Soteriologian
3d ago
I agree with your presentation on kingship and the origin of its authority, and that Moldbug doesn’t really "get" it.
That said, you're still left with the age-old problem of "What happens when the sun sets on the sun-king?" Enlightenment philosophy was developed and trounced everything in its path for a reason! In the same sense that true kingship is ultimately grounded in conquest and social Darwinism, I point to the triumph of liberalism over older thought modalities and say, "Behold, your king."
Finally, there are a lot more problems with kingship today than there were in the Enlightenment era, because the nature of battle has changed. What is a knight in the face of an autonomous drone swarm, where each unit that can kill him and his brethren costs less than his monthly salary? What is a knight when his bank account can be frozen on the whims of a bureaucrat?
Whatever a knight is in 2026, it looks nothing like a knight from medieval Europe. And a true king surely more unrecognisable still.
But then again, I suppose a true king, by definition, would figure all this out.
"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel"
Soteriologian
3d ago
Well, whatever one may say of her politics in general, I don’t think that’s what this specific incident implies: she didn’t want to watch or control anything here, in the Zuckerberg sense. She didn’t start an email service and try to get a bunch of gullible people to use it; she just hosted her own mail server for herself.
It’s honestly incredibly based. Possibly the most tech-literate and clearheaded act of self-sovereignty I’ve ever witnessed from a politician (although admittedly the competition is nonexistent).
Soteriologian
4d ago
Perhaps we all long for, on some level, to be watched over and controlled
Well, Hillary Clinton doesn't. Perhaps she truly was the rightful heiress of the free world.
Soteriologian
4d ago
Pretty much.
What incenses me most about race-conscious rightoids is how incapable they are of sovereign thought, especially that of any relevance in 2026. The board is as you mention in your final paragraph: the digital surveillance state is wired up well enough that it's basically just "Draw a selection rectangle around the protest mob on Google Maps, right-click, 'Freeze bank accounts.'"
Even for something as fundamental as communication, rightoids just do it on the centralised, mass surveillance platforms run by the "idk, they trust me. dumb fucks" sort. Meanwhile, Hillary fricken' Clinton -- who was a woman in her 60s at the time -- was like "I should probably run my own email server on a box in my basement so I don't have to depend on a bunch of centralised surveillance slop like gmail."
Like come on, if grandma socialite over here is out-cyberpunking your ass, you are not a serious political actor.
Soteriologian
4d ago
I mean, if you want to define any insurrection against the established order as innately leftist, sure. From a monarchist viewpoint, there's little difference between 1776, 1789, and even 1917. But the Americans -- both now and then -- view their revolution as quite distinct from these others. Call me a liberal if you must, but I find their case compelling.
The problem with Monarchists is they have to answer for kings like, well, the current king of England, who is overseeing the replacement migration of his own people and outright celebrating it with foreign holidays. Is rebellion against this monarchy "leftist" or "liberal"? Who is the left and who is the right here? I think the terms just lose all meaning.
And it's not like "Oh, well this is an exceptional case, nobody historically could have imagined having an idiot monarch like Charles," because, yes they could. This happens all the time: finding yourself in the position of having an idiot as monarch is the problem with monarchy, and has been so for all of recorded human history.
Soteriologian
6d ago
Half? You can get a man to give up his entire kingdom!
"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" -Richard III
Soteriologian
6d ago
I'm saying women extracting ludicrous amounts of wealth from men simply by being hot is something that's been going on for millennia.
Soteriologian
6d ago
I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
Meanwhile, in the gospel of Mark:
And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.
And of course, long before that, in the book of Esther:
Then said the king unto her, What wilt thou, queen Esther? and what is thy request? it shall be even given thee to the half of the kingdom.
Soteriologian
7d ago
What is the scoop on SIDS? I heard some echoes from conspiritard circles that it's a euphemism for women killing their babies (by accident or not), but I don't have a high degree of faith in the source here, and I'm not an expert on baby health.
Soteriologian
9d ago
It's got that 2008 Cracked.com writing style.
Which is great the first time you see it. After the dozenth the time, eh.
Soteriologian
9d ago
I'd say your vibes are the exact opposite of what they should be, given that the Tornado cash devs were arrested by the government and the Zcash foundation is in McLean, Virginia (the spook capital of the world).
Soteriologian
9d ago
A "rectification" settled by shooting the British army until they fled back to England.
Soteriologian
9d ago
Two fun stories from tech this past week:
Story 1
The rsync developer picked up vibecoding recently, which resulted in him publishing a busted release that started breaking people's backups, which caused a nuclear level of backlash. The rsync dev responded by posting this wall of text which insists that no, vibecoding is actually the future, chuds.
