Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
10d ago
I saw a picture earlier purporting to show tons of sea traffic going around the Horn of Africa, supposedly rerouted from the Straight of Hormuz.
If we assume the SoH is going to be fully closed long-term, so that people adjust and buy into the next best marginal shipping pattern, what would the actual long-term consequences be? Are we talking more like a 15% increase in shipping costs or 200%?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
10d ago
The US having tactical military dominance over Iran can hardly be "stunning".
I am skeptical that many people of the strongly anti-Trump persuasion would have, two months ago, committed to a prediction of "The US dumpsters Iran's military with training accident levels of cost". I think we'd have heard a lot of rhetoric about how Hegseth is an incompetent, drunken Christofascist retard and that the US would massively underperform.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
10d ago
Yes. I actually had a doomer crashout a few years ago when GPT3 hit the scene and they were claiming it could pass the bar exam, and my tech writer friend was expecting his entire profession to be rendered obsolete within a year.
Three years in, I've gotten used to the way the hype cycles are exaggerated.
But I still think there's a large chance that this tech ends up upending my life in ways I find terrible and existentially horrifying, if not ending all life as we know it. I still think it's the lamest sci-fi tech we could have gotten. I just don't expect it to (up)end society within the next 18 months and I basically ignore the new SMASHED BENCHMARKS SO STRONG AND GOOD AGI COMING OMG announcements.
There's clearly something very powerful with the tech and just as clearly a deranged funding and quasi-religious cult element to how people talk about the tech.
For an example, we have an enterprise version of Gemini at work. I can do things like feed it an Excel file with some info about customers, and have it search publicly available data to fill in contact info, business details, upcoming events, etc. That's pretty neat. I can also get help writing corporate slop emails to the proper corporate slop tone. But they also want this to be something my frontline employees can use to help with their actual job. I was assigned to figure it out and prepare our people to use it and after some investigation and experimentation my actual recommendation to my boss was that no one ranked below me should ever be allowed to use it for anything ever. I don't want to dox, but imagine that my first interaction was having Gemini eagerly offer to coach me through violating HIPAA requirements before underestimating our pricing structure by a factor of ten. I explained the error and it begged for forgiveness and then multiplied the original numbers by 20.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
10d ago
Altman's version was something like "AI is probably going to destroy the world, but there's going to be a lot of really great companies in the meantime."
Just literal Captain Planet villain shit.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
11d ago
I was shocked. I've never seen anything quite like it. Previous recent violent attacks each had at least somebody that didn't like it. We've discussed before that a lot of Americans don't like "tech bros" and "executives" in the "Epstein" class, but I think I've severely mis calibrated how deep that loathing goes.
I don't know how much you can generalize this. "Sam Altman is a literal Captain Planet villain who literally did the meme" is a take I've heard from relatively normie friends.
I'm an AI doomer/skeptic, but I don't hold an animus against the tech industry, and if I were going to fedpost irl, I think Altman might be the most deserving person in the world, on sheer utilitarian / self-defense grounds. He's the sort of fucker whose story ends with the use of the term "Exterminatus".
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
11d ago
I'm not sure I'm ready to give up the dream of academia
Getting paid for it is the dream, obviously, but you can also obsess over old books while developing an alcohol problem as a hobby.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
11d ago
I've heard paternity tests are illegal in France, but the context implied this was a French issue. Is it a more common thing across Europe?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
13d ago
Around 1 nmol/L or 29 ng/dL, but that’s not a problem let’s say :p
If you say so. I just think that we are probably made of meat and chemicals, and that things like hormones meaningfully affect our minds, preferences, attitudes and thought patterns. If you took a testosterone booster, it is very likely that you would find an "inexplicable" new appreciation for status competition and combatative behaviors.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
13d ago
This is why I'm mostly staying at a high altitude and waiting. There is so much crud and chaff and lies and demoralization campaigns and delusional thinking and lies and insanity and etc that neurotically worrying over every news report seems like an act of pointless, self-destructive madness.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
14d ago
I am honestly unsure how much of the net is bots anymore, but I am hesitant to disregard the possibility that the lizardman constant for conspiracy theories is booming in less savvy populations with access to instant AI video generation.
