WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1d ago
...the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation." But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.
That really is the key behind my fears of SV. They have so much information at their fingertips. It's already known that even 10 years ago they were experimenting on directly influencing how we feel. I'm supposed to believe there is anything stopping them, any moral or legal barrier, from developing systems that act just like this? The deleterious effects of social media algorithms on mental health are already well understood, but they craft them because it's good for their bottom line. Why would they not lean into the explicitly harmful effects, and unleash it on their enemies? What we already know they do, and have done, is proof of malice enough.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Getting bogged down in the details of what Scientology, as an organization, is capable of today is totally beside the point that they prove a conspiracy of the type I outline is possible, and easier than ever. Maybe not for them, as they aren't what they used to be. But for someone sufficiently motivated.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years people will be leaving the Current Year cult, spilling the secrets of the things they were "forced" to do at the time.
And once again, forget, for a moment, the notion of a "conspiracy". Going back to Scientology, sure, elements of their attacks were conspiratorial. They had a whole office of dirty tricks. But there was also a prospiracy side to it. They declared a person "fair game", and all their member's knew what that meant. They didn't need to be told to do anything in specifics.
People like Crowder have been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology. Imagine some "rogue employee" at Facebook deciding "LOL, I'm going to manually add Crowder and Mrs Crowder's accounts to the 'hate algorithm' list." Same as how some "rogue employee" (at least when caught) always seems to be adding them to shadowban, suppression, and other soft or hard blacklist. Next thing we know, Crowder and Mrs Crowder are just angry all the time for reasons beyond their ken, and are fighting constantly. Per my last link, the tools already exist! Facebook as algorithms that can manipulate your emotional state, and they can place users on them.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Maybe. But Thiel is not the only model for how to execute a "conspiracy". I often think about the Cult of Scientology, especially when their "Fair game" doctrine was in effect. I wish I still had the article, but one journalist in the 70's and 80's covering them was harassed by them night and day. But probably the most insidious part was that scientologist also covertly insinuated themselves as her "friends".
I think the article I remember might have been about Paulette Cooper? I mean, look at some of these details!
In February 1973, anonymous flyers appeared all over Cooper's new apartment building accusing her of various sexual perversions, including pedophilia.
While she awaited trial, Cooper depended heavily on several close friends, two of whom turned out to be agents of the Church of Scientology. "Jerry" often stayed in her apartment and would eventually move in for several months, during which time he reported regularly to the GO. In one GO memo, he noted that if Cooper became depressed enough to commit suicide, "Wouldn't this be a great thing for Scientology?" On several occasions, he tried to coax Cooper to stand with him on the dangerous ledge of her 33rd-floor apartment.
The GO's harassment of Cooper continued into 1974. Her father's office received copies of pages from the diary she had kept as a teenager—and still had in her possession. In early 1975, GO agents broke into the office of Cooper's college psychiatrist and stole her records.
In 1976, Hubbard and his operatives in the GO, frustrated by their failure to silence Cooper, developed an ambitious new campaign to discredit her. Dubbed Operation Freakout, its goal was to have Cooper "incarcerated in a mental institution or jail or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks." The plan included staging multiple tightly coordinated incidents involving imposters, false reports, and planted items.
In many ways, elements of the cult conspiracy against a reporter hostile to them are easier today than ever. You don't need to anonymously spread fliers when you can have the algorithm spread information for you. You don't need to break into their physical offices when you own more data on them through their internet usage than was even imaginable to Scientologist in the 70's. You don't need to find any actual people to be their friends when catfishing with fake profiles is so easy!
I'd argue, executing a Scientologist style Operation Dynamite or Operation Freakout is easier than ever, and could largely be automated through the use of algorithms.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
I'm less interested in litigating what to call the social factors of divorce, than establishing as a data point that people can be influenced to divorce, so I can move onto other data points that assume that. It sounds like we agree on that.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
So, uh, I feel like this post straddles the line between Friday Fun Thread, because I'm only like, 49% serious about it, but it's definitely culture war worthy, so, you know. Please remember I'm only partially serious. I'm not going to die on this hill, and gun to my head, I don't really think this happened. But... I think it could have.
Could Steven Crowder's Marriage Have Been Targeted by Silicon Valley?
Steven Crowder has gone the route of many youtubers into, IMHO, algorithm triggered insanity. Youtube content creators have been having mental health struggles for almost as long as it's been a job. I saw one youtuber describe it as having a robot boss that refuses to tell you what they want. And you keep throwing effort into their implacable gaping maw, and wait to see if the algorithm rewards you with income. If it does or doesn't, you have no idea either way what you did to please it. But you know you must.
This may have hit it's high water mark when a mentally ill Youtuber went to shoot up Youtube's offices.
So I see lots of content creators lose their damned mind. Something in the algorithm changes, they can't pay their bills anymore, they can't contact any actual human at Youtube about what to do, and gradually or suddenly they begin acting erratically out of desperation and anxiety. Steven Crowder was no different. His deteriorating mental health, paranoia, and controlling behavior are as plain to see as the sun in the sky.
What was different about Crowder was we know that he was specifically targeted by social media companies.
The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.
So, if we take as a given that algorithm chasing drives people insane, and that furthermore Steven Crowder was specifically targeted by Silicon Valley, what does that have to do with his marriage?
Well, on a human level, divorce is a social contagion of sorts. Backtracking and caveats aside, the raw numbers go like this
These researchers determined that that when close friends break-up, the odds of a marital split increase by 75%. They also found that people who have divorced friends in their larger social circles are 147% more likely to get a divorce than people who have friends still married. People with divorced siblings are 22% more likely to divorce. The study even revealed the contagion of divorce among co-workers could be as much as 55% in small companies.
