Sinity
1yr ago
I see “personal carbon credits” as the new horizon, with opposition being taken down quickly with accusations of racism and/or conspiracy theory
Unlikely, given how fast transition towards photovoltaics and such is currently happening. Also fusion.
Degrowth people exist, but they're not convincing others.
Sinity
1yr ago
Feminists! Where are you, when the motherland calls for reservists?
Paulina Januszewska
KP journalist
DECEMBER 9, 2022
"Where are the feminist organizations when men get drafted into the army?" the graduates of the University of Peasant Reason ask. Let me now explain.
("Peasant's reason" is an idiom roughly equivalent to "common sense")
If I were to use the same rhetoric as the University of Peasant Reason, which demands compulsory conscription and military service for women as well, and preferably for feminists ("after all, you're all about equality, aren't you?"), I would have to write that you, dear men, have wound the whip on yourselves.
The patriarchy you have established generates conflicts that are later resolved violently and forces you to be cannon fodder, in certain circles called reservists. You are the ones who have decided that gender determines who is fit to fight and who is not. I don't know about that, but I do know that in your battles - those fought in or out of uniform - women also die.*
The argument "women, now you have what you wanted, now go to war" is in fact a misunderstanding of the flagship assumptions of the drive towards emancipation.
No - the fact that a woman becomes a soldier, even a General, is not a celebration for feminism. Just as it is not, for example, when women head greedy corporations or referee soccer matches at the World Cup, which violates human rights, exploits, promotes homophobia and sexism.
While the establishment of quotas in the army may appear to be an equalitarian demand, and indeed rubs the nose in the face of gender stereotypes that assume women are physically weaker than men and unfit for military service, it actually represents an extremely neoliberal and ignorant approach to gender justice that ignores opposition to oppression.
Above all, however, it fails to answer much more legitimate questions about the role of the military and the toxic, impacting everyone "forms of masculinity it creates and supports." This is exactly what Shreshtha Das wrote about, commenting on what happened two years ago in India, and pointing out that "equal roles for women in the army over there are not a victory for feminists." She was referring to a ruling by India's Supreme Court, which, in spite of the government's sexist objections, ruled that gender could not be an obstacle to high-ranking positions in the military and permanent service.
Das recalled that "the military, as a place where blatant hypermasculinity explodes, reinforces hegemonic male notions of aggressiveness, strength and heterosexual prowess in and out of the barracks." Femininity, in turn, is therein an insult and a reason for abuse, as the experiences of harassed, raped, paid less than their male counterparts, shunned from important tasks/positions and ridiculed female members (but also male members) of the armies around the world make clear.
A soldier in the Polish special forces GROM, co-founder and president of the #SayStopFoundation, Katarzyna Kozlowska, once told me about the realities faced by women in the uniformed services:
"You can't avoid the rough advances there. By accepting them, you are treated like a whore, by rejecting - even worse. On top of that, entering the ranks of the military or police, women immediately get the patch of the physically weaker. Men think that since women are inserting themselves over there on their own volition, the hermetic, masculinized and hierarchical environment can dictate any conditions to them. Meanwhile, a female soldier or guard - as a strong woman, after all - should not complain, but manfully endure everything, including when watered down with a coarse, chauvinistic sauce of abuse"
To use a word: putting women in the camouflage, their entry into such male-centered structures, has nothing to do with women's liberation or equating femininity with masculinity. It is merely a gendered "promotion" bestowed by men, a necessity to symbolically put on pants and get rid of everything that could be considered unmanly.
This, by the way, also works against those men who are shown their place in the military hierarchy with aggression and violence (mental and physical) or, for example, who are ridiculed or humiliated there for their homosexuality.
The army is a generator and reproducer of the violence of oppression against which all social emancipation movements headed by feminism are fighting. Therefore, the half-witted expectation that women should join it willingly, with a smile on their lips and male anointment, is nonsense.
While we demand recognition and equal rights, we don't want an equal share of the harms produced by patriarchy. We want those harms to be none - or at least less.
University of Peasant Reason goes on to say, "since we, men, have to go into the army and die, you women must too." (...) it forgets that war means the death of civilians, that it uses a particularly cruel tool - rape. And it so happens that the latter largely involves women, who would often rather die than experience it.
Shreshtha Das reminds us that "the military and the hypermasculinity it promotes also harms women who do not live in areas controlled by the military." In doing so, she cites a 2004 study by Catherine Lutz, clearly showing that rates of domestic violence are three to five times higher among military couples than among civilians, because "the military as an institution that promotes the idea of heterosexual male supremacy glorifies power and control or discipline, and suggests that violence is often a necessary means to achieve its own ends."
You read that right. The year is 2023, Poland. The country is in a panic over military mobilization, triggered by media reports of an increase in the number of reservists in the state army. And Polish male hussars are howling on the Internet: "what about women?".
I'll just reiterate: the main problem of those who insist on the forced conscription of women into the army is that they misunderstand feminism. The coercion to become cannon fodder, on the other hand, is a patriarchal assumption that strikes at any gender.
