curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
See here - huh? Why? The mainstream/cathedral/dems have been plenty harsh on ftx. It's not like madoff didn't donate to politicans, and if the dems/govt were as corrupt as that would imply the US would've descended into third-world chaos decades ago, as every large corporation that committed massive fraud, causing economic stagnation, would be rewarded.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I precommit to the sex tape not being real, although I'll certainly post it on rdrama if it is. TheMotte prediction markets when?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Most likely that inane bullshit is the kind of thing 'normal people' love, and pushing it on their feed means they watch more of it. see: his videos getting millions of views. Ditto for schizo/weird ads, less confidently, probably relatively stupid people click on them. This is the same reason google sucks nowadays - normal people don't want, either revealed preference or intend, to see a RTFM link when they google an error message, they click on and read the shitty copywriting spam so that's what they get.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I've heard this a lot and it is bad. Kind of hope they video files still around, just behind a tombstone or something, but videos are large enough they may be deleted to save space
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I also don't watch advertisements, actively avoid products I see in ads, actively avoid believing any implicit claims in ads like 'wow thats a cool rugged truck', and am not interested in almost all advertised products anyway for various practical reasons. But ads still work for most people, who don't do any of that.
You aren't the only one, but you're a minority! Similar to tiktok - it's uniformly useless garbage, despite me exploring a lot of niches for a few hours out of morbid interest (there's a few ways to ignore the algorithm and just watch a roughly global-view-biased feed), but lots of even very smart and successful older people I know love watching the cat videos or humor videos or whatever.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Suggested videos still works, but it's somewhat worse than it was a decade/half a decade ago. Half of the suggested videos are just generic popular ones that are somewhat genre relevant - I'll try to explore some small niche and half the videos will be 5k of kinda-what-i-want and half will be 1M view videos in the nearest popular niche, but you can just ignore that.
As OP said though, that "artificial scarcity" is just market pricing + inefficient secondhand market distribution. "not sold at the price she offered to humans" is the market pricing it - there's more demand than supply, so price increases, and if the original seller isn't willing to do that an automated intermediary will do it (and if you ban that somehow, human intermediaries will do it instead). None of that solves the problem of scarcity - there are way fewer tickets than there is demand for tickets at the price offered, raising the price just means they're sold to the subset of buyers-at-initial-price who can pay more as opposed to the subset of buyers-at-initial price who click fast enough
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Math is entirely correct (and this is just econ 101), but put very simply and less precisely - if the original market is well behaved enough, and there's "enough" thing for everyone who's willing to pay $100, then the scalpers can't make money, because people can buy from the original seller at $100. And the people who haven't bought tickets are willing to pay less than $100, so the people the scalper crowds out by buying extra tickets are 'on the margin' and willing to pay $100, so the scalper doesn't make money - they buy for $100, sell for $100. But in cases of 'scalping' there usually isn't enough thing for everyone who's willing to pay $100, so there are lots of people who are willing to pay $200 who aren't getting a ticket, so the scalper buys for $100 and sells for $200.
This 'makes the market more efficient' in cases where the thing matters and isn't a concert ticket - if company A wants to buy thing for $10k because it's a critical component for centrifuge and company B wants to buy the thing for $5 because it looks nice on their wall, and the seller is selling for $5, and B buys it, this is just dumb - whereas if the scalper scalps it and sells it for $10k, the economically useful thing happens, and the scalper gets the monetary benefit (which the original seller can capture by raising the price themselves).
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Isn't the winning move to secretly price them higher, by having 'scalpers' be the scapegoat but actually internalizing the scalping? A way to do that would be to have ticketmaster ""scalp"" for you, and pay you most of the profit. Not that they're doing that, I haven't looked at all.
The very act of buying up tickets/GPUs/whatever means that there won't be enough to fulfill demand, which drives the price up.
But they need to sell them too, into the original pool of sellers, who still have the same willingness to pay. Outside of things like price discrimination / monopoly pricing it doesn't "drive the price up" any more than the price would've been if nvidia priced it higher.
When a scalper buys up all the cards for $500 and then sells them for $1000, they are "solving" a problem of their own making.
They're redistributing the cards from people with lower willingness to pay to higher willingness to pay - which can be valuable if it's e.g. a gamer who wants slightly better graphics than the last generation to exactly zero gameplay effect bidding against an AI company, or not matter much at all if it's a concert ticket (but that's because concerts themselves don't matter much). Although - for a variety of reasons, in the past sometimes 'intentionally partly disabling some lines of your product so that you can price discriminate better' but often reasonably, AI chips and gaming chips aren't great substitutes.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
it puts lower prices on its goods because this brings it benefits that are not directly measurable, but are still real
which are?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Scalpers can buy, and actually have bought, tickets, sold some at high scalping prices, and discarded the rest.
