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Here's Udio, a new AI music generator that has emerged as a competitor to Suno. There's less of the audio "artifacting" that exists in a lot of AI music tools, and it can actually do some pretty decent generation from keywords. It's early days and there are limitations and still identifiable signs of AI-ness, but it's quite a large step forward from the previous iterations.
The emergence of all these musical AIs as of late has been quite validating, especially since I've had a good amount of arguments with art people I know about the ability of AI to create music - as someone who makes music as a hobbyist I've come at it from the perspective of "these are all just patterns and systems of rules, and can be imitated easily by an agent familiar enough with those rules". In similar fashion to those who predicted that visual art would be difficult to achieve via AI, those who were predicting that this ability was not generalisable to music were wrong.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
Whether this is good or not is a question of values and not really related to the point, the topic of discussion is more about whether it's possible.
I think your scenario is unrealistic in any case - automation of manual labour tasks is certainly feasible (and has been achieved in many cases) and more such jobs in these domains will eventually become obsolete once technological advances make the cost of doing so lower than employing human labour, but that's besides the point. You can be an AI doomer and still realise that AI has immense potential. Plenty of the people discussed on this forum certainly believe so (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, etc). But there are still a lot of people basically treating AI as a hype-fad pushed by techbro caricatures, who regard automation of all these oh-so-human pursuits as practically impossible and scoff at the mention of AGI, and pretty much every two years their predictions get overturned.
How do you remember large amounts of information indefinitely without making a sustained, concerted attempt to do so? The system I have developed so far is to maintain a series of detailed notes which I refer to periodically whenever I want to recall things. But these notes have become almost prohibitive in length, and read any section of these notes infrequently enough and it's like the information is Teflon-coated, things become difficult to recall very quickly and this is especially true after I've made concerted attempts to cram new information into my head. It gets displaced by other things and the topics I want to learn (and argue) about are typically topics which are quite deep.
This is partially for the sake of helping me make persuasive cases in real life. It's something I've been trying to do more of for the past half-year, and it is at least part of the reason why I am participating less on social media now (other reasons for this include personal stuff, such as a family member having a stroke - this has put things into perspective a little bit and has made me deprioritise spending as much time on political screaming matches on the internet as I used to).
It would also be nice to get tips on how to handle real-time debate. I think I've generally been doing well and think I've been able to marshal a good amount of evidence in favour of the claims I make, but sometimes I trip up because I'm still not acclimatised to the dynamics of real-time debate and haven't yet grown fully accustomed to the unique characteristics of that specific debate format. Online, the speed of information recall is less of an issue simply because you can take time to refresh your memory, compose your thoughts, smooth out any holes, etc, before putting out the best version of your argument you possibly can. In real life, discussions are very scattershot and claims and counter-claims get thrown around all the time, questions get posed to you that you aren't always capable of recalling the answer to, and you need to remember and consolidate all the information you have in your brain in order to cope with it. No mistakes or hesitations or God forbid admissions of "I don't 100% remember at the moment, but I think..." are allowed, or your credibility slips. You have to be very careful with the words that come out of your mouth, and momentary slips in concentration can be fatal to your persuasiveness.
I would like to debate as well as I possibly can, and while that's easier online (you just have to put in a lot of detailed work, which I can do) in a real-time setting the demands and pressures are different.
So I've recently watched the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. One of the central plots of the show (and from what I can gather, also the book series) seems to be disappointingly half-baked, especially considering that the plot device is the namesake of the show and the title of the first book.
Something that's established early on is that the San-Ti (or the Trisolarans) live in a chaotic three-body (really a four-body) system that can't be predicted, and despite having the capability to enter into lungfish-like dormancy their civilisations kept being wiped out due to not being able to predict when destructive climatic shifts would occur. You could, however, probably predict the chaotic orbits of three bodies solely through simulation, the aliens would probably be capable of this. The issue for us and why it is "unsolvable" is that there’s no simple one size fits all solution where you can plug in initial starting conditions and predict the state of three bodies at any point in time - but you can move each ball a little bit as a small amount of time passes, and then recalculate.
Of course, methods which iteratively compute position can and do deviate from reality, a small error can result in large deviations in the model over a very long period of time, but you can minimise error to a very high degree. And if you’re living on the planets themselves, you can constantly update the state of your simulation every time your model observably deviates from reality. So an iteratively computed model, continuously updated to align with current state, would probably help them avoid dying off at any given point, because T = 0 keeps being reset and you only ever need to calculate T + 1.
