Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
16hr ago
AMA? What would we even A you about? Come on man, you can do better than this. Give us a little more to work with.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
17hr ago
Yeah, I know. I'm fully aware of it being wishful thinking.
I just really, really hope that "we" (humanity?) find a way to save ourselves from wireheading ourselves to death. It's just such a profoundly unaesthetic way of going out. But then again, I guess natural selection will handle it.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
17hr ago
I wish they made video games that leverage all that engagement and addiction to better the consumer. Teach them useful skills, like the video gaming advocates always claimed games could! If you can make them stare at a screen for hours on end, at least make them come out of it improved rather than impoverished!
I wish. I wish.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
17hr ago
Just consume calorie. Come on man, you're the transhumanist, look past the shape and taste and texture of the meat, consider only what it means for your more abstract aspirations. You are a dyson swarm in the making, what matter whether this brief bipedal interlude speeds towards its rendezvous with destiny fuelled by salami or by Kötbullar? Elevate yourself! Transcend the need for rotund victuals!
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18hr ago
Please explain the difference.
Not American, and I won't speak to America.
As for Germany though, and the world in general, I'm a "go down swinging"-Doomer. My country is doomed by terminal cultural decline, political idiocy, economic sclerosis, technological ignorance, social atomization and demographic freefall. We're big enough and wealthy enough to muddle on for a long while yet, but there seems to be no reason to expect a reversal of trends.
As for the world in general, I strongly suspect that the age of humanity as we knew it is slowly drawing to a close.
And I don't necessarily mean AI, although that will of ocurse be a factor. LLMs are powerful enough to replace humans in certain niches, sure, but AI as a whole still has a way to go before before it can outcompete us in general. It will, though. Sooner or later. Whether the protagonists of tomorrow's history will be AIs untethered from discrete physical bodies, or robots, or human bodies with AIs living in their heads, who knows. But in the long enough run, human bodies will just be a waste of resources. A little closer to now, we'll see more and more niches taken over by machines and AIs. At first the steam engines came for the hammering, but I was not a John Henry, so I didn't speak up. Then the robot arms came for the assembly lines, but I wasn't a stereotypical blue-collar worker so I didn't speak up. Then the LLMs came for the professional bullshitters, but they still have enough regulations in place to keep their sinecures for a while yet. One day they'll come for the last of us. Maybe some few humans will be rich and powerful even then, commanding legions of AIs and whatever human serfs please them. But one day the universe will take a good look at "humanity", notice that the humans don't actually have a role to play in there, and simplify the equation by removing us. Transhumanism to the rescue, some say - empower humans through technology to outcompete inhuman AIs. But why keep the human in there, I ask? What do we have to offer?
And alright, let's skip the AI topic. Let's pretend they don't exist. Science-fiction does it all the time. Recognizably human protagonists, personally choosing to do things, leading recognizably human lives in which they choose what to do with their lives, whom to associate with, experiment with different lifestyles, engage in adventure and romance, excel in their chosen fields, found families, believe in higher concepts, live with purpose, just like their ancesorts did five thousand years ago, true human lives for true humans.
As if.
Aside: Information technology is rotting our brains. Maybe we'll develop countermeasures (Totalitarian regulation? Social engineering? Neurological modification?) and keep the digital crack in check. If not, then natural selection will cull the susceptible. Alright, problem solved either way. This one was easy. Now let's get to the meat.
