TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Fully agreed. If I was an animal in the wild then it very well may be true that life would be consistently painful enough that suicide was the better choice in the long term. Maybe this could even be extended to medieval peasants and early factory workers. But today? Modern life has so many conveniences and entertainment options that we're all functionally living in a cornucopia. I do 5-10 hours of real work per week to maintain a solidly middle class lifestyle, then spend the remainder of my time doing whatever I want.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
It will correct itself in a generation or two
I highly doubt this will happen automatically, as birthrates were a nonissue basically everywhere 100 years ago, but now they're affecting basically every society. The Amish + Orthodox Jews seem exempt for now, but they're very strange societies that both see a decent chunk of people leaving the farm every generation, and which aren't sustainable plans for entire societies -- a lot of the Orthodox Jewish birthrate is propped up by insane welfare leeching, for instance.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Spicy AF take, and one that I fully agree with! A lot of parents will say that kids are worth it overall in some metaphysical sense, even while they complain constantly about all the object-level problems kids cause. I've heard a lot of parents claim that you only like kids after they've been born, that your body flips a switch or something and forces you to be happy about them. Maybe this is true for some people, but it kind of sounds like a combination of cope + reciting the only socially acceptable line. What, are people going to say "no, I wish I didn't have kids"? I've pressed a few parents in private and it has sort of seemed like they angle that way, although they'll never explicitly say anything like it since that makes it sounds like they don't love their kids.
Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down.
It's almost certain that the increasing quality of childless life in terms of entertainment is a big contributor. I don't think a lot of people remember how boring everything was even just 20-30 years ago, but now we have an endless stream of high-quality entertainment constantly at our fingertips. With that competition, kids frequently get bumped off the to-do list. A lot of people would like to have them as a "feather in the cap" sort of achievement, but they require an absurd amount of commitment relative to literally anything else that the opportunity costs are just too great.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Gamers and neckbeards complained endlessly about these things on online fora, but curiously the gaming journalists always seemed to take the side of the industry, calling gamers entitled manchildren for caring about this stuff.
This is not my recollection. Some sites probably did this, but there was always a significant chunk that decried this sort of stuff either implicitly (e.g. consistently highlighting bad industry practices) or explicitly. I remember Oblivion Horse Armor being pointed out by journalists as a bad omen. I don't recall them doing any sort of concerted, major push for "you need to just accept this, losers!" The Xbox One reveal was similarly panned. Heck, some former journalists became full time commentators calling all that stuff out, like Jim Sterling.
Probably the biggest difference between the mainstream gaming press and regular gamers was the reaction to Mass Effect 3's ending. I recall most sites at the time going "meh", like it was bad but not terrible. Eventually they basically got bullied into adopting the popular view that it was the video game Crime of the Decade, but there was indeed that initial week or 2 where they underplayed it.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
I don't know what exactly is your point with this post. A lot of people presumably went through similar phases that you did, although I doubt anyone had a nearly identical path. I remember GamerGate vividly as well as New Atheism, but I never seriously watched people like Sargon of Akkad or Peter Molyneux. Is your post just to talk about that entire vague blob? Sure, OK, I'll add my 2c.
GamerGate didn't start in 2008-2013. The inciting incident was in 2014, although it's functionally irrelevant other than as a red herring for people to describe what the "movement" was "really about". I'm sure some people were genuinely concerned about ethics in video game reviews, with the reviewers being a little too cozy with the developers and not making that clear. In practice, the movement always really was primarily concerned with feminist/leftist encroachment in video games. Anita Sarkeesian's breakthrough kickstarter in 2012 ought to mentioned alongside that. There were likely smaller events as well, but Anita Sarkeesian was when I first really started noticing the culture war battle lines being drawn. In any case, there was a lot of embarrassment in polite spaces about being seen as "against feminism" in the days of proto-woke, so people liked to pretend GamerGate was about something else, but no, that was never really true in practice. I'm glad we can all just drop the guise and talk about that stuff openly now. It's perfectly valid to push back on the types of cultural changes that Feminists would want, which is mostly redesigning characters so they don't appeal to male sexual preferences, as well as accepting sectarian leftist propaganda as a passive backdrop.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Woke leftists usually get away with quite a bit more than a median poster here.