Note also, these are aliens that can unfold a photon’s higher dimensions, inscribe a supercomputer onto it, fold it back down, send it to a target site then communicate instantaneously with it via quantum entanglement. Aliens capable of incomprehensible space magic aren't capable of simulation, apparently.
One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.
The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.
It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.
I've been refreshing the counts for the past few hours, and this referendum failed even harder than I thought it was going to as well. 60% rejecting the proposal and losing all states is a pretty damning result for The Voice. I'm particularly surprised by Tasmania's rejection, because it was a state that Yes supporters were relying on to support the referendum, and surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes.
Something that Mundine stated in the aftermath of the referendum results did resonate with me quite heavily:
Warren Mundine, the leading no campaigner, has credited his side’s focusing on migrant communities for helping defeat the referendum.
Mundine spoke to Sky News, noting “some of them come from countries where they were second-class citizens” and were open to a message about the voice causing a divide.
We knew that the migrant community is 50% of Australia, either born overseas or their parents have been born overseas. We deliberately target that group.”
I'm the kind of migrant that has experienced this, and am incredibly opposed to affirmative action. Progressives might think their ideas are revolutionary and new, but their mindset of victimhood, group accountability and unequal racial treatment on that basis is basically endemic in many third-world countries, and many migrants have been on the wrong side of policies that look and quack a good amount like progressive politics.
As a result, I was in support of No from the very beginning, and though I couldn't vote in it I am happy with the outcome of the referendum. If the Voice had ended up with too much influence it would essentially have been a permanent, constitutionally mandated lobbying group which constituted an outright subversion of a proper and impartial democratic process, if it ended up with too little influence it would have basically been useless. Both would have warranted a No vote.
Well, TIFU.
Today I managed to achieve the incredible feat of making it to work over two hours late. I was so smashed that I slept for 11 hours, through an alarm, and made it to work at 11:35 AM. Was expecting to be raked over the coals once I got there and apologised, but instead my superior repeatedly told me it was alright and that she was just worried if something had happened to me.
While I am usually a very reliable worker and often work close to 50 hour weeks (for a job that pays far lower than the median Australian salary), I don't feel good about it. At all. I stayed three hours after close of business just to try and make up for it and got off work at 8pm, something I was told I didn't have to do but did anyway. I feel especially bad because my superiors are genuinely nice to me and even though the job is tiring, requires a lot of task juggling, and doesn't pay very much at all, that's not their fault and I would really like to not disappoint them.
So here's an admittedly fairly trivial matter that's been on my mind lately. This is a bit of Fun, bit of Wellness, take it mainly as a lighthearted question because it's really not weighing on me too badly all things considered.
It's Friday and I'm home after 10 hours poring over numbers in Excel spreadsheets. I find that after a workday like this it's hard to get myself to do anything at all, it's almost as if there is a daily quota of mental effort I can expend on things. Once I devote all of that to preparing people's financial statements, income tax returns, business activity statements and so on I can't devote any more of my focus to my own projects and endeavours. Not to mention memory limitations, I am now using a significant portion of my storage capacity to track goings-on at work (made worse by my clients' numerous demands, which I will mention later) and remember the appropriate accounting and tax treatment for various matters as well as the relevant circumstances of each of my clients. The work itself isn't necessarily super difficult in and of itself, it's just that there are a lot of clients asking for a lot of different things.
It's quite hard to coordinate anything after work too, because my clients are often absolute fucking children who expect they be catered to on a timeframe that suits them - for example, they want things to be done at a certain time yet sometimes take forever to provide the information necessary to do the work they request, and their delays sometimes require me to stay long after close of business. Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors. Said reviewer was not happy about that, and I have stopped planning anything after work because of this. Compared to other stuff that's happened though, this is a small matter - this same client requested that we do work over the Christmas period for them, when the office is closed and people are expected to take annual leave. Please note, they sprung this on us in November, when almost everyone else working on the client had already made travel plans, and as a result I might be the one who has to do that work.
I can't really list anything significant I do outside of work at the moment, because as it is right now the work week smashes me enough that I can't build up the level of focus necessary to actually do things. In other words, I feel as if I'm becoming my work, and I'm not sure if I like that.