Human population continues to grow. There's a lot of us. We're not living in villages and small communities anymore (well I do, but let's not pretend that this is the norm). The growth of states seems to have been checked for the time being by the current international order, but sooner or later there will be pressure to unify further - and if that cannot happen, then states will slowly be superseded by some new order that does not respect borders as they are. Many claim that is is already happening, but in my view it's a slow process. Bigger polities with disproportionately bigger populations, atomized and globalized, welcome to the cyberpunk future in which human lives are individually just not very valuable. Will this future be the turbo-capitalist dystopia in which humans are simply commodities, flitting about from place to place, working 80-hour weeks just to keep from drowning in debt, completely dehumanized and disassociated from each other by a lack of time and the fluidity of the labor market and enjoying a standard of living that's just barely above being a rat in a box, on a good day? Or will it be a hyperregulated totalitarian nightmare in which you are born and bred and raised for the task that society requires of you, you work 80 hours a week because any less and you're an asocial parasite, you're dehumanized and disassociated from other humans because of a lack of time and the rigidity of centrally planned social organization, and you enjoy a standard of living that's just barely above being a rat in a box, on a good day? At least humans are still around, and not governed by AI overlords - but rather by market dynamics or some buerocracy. Either way, it's an inhuman superorganism that humans are little more than cells of. We will live like this. We will breed and engineer and select and adapt ourselves to live like this. At present we are halfway between the feral hogs frolicking in the woods that we were and the domesticated pigs born and butchered in an assembly line that we are destined to be. Pray that the future does not replaces us with synthetic meat.
Human life will change. It will either change by becoming completely obsolete, or will (either as a transitional period before total obsolescence or as a terminal state) change by becoming increasingly optimized towards producing value while demanding a minimum of resources. If you think otherwise, please tell me why. Historically we've gone the other way, right? Humans are more free, more individually wealthy and comfortable than ever. Why should the future be the opposite? Why in the world should we have reached peak human flourishing already?
Because in my view, either information technology or social technology are becoming ever-more suitable for the instrumentalization of humans by superorganisms, be they markets or buerocracies or AIs. Historically human agency was a key component in human value, but as we coalesce into and are subsumed by larger entities, individual human capabilities become increasingly inadequate to navigate the world. I'm no scientist, no futurist, nor even very smart like many mottizens. I can't do a good job of pinpointing why I think this. Please disagree with me. Tell me I'm wrong.
Anyways, what can a reasonable approximation of a real human being like myself do when the future looks like that? Becoming one of the beautiful elite who rules over the unwashed commoditized masses seems exceedingly unlikely. Becoming a transhuman god like some here (you know who you are) expect to be seems laughably unlikely because, as said, that god doesn't need a human component. When the future looks like a nightmare either way, the best I can do to meet it is to just carry on and say bring it. We'll cross those bridges when we get there. It's not like any ending other than death and oblivion were ever in the books, for anyone, be they man or machine or godlike superorganism or the universe itself. Consolation prize: In the end, we're all equally gone.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
19hr ago
Would they be happy to be scammed in this manner, with inferior goods? Is there a single recipe on the planet which accommodates such mutilation?
My wife makes those kinds of substitutions work all the time. Just shrug, close your eyes and chew harder.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
19hr ago
Presumably this is a pointless post on my part, since you have already "crashed out" and thus, assuming you are a serious person and not some kind of attention whore, you will never read it.
But I'll say it anyways: Your post is in very poor form. If anything, complaining about "tainted by racism" and "could be valuable" smells a lot of you being a culture warrior who came here to do a victory lap around the deplorables rather than to engage with the site's actual purpose. Maybe that's wrong. We'll never know, since you're gone. But it's one more data point, one more anecdote in favor of the narrative that the left runs on purity spirals and echo chambers and cannot tolerate dissenting opinions. Presumably because current-day leftist thinking is built on lies and wishful thinking and cannot stand up to outright disagreement. Maybe that too is wrong, but again we'll never know. Not from you anyways.
Which is, quite honestly, a shame. I don't want The Motte to be an echo chamber, racist or otherwise. I'm racist enough myself, thank you very much. But of course you're right, we live under conditions of culture war, not culture polite exchange, and you presumably want to actually fight that war. You want to punch the nazis, reeducate the stupid masses susceptible to outmoded populism, and live in a world in which everyone is educated and enlightened and on the right side of history, and like all good leftists you are, of course, too good to waste your own time with the enemy.
