Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
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User ID: 214
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I have a buddy who was/is(?) still into the GME and AMC stuff. He tried to convince me that the mother of all short squeezes you mentioned would happen in about June of last year. I just told him to not invest what he couldn’t lose, etc. but it was troubling to see him constantly latching on to that and other cope excuses for why his meme stocks were not working out.
He isn’t well off and has a lot of issues in his life, most of them genuinely not his fault. It’s easy to scoff at what he’s doing, but I think the degenerate betting you see in the crypto/meme stock space is more rational than I first gave it credit for. If you’re a young man with little assets, no education, no girl, and no status, what do you have to lose if you make a terrible options play and go bankrupt, really? And what do you gain? Possibly a life free of working a shit job until your body gives out.
You might run the numbers and find that the odds are so low that it is not worth the risk. I’d tend to agree, but If you’re the type to run those numbers I’d bet you’re more likely to have something resembling a degree, stable job, and financial assets.
There are issues with those online communities you described but at their core they’re a place for young men who aren’t doing as well as they’d like to shoot the shit and find some camaraderie. We used to have wars, robust priesthoods, and high risk high reward jobs like whaling (we still have some jobs like this, not as many though) to deal with excess men. What pressure valve is there for excess men today?
I don’t think we should bring those things back, because most of those things are terrible. But men are disposable and for many the risk/reward of hustling crypto/NFTs/stocks does seem to make sense.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Their content moderation team in the U.S. market is based in California and will promote and censor things in accordance with Californian values. I've followed conservative accounts on there that kept getting banned whenever they hit a certain follower threshold. On the other hand, their site recently highlighted several trans creators to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility.
From the second link:
Working with me and my team throughout this process will be an outstanding group from the global law firm K&L Gates LLP, including former Congressmen Bart Gordon and Jeff Denham, who bring excellent expertise in the technology sector. The external team that we've brought on for this project will collaborate with our internal US management team to work on several key initiatives:
-Create a committee of outside experts to advise on and review content moderation policies covering a wide range of topics, including child safety, hate speech, misinformation, bullying, and other potential issues.
In its domestic market China has a much tighter leash on what TikTok can show its users, of course, but in America TikTok's social positions are the standard progressivism you will see promoted by any other major American company. If China is putting its thumb on the scale for the U.S. moderation team to engineer American social discord, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the chaos created by Musk simply halting most censorship on Twitter.
Fair, I should have expanded on that point some more. The psyop potential isn't ideal, but you might have to pick your poison here. Under the proposed law, the loss in Chinese narrative control would just be replaced by unprecedented expansion of federal power to do the exact same thing. The Twitter Files made it clear that the feds found it in their interest to coerce social media platforms to enforce a narrative via implied threat of regulation. I'd rather not give them the power to ruin any tech company on their shitlist by having an unelected committee declare it to be a foreign asset.
I understand if you disagree on the value judgement here. I'm no CCP fan, but since I don't live there I'm less concerned about them than I am domestic government overreach. If your response is we should still ban TikTok, just not this way — how should we do that without massive increase in government power or curtailing our free speech?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Kulak's meteoric rise on Twitter has been fascinating to watch. One of his threads — Are you racist or anti-semitic?, I believe — did numbers and put his follower count over 10K. His evocative style and grandiose ideas fit the medium very well, though I will miss having him around if he stops posting here.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Yep. That's why the only winning move is to not play, IMO. Willpower is a finite resource, while entire industries of highly-paid optimizers are working full-time to break it with their products. Limiting your vectors of exposure is the best way to live a life free of negative drains, but this is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more things become gamified services. This involves more than just Gacha, but that industry is where it's really easy to see the psychological tricks laid bare.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
In fact creative people seem to be barely hanging on, against all odds.
They seem to be flourishing. It feels like every day I can find something new and amazing that I'd never heard about before. The problem is that there is too much good stuff out there right now, because as an individual you have limited free time and lots of responsibilities and goals.
Because the less you practice something the worse you become at it, and AI generated art doesn't give you a lot to practice.
I can see that. I still think art as a hobby will be widespread despite it not being economically viable. Art as a means to an end is where things get exciting. To give an example from my own life, I moved for work and started an online tabletop campaign with some friends of mine. This is normally something I'd do in person, but the situation is what it is. Moving online has its drawbacks but also gives me a lot of opportunities to increase the production value of my games with pictures and maps while we play. I'm not great at drawing and it isn't feasible to make that much art myself, but being able to generate it instead of hoping I can google an approximation of what I want to show? That's really exciting.
I just think the kind of people that would use to play music at your local pub, paint, or join a theatre group, increasingly just don't bother anymore, and that AI will only make it worse.
An overabundance of entertainment does make it easier to just consoom, but better tools and more time due to cheap/free labor from automation similarly frees up creatives to create. We'll have to see how it balances out. We used to have to have 9 farmers to support 1 non farmer. Better technology has turned that number on its head, and I would bet on it continuing to do so.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Some fun ones:
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The Three Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin, though the third book isn't nearly as good as the first two. These consumed a week of my life as I was unable to put them down.
