4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
It's going to be "too soon to do so" in the anecdotal Zhou Enlai sense for a very long time, and on top of that hopelessly subjective (is "US police are now scared of casual violence towards black do-no-gooders" a benefit or not? Would "Israel occupies part of Lebanon" be? Would "US Evangelicals ecstatic because they think the Rapture has drawn closer" a benefit or not?).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Well, given that the Iran war's direct costs are already estimated to be in excess of 20 billion, a couple hundreds more in funding are being requested and this does not even include figures for random damage like US embassies and bases in the region let alone indirect costs due to more expensive fuel and what-not, I think we are some orders of magnitude past that. (We'll see about the deaths depending on whether they actually proceed with a ground invasion.)
(And no, the "military budget is just money reinvested in US companies" argument won't do much here; it's still money that means part of the economy is retargeted towards making things that explode rather than twinkies. You could make absolutely the same argument about BLM damages since presumably the damaged storefronts were also rebuilt by US companies, too. What's the qualitative difference between "fire a missile and pay for a replacement" and "shatter a window and pay for a replacement"?)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
His opposition including some stupid people who can't get their narrative straight is not a particularly strong point in his favour.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
I'll need more time to chew on the rest of your essay before I can respond cogently, but
Simulation and emulation are not magic tricks. If you encode an abacus into a computer running on the Von-Neumann architecture, and it outputs exactly what the actual abacus would for the same input, for every possible input you care to try (or can try, if you formally verify the system), then I consider it insanity to claim that you haven't got a “real” abacus or that the process is merely “faking” the work.
I think calling it insanity betrays a bit of a failure of curiosity towards this aspect of human psychology. Why is it that any people make "retro" games for retro architectures, when they could just imitate the style in a modern engine? The HN public, I imagine, would be much more excited about "I got Doom to run on a toaster" than "I got Doom to run in a VM that has the power of a toaster". Why is breaking out of Alcatraz more interesting than clearing an obstacle course that was designed to be equally difficult? If in the Paralympics, a one-legged guy was hop-racing a two-legged guy with one of his legs tied to his back, which one would we cheer for? Why do we fantasise about Robinson Crusoe scenarios when we could do like the Primitive Technology youtube guy and buy a plot of land somewhere cheap and go frolic around in it wearing rags? Why is the handmade plastic trinket more valuable than the molecule-perfect mass produced Chinese replica? Humans, I think, tend to find acts, and products, of any form of "ingenuity" more real if they sit at or near the optimum point of a real optimisation landscape that someone may realistically encounter. If the optimisation landscape is artificial, and defined by restrictions that we could really just "wish away", then optimising for it is fake and play, and the product of such an optimisation process is a toy. Perhaps it is also so with the human software: a human running under the constraints of self-replicating meat evolved in the African jungle is a precious and impressive thing, but a human running in an emulator on a piece of silicon that is powerful enough to run Culture Minds is a neat diversion that's maybe worth 10 minutes of scrolling and an upvote.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Apart from faceh's argument below, it also seems to me that if a lawmaker passes a law because it seems like a good idea at the time, the times change and now it no longer seems like a good idea, then it should be up to the lawmaker to revoke that law. If you want this to be up to the courts, you at least ought to force the lawmaker to bundle each law with some text describing the contingent circumstances that the law is meant for, rather than simply letting the court and the commenting public engage in motivated guessing ("surely they said this because there was a frontier to settle and they needed bodies, which is no longer the case"/"surely they said this because they wanted to found a country to rule and represent everyone living in its confines, which is just as applicable today").
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Or put it this way - Trump chickened out of tariffs that would have been far less damaging to him than 10,000 American military deaths in a full or even partial invasion. Why would he TACO the former but not the latter?
Seems like a good opportunity to test the theory that Israel has a unique grip on him (directly, or indirectly by way of having a grip on his handlers/the top of the USG apparatus).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
The idea that the human ancestral environment was like this always seems like a mere just-so story to me. It seems sensible in our setting to believe that those who live in a state of nature outside of the reach of civilisation will behave in this way, because this is what we observe about people who live like that, but people who live outside of civilisation in the modern world are not a representative sample, and could easily have been selected for the sort of rapist anarchic tendencies you describe.
An explanation that requires much less in the way of assumptions about male/female relations in the age of Grug is that in a slightly more violent, slightly more anarchic society, the same guy who is an asshole to you is more likely to be good at being an asshole for you, in a setting where being an asshole is a good way to win competitions for limited resources. That would also explain the anecdotal evidence that women from slightly more violent and anarchic modern societies like Russia, the Levant or just about anywhere in Africa show a more pronounced preference for "bad boys" who may also be violent to them, over nice guys who will be continuously sweet and wont to get beaten up and robbed by the "bad boys" in those countries. In fact, Ireland as of 20 years ago probably also belongs in that list?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Sorry for the late response! I had a lot going on and it kind of fell by the wayside.