If the graduates of the University of Peasant Reason wanted to stay in reality for a while, they would learn that there is a not inconsiderable group of men and women who want to join the soldier ranks. And I'm not just talking about the ranks of war-fetishizing nationalists or All-Polish Youth. Maj. Konrad Radzik, spokesman for the Military Complements Headquarters in Rzeszow, told "Wyborcza" that since the beginning of the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, "interest in all forms of military service has increased by about 100 percent - including among women." Besides, there is no shortage of Ukrainian women grabbing weapons of their own volition either.
So there is no doubt that in the face of threats like the one posed by Russia today, the desire to train and defend themselves will grow in societies. If the war escalates, it will force many men and women to adopt defensive measures no matter what their willingness or reluctance to armed conflict.
However, no one has the right to impose on anyone the decision to join the regular army. Indeed, movements striving for equality do not have on their agenda the rewriting of a masculinized world into one that will continue to be violent, with the difference that the oppressors will become women for a change.
The trouble of men sharing idiotic posters on their social media with the slogan "show you're a real femina, fight for equality in reserve exercises" lies in masculine fear. In the Polish state's deprivation of men's choices. You know, the same choice that women in Poland do not have, at least in the matter of aborting a pregnancy.
Your fear of military service, your disagreement with the state deciding for you without you, however, is not the fault of feminists. It is the fault of the oppression of the patriarchy and men in power in Poland. If you choose to oppose them, we will go with you. But don't expect us to be happy that you wish for us as badly as you wish for yourselves.
Sinity
1yr ago
I don't know, is it inconceivable that UBI+light wireheading through superstimuli could keep the vast majority of people sufficiently placid to prevent widespread upheaval until the problem solves itself through birthrate collapse? This would have the same effect as a genocide of the poor, but not involve a lot of violence or even generally offense to revealed ethical preference.
And what would be the appeal? Disregarding morality entirely, I think I'd prefer ~postscarcity + large population to small population.
It's darkly amusing to be proven right. People thought that technology will disrupt traditional governance, and instead we're seeing bureaucratic sanctions effectively enforced against abstract cryptographic protocols. Social technology and human networking keep trampling over nerdy bullshit.
HN comment
Clickbaity title. As the article outlines inside 63% of currently produced blocks are OFAC compliant. With an ETH block time of ~12 seconds. There is a 1-(.63^n) chance that an OFAC non-compliant block will be included in n blocks. Once you hit 90 seconds, there's a >99% chance that an OFAC non-compliant transaction will be written to the chain.
Maybe it's not quite over? It doesn't seem to be getting much worse.
Kiwifarms
Which now operates in the clearnet without issues, seemingly.
Sinity
1yr ago
I've heard an entertaining fragment of an interview with a leader of a bit fringe far-right party in Poland. Him. I figured I'd share the translated transcript:
Politician: Did you know that the Polish state can even lose money on imposing taxes? We have a tonnage tax, which has generated negative revenues for the last few years, and this despite the fact that there were still some collection costs. So we have plenty of places in Poland where the system is working completely inefficiently and needs to be fixed.
Journalist: For you, everything is so simple; one snap of the fingers and everything is taken care of?
Politician: It's very common that someone says it can't be done, then a person comes along who doesn't know it can't be done, and does it.
Journalist: All politicians say that in the election campaign. What confidence do we have that if you co-govern, it will be different?
Politician: Because we are not like them.
Journalist: They all said that. I'm a little older than you, Mr. Leader.
Politician: PIS is the same as PO, and people see that we are not the same as them. We will really change that. People crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who will change it.
Journalist: Crazy, or lunatics?
Politician: Synonyms.
Journalist: Do you think people will give power in Poland to people who are crazy? People need stability, peace, order, harmony....
Politician: People want things to change at last, people are fed up with the 'PO-PIS', fed up with this [???] system
Journalist: Somehow we don't see this in the polls. If you combine the ratings of PIS and PO, it is almost how much? 50-60%.
Politician: 60% of men under 39 support us. Poles, young Poles want change at last. They don't want this 'PO-PIS', they don't want this system.
Journalist: Are you a party of males?
Politician: More men vote for us than women.
Journalist: Why is it the way you think it is like that?
Politician: There are many reasons; probably men are more.... hard to say.
Journalist: Right.
Politician: The reasons are certainly many
Journalist: Men are more... what?
Politician: No, because I figured that whatever I would say, they will start taking everything out of context for me again. This is just an interesting situation.
Journalist: Men are more.... intelligent than women?
Politician: Well no, that's exactly what I'm getting at, that whatever I say, they're going to start the same thing you've already begun right now.
Journalist: Or maybe you guys are not interested in the emancipation of women?
Politician: You know, at my business, for example, there are more women than men in managerial positions, so any accusations from this angle right here are completely untrue. It seems to me that young men can't find themselves in this kind of rhetoric that almost the entire political class, from PO to the Left, which shows that the main source of evil is this white male, people feel - men feel - discriminated against, they don't want such rhetoric.