Certainly not! If you have any examples, I'd like to see them.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I think most people think it's fine, including you.
Very strongly disagree with this, especially when it comes to myself. I happen to be something of an authority on myself, actually.
I think if woke leftists came around and starting speaking like this, they would get banned pretty quickly.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
You can criticize the speaker as well, there's nothing wrong with that.
No, personal criticism of the person you're debating with almost never goes well. It breeds defensiveness, vitriol, and one-upsmanship.
Yeah, that's what Amadan said, "We just don't always agree with you what constitutes an attack".
OK, they're free to do that, but I do not think this is within the realm of "reasonable people could disagree". I'd say most people would think these types of statements cross a line. At the very least they don't add productively to the conversation, and it would be better without them.
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
a lot of people think you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll
you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.
You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit
Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Right, but personal criticism is.
Attack the argument, not the speaker! I think personal criticism should be avoided as much as possible as it never tends to be on the positive side of the light:heat ratio. So no, I don't think "it's personal criticism" is a great defense.
Replacing [thing that can be good or bad, depending on how you do it] with [thing that's always bad no matter how you do it] completely changes the discussed scenario.
Again, I really disagree with the notion that calling someone a "bad faith borderline troll" would ever be a "good" thing for a conversation. It's not quite as terrible as "lying shitbag", but it's quite clearly still "bad" in my eyes.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
precisely because "bad faith borderline troll" is fine, actually,
Name calling like this isn't fine. If his argument was that it was fine, he could have just said that instead of claiming the issue was that I quoted out of context.
If his argument was that it was fine because he had some "justification" in the rest of his post... well that would indeed be different to the argument I thought he was making and which I responded to, but it would be even sillier. You could justify practically anything in that case, including "lying shitbag".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
The principle exists outside the specific words used. I presume he would think "bad faith borderline troll" is bad, but I couldn't be sure. I wanted to demonstrate the principle clearly without having to worry about whether he'd come back with "bad faith borderline troll" is fine, actually.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I was not changing the principle of "selective editing", nor of "relaying what other people think".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Again, I was demonstrating the principle.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
His whole point was that it was a "selective edit".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I want to make the principle clear. I think accusing someone of being a "bad faith borderline troll" is bad enough that it should be sufficient, but a lot of people on this site seem to think that's perfectly fine as far as debate etiquette goes. I don't think anyone would defend "lying shitbag" though. Hopefully I'm not wrong.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I guess a lot of it comes down to what exactly you're building too. I doubt I'd get as much pleasure from the end product if I was designing something like medical device firmware that hardly anyone would ever interact with, and they mainly only get upset if it stops working. In my job I'm designing data reporting tools which let me see a big difference compared to the old version, and I have end-users telling me "oh wow, this is a lot better than what we had before". In my free time I design little video games and ad hoc apps that let me automate things I had previously done manually, both of which have intrinsic appeal.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. For what it's worth I'll include the "a lot of people think" part to the front of it for fuller context going forward, but it's still quite bad even with that included. Claiming you're just relaying what other people think shouldn't be a shield that lets you just write whatever inflammatory stuff you want.
E.g. if I wrote something like this, I ought to get moderated:
You know Amadan, a lot of people think you're just a total lying shitbag. For a long time I urged people to give you the benefit of the doubt, but goddamn I really get what they were saying now.
I do not think it would be a great defense if I said: Oh hey, technically I wasn't saying that about you, it's just what other people have said about you that I'm informing you of ;)
(If it's not clear, this was for illustrative purposes only. I would never describe you as a "lying shitbag" or "bad faith borderline troll" no matter what our differences of opinion were.)
Also you're saying I didn't include enough context, and then you turn around and clip out the context of the next sentence in that post of yours:
I guess this is the point where I say "Goddamn, I get it now," because frankly, you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.
