HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
The anti-doomer's flowchart, courtesy of Ross Scott.
You may remember that, a while back, Ross Scott (of Civil Protection, Freeman's Mind, and Ross's Game Dungeon fame) hosted a discussion with Big Yud himself over AI risk. I couldn't finish the video, but I gathered that Ross was not impressed by Yud's arguments from the premise of AI gaining consciousness and thus wasn't really grasping what Yud saw as the problem. For the many of you who are averse to long videos, the above image lays out Ross's positions on AI risk, with reasons for why.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
Yeah, reading this post and encountering the section about the HRE, I'm surprised that Kulak did not simply predict that the US would devolve into a patchwork of "tollbooth kingdoms" just like what the HRE became.
Fundamentally, I think the challenge for the US in the future, and the solution to said challenge, ultimately comes down to culture, cf. the Noah Smith complaint about us not being a culture that builds. I think where I diverge with Kulak on this whole concept of "US dying of DEI globohomo" is that I think it eminently possible for culture to shift and for the US to get on some sort of "healthier" path of governance, of ditching unproductive ideas and ideological frameworks, before the US has to ditch them the hard way via total collapse.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
For some, the easy retort here is "what's the difference?"
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer.
Well, perhaps aside from armored vehicles and firearms. WWII suggests that industrial capacity is fungible in some specific contexts.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
I do have to wonder: how do Europeans react to news like this? If I'm, say, Emmanuelle Macron, then I'm probably gonna be in a mild panic every time news like this breaks, because I'm going to try and pull every political lever in reach to prepare my country for the possibility of the Pax Americana going poof by the middle of 2025.
Eh, I'm under the perception that Blue Tribe is pretty damn split on alternative medicine and pseudoscience. On the one hand, large swathes of Blue Tribe go all in on it, but on the other, the rest are kind of horrified at the harm it can cause. The Blues are lucky that the political polarization over COVID shook out the way it did, because now they can jettison anti-vax from their memeplex (where previously it was an alt-medicine mainstay that was causing Measles to resurge).
Similarly for the Red Tribe/conservatives, I have to wonder if anyone even pushes Intelligent Design anymore; am I wrong for saying that it always seemed like a way to smuggle God into the secular realm? But now that Christianity has been on the backfoot for so long, conservatives and the like don't really care for whitewashing their beliefs like that.
HalloweenSnarry
10mo ago
The Court is always and altogether--albeit willfully, like a moviegoer whose suspension of disbelief is essential to the process, like a wrestling fan whose kayfabe is the lifeblood of the art form--deceived.
Is there not a reason why we symbolise Justice with a blindfolded angel/goddess, though?
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
Given Russia's performance in Ukraine, it wouldn't even be a stretch to depict them as a massive, terrifying force comprised of incompetent jobbers and cannon fodder, much like Nazis in popular fiction.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
ACX just seems to be Substack already, unless there's some other way to view the posts. I also notice awful, awful chugging on ACX. I think the problem is that the comments section always loads everything, which is a lot of text and images to render, whereas normal Substack makes you go to a separate page to see all of them.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
In fairness, I think even the book's appendices and such almost tacitly imply that it might as well be Arizona's population stretched over an entire planet.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
Is this a sarcastic post? As much as I think LSF-adjacent stuff does provide culture war fodder, I don't think it's all that good a fit here, nor is it that important in the grand scheme of things, outside of how much it indicts institutional culture.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
France's interests in North Africa were originally justified as ending the Barbary slave trade,
I understand that the early US made military efforts against this as well, if I'm not mistaken.
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
I would not be surprised if there's a similar gap like this in the US, with a distinction you can draw between Native Americans on reservations and Native Americans who are more integrated with the rest of society?
American here, I'd say that is the case here.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
To add onto 07's reply (and WestphalianPeace's, kind of), this feels a little hard to believe when SBI is potentially the Kiss of Death for developer studios. We are currently in an era of layoffs across literally any industry connected to technology (including journalism and especially including game development above the indie or mid-market level), and Suicide Squad will be the end of Rocksteady if it isn't already.
Sure, the publishers wiping their tears with stacks of cash while the developers are left to look for new jobs is not a new story by any means, but I suppose it casts some doubt on this narrative.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I watched Silence of the Lambs a while ago, and I remember that Lector expounded that Buffalo Bill wasn't necessarily trans, he just hated his own identity--which, sure, these days, that might be more of a distinction without a difference, but it doesn't seem like the movie is as anti-trans as one might think.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
The OP's comment suggests that nobody is really learning anything from where things are heading, thus, it's unlikely anyone's going to update hard once things accelerate out of control.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
Was the life you had in Venezuela really that much worse than sitting on the frozen streets of a foreign country begging for money?
Genuinely, the answer is probably "yes."
HalloweenSnarry
9mo ago
But how does keeping secrets solve either of those issues?
HalloweenSnarry
7d ago
What are these foundations? Why are there three versus six? I'm not familiar with this terminology.
HalloweenSnarry
14d ago
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
I dunno, maybe it is something with the background scripts on ACX, but I could swear the reason is "the page for any ACX post is like 43 times longer than any non-TV-Tropes webpage needs to be, because the comments section is not truncated like on any other Substack post."
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
I think the comment you're replying to is pretty much just FNE expressing an aesthetical-moral distaste for the concept, not exactly a disagreement on the technical aspects.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I imagine the confounder with Pakistan is that they're next door to people they really, really don't like. Italy and Germany, meanwhile, have never really had beef with each other since, what, the dawn of the 19th Century?
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
Perhaps, but as a half-Pinoy, I'm under the impression that American authority in Southeast Asia rested more with Gen. McArthur than with the elected government of the US.
Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.
More options
Context Copy link