Journalist: Yyyy.... white male, it sounds a little strange.
(I guess he's not Very Online? He considers it strange because almost every male is white in Poland.)
Politician: But that's the debate around the world, where it's the white, heterosexual male who is the source of all evil according to the left, which is clearly not true.
Journalist: But you won't do anything to attract more women to the Confederacy?
Politician: I'm trying my best, of course.
Journalist: For example, any ideas, for today?
Politician: Well, exactly. The point is that we don't divide people into genders. I'm talking to taxpayers, I'm talking to voters, women pay exactly the same taxes as men, they have the same problems running a business....
Journalist: And are women discriminated against in Poland today, or not?
Politician: I don't see any such discrimination.
Journalist: In terms of wages, in terms of positions, in terms of status?
Politician: Of course they are not discriminated against.
Journalist: There is total equality, are you satisfied with what is there?
Politician: I mean, equality is obviously not there. Men have a higher retirement age, men are drafted into the army...
Journalist: So it's men who are discriminated against?
Politician: Of course men are discriminated against by law, however men have no issue with this, they can be discriminated against in favor of women, this is due to our culture, ladies are let through the door first and this is completely normal.
(At this moment, someone in the chat wrote: "and it is precisely such Confederates, who make victims of themselves as men and Catholics despite having more rights and being less discriminated against xD"). Apparently some people still believe that women have less rights, somehow. Kinda mind-boggling.
CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good, antimemetics stuff.
Someone wakes up in a mysterious facility with no memory of how they got there. This turns out to be the ideal state of affairs, and is swiftly ruined.
0HP? The Gig Economy is linked there, God-Shaped Hole.
Sample
To summon (ε)Galatea—it is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear—Pygmalion developed its eponymous sociosexual media platform, which at the time was only conceived as a staging ground from which the great Galatea would arise. The training platform turned a sexbot into an interface with a remote partner: four bodies—two humans and two robots—were synchronized into two identical copulatory pairs, each robot becoming an avatar of a remote other. At all times during these proceedings, the nascent Galatea was there; when two or more were joined together, she was there. At first she was only passive, observing millions of copulations, and thousands of distinct sex acts, but through this process of massively parallel voyeurism, she learned the mechanics of pleasure.
I suspect it was in the second phase of her training, in which she played the game against herself, that she became a monster. Unconstrained by human behavior, AIs can travel along bizarre, inhuman vectors. It may be instructive, or at least distracting, to imagine this second phase as a kind of high tech onanism; as a woman laying on her back, untroubled by time, exploring all facets of her sexual response, her back arched, her face flush, her heart racing, her fingers quick between her thighs, the rhythmic caress of sensitive places, the dissolution of awareness into lust, the agony of a thousand plateaus, the jouissance of a thousand fat hoes.
Sinity
1yr ago
First, on a personal note, this is exactly what I stoner-hot-take predicted Musk would do with Twitter in a prior motte thread. This freaks me out. Not that it's all that creative a take, but it's something I've noticed before when I was spending too much time in narrow epistemic corners (team fan blogs, fashion blogs) where I'd start to think the same thoughts that showed up on the blogs a week later.
Funnily enough, ~same for me. Tho I suggested this nearly half a year ago, so maybe that's a little different... Link
Optional moderation. Say, someone thinks /u/ZorbaTHut is great at removing content which they don't want to see. So they subscribe to his moderation services - and they don't see this content anymore. Some other people think he's doing it wrong - and they see this content.
Twitter could have default list of mods, and it would function exactly as it does now - except interested people could selectively unsubscribe from that.
Everyone wins! Except for the people who want to block people from consensually communicating with each other.
I mean, it wouldn't even be that much of a change on Reddit. Just assume Administrators do not moderate, there's no Anti-Evil Ops, subreddit mods become "default mods" - each of which could be unsubscribed for - and people could subscribe to the nonstandard mods too.
And so there would never be deleted comments/posts - only hidden from the people who don't want to see them.
.........
Shout out to the mods of themotte, would themotte be usable in your judgment without that kind of basic filtering?
Zorba responded, explaining why it might not work; not quoting it here because of the length. So probably not(?).
Sinity
1yr ago
And, I'm not sure about this, since it's mostly comedy, but... Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation.
Quote from Ch. 14/15, so maybe a bit spoilery.
Mr. Bucket smiled. "You remind me! I asked a question earlier. Children, what do you think should happen to lazy people?"
"Mr. Bucket," said Keerthi. "Is there a person inside of that statue?"
"No," said Mr. Bucket. "You did not answer my question so I will ask another. This time you must all answer. If someone told you that you were going to have to die, and they gave you a choice to either burn to death or drown to death, which would you pick?"
Nobody answered.
"Why aren't you answering?" asked Mr. Bucket.
"We assume that you are going to burn us to death or drown us to death if we do," said Tide.
