Soteriologian
9d ago
Yeah, personally, I've never bought into the AI hype at all. Everything I've ever tried to use it for, it promptly shits the bed on, so I just dismiss it as worthless.
But even in an alternate universe where I'm the crazy one and everyone else is sane, there are severe problems with trusting this stuff: first, you're de facto ceding control over your technical infrastructure to a third party (run by exactly the sort of people who say stuff like "idk, they trust me. dumb fucks"). Yes, yes, you're supposed to religiously check the output before committing, not let it execute unsafe commands in a privileged environment, yada yada. I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya. Second, there is existing precedent for tech services being intentionally made worse to increase usage: for example, Google intentionally made Google search worse by doing things like disabling spell check so that users would have to search multiple times to find the result they were looking for, thus "increasing usage" (yes, this is from an actual court document lol). As OP and plenty of other smart people have noted, there is is a trivially obvious incentive and mechanism for this to be done with LLM coding agents. Just make the agent worse so people have to use more tokens!
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Let's not pretend like Maduro got old and resigned, and now there's a power vacuum for new leadership.
He was flown off by a foreign government in a midnight heist. Whoever wants to step up and take the reigns has to keep that in mind, lest they be on the next flight out.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Yesterday I decided to look up my local young republicans group, to see if I could actually do something political instead of just talk about it online.
That is how you take political action in 2026. You can reach an audience of millions with a camera in your basement, and many do!
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Is the relaxing part happening?
Huh, I thought he ended the state of emergency after they'd finished the gang crackdown. But apparently it's still in effect (after having been "extended" multiple times)!
I guess that's some good PR on their part.
they scaled it back because Republicans stopped wanting to pay taxes to pay for prisons once crime dropped in the noughties
Surely someone at the Heritage Foundation can do some clever accounting to factor in the cost of crimes committed by unincarcerated criminals. When a 20 year old is killed, that's 40 years of tax revenue you lose! It's not even dishonest math, that's actually how this should be accounted.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
John Galt not showing up for work again. Who even is he?
Soteriologian
3mo ago
I think there's a lot of demand for this, especially among under-40s.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
You cite Bukele, but Bukele for all practical purposes suspended the law and went full fash: the algorithm was "if you look like a criminal and smell like a criminal, you're a criminal." They were not spending months carefully dissecting each bit of evidence to make sure Fernando really is the perpetrator of the exact incidents we're charging him with. Luckily for everyone, once Bukele arrested all the duck-typed criminals, he relaxed and everyone now lives in sunshine and rainbows.
Now, granted, the US does not have a homicide rate on the scale of what El Salvador used to. But if you consider mass illegal/dubiously-legal immigration a serious problem and intend to resolve it, then yeah, it is at that scale. Even larger, actually. The idea that doing this is going to solve anything is delusional. It's pissing into a hurricane.
Similarly, for fraud of the sort in the recent video the top-level comment is discussing, I don't think carefully investigating every incident is realistic. How much human effort do you estimate it takes for a scam ring to setup a new fake daycare (or god knows what else)? If it takes them less resources to produce the scam than it does for you to fight the scam, you're losing.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Tapping the sign doesn't really do much. What you're dealing with is parasitism, and you don't get rid of parasites by saying "Wow, look at all the parasites!" or putting a sign up that says "PARASITES" and slapping it ´til your hand is raw. Even calling the parasites parasites to their face won't do anything. They don't give a fuck lol
And to double-down on the metaphor, this is not merely typical roaches-wandering-into-the-kitchen problem. You have a malicious-party-actively-collecting-roaches-and-dumping-them-into-the-kitchen problem.
I don't want to be accused of mincing words or hiding my intentions, but I also want to respect the rules of the forum which clearly state that you can't advocate for violence, so... I'll say it this way: the solution to this is violence, and yes, following the rules means you are incapable of enacting any realistic solutions. So, to square the circle and avoid advocating for this solution, I'll say course of action I advocate is to flee Sodom and Gomorrah before the rains of destruction fall. It won't save anyone else, but it will at least save yourself.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
"European culture" kinda isn't a real thing right now, as they're not sovereign in any meaningful sense and basically just act as US vassals. The postwar social engineering gave them a synthetic culture that lends itself only to this role.