The important bit is the "I get it now", which I'd say isn't a far leap from saying you agree with them, at least somewhat.
"Very bad form", as they say.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I'm glad you enjoyed reading it! And yes, it's mildly frustrating in a lot of ways to have a CTO that doesn't know much about tech. I wish ours had a handler that knew what they were talking about.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Heh, I'd certainly like to think so. I wish my current job had infrastructure that was as elegant and well-functioning as my train-based city blocks.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think. What will matter is what the industry at large thinks, and there's a decent chance that they will believe (rightly or wrongly) that everyone needs to use LLMs to be an effective engineer
If you really don't see LLMs adding any value, then you can just lie about using them quite easily. I think they're very useful, but can still see they've become a huge management fad, and I doubt they'll stay like that for more than a year or 2. You can just say you're using AI if they don't check, or send it off on goose chases with filler prompts that you don't actually use the results of if they do.
I like doing my job. I get a great deal of joy from programming. It's an exhilarating exercise in solving interesting problems and watching them take shape. But using an LLM isn't that. It is basically delegating tasks to another person and then reviewing the work to make sure it's acceptable.
I just don't understand this mindset at all. There's a certain elegance in the craft for sure, but the value of the end-product is what's always been truly impressive to me. It's like for an architect/builder: Seeing them swing the hammer can be cool, but it's the house that they build that's worth admiration in my eyes. LLMs have thus been a thing of beauty for me since they can get there so much faster, and more robustly. It feels like I have a cheat code to just snap my fingers and pop buildings into existence.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
There's certainly a lot of nonsensical pressure to use AI from executives, which all seem to drink at the same information trough that has decreed "AI is the hip new thing". I've written about my experiences with that here. That's a fad and will probably go away within a year or two.
I'd still recommend playing around with AI and finding where it can add value. I'm doing roughly 30-40% less work in my software engineering role because of it, with the savings being redirected into building more robust systems, as well as many hours into Factorio.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
As I said, it's not about total popularity. Popularity within the movement is sufficient. If the NYT was ignored by every centrist but still did the same quality of work and was widely read by leftists, that would qualify since it would be generally truth-seeking news with enough pull to be a major part of the conversation. You could sort of see the outlines of this with stuff like the National Review back in the 90s and 2000s, but it was ostracized by conservatives themselves. Now, nothing even remotely looks close in the age of MAGA.
The rest of us do deserve to be here because we just don't admit our biases, lies, and open support for genocidal tyrants.
Not sure what this is in reference to.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
If you consider your behavior in posts like these to be fine, then I would not consider you to have a very good definition of what constitutes an ad hominem
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll
you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.
You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit
Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
This is because the centrist democrat wing is woke, so they pick woke staffers.
They're not. You can look at the evolution of someone like Noah Smith to see an example. He went from pretty woke in his Bloomberg days to heavily criticizing wokeness while still being left-leaning today. Back in 2021 some Dems still didn't have antibodies to the woke mindvirus which is part of why Biden picked some of them. That, and "staffers" are kind of their own unique breed that have been radicalized by the internet on both sides. The Right has an increasing problem with its own staffers being groypers these days.
There is no woke burnout.
There very clearly is. The woke faction still exists certainly, but it's much less powerful than in its heyday.
Disagree here on 2 points.
First, a lot of people (myself as an example) really DGAF that they buy most of the things they own. I might get a sense of accomplishment from building something, but it's more from the skill expression of having done it (and the convenience it will bring me, but that's a different discussion) than the fact that "I" made "the thing".
Second, you're overestimating how much our ancestors made themselves. Barter amongst the tribe was a constant occurrence, and there was even a decent amount of trade between tribes although that was less important on a day-to-day basis. "As long as there have been humans, there has been trade" is as close to a universal as you can get. It would be weird for a species that got a lot of satisfaction from making things themselves to have a big emphasis on specialization even in the archeological record.
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