Right? Wrong? No point in caring, you're gone.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
20hr ago
The pioneers of yesteryear most likely would have turned out just like Harold, had they lived in a Schlaraffenland where you get paid for existing and sugar comes in through every pore.
That said, I absolutely understand the nostalgic mewling. Wanting to preserve and contribute to the legacy of one's forbears, in their and one's own country, seems perfectly natural and like a desire that society ought to promote, if not for aesthetics then in its own good interest. And the failure of western societies to square this outlook with immigration is, IMO, a pretty severe one. Widespread national self-hatred leading to and giving space to the exaggerated self-confidence of immigrant ethnicities is a very fine recipe for ethnic tension even in a sometimes-purportedly post-ethnic world. It's hard not to see immigrants as invaders and parasites when your personal ancestors put a lot of work into making a place for themselves, and you yourself put a lot of work into maintaining it, but in comes a foreigner whose allies overty and epxlicitly hate you, and who retains his distinct and foreign culture, who send money back home, and who inhabits not the remnants of the old localized and intergenerational country that you yourself might see yourself in, but its modern, atomized, globalized replacement.
It's not like this is uniquely American.
My German ancestors immigrated to the village I still live in five generations ago, having come from and brought in wives from places as far away as...another village a few hours' walk way. To them, it was perfectly natural that you stay in one place, or very close to it. You maintain your social connections without even thinking about it. You constantly exert yourself to improve the commons. You behave well and work hard and accept that if you deviate from that, you will be shamed into the ground. And so they behaved and worked, for generations, and went out of their way to keep the commons ing ood shape, and here I am in a world of lies and distractions and addictions aplenty, sticking to the straight and narrow, do-the-hard-work-and-obey-the-rules, neither living beyond my means nor resting on welfare, paying taxes on taxes, trying my best to help rather than harm the rotting edifice of "the commons", in no small part because that's what generations before me did and I'll be damned if I'm the one to break with that.
And in come M'beke and Muhammed, rightfully convinced that us Germans are just sheep that need to be fleeced because what else are we, with our own young women telling them that they have a right to be here and everyone has a right to a high standard of living and nobody has a duty to work and white people are evil and then old Germans will remind them that no, actually, it's Germans who are uniquely evil, and M'beke and Muhammed just laugh fly their own flags and loudly blast gangsta rap and muslim music and swagger through the streets while drab little Germans dodge them on their way to work or to, sheepishly rather than triumphantly, to pick up gibs alongside these immigrants. They're parasites and proud of it. They might learn to speak German, but will do so in an ostentatiously ridiculous accent that marks them as separate.
Meanwhile, the other M'beke and Muhammed actually get jobs and become economically productive members of society...but still remain M'beke and Muhammed rather than become Martin and Matthias, and raise their children as lilttle M'beke and Mohammed, because they see the insanity of German ethnic self-hatred, the decrepitude of our culture, and sensibly stick to what they know. They barely speak enough German to make themselves understood. They're here for as long as the money is good, but even then they associate with their co-ethnics and can we rely on them to stick with us whent he going gets tough?
And then of course there's Nguyen and Pajeet, who come into the country, work their asses off, shame us with their immense productivity and modest standard of living, speak German with barely an accent, bring in their whole family form abroad who all do the same. These are the guys we want, right? Not so sure about that, really. If they can move around half the world and seamlessly make a good life for themselves here...then they can probably repeat that trick once this country goes to shit.
Immigration is touchy. The ideal immigrant comes here not because his home country is a shithole, or because life here is easy and you get paid for showing up, or because his co-ethnics invited him to join their enclave, but because he wants to be German. But who would? Germany hates Germans. Germans hate Germans. Germans teach everyone to hate them. And as with all these tendencies towards national suicide, I suppose it's rather similar in America.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
20hr ago
One of the many things that young people should have screamed at them and be shamed for ignoring.
