official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Indigestion is a common side effect of alcohol withdrawal. Alcohol helps with that.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
I asked Bing's Sydney. Btw, I am now pretty certain that she does in fact use GPT4 in the Creative mode. Anyways, she had some suggestions:
The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund: An example of a modern take on the noir genre, The Crow Girl is a violent story with an unreliable narrator. Detective Jeanette Kihlberg has the requisite messy personal life and cynical worldview for noir stories, and the crimes she finds herself investigating, involving mutilated, mummified children, explode into a horrifying and exhilarating mystery that spans decades and continents
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: A bestselling and acclaimed novel that introduces Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker and investigator who teams up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist to solve a decades-old disappearance of a wealthy heiress. The novel explores themes of corruption, violence, misogyny, and revenge in a dark and gripping way.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith: A charming and humorous series that follows Precious Ramotswe, the founder and owner of Botswana’s first and only female-run detective agency. Precious uses her intuition and common sense to solve various cases, from missing husbands to wayward daughters, while also dealing with her own personal issues.
Tart Noir edited by Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson: A collection of short stories by various female authors that showcase the subgenre of tart noir, which is characterized by strong, independent, and often sexually assertive women who are involved in crime, either as detectives, criminals, or victims. The stories range from dark and gritty to witty and humorous, but all share a noir sensibility
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Reddit nuked the API used by pushshift.io which they all used. So I guess no.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
and for some reason I looked into their drawers and closets and saw one type of underwear of the same color,
Also black socks fit any clothing.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
https://xkcd.com/512/ but for arguing on the internet.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
If I were trying to invent a leftism capable of handling a workerless future I think I'd go along the lines of some of the recent questions as to how copyright interacts with the output of LLMs. Namely that these things are sampling out entire culture and to some degree we all have some claim to the output, even if it's only through the influence we exert on someone who exerts influence on someone who exerts influence on someone who directly produces lots of the training data.
Longposters shall inherit the earth, yay!
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything.
The exponential nature of the normal distribution means that relatively small differences in the average ability translate to 100x and more differences in representation when we are talking about one-in-a-million and rarer levels.
There's this unspoken assumption that yeah maybe transwomen on HRT still have like 15% higher lung capacity, but there's like 1 of them for every 300 women athletes, nobody would notice them without looking on purpose. Then you have Lia Thomas and those cyclists and "All three medalists [in 2016 Olympics 800m track] have been found to have the 46,XY karyotype" (despite intersex women being even rarer than transsexuals) and try to convince yourself that this is a series of freak coincidences that definitely don't signify a trend.
No. Math says that if HRT and stuff limit inherent advantages of transwomen to like 15% on average, and there's less than 1% of transwomen athletes, then top 100 women athletes among 8 billion people will be entirely trans.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
You gotta admit though, it's a fun contrast between how you diagnosed someone who doesn't pre-match their socks with depression, autism, and a laundry list of other possible disorders, but then admit that you don't understand how someone can have all their underwear in the same color instead of matching it with their visible clothing.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Have you seen the orchestral version of "Dragonborn Comes" btw? Your comment reminded me of it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hnXD6FRZtn0
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
You might want to read this paper on Reverse Dominance Hierarchy: https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf
I got to it from https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/ which you might want to read first, as an aperitif of sorts.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat.
Do they really?
One thing the pandemic taught me is that people's experiences vary a lot by the country or state or city, but still, do they really?
Here, we had everyone masking in shops etc without much grumbling, like, all right, why not. But I remember exactly one case of a guy asking me to keep the distance and it was so weird, like dude, you actually take it that seriously? And he was apologetic asking me to step back, rather than frothing at the mouth.
So: it's entirely possible that my experience is completely different from your experience. But on the other hand I can't help but suspect that my IRL and online experiences respectively are actually very much the same as yours, but I'm better at discriminating between the two and dismissing online crazies as not representative of the people.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
If you remove the recency requirement then:
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Original Bioshock is misunderstood by most people IMO. What was the point of Ryan's final speech? If he knew the code phrase, why he decided not to use it?
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SOMA had some very visceral non-political based and reality-pilled moments which I don't want to spoil.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
My cats clearly don't understand how doors work.
