nand
1yr ago
We have way more access to safe, 'consequence free' (not counting the emotional component) and pleasure-oriented sex than ever before
Do we really? Then why is every generation having less of it, and people taking longer to lose their virginities? Why are the most developed countries the most sexless?
In dating, if you're ghosted, do you a) always move on stoically, b) always give it one more shot, or c) go with a mix of the two depending on circumstances?
Always a) without second thought. If she ghosts you, she's not worth your time. Either because she's the type of immature bitch who gets a kick out of emotional manipulation, or because she's just plain not interested.
Overwhelmingly likely, the latter. You have to remember that women feel attraction in a way fundamentally different from men. They are fickle, extremely selective, exponentially more hypergamous, and basically all-or-nothing. A woman can't be half-interested in somebody, she is either head over heels or wholly uninterested. If you get ghosted you are already in category two, and trying to flip her back into the other state at that point is fighting a losing uphill battle.
So what do you do? Do you have a system for deciding if and when to follow up after not hearing back?
Play the numbers game. If landing a relationship is one in thousand, you have to churn through a thousand mediocre semi-interested women before one will work out.
If you're even at a position where you have the free time and mental capacity to spare thought for somebody that ghosted you, I'd say you're not yet seeking out enough opportunities. I sometimes have days where I chat with 5-10 new people in a single day, something that takes a lot of time and effort. Effort I no longer have left over to worry about some girl who hasn't responded in 3 days.
But on the other hand, I've often wished that girls I ghosted would reach out to me. Often I stopped replying for a petty or momentary reason, and a week or a month later I'm feeling silly about it and I want to see her again but I'm too embarrassed to reach out because I have no good explanation for the initial ghosting.
This sounds like a trivial problem to fix and absolutely not at all a reason to project such (IMO neurotic) expectations onto other people.
A far more symmetric view: Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality. Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality.
Don't you arrive at these desires merely by adopting meritocracy as a core value? (In addition to different beliefs on the object-level question of whether or not racial differences in outcomes are primarily the organic results of natural differences in group abilities or primarily the result of societal oppression)
Are you suggesting that meritocracy is fundamentally a dishonest viewpoint? Or are you suggesting that most proponents of blank slatism vs HBD are not arguing as a result of an innate desire to see people justly compensation for their work? (If so, why? Isn't it just as infuriating to see people being unfairly elevated/oppressed from either point of view?)
What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.
Probably because it's, at least in part, an attack on my core identity - a hacker, computer programmer and free software advocate. But also, because it's one of the most blatant forms of authoritarian oppression: Not being able to do something with my hardware that I know it's capable of drives me furious, because there's no technical reason for it. It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.
Am I right in coming away with the conclusion that your post seems to be arguing about two very different and almost opposite things?
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An AI's general willingness to combine things in unrealistic ways. This is the ability required to produce images of things not heavily represented in the training set, such as female presidents.
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An AI's ability to understand and ignore "spam" in its training data (e.g. popular depictions that mislead from "reality"), such as Marvel depictions of Norse mythological figures or faux 80s illustrations.
In a sense, these are directly opposite goals because 1 requires painting something unrealistic, and 2 requires ignoring/penalizing unrealistic outputs. I suppose the common ground is that an AI should default to painting logical/coherent/realistic things unless prompted otherwise. But even this desire is loaded - first of all, the way these AIs are trained, I think, sets them up to hopelessly fail at any measure of how "realistic" their outputs are - we humans have the advantage of our perception of reality being a distinguished input, and also by access to vastly more information crucial to understanding concepts such as causality and physical intuition. It's also clear to us whether we're seeing something real or seeing something fictional, by virtue of that fictional thing always being a subset of the reality we perceive (e.g. a still image on a display, rather than something we're seeing with our naked eyes directly).
nand
1yr ago
If you're saying that because i was being a shitheel that data should be rejected...
My argument is that it is not a valid reason because the premise invalidates the conclusion. If you have to resort to assuming somebody is either incredibly immature or incredibly manipulative in order to justify why you should write to them, then I don't see a compelling basis for a relationship either way, thus sort of invalidating the conclusion.
On a tangent, I think applying this line of thinking to women would amount to dangerous wishful thinking more often than not. So merely entertaining it as a possibility is a sort of memetic hazard on its own.
Why do you ghost people, when you have ghosted them?
Because they are wholly uninteresting to talk to, unattractive, or I just otherwise don't think they're worth my time. It's the most clear "I'm not interested, but I'm also too busy to reject you" message you can send.
nand
1yr ago
For somebody mostly ignorant of politics: How come Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea was largely ignored by the west, or at the very least, did not receive such widespread popular culture support (e.g. Ukrainian flags everywhere)?
nand
1yr ago
Am I the only one genuinely baffled by why it matters whether the missile was Russian or Ukrainian?
Cause and effect. If the Ukrainian missile was fired as a defense mechanism against a Russian attack, then I think it's fair to attribute collateral damage to the initial attack. (Indeed, the whole invasion)
nand
1yr ago
I would actually double down and assert that 2+2=4 is a fact deeper than arithmetic. If 2+2=4 are elements in a modular ring, it holds true. If they are vectors, it still holds true. If they are abstract discrete topological spaces, it holds true. I have not encountered a situation in (non-joke) mathematics where the symbols '2', '+' and '4' are overloaded so as to not make this equation true.