How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.
This whole thing is genuinely hilarious, the fact that the "mummy" bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T. and the repeated assertions by the press that scientists managed to "draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating" makes this perhaps the most unintentionally funny thing I've read in a while. Guys, I measured the velocity of a moving car using mass spectrometry, please believe my results.
At this point, I would be glad to never hear about ayy lmaos again - I'm actually interested in the topic but the ayy craze has crossed the line into sheer parody. It's particularly frustrating because there are more credible (albeit circumstantial) pieces of evidence out there they could grab onto like the Viking Lander biological experiments, but their case has hinged around ridiculous UFOlogy and eyewitness testimony and now apparently they're resorting to using ridiculous E.T. looking mummies that obviously aren't faked at all.
At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018. The people who defended her, such as Dan Olson, are fairly prominent even now (Olson is a fairly popular YouTube documentarian nowadays, who's roughly BreadTube-adjacent). He accused 8chan of hosting CP and yet changed his twitter handle to include "Butts" in solidarity with Nyberg.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed.
I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.
This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.
I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.
I have a partner who likes cities. He has always seen himself living in one, and has a certain affinity to the culture and outlook of many city-dwellers. I am having trouble understanding or sympathising with his viewpoint, and vice versa.
This might seem tangential, but bear with me:
I went to the Blue Mountains over Easter - for the unacquainted, it is a large wilderness area outside of Sydney and a World Heritage site. It’s probably one of my most frequented excursion spots due to its proximity to the city, yet it’s a completely different world out there.
The first thing I noticed, as is the case virtually every time I leave a major urban area, is that the silence and solitude is palpable. You can leave the window open and not be assaulted with a storm of noise (which occurs in the city even on the 13th floor of a building, I can attest to that). Leaving for the great outdoors is quite a good way to clear away the mental clutter that accumulates when you are overstimulated for a long period of time. I’ve done this whenever I get the chance, and it never fails to reset my brain. I listen to music a lot in my normal day-to-day life, but here it just felt wrong to do so.
Another thing that stuck out to me is that you can actually see the stars come out at night. The older I get, the more I appreciate this feature of being outdoors. The ability to look up into the heavens on a quiet night and see the universe above you is something that just doesn’t get old.
The natural environment is breathtaking, too. There are dry sclerophyll forests heavy with the aroma of eucalyptus and dotted with the golden blooms of wattles, rainforest-lined valleys and canyons that plunge to depths of 500 metres, beautiful little waterfalls and mossy creeks that swell after rain, and so on. One night when I was there, I did a night hike to a cascade named Cataract Falls, armed with only a headlamp, and when I turned off the light there were glow worms all over the place. The waterfall was like a natural amphitheatre covered in these shining little blue lights, and it was hard to tell where they ended and where the stars began.
I think this, along with many other experiences, has led me to an inevitable conclusion: I really detest city life.
They’re overwhelming, impersonal, noise-filled, cluttered environments, where you’re virtually forced to rub shoulders (in the literal sense) with people if you want to leave your house, and which are incredibly aesthetically alienating, especially ever since the utilitarian commodification of architecture got started, the trend that Bauhaus and other such design schools put into motion.
Keep in mind, Australian cities are probably less “vibrant” and less dense than, say, North American ones. I routinely hear Australians complain that they have no real cities, that everything closes early and that the nightlife is nonexistent, they consider Australia a country you go to for the outdoors and not the city life. Sydney itself is a reasonably well-maintained city, there are no seedy strip malls and it’s fairly walkable - but I still find it to be far too crowded and too noisy for my tastes, and find that the culture and views of the cosmopolitan urban-dwellers range from insipid to downright irritating.
The conveniences that cities offer are nice. But I am frankly struggling to think of any significant conveniences that are offered in a city which aren’t also offered in a small to medium size town that offers far greater recreation opportunities. If you can get a reasonable range of food and lodging, and some medical care, I find that sufficient. If the goal is thriving nightlife, constant activities, cosmopolitan feel and being able to go places at any time of the day then sure, cities are The Place To Be. But I place zero value on any of these things.
