status enough to be noticeable. Which is probably like 40-70% among men and 60-90% among women, by my completely unevidenced speculation. In that bottom 10-40% of women are the women who aren't noticed by men, and I'd wager that women who are less traditionally feminine are more highly represented within that bottom slice. So if you build your vision of what a typical feminine woman's life is like while ignoring that slice, you end up with a vision that's, among other things, more feminine than the reality. I think a lot of transwomen combine that with some other pathologies to end up believing what they do about what being a woman is like.
07mk
2d ago
I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?
The standard feminist answer is that women objectifying themselves is empowering, but men objectifying women is degrading to the women. Of course, there are plenty of issues you can raise with this, but the standard feminist way of dealing with it is not to think about it too hard and to shame others who do - which, to be fair, is the standard way of dealing with most/all ideologies' thorny points.
07mk
2d ago
I've said it before that a lot of the gender culture wars seem to be caused by the apex fallacy. People draw conclusions about the typical or median of the other gender based on noticing the chunk that's high status enough to notice. I think a lot of transwomen suffer from a pathological level of it.
07mk
3d ago
For example, it seems like traffic stops can get scary because it's hard to tell if someone's reaching for a gun. Maybe the script should be "person being pulled over keeps their hands on the wheel until the officer comes over and can see what they're doing". And now if I'm pulled over, I can do that, the officer knows what to do with it, and my action isn't something he's worried about.
I wasn't handed a script when I was studying for my driver's permit/license, but this very thing was exactly what was drilled into me as the thing to do when pulled over by the police. Both hands glued to the wheel unless or until instructed otherwise. In general, the fact that you need to always show both your hands, don't reach for something that's hidden, and don't make sudden movements are what I'd consider the basic "script" for interacting with police which I had picked up growing up. I didn't grow up in an environment that had much police interaction, and I haven't had any meaningful interaction with police as an adult, so I can't remember where I picked up this "script," though.
07mk
3d ago
Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war.
Without commenting on anything about the actual facts of the situation, I think the very fact that one side of the metaphorical culture war believes that it's particularly culture war means that it's necessarily culture war. As in the case of Floyd & Chauvin, it doesn't matter if the killed/killer were unfairly treated because of their race or status or whatever, all that matters is that enough people on any given side believe that it's particularly culture war, and it seems evident to me that enough people do, among the people who do know about it. The absolute total number of people knowing about it is also, of course, particularly culture war, due to how issues like this tend to get covered in mainstream media, and it seems to me that the people who do know about it are trying to increase that absolute total number, which is, again, also particularly culture war.
I feel like whatever issue there is with child actors will just be part of a larger trend with actors in general with AI. We may look back at the 20th-early 21st centuries with their actors performing in front of a camera to be displayed on a screen with quaint curiosity and a bit of horror like how we today look back at Buster Keaton hanging off a train for films in the early 20th century. I.e. we just no longer need to place real humans in such dangerous or effortful situations anymore, thanks to being able to show the same thing using computers.
I think the bigger thing may be social media celebrities, which will also be easy to fake, but which will naturally draw people - including children - in who are attracted to fame. The photos and videos might be computer-generated, but the faces and voices will be that of real, likely fame-hunting, humans, again including children. I don't know how we would or could protect children from early fame from such things. As someone else alluded to here, they'll most likely be "groomed" by the "algorithm" to creating and even enjoying creating certain types of content that I personally don't think would be good for there to be more of for society or for the children in question.
A reign of terror a la Scott Alexander China that just dictates how the algorithms work might work, but I can't see that being likely in the United States or even particularly desirable, as the cure may be worse than the disease. Age limits on social media are being tried in various places, but I'm skeptical that they can work without some massive cultural shift, which also seems unlikely. When the "winners" of social media are, almost by definition, high status, it's going to be hard to get people in general not to want to ape them, especially given the far lower costs of attempting compared to e.g. trying to become an actor, musician, or professional athlete.
Maybe the only way out is through, by sticking each of us in our own personal Matrix.
07mk
4d ago
Were there actual death threats, and how much more than the background default amount? I didn't see any actual examples of any of the "hate" directed her way in that Teen Vogue article, and my past experience with checking what are claimed as "death threats" tells me that I should presume that they're almost all death wishes rather than death threats.
07mk
4d ago
Given that this is known, what are the odds that at least one of the nuclear powers has major population centers/rich areas of South America as some of their auto-attack targets if shit hits the fan? Nukes aren't exactly cheap things you can just throw around willy-nilly on a whim, so perhaps it wouldn't be worth it. But I know that if I were in charge, I'd try to make sure we've got a few reserved for targeting places that are of strategic non-importance for (1) spite (the big reason) and (2) making sure that they don't have advantages over us for the Mad Max-esque post-apocalypse. Better to be Immortan Joe than a War Boy. I might even devote some intelligence resources to tracking the top X richest individuals on Earth at all times and make sure that their latest-available/best-guess coordinates are targeted.