The only sort-of exception is France, and even then, they only tend to exercise sovereignty in cases where it doesn't really matter.
Even in cases where it kinda looks like maaaaybe Europe is exercising some degree of sovereignty, e.g., fining big US tech companies, it's really more akin to acting as a wing of the Democrat party than an act of actual sovereignty. An act of actual sovereignty would be building their own social media site / web browser / mobile OS / desktop OS, and obviously that never happens to any degree of relevance (and when it does, they immediately hand it over to the Americans like they're supposed to).
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Eh, the political class really does have Main Character Syndrome, in the sense that you hear things like "Venezuela is evading sanctions." Um, yeah? Venezuela is not, in fact, part of the US. US law does not apply in Venezuela.
The deliberate pretension of inability to comprehend this sort of thing is something the political class will have to come to grips with as the relative strength of US power wanes.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
It's not really kto/kogo, it's more that when those who really run the show decide you need to go, these sorts of accusations magically become headshots instead of ricochets.
When the people actually running the show want you in power, you can be all over the Epstein files and nobody cares (or, rather, their caring is meaningless).
My point is just that nobody's ever removed for doing a terrible job. There's always a moral justification. The moral justification isn't the actual reason, of course: it's the pretense.
the meek will inherit the Earth
I mean, this is basically "them darn thespians and homo sapiens." The word "meek" is is πραΰς, which as you can see on the Wiki, is more like gentle, related to the root for likeable/well-disposed. Heck, the example usage there is from the Victory Odes: "the king who rules Syracuse, gentle to his citizens"
As for the first being last and the last being first, well... I present to you the word gentleman.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
I'm familiar with his thesis. I'm just saying Christianity only fits his narrative when you pick and choose certain aspects of it. Which, to be fair, is what Christians typically do lol
But to be even more fair: the parts they selectively choose to ignore are often the parts most aligned with Nietzsche's thesis. Paul says don't rebel against the government (and he's under the Roman government! Not a fairly reasonable government like Britain's!)? Can't hear you over my #1776, baby! Christians, if anything, are the most celebratory of the colonial rebellion of all America's demographics.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
If you define "be kind to those less fortunate" as woke, sure, Christianity is woke. But I think that's a very dubious definition of woke. I'm not aware of any successful real-world culture that has the smoothbrained barbaric machismo that the dissident right seems to think is the essence of real civilization.
The same culture that brought you the Nanjing Massacre has this guy as a legendary ninja hero.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
These aren't disconnected phenomena, though: the reason people who suck at making games are in charge of making games is because they are there on woke credentials, making content you're supposed to be morally obligated to say you like.
You see a similar phenomena with Christian media. It's typically poor quality and watched by few because the people in charge of making it aren't there because they're good at their jobs; they're there because of their ideological commitment.
In both cases, the root of the problem is it's socially unacceptable to boot someone who is simply bad at their job for being bad at their job. You have to respect their moral commitment over their competence.
It's the same in politics, too. Bring your country to its knees with wasteful spending and idiotic policy? Not an issue worthy of dismissal. But touch someone's butt once in a bar in the '80s? Now that's the sort of person we cannot tolerate being in charge of anything important!
Soteriologian
3mo ago
There is very much a talent pool for making non-woke media: it's called the country of Japan. Just because the West is incapable of making anything other than woke agitprop doesn't mean nobody else is.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
The New Testament isn't really woke. It endorses man-woman marriage, especially monogamy, as the correct sexual paradigm, and condemns promiscuity and homosexuality. Even in the passage in John with the woman taken in adultery, it's true Jesus doesn't advocate for stoning her, but he also says, "Go and sin no more." The most dubious sexual thing I can think of in the New Testament is that it, with the Old Testament, explicitly upholds Lot as a righteous man, despite the fact that he's documented as getting drunk and having sex with his daughter (after he was rescued from Sodom!). And if once wasn't enough, he does it again with the other daughter. In any case, whatever difficulty (I love this term by theologians lol) one has with the Lot passages, this isn't the sort of sexual activity wokesters are advocating anyway. Woke advocates for the sexual activities that are explicitly condemned, not the behaviors righteous Lot was engaged in. Further, the New Testament is very patriarchal: it forbids female ministers, and in fact, says women shouldn't talk in church at all (which Christians women don't seem to take very seriously), and says women should not have authority over men. That's really, really not woke!
