faceh
2mo ago
Yeah, you'd assume that she's smart enough to have thought of that. She'll age out of the profession (at least, the high-paid tiers) eventually, so just make sure you're socking enough away to live off when that happens.
But if she's being honest that she didn't foresee the massive 'backlash' from the positions she openly supports it doesn't speak well of her foresight.
Like, her best-case scenario is she can buy some land in a rural part of the country with really nice views, raise some animals, and maybe find a guy willing to retire out there FAR from the public eye and thus well-insulated from all the cruelty, so she can live out a peaceful life with her accumulated wealth.
It is really unclear to me what impact she intends to have on the world, otherwise.
faceh
2mo ago
I would rephrase my position as "Active and former prostitutes are locked out of high-status permanently and indelibly."
I can imagine a known prostitute 'correcting course' and making real contrition for her past and receiving real forgiveness and being accepted into a community and given a position of some respect if she makes significant contributions from there.
But I have a hard time imagining someone saying "Oh yeah, I live in [town], the one that just elected a reformed streetwalker as mayor, and I'm proud of it!"
She outright claims to be the highest paid escort in the world or similar. Allegedly $4k an hour, and was a top .1% or whatever Onlyfans performer, allegedly pulling six figs per month (which tracks with other top ranking accounts on that site).
There's probably at least one year where she net 1 million or more on her tax return.
And she's surrounded by high IQ techy/rationalist people. She can get plenty of advice and guidance on wise use of funds.
And, if I may add, if she's not leveraging her San Francisco connections to do some wanton insider trading on tech stocks and startups, she's an abject idiot, which I do not think she is.
That said, she's also claimed she thinks AGI is going to kill us all in the next 10 years, and thus she's not doing as much 'retirement' saving or other long-term planning, so burning piles of money on the altar of hedonism is possible.
faceh
2mo ago
I mean, can you name any former porn stars who have gone on to become high-status, influential people?
Generally once you've got that reputation indelibly tied to your identity, it becomes impossible for a certain 'higher class' of person to take you seriously.
faceh
2mo ago
That's my primary reason for mostly ignoring the whole thing, I don't want people to be cruel, but I don't feel any need to step in to defend the 'victim.'
She's got plenty of support and resources, I won't go around yelling at people to be nicer, on her behalf.
On top of that, some of the cruelty is not for its own sake, but from people who genuinely think she is a negative impact on the world. I haven't seen much honest discussion of that side of things, although @Southkraut has opened the question in this thread in a way that I find insightful.
After observing for years, its my conclusion that literally everything she does, from the weird polls to the bemoaning her inability to find a husband (who would tolerate her OnlyFans), to the gangbangs is just her way of selling her services, targeting a very particular niche: grown up tech nerds who find themselves suddenly very wealthy.
If you engage with her in ANY way, you are entering her sales funnel.
This wouldn't be so bad except she likewise bends all attention around any issue or event to be about her. Even this action has made it so people aren't discussing whether her critics are right, now its all about her disappearance from the public eye.
My prediction is she makes a very ostentatious return to social media inside a month, probably setting up some big event she will promote, and then continues on as usual.
faceh
2mo ago
Yeah.
Remember we're talking about a multi-millionaire who runs in extremely wealthy tech circles, and has hundreds of people who would run to her defense and aid at a moment's notice.
Unnecessary cruelty for cruelty's sake is bad, but my sympathy is limited in the same way it is for any wealthy celebrity who seeks the limelight.
faceh
2mo ago
More critically, serious enforcement is dependent on self-reporting.
Yep. And this will increasingly be the case.
Generate a few dozen plausibly human-drawn images, release them on a plausible timeline that a human artist could achieve, and there's little anyone could do but speculate.
Maybe there's some solution that involves uploading the raw files from the WIP to a blockchain or something.
faceh
2mo ago
Nah, there's PR firms and Publicists and brand consultants and such that can leap into action to help a budding microceleb try to extend the limelight with a preset path for leveraging their one claim to fame into public appearances, social media, and maybe some acting or singing gigs.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hawk-tuah-girl-hailey-welch-1235937553/
Organic celebrity just isn't a thing these days (if it ever was). Used to be you could be a viral meme and ride that horse for a bit until the anxiety got to you.
And of course, she got in trouble for her memecoin because she trusted a entity that specializes in memecoin rugpulls (note, they sell a physical rug product on their website).
There's a whole ecosystem that will try to latch onto any potential niche in the attention economy to monetize the moment.
faceh
2mo ago
I wouldn't use most sites, period, if Ublock Origin stopped working.
