@JulianRota's banner p

JulianRota


				

				

				
1 follower   follows 1 user  
joined 2022 September 04 17:54:26 UTC
Verified Email

				

User ID: 42

JulianRota


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 04 17:54:26 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 42

Verified Email

I don't see "clearly good versus evil" at all. From the other perspective, Ukraine is a rebellious breakaway province of Russia. In American history, the Confederacy dearly wanted to be independent at one time - was it unambiguously evil to fight a war to stop them? (granted the slavery thing muddies the waters considerably, but still). There have been lots of wars all around the world to subdue would-be breakaway provinces of greater powers. What business of mine is it whether Ukraine deserves independence or is an uppity breakaway province when I've never set foot within a thousand miles of the place?

A Russian would say they're on the side of good because they need the buffer space to defend against the next Western invasion, which has in fact happened twice in the last 250 years and been horrifical lethal to the Russian people both times. Do you expect them to believe us when we say we totally have no intention of ever doing that again, while NATO keeps gobbling up countries closer and closer to their border?

If that ever becomes the case, the Constitution would have been entirely subverted, the Government would be no longer legitimate, and I would support the armed overthrow of the government and all institutions participating in or complicit with the maintenance of that power.

Being very very stupid seems to be common, but it's the combination of that and the maniacal insistence on continuing to post the same points over and over again even after they've been thoroughly debunked that's the issue. Taking that into consideration, it's not hard to see why many platforms eventually ban it. At a certain point, you're just annoying the crap out of everybody.

Eh maybe. But then still, why an opioid epidemic now? Opium and derivatives have also been around for a very long time. Is it just that much more appealing in pill form and prescribed by your doctor than in smokeable or snortable form?

I think we'd have to be concerned with the likely motives of such actors.

I think Russia and China etc don't have much reason to care whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge - the outcomes on things they actually care about are probably within a standard deviation of outcomes regardless of which party is in charge of what. What they are likely to care about more is the overall levels of tribal division and conflict.

Low internal conflict means that anything we do or intervene in overseas is likely to be broadly supported, consistent over the long term, decently well-planned and robust against setbacks. High internal conflict means that anything either party does will be opposed by the other for tribalistic reasons if nothing else. Interventions will tend to be the opposite - inconsistent, weak, poorly-supported, poorly-planned, likely to be canceled at minor setbacks.

As such, they probably don't really care about actually hacking voting machines, except in as much as half-assed and ineffective attempts to do so reduce everyone's confidence that whoever gets elected won legitimately. They are probably much more interested in backing extreme activist groups on both sides to amp up the overall level of division. Which IIRC is pretty much all they've been credibly accused of doing.

Ditto from me on basically everything you said.

Under the theories that power Keto, most of the food that's easily available in the Western world is completely terrible for you. Eating food that's terrible for you and also taking a drug that probably makes it have less of an effect for life seems like a worse idea than just eating better food.

I advocate a gradual approach to moving onto Keto. Start by making a list of everything you eat. One at a time, replace each thing with something more Keto, ideally starting with the worst. Keep going until you notice positive effects. The usual standard of 20g of carbs a day is probably not necessary to get down to if you're not trying to lose hundreds of pounds of weight. If you can stay under 100g or so of carbs a day and not notice at least some positive effects, then it's probably not going to work for you.

There's a rule here for Make your point reasonably clear and plain. It's not clear to me what your point is, so why don't you just say it, whatever it is? Why are you making it all about me and my experiences? Exactly what is the "lie" that you are referring to at the end?

To be more exact, I wouldn't bet that there's much daylight between the overall approval rates of most types of alternative medicine between registered Republicans and registered Democrats. But I would bet that the great majority of people enthusiastic about most types of alternative medicine (possibly aside from things Covid-related) would code as highly Blue team based on their overall interests and values etc. They might not necessarily bother to actually register and vote for various reasons, or may claim to support one of the third parties more Blue/"crunchy" than the Democrat party.

I've seen a little bit of a few things like this. Not really enough to have much to add to this thread. But I do think that one of the major issues in the way our larger culture discusses political issues is that a large segment of the "activist class" doesn't have the slightest idea of how these people are, how they really think, and how they actually respond to the "helpful" programs that they constantly dream up. They just listen to a few of these fake sob story tales or videos and go off entirely on believing that, never even pausing to consider that it might not be an accurate description of the situation.

