MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I think a big problem that has come up for IOT products is that they’re much more common than they were in the 1990s and are often connected to critical infrastructure either for private homes or to cameras inside the home. It might not have mattered how hack able a system attached to a dorm refrigerator is when it counts the beers removed and orders more. It’s not a well known system in 1998, and even if someone got into it, the worst that you could do is either change the program to never order beer, or maybe order a lot of beer. Attach the same system to 100,000 homes and have it use your credit card to order food from Amazon and you have a lot of actual damage you can do. You can steal credit cards. You can order stuff and have the address changed to your address. You can muck with whatever system it’s using to order from Amazon. Connect an automated door lock on a dorm room that can be opened by smartphone isn’t as dangerous as the same system on the doors of a business or government building.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
Is fuentes encouraging people to move to the country and form a community? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him saying something like that. I wouldn’t have a problem with people advocating that they and people like them form close knit communities in the country and adopt whatever they consider to be the ideal lifestyle. I’d only really object to people imposing that lifestyle on other people.
I’m not even convinced language revivals in such isolated communities is as hard as you think. The issue is getting enough fluency that the next generation is raised speaking that language, rather than speaking the language of the broader culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
This might be true, but for most non-humanity majors, they have a degree that signals a marketable skill and therefore they can often get a job that pays decently enough without the need to go and take a second degree to avoid working at Starbucks or something. Humanities don’t teach you skills businesses need or want. And on the art end, it’s almost anti-career skills. Nobody will ever ask you to write a screenplay or make an oil painting in an office. At least the psych degree requires researching and producing reports, often presenting findings to the public or peers.
The other negative of an artist is that quite often they don’t understand just how unlikely success is in their field and thus some will spend a decade or more “trying to make it” and keeping a low wage job that doesn’t make demands on their “art”. I know a guy who was still spending hundreds every month booking himself studio time to make cds of his music into his thirties. He’d spend time on the weekends playing gigs for free as well. Everyone knew he was wasting his life on this — he’d never actually have a career even as a local artist. But at the same time, he wasn’t moving forward in an actual career until well into his thirties.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I don’t see why that would be. I find a lot to admire about heredi Jews, the Amish, Mennonites, and other similar groups. I think as a model for forming stronger communities these groups while different share common features that could be easily adapted to creating enclaves of traditional culture for those who wants that. The secret sauce seems to be a strict set of community rules, dress and sometimes language that differs from the mainstream, and a focal point in religious beliefs and practices.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4d ago
I think we’ve by and large started yaslighting because of mistaken notions like being nonjudgmental and being supportive. In short, being polite, thus defaulting to whatever media and friends put out in the culture. Telling a kid that his art sucks hurts him and makes you feel like a mean person. Telling him how few people make it in professional art feels mean. And especially in the USA, being nice and polite no matter what harm may come from it is the norm, no matter what the consequences are. I don’t see this as true kindness because it’s often a lie that will eventually come to hurt that person as they make very expensive mistakes or otherwise give up on things they might want. Truth is freeing, and knows that the hobby isn’t going to feed them on the outset is going to allow them to make better choices.
Regarding the hobby-as-career thing, the culture is pushing it in large measure because the older contract isn’t true anymore. Any old job doesn’t give you even a working class life, raises are pitiful, and the cost of living is climbing. One way to keep people from rebelling is to subtly change the contract in the mind of the public. Don’t think about your job in terms of money, think about your job as a calling something that you were born to do. Then you won’t ask for the money or at least not as much.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4d ago
I don’t see resigning as a good answer here. If you resign you are personally absolved from having to make the decisions that will come up, and also unable to guide the response. It’s a cowardly way out. You know what will happen, you know what it likely means for history on both sides. You just don’t want your personal name on it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
I would consider a different possibility. These people may or may not be in therapy, I don’t know. But the normalization of therapy, and the normalization of therapy speak is that people are less likely to shame or punish bad behavior when the person doing it is suffering from mental illness. So a lot of people use this to their advantage just like people use minority status or being the son of an executive. Being seen that way is used to engage in bad behavior without having to pay a real price for it.