Cities are places I live in solely for work-related reasons. I have lived in many, and they are places I would never live in given the choice, and it makes it really difficult for me to even put myself in a frame of mind where I see it as the optimal way to live. Ask him about any of the things I mentioned, and he’ll reveal that none of it actually matters hugely to him. He finds these less urbanised places dead and depressing, a viewpoint which I could never understand - after you’ve lived in a city for any amount of time, it feels interminable - like an endless randomly generated series of the very same hedonistic pleasures expressed in slightly different ways.
Perhaps it really is just tribal affiliation - he identifies more with the outlook of those in the city and less with those in more rural areas. For me, it’s the very opposite.
I’m not sure what the point of writing this post is, I suppose I’m sourcing hot takes. It’s a difference that we’re both somewhat adamant about, and that may cause issues down the road - so maybe I’m asking to understand, or maybe I’m asking if anyone else here feels the same as I do.
Review: Echopraxia, by Peter Watts
So I recently read Peter Watts' Echopraxia, a follow-up to his acclaimed book Blindsight, which is one of my favourite science fiction books I've read to date. And my opinions on this are... mixed, to say the least. In order to explain my thoughts on the book, first I will have to give a detailed synopsis of the plot-points. This is going to be long, since the book is very crammed with details, and if you miss even one, it's very difficult to understand anything that's going on. Spoilers abound, of course. Minimise if you don't want to see them.
Plot
The book starts in the aftermath of the events of Blindsight, where the ship Theseus was sent out to investigate a potential alien lifeform in the Oort Cloud. As far as the characters in Echopraxia know, Theseus simply stopped broadcasting all of a sudden and went quiet.
Echopraxia starts with parasitologist Daniel Brüks being herded into a war in the Oregon desert between the super-intelligent hive-minded Bicameral Order and an also-super-intelligent vampire called Valerie, who the Bicams end up brokering a deal with. Brüks gets caught up in the middle of their plans, and eventually ends up in the Bicams' monastery.
Only a short while later most of the Bicams are killed off by a bio-engineered virus made by baselines (normal humans) afraid of their abilities. They've seen what the Bicamerals are capable of when they were waging war against Valerie, and that scared the military enough to try and kill them off. The remnants of the Bicams barely escape Earth on a spaceship called the Crown of Thorns, alongside Brüks, Valerie, soldier Jim Moore, translator Lianna Ludderodt (who acts as a translator for the Bicamerals) and pilot Rakshi Sengupta. Brüks follows along because he's seen more than he should of the Bicamerals' operation, and realises that if he returns to society now they'll imprison and interrogate him because of the potential information they could extract.
In transit, the Crown of Thorns gets attacked by baselines again, and in response the Bicams snap the ship in half, detaching the living quarters from the engine and blowing up the engine in order to make their pursuers believe that they've been destroyed. As this is all happening Brüks finds out that the Bicams in fact had a preexisting plan to use the Crown of Thorns to investigate the Icarus Array, which is essentially an energy generator that orbits the sun. Some unauthorised information was sent from the Theseus mission back down to the Icarus Array (presumably by the aliens that Theseus was sent to investigate), and the Bicams believe they will find something they call "The Angels Of The Asteroids" there. Once at Icarus they plan to start re-fabricating a new engine to cover the rest of their trip.
Other character motivations are also revealed in this portion. Moore is with the Bicams because his son Siri Keeton left on the Theseus mission, and the Bicams possess information about Theseus that he wants access to. Sengupta is there in order to pay for the life support of her wife called Celu Macdonald, whose condition was very indirectly caused by an oversight of Brüks and his colleagues. She does not know this yet, though.
The Crown of Thorns docks with the Icarus Array, and the crew finds out that a portion of Icarus has been infected by a time-sharing slime mold (Portia). Presumably what was being sent down from Theseus coded for the in situ construction of this lifeform. While the crew studies Portia the book launches into discussion about the nature of reality, exploring ideas about digital physics, and how physics is something akin to the OS of the universe. Brüks learns about the Bicamerals' conception of "God" as a virus that breaks said OS, and learns that they think Portia is the Face Of God (because the way Portia was sent to Icarus shouldn't strictly be possible, and is a demonstration of anomalous behaviours in the laws of physics). Their goal is to "perhaps worship, or disinfect”.