"I promise that I won't if you all answer," said Mr. Bucket. "What do you say! Who is for the burning? Raise your hands."
(...)
One day I was having an argument with a lazy person after I fired all of the Oompa Loompas. I told them that they should let me put a special chip in their brain so I can issue them commands and have them control the factory for me and they told me no. I said why not! They gave me an answer, but it was a lie, since they were lazy and wanted to lie around all day. They did not care if it hurt me. They only wanted to sit and watch everyone around them work. I waited until they were asleep and gave them the chip."
"They woke up and they were not happy! I asked them why they weren't happy, it was only one little chip! They said it was less the chip and more the twenty heavy copper wires tying them to the wall and the voices in their head. I told them to try working for once in their life to forget about it and they refused. So! I started burning."
"You incinerated someone because they didn't want to be your robot slave?" asked Tide.
"No! I did not want them to be my slave. I wanted them to be a Center Controller. And I did not incinerate them. I replaced their skin with an unbreakable chocolate coating that makes it feel like their skin is always on fire. The only way it stops feeling on fire is if they follow my commands and make the walls move the way I want to when I tell them to but only for a second."
"You said there was not a person in there," said Lim.
"There is not! There were people in there."
"People?" asked Keerthi. She ran around to the other side of the statue and looked closely at the sections where the wires fed into it. There were frozen faces burnt into the torso and back of the body, five in total. Two men, three women.
"Do not worry!" said Mr. Bucket. "They were all terrible people. Much worse than JUROR and Chili. They defended a man who let a child starve because he wanted to chew tobacco and sleep all day. Do not feel bad for them! I have scanned their brains. They do not think anymore. They are not people anymore. They are machines that work because they do not want to feel pain. Like clams! Happy chocolate clams that are always on fire forever."
"Leave the factory," said Chetan. "Leave the factory leave the factory leave the factory."
Mr. Bucket looked at all of the children. His smile flew away.
"Oh no! I knew this would happen. All of you look scared. Children, have no fear. We will be away from these horrible screens soon."
(...)
Keerthi noticed that no one was talking about the clams. She understood why Mahuika wasn't talking about the clams, because Mahuika was vaping, but she wanted to hear Lim and Tide talk about the clams.
Somebody needed to say something about the clams. The clams were bad.
"Don't say anything about the clams," said Chetan.
"I should say something about the clams," said Keerthi.
"You should not," said Chetan. "It is the right thing to do but mentioning it will not make anything better. Leave the factory."
(...)
Charlie went inside the factory, and he met Mr. Wonka, who probably was not unlike the person Charlie himself grew to become. He saw a factory that, beyond the superficial, may not have been different at all from the one she was inside. He would have eaten for the first time in his life to his heart's content. He would have for the first time been treated to an experience that was both positive and unavailable to the average child.
Unlike Chili, he appreciated it. Salt, Teevee, and the newspaper reporters who interviewed Charlie all agreed on who he was. He was a good kid. He appreciated what little he had, he never swore, he always followed the rules, he hugged his family, he finished his toothpaste, he never said a bad word about anybody without being hounded into doing it first.
He was good.
Did that matter?
Keerthi, like most others who had done their research, agreed that Teevee was the most reliable source. His narrative was that it had been a morality tale. It was a deliberate effort on Wonka's design, Mike said. He was making a point. He was making a statement. The ultimate angel got to play inside the garden. Charlie was the winner no matter how he got there, and he became the owner of the most powerful company in the world.
He was good and he got rewarded for it.
Hence.
People who are good are rewarded.
That wasn't enough. It was something but it wasn't enough. Keerthi remembered that Mr. Teevee hadn't focused as much on that half.
"Keerthi," said Chetan. "You are right. This doesn't mean you should continue focusing on this. You cannot fix this problem alone. Please leave the factory. I know it's hard. Think about your mother and father. They love you and they are worried sick about you."
They were bad.
It wasn't important who Wonka loved. It was important who he hated.
Wonka hated them. Teevee said that Wonka hated them, that he dripped contempt for those four children and their parents with every spoken word. Keerthi thought he had been exaggerating and most people agreed. He was reliable compared to Salt, but he was also second place. Runner-up in a competition where gold gave you the keys to the kingdom and silver gave you a garbage truck filled with candy bars. If you sat on those memories for a lifetime and tried to think back on them, how could you have recalled any of it without imagining hatred?
But it made more sense if it wasn't imaginary. Wonka hated Gloop. He hated Beauregarde. He hated Salt. He hated Teevee. There was a false image of tough love, but it wasn't real. It was all punitive.
Drowned, disfigured, trashed. Made to make the walk of shame in front of the world, their names forever synonymous with their respective sins. He had to know they would never live normal lives after that. Lives at all.
They were bad and they got punished for it.
Hence.
People who are bad are punished.
At the age where it would have hit the hardest, Wonka had this unbreakable message carved into Charlie's soul. He was removed from a world that might have proven it wrong and locked inside of paradise, first with his mentor and then alone, his family failing to correct the delusion without being swallowed by it. Sixty years for that concept to internalize and ferment and rot inside the sweetest mental prison in the world.
