Templexious
Stuck in time
User ID: 2308
Templexious
5mo ago
To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
- Be in AI or AGI development already or in the next 2-3 years
- Be incredibly wealthy already
- Likely be from a company currently valued at least in the tens of millions of dollars
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
Templexious
4mo ago
That mitt romney article reminds me of one from the bush campaign where they claimed that the John Kerry kids were awful and rude and used slurs and a bunch of other bullshit.
His kids at the time were two-four years old. People will write literally anything during campaign years, so long as it makes the other side look bad.
Last time, I had "lost" 4 lbs. That was a weight measurement snafu: turns out, my home scale is consistently off by about two pounds, so it would be correct to say that at the time of the post, I had lost two pounds, not 4.
However, since beginning semaglutide, I have lost approximately 12 pounds. The number of calories I managed to avoid eating thanks to sugar reduction is more than 500 kcal/day. I'll not detail the experience in too much detail, but current conclusion is that the vast majority of my weight loss comes from being able to cut down on the soda.
I will note a few extra details: Loss of interest in bread. Not terribly strange, considering most bread is a vehicle for sugars. But everything from subway, to hot dog and bratwurst buns, to regular sliced bread. White bread now has the same palatability as low-sugar sarah lee's wheat bread. Naturally, I have swapped over to Sarah Lee's. Miracle Whip is nasty now, though regular, low-sugar mayo is still good.
If you are struggling with weight loss, especially snacking + sugar, Semaglutide is a miracle drug.
Templexious
4mo ago
This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.
99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.
Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.
When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.
For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?
If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?
After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.
In like manner, Fascist politics give the feeling of “momentum,” “going there” and “moving towards,” an exciting sense of fatal direction.
I question the foundational assumptions which undergird this argument. Marxist and Communist and even liberal and neoliberal ideologies, which have varying claims of "the future is ours!" and "we will win in the future!" and "the world becomes more liberal over time!" have all made the rounds.
Every ideology and every movement makes claims of inevitability. Sure, Landianism also has a tinge of being darkly enlightened. "Our god, our religion, our ideology is better than YOUR ideology" is a key ingredient of every system of constructing national, social, individual, political identity.
Society will progress. Society will regress. Time moves on, and yet there is an idealized past being attempted to move back to, or an idealized future. There is no ideology that exists which doesn't also make meaningful claims about the future and its own inevitability. Latestage capitalism evokes this idea that capitalism will fall over because it's in the last stages of metastization. And yet. And yet it still hasn't fallen over.
Templexious
1yr ago
Hello Mottizens, long time lurker, first time top-level commenter. I think I understand the rules, if I haven't absorbed them by lurking over the last 9 or so months. As ai x-risk enters the politicosphere, I hope we can consider discussion of the topic as on-topic for the thread.
I've been thinking about the upper echelons of the x-risk bourgeois- in particular, the polyamory. Your Aella, your Eliezer, your MIRI heads, the ouroboric relationships in the community, and watching the social drek that's been demonstrated by following their various Twitter accounts. I've been wondering. Aella is a sex worker, and she is clearly being treated like shit by Eliezer. For a man who believes doom is coming, having a kid seems, at this point, frankly illogical.
With all the money EY has picked up from MIRI etc, I would probably fuck off to some tropical islands, or if EY is such a japanophile, to Japan.
But: Why does Aella tolerate his bullshit on Twitter ?
My theory, therefore, is that Aella has so much dirt on those people that she could singlehandedly doom any prospects of a bunch of the lesswrongian bay area stemcels from seeing the light of day for the next ten years. You simply don't host consentual-non-consent parties without picking up some piles of dirt. Whether they're our redpillers who think rape should be legal, or just lonely rich dudes who just need someone to fuck but don't know how to go to Vegas and get escorts.
You don't host sex parties without eventually picking some really terrible, skeevy shit. And I think she realizes this. And I also think she realizes that these are the kind of people with enough money, that if they wanted her gone, she's gone. As such, it's my belief that Aella is stuck in a hell of her own making. If the bubble pops, things will get nasty.
As such, my theory is that Aella is tolerating Yud, and the other rationalists, because she's scared for her life. If she were to tell EY "no, you're being a creep... and also endangering the entire x-risk movement", (which, as an aside, I don't think he himself believes in, based on his behavior) she's going to get replaced as the sex gatekeeper for the rich, sex-starved stembros. And so, perhaps, her attempt to have a kid is her bid at retiring and moving to fade off into obscurity?