I do think therapy in wider society and therapy when the person isn’t severely mentally ill can be a problem, but I don’t see that as what is happening here. These people seem to know exactly what they’re doing, and they use therapy as a protection against people calling them out on their behavior.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
I don’t think it does. You can actually grow your own food. And you can make black bean burgers and so on or cook with chickpeas or something.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
It’s also a lot harder to make it common if you’re not willing to start small. I think the flexitarians will move the needle toward reduced demand for meat simply by forming the habit of eating less meat. And as more people are choosing to eat meat less and trying out vegetarian and vegan recipes and asking for those options in restaurants, then it’s going to be much more mainstream. And in fact I see it happening n grocery stores alongside keto and gluten free. People trying it out and doing it every once in a while was more than enough to put enough options in grocery stores that even in Missouri, I could easily get the kinds of foods that I want in any one of those diets. As time goes on, I expect that even more people will be willing to try black bean burgers or fake meat nuggets and never look back.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
I agree, but I think it’s a lot of the media and social media have take over so much mind-space that it’s driving an obsession with events that most people left to themselves would not care about while causing people to neglect the boring and important stuff they should care about.
Gaza is a case in point to me. The country is the size of Vermont, it has some oil, but its strategic importance is much lower than other oil exporters in the region. For most people, unless they practice Judaism or Islam, it’s no more or less impactful than any other conflict going on right now. If this war happened in 1984 when the news was on for an hour a night, nobody would care outside of Zionist Jews and Muslims. The White House would be doing what it is now— trying to negotiate an end to the fighting while giving bombs to Israel and food to Gaza. As it stands, the world is watching because the world is watched everything all the time.
I always find this instructive stuff when it comes to the outrages of the day. Most of it, when viewed from the point of view of long distance or time frames not only don’t actually matter that much, or matter much much less than the attention paid to them. Most actually resolve themselves without anyone doing anything. Mark that it happens but in a week or a month, it will likely resolve itself.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I never had a problem with any of the aesthetics of either lab grown or fake meat. In fact, personally I think both are good in the sense that it would convince people to a least give it a go and in a way that doesn’t affect their lifestyle that much.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I think honestly, you could probably do well creating something to re-orient gen z people into healthier directions. I’ve personally found a philosophy of Stoicism mixed with secular Buddhism to be helpful for me, and I suspect such a thing mixed with proper socialization and physical activity as a sort of “adult summer camp” experience could not only make you a fair amount of money, but help to make them and by extension the rest of society a bit healthier.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I think a lot of WEIRD people are stunted. And I don’t think men would do much better in a similarly worded “would you rather” scenario aimed at them. The issue is that the way we raise kids and the way we’re taught (or more properly mis-taught to judge risks, rewards, and dangers) tends to create an entire culture of infantile adults who can’t understand let alone handle the real world. And we do it to ourselves.
The first issue is extreme safetyism. We’ve gone from being a frontier people who were used to handling our own lives and the risks that came with it, to a people that are suffering from anxiety and depression in probably the safest environment humanity has ever known: a country that hasn’t had a war on her own soil in almost 200 years, where the biggest health risks are diseases of gluttony or old age, where most people face the workplace dangers of paper cuts, and where we commute strapped into cars that are designed to withstand collisions going much faster than they normally go. And I think a lot of it is down to safetyist lifestyles that not only don’t teach people to reasonably handle a risk, but create a mindset in which you’re taught to ruminate on the idea of injury death, insult and loss.
The second thing we’ve been taught is to put our own feelings on the level of facts. I’m not suggest that your feelings don’t matter at all, but I do think that we’ve put them much too far forward in our thinking process, which leads to all kinds of problems. First of all, feelings about a subject are not always true. You might be afraid of spiders, but if they aren’t actually dangerous to you, that fear is only going to harm you by diminishing your own life and your ability to live it. Second, focusing on feelings especially negative feelings just makes you feel worse. Focusing on positive emotions isn’t all that great either if you get so attached to the good feelings that the loss of them is catastrophic to you, or leads to unrealistic expectations of what life is like. Negative emotions are normal, and losses are common. You will experience both often. And if you’re focused on feelings, you’ll be miserable.