I think it works okay if you view things in a more fuzzy way. The idea of abolitionism didn't just magically appear at the time of the Industrial Revolution, just like the IR itself wasn't a single thing at a single time but a gradual progression over hundreds of years. Going from an idea written about by a few privileged elites to a movement endorsed by nation-sized populations and that nation-states are prepared to wage full-scale wars over is not an instant or automatic process. It seems very plausible to me that the IR powered the growth of abolitionism from something that they were willing to pass in places that didn't really have any slaves anyways to something that they were prepared to enact and enforce by force of arms in places where the entire economy was built on slave labor and the controlling imperial power was getting a fat chunk of the profits.

A question that sounds snarky and rhetorical, but is actually serious: Why don't you guys just argue with each other privately?

Why indeed? If you move to DMs over any of a hundred systems, you can sling as much crap as you want at each other, and nobody will judge you or mod you or ban you for doing so. So why not? The only reason that makes sense IMO is that the audience matters. Everybody here has to see it, or at least be able to see it.

But what of the effect that has on the place? I see that you don't feel offended or put off by the argument. What of the audience though? They're important - they must be, or you wouldn't be interested in posting it publicly. I've come to think that, to use another Wire quote, all the pieces matter.

Regardless of whether you or BC are super offended by the debate, when everybody sees it, and sees it not being modded, it changes the tone of the whole place. It becomes just that little bit more acceptable to trash your debate partner rather than discuss civilly. People who love that are more likely to come and stay, and people who don't will disengage and drift away. Even more importantly, it changes peoples behavior just a bit. Nobody is perfectly combative or perfectly civilized. It's a signal to turn off the civilized part and dial up the combat part. And that does in fact matter, even if we'd rather it didn't or it isn't immediately obvious.

The same points can be made perfectly well without the personal attacks. Perhaps even better. Even if I think User X is a great big jerk, it's not conducive to a reasonable conversation to just call them a jerk. It's perfectly possible for me to be the calm and reasonable one and make my points without the insults. If I do it right, and I'm right that they're a jerk, then they will show themselves to be one to the audience in short order. The audience is a lot more likely to believe it when they see it for themselves over just me telling them.

I've enjoyed Extra History. They're mostly good, though to be taken with a grain of salt on anything too close to the culture way.

Have you tried any corticosteroids class skin creams? I didn't see any on your list. I use them daily to keep my skin in decent shape. I found a nice strength chart here for all of the specific types. The weakest - hydrocortisone - is available OTC at pretty much any drug store. I was prescribed a class 6 on that chart for a while, but I eventually discovered that the OTC hydrocortisone worked just as well for me.

Dermatologists really don't like prescribing the stronger variants long-term, but it might be worth a try to see if it helps if the OTC stuff doesn't help much. It helps if you find a friendly one who is willing to experiment with unconventional things.

I haven't seen anything I regard as solid for Telegram corporate providing significant special access to any authorities. There are a few articles with vague implications, but no actual results that would require such access. Most actual results I've seen seem to be from the authorities confiscating somebody's device and getting into Telegram etc on it, which is a problem, but not a Telegram problem.

A bit conspiratorial, but I have a feeling that the legacy media enjoys writing articles implying such things for Telegram specifically because they don't give any special access to anybody. They want people to believe they do and distrust them, so they use competitors such as Meta, Alphabet, etc which actually do give authorities the keys to the castle, who they don't write scary articles about.

It does do the unique username. I suppose if you already talk to a lot of IRL friends that expect it to be close to your real name it might be weird to need to join a bunch of super-anonymous groups. I guess you could create a new account, but I think it's tricky without a new phone number. I have written a few basic apps against it, as far as I can tell, the phone number truly isn't accessible if it's locked, but there is a unique integer user ID. But I'd stick with my point that's about the same anonymity level as any other platform.

What's non-anonymous about it? One setting change to hide your phone number, then you're exactly as anonymous as any other platform, including this one.

I've never worked there, so I don't know for sure. I'm inclined to think it's basically true though. For one, I don't think Musk's companies hire true juniors - indications are that they expect every employee to be highly competent and motivated. I wouldn't be surprised if getting a good idea through can happen even at the lowest level. Musk is reported to be a notorious micro-manager - that's the good side of it, that good ideas at the lowest level can be found. Of course there's a flip side to all of this too - if your idea isn't actually good or you can't execute on it, you might just be summarily fired.