This world has billions of people who believe in the silliest peasant magic, who record street clashes fought with bows and arrows on iPhones that have built in translation software. How many of them would see a short of an arrow taking down an F35 and feel doubt?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
14d ago
I’m glad there was no serious physical bullying when I went to high school, judging by older generations and media depictions, it was rampant and traumatic.
It was there. Hard to say how rampant it was. Of say, 10 guys I was close with growing up, two of us had that kind of experience and the other one basically spent middle school in the hood.
Instead, now kids get an unholy Mean Girls panopticon where cruel rumors (complete with memes, diss tracks, and AI videos) spread across entire counties in an afternoon.
Not sure that was an upgrade, overall.
I must be too autistic because that doesn’t seem fun to me. The last thing I’d want to do with my friends is fight for status, but hierarchies and rankings and competitive games have always made been a source of stress and I wouldn’t want to introduce that in what’s supposed to be my relaxing wind down time.
What are your testosterone levels?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
14d ago
No one thought Iran was going to pull a rabbit out of its hat and clear the skies of US planes or take out a carrier group.
Just a point, but X is full of third worlders and third worldists who claim to not only believe that Iran can do this, but that they already have, and they have the AI generated videos to prove it.
I had almost this exact scenario come up once, in the last real fight I got into in high school. A short guy who had spent the last year getting jacked, after my 6'+ ass quit all sports and devoted the previous year to D&D and Warhammer. He hit me with a sucker punch while I was kneeling at my locker, and then let me get up for a proper fight... and then didn't land another hit. It honestly felt easy. He just has so much further for each punch to travel. It felt like I had so much time and space to react.
Put it this way: I had to angle down slightly to punch him in the face, and if my fist was hitting him at full extension, then his fist was whiffing inches short of my chest.
There's probably some ratio where things flip. A height gap of 3" wouldn't matter like that. But a foot or more? It's like an adult versus a tween. Would have to be a hell of a tween. And again, training or skill differential will matter more. My examples are "teenage idiot versus teenage idiot".
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
14d ago
I hope you realize this sounds a bit unhinged.
Nah, it's just an ugly side of human nature. Pride is a rough master, and that velvet glove / participation trophy empire thing that the US was doing with Europe just sparked resentment.
Europeans here have commented plenty on the asinine degree of hatred the MAGA crowd had suddenly developed for them. I think it's a reaction akin to jealousy, and it's always ugly and pitiful. Little more to say.
It's not hatred, it's disdain. How many European nations give harsher sentences for tweets criticizing the government than for migrants gang raping minors? We see our own suicidal progressives push the same policies, and I promise you, MAGA isn't jealous of the vibrant murders. The difference is that most of Europe doesn't seem to have the will to do anything but look sad and ask if it's time to die.
I wish the sane and decent among them the best of luck in restoring basic civilizational norms like the rule of law and respect for speech.
Nothing of the sort happened, the only active "Chinese tech" I'm positively sure has been defeated was HQ-2 that dates to, like, Cultural Revolution.
And the anti-stealth tech. And technicians. How's Xi's purge wave going?
Try to check out alternative sources, and preferably not the outgroup but some professional ones.
You mean the guys who don't even know what NATO stands for? lol.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
14d ago
It's hard to have sympathy for people who felt absolutely no need to gatekeep the integrity of their institutions.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
That loyalists conveniently forget such issues or reframe them into WINS is unsurprising.
Exactly. The hysteria and delusion is off the charts.
Trump has caused hundreds of billions in damage with Liberation Day tariffs
Not seeing real justifications for this claim, even from virulently anti-Trump outlets.
attacked Denmark and forced EU allies to orient towards China
No, they're just quislings who were already sucking up to China because China is an asshole that thinks they're subhuman.
basically wrecked NATO by this point
What good was NATO, in a post USSR world? Europe is a sick old man.
foolishly escalated against the same China and got humiliated in Busan
Genuinely laughable after 20 years of watching every national level Democrat get rolled like a middle schooler in their first poker game.
exposing American industrial ineptitude (particularly to Korea)
Better to hide it and let it get worse?
is about to lose Taiwan
See, this is exactly what I mean. China is retrenching and reconsidering Taiwan plans after watching their tech fail the last four months. 2027 is going to come and go with no Taiwan invasion, and you will never, ever, ever remember this failed prediction, just like the other failed predictions from every single one of the last 500 weeks.