Now, on the financial side of things, I think the woke people have a lot more textual evidence to work with. But the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is all over the place on this. On the one hand, many if not a majority of the good guys are wealthy. On the other hand, there are repeated condemnations of the wealthy, even in the Old Testament. Progressives' favorite passage from Ezekiel says: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy." Christians get very upset about this, but frankly, the progressives are correct: Ezekiel highlights the prideful disregard of the poor, and doesn't even bother mentioning what Christians today often call Sodomy.
So, to the extent that the Bible is financially woke, it's not really a New Testament thing: i.e., it's not part of a mind virus concocted by the apostles to infect Rome and drive its fall, as seems to be the thesis on the Nazi right.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
There are multiple competing power blocs, but not in the way you're saying. It's just various groups of rich people fighting over gerrymandering and PAC lobbying.
What the plebes want is not even a relevant factor in the equation, because the plebes refuse to exercise any discretionary funding over anything or hire any good lobbyists. You can literally put tattooed porn stars and Indians praying to Hindu gods up at the conservative party convention and they'll just march out and vote anyway. What they think does not matter at all.
The Epstein Files fiasco is just a big clown show, much like WWE Smackdown (which, incidentally, was also represented at the conservative convention!). This is not serious politics: it's reality TV.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
The mainstream conspiracy narrative is so ridiculous. If the government is under control of foreign blackmail, none of what it releases can be trusted anyway (it's at best selectively-released, if not outright fabricated). If the government is a trustworthy source of information, then it's not under the control of a blackmail cabal in the first place. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Also, this whole redaction thing is such a troll. If you want to release 50 pages and hide 50 pages, you don't release 50 unedited pages and 50 pages of black boxes; you just release the 50 clean pages and don't mention the other pages you left out (and yes, I do deem the government capable of re-numbering a list, especially with the help of ChatGPT).
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Pre-ground anything that was once alive is generally bad.
The whole reason you grind a food/spice in the first place is to expose the surface area to increase the rate of chemical interaction. When you do this in advance, you just expose it to the air, where you increase the rate of decay, which destroys all the interesting flavour and leaves you with the classic taste of cigarette ash loved by middle classes around the world.
By similar logic, for beans like coffee, you generally want to keep them raw or frozen for long-term storage. Once you roast them, you’ve killed the bean, which obviously disables its immune function, so all the microorganisms that share your affection for good coffee now start to feast. Grinding, again, just exacerbates the rate at which competing microorganisms can consume your coffee before you can.
Personally, I always order from a distributor that roasts right before delivery, but do the grinding myself just before brewing.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
no duh the White Tree symbolises Gondor, the way the Union Jack symbolises Great Britain or Uncle Sam symbolises America.
Oh, come on, it's much more than that. It's not merely a crest. In the books, the White Tree is dead, and no sapling of it was found. When Aragorn returns and ascends to the throne, he is led by Gandalf to find a lost sapling of the dead tree, which he returns to the courtyard and plants, where it grows and blooms. This clearly symbolic of the loss and restoration of the line of kings.
It's not just the football logo for Team Gondor.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
Movies in particular, no, but there's an enormous amount of quality video content produced on shoestring budgets on YouTube. NileRed, 3Blue1Brown, Adam Ragusea, Practical Engineering etc.. It's not just a handful of people: there are many channels on a myriad of topics, produced by people who as far as I can tell have no major studio backing. It's just regular people with cameras, doing stuff they find interesting and showing other people.
I'd wager this "industry" already dwarfs legacy producers of similar content.
I don't think there's anything stopping people from producing movies, the will just isn't there for whatever reason. But It's been done before: The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!
As for writing, there's SlateStarCodex, which was just a guy who decided to make a website to publish his writings. It was pretty big once upon a time, so I hear. He wrote a book, too!
Soteriologian
4mo ago
There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it?
I don´t mean to be overly hyperbolic, of course. But even back in Ye Olden Days, yeah, great writers were often persecuted. John Locke fled England on fear of his life. John Bunyan wrote much of Pilgrim's Progress from prison.
