Assuming webfics count, Erogamer. Not sure how to describe it; maybe metaphysics / nature-of-reality porn. Also literal porn (which is why it's behind registration-wall). Here's the first post.
I think it'd be nice to share media-lists (like myanimelist/anilist goodreads etc.). Since I brought this up, here's my anilist[1]. Currently I don't maintain anything else.
can we maintain a Motte book thread?
I'd extend that to 'media' in general. Maybe apart from people sharing stuff individually, we could vote to watch/read specific things and discuss?
[1] Completed contains, generally, one entry per series - no sequels etc.
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?
Sinity
1yr ago
Choose team liberty over team coercion.
IMO past lockdowns permanently increased liberty in the future, by shifting the default from office to remote work, where applicable.
The previous arrangement was plain coercion (just look at the management class still trying to fight back occasionally, despite workers clearly preferring their freedom). Which actually affected lives, to a drastic extent. Lockdowns were lukewarm, and very temporary.
Choose team economy over team lockdown.
Same here; it could've only increased the pace of change long-term. Killing/damaging obsolete sectors of the economy like physical retail is good.
Sinity
1yr ago
Also the name itself. Through it's definitely too late to change this.
Scott himself, in the post where he introduced (popularised?) the term, said
This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.
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'?
edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.
Also lists are possibly broken (plus there's too much spacing between items)
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test
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second level
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sth sth
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Sinity
1yr ago
They do have a tendency to overstate the severity and applicability of issues due to the benefits of publicity in that community.
Not sure if they overstate the severity of issues; If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?
They were playing chess & you were playing checkers;
Not directly applicable here*, but cybersecurity in general is... there's no cybersecurity, really. Intel ME.
* but maybe for Gab / Truth and such?
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
An alternative way to frame this is that spreading infohazards is good for people near the bottom of society but bad for those near the top, since higher societal instability is like heating up a bubbling cauldron of soup - the increased volatility makes it more likely that ingredients at the bottom will bubble up to the top.
Watch "Mr. Robot" TV show. a) it's great; b) shows things going the other way around than you expect, so you might notice sth you haven't considered.
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
Suppose we naively equalize this power, or just adapt current political institutions to it, such that in a few generations a plebeian can secure resources to start his own copyclan and bite off some share of the light cone. What would they make of it? Would they not devolve into puddles of high-maintenance hedonium? Or, worse, would they not spill into ugly rat races over artificially scarce artifacts to secure positional goods, invent increasingly absurd sports, flaunt their cognitive limitations, vote for some even more buffoonish Trumps, and generally mode-collapse into God-monkeys replaying behavioral loops from Savannah? Worst of all, would they not succumb to Moloch in His basest form, the Blight from Sandberg's own worldbuilding exercise, like Scott warned in his meditation?
Yeah, but that doesn't preclude giving them, say, equivalent of Earth's worth of resources. It doesn't necessitate murdering them by restricting anti-aging or mind uploading tech.
If a half-ape like me can think about eventual cool and useful things to do on an astronomical scale, to scale my agency up, they ought to be able to feel it already.
I don't expect there to be that much interesting stuff to do in Reality. Space ~undifferentiated at scale. Agency = compute.
I'm less of an elitist than you, and you're far from the worst offender, but frankly it's very hard for me to imagine that, if I were to make the decision that people upstream of of Altman or Hassabis will soon be positioned to make, I'd have the heart to play Prometheus. I would, however, try to spread the prerequisites of high agency. I'd be enticing baseline humans to partake of Ambrosia, the Fruit of Knowledge and the water of Mnemosyne before giving them Fire.
What would that involve?
Conveniently, utilitarians tell us that human lives, happiness points and QALYs are fungible, so it makes little difference on the cosmic scale if you uplift the current 8 billion half-apes, or let them expire (but ethically, e.g. doubling down on addictive entertainment production, SusTainaBility propaganda, birth control and child substitutes and industrializing this novel Canadian practice of recommending euthanasia to unhappy poor people), and generate a more aligned population from the small chosen seed.
I think most would agree that killing someone, to swap them for someone new, is not good.
Maybe it's copium, but I really don't believe that it's likely. It's a coherent view, and it does make sense from purely selfish perspective, sorta - but moral intuitions would scream. I mean, really? (not literal) post-scarcity achieved, now let's go kill everyone except close family and such? Kill actual living 10B humans, replace with new instances, personally designed?
All of that motivated by just wanting to grab, say, 10% more resources (otherwise allocated equally between existing humans)?