The most amusing part is this is not some cooked zoomer who picked up Claude last week and deluded himself into thinking he was now a real coder. This guy is the founding author of the project, and has been its primary maintainer for 30 years.
Story 2
Zcash is a cryptocurrency which advertises itself as a privacy coin. As all good cyberpunks do, Zcash has a centralised, legally-incorporated foundation elaborating their trademark policy as well as a wealth of resources about 1023s, bylaws, IRS compliance, and pretty much anything else that would brighten the day of a young cyberpunk.
But don't worry, it gets better when you dig into the details: "Privacy coins aren’t all the same — and Zcash takes a unique stance among them. Unlike [redacted], which enforces full anonymity by default, Zcash gives users a choice." A unique stance indeed! This stance has been pioneered elsewhere by Telegram, which famously features end-to-end encrypted chats that a user can opt into (and if they don't, well, the messages are unencrypted by default just like on every other platform, and Telegram and anyone capable of arm-twisting Telegram can read them). I'll note that as a frequent user of Telegram for over a decade myself, I have never once had someone initiate a secret chat with me, which just goes to show that all true cyberpunks love mass surveillance, and will choose it whenever they are given a choice. Like Telegram, most users of Zcash choose not to make their activity private. Of course, even if you opt into the shielded pool -- a respectable choice! -- make sure you do so carefully, because there are definitely not guns pre-pointed at your foot C++ style.
But all of that is old news! Today, the price of Zcash wrt the dollar crashed nearly 60% on the news of a new critical vulnerability discovered by a random person deciding to point Claude at the code base (not the Mythos version; just the regular version accessible to anyone). The vulnerability allows unlimited coins to be printed in the shielded pool where nobody can see them. Some foolish conspiracy theorists have put forth the hypothesis that backdoor money-printing may, in fact, have been a feature, not a bug, but fortunately, top men are on the case to discredit such harebrained nonsense.
What's especially baffling about Zcash is that despite its impeccable reputation, Wikipedia notes its adoption among darknet cryptocurrency markets is less than 1%.
Soteriologian
9d ago
I think you're correct, but I think another key aspect that is underdiscussed is Overmind assassination (both literal and de facto; the most effective way to knock a piece off the board is often not to kill them and turn them into a martyr).
Soteriologian
9d ago
Nah, I'm not a Moldbug fan, but he is correct here.
The right historically has not had such difficulties with this. The US colonists said, "You will not tax my stamps and tea, and if I catch you doing so, I will shoot you." These are not envious leftists or commies. They had a sincere, coherent political model that they were willing to pursue -- not just to the point of sacrificing their own lives, but to the point of sacrificing the lives of those who disagreed with them. They prioritised their movement and their vision above that of the governing state, and they were willing to back that with as much violence as they could muster.
That is, in fact, what winning looks like.
Soteriologian
11d ago
Moldbug is correct when he says leftists understand power and the right does not. I bet these protests go nowhere, despite being entirely justified (especially compared to the Floyd protests). In fact, this justification is why they'll go nowhere: the right can only rally when something verifiably bad happens, and even then barely muster the gumption to care. The left, in contrast, doesn't give a rat's ass about the facts on the ground: the incident is useful to the cause, and we're going to milk it for all it's worth because what we actually care about is The Movement, not the incident.
There really is nothing similar to The Movement on the right. The left retains all moral authority to itself: as long as your actions are in service of the movement, nobody cares whether your actions are legal or not. Loot the Nike store, raze the Starbucks, shoot the United Health CEO, whatever: you may be a criminal to The System, but to The Movement, you're a hero! The right does not retain any moral authority to itself. All it can do is appeal to the existing laws and say, "See, the immigrant with a knife stabbed somebody! That's against the law! The police should ARREST him, and and... maybe even DEPORT him." Yeeeeah, one of these two teams is going to trounce the other.
I think the reason for this is that the left does actually have an overarching narrative that compels the assent of and motivates the actions of its adherents. That's not to say it's true or accurate, any more than Islam being able to compel suicide bombers means Mohammad actually flew to heaven on a winged unicorn. But the narrative is there, and it inspires loyalty and action.
