aiislove
1yr ago
Humanity suffers from a massive lack of competence on every axis imaginable. We cannot now imagine how nice the post-singularity will be, but for a floor consider a world where everyone is good at everything at will, including every social skill.
Your last paragraph sounds extremely dystopian and unappealing to me. It's completely inhumane and in my mind renders the experiences of everyone who's been alive before that as hollow and makes all of the suffering they and we have been through completely needless and pointless, just for endless generations of human beings to enjoy a life free of inadequacy. The fact that another commenter says it sounds grand is so distressing to me. If things truly begin moving this direction all I can do is hope to move as far away from people living this way as possible. The biggest joys in my life are experiencing human emotions that are gratifying that I've earned: the sun on my skin at the beach that I've worked hard to visit, being able to explore distant cities and meet new people from all walks of life. I will feel no gratification in being good at social skills through some technological enhancement, even if the AI enhances my gratification of it is as well. I just want none of it. All I can do is hope that opting out will be possible.
aiislove
1yr ago
Yes, I was saying straight men and gay men alike are driven to madness when we're not getting laid. When I think about how much harder it is for straight men to get laid than gay men I feel surprised that straight men are able to keep it together as well as they do. I wouldn't want to jump through the hoops that you guys have to jump through to have sex and don't envy the runaround at all.
Taking this to its dramatic extreme, the older I get the less I care about the trappings of society and can't help but feel like all the niceties and luxuries of life are a sort of masculine "nesting" instinct to attract female mates. Since I don't have to lift a finger to get laid as a gay man and this is becoming more and more clear to me, the allure of luxury goods is less and less appealing- and indeed, at a certain point simply highlight my insecurity rather than enhance my masculinity itself. When it comes to attracting men as a man, you want to display security, and nothing looks less secure than some insane piece of fashion or a botox'd face or a piece of jewelry or a fugly haircut or basically anything other than the body you were born into. Women may demand these luxuries to feel safe, or as a signal that the man is flawed/able to be tamed/sensitive, but men find them as cringe markers of insecurity (which is much easier to notice in someone else than in yourself, by the way.)
aiislove
1yr ago
I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race?
I absolutely abhor this line of thinking. I grew up in a red tribe setting and spent most of my adult life around blue tribe people and whenever they say this sort of thing it makes them look so, so bad in my opinion. People who watch Pawn Stars and NASCAR are poor and even if they're not poor have little to no cultural power in their own country, they have been dying by the thousands in drug overdoses, the rust belt has been on a downward spiral for a century, they have a poor quality of life and then have to be degraded by.... "theater kids" who rub their suffering in their faces. Sorry for the rant but it blows my mind when I see the same tribe of people who spend every waking moment trying not to offend BIPOC people flippantly painting Trump voters as people who have chosen not to keep opera alive rather than painting them as people with the cards stacked against them who are more worried about getting their rent paid than trying to attend a ballet to feel a little superior to the people around them.
Actually, I think I've just hit at the crux of the issue of your original post. Theatre kids are, or have been for the past few decades, leftist because it's where elitism and cultural capital lie. Take away that construction and suddenly the creatives are free to switch sides, which I believe is already starting to happen as I've outlined in this post from a few months ago.
aiislove
1yr ago
I never knew exactly how we were supposed to read that part. I always felt like we were supposed to be rolling our eyes at Hermione and that her attempts at elf liberation were a satire of overly zealous leftism but then other times it felt like we were supposed to be on her side, granted I haven't engaged with the material since I was like 17. What do other people think?
aiislove
1yr ago
Why do you recommend I try not to care what service workers feel? Is that to help them feel better, because it puts less pressure on them, or is it to make me feel better so that I can stop ruminating on awkward situations? Or both?
I am a people pleaser and obsessed with how others feel and perceive me so this is really unintuitive to me and I don't know how to not care about how the person I'm interacting with is feeling or what that would even look like or how it would play out. I imagine they would get mad at me and then I would feel guilty that I didn't try my best to be a better customer.
I have never played either of those games but I just google image searched both of them and I disagree.
https://www.beamdog.com/media/images/1-PC-English.height-1100.jpg
I prefer the above to these:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MDMeCbXyQ2EXMjpE25yw3D-1200-80.jpg
The BG3 shots are chaotic and messy and at a random crappy angle. The BG2 shots are organized and clean and easy to look at. I am a designer and prefer the former.