Hey, wake up! You've been in a coma ever since Mueller had Trump arrested back in 2018 after THE WALLS CLOSED IN!
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
Is Trump really describing a satisfying outcome?
I didn't have any particular goal in mind in the first place. "War with Iran" was not on my list of things I wanted to happen. I'm content to wait and see how it shakes out over the next 6-12 months.
Also, I caution everyone against jumping to any conclusions here in terms of what will actually happen. Trump says things to push directionally, not to score points with the teacher for being accurate.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
Oh, for sure. "The Democrats" poll insanely poorly because their positions are mostly insane troll nonsense, but "John Normalson [D], who spends the campaign talking about nice, moderate things and never taking tough questions before getting elected and voting like Mao" will poll and perform pretty well in the general.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
uninterrupted and unprecedented shitshow.
No, everything has been between "basically fine" and "awesome, actually". This is what I mean by catastrophizing.
What did you mean by ten years?
That's how long Trump has been dominating our political conversation. That's how long lefties and NeverTrump types have been having crashout meltdowns EVERY. SINGLE. WEEK. about whatever new calamity is making the rounds on TikTok or BlueSky. How many times has Trump DESTROYED THE ECONOMY?!!/1 How many times has Trump STARTED WORLD WAR THREE!!!!1? How many times have we seen THE END OF DEMOCRACY!!1?
(They screamed, on their national television shows where they will definitely never suffer consequences for open, deranged antipathy for the purported fascist king of America. Unlike Europe, where complaints about being raped by migrants or criticizing politicians gets people jailed for longer than the migrant rapists.)
And no one ever stops and recalibrates. No one ever pauses to take a sanity check. They just lose issue after issue, fact pattern after fact pattern, and dive straight into the next hype cycle.
Remember the other day when all those idiots thought he was dead?
LMAO.
It's certainly flailing and I want to call it ineffectual, but at this point the sheer staying power of the moral panic / doomsday cult mentality is honestly impressive. Terribly unhealthy, but impressive.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
Didn't they just disappear the guy in charge of their anti-stealth tech because in the aftermath of said tech being utterly ineffective in Venezuela and Iran they discovered that the guy had just made up the data saying it would work on US stealth bombers?
China has large cultural problems of it's own, and I frankly wouldn't be surprised to discover Russian levels of materials were garbage or simply non-existent because they were secretly sold off the back of a truck.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
The Republican Party may be over for the next decade.
Democrats are currently polling worse than anyone except Iran itself.
Going to log the prediction that the polls in 2 months are substantially identical to the ones from February.
Remember when Trump ended everything with that horrible tweet about Robert Deniro?
Did it take everyone a minute to dredge up the memory and substitute the correct actor?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
Does it not tire you to engage in this constant catastrophizing? It's been ten years. How are people still driving themselves into madness like this?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
15d ago
Like if you can squat the taller dude on your back and regularly throw around 300 lb+ weights in the gym, are you really at much of a disadvantage in a fight? I guess striking you would be due to body length of course.
Yes, reach is a bitch. Based on limited personal experience, a large height gap strongly overcomes a muscle gap. Top tier athlete/power lifter might swing the balance back, I would guess, and all of this is assuming no particular training discrepancy, but a foot+ of height advantage is massive.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
19d ago
This isn't something I've specifically studied, but I have a meme in my head that "chew through leadership until you hit the secret sauce right man for the job" is a fairly common pattern in winning modern wars. That the guys in the history books were often talented second or third rank officers who got promoted after fuckups from the peacetime generals.
Now that you point it out, the whole thing being confused or misleading makes much more sense. I think I crossed a mental wire with the Suez.
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