The right, in contrast, has no Movement, especially not one that compels moral authority over the state to any relevant degree in #currentyear. There are two wings of the right: the actual tradcons (which look like this), and the Nazis (which often LARP as tradcons and look like this). If you bomb an abortion clinic or a migrant detention center, there will be no rallying to your defense by women with hundreds of thousands of likes inquiring when the conjugal visits will begin in your prison, there will be no photographer taking Renaissance photos or featuring your drip in Time magazine. Now, I know Luigi is unusually attractive, and the Clavicular worldview is to attribute the fanfare to that. But let's be real: if Luigi had shot a leftist figurehead, this is not the reaction he would have received. Luigi's cuteness is useful to the movement: the movement is not subservient to the actions of the most cute, as the Clavicular model would contend.
Can the right figure out how to claim moral authority? In its current incarnation, I doubt it. What the right is missing is the right side of the Bell curve: they have plenty of Zerglings, but no Overmind. In fact, I'll go so far as to say a lot of the Overminds they do have are false, in the sense that I think incidents like Jan 6 are setups to get rightoids to clown themselves into getting arrested. They think they're crossing the Rubicon with Caesar, but they're really just being goaded into making fools of themselves by agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them in their fog of war.
Soteriologian
12d ago
Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power.
This seems the most likely to me. Unlike many here, I've never bought into these "new right" movements like Maga. They feel very synthetic to me (or, as the kids say, fake and gay), in the sense of both being manufactured and specifically being manufactured by people who have dubious belief in the product they're selling. Like having a tattooed pornstar, a WWE Smackdown champ, and an Indian woman praying to a Hindu god featured at the RNC does not strike me as a sincere evolution of the right-wing movement from 20 years ago: it looks more like a spiteful mockery of the Christian right's inability to stop a hostile takeover.
Hillary said back in the day that Trump was a Pied Piper. She presumably meant he was there to lead the right astray into clowning themselves and severing their access to power forever, as she, the stout and civilised pantsuit princess, ascended to the throne as First Woman President and Leader of the Free World.
As is often the case in politics, she was quite deluded about herself. But I think she was basically correct about her opponent.
I keep predicting a market crash, and I keep being wrong, but... well, I'm going to keep predicting it anyway, because the market looks pretty damn irrational to me. And yeah, if you get the largest market crash since the Great Depression, it might be a good idea to be somewhere else, because people are already not in a good mood. There will be calls for heads on pikes.
I'm not sure I follow your confusion. In a strictly mathematical sense, you may have equivalence, but if you publish your paper in the world where electrons have positive charge and everyone else publishes their paper in the world where they have negative charge, well… you can see how this appeal to "Well they’re equivalent either way 🤷♂️" is both technically correct and also asinine.
But it's not just this sense: in the bool example, there's only one bit of information at play, but say you're talking about something more complicated like graph isomorphism or SAT solving. The representation of the problem matters a lot in practice! You can famously write a SAT solver in a single line of Haskell code, but you can also do it in 60,000+ lines of low-level systems code. I'm sure you can guess which is the useless party trick and which is the industrial-grade SAT solver. But even more relevant is that the technical curiosity is, in a strictly mathematical sense, more correct! The industrial-grade SAT solver has a maximum variable count just by the fact that it labels them with 32-bit ints, which is obviously ridiculous by theoretical standards: there’s no magical limit on the number of variables you can have in a SAT problem.
So, let’s say we’re interested in proving the correctness of a SAT solver. I bet there are a fair number of people who’ve played around with Lean and similar systems who would have a fair shot at proving the party trick correct.
There’s not a single person on the planet who stands a shot at proving the industrial SAT solver correct, nor is there likely to be within a thousand years.
And this is how it always is! There is this enormous disconnect between the truly formal representation of a system and "equivalent" (in any colloquial sense) real-world systems anyone cares about, even for systems that are themselves formal fields of study like SAT (much less anything an MBA would consider “real world”, like whether his website is secure).
The reason money has any interest in Lean 4 beyond "the government will give me a tax deduction for my charitable donation" is because we want systems to stop being so broken, and formal verification is supposed to help with that.
My point is just that there are… asterisks. A lot of asterisks.
If someone's "proofs" aren't of kind Prop, they're doing something wrong.
This is simply not the case, as even my example in the OP shows. Proofs do contain computational info, and many times you cannot choose to ignore it: it really makes a difference whether the off switch turns the system off or on! You can’t just say "Well, there’s two options either way, so they’re equivalent," and be done with it.
Prop isn’t some special universe where your proofs live. If you have that mental model, you’ve never built anything with these systems. That’s like a "meat comes from the supermarket"-tier take on how this works.
Even the name "Prop" is a reference to it being intended for propositional equality, which in some flavours of dependent type theory is asserted to have one constructor (and traditionally, this axiom is one that induces poor ergonomics; hence, Voevodsky’s axiom and the development of HoTT/cubical theories).