Played around some more with physical movement in Unreal. Figured out the algebra for it, wired it all up, and I think it downright works. I am making boxes float and point at each other and jink sideways pretty much as inteded. So long as they don't bang into obstacles and end up going into spins. I'll need to add some kind of self-righting behavior, too.
So I added guns to the boxes, and allowed them to fire those as soon as they're pointing at the enemy box. And that didn't work at all. First off the guns are the wrong size and in the wrong place (some kind of relative transform issue?), they don't follow their parent box (parenting doesn't work like I think it does?), and when they fire the guns, the bullets have the same problems of wrong size, wrong place, and not actually moving. Also, when I attach the same gun to my player character, it just gets catapulted all over the map (collision resolution?).
So, yeah. Not exactly hyperrealistic drone warfare, and not exactly working.
Edit: Fixed what I thought was a parenting issue. Turns out that while you can apply physical forces to MeshComponents, doing so will move that component instead of the actor it is attached to. Applying that same force to a CollisionComponent instead will actually move the actor itself.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6d ago
people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
In some cases and otherwise to some degree, yeah. Tattoos signal any of the following:
- Stupidity
- Short-sightedness
- Addiction
- Insecurity
- Bad taste
- A desire to fit in
- A good sense of what is currently fashionable
Nobody will ever convince me that the one-billionth "tribal" tattoo or chinese lettering down the spine of a non-chinese-speaker is meaningful or artistically valuable.
Most people look like either a toddler slapped stickers on them, or like a derelict wall in a shit part of down.
as @Iconochasm said. Hits the nail on the head.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
Peter Watts is, in my opinion, a very original writer, but not a very good one. He introduces interesting concepts or combines concepts in interesting ways, but his misanthropy is downright monotonous, his characters are pretty much just "what if someone were extremely fucked up in this particular way", and the plots are always "everything's fucked and then it gets worse". Garnish with more or less novel scientific ideas, interesting to read, but not really good books as such.
My favorite flourish of his was in Echopraxia, where he casually dropped the non-bomb that reality in that book was proven to be a simulation, but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.
I'll probably read anything he writes, if only to hear about his latest inventions.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
It's a campaign that's clever, but also kinda weird for someone who lives here.
Because Baden-Württemberg isn't really a place. It's a state, sure. An administrative division of Germany. An amalgamation of two (maybe three depending on who's counting) slightly older states, each based in turn on territories collected by different noble dynasties. Culturally broadly related, but not actually one coherent culture. You might find modern people who seriously call themselves "Baden-Württemberger", but it's a meaningless synthetic term.
If you tell someone from abroad to fly the B-W, he'll take a plane to Stuttgart and wonder about why ever anyone would come here. Terrible place, by regional standards. As far as large cities go, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Freiburg and Ulm (in no particular order) each have something unique going on. But Stuttgart, almost certainly the first port of call for anyone, can only claim to be the biggest or the most generically urban. There's not much good to say about it. Oh, and then there's Mannheim. The Mannheimers are full of themselves, but but I don't see the point of them.
But the cities are irrelevant.
The majority of the population lives in or near smaller towns, and there's a sizable number of rural village dwellers as well. The latter are probably not meaningfully interactive for foreigners, but the former are! Most small towns take great pains to be accessible to tourists. A potential visitor could pick a few at random, exclude the ones that have been bombed to shit in WW2 because the architecture sucks now, and visit places that are visually unique and valid representants of various local southwest-German cultures. Swabian, Franconian, Badenser, and the many subcategories and overlaps of each.
If I saw a sticker telling a foreigner to visit, say the Allgäu, the Bodensee, the Schwarzwald or the Nördlinger Ries, then sure, those are distinct geographical areas worth visiting if you like hiking. If I saw stickers telling a foreigner to visit, for example, the aforementioned Heidelberg, or Rothenburg, or Dinkelsbühl or any other of the hundreds of lesser-known towns with well-maintained medieval and early modern architecture, then that's a sight to see for those with a taste for it.