The third thing is that we aren’t taught to look to facts. Nobody is asking whether a thing they believe is actually true. They aren’t taught statistics, probability or logic in school, so they have no real toolsets to use to decide what is real or not or whether a thing they read or see is true. What are the actual facts on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza? Would this not change how we think about what to do in those situations? What is the actual cause of inflation? Would knowledge of the cause change what we do to solve it?
I think the best things to teach kids are sensible risk taking, stoicism and not getting attached to luxury, and good sound thinking and truth-seeking. These things can be taught, and to be honest we used to teach them. In STEM and philosophy we still do. It’s just that we’ve removed most of this from the curriculum of people who don’t need to use them for work and then wonder why our systems don’t work and problems don’t get solved.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8d ago
I think there’s probably a good amount of political manipulation just like there are accounts that give high reviews to products or to review bomb rivals.
Pushing political views online on any site has a whole host of advantages.
1). It’s cheap. If I can get a package deal for 50-100 bots for less than $500, then this is going to be much cheaper than trying to use traditional advertising in the same platform, to say nothing of traditional TV, radio, or print advertising. This means that a single person can get thousands of views and upvotes on a topic with little investment. If I wanted to promote Jill Stein (who’s running for Pres. with the Green Party) spending $500 to get 10,000 views is pretty cheap.
2). It at least looks organic. People generally scroll past advertisements or ignore them. Ad blockers are common. Very very few people see an ad and pay attention to it. But if they see a post on their social media, they might read it and the comments below and thus the owner of the accounts has some opportunity to make their case.
3). You can quite easily tailor your message to specific people and interests. If I wanted to convince Biden voters to vote Stein, I go to progressive subs. I don’t have to get into conservative and pro Trump areas at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
I’ve always found the “history” argument weak. The reason people protest is at least ostensibly because there’s a moral wrong being committed. Yet, the “right side of history” argument doesn’t even engage with the moral arguments. If the cause is morally right, then it is right, whether or not history goes along with it. Second, history isn’t even a line, it’s a graph it can and has changed direction multiple times. The Romans were okay with being gay, until they became Catholic. Several countries have gone from being communist to being market liberals at the same time other states have gone the other way.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
I suspect what’s actually going through Abbot’s mind in the near future is his political future. He’s angling to be seen as a defiant leader something like Desantis is in Florida. I don’t think trans athletes come around often enough that there’s going to be more than one or two in all of Texas. If those few happened to go to private school, there’s no real way for the state to enforce a private school’s policy on trans athletes. If my math is right there are only 12,000 trans people in the entire state, with most being over 18. On that sense the issue would barely even be an issue unless the government were taking very strong sides on it. But it makes great press in the news cycle.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
I think there’s also an aspect of “fashion barber poles”. I think my clearest political example would be something like color-blind politics where the race of the person wasn’t supposed to matter at all. This was the goal in the 1970s and 1980s. A not-racist believed that race didn’t matter. The problem was that “normies” started to buy in to that. Essentially they won. Everyone from Reagan to Bernie Sanders believed in that at the time. So it loses a bit of cred not because of internal problems with the movement, but because if you’re upper class, there’s a certain amount of pressure to not be mistaken for the unwashed masses. And much like fashion, food trends, and media trends, ideological trends follow in a predictable pattern of the aspirational trying to imitate the elite, the normie imitating them, and the elite wanting to separate themselves from the mainstream. Thus the movement changes to things that normies don’t do.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10d ago
I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps). It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.” Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.” But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution. A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.
Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite. We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.
A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away. It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.” But it can’t anticipate side doors. It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is. So you can easily leave.
Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI. We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10d ago
I don’t think it’s hard, I think controlling any super intelligent being whether natural or artificial is not possible. In order to control it, you have to understand it and its current and future limitations. But if AI is going to be orders of magnitude smarter than us and have a will that is somewhat free, you have a being who’s thoughts you can’t even begin to understand with desires that you cannot hope to comprehend. It’s like your dog trying to control you. Your desire to play COD makes no sense to your dog. He can’t even understand that you’re controlling what happens on the screen let alone why you want to do that. The dog can’t abstract in a way that makes your decision to do that make sense, nor can he make sense of what you’re doing. AI might not be just 2-3 times smarter and thus better at abstraction, it might eventually be 1000 times smarter. We might be ants trying to understand humans. Nothing you do besides literal eating makes sense to the ant. Yet, we humans arrogantly proclaim that we must fence in and control AI. Our rules for it will keep it from escaping.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
It’s the same logic extended one more step. Recognizing that Israel isn’t living up to those ideals or even pretending to puts Jews on the negative of DEI.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
The problem is of course that AI can take jobs faster than we can train people to do them. It’s just as adaptable as we are, maybe more so. Can an AI atttached to cooking utensils make a hamburger that’s as good as Five Guys? I think it probably could, given enough time. If it can do that I think it could probably make just about any food you wanted. I think it can also produce creative writing and movies and TV. What it takes is someone deciding to train it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
I think it actually could become a problem in that the far left and far right are in pretty strong agreement on the accusations against the Jews, that they’re manipulating narratives to their own benefit, and that they only care about themselves. The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do. There’s barely even a whisper of blame on Hamas for launching the attacks or holding hostages or the crimes committed during the attack. And when you couple that with full support of the intifada, chanting of the slogans that deny Israel’s right to exist,
Personally, I think most of the Gaza situation is on Lakud which isn’t all Israelis and has little to do with Jews who don’t support Lakud or Natanyahu.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I don’t think you can really compartmentalize to that degree with any integrity. In most governments and political parties they have openly stated platforms and they at least intend to make good on those promises. You can’t support only the good without accepting the bad. You can’t have support for a faction that kills gays and support gay rights. You can’t support the political goal without supporting the social goals because if they get their goals of defeating IDF they’ll go right back to running Gaza the way they want to.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
13d ago
The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism.
I think the lack of a religious alternative makes the idea of trying to remove Christianity from western culture more or less a nonstarter. Until there’s a robust religion that comes out of Pagan thinking in a real pagan way, with an unapologetic pagan way of think (that is, a religious and philosophical movement in authentic paganism that doesn’t have its origins in either Christianity or as a reaction to Christianity), then you can really build outward from it. Judaism is its own thing and always has been, and it’s not really a LARP of a dead religion that exists only in distinction from Christianity and Islam. Jews have their own thing. My experience of paganism is that it’s a LARP that no one takes seriously, and certainly don’t behave as though they believe in Odín, Thor, Zeus, or Athena. They don’t have a sense of reverence for their deities, the sense of them as having wants that you might not like. No sense that you can’t just pick and choose.
And I think that matters because like it or not, the best innovation the Abrahamics have is that their texts are canon and inspired and thus it gives a bulwark against it being twisted into whatever form the elites want. The Torah, the Bible and the Quran are explicit in what they say, and thus cannot be easily interpreted to not mean what the text says it means. Islam can never allow pork. It’s in the book, and the book is from God and not changing for the whims of the rest of the world.
I mean ideally people should be aware of the issues around network security to the point of being able to make reasonable decisions on whether a given networking device is safe to use much like they do every day with other devices and vehicles and activities. No one looking at a lot full of cars doesn’t make sure the car has airbags and seatbelts and antilock brakes. That’s not a super deep understanding of automotive technology, it’s pretty basic. And in home network security I think you should know enough to look for the basic security features. I wouldn’t buy a networked baby monitor that didn’t have at minimum password protection and encryption. I’m not an expert but I know enough to know that unencrypted information can be viewed by anyone with the appropriate receiver and that a device not protected by a fairly strong password is open to hacking. I think people are treating PNP devices differently than they treat other similar devices. It’s not that they are incapable of due diligence, it’s that they see computer devices and the systems around them as too complex to understand. They aren’t.
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