Anyway. From Perfect Imperfection:
- Yes. - She took a breath. - Take advantage of it. These are the privileges of your position. The ease of escaping into bliss, into places of absolute peace. Reverse the way you think: it's not you who moves in the world, it's the world that moves in front of you, like a perforated tape, and you choose on which part to latch the reader of your soul.
- Stahs [standard homo sapiens]. - He patted the horse on the neck. - I am a stahs. An aristocrat. Is that how I should think?
- Exactly. What, you don't like the word? Aristocracy is necessary.
- You are attempting to freeze culture in an artificial state.
- To freeze man. Humanity.
- It all amounts to the same thing.
- Does this outrage you? Why does it?
- I don't know. It seems to me some kind of... calculating, ruthless. Social engineering. It has a bad connotation.
- Didn't they tell you, every Progress inevitably gravitates towards UI.
- They said. Actually... you told me.
- Ah. - She raised her eyes to the starless sky. - Me. Well, yes. So you know - if it wasn't for Civilization, you would have found here after the resurrection only phoebes [posthumans] and inclusions; there would be no more stahs. Well, maybe a few zoological specimens.
- But did you have to go straight into all these pseudo-feudal rituals?
- There wasn't much choice. In an inf economy, in an economy of arbitrary distribution of infinitesimals, feudalism remains a stable system. Democracy - not. Is it democracy that you feel sorry for?
(...)
It appeared that she had gone all the way: the sun setting over the ocean, the golden beach, the white stones of the boardwalk, the warm wind above shaking the plumes of palm trees.
The beach was not yet empty, dozens of tanned nude people were walking along the wave boundary or playing volleyball. A girl with a dog stopped at the steps leading to the boardwalk and gawked at Adam and Angelica - she probably noticed their condensation. Zamoyski winked at her. She whistled at the dog and they ran on, child and animal. (...)
They ordered milkshakes. From the waitress's demeanor, her naked nervousness, her quick, stealthy glances, her artificial precision of speech, Adam inferred that she recognized the stahs in them.
When she left, he looked around the boardwalk and the beach. He looked for signs of tension and agitation in the behavior of the beachgoers - the recent war with the Deformants, the current one - with the Suzeren, these massacres of people from the ripped apart Ports... But nothing. A postcard resort.
How much of the information about these meta-physical clashes ever leaks into the cultural soil of HS Civilization, to the very bottom? Gnosis doesn't censor it, after all; it's all floating around in Plateau. But apparently the enstahs don't care much.
But you have to admit: they live luxuriously - in the luxuries of the 21st century.
- How many of them do you think have citizenship of Civilization?
- Probably none. - Angelika shrugged her shoulders.
- Do you remember what you told me then, in the clearing, under the moon? About the rules of Civilization and feudalism?
- Aha.
- "Because to me it looks", he waved his hand, "like the twenty-first century, right down to the marrow of its democratic bones."
- Well. Ninety-nine percent most of the time live as you lived in the twenty-first, after all, this is what our Civilization is based on, we must have a strong cultural foundation, a certainty of normality. But above these ninety-nine percent are the stahs, there is the whole hierarchy of Civilization, the Lodges and the Emperor and the Gnosis and the prohibition laws. Well, then, this political structure that makes the twenty-first century possible - now it was Angelika who embraced the landscape with a broad gesture - this structure is feudal in its essence.
- You can't live in democracy and feudalism at the same time. It is an absurdity of sorts. They quarrel with each other in every detail, in language even.
- Really? After all, in your time feudalism has already begun to overtake democracy. Don't make such a face. You knew. The greater the power of the intellect - and therefore of money - the lesser the power of the majority.
- You were well indoctrinated by the Jesuits. And the facts - what are they? He looked at the beachgoers.
- Stupid sheep herded by enlightened shepherds from the heights of the Curve. How nicely they play! How happy they are! How wonderfully tanned! How nicely fattened! We'll step in before bedtime, stroke their heads, they'll lick our legs, make us feel better - and let them continue to play carelessly.
- Isn't this what the paradise of democracy looked like in your day?
- Democracy. Repeat the word. And those here? They don't have the right to vote, they're not citizens, they don't -.
- But they don't want to be citizens! As stahs they would be restricted by Tradition. And yes - they are absolutely free. Civilization does not constrain them. They can be whatever they wish. Do whatever they desire. Do nothing if they desire it. Inf fulfills their dreams, inf gives them security.
- And what do they do? They lie on the beaches.
- And what did they do in your day? They drank through their allowances in neighborhood parks. - She laughed. - Fren is the same, only the laziness is more luxurious.