I don't know, my experience is kinda the opposite, but I have been programming since childhood. I find AI very frustrating to use, and rarely consult it.
Keep in mind that it has all of Github in its training data. It can go a long way by basically feeding you an existing project and not mentioning where it got it. I don’t mean to oversimplify and say that this is all models do and that there’s no reasoning, but I think people underestimate just how much is memorised: you can get mainstream models to recite entire books like Harry Potter almost word-for-word, with upwards of 95% accuracy, and to the extent that you can't, it's usually due to active sabotage by the model vendor to prevent people from getting free Harry Potter, not because the model doesn't have Harry Potter memorised. Vendors really do not want it to look like everything is getting memorised, but to a large extent it is. I just tried it with some random books I'm reading now and… yeah, they definitely have every book I'm trying memorised, even though they're very coy about it. And some of these are quite obscure books that I'm confident less than 1% of people would even recognise the name of. I then tried it on a snippet from a random library I published ten years ago on Github and… yeah, it has it memorised, down to the exact word. Amusingly, unlike the books, it does not go out of its way to tell me where this quote is from and lecture me about the importance of copyright. When I explicitly ask it where it got that, it just says it made it up—that it’s not a quote from any published book.
EDIT: to drive the point home, it is not so good at predicting the text of an unpublished library I have sitting on my PC! I suppose it's some consolation that this vendor does not appear to have access to my computer.
Soteriologian
14d ago
Well, if we're going to be pedantic, proofs of kind Prop are irrelevant. I haven't followed this stuff in a while, but I'm pretty sure this opens a big can of worms, especially wrt erasure. Google's AI assures me this is all totally resolved and there's zero overhead, then links me to this thread which is not that old and smells of all the swamp I remember from back when I followed this stuff.
Soteriologian
14d ago
The Hilbert thing is more a sign of the times. Back then, there was a lot of resistance and emotional slapfighting over this, because in ye olden days, people were very concerned about which postulates were True (TM), and viewed any attempt to discuss this as an attack on Truth.
Today, we worry less about this absolute notion of Truth and more about models: is Euclid's parallel postulate True or False? Well, there's actually nothing to fight over: you just get different geometries, but they're all meaningful and useful! So rather than saying "The parallel postulate is true, therefore XYZ", you can just say "When the parallel postulate is true, XYZ holds." Even questioning logical primitives that seem "very true" like "can you appeal to a theorem more than once in the same proof?" turns out to have surprisingly useful implications! For example, if you're modeling a cookie, it makes a lot more sense to say you can only eat it once, rather than you can eat it as many times as you want. It's not wrong; it's just a different thought model. A thought model that, incidentally, is the foundation of a very popular programming language.
One can say "Ok, but what if the postulates imply a contradiction? Surely that's bad, right?" Well... yes, but actually even here there's a lot of subtlety. Not for mathematicians, but for everyone else: see, the trick to defining logical systems that dodge Russell's Paradox is to have a cumulative hierarchy of universes, which is what a lot of dependently-typed proof systems use. But it turns out this is an enormous pain in the ass to work with for writing normal software, to the point that literally nobody does it, and instead we settle for simpler systems that are much more ergonomic to write in yet still, in practice, give a pretty strong (but not rock-solid!) guarantee that you haven't contradicted yourself.
Anyway, constructivism is a more grounded model compared to classical logic, in the sense that it actually computes results, and you can do the legacy thing by just saying "When the law of the excluded middle holds, XYZ."
Soteriologian
14d ago
An appeal to a definition is a proof ("By the definition of XYZ, we conclude..."). A definition itself is not a proof ("Let xyz be defined as ...").
The confusion is coming from the fact that Refl : 0 + 0 = 0 is the syntax of an appeal to the definition of plus. It is not the syntax of defining the + operation.
Look, I'm not going to run around in circles all day about this. I'm pointing out that mathematicians are more sloppy in their vocabulary than the theorem prover, and that there are subtle differences over how terminology is used. I do not care to bikeshed endlessly over this. It's obviously true to anyone with any experience in these fields.
Soteriologian
14d ago
I think you've never spent any time with a formal theorem prover lol. You're conflating the definition of + with the proof Refl : 0 + 0 = 0.
Mathematicians can say whatever they want, but the story here is about mechanically-verified formal verification, and this is how formal verification works, whether legacy mathematicians think this pedantically or not.
The classic "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Never short!
Traditionally, the way to handle this was to reallocate to stable assets, where "stable asset" meant gold and treasury bonds.
With the crash we're headed for, I think canned fruits and bullets are the stable assets of choice.
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