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Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday. Nonfiction story of how Peter Thiel took down Gawker through Hulk Hogan. You can probably finish this in a single sitting or day.
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There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. Webfiction, though I think you can buy it as a physical book now. If you're into rational fiction you've probably heard of or read this one.
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God-Shaped Hole and The Gig Economy by Zero HP Lovecraft. I'd put this in a similar genre to the Antimemetics series, though the authors are on opposite poles of the ideological spectrum. God-Shaped Hole is quite NFSW, just a warning.
Attack on Titan, though I wish it had ended at the end of season 3 instead of turning into what it is now. Whenever I show it to someone, I tell them to stop watching before season 4.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Even if Trump loses the primary, I don’t think his ego will allow him to not run as an independent. It’s looking like he either wins the primary or nukes the winner’s chances of taking the general by splitting the vote.
So… four more years of a Democrat in charge of the White House or four years of him playing the perfect boogeyman to the left while failing to get anything meaningful done*.
I can accept that in a lot of ways, he was genuinely sabotaged by lawfare and trumped up criminal charges that made it difficult to keep competent staffers. But if there’s someone who can fight back against that, it’s not him.
Trump opened a lot of doors, but I wish he were capable of stepping aside and letter more competent people build on that, rather than forcing it to live (and die) with him. But that’s his whole thing, isn’t it? He does not back down on stuff like this. It’s his biggest strength, but also the biggest weakness of a political movement that is tied to him.
*To be fair, if you were motivated by Roe v Wade, he really did deliver on this.
If we could produce meat indistinguishable from the real thing at a competitive cost and scale, I would eat it. This seems a ways off to me from what I've read in the thread so far, with the most viable solutions being mere facsimiles of this. I don't eat the Impossible stuff and the current leading synthetic meat seems unappetizing to me. I want to emphasize that this isn't due to fear of synthetic meat per se, but the idea of replacing genuine meat with an inferior product. If we can make synthetic meat as good as real meat, that's an amazing feat and should be celebrated.
Supposing we manage to do this, I'm mixed about some of the second-order implications. I don't like the centralization of food production that would likely result from this. Also, the potential banning of hunting and fishing as you said, or of consuming actual animals. I'd still want to pursue the lab meat. Making more of something for less time, money, and resources is how the species has avoided its Malthusian limits for so long. Any big advancement brings about issues we couldn't have conceived of before, but the tradeoff has almost always been worth it.
My condolences to you and your friend. I'd like to chime in as a secular person who is against assisted suicide for young, physically healthy people but is fine with euthanasia for people who are terminally ill, elderly, or extremely physically disabled.
Some other people have put this more eloquently, but I believe by okaying euthanasia for the first group we will get a lot of people opting to end their lives who would have stuck it out and become happy, productive adults. If a healthy person wants to take their life, I'm not going to cast moral judgement on them. But they should do it on their own terms — by bringing in the state we legitimize it and widen the net of people who will be lost. Suicide may be an option, be it should remain culturally taboo.
In the case of someone with no future due to terminal illness, or for someone physically incapable of ending themselves (the example I'm thinking of is someone who is paralyzed from the neck down due to an accident), the suffering is both clear and incurable at our current level of medicine. It's a lot easier of a call and has clear limits that won't (shouldn't?) lead to healthy people being killed by the state.
I suppose my guiding principle would be: what societal guidelines/guardrails will lead the average person to happiness and produce a functional, healthy society?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Damn, I hadn't heard of that. I feel bad for them, their prices are pretty high but they were the only company besides Stable Diffusion that seemed to actually want to give people what they wanted and not grandstand about keeping the tech away from the plebs or combating social bias.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
29d ago
PF2e looks really fun. It seems like it was made by and for people tired of 5e's lack of crunch. What do you plan on playing?
We're all on Virtual Tabletop as well. I don't know if it'd be my first choice, but there are a lot of advantages to it over in person, like presentation, handling rolls, etc. If a campaign takes advantage of the online tools I think the switch is worthwhile, but when the GM doesn't do that it always feels worse than in person.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1mo ago
They often hamstring a good sucker punch twist by foreshadowing what's going to happen before you start the story. If they come packaged with a tagging system like on Archive of Our Own though, where you can search by the most granular of details to find the story you want, I can get behind that.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2mo ago
Seeing as so much of the AI Safety field turned out to be, in practice, simply ensuring the AI Overlord agrees with progressive dogma, I'd prefer to just let it rip at this point. I'll throw in with the /acc types and take my chances with Clippy over having these ideas be enshrined in the AI that will mold the thoughts and lives of future generations.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
Go figure. It's very noticeable for a lot of properties, like League of Legends, but I always wondered whether it was an unspoken thing or explicit rule in these companies to always be showing certain types front and center. I'm in a different field, but I have received explicit instruction in the past to request diversity from the graphics team when I have ad creatives made.