The crew eventually start managing to communicate with Portia, which goes wrong once they realise what it's capable of. It has in fact managed to infect the entirety of Icarus without anyone knowing, is capable of reallocating its own mass throughout its structure to create walls and appendages where they didn't previously exist, and can also harden itself like armour. Portia traps the Bicams, Ludderodt and Moore in Icarus, attempting to conduct a sampling transect, and Brüks tries to rescue them. In the chaos Valerie takes the opportunity to slaughter the remaining Bicams, and Brüks flees back into the Crown of Thorns. Valerie pursues him and somehow manages to trigger a seizure in Brüks that completely incapacitates him, but Moore intervenes at the last second. He locks Valerie outside the ship and jettisons Icarus into the sun, seemingly killing Portia.
On the trip back, the characters find out that Valerie isn't really gone, she's just tied herself onto the outside of the spaceship and has used her vampire hibernation powers to lay dormant on the journey home. They also discover that Valerie has been priming Brüks the whole trip to Icarus, subtly rewiring his brain in order to be able to trigger seizures on command with a single codeword. It also becomes clear that Valerie orchestrated the viral attack on the Bicams early on. She knew that the war she started with them would scare the baselines into releasing a biological virus into their monastery, enough to keep the Bicams out of the way for the trip to Icarus but not enough to derail the trip happening.
The characters also unveil a good amount of Valerie's backstory. Valerie was actually a test subject and, along with other vampires, staged a synchronised, coordinated escape from a research facility despite vampires not being able to even tolerate each other's presence in the same room (they habitually kill each other on sight). Brüks suspects that the inability of vampires to tolerate each other was not a naturally evolved aspect of vampire psychology, rather he believes that humans added it in when they brought vampires back to life as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy.
Furthermore, you find out that Jim Moore has been receiving messages from his son who left on the Theseus mission, but Sengupta and Brüks actually think that these messages are being sent by something that is simply pretending to be his son for the purpose of hacking his brain from a distance. The implication here is that the entirety of Blindsight (which is comprised of messages recorded by Siri Keeton) might be a complete fabrication by the aliens.
The Crown of Thorns arrives at Earth. In order to kill Valerie, they escape from Crown of Thorns to a landing satellite and direct Crown of Thorns to burn up in the atmosphere. At some point Valerie gets onto the lander and sneaks in unnoticed. Once they land, Sengupta picks a fight with Brüks when she discovers he's "responsible" for her wife's death, and learns how to trigger the seizure-response Valerie implanted in Brüks. Moore steps in and shoots Sengupta, then Valerie steps in and paralyses Moore by whispering in his ear (presumably she has been rewiring his brain to respond to certain stimuli too).
Valerie then takes Brüks back to the Oregon desert, and we slowly learn that Portia has somehow hitched a ride on Brüks. It is in fact incubating in him, improving his cognition (it is implied that this is done by deconstructing his conscious processes). Infecting Brüks seems to have been the goal of the Bicameral Order. Though it is not stated outright, the Bicamerals likely infected Brüks once they found out that Portia was capable of infecting humans and acting as an interface between humans, making humanity as a whole into one big hive-mind capable of intelligence on a level not seen before. Not so great for the individual humans who lose their identity, though.
Valerie's goal, too, becomes apparent when she injects a patch into Brüks towards the end of the book, meant to hack Portia to include a cure for vampire weaknesses (namely their inability to cooperate and tolerate each other). It seems that she wanted the Bicamerals pacified in order to place her plan on top of theirs without any resistance from them. Portia seems to take Valerie's "hack" as an act of aggression, and since it's at this point piloting Brüks' body to a certain extent, it kills Valerie.
Brüks, realising that Portia is in him, jumps off a cliff in an attempt to end Portia. But Portia does not die, and it continues piloting Brüks' body, walking out into civilisation to infect others.
Continued in below comment
A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!
Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.
Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort. "Considering the motives of a source" is generally a good principle, I agree. That just as much applies to your in-group as it does to your out-group, and defending someone from critique without knowing whether that critique has basis or not is not epistemically justifiable. The motives of those making a claim are ultimately irrelevant to the truth of a claim. "Being skeptical" does not entail "knee-jerk rejection", especially in situations when the evidence is already there for you to look at.
Regarding your other comment on this, I have no doubt that at least some of the people here were ignorant in some way or other (though some, such as Galvez and Ryulong, were almost certainly being dishonest). I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.
The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.
The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).
One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.
The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.
This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.