I don't think VPNs are a great solution to any of that.

If you want less tracking from the tech majors, it's probably more effective to get adblock and/or pihole and block all traffic to them. After voluntarily switching away from their services of course. Being on a VPN while logged into their accounts and/or still allowing every website that integrates with them to send traffic to them doesn't accomplish anything. And being on a VPN while blocking all traffic to them also doesn't accomplish anything.

For torrents, I've tended to think it's better to use only private trackers locally and use remote seedboxes for any "public" torrents that might be tracked or detected. Why VPN all traffic to and from your home PC just to hide your torrents from your ISP badly (they will still know you're using a lot of upstream bandwidth in patterns typical of torrent servers, if they actually care enough to check), when for a similar price, you can set up a proper seedbox that's always online and your ISP will never know about at all?

Just went to do volunteer duty, and a slot for a post in the list has the radio buttons but no actual post: https://imgur.com/a/AJogzPc

The other two posts in the 3 post list were perfectly normal, just the third one was completely blank - no content, date, or links.

Well they banned you for a bit so I suppose I won't get an answer right away, but if you're game, I'd dearly like to hear an actual rigorous definition of exactly which wars America has fought in the last few decades were "for Israel" and why. Near as I can tell, none of them were suggested or approved by the Israeli state, and none were particularly beneficial to it.

I think I could make a better argument that the US in it's war-making has been rather hostile to Israel. Israel was not permitted to join in on Operation Desert Storm. Saddam launched some SCUDs at them anyways in hopes of provoking a direct response. The US forbade Israel from responding directly and attempted to stop Saddam themselves.

Yours sounds like it behaves more like an actual injury. Mine tends to feel better when I'm using it, and tends to flare up when I'm not using it.

Yeah that's pretty similar to what mine is like

I'm not super against paying for it, I'm just a little reluctant to when I don't have any idea what to use it for that's actually useful. I've mostly used ChatGPT for things I might otherwise google for general explanations. It does mostly provide better results than whatever you'd find on Google.

How are you guys accessing ChatGPT4 anyways? I've used ChatGPT a couple of times and I was under the impression that GPT4 is only available via the commercial API with significant costs. Are you all paying for it, or is there some other site that lets you use it for free for some limited amount?

Do you not think people could dictate essays, draw with their hands, edit music, etc with this tool? Why does this entire OS seem fundamentally based on consumption to you?

Sure, you could do that, but what's the advantage over conventional hardware? I can do all of those things just fine with any ordinary computer and off-the-shelf accessories and software that has been available for years. The only really new thing that this device has is the immersive VR experience. That's cool, but I don't see how that gets you anything for creating content.

I'm betting that right now many people who would otherwise be more economically useful are not because they don't have the temperament, ability, or inclination to learn how to type quickly or move a mouse around quickly. With VisionOS and later generations, we'll see much more 'natural' inputs, or at least have a lower barrier to entry than, say, learning to type at 100 wpm.

I don't think that's the case. Keyboards and mice have been dominant because they are very easy to use. Sure, it's not easy to type 100wpm with good accuracy, but pretty much everyone can type 10wpm. Typing 100wpm isn't that useful outside of stenography anyways. Typically the limiting factor is how fast you can think of more meaningful words of text or working lines of code to type, not how fast you can physically type them. In fact, I'd bet that whatever the solution VisionOS uses for typing (we haven't seen that yet, gee I wonder why that is, you'd think if they have an awesome solution to getting text from the user's mind to the device they'd have shown us), it's less intuitive than a keyboard. How much skill does it take to get 10 correct wpm into a VisionOS document versus a regular computer with a regular keyboard?

And that's before we get into things like, how easy is it to read text or data off of a physical page while typing it or something loosely based on it into a VisionOS document?

I'm about a third of the way through reading it myself. It's interesting enough that I think he would have made a better than average Motte contributor. I haven't found anything yet that would seem to justify a terrorist bombing campaign though.

It's just a dream, and the timeline doesn't match of course, but I want to think we could have told him:

It's okay friend, your views are welcome here! We will read them and discuss them with you. You don't have to blow anyone up!

Of course, that might not work. But the greater the extent to which he had the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously and did that anyways, the more he's just a midwit terrorist asshole whose ideas aren't all that interesting.

The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?