This would fall into price discrimination / monopoly pricing. But how common is that? If there are multiple scalpers, one scalper doing this gets outcompeted by another selling at 'market price' (and both get outcompeted by the original ticket seller selling at 'market price').
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The original supply at the original price was already too small for most people to get a ticket. The scalpers are redistributing tickets among the group who would've originally bought tickets, and extracting some surplus for the redistribution, but the same number of people still end up with tickets.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
aquota is claiming they provide a useful service that they are incentivized for (making it possible to buy tickets over a long period of time by increasing price), which makes it no longer 'their fault' for doing something bad
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Can you elaborate / post a link that fleshes this out? This is a very widespread claim but I'm not sure how true it is. The 'addictive/parasocial' elements of twitter are - as far as I can tell - tweets having likes, people having follower counts, and tweets being recommended based on likes. Aren't those basic social media features that are legitimately useful?
Other criticisms of twitter are 'the short tweet form means anything subtle can't happen' (sort of true but its not like long-form platform with the same userbase is better), and 'the ui is awful' (kinda true)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Wouldn't they do that on any other social media platform though? And offline? It's not like the NYT newsroom or universities in 1950 were less 'elite sens-makers and narrative crafters jerking themselves in a circle'
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
yeah fixed
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
there's a competing theory that we "took over the planet" because we had language and could thus learn from events that we ourselves did not witness
Transformers and large neural nets generally are universal ML system that can do moderately-intelligent tasks like create images, play games, optimize all sorts of real-world tasks, and also understand language. Human intelligence is similar - use and understanding of language depends and is made of general intelligence. If dogs could talk, they wouldn't be smarter. And - they can talk, sort of, they have verbal and body-language signals that mean things, they just can't do larger-scale things with that.
The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought
You can link articles/other long-form content though, and a solid fifth of the articles I read come from twitter links. This gets to my claim that it's more the quality of people - smart people just link stuff & read the links, and dumb people, when they read, do shitty fiction/motivational books/etc.
Attention span doesn't really make sense as a concept tbh, I argued this on reddit but twitter's "attention span" effects aren't at all different than that of casual social conversations, which happen constantly.
I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded
There are many, many, many competent professionals who perform at their job better than 99.9% of humanity has for all of history, and use twitter very frequently, and have for years or a decade. Programmers are one of those, but many non-programmers do too. This is just plainly and obviously false.
So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".
I constantly see disagreement on twitter though. Quote tweets, replies, just general posts of the form 'this other guy said X which is bad bc Y'. It's usually not useful disagreement, but it's not like the comments sections of major newspapers, or random peoples' long-form writing, are better.
And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it.
celebrities have always been dumb and said dumb things, that's just not new at all, read a tabloid from the 19xxes or something
And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform
False consensus? Mainstream center-right accounts exist and get tons of engagement though? Even if those were downweighted 50%, hypothetically, there's still not a 'consensus'
They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism
how is this any different than reporting on random out of context statements from long political speeches or conversations, a mainstay of journalism historically?
No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.
at least twitter has some complex and intelligent people, tiktok has none of those. what's a single tiktok account comparable to professional discussion among scientists on twitter, or just @thezvi, or even @rapegroyper14?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The tweet before trump mention:
New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
Not clear what that means, other than not being in the spirit of free speech.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
'Straight' doesn't mean 'not degenerate', familiar words + owning the libs != accuracy. If a straight guy + a woman do butt stuff ... how does that make the guy 'not straight', even if he gets off from it? The claim is iirc 'prostate stimulation is sexually pleasurable', and that doesn't have to involve enjoying the idea of being penetrated by a penis, necessarily. This is separate from 'is it good' or 'is it degenerate', just in terms of accuracy, 'it isn't straight' doesnt seem right.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Is this an estimate of 'what percent of straight men engage in butt stuff sometimes', or an estimate of 'percent that enjoy the idea w/o engaging in it', or of 'what percent would enjoy it if they wanted to'? (although that doesn't equal 'should' - most people could enjoy most weird sex things with the right social circumstances and intention, that doesn't make it worthwhile)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You've definitely met many of both (more who masturbate), it just hasn't been mentioned due to local norms
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Humans 'took over the planet' and displaced billions of other animals just by being smarter. Why wouldn't AI agents do the same? Our intelligence relates to physical mechanisms somehow, and computers are a much faster and more efficient way of implementing similar things, so why wouldn't computers be able to do so better? Look how rapidly technology is integrated into human life and the economy, won't that just continue to accelerate as it has over the past 300 years? What does a human do, what happens to the economy, when complex AI interactions drive more and more of it?
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