Haven't written anything significant in one of these Wellness threads for a while, suppose now's a good time.
I'm currently in my fourth week of my first job at an accounting firm after a year or so of actively looking for a job (after recovering from years of chronic illness that derailed a lot of my plans). A lot has been thrown at me so far and it's been fairly exhausting. Despite how draining it can be, this is a development I'm fairly pleased with, and I'm even more pleased with it given that I have a reasonable level of certainty that I got in because of merit and not identity. During the job application process, I had a practice of entering "prefer not to answer" to any identity-based questions that could work in my favour, especially if the organisation indicated they would like to diversity hire (an all too common sight in Australia).
There is one thing that has been causing dissonance though, and it's the gulf between how I perceive myself vs. how other people seem to perceive me. So far people have told me that I have been doing well, and according to my superiors everyone who has worked with me has offered up very positive feedback. I am frankly very perplexed by this - I consider the rate at which I've been picking things up to be normal and expected, if not slower than I would personally like. I do attempt to be as fastidious as possible in my work, but I get the sense that I sometimes ask questions in excess and miss things that should be obvious. Note, I'm not complaining about the positive feedback in any way and I'm glad they consider me to have been performing well, but it's genuinely surreal to see how different their evaluation of my performance is from my own.
Perhaps I'm just used to unreasonably high expectations and perhaps my idea of "basic competence" is biased upwards, but I feel like short of actual mental retardation it's very hard to mess up what I'm currently doing. And it sometimes makes me think that the other shoe is going to drop, and other people are eventually going to see me in the way that I see myself.
Honestly, this just goes to show me that framing is everything and I think the unnecessarily obfuscatory and slanted nature of the original wording is causing most of the controversy.
I agree with the reframe posted in the Twitter comments: "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you die". If formulated in this way, there would probably be much less disagreement over the optimal solution here, and picking blue so you can also save people from their own choice to pick blue would be much less of a point of debate.
Thoughts
Okay, with that general synopsis down, I want to talk about the story, the things I liked and didn't like.
Firstly, I want to talk about the pacing. The whole first portion of the plot, up to and including Portia's attack on the crew and the ejection of Icarus into the sun, is incredibly gripping and packed full of interesting ideas (Portia's time-sharing, as well as the concept of God as a virus, are very interesting, and the epistemological discussions contrasting Brüks' empiricism and Ludderodt's faith are very well done). When they discover Portia it feels like the plot is building to some climax - but that climax happens very quickly at the book's midpoint, and on the journey back to Earth and onwards, the plot slows significantly. In the second half there's a lot of downtime which is almost entirely used to contextualise prior events in the story. The characters feel very passive in this part of the book, and it just seems like they're for the most part discovering and clarifying what happened in the earlier portions without really doing much of anything themselves. I am aware that this type of book isn't necessarily about the action, but the story arc does need to feel satisfying somehow.
The book's structure really does feel like Watts used Freytag's pyramid (in a strange way). Introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion. If you were to interpret that very literally with modern definitions of "climax", you would get the general structure of Echopraxia where the book's energetic peak is straight in the middle, and that means you have a lot of book to sit through and not too much tension to sustain you after Portia attacks and is (seemingly) ejected into the sun. Plot points are clarified and some of the development from then on is certainly very interesting, but it definitely doesn't feel like a particularly eventful second half of the book. Not in the traditional sense, anyway.
I want to re-iterate that I think Portia was incredible. Watts' aliens are always very well done, and Portia's ability to emulate a larger, more complex brain by modelling one part, then saving the results to feed into another part, was a very neat idea. The way Portia communicated with the crew was great, too, and very suspenseful. I feel like devoting more time to exploring Icarus and Portia would've definitely strengthened the book, because the main interaction with the alien is confined only to one of the five main chapters (and that chapter is by far the best section of the book). There's less focus on the dynamics of first contact per se here than there is in Blindsight, and I think this weakens it quite a bit. The curiosity that comes with exploration is a great driver.