I suspect this is why you aren't allowed to change the race or sex of your character in Battlefield One. You're gonna have to swallow your pride and accept playing as a black woman fighting for Germany in WW1.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
9mo ago
I'm not sure about the programming side, but a tool like LOOT could help you detect those issues. If users report conflicts between mods, it will flag your load order to warn you about them. Of course, if you're just looking to get your feet wet with some technical work then there's nothing wrong with giving it a go yourself.
It's also worth learning how to use the Skyrim Creation Kit as well. I used it to spot patch a few mod conflicts that didn't have patches, for example removing a barrel placed by a city overhaul mod that a boatman was sitting in, or restoring some missing pieces of terrain like you've had issues with. If you're looking for an excuse to learn how modding works, it's a great tool. I would also use it to create custom modded companions and it taught me a lot.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
11mo ago
Thoroughly recommend Matt. He used to post on the old site too. His New Epidemic, Enron, Opium War, and Aztec posts are some of my favorites.
LOTR is the exceedingly rare case where I prefer the movie adaptation over the book. I found the Hobbit and Fellowship books enjoyable, but the Frodo sections of Two Towers and ROTK were... difficult to push through. Movie Two Towers made the right decision to interweave Aragorn's story with Frodo's, instead of hitting you with it all in one uninterrupted block.
This is the main thrust of it from Matt Taibbi from his statement to congress this month. I don't know why they released the leaks as tweets; it's impossible to find specific receipts for these statements when they're broken up between 20 threads over several accounts...
We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:
Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:
Or:
Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.
This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.
We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.
A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”
Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.
Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense.
But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.
By implied threat of regulation I mean the unsaid thing that would be on these companies' minds when they received a communication like this — what will they do to us if we refuse to comply? These requests weren't based off a legitimate court order, just the government saying "We'd really like it if you stopped this person from saying things we don't like." Right now they're doing the most they think they can get away with, ReportMaxxing and informal requests, so if given increased jurisdiction over content we have good reason to suspect what they'd immediately start doing with it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I don't think the Taliban were exempt from bans in the pre-Musk era. There was a fairly popular account that sprung up in 2021 right after the pullout that was supposedly them, but it got nuked after about a month. By now most, though not all, of the conservative accounts banned under the old regime have been let back on. I think Signals is expressing uncertainty whether the Taliban PR account is genuinely them. I'm leaning towards thinking it's real due to the post informing people that Lord Miles is missing. But it's hard to tell anything these days honestly.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
There are a lot of barriers to free competition that people aren't aware about. One of them is that payment networks, which are required to participate in the modern economy, are in the business of blacklisting people and businesses for opaque and often unappealable reasons. This article, Section 230 isn't the problem, Payment Networks are goes into some detail on this. If your ability to process credit card transactions can be taken away for not playing nice, this is a significant deterrent to sticking your neck out against the prevailing culture.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I can’t imagine showering less than 40 times a year. Aella is weird and often offputting, but is obviously someone who understands physical presentation. I suppose I believe her when she says she doesn’t smell, but I’m interested how she manages that.
Hygiene is a fun subject. Physical activity and clothing are obviously important, but dirt and genetics seem to matter a lot to your personal experience with it. I have a friend who smelled of mold and BO for years and didn’t seem to understand despite me hinting/outright telling him for the longest time. He almost certainly showered more than Aella but still smelled awful. He eventually had an embarrassing encounter where his coworkers told him frankly how bad he smelled.
I like showers in general; they’re pleasant and being freshly washed helps me feel presentable and confident when I go out. I shower once a day, and feel shlubby if I leave the house without washing up beforehand. That’s mostly psychological, but I get terrible bedhead and it’s obvious if I don’t get it wet. I wash my hair with water every day but only shampoo once a week or so.
3 a day seems high, but I would probably do that many days if drying out my skin and hair wasn’t a concern. Season and exercise will make the average number very. How often do you shampoo and moisturize?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'd love to see nuclear implemented at all, so if we have to put them out at sea then so be it. I'm a layman when it comes to this, but I guess there's the risk of contamination going directly into the sea if things go wrong. That said, we've detonated nuclear bombs over the oceans in testing before so it's probably not an existential problem, and we still run the risk of ocean contamination with traditional power sources via oil spills.
I don't think this will change the minds of many who aren't on board with nuclear already. Most of them oppose it on concerns of safety or the supposed permanence of the waste. I suspect there is a large group against nuclear because it can address power sustainability without fundamentally restructuring our economic and social system, but this is getting close to CW thread territory so I don't want to get into that.
The reason you ask for the player to roleplay his speech but not to describe his sword swing technique is because D&D is a game that exists in our heads. It is a real as the group believes it to be. That is to say, it can be very real, but this requires collective suspension of disbelief, engagement, buy-in, and yes — roleplaying. You aren't taken out of the collective fantasy by your fighter's player not knowing how to swing a sword, but you are by the player who is supposedly the high Charisma party face clamming up whenever an NPC speaks to him.
I don't have an issue with such players being at my table, and in my experience they tend to avoid those kinds of characters anyway. You don't need a silver tongue to be able to play a charismatic character, but you need to have some degree of wit and charm. If a player wants to give a speech, I'm not exactly expecting St. Crispin's Day, but he should have something to say.
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