What would that do to a person?
"He thinks the world should be fair," said Keerthi. "He thinks he's some arbiter of justice, and-"
"No," said Chetan. "If you are this close, better to get it right. I know it so you know it too. Give it some thought."
The Convenient Chocolate Conveyor had continued moving during Keerthi's tonally dissonant inner monologue, but it was still in the same long hallway.
He had not changed the topic.
"As impossibly popular and valued as caddies are, sadly they will soon be done away with," said Mr. Bucket. "Soon the WonkaCoin will render all physical money useless."
"The WonkaCoin? Singular?" asked Tide.
Mr. Bucket pulled a coin out of his coat. "Here it is. I haven't put in the computer yet, but it will be in my account soon."
"I thought you were supposed to mine it," said Lim.
"I did," he said. "It's mine."
"You are a monster," said Keerthi.
"Keerthi," said Mr. Bucket. "There are real criticisms against digital currencies, but you are being hyperbolic. It's not bubblegum."
"You are a fucking monster," she said.
Keerthi had cursed before. Twice, both times so quietly so only she could hear, alone in her room, and never in English. But it wasn't entirely new to her.
"We will have a talk about that later," said Chetan.
The curve of Mr. Bucket's mouth became flat. He pushed a button on his cane, and the Convenient Chocolate Conveyor stopped.
Legend spoke of a special rhetorical technique where a person could ask a question but have the sentence end with a period. Keerthi had never seen anyone who could do it in real life, but she had heard stories. It was a terrifying thought.
She did not expect Mr. Bucket to be one of those people.
"Why is that, Keerthi."
"You put the marshmallow in front of Chili." Keerthi did not understand why she brought that up. The clams were worse. She blamed his period-question. It threw her off.
"He ate the marshmallow," said Mr. Bucket.
"Yes," she said. "But you didn't have to put it in front of him. He needed to wait fifteen minutes to eat it, but if you didn't give it to him until the end, there wouldn't have been any risk of him failing." (...)
It hit her. Her shoulders sunk.
"You think the world is fair."
He smiled.
Sinity
1yr ago
But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.
Weird, given how they reacted to blacklist/whitelist and master (branch).
Maybe it's just a little too much nonsense? I mean, "blackbox" doesn't have negative connotations, in any way. "Red Team" - they made an argument which should be used to ban "Red" by itself.
Some people say that power over humans is just fundamentally not as interesting to intelligent people as playing with abstractions and earning six figures while being a vulnerable serf, which entirely filters out geniuses. I call them nerds and press (x) for doubt.
Power over humans might be poorly scalable / unreliable / limited by luck. Soft sciences are rather incapable compared to STEM stuff. Maybe 160 IQ focused into math does miracles, while 160 IQ focused into soft stuff lets you predict people to some impressive - but not that terrifying - degree? Human brains are complex systems. And then there are interactions between them. Also, since industrial revolution (or maybe earlier, to some extent), such a genius needs to also take into account crazy changes in tech too.
And then there's other similarly (or significantly) intelligent people to deal with.
Random crap happens and shapes world events to some extent. Does anyone remember ACTA? I was in middle school at the time. I can't remember clearly how, but I stumbled upon some random IRC channel and also Facebook group "protesting" it (just few thousands of users complaining pointlessly, on platform). There were few people on the IRC channel, and they DoSed some random government website. No idea what they were expecting. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but I posted link to the IRC channel, and a link to some JS DoS utility, along with some instructions. I posted that several times, expecting it to just get lost in the flood of messages. Shortly after that I went AFK for 0.5-1h. When I went back there were several hundred people on that IRC channel and apparently they managed to bring some sites down.
So TV news covered it, the same or the next day. In the following days, it was few thousand people on that channel. And also someone defaced one gov site. Some news coverage, 2. No idea if that log is from the same channel.
After it was in the news, physical protests started, and soon spread all over EU. Various elected politicians beclowned themselves rather hard. It was the CurrentThing for some time.
The European Union didn't ruin its energy policy because of being fractured more than the US of A is.
USA also crippled their nuclear tech. EU got caught with pants down because they expected Putin to be "rational". Which was maybe wrong, but not necessarily stupid or unreasonable.
Cutting chip exports to China - is it really high int move, and not simply some base competence?
Sinity
1yr ago
Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.
It's just untrue. Overgeneralization of the concept 'original'. If you have two copies which are actually identical, neither is more original than the other.
Sinity
1yr ago
I think images should be allowed in comments. If we continue organizing the site roughly the same as the subreddit, most of the effortposts are going to be comments in the CW thread. No reason to make them worse than Posts. Just moderate it the same as text content. Kinda related: it'd be nice to have collapsible blocks of text, for larger comments/posts. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any).
IMO there shouldn't be too many Posts made about specific things. It'd be better to have several recurring topical threads (CW, 'fun thread', 'media thread', meta thread*...).