Gamelan is very nice. There's a few regional types extant in Indonesia; Balinese and Javanese are the major traditions. The one you posted (and the one that seems to have gotten popular among Western listeners) is the Balinese style, which I suppose is understandable since Bali was the first Indonesian island to be developed for international travellers, and it is fantastic - but I would actually say the Javanese style is the more elegant and delicate of the two.
I see! I was vaguely aware there were different styles, but never succeeded at finding good videos where you could actually see the players play.
My first introduction to Gamelan actually came from a 1993 video game soundtrack, which had several Gamelan-inspired songs going with its more generally Austronesian flavour.
How was Singapore, by the way?
Long story, but I enjoyed it a lot. Contra what everyone had been saying, there was easily enough to do for 10 days, even though I didn't manage to get out to Malaysia (I got close to one day but Shuttle Tebrau tickets sold out just as I was fighting the website, and the locals scared me off the other route by talking about 3h immigration queues). The food was great, highlights included climbing into the Labrador AMTB battery (was that your rec originally? It seems like it was open to tourists for a while but now it's just a ruin sitting in a patch of forest) and the NUS Gamelan club's weekly jam session (seemingly open to all). At the Asian Civilisations Museum, they had a special exhibit on games. I hyperfixated on the design of the Cherki cards I saw there and went on a wild goose chase to try to get a set, only to find that nobody in SG sold them anymore; in the end one of the local friends ordered it online from an Indonesian supplier.
As long as it's sufficiently local and hasn't been globalised in the same way that anime has (Nintendo would not be an acceptable answer either), Japanoposting is fine. I see your Shiina Ringo, and raise you another obscure Japanese artist called JAGATARA, here's an exceptionally funky album from that band I particularly enjoy.
Shiina Ringo is not particularly obscure, just popular with a very different crowd from the usual ACG circuit. The JAGATARA album is fun, listening to it now. You should check out other Shiina Ringo songs (ex., ex.) as well, if you don't know them yet.
Mainland Chinese media
I unfortunately didn't vibe with the RE-TROS songs you linked, but they remind me a little bit of this German techno(?) album.
In terms of more mainstream mainland songs I know, there's a lot of TV singing competition vocal fireworks stuff some of which is pretty good, e.g. Zhou Shen. For a while, Youtube would also shove songs by Lexie Liu in my face every so often, some of which are relatively catchy. The one I linked stayed in my memory for its fairly authentic use of European crazy girl woo as source material.
A decent Taiwanese song that was linked to me. I also enjoy this A-Mei depresso.
Lastly, let me shill this Hungarian duo I got to see live a while back. They self-identify as jazz, but it's really more some sort of jazzy techno with vaguely Japanese melodic influences.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
The "signalling" perspective is not really that helpful. Sure, people get into things to signal, whether it's becoming goth to hit on hot goth chicks or going fishing to make your red-tribey dad like you. What's the evidence that (1) this does not result in them actually liking the thing, and finding ways of deriving enjoyment from it qua itself? I suspect that (2) this is how most people actually come to like things most of the time, and (3) there is a pronounced tendency to only see the signalling component of preferences where we don't like the signalling component. (This is so obnoxiously outgroupy! Surely they're just doing this on purpose to shit on the ingroup!)
I know, because whenever I see this for US red tribe culture (like gratuitously mentioning your gun collection or (non-furbaby) dogs), my gut instinct is also to cringe and interpret it as "pure signalling", in much the same way. Like, who would actually enjoy hunting? "Dude, I camped in the woods for three days during the hurricane the other day, just me and my .22, and shot a 400 pound buck! Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" - "I'm not sure I get what's so fun about that" - "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely got pretty grimey, haha." with the snide implication being "But me and my big masculine outdoorsy self had a great time." If any of our red-tribe denizens think this interpretation is ridiculous and sneering, good; consider the possibility that that is also how Infinite Jest enjoyers feel about the above dismissal.
(...and I say this as someone who hasn't read any of these books. The most stereotypically pomo piece of literature I've made it through was House of Leaves, out of a sense of duty to xkcd, and I found it silly.)
Does the one-eyed man get to be king of the properly sighted just by presenting some blind people he would be comparatively fit to lead, though?
I don't think the metaphor you chose works here. In the end, you are just trying to force the parent poster to answer for some incompatible view espoused by unrelated people who happen to agree with him on the "Trump bad" part, which we can maybe consider to not be completely invalid if you also take responsibility for the "support Israel to position the set-pieces for the Rapture" camp on your side.
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