Broadly I don't really like the art styles of either of these games but I have the same opinion of, for example, FF7-8-9 vs FF15/16, or Persona1/2 vs Persona 3/4/5
I am not saying that prerendered background are like, technically better in terms of computer power or technology or something, I'm saying that 3d environments that have random camera angles are less aesthetically appealing than a fixed angle view arranged by an artist.
aiislove
8mo ago
Yeah. As someone who has been using stable diffusion/ai art generation nearly every day for quite a while, your box metaphor is pretty good. I feel like I keep hitting the walls of what's possible with it, and augmenting the capabilities of the AI take a lot of time and tweaking and technical skill that I'm lacking. It's also like it's so easy to get 90% of what I want from the AI but it can take ages and ages to get 100% what I want and even then it involves some old fashioned photoshop tweaking post generation most of the time. I ran into the same issue with chatgpt stuff too but my skills are more in visual arts than in language arts so I hit the walls faster with chatbots as I'm less able to coax out useful stuff with chat than I can with image generation.
aiislove
8mo ago
FWIW if budget is an issue, I didn't even know there was a patreon for themotte until I read this comment and I've been lurking here forever. I really hate ads and begging for money generally but maybe promoting the fact that there is a patreon for the place a bit more isn't a bad idea if you need more money to run things.
aiislove
9mo ago
I think everyone knows about innate differences in intelligence. Growing up everyone knew advanced classes in school are mostly white and Asian and very few blacks. The school I went to in the suburbs had few blacks and none of them were in advanced classes while all the Asian kids were. I can guarantee you I'm not the only person who noticed this, even in elementary school I think everyone knew that Asians are smarter and blacks are less smart. If you think no one has this figured out I don't know what to tell you.
aiislove
9mo ago
do Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power just because their ancestors from 400 years ago fled England?
This isn't what 2rafa is proposing in her post at all, she is proposing that the Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power because they have more sense of duty and respect for the people around them and the institutions that their ancestors built than the descendants of people who flew over 30 years ago do.
aiislove
9mo ago
You ignore race at the expense of living in and experiencing reality. I would love to have the luxury of ignoring race all the time, but I don't have that luxury. It doesn't really stop at race either, any time you distract yourself from any kind of material reality you are doing yourself and those around you a disservice. You can tell yourself that men and women are exactly the same and redefine the definitions all you want a la Judith Butler but it's as incoherent at the end of the day as telling yourself that Vietnamese men and men from Ghana are the same thing. I've been all around the world and it's simply not true. Black men are more prone to violence and aggression and are more sexually threatening and intimidating than East Asian men, for example. It's so simple that people don't want to look at it. Just go to the fair and look at the chickens. There will be small meek chickens and big aggressive ones. Look at dogs. There simply are differences. Advocating for race blindness on the backdrop of BLM riots is absurd, this just feels out of step with reality at this point.
Racial blindness is a great ideal to work toward, especially in times of peace and little social unrest, but right now it's just so ridiculously out of step with the times that it seems kind of incoherent. It doesn't seem in effect very far removed from the liberal anti-racist position which is also glaringly out of touch.
aiislove
11mo ago
As someone who used to listen to Coast to Coast AM all night every summer in my, er, late youth, I'm curious to know if there are any interesting developments in cryptozoology or paranormal activity over the past few years. I kinda lost the plot on the UFO stuff, the conversation always feels so masturbatory ("The government says [something exciting]!" but the [something exciting] always seems to be something, um, not exciting, to me...)
aiislove
11mo ago
This is classic victim mentality. We make up stories to ourselves about what we've been through. Reimagine the perceived injustices you've experienced as times when you've grown or learned to make them strengths rather than weaknesses. If you're here you're probably smart enough to twist anything you've been through into a bad experience, but you could just as easily shift your perception of these things into positive experiences. It may seem like it doesn't matter but you're always going to be happier if you shift your beliefs to a positive view of events rather than a negative one. And most of the time there is no objective truth to the matter so you might as well choose the more theoretically positive one for yourself.
I don't know if that makes sense, but basically stop painting yourself as a victim in your own mind and view your suffering as empowering rather than defeating and you'll be much happier and confident and effective as a person.
aiislove
11mo ago
at heart a Karen is someone who demands that entry-level workers acknowledge her as a social superior
The issue is that Karens don't realize themselves as social superiors and see themselves as socially inferior to entry level workers. No one who truly feels themselves above someone else treats them poorly, that's absurd and insane. Karens emerged because the social roles have become so blurred in modern America that no one realizes they are above the minimum wage employee, hence the entire phenomenon of Karens acting ridiculously.
Oprah Winfrey is a total Karen.
I don't know what you are referring to specifically with her but if you perceive her as a Karen in some instance I presume it's because she lacked the grace or perspective to acknowledge her social superiority as well
aiislove
11mo ago
centraco
What does centraco mean? Central American? I just tried googling it and couldn't find anything, was it a typo?
aiislove
1yr ago
Firstly, I was taken aback by how fair Thai people tend to be. I thought they'd be swarthier, akin to Malaysians or Indonesians, but quite a large fraction could easily pass as Caucasian if not for their facial features. The ones who are really tanned seem to be people who work out under the sun, having skin tones I expect.