They don't even understand that I open doors. One has learned that if she stands with paws on the door and looks at me and meows then the door opens sometimes, but I'm really not sure that she understands that it's I who opens the door, she just knows that "the door's open" tends to happen after "meow near the door". She doesn't understand "push on the door" leads to "door opens", I checked.
How would something like that work for humans? I mean, is it possible to imagine beings that are so above us as we are above cats and who affect our lives in meaningful (open doors etc) but incomprehensible ways? Like I have a literal guardian angel, I pray to it (like my cat meows to me), and then somehow things work out better for me, in an incomprehensible way. How could that work? How could an angel "opening a door" for you appear to a human?
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
"Conspiracy" is a complicated concept involving several different attributes. Consider for example CIA did 9/11 the Iran-Contra affair:
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It's coordinated and centralized.
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When/if exposed most people agree that it was immoral and bad.
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People perpetuating it know that it will be considered immoral and bad.
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It's executed in secret, so people assume that its effects (such as the crack epidemic) are exaggerated or caused by natural processes or whatever.
There are also secondary attributes, for example there's a solid argument that (1) + (2) + (3) together mean that it's hard to run a large conspiracy because every person involved increases the chance that someone snitches.
But there are also semi-conspiracies that lack some of the attributes. The Great Replacement doesn't require coordination or centralization (though people like Soros act as coordinators within their significant spheres of influence). People perpetuating it think that they are doing a good thing, they just stop at the very last step: diversity is good, we are increasing diversity of western countries, but we don't admit that more diverse = less white (which is trivially true, not a snark even) at least not when those racist white people might hear us.
The only conspiracy trait that is really fully present here is that ordinary people are not aware that there are forces working towards a particular end purposefully and industriously, and so will be surprised when that end is achieved. Oh well, most of the conspirators delude themselves about that too.
There's a lot of progressive semi-conspiracies that work like that. One can't help noticing the pattern:
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this will not happen
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this is not happening
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this is happening rarely and for random uncorrelated reasons
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this is happening and it's a good thing! (or if it's obviously bad then nobody could've predicted it, also it's a part and parcel of the hustle and bustle).
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I hear you about the existential angst though.
I haven't read "The Three Body Problem" yet, so idk if I'm talking about a similar feeling, but Charles Stross' "Palimpsest" put me into a very strange state of mind closer to the end. It begins as a straight up rewrite of Asimov's "The End of Eternity" (which Stross freely admits) but then goes elsewhere.
(2) beholden to an anti-white “conspiracy”, which (2a) is influenced by anti-white academics sometimes
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Immigration massively benefits poor, non-white immigrants themselves, so it's our moral duty to promote it.
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Unfortunately the white majority is racist in various ways, from passing racist laws limiting immigration in the first place, to systemically exploiting illegal immigrants, to whites oppressing nonwhites on an individual yet systemic level (for example, managers are likely to be white, white managers are likely to have unconscious biases against nonwhite subordinates).
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Asking whites nicely to stop being racist hasn't worked yet and is unlikely to suddenly start working, therefore it's our moral duty to seek other solutions.
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Decreasing the proportion of whites in the society will gradually strip them of their democratic and societal power and improve the situation. Note that things improve on the margin too, we don't need to wait until the white population drops below some magical fraction to see results, every percent of fewer whites makes things better for nonwhites.
Therefore a moral duty of every person who believes in (1), (2), and (3) (which is every liberal/progressive/left-leaning person) is to support (4) as a goal, support things like increased non-white immigration and oppose any attempts to increase white fertility, with an explicit purpose of making western countries less white.
There's no need for a "conspiracy" if everyone with certain beliefs pushes for certain political actions that follow from those beliefs with a near mathematical inevitability. Of course if you ask a progressive white if they really want to make whites a minority they would vehemently deny it, though without any principled argument for why not. And they sure do act in ways that are consistent with them believing in the moral necessity of (4), at least unconsciously.
(2b) is influenced by Jewish groups that benefit as they retain strong in-group biases while everyone else de-homogenizes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181107090043/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/magazine/george-soros-democrat-open-society.html is a very interesting article, not only it's a respectable journalist writing for a paper of record unlike some lunatic rambling for hours on youtube, but also rather than being hostile to the conspiracy he wholeheartedly supports it; rather than exposing it he boasts about it. How can we not believe him?