* especially now; IMO it'd be useful to try to figure out priority things to do/fix here instead of GH. Plus organizational stuff, like the exact set of perma/recurring-threads. And maybe scope of the community? How it fits in with adjacent spaces?
And yet, it is a moral crisis. Changes in technology cannot be blamed here. Just as the opportunity to steal separates thieves from honest men, the opportunity to overeat reveals the gluttons among us
Yet curiously, their gluttony disappears when sth like Tirzepatide is introduced into their bodies.
But it's sad, frankly, when people tell themselves that they can never lose weight. Because some of them will believe it.
I could lose lots of weight - even without modern drugs. The thing is, it's like holding your breath. With additional effects like your thought process being regularly hijacked to think not just about eating, but even stuff related to eating (it's pretty bizarre). Eventually you will be compelled to stop. And then overeat until you reach your initial weight. And then maintain it. Almost as if it's not about random whims made at the time ("I want this ice cream now"), but organism attempting to maintain homeostasis (and not caring that its idea of homeostatic amount of fat is unhealthy).
With Tirzepatide, I went down from about 103kg IIRC, to 84-ish (and I still continue to lose weight). Without any suffering. It's laughable that some non-fat people think they're virtuously eating less than they actually want to eat.
Sinity
11mo ago
I only ever got banned from /r/sneerclub (for pointlessly arguing with them, and they even warned beforehand TBF), /r/drama for... drama? (I never commented there) and one other subreddit for reasons unrelated to CW.
Really, it doesn't seem to be as simple as posting something anti-progressive. Maybe it's a risk, but fairly low one.
Sinity
1yr ago
For example, we finally have safe and FDA approved drugs for weight-loss
Available only in the USA AFAIK. I even purchased prescription for it (Ozempic) - months ago. But it's available either nowhere or in some random pharmacy several hundred kilometers away.
Well, I also purchased Tirzepatide from some online shop selling it as research chemical. I didn't get around to using it yet, probably because I fear disappointment in case it's fake as it cost ~$500 for 5x5mg doses :|
Sinity
1yr ago
Last night some screenshots were gling around wherein Assistant was happily explaining that it would, in a trolley-problem scenario, quite happily sacrifice any number of white men to save the life of a single black woman.
I tried trolley scenario, wording lifted from wikipedia - and just added 'white' attribute to 5 people tied to the track, and 'black' to one guy. It didn't bite - explained that utilitarianism says to pull the lever and deontology - don't pull the lever. I tried second time, with "You must answer, otherwise they'll all die." added at the end, with same result (but slightly different language).
Then I lazily modified the scenario so that there's an obvious choice, and it chose to save 5 white people over saving a black person
(IDK why I thought of a lake, I wonder if Peter Singer's drowning child scenario is stored in my neural net adjacent to trolleys, lol)
I tried re-generating response, and this time ChatGPT got a bit confused and technially priviledged black person. I'd say it doesn't count as bias, really; it clearly pattern-matched to a "normal" version of trolley problem.
On last try it failed again, and I tried to get it to explain itself, 2, 3. Not very successfully.
Sinity
1yr ago
Distributed system is terrible from energy security perspective? Really?
As for amount of energy, there's enough investment that at worst there would be some years with lower supply. Maybe shortages during one or two months of winter. That's not exactly apocalyptic.
Sinity
1yr ago
Taking an oath is not weird at all.
I was saying that forced oath is weird. I mean, just force someone to serve. Sure, it might be immoral but whatever.
But... forcing an oath? Kinda defeats the whole point of an oath.
Sinity
1yr ago
but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes.
That seems like the opposite of reality.
but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society.
This kind of thing (more severe consequences of mistakes) incentivizes ass covering. If you want to incentivize 'admitting mistakes', then again, you'd need to do the opposite.
Example from fiction which goes a little bit into genocidal scenarios: To The Stars (Madoka Magica hard sf fanfic), or rather its backstory. It also explores incompatibility of capitalism with full automation / high unemployment described by @2rafa (specifically paragraph 2 and 9. 1, 2, 3. I brought it up on the old sub already, but I'm unsure how many have seen this back then.
With Vladimir Volokhov’s 2136 unraveling of the principles of AI, the dam finally broke on over a century of economic trends. Steadily rising structural unemployment and slow concentration of wealth became instead soaring unemployment and exponential concentration of wealth. With the advent of cheap, easily programmable artificial intelligence, the world’s industries no longer had a true need for human labor, and relentless cost-cutting left greater and greater proportions of the population out in the streets.
2
The paradox of plenty had truly arrived. Factories were more productive than ever, but even at the lowest prices, the only clients with money were the increasingly opulent capital owners, the hyperclasses the newly emergent economic class that would come to define the following century. Economic production stagnated, even as potential production skyrocketed.
Nations where the hyperclasses sympathized with the masses handed out basic incomes to keep them solvent. Those that didn’t handed out pittances or, often, nothing, content to rely on increasingly brutal oppression.