This is due to large Chinese immigration (especially in the north) as well as fairer skin being seen as higher class especially among women who generally cover their skin and wear sunscreen to keep from tanning.
Secondly, they're piss poor at speaking English.
I found everyone to speak pretty good english when I was there. It's much easier to get around in Thailand knowing no Thai than it is to get around France knowing no French or Japan knowing no Japanese.
Thailand is really clean. [...] The roads are in great condition
...I can't agree but I've never been to India so my comparisons are mostly with first world countries
But the most perplexing thing is the sheer number of pickup trucks here.
I was surprised by this too, specifically the giant US style trucks
Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass?
Based on nothing but my own observations, there is less sexual divergence in the phenotypes between East and SE Asian men and women than between men and women in other groups of people.
aiislove
1yr ago
Hmm, I don't think I've noticed myself or other english speakers having trouble with the r or t/ch/ts sounds but maybe it's something that's more pronounced for people who've spoken Japanese their whole lives and there's a nuance that I'm not aware of. I have noticed that the "ふ" sound is a lot breathier or "h-like" than the way English speakers usually pronounce "fu".
I generally have trouble with vowels more than consonants in all languages, my vowels tend to be really flat (I don't like nasal sounds so when I say "cat" for example, in english, I avoid the nasal a and voice it a bit more like an "ah" sound if that makes sense.) The vowels in Japanese, German and Spanish are all essentially the same though in my mind (disregarding the umlauted ones in German.) The r in Japanese is similar to the "tap r" in Spanish. Sometimes the "u" in Japanese is a bit like the umlauted u (ü) but it seems a bit more of an affect or personal choice rather than common Japanese, I'm not sure
aiislove
1yr ago
I think your response is actually a good way to illustrate why school shooting makes sense in an American context and why it doesn't in a Russian/rest of the world context. Your summary of school is pretty unemotional, including a list of daily routines and focusing on the drudgeries of your daily life. You just mention girls for one line. When Americans are asked about their highschool experience, especially young men online, you're likely to get a lot more of an emotional response, with a more bombastic tone and a litany of perceived injustices that they experienced. Americans generally want to be the most successful and well liked and popular person in the school and they often can't stand accepting their place somewhere else on the totem pole. Young American men are driven to externalizing their problems, blaming the social situation rather than on themselves or something outside of everyone's control, so to punish the externalized enemies is more logical in the American context than in most countries. Any time the weak are able to be armed it's really no surprise that sometimes they will take the opportunity to try to claw back some dignity through violence.
aiislove
1yr ago
You have an interesting perspective but I wouldn't break things down into distinct categories as you have. In my experience, the needs you listed aren't unrelated at all but rather all play into each other. The sex and intimacy validate the ego. If you have sex with no ego validation (for example by having sex with a prostitute) it is extremely unsatisfying because you don't feel that your partner likes you in any way, so there is little to no ego validation. This is the same if you have a sex partner you don't feel equal to and feel they only like you for your money/status/power/something other than your intrinsic qualities or physical characteristics.
Intimacy is also a motivation only insofar as it validates the ego. It reinforces your feelings of power and worthiness to be held and admired and to offer admiration and intimacy in turn.
The whole idea of first having to change themselves to get validation and/or intimacy is somewhat logically contradictory.
In my experience it's very gratifying to be able to change yourself and have power over your own body and physicality and then be validated through sex. When I felt very badly about myself I was incapable of having good sex because I hated myself so much that anyone who liked me as I was repulsed me. After improving myself I am much easier to love. If you are so insecure that self improvement points to your weaknesses rather than as a place to improve yourself, you are working against your ability to be loved and have your ego gratified. Men are competitive and will always have insecurities so if you aren't working on yourself you're doomed to be stuck in a mode of self doubt which leads to misery.
I think men who don't appear to be driven by intimacy are insecure about their ability to show love to other people and avoid this part of relationships. It's not that they don't want to feel loved, but they have experience from not being loved in the past or are afraid of their partner rejecting the showing of love so they avoid it.
Seeking mainly validation from sexual relations is usually a bad idea in general if for no other reason than that it makes one's ego dependent on what other people think of you sexually.
Yes, men must find a source of validation from within themselves or else any amount of external validation they get is just not going to work on them. If you've known insecure people and tried to give them a genuine compliment they often reply with bitterness or as though you're attacking them when you're just trying to be nice, it's the same thing.
So the solution, it seems to me, is to try to be mainly driven by wanting sex as opposed to validation and intimacy.
Sex without ego validation is completely pointless. As a gay man I can get so much sex but if I'm not feeling loved by my partner it just feels like masturbation with the extra needless steps of looking for a partner for no reason if they don't validate my ego or provide some intimacy toward me.