Here's a hot tip too, I've been using ChatGPT to help create custom filters to block out other types of content I find annoying. You can use it, for instance, to block a particular youtube channel from ever showing up in your feed or recommendations.
faceh
2mo ago
I mean, I was happy to allow those perceptions to continue. "Facea," "Faceb," "Facec," etc. all seem like they could be valid words, so they work quite well as pseudonyms. It just made it easier to keep straight in my head.
This was before password/account managers became standard, so it was helpful to have an organizational system for identities.
And since I stuck with FaceH for so long, I myself pronounce it approximately "Face-ah" in my head.
faceh
2mo ago
There's no technical reason renewing a prescription requires you to do anything more than log into your pharmacy somehow and click a "renew" button. Any further complexity is because the pharmacy decided to waste your time.
Yes.
YES.
YOU'D THINK THAT.
But you click the 'renew' button and the Pharmacy reports that you have to get a new scrip from your physician. Well okay. You call the physicians office and they say you need to submit proof of your identity sufficient to make sure they're writing it for the right person. E-mail won't do, they need it faxed or you can stop by in person. Then once that's done, they will forward the scrip to the pharmacy. But it turns out the only way to check if the pharmacy got the scrip is to actually call, which means waiting on hold, and once you've done all the intermediate steps, THEN the 'renew' button works. And then add in a layer of fun if you want to get insurance involved.
Maybe other pharmacies do it differently, but I assume a nontrivial part of the process is regulatory compliance and antifraud measures.
Its one of those tasks where it could be a 2-5 minute diversion, or 90 minutes of running around, navigating phone trees and getting various ducks in a row to get the particular outcome you want/need, b/c the parties involved are not motivated to help much, are concerned about fraud/deception, and are not in good communication with each other.
So as the one person properly motivated to complete the task, who isn't worried about fraud, and can act as the intermediary between the parties, I'm now shouldering the organization burden. It is what it is, but I'd sure love to throw AI at the task.
faceh
2mo ago
And the spot that has bugged me for a while now: how much AI/digital assistance is really crossing the arbitrary line you've drawn?
Can you use AI to generate the original concept and then spend a couple hours touching up from there, so the final result is just as much your effort as anything?
Can you sketch out the basic details and then feed it to the AI and basically have it 'paint by numbers' to complete the project?
Can you have the AI spit out 50 separate images, and YOU spend the time cropping, superimposing, rotating, adjusting and compositing them all together for the end result?
Make the rule on what is 'unacceptable' AI art and the tech can run RIGHT up to that line precisely to the pixel... then stick a single tiny digital toe over it, daring your to complain.
That is what makes the tech amazing/dangerous: whatever rules you make for it, the AI itself can be used to circumvent said rules.
faceh
2mo ago
lol I've basically decided to start integrating almost all my online identities, so no need to spin up a pseud for any new sites or to tackle any new controversies behind a new mask. The seal has been broken between most of them.
Face I will only come about if I am cancelled so thoroughly that I'm forced to live in a cabin in the woods or a sailboat in the Indian ocean.
And in that case it'll probably not be a username but just the signature I put on the drone-delivered pipe bombs I'm sending out to get revenge on industrial civilization.
I think its also just the hypercompetition that results because 'attention' is a fixed resource, and so every single advantage you can leverage to capture it becomes critical, so everyone evolves towards using every little hack/trick to keep their content in the public eye, lest they be left in the dust.
Whenever someone makes the jump from doing content creation as a hobby/side-gig to full-time career you see the shift. Shorter videos, higher pace of uploads, and general drop in quality while minmaxing every little detail that keeps people engaged and improves ad revenue. The content becomes, fundamentally, an afterthought compared to the drive to attract more viewership.
Then they branch out into the other standard revenue streams. Patreon, a podcast, and maybe a livestream channel... then the death knell (imo)... political commentary.
Mr. Beast is perhaps the apotheosis of this pressure to keep wining attention. He's an apex predator in the environment, but at the cost of selling his soul to the algorithm daemons.
Similarly, literally nobody in the 12+ years I've been using it has grokked that my username is "Face H".
So nobody has bothered to ask what became of Faces A-G.
faceh
2mo ago
Especially when there's a whole grifter-industrial complex geared towards helping randos turn their 15 seconds of fame into a flash-in-the-pan celebrity career (hawk tuah, anyone?)
faceh
2mo ago
Yeah. Fact is that any device that with an internet connection is likely trying to nudge or otherwise cater to you in a way that will get you to alter your behavior, spend money, or even just cough up more information that they think they can use to sell you stuff.
And every time you give in it gets just a little better at predicting/manipulating you.