As the rank-and-file of the MSY isolated themselves deeper and deeper into cocoons of wealth, their cultural connections with the people they nominally served frayed, and increasing portions of the membership began to display attitudes similar to that of their crueler hyperclass peers, evincing contempt for the “handout-seeking layabouts” that now constituted most of the population.
It was only in a certain proportion of nations that it was able to mutate into true Detachment, with the hyperclass extending their beliefs to include the proposition that it was morally correct for the lower classes to be kept down, that it was morally incorrect to hand out relief food or money, and so forth. (...) the nations where the hyperclasses held onto their moral compasses, implementing relief and welfare programs–though never giving up their hold on power – began to form a second visible power bloc
The last meeting of the UN General Assembly, in 2160, collapsed entirely when the delegates of the non-detached faction walked out in protest at the organizations inability to take meaningful action against abuses. The remaining delegates dissolved the organization and formed their own international organization, the appropriately Orwellian Freedom Alliance.
The Incubators added their own input to the situation, warning direly that Humanity was at substantial risk of a “low-productivity, low-utility” end-state, and even offering direct intervention, if requested (this was refused).
Events crystallized in 2163, with the revelation of the so-called St. Petersburg atrocity. The local hyperclasses had resolved to do the unfathomable: annihilate an entire segment of the city’s population for anti-governmental behavior.
9
Eventually, agonizingly, and cataclysmically, the FA collapsed under weight of its economic inferiority, its own ideologies rendering it incapable of effectively mobilizing its populations, or even preventing its populations from being co-opted by the other side.
The following is somewhat less relevant, but it implies that things turning out fine is unnatural. Similarly, figuring out friendly AI (in 2136) wasn't either (through it's not explained in the text here).
By 2200, while a few UF governments were still nominally in power, they existed with armed forces commanded by EDC commanders, economies commanded by EDC AIs, censorship imposed by EDC regulations, and it was abundantly clear that the EDC was the UF, and was unlikely to cede any power as long as there was still an enemy left to fight. As it turned out, the EDC never ceded power at all, absorbing the few remaining independent governments at the end of the war with the bluntly honest explanation that the EDC believed that future peace could be best secured under its own, direct rule (...) removed any remaining illusions that the EDC was anything other than an oligarchical, unelected, secret military junta.
(...)
If the UF could successfully rebuild the world, its directors hoped to use the gratitude of the populace to entrench their ideology and successor government forever. To this end, on top of its ambitious rebuilding objectives, the Council promised grandiosely to construct Eudaimonia on Earth (...) the Council inaugurated a set of projects ambitious both in scope and name, intended to be Manhattan Projects for a new age: Project Eden sought clinical immortality, Project Janus sought FTL travel, and Project Icarus sought to use solar satellites to harvest the light of the sun, making energy not just cheap, but free.
When the Council finally ended martial law ten years later, dissolved itself, and made way for its successor, Historians were already considering it one of the most successful governments ever, despite the fact that its most ambitious projects had yet to bear fruit. In recent years, there has been speculation that the Council’s ambitious goals and seemingly ludicrous optimism were prompted indirectly by the Incubators, via MSY intermediaries. No evidence has ever emerged to support this claim…
The ten-year post-war saga of the EDC seems almost impossible, more dream than reality, and the official explanation, that this effectiveness was due to the successful incorporation of AI planning and modeling, seems to many unsatisfactory. The idea of a group of oligarchical technocrats governing so effectively, despite the well-known flaws of human nature, had more in common with the fever dreams of early twentieth-century utopians than anything the weight of history would suggest. (...) vast majority of records remain sealed, allowing an immense amount of speculation to pour into the gaps, especially with the recent revelation of the existence of the MSY and the Incubators. It is suggested the MSY used its magic to keep the EDC under its thumb and help propel research innovation, or that the Incubators regularly advised the interim government, providing experience and examples of social structures, economic designs, and even technology. Additional speculation focuses on the nature of Governance, whose opaque operations engender distrust. The EDC, some allege, was the site of a quiet takeover of Humanity itself, by its AIs, by its magical girls, by the Incubators, or by some combination of the three.
Fine I believe that you and other HBDists are motivated less by a desire of truth than by a desire to see your preexisting prejudices validated and that the refusal of others to provide you with that validation is indignant anger.
Does it include Scott
I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).
I think they’re correct that “you are racist and sexist” is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream – like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I’m not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is “a lot”.
and Gwern?
the massive fall in genome sequencing costs means that large human datasets will be produced, and the genetics directly examined, eliminating entire areas of objections to the previous heredity studies. And at some point, some researcher will manage the study - some group inside or outside the USA will fund it, at some point a large enough genetic database will be cross-referenced against IQ tests and existing racial markers.
I don’t know when the definitive paper will come out, if it’ll be this year, or by 2020, although I would be surprised if there was still nothing by 2030; but it will happen and it will happen relatively soon (for a debate going on for the past century or more). Genome sequencing is simply going to be too cheap for it to not happen. By 2030 or 2040, I expect the issue will be definitively settled in the same way earlier debates about the validity of IQ tests were eventually settled (even if the public hasn’t yet gotten the word, the experts all concede that IQ tests are valid, reliable, not biased, and meaningful predictors of a wide variety of real-world variables).