I think all men want sex and intimacy as a way to boost the ego. They are not separable. I am a gay man so I don't know how straight men think but I suspect motivations are largely the same.
aiislove
1yr ago
What happens to human tribes or primate populations in the wild when the average age of the populations become too high? What kinds of social dysfunctions emerge in these societies? Do the young start to neglect or abuse the old? Do they get outcompeted by rival tribes? Is it simply something that never happens in the wild?
Any thoughts on the "Chinese spy balloons"? I just did a search for "balloon" on here and couldn't find any discussion of it. Was wondering if anyone had any theories or points to share on the situation
aiislove
1yr ago
I actually think it's cool, I like the surrealism of the setting and the repetitive rhythm of the audio and the physicality of the woman on the floor who is really beating herself up for the audience. I can't decipher the words or figure out where the banging is coming from but I don't think it's a terrible art piece. Obviously it's been decontextualized in this clip and I'm too lazy to find out more but I appreciate it for the absurdity alone.
And ironically I think you're wrong to say that the leaders of the western world even enjoy this, they're mostly far too cynically gone from the world of enjoyment at this point and sort of just accept it as the state of performance art today and view it through the lens of the Nth generation of like disruptive subversive irony that this class of person is supposed to view everything through at this point. I don't know it that makes it better or worse for you.
What kind of art do you prefer?
aiislove
1yr ago
Can you give me a link to the tool these images were made from? I googled "imgn_ai" and the first result was "imagen-ai.com" so I installed their program before realizing it wasn't that, then I found "imgnai.com" which is a telegram thing and I don't know what telegram is, and then I found "imgn.ai" which is yet another thing that doesn't seem to be what made the images.
I reverse google image searched the first image and there are lots of twitter posts of the image but none are pointing to an original source or mentioning the program used to create it.
I'm asking because I want to generate similar imagery.
aiislove
1yr ago
Is that really that much different from an Athenian youth tying their identity to Achilles or Odysseus?
Do you mean an Athenian youth as in a young man from Athens, Greece today, or do you mean a hypothetical young man living in ancient Athens?
In case you mean the former, the main difference I would point to would be the test of time- that tales of Achilles and Odysseus have survived millennia to still be relevant and resonate with us today, whereas Spiderman (specifically) was just invented a few decades ago. Additionally there is more cultural legitimacy afforded by the proponents of ancient Greek myth, today and throughout history: philosophers, religious and government leaders back in the ancient times, professors and scholars of literature today and so on. People can argue that this shouldn't matter, but I don't think anyone would argue against the fact that in practice it does matter.
Additionally, I am personally very particular about aesthetic and the form that media takes. For example I have huge respect for anime and most Japanese art forms and find that American art forms are deeply unappealing in comparison. Modern Japanese tying their identity to (90s anime/manga*) Sailor Moon doesn't bother me nearly as much because I think the artwork that Naoko Takeuchi created and the 90s anime are both stylish and attractive and elegant, whereas the style of Western comic books I find garish and amateur and crassly commercial and lacking refinement. I know many Western media fans don't understand this but as a creative/artistic person, I can't stand when media looks bad, and Western media nearly always looks bad, in my opinion.
That was kind of a tangent but to tie it back in with your question: ancient Greek art generally looked good, or at least what's left looks good in the museums today. So if someone of Greek heritage wants to tie their identity to ancient Greek legends, I don't find that terribly embarrassing because it's rooted in something aesthetically pleasing. But when I leave America and have to be associated with the culture that brought the world Spiderman, I'm embarrassed by the lack of elegance and consideration for aesthetic that I see in Hollywood movies, Western comic books, American art and architecture and so on.
I may be destroying the basis of my original argument with this post, but I think the main point I'm trying to make is that if you tie your cultural heritage to someone else's ugly art, you're going to first be associated with ugly art and then you're going to be upset when the owners do something with it that will upset you. Neither of these things are good to me. So in my mind if you want to tie your identity to media, first seek out good media, and then have the foresight to understand that JK Rowling can be a TERF in 10 years or Star Wars can go woke in 50 years, and don't place too much stock in this identity to begin with.
*Sailor Moon Crystal looks bad.
Your haughty affectation is a defense mechanism to protect yourself from having to see the ugliness in your heart and the uncharitableness you approach the world with. I don't know if you are rich or poor but regardless you display no sense of noblesse oblige and have no class. You can delude yourself into thinking you've made peace with your hard-heartedness but at some point you will face a very human obstacle and the flimsy affectations you are relying on will crumble and you'll be left with a cold heart that offers no warmth for yourself or the situations you face.
Are you engaging with my views on an emotional level or are you protecting yourself by holding them at an analytical distance to try to perfect your artificially constructed worldview?
Can you tell me your secret to being so above the rest of the wretched of the earth that you can operate on some theoretical transhumanist plane of great civilization in spite of your own humanity?
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