(you probably want to read the intro of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl for some context)
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
what do you mean by burning off horrible habits, how does that work? if somebody died having stolen on some occasions, burning in purgatory is not going to reverse any of the thefts he did. and once he gets into heaven why would he need to steal anyway and if he steals in heaven, there is nothing in christianity about being kicked out of heaven, and if there was, purgatory would no longer be needed by your rationalization.
Imagine the world as a reinforcement learning environment that's intended to produce Good Servants of God. Emphasis on willing to serve God. Now the thing is, God doesn't care at all about punishing anyone, it only cares about burning out whatever parts of one's personality that prevented them from obeying His rules. An evil person who rejected God completely will have only a few parts of his personality lifted into the Godhood. A nice person who sinned occasionally and was upset about it will have the sinning part of himself removed, as he wanted all along, and get uploaded mostly intact.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
With AGI on the horizon he’s a god damn prophet.
Even more of a prophet than you probably realize. I once collected every single mention of the Butlerian Jihad from the first four books, which was surprisingly few, about a page of relevant text all together, and apparently it was not about any kind of Skynet type of situation, but the machines naturally forcing the society to be more convenient/predictable/understandable to themselves. Think along the lines of choosing extra classes in college not because of something that interests you but because you know that an AI would consider that when recommending your career, and you know that you'll accept its recommendation because it's the best for you and so on. And with the AIs optimizing the society for predictability it was robbing humanity of its future, kinda like Leto II's plan actually but without the reverse psychology part.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
What are better writers in the same category though? I've heard a few names, like August Derleth, but apparently nobody reads them at all (including me).
And Lovecraft isn't that bad of a writer anyways, IMO. I've read everything he has written, twice, and enjoyed it. The only really bad story was https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Medusa%27s_Coil which is so hilariously racist it's good actually!
O, that reminded me, if you want to read something really REALLY bad, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lair_of_the_White_Worm by Bram Stoker after he suffered a couple of strokes apparently. Words can't do it justice.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
And on the meaning side, we long ago reached the age where, per John Adams, the majority of the population could “ study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain”. They choose to collect Funko Pops, play slot machines or gacha games, watch reality TV and porn.
You and everyone else here (including @DaseindustriesLtd) are way too optimistic. You envision the failure mode of a UBI program as some recipients choosing a half-time job as a cashier over composing poems. The absolute worst possibility is them playing video games all the time.
We have had multiple attempts at UBI already, even if they weren't called that and differed in various unimportant aspects. Paris banlieues, US projects where 95% of inhabitants are on the dole--oh how you'd want them to play vidya all day instead of filling their upper levels of Maslow hierarchy with doing drugs, selling drugs, murdering other drug sellers, theft, robbery, general destruction of property, rape, riots, arson, every antisocial thing you can come up with they actually do. And they form a generationally unemployed underclass, a lot of people with no respect for labor and nothing but contempt for the hand that is feeding them. And they vote, besides burning up cars for fun.
This is the hard problem that any UBI-like proposal has to solve, not the pedestrian stuff like not preventing people from having part time jobs or removing unnecessary barriers to getting healthcare.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Does anyone remember (or can google) a Slate Star Codex post where he shared his experiences doing child psychiatry, in particular the constant refrain of how psychopathic children turned out to be adopted from rape victims and the like? The closest I found was https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/19/genetic-russian-roulette/ but I think that the post I remember had the adoption angle in particular. It's very probable that it was just a part of a larger post.
To expand on how I see these things. If a flat earther comes here and not only makes arguments but engages with counter-arguments in good faith, that's all good. If they flat out ignore the strongest counter-argument, because they are literally too stupid to understand how, for example, fire works (which neandertals understood), or maybe even pretend to be that stupid (which is also stupid in its own way), then I think that:
It's good for everyone else on the forum to be made aware that the person in question is very very stupid (or pretends to be) so arguing with them is a waste of time.
The person in question forfeited their right to be taken seriously by not taking counter-arguments remotely seriously.
The forum would benefit from such people being named and shamed for their real or pretend stupidity and be driven away and the land of the heathen consume them.
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