- But why is citizenship something that is bought? Even if they wanted to, they couldn't afford it.
- And how do you distinguish such a decision from hundreds of other temporary whims, fulfilled on a word? How do you make them feel that citizenship and politics are more than just another inf game?
- In such a culture they grew up, what do you expect from them?
- But nothing! This is just a man's natural state!
- After all, you can see it, she resumed more quietly. - Just look at them. Progress itself is undemocratic. Take a look at the Curve: up over here, down there. The universe is undemocratic. There is no such livable universe at all that doesn't enforce a Perfect Form, doesn't impose a hierarchy. Democracy goes against the laws of physics. And subconsciously they know it, they all know it.
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.
Sinity
1yr ago
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.
Sinity
1yr ago
(Online) people bringing it up since the war started are shunned. Before, it was frequently brought up.
Sinity
1yr ago
a significant component their national myth is of Poles as the bulwark, standing strong against the tide (Polish spearmen held back the Golden Horde, Polish Hussars broke the siege of Vienna, and so on).
Sometimes to a cringe-inducing degree. See Christ of Europe
Sinity
1yr ago
If advertisers are willing to pay so much, maybe Elon can just ignore their demands to control what kind of content is allowed on the platform?
Sinity
1yr ago
I think there's a nontrivial chance (say, 15%?) that Twitter ends up banned from various app stores like other 'free speech' twitter clones have. Lets say within one year.
It'd be hilarious if it happened, and then Musk invested serious money into some alt-appstore for Android. And maybe somehow broke iPhones to allow alternate app stores there too. Tho EU is already solving that particular problem apparently.
Sinity
1yr ago
Kinda off topic, but I find it really weird that felons can't vote in the US. I remember being very confused when I learned about this (recently). Seems like a bad thing, especially given stupidly high incarceration rate. Apparently almost 2.5% of the population was disenfranchised at the peak (2016). Seems to be potentially enough to shift the outcomes of the elections.
So, say, some political group takes power, passes laws which disproportionately affect people voting for the other side, lots of people go to jail... and they're stripped of the right to vote.
Seems like a really stupid idea. Probably popular tho.
Sinity
1yr ago
Let's say you have content-addressed Content-addressable file system. It supports mirroring of any piece file onto multiple devices. When user saved a new file, it is saved, identifiable only through its content hash, onto two or more devices.
If you unplug any of them and plug it to a different computer, both computers will have the file.
Which is the original file and which is a copy? Neither is original, it makes no sense to talk about 'original' in digital realm (usually).
And yes, files, digital data - abstract stuff. Maybe for 'real' objects it is different? Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms
Suppose I take two atoms of helium-4 in a balloon, and swap their locations via teleportation. I don't move them through the intervening space; I just click my fingers and cause them to swap places. Afterward, the balloon looks just the same, but two of the helium atoms have exchanged positions.
Now, did that scenario seem to make sense? Can you imagine it happening?
If you looked at that and said, "The operation of swapping two helium-4 atoms produces an identical configuration—not a similar configuration, an identical configuration, the same mathematical object—and particles have no individual identities per se—so what you just said is physical nonsense," then you're starting to get quantum mechanics.
If you furthermore had any thoughts about a particular "helium atom" being a factor in a subspace of an amplitude distribution that happens to factorize that way, so that it makes no sense to talk about swapping two identical multiplicative factors, when only the combined amplitude distribution is real, then you're seriously starting to get quantum mechanics.
If you thought about two similar billiard balls changing places inside a balloon, but nobody on the outside being able to notice a difference, then...
The concept of reality as a sum of independent individual billiard balls, seems to be built into the human parietal cortex—the parietal cortex being the part of our brain that does spatial modeling: navigating rooms, grasping objects, throwing rocks.
Even very young children, infants, look longer at a scene that violates expectations—for example, a scene where a ball rolls behind a screen, and then two balls roll out.
People try to think of a person, an identity, an awareness, as though it's an awareness-ball located inside someone's skull. Even nonsophisticated materialists tend to think that, since the consciousness ball is made up of lots of little billiard balls called "atoms", if you swap the atoms, why, you must have swapped the consciousness.
The original must have the quality "created first."
But to what do you attach this metadata, if you are presented with two bit-by-bit (or atom-by-atom) identical objects? If it's a 'real world' painting on a canvas, and you make that copy, the only way to discriminate between them is some metadata - like position in space of its center of gravity or sth. That seems rather arbitrary.
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.
Unlikely, given how fast transition towards photovoltaics and such is currently happening. Also fusion.
Degrowth people exist, but they're not convincing others.
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