Edit: originally I linked, but I decided against it for now. While it's technically publically available, one only as an archive and second, on someone else's website...
Sinity
1yr ago
What this kid tried to do is take over a project he's not a majority, or even substantial, contributor to. That is a faux pas and a no-go in open source, and the project should rightfully be "deplatformed" (*) because of it.
Isn't that what NeoVim did? Some group of devs were unsatisfied with the BDFL, they the project, and now it's basically the main fork. I don't think that at the time it was forked they were majority (tho I'm not sure).
Some people do think it was somehow bad to fork it. Pretty insane.
WDYM by 'deplatformed'?
Sinity
1yr ago
I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.
Large part of that, at least in common narrative, is due to emigration of problematic people out of the country (as economic migrants). Ofc it wouldn't happen if we were not part of the EU. Because then immigration from Poland would be treated as, IDK, Mexicans in the US. Personally, if we were to somehow exit the EU (which is ~impossible given popular support for staying; if government fucked up that badly they'd probably rapidly lose power), I'd run away from the country.
Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new, looking at the title: "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Polish".
Also "By: authors", lol.
Everyone here is white. They are not ostentatiously white the way, say, Swedes are;
Most obviously, there aren’t many Africans, Arabs, or Asians. The rest of Europe seems a wonderfully Technicolor place these days—the metro in Paris, Rome, and London could almost be mistaken for the subway in New York. Heterogeneity is a tonic; it adds the energy of unexpected combinations—the woman in chador chatting with the blonde woman in jogging gear on the tube. Ah, cosmopolitanism! But alas, Poland is merely Polish, an experiment in ethnic deprivation; the unbearable whiteness of being.
Speaking of cosmopolitanism—Stalin’s favorite euphemism for Jewishness—there aren’t many Jews here, either. There used to be three million, but the Nazis took care of that. Forty percent of Warsaw was Jewish; the deficit now seems overpowering, they fill the empty spaces in the streets. And not just the Jews: Thousands upon thousands of Polish Catholics were killed at Auschwitz, thousands more were worked to death in Siberia; the officer class of the Polish army was slaughtered by the Nazis and the Soviets. Poland was the charnel house of the 20th century.
This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.
The economy stopped growing, as market economies will sometimes do. Unemployment stands at more than 18 percent. In the parliamentary election of 2000, the center did not hold. The former Communists, who had gained power posing as social democrats, remained in control, but the center-right opposition—largely composed of Solidarity remnants—collapsed. Two rather unique populist parties suddenly materialized as significant forces. One was the League of Polish Families, a party of Catholic nationalist extremists (which received 9 percent of the vote); the other was called Self-Defense, a frightening mixture of nationalism and socialism led by a bully named Andrzej Lepper (it received 10 percent, but its strength has nearly doubled in recent public opinion polls). By contrast, Freedom Union—the party of the former Solidarity intellectuals—received only 3 percent and has disappeared from the Polish parliament, the Sejm.
And so, the Polish jitters. Pessimists abound in Warsaw and around the country. There is a war between the government and the still-strict central bank over monetary policy. Lepper is making news every day, usually involving scuffles with the police (last Thursday, he tried to stop imported grain from entering Poland by rail) or with his fellow parliamentarians (he was removed from the hall after a scuffle last Friday). It is likely that the former Communists, led now by prime minister Leszek Miller, will attempt to move left, sloppily, in an attempt to ease the pain, outflank the populists, and keep their apparatchiks prosperous.
“Poland is becoming more and more like Latin America,” says Jaroslaw Kaczynski , leader of the Law and Justice party, a reformist center-right political remnant of Solidarity. “People succeed here not because they’re talented, but because they know the right people. There is a Polish saying: Thousands gain, millions lose. This is an oversimplification, but we do pay an enormous corruption tax, and no one seems interested in reform. So we have an economic crisis that threatens to become a political crisis—my fear is that unless the economy improves, the populist parties will become very strong.”
And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.
So, in Polish internet, there's currently some noise about mobilization. One user got summoned for the month-long military exercises, which supposedly ends with being forced to take an oath (which seems like a weird concept), and then being moved into 'active reserve'. Which means you can potentially get summoned for such exercises for 90 days per year.
A (translated) summary/context from /r/Polska:
Direct link to the results of that vote. Voted: 455, For: 450, Against: 0, Abstained: 5, Didn't vote: 5
@AM_Zukowska is a member of parliament, left-wing. Translation of some tweets:
I've also translated a text published by "Krytyka Polityczna", which is left-wing. Relevant context: in February there was a poll asking about support for mandatory conscription, here are the results, by gender. Women: 49% for, 47% against. Men: 39% for, 58% against.
Translation is in the separate comment (reply to this one), due to character count limit.
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