07mk
4d ago
I've never heard of cooking bacon in water in my life. Growing up my Slavic parents would cook hot dogs in water but that's basically the only meat I've ever seen cooked by boiling as far as I can remember (I'm not counting stock here).
A friend of mine recommended cooking bacon in shallow water in the frying pan, as he said it got him the crispiest, most evenly-done bacon he's ever cooked in his life. I tried it a few times, but I could never get it to be any better than just frying on the pan normally. And in any case, the cooking process meant all the water boiled off anyway, so it doesn't apply here. My friend is Russian-born, though I believe he got this technique in his adulthood, long after he left behind Russia for America.
I've come to the conclusion that baking is the best method, though I have to be careful about the smoke triggering alarm.
07mk
4d ago
In general I think it would be great for game companies to have to release the code open source if they're going to stop supporting something, even an old version of a game.
In the long run, this might just be technologically obviated. If we live in a world where we can just tell Claude Opus 420.69 to reverse-engineer the server software and also the client software to be identical to the actual client software except with whatever encryption and security checks stripped out, and it actually generates that software successfully and cheaply, then all we really need is to prevent government interference. Of course, this could create a DRM cat-and-mouse game where the game devs program their games such that the security checks are so fundamentally built into the game that it's impossible to make a version of the client software that's meaningfully the same but with the security checks stripped out.
07mk
5d ago
GOT would be harder because the end wasn’t terrible it was just bad relative to the earlier work.
This is the second most offensive opinion I've read on this website.
07mk
6d ago
Mathematicians can say whatever they want
A legacy mathematician would use the word "proof" only to describe [("Refl is a value of type 0 + 0 = 0")]
(emphasis added)
So it seems like you're walking back the claim you made about what a (legacy) mathematician would say. Again, a legacy mathematician or any mathematician wouldn't describe that as a "proof."
07mk
6d ago
The native vocabulary is "3 is a value of type Nat" or "Refl is a value of type 0 + 0 = 0". A legacy mathematician would use the word "proof" only to describe the latter, and think it odd to use the word for the former.
Neither of these would be considered a "proof" by a mathematician. Those are just statements of fact. A mathematical proof is a logical argument of deduction that shows that some statement must be true if some set of premises are true. Statements of fact are used in proofs, but a single statement of fact wouldn't actually constitute a proof.
07mk
6d ago
As long as every $250 bill is coated with peanut residue. Let's put some eugenics into the mix.
07mk
7d ago
They should make that one again, but put Al Gore on it.
07mk
7d ago
Quarters are low-value enough (approximately 0.25 USD, if my math is correct) that fraud detection by humans is probably a very low priority. A counterfeiter would have to make a truly large mass of them to make it worth the production costs, and laundering all that without arousing suspicion has got to be some back-breaking labor, which defeats the purpose of counterfeiting. So given the low chance of loss and the low amount of loss from letting a counterfeit quarter through, most people don't find it worth the effort to try to detect it, unless some other alarms get raised.
07mk
7d ago
Combine that with livestreaming, and it seems like there's some major opportunity for growth here.
07mk
7d ago
Hm, perhaps the trophy hunting business could be improved with a sort of minimum caliber/destructiveness requirement on all weapons used for the hunting.
07mk
7d ago
Independence Day was 1996, not 1986. For a really good underrated McTiernan film closet to that, I recommend Last Action Hero from 93, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger with middle-aged Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones) as the villain. It was overshadowed by the Jurassic Park juggernaut, but it's a fantastic meta comedy action film parody. Feels a decade or two ahead of its time, as this kind of self-referential satires became far more common in this century than the last.
07mk
7d ago
I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.
(Emphasis added) Evidently, you do.
07mk
7d ago
According to the Wikipedia article, it seems that there was a "Cecil Effect" in Zimbabwe after the affair, where westerners hunting lions there became less common than otherwise would have been expected, resulting in less pleasant lives for the locals due to more lions and less money. I don't know much about the trophy hunting business, but what little I know about it from podcasts and radio shows makes me not surprised; it always seemed to me that westerners paying huge sums of money to hunt exotic animals in Africa was almost an unalloyed good, with the only significant downsides being for the individual animals themselves and other westerners who care more about optics or suffering of animals than about the suffering of other humans. The "I consent! I consent! I don't!" meme comes to mind.
The conversation around this reminds me of a clip I saw of a conversation between Jon Stewart and some (former?) head of some government agency on a stage a couple years ago, where he was pointing out that the fact that the agency can't account for where all their funds went is, in itself, proof of mismanagement, and she was insistent that the fact that they couldn't actually point to a wrong place where the money went meant that there was no evidence of mismanagement. The idea that the people running things have a responsibility to pro-actively provide evidence that things were being tracked properly in order to clear the bar for "not mismanaging" seemed to be utterly foreign to her and completely impossible to penetrate her mind. When incompetence can so easily allow for malice, incompetence must be treated like malice. This is why the ethical standard for bribes and favors in business is that it must not even appear to be corrupt; the lack of actual corruption is not a defense and not relevant.
More options
Context Copy link