And I suppose this is something that irks me, because there's some really neat ideas contained in here, but they never quite pay off in the way you'd think. Instead of the focus being on an adversarial dynamic between the alien and the humans (or post-humans) we get only a small sliver of that. Rather, the main conflict is a much more convoluted conflict involving super-intelligences trying to repeatedly outwit and one-up other super-intelligences in the service of their own goals. Seeing the characters be moved around and manipulated by intelligences greater than themselves with their own inscrutable agenda you can only hope to guess at is quite interesting for sure, however this conflict has less of a sense of unity and purpose for the reader, something I think is important if you want people to be invested. Sure, there’s a risk of making it too much like Blindsight, but at the same time I think there’s no need to change something that works.
Additionally, these post-human plans, when you manage to figure them out, don't always click in an extremely satisfying fashion either. For all her cunning, Valerie's plan is convoluted beyond belief. Her plan is to confront an alien organism whose biology and function she has absolutely no clue about, get a human infected with it (how do you know it can even "infect" until you've encountered it), and somehow... hack said alien in order to relieve vampires of their inability to tolerate each other.
I doubt Valerie could have predicted the chain of events here, so how could Valerie have known that what was on Icarus would aid her in the goal of freeing vampires? Even super-intelligent minds like Valerie's would be limited by information constraints. And why in the world would you do this anyway? If you wanted to free vampires from the cognitive shackles of "divide and conquer" and you had the ability to reprogram a completely novel alien organism, it seems easier and more straightforward to stay on Earth and manufacture some airborne biotechnology or something similar with the aim of reprogramming vampire cognition. There's no real need here to piggyback off the plans of the Bicamerals. Either I'm missing something, or Valerie's plan doesn't make a single bit of sense.
The Bicamerals' plan is less questionable. The Bicams themselves clearly didn't know exactly what was on Icarus up until they confronted it and understood the nature of what they had encountered. Then when they realised what they were dealing with, they infected Brüks with it. They were playing by ear, and found something that they could use. Okay. What I am struggling with, however, is understanding the game plan of the aliens - specifically why on Earth the alien Theseus went up against would intentionally seed the Icarus Array with a lifeform capable of turning the entirety of humanity into a super-intelligent hive-mind. That is an utterly suicidal move.
On that note, I want to talk about just how ridiculously omnipotent the vampires are. Valerie is essentially nothing short of a superhuman character, capable of subtly rewiring human brains on the fly, and she is also capable of rewiring her own brain to make her impervious to the Crucifix Glitch. She coordinated with other vampires in a rebellion in spite of "divide and conquer", and throughout the book Valerie is capable of manipulating and eventually murdering a super-intelligent posthuman hive-mind. Sure, vampires are supposed to be capable of achieving things that we couldn't (though if a reader's suspension of disbelief has already been stretched too far at this point I would understand).
What really breaks it for me is that the reader is also supposed to believe that despite these incredible cognitive advantages, vampires somehow went extinct when humans built architecture due to lack of access to their prey. Making this worse is that it is also implied that vampires were more able to collaborate with each other in the past and that their inability to tolerate each other was something humans put into their head. But if it is the case that vampires can out-manoeuvre humans even with these types of cognitive handicaps and despite the fact that right-angles are far more prevalent in the modern world than it would've been in human prehistory, there would be no standing a chance against them in the past. They would simply not have gone extinct in the first place.
I realise I sound as if I dislike this book, but I don’t. I enjoyed it quite a bit, in fact. It’s more that the parts that are done well are done really well, and the parts that are done poorly are a bit of a shame and really stick out as a result.
FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.
In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.
I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."
The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.
I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".
Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.
EDIT: clarity
Are there any alternative systems to RNA/DNA that can pass on genetic information? I'm not talking about stuff that essentially just uses the central principle and structure of DNA with some of the specifics changed, like XNAs which just use a different sugar backbone, or Hachimoji DNA which just adds on extra base pairs, I'm talking about plausible hypothesised systems that are radically different to what we use now.
One of the most fascinating and out-there proposals I've come across is Graham Cairns-Smith's clay hypothesis, which posits that clay crystals were the first genetic material. The idea here is that crystal growth is a form of self-replication that "reproduces" its arrangement, and can even transmit defects. The pattern is then "passed along" when the crystal breaks (scission) and continues to grow independently from the original crystal. Eventually, a "genetic takeover" of sorts happens, where clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surface improve their replication and catalyse the formation of increasingly complex proto-organic molecules that eventually take over the original genetic substrate as the new genetic material.