And so, when she (imo, inevitably, some time in the next few years if her hail mary to disappear off the map before her body expires and they no longer want her) explodes, we'll have another article in TIME, or The Guardian or whatever other woke news reporter can get their hands on first. If/when that happens, we can kiss the pretenses of x-risk concern out the window, as the final curtains get pulled.
Thoughts? Holes in logic? Did I assume too much?
Templexious
11mo ago
After lurking here, I find myself relatively confused. You're the first person I've seen attempt to disambiguate between progressivism and wokeness. What is the difference between wokeness and progressivism, in your mind?
Templexious
7mo ago
Keep in mind also that Tim Ballard was married. I'm sure his wife didn't exactly consent to him trying to sexually proposition the women who went with him on these trips.
Unfortunately, as Quantumfreakonomics notes, she has not spoken on the issue, and she is most certainly a victim.
Templexious
9mo ago
Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.
This claim is going to need an in-depth number of citations showcasing that all books that libraries host are still available and purchasable, and their prices, and comparisons with past prices, all adjusted for inflation, as well as the average income of the parents who send their kids to a particular school, also adjusted for inflation.
The justification for tearing down institutions needs to have some measure of scrutiny.
Templexious
1yr ago
That definition of "Far Right" is strict, and it's difficult to extract value from it. If you loosen your definition of it ever-so-slightly and you start getting christian nationalists/christian technocrats/crypto statists and evangelicals, the path to "Far Right" takeover becomes much clearer.
Templexious
10mo ago
Going to prestigious schools is important, not because of income, but because of connections. The connections available to you socializing while at MIT or Harvard are vastly stronger and more likely to land a person in the top 0.01%, than if you go to OSU.
The key to getting into the ground floor of facebook or netflix or paypal wasn't technical skill, it was who they knew.
Templexious
2mo ago
In an unrelated note, since there's no better places to discuss this, instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.
Reading the motte has become a dull slog, and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITLES pretending to say something meaningful without corresponding substance.
Templexious
8mo ago
Because a border wall increases the marginal cost of trying to cross the border, and allows the country to begin to get a handle on its own internal affairs.
You'll never get illegal immigration to zero, that doesn't mean "do nothing" is the correct approach. Unless you're from the WEF or similar globalist group where no borders is the entire solution.
Templexious
10mo ago
In an attempt to better manage my weight, I have gone on semaglutide.
This stuff is straight up magical, and its efficacy has caused my opinions around personal health management to shift dramatically.
Where I was drinking at least 32 oz of sugary soda a day and unable to stop, those impulses have basically disappeared. I fill up faster, but that primal urge, the association of high fructose corn syrup, is gone.
I am not even on max dose, but have already lost 4 lbs in less than a month. I fully expect the entire usa to be on semaglutide or analagous in the near future. The monthly price of not being morbidly obese seems that it will come to about 500$/month, at least until competitors come to town.
Templexious
11mo ago
Trump could bring up and rehash all of his 2015-2016 talking points all over again, and it would carry him right back into office.
The main issue that would stop this are his stances on Russia and the Ukraine. Many of the population still remembers the cold war and the fact that Russia was America's #1 threat, and if democrats played their cards right, could use his stance there to put his campaign under ground.
Templexious
6mo ago
Nursing homes are in aggregate a symptom of a social disease- end of life care for the elderly and the infirm is atrocious.
Society has kicked families out of their homes, and left the elderly out to dry, while simultaneously sucking up adult children's time that would be spent caring for the elderly in their last years.
The problem is that historically, we simply didn't have the technology to keep them all alive, usually, when elderly would spiral, they would spiral relatively fast- infection, diabetes, cancers, all things that had no cure in the ancestral home. In the current era, we just wait for them to decline, and while we have cures for the most major diseases, we have nothing to help the elderly live more fulfilling and yes, even economically-productive lives. They are shoved into a heartless building where they play bingo on Tuesday at nine am and wait for god to come knocking, with the very occasional visit from what remains of the local evangelical churches activities.