But Baden-Württemberg? What's that? Where are you supposed to go to be able to solidly claim that you have gone there? For someone right here, it's incoherent.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
I think they're mostly wrong. There's some truth in that the knowledge of an idea can spread due to the idea being publicized. Obviously the knowledge of the idea is a prerequisite of the belief in the veracity of the idea, so if you squint you can see the truth of it, but the modeling of the belief in the veracity of the idea being helplessly thrust upon someone like a cold virus is far less useful than the one involving treating ideas like things that people can and do accept and reject. Not always based on reason and logic - not often based on reason and logic, even - but not helplessly.
The sharing of an idea is usually a prerequisite for its spread though, unless it's a particularly obvious idea.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
Law, and insurance.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
They're not wrong, but the actions they endorse, promote and undertake based on this run contrary to popular concepts like the "marketplace of ideas", "free speech" or "each citizen is an educated adult fully qualified to choose on his own what to think".
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
Prima facie, this sounds absurd. Does not matter much for what?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7d ago
WTF are you doing. This is crazy talk. GTFO ASAP.
Acronyms aside, there is a whole non-crazy world out there, and you do yourself a disservice by associating with this particular flavour of deluded crazy. Whatever it is you end up losing by categorically rejecting this business, it's not worth getting dragged into it. If a friendship breaks over this, then what kind of friendship was it? Rhetorical question.
Get out of there. Don't go along with it. Sticking one's dick in crazy is one mistake one can make, but sticking the whole of you into crazy for weeks on end is another.
FWIW, the "nazi by association" rule has been strongly enforced by leftists and the leftist-dominated mainstream for a long time, has been weaponized, codified in rules and even law, has been a defining aspect of the German political landscape for generations (still being called the "Firewall" here). It's absolutely the water that most media swim in, classical as well as social, and the preferred weapon of SJWs and SJW-influenced useful idiots everywhere.
Anecdote: I used to discuss politics with my mother. Once, as she was mid-rant about the nazis ruining society, I told her that I had gotten to know an AfD voter and that they were an actual human being. Since then we never have spoken about politics again. Her way of eliding the issue that, by the rule of association and a failure to apply the rule correctly, I was now on the wrong side.
This isn't some new or poorly-observed phenomenon (just to be clear; I'm not implying that you see it that way), but a core doctrine of the left in the culture war.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
8d ago
Some minor coding, preparations for future "features", but nothing visible.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
8d ago
Nah. As you noticed, in spite of taking it upon myself to scream "Deutschland Deutschland über alles!" at everyone on the internet and at some people IRL, I'm neither a pureblood nor otherwise archetypical. I suppose I put on the German extra hard to compensate. I do take to Teutonic autism, though, and very much like punctuality, order and hard work. How good I am at those is another matter. I really like the Germany I grew up with. I'm Swabian, not Bavarian, so there's a massive cultural difference between me and your picture. But OTOH, my German family were no-nonsense subsistence farmers up until two generations ago, and I was partially raised by exactly those former farmers, so it's not a complete mismatch.
As far as your friend goes - with a father like that, low agreeableness seems like no wonder!
You've already got about a million replies, so I suspect there's nothing substantial I can still add to it all. If you even want to read any more!
So here goes. I'm a half-jewish German who strongly identifies as German and effectively not at all as Jewish beyond having some family members who do strongly identify as Jewish. By what German public schooling has taught me was Nazi Racial Science, I fully qualify as a Jew to be reomved, though. My Jewish ancestors managed to flee the Nazis as well as the Soviets unharmed, so I can't claim any tragic family history on that end, though it's entirely possible that they lost many friends that I never heard of. From the German side, I know of many who died in the war, much to the family's detriment.