Schulman, Yurke and Winfree in their paper "Robust self-replication of combinatorial information via crystal growth and scission" use the same principles to create a set of DNA "tiles" that replicate its sequence of tiles through crystal growth. Each tile has "sticky ends" that hybridise with each other, and under appropriate growth conditions, complementary sticky ends hybridise, while non-complementary sticky ends are unlikely to interact. The interaction of these sticky ends allows for accurate sequence replication during growth, and once crystal growth has propagated the sequence, these additional layers are then "cleaved" off through mechanical scission.
However, that's the only truly interesting and novel idea surrounding this I am aware of, and I'm not entirely sure if and how this system of replication could achieve a significant level of biological complexity (save for a "genetic takeover" that effectively replaces the original system). I can't help but feel there are probably more such systems that could be posited.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
It's not my framing, it's someone else's whose I agree with (in part at least because it stresses the "personal agency" aspect behind someone selecting blue), but if framed in the way you've postulated I still think there would be less disagreement over the optimal solution. I also think "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you, along with everyone else who has also taken the blue pill, die" is good wording.
I'm not allergic to altruism, but assuming no coordination and no knowledge of others' choices I seriously cannot envision a real-life scenario with actual life-and-death stakes where the majority pick blue. I've got a fairly high level of confidence that people would be rational actors in such a situation and thus consider "blue" to be suicide with no actual added benefit to anyone else.
I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose.
This seems to be a common trap people fall into, the second people gain any amount of status within the system their ideas quickly soften and become more in line with the cultural hegemony. Hanania isn't an exception. I don't even think this is necessarily intentional dishonesty per se, people are primed to shift their beliefs the second the costs of that belief become unacceptable.
I'd wager your average, well-adjusted person is engaging in motivated self-delusion on many different topics without being aware of it, and that it is the people who have nothing to lose (or think they do) who have the ability to entertain independent thought the most. This doesn't mean they necessarily come to the correct conclusions, it's rather that their conclusions are not constrained by social desirability and are more "honest" in that regard.
Depends on who was doing the evacuation. On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch certainly favoured women and children in the evacuation, but when he could find no more women and children, he allowed men on. On the port side, Second Officer Charles Lightoller interpreted it as women and children only and prevented men beyond crew from boarding them, even when there were spaces available.
"During the evacuation, Lightoller took charge of lowering the lifeboats on the port side of the boat deck.[10] He helped to fill several lifeboats with passengers and launched them. Lightoller interpreted Smith's order for "the evacuation of women and children" as essentially "women and children only". As a result, Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board, meaning to fill them to capacity once they had reached the water. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Godfrey Peuchen has the distinction of being the only adult male passenger Lightoller allowed into the boats on the port side evacuation, due to his previous nautical experience and offer of assistance when there were no seamen available from the Titanic's own complement to help command one of the lowering lifeboats."
What Quantumfreakonomics is describing did happen. And the relatively small proportion of men who did survive the Titanic came under public scrutiny and were often reflexively judged as cowards.
EDIT: As an aside, it should also be noted that there were instances of boys (at least by today's standards) being deterred from entering lifeboats on the Titanic. For example, there's George Frederick Sweet: "On the night of the sinking young George, alongside Samuel Herman, saw Mrs Herman and her daughters off in one of the lifeboats. George, although not quite 15-years-old, was probably deterred from entering a lifeboat despite his young age and he and Samuel Herman died together, George being just one day short of his 15th birthday. Their bodies, if recovered, were never identified." In a similar instance, Rhoda Abbott refused her place in a lifeboat because she realised her sons (aged 13 and 16) would not be able to enter.
Then there's this affidavit by Emily Ryerson: "We saw people getting into boats, but waited our turn. There was a rough sort of steps constructed to get up to the window. My boy, Jack, was with me. An officer at the window said, "That boy can't go." My husband stepped forward and said, "Of course, that boy goes with his mother; he is only 13." So they let him pass. They also said, "No more boys." I turned and kissed my husband, and as we left he and the other men I knew - Mr. Thayer, Mr. Widener, and others - were all standing there together very quietly."
That's one of my favourite artists and is certainly suitable for children. After the RDJ album, I recommend showing them the accompanying EP, Come To Daddy, and the title track's music video.
When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
https://archive.is/2ciMR
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
The response from other users is as such:
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
https://archive.is/B8jBZ
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
https://archive.vn/eBVCb
And:
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
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