Yes, there are problems in nursing homes, but no, there's no incentive to solve it, one way or the other. The country seems locked in indecision on this particular issue. The AARP is the largest focus group in the US, and as a bloc, holds a stranglehold on the younger generation's ability to help them solve their problems. Young and middle-aged voters are similarly out-of-sighting and out-of-minding the entire problem- shove the elderly into a nursing home and visit once a month until they die-if you're nearby. Maybe do a task that the nurses haven't gotten to. Then move away when offered a raise or a new job in a new state.
Ol' granny's got 5 years still left in her, nevermind that she can't make her way to the toilet any more, but her son Kyle is 50 years old and still in his career and living in tennessee, five hundred miles away.
Templexious
8mo ago
In my spare time, I have been playing platformer and sidescroller games. I finally snaked around to celeste.
Not a fan of the story, mostly because the characters are whiny and annoying, but damn if the soundtrack isn't a tour de force and the gameplay makes me want to break my controller.
Luckily the dialogue is short, and the game wastes little time getting to crushing me with its difficulty while ensuring progression is possible.
Would there be interest in a book review or summary of kantian philosophy and/or john locke's treatises? The goal would be to relate them to our current political situations under my own personal lens.
I find them to be incredibly prescient, even hundreds of years later, and the online material which covers them is only what can be gleamed by browsing wikipedia, and therefore rather shallow.
Templexious
7mo ago
I've leveled out the weight loss at roughly 26 bmi, 28.5% body fat, and 30 lbs of fat loss since starting the semaglutide shots.
The goal was to slide off the shots and maintain the diet, but to hit my goal (another 20 lbs of still remain) I've added in some more exercise than just the dumbbells and short walks. I've always hated cardio, but the immediate social gains of having lost this much weight are so noticeable that i'd be a moron not to start doing more.
I've picked up a copy of p90 and the insanity workout video series and will be half-assing them. The goal isn't to be bulky, it's to lose the chub. We'll see if, through winter, I'll be able to maintain everything I've lost so far.
Templexious
7mo ago
It has been interesting to see the inversion of blame posts like this attempt.
Like the theory that the ADL is funding neo-nazis. Why would they do anything like that? It's an insane proposition if they were actually being paid by the ADL. And it has zero upsides. If the ADL had a whistleblower moment it would entirely dismantle their whole organization.
I do have my own conspiracies regarding jewry, but "the ADL is actively stoking anti-semitism" is an incoherent proposition. Toss eggs at me later if there's leaks that show they were wiring money or writing checks funding neo nazi demonstrators, but you'll need to forgive me for being a bit skeptical at this overexplanatory theory that's cropped up the last few months.
Jason Aldean is a city-centric "country" artist and tends to be rejected by most rednecks, his audience was usually 16 year old girls who've never left suburbia or cityville. The kinds that Bo Burnham make fun of in his skit about country songs.
Artists like Colter Wall, Ryan Bingham, Cody Jinks and Cody Johnson tend to be considered more "true" country.
Templexious
11mo ago
Trump just had to sit around as the establishment media wrung their hands and made complete fools of themselves, crying about this or that, demonstrating how little power they actually had.
Showing people what a complete farce the whole thing is, and leaning into it.
Templexious
7mo ago
To your first question: you can generally tell when a judge is pretty sick of one party or another when you read their rulings. If they feel like the other parties aren't taking the process seriously or taking advantage of the system, their tone will reflect that.
It is not uncommon for judges to joke or use incredible amounts of sarcasm in the court room. The supreme court can get fairly notorious about roasting and escalationary language in their rulings. Whether or not it's justified in the Trump cases, I'm not sure, and haven't been paying much attention, however considering the incentives at play it wouldn't be a surprise.
Templexious
8mo ago
We are at about 16 lbs of weight loss today, making for a current average of about 2lbs of weight-melt a week. I was hoping for 3lbs/week, but if I eat any less, I'm concerned it will eat into muscle instead of fat. I've begun adding some small amounts of weight training to hopefully stave that fear off.
Intend on weaning off of semaglutide soon, to see if I can maintain the new diet, curious about how that will go. With christmas and other holidays rolling around, I am going to be bombarded with so much sugar that I don't think it would be wise to fully get off semaglutide.
We will see.
[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]
This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.
In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.
The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.
If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of:
||around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.
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