There is an underlying concept of "twoness", "addition" and "fourness" that holds this property even as you generalize it to systems beyond integer arithmetic, almost like a fundamental structure of mathematics. This is not even about notational trickery. Even if you decide to use different symbols, it does not change the underlying mathematical relationships. You would just be expressing the same undeniable fact differently.
nand
1yr ago
Isn't it on aggregate better for the world for the children of mentally unstable murderers to die before they can continue the cycle of harm?
As for the fathers, it really doesn't requite a lot of effort not to impregnate a crazy person.
Intuitively, it would appear to me that in the hierarchy of needs, a large chunk of the tech sector essentially falls into the highest bucket - entertainment, self realization and pursuit of curiosity. I would imagine that, as an economy suffers stress, we would see industries failing in a top-down manner, where the most abstract industries that are the furthest removed from immediate basic needs feel the burn first.
Is there any prior art establishing whether or not big tech is such an industry?
nand
1yr ago
But if there is no reprisal, then Poland, at least, has to be asking, what's the point of belonging to NATO? NATO, the alliance that was specifically created to deter Russian military incursions?
But... Russia has not taken hostile military action against Poland. The missile, if it even was theirs, was clearly aimed at the Ukraine. Two farmers died. Nobody gives a shit.
Despite being generally very pro biodeterminism, I actually feel like this is a product of western culture moreso than innate biology. Have you ever talked to women from a non-western nation? They often have a completely different mindset. I'm currently dating a Russian woman and I can talk quite freely with her about political matters, even sensitive topics like HBD or feminism. It's not just her, many Russian women I've found are far more open to criticisms of the values that Western women hold sacred.
Of course, you can make the argument that Russian culture is still designed to suppress the opinions women would otherwise naturally tend to have, and that it takes a liberal nation to reveal their true colors. But for once, I think the blank slatists actually have a point. What you believe is largely a product of the society you were born in, and the west has simply gone off the deep end with feminist/SJW/woke theory. If anything, you can argue that women are merely more naturally susceptible to whatever the prevailing dogma is in the nation they grew up in.
nand
1yr ago
I mean, I was formally diagnosed with a psychosomatic pain disorder because I kept claiming I had stomach cramps to get out of going to school. This whole thing strikes me as a bunch of adults becoming genuinely confused that somebody could legitimately fake illness to get out of unwelcome chores, and lie about it with a straight face.
Teenagers are monsters whose moral compass has not yet developed. There is no "mass sociogenic illness" being "spread" via social media. Infohazard? Seriously? Just don't pretend to be sick to get out of work and you're immune.
It should come as little surprise that the methods are different when the outcomes are, too - consistently, capitalism rewards IQ, while IQ is a trait selected against by natural selection - in every generation.
Edit: Incidentally, the first time I've heard it verbalized that way was by a woman. I literally quote her: "A girl cannot be only half interested, in her head it is always either yes or no."
nand
1yr ago
This is true, but rest assured, if I simply stop responding to somebody it's more likely than not that I've already forgotten about them.
nand
1yr ago
It only works because those websites censor everything that offends American puritan sensibilities. This is sort of why fansly exists, it has much laxer content policies than OnlyFans.
Know what Fansly also doesn't support? My credit card provider. (German national bank, via MasterCard)
nand
1yr ago
Note: the guy who kicked the other developers out was rather inactive as far as actual development of the project goes, so that does make this a bit of a pointless move. In open source, power is awarded to those who do. Merely holding the keys does not make you the supreme ruler. If you kick out the majority developers of a project, they will fork the project and leave you holding an empty bag. What this kid tried to do is take over a project he's not a majority, or even substantial, contributor to. That is a faux pas and a no-go in open source, and the project should rightfully be "deplatformed" (*) because of it.
Not because of his political opinions.
(*) But, please, call a duck a duck. A hostile take-over is bad enough, why does the media have to distort and lie and frame this as "malware"??
nand
1yr ago
The characterization of the New Right as being liberals but with added elite skepticism makes me wonder to what extent this demographic actually overlaps strongly with the supposedly far-left pro-communist anti-institutional "all cops are bastards" camp. Or, to put it more bluntly, I'm wondering what exactly about this 'New Right' demographic is even still right.
If the belief is essentially that free trade cannot work because 'checks and balances' don't exist, resulting only in centralization of power, corruption and impression - haven't you just made the case for the anti-capitalist / anti-market left?
nand
1yr ago
Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.
This paragraph confuses natural selection of ideas with natural selection of the hosts those ideas apply to. It is entirely consistent with the idea of religion as a hyper-effective brain parasite / mind virus that spreads more easily in well-connected and organized societies.
nand
1yr ago
I think the most interesting question is whether or not Shutterstock (et al.) is itself capable of deploying AI-based stock art generators. Why fear new technology displacing your business model, rather than simply adopting that new technology and using it to further cement your market position?
With their existing portfolio, surely they have the easiest means of all to train an AI on their own corpus, no? Or is access to AI-capable hardware and the necessary know-how that gatekept?
I could not disagree with this more. Gender absolutely does not follow a Gaussian distribution. By this claim, you would have a hard time determining what gender most people are. And yet I can assure you, that barring cherry-picked exceptional cases, the median human will have an exceptionally easy time sorting photographs of people into "male" and "female". What gender is, is a bimodal distribution.
Incidentally, the same criticism applies to your forced normalization of all of the other labels you are criticizing - for people's usages of terms like 'ambivert' to to make sense, it is sufficient that they believe its a bimodal distribution, not a discrete one. (And this goes doubly for sexual attraction, where 'bisexual' is definitely not the majority category)
Finally, knowing that somebody is average in a trait is useful information, because it collapses your uncertainty about that person. It's not the same thing as describing an elephant as gray.
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