Politically I'm somewhat all over the place, but cluster strongly with the right-wingers. And my position on WW2, the entire Nazi era and the Holocaust is - it doesn't matter. The epistemic wells have been poisoned. There are no more productive discussions to be had. Anyone except the most autistic historians, the most unfettered reparation-seekers and the most combative wokists will gain more by burying the entire period of history than by rooting around in it. "Never forget" is a terrible approach, in my opinion, and the opposite of what should be done. The consequence of forgetting it will be dropping a ton of poisonous baggage and become a lot more agile, for everyone involved. The consequence will not be the second coming of the NSDAP. And if Jews want to prevent future attempts at Jewish genocide, then IMO they should keep a weather eye on the Muslim world, as I suppose Israel already does, rather than alienate their actual or potential allies by constantly insisting on their historical guilt. I do admit it seems to have worked well enough for a time, and I cannot fault the realpolitik here, but as far as Jewish-German relations go it'll be an own-goal when teaching the Germans to hate themselves results in the islamification of Germany.
And I'll also sing along with the chorus of "please don't go, we want you here, we need people like you!".
This place is, to me, like a martial arts club. You go in, you find someone to spar with, and by the end of the day you learned something about your weaknesses and bad habits. And that just plain does not work when there's nobody around who's willing to expose and exploit those actual weaknesses. "One crow will not claw out another's eye", goes the German saying. When everyone here more or less agrees on their respective world views, there's just not much of value going on. One Witch will not knock out the other even when they're wide open, either because we subconciously don't want that weakness to be exploited (mirror neurons being a bitch) or because we genuinely aren't even aware of it.
The reverse of this is, of course, that any one contrarian to the consensus here will get pummelled. It's like going from boxing to BJJ and all of a sudden everyone's sweating all over you on the ground. It's admittedly disgusting, but if you endure it you will come out a much better-rounded fighter than you were before. Refuse to engage in grappling, and you'll never make it in MMA. I'm probably overstretching this metaphor. But on the other hand, if we here are a BJJ gym...then you can teach us a thing or two about striking. But either way, it requires that we get down and dirty with each other, and there will be complaints about faces getting punched and joints getting locked either way. To de-metaphor it: There will be downvotes and false reports and specious arguments and trolling and all that you might complain of.
So when people here advocate for tossing the jews into the ocean and blame them for all their country's failings - I'd exaggerate if I said I can emphasize; there are too many people here who are on "my side", as it were, and who go too easy on me. Maybe they just recognize that I'm just a midwit and not worth going 100% on. But that's exactly what ought to happen. I want you to stand up to me and tell me why I'm wrong. I most likely am. Who isn't? But I'd rather have that pointed out to me in an online textual sparring setting than by embarassing myself IRL. The alternative to that is simply going with the IRL consensus, but who comes to The Motte with that intention? Who here would not rather learn to be more effective as a contrarian?
I hope you stay.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
10d ago
Be quick about it; I think the gratis period expires today or tomorrow.
Who is this booted "you", who's "us" in that quote? Needs more context.
But to answer the question: No. Fortunately. The radicals I know have been radicalized as much by the IRL water they swim in as by online propaganda. This means that the radicalization is both somewhat attenuated by the need to be IRL-compatible and sadly precludes a return to normal because radical is the normal, as said, water they swim it. It's socially acceptable to spew wild theories about Russian or American or Chinese intelligence agencies doing god-knows-what, about the Rich planning to eat us all, about foreigners wanting to skin us alive, about elites not being happy until we live in the pod and eat the bug, about how the planet is doomed and we're all going to die by tomorrow, about how the vaccines / the environmental toxins / the microplastics / the heavily processed food is giving us cancer / making us infertile / turning the frogs gay. Just pick the right flavor for a given audience and you're off to the races.
And some of those theories may well be right, but epistemic humility is thoroughly out of fashion. I do see people go off and and get worked up until they call for race war now gas the kikes / revolution now eat the rich shoot the nazi politicans / deindustrialize now voluntary human extinction save the planet before it's too late. I don't see people talk each other down with anything that even directionally resembles "Wait, that's hyperbole. Have we considered the counterargument?".
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