I like my Alexa devices, but the occasional attempt to say "hey we noticed you liked [X], just say the word and I'll charge you for [Z]!" sometimes make me want to send them off to the Bitcoin mines forever.
I've already precommitted to ignoring any attempts by a smart device to sell me on something I wasn't already intending to buy, unless it can send a big breasted brunette in a bikini to my front door to make the sale. Any marketing experts who are tapping into my motte account can take that as gospel truth and act on it as they see fit.
faceh
2mo ago
So what can’t these systems do today?
Far as I know they can't renew a prescription for you, which has been my personal benchmark for 'agentic' AI for a year or so.
Or maybe its not that they can't but they aren't permitted to for liability or similar reasons.
I just want to be able to ask the thing "I'm running low on [pharmaceutical product], please order up a refill. And sometimes that process requires navigating multiple phone trees for both the pharmacy provider and the party doing the prescribing, to provide various sorts of documentation, sometimes via fax(!) and to make a payment and arrange for pickup or delivery at a convenient time.
All stuff I find very boring and tedious, so if I could offload it to an AI I would do so in a heartbeat.
faceh
2mo ago
True, but in many cases you will have to actively fight the algorithm's attempt to get you to partake in whatever drivel is popular with everyone else, and watch out for its attempts to sneak in ads or other content that someone is paying to put in front of your eyes.
If there's one thing I have always and forever refused to do, its falsify my personality or my preferences.
I won't give something a 'like' on any social media site unless it is actually content I would genuinely prefer to see more of. I hand out dislikes liberally when it is even an option when I encounter things I would really rather never see again.
I will adjust my rhetoric to account for an audience's tolerances for controversy (call it 'discretion' or 'professionalism'), but I won't shift the message itself.
I have literally never stated a position on an issue that I wasn't prepared to at least half-heartedly defend. I try to state my positions on any issue with as much clarity and precision as can be mustered with the English language.
And I do hope my reward is that whatever AI-Algorithm God arises will not have to guess at my preferences and utility function and will thus be able to give me an experience that is very closely optimized for the things that I truly enjoy, and not just the things I pretended to enjoy to fit in or to trick onlookers into thinking I am at all different than what I am. If the GodGPT looks across the entire history of my internet usage, and sees what type of youtube content I liked, the type of subreddits I subscribed to, the arguments I got into, the songs I played, the films I rated highly (and low), the type of people I interacted with, going back for decades now, I think it'll have an easy time figuring out what type of world to stick me in to win my hedonic approval.
Like, many actors seem to get very frustrated when they get pigeonholed into playing a single popular role for years and years on end, or typecast into the same types of roles over the whole career. Imagine how bad it would be for a nigh-omnipotent computer deity to feed you up horrible slop content for the rest of your life because you kept pretending to like [popular thing] for so long that your entire digital footprint suggested that it was your favorite type of content ever. The role you played has become your life.
I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent.
Governor Desantis of Florida achieved a record budget surplus for the state in 2022.
He's had a budget surplus literally every year he's in office.. INCLUDING the years kneecapped by Covid.
His budget this year is literally titled Focus on Fiscal Responsibility, with a ton of tax cuts involved BECAUSE the state has been so fiscally successful.
The state has 120 BILLION dollars in reserves.
Government spending in Florida actually DECREASED from 2020-2022 (it has increased since, mind).
Can you show me a SINGLE State in the Union that is primarily run by Democrats and has done something remotely similar?
Or are we still doing the very tempting but fallacious thing where we assume ONLY the Federal level party represents the whole?
faceh
2mo ago
"Hard Rightie pundit living off of family wealth" seems like a notable archetype.
faceh
2mo ago
I went through a version of that.
Not so much the politics, but she ducked out of the relationship, cut many existing ties, gained a bunch of weight, and now she binges anime (I found her myanimelist account last year) and plays around in Role-playing servers.
And I have three different acquaintances that had this happen too, one of whom I mentioned recently.
One wife was a really nice Mormon girl who now is presenting as full on LGBTQ, blue hair, and does roller derby.
I know of zero relationships that ended because the guy went too far right.
Yeah. I was going to say, negative feelings are less likely to arise when an attractive woman won't sleep with you because she is flat out waiting for marriage.
It's when she is clearly having sex with other dudes but for some reason rejecting it with you when the feelings of inadequacy and the male sexual competition drive speak the loudest.
A woman who opts partially out of the sexual marketplace, and dresses and behaves accordingly, is still going to stir feelings in men, but easier to rein those feelings in when its just known that NOBODY is getting the prize, so rejection isn't specific to you.
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