Today, with the advent of the internet, it's much easier. Fuentes had his bank accounts and credit cards locked, was put on a no-fly list, and booted from every major social media platform. Has that stopped him?
Or take all the AAA video game producers that have been ideologically captured. So what? Just make your own studio! Clair Obscur just won game of the year! And the runners up were like... Hollow Knight: Silksong (produced by a grand total of 3 people, if my knowledge serves me right) and Hades 2. You really can just Do Things, and out-play people with orders of magnitude more institutional privilege.
Anyway, the other thing I wanted to highlight with my post is that complaining about institutional capture is a really bad battle tactic. I won't contend that fighting to retake institutions is a bad idea (though it's not the sort of thing that inspires anything in me personally). It's probably a good idea. But complaining that you don't like the status-granting institutions lends them more status, because it looks like they correctly kept all the losers out. For anyone seeking to go on their own Long March to retake the institutions, you need a more compelling battle cry than "No, no, you can't refuse to accept me, my test scores were good!" I propose something akin to Harry Potter's line when he retook Hogwarts: "How dare you stand where he stood!"
Soteriologian
4mo ago
The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there
I guess, but in a world of technology, even a tiny amount of empowered talent can compete with an ocean of well-funded incompetence. Telegram famously has like 30 employees, and it's one of the largest social platforms on the planet.
Regarding Thiel & co, it's honestly kinda baffling to me how much worse they've gotten with selecting people to fund in recent years. They used to be much better at identifying talent. Take Vitalik Buterin. We can debate whether Ethereum is a scam or not, but it is certainly extremely successful, and Vitalik himself is not a grifter: he is very gifted technically. He has good knowledge of cryptography, and has written extensively on it.
Similarly, take this recent tweet by Paul Graham. I agree with him, but it's a frankly baffling admission: are you seriously conceding that none of the people in charge of distributing large amounts of money know anything about how technology actually works? You don't think, maybe, you could get some actual electrical engineers and high-tier software developers on your staff instead of a bunch of socialites and wordcels? It legit boggles my mind.
Then again, the website I'm typing this on barely loads half of the time I try to visit, so apparently running a small forum requires S-tier talent these days.
The root of this is not entirely unjustified, although I won't contend envy is not some part of it.
Before the industrial revolution, power and population were strongly correlated: if you want to be powerful, you need people on your side, and a lot of them. Even if "on your side" means a not-particularly-reciprocated relationship of "I sit here in my castle and you plow the fields", at least the peasant is necessary to plow the fields. You can't just kill him (or at least, not all of him), or the field goes unplowed, and you starve.
With the advent of industrial and especially computer technology, this balance is upset. You really can just kill all the peasants and have the field plow itself. Now, is this done? No, or at least, not yet. But it's partly because it's not yet entirely practical. You can buy a really nice nuclear bunker for a few billion in 2026, but nonetheless, post-kaboom, it's still just a relic of a prior era and you're on a limited, non-renewable supply of luxuries with minimal ability to bootstrap yourself and your buddies back up to industrial civilisation on timescales relevant to your personal comfort. Thus, it's more comfortable for now to not kill everybody.
But that's just a technology problem, too. In the foreseeable future, it may indeed be feasible to build a full, self-sustaining, closed loop of industrial production (ie, sufficiently advanced bots that they are capable of maintaining the infrastructure of their own production, together with being able to do agriculture for you). Once you have this, yeah, you really can just exterminate billions of plebes and suffer no long-term decline in quality of life.
So, basically, industrial production still depends on the labour of large numberse of plebeians--too many to keep alive with you in a bunker, so they must be kept alive for now.
The plebeians, daft may they be at times, are not entirely unaware of the dynamics at play here. Everybody has seen Kingsman, they know how this works. "Automate everything" is brought in under the guise of "but it will make everyone comfy and bring in an Age of Abundance!", with a Thatcher-esque dismissal of "but who controls all these bots?" as unjustified envy of the rich. But the reality is once the plebes are not necessary, the people in control of the bot swarm sooner or later will decide maybe keeping this unproductive Disney World alive isn't actually worth the trouble, and just decide to pull the plug.
So where does this leave us? Well, the Butlerian Jihad, obviously (fun fact: the "Butler" in "Butlerian Jihad" is this guy, who wrote this cute little letter, which you should read at your leisure).
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