And when you are talking about social media's influence on divorce
Firstly, it facilitates reconnecting with past romantic partners, which can lead to emotional affairs and infidelity.
Secondly, excessive time spent on social media can lead to neglect of one’s spouse and relationship, causing feelings of dissatisfaction and disconnection.
Moreover, social media platforms often portray idealized versions of others’ lives, creating unrealistic expectations and comparisons within relationships. This can increase feelings of unhappiness and resentment.
But this is all the background radiation from the no-fault divorce atom bomb going off 50 years ago.
Could Silicon Valley, not unlike how they targeted Crowder's business through the algorithm, having also targeted his marriage? Could they have crafted an Iago algorithm and had it target Crowder and his wife: to sow distrust, resentment, and a belief that there are better options out there? Ten years ago Facebook was caught experimenting on user's emotions by adjusting the algorithm they were exposed to.. It's not like they don't have the technology.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
I haven't, but I can probably ad it to my reading list. Making my way through Crime & Punishment lately, when I'm not working on a bunch of cabinet doors.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
The psychologist will presumably recover, once she stops screwing her ex.
Take it from an older, more experienced man. If you meet them in the midst of mind numbingly retarded self inflicted consequences, they never stop. Sure, she might stop fucking her ex, but then maybe she'll fuck her boss. Or her friend's husband. Or cut of all her hair and join a cult. Or decide she's trans. And on and on and on. Stupid doesn't just go away.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Or at least 80% of the female population on said apps needs a therapist more than a boyfriend.
Ryan Long - Women are Psychos Too
Ryan Long - Stop saying 'All Women are Crazy', it's only 41 million
And I'll leave it there, cause it's Friday Fun Thread, and Ryan Long is fun.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
It is profoundly heart breaking watching people you otherwise respect and have affection for repeat nonsensical NPC talking points, as though they were their own original thoughts. It just completely breaks your perception of them. It reminds me when I was reading the Prince of Nothing series, and the main character is some genius hypnotist manipulator, and every other character he encounters goes from being an interesting individual contending for power in a Game of Thrones-esque power struggle to merely his puppet. By the end of the trilogy there are like, 3 actual characters left, and everyone else has become an NPC in thrall to him. I kind of hated it.
It's frightening above all else. It lowers my estimation of humanity on an absolute basis, versus merely impacting how I view that person. It changes how I view myself. It's like if your best friend tumbled over one day, cracked his skull wide open, and instead of flesh and blood and brains, there was just a hamsters on a wheel that quickly ran off, leaving your friend inert. And while your first thought might be "Was he always just a hamster on a wheel?" your next thought might be "Is there a hamster on a wheel in my head too?!"
It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if LLMs aren't actually that smart, but that people are dumber than we thought. I can't think of a better analog to "Pattern matches language tokens based on a data set without any comprehension of their actual meaning" in people than just uncritically repeating NPC talking points, angrily, without considering for even a millisecond any of their broader implications. I've called it unidirectional knowledge before. You are spoon fed a list of data points, along with the only permissible conclusions you are allowed to draw from them. Do not draw outside the lines! Most people are happy not to.
Frankly I can't understand how we, as a species, made it through anything anymore. I don't understand how we progressed past city states. Maybe an elite, which really is better than us, and which really is necessary to keep us from all choking on our food because we forgot to chew (metaphorically) is real and required.
More importantly, if such an elite class of human is real, it's probably safe to assume you aren't among them. You have to face the very real possibility that you, like everyone else, just has a hamster on a wheel in their head.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
On September 7, 2021, the Bitcoin Law came into effect and bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador, making it the first country in the world to do so.[24] As part of this adoption, the government began requiring all businesses to accept it.[25] Under the law, transactions in bitcoin are not subject to capital gains tax, and foreign bitcoin investors who invest over ₿3 in the country are eligible for permanent residence.[26]
WhiningCoil
5d ago
The wife finally caved and gave me her blessing to just remake the cabinet doors for our kitchen, after our attempts to strip and refinish them failed horribly.
Picked up about $100 in rough hard maple at my local lumber yard, and began the process of marking out my pieces on the planks, breaking it down, milling it, etc. It's the first major job I've put through the jointer I got back in December, and it's easily proving itself worth the money.
See, before I was putting the parts of my project on a planing sled to get one side flat, with hot glue and shims to support the wobbly workpiece and keep it in place. It took forever. Then I'd clamp it down to another sled for my tablesaw and rip off one edge pretty damned straight. This worked but was slow, and involved a lot of extra steps. It also discouraged me from re-flattening a workpiece if it cupped a little after sitting in my detached garage for a week or month.
But man, now that I have a proper 10" benchtop jointer, it's so damned fast! I ended up with 40+ individual pieces for the 9 cabinet doors I need to make, and I just zipped them across the jointer, gave them a few passes through the planer, and I'm good to go. Was relatively frustration free, and extremely straight forward versus testing and retesting the wobble of a board and shimming it on a sled. Probably would have taken me all damned week or more to get through all the pieces the old way.
Side note, someone once asked me if all these tools were "worth it". You know, beyond the enjoyment of having a hobby, or making beautiful things yourself that you can appreciate every day. And that's a hard question to answer when you are making weird custom items. I mean, any sort of custom carpentry is going to cost you, but you rarely compare what you've made against that. You compare it against a retail item, possibly of inferior quality, or maybe some etsy or ebay piece, though that can be all over the place too. Anyways, cabinetry gives me an answer.
The same nine doors I'm making for $100 in material would have cost about $600 at Home Depot or Lowes. They are $60+ apiece. Even including the router bits I bought to do the raised panel, stile, rails and edge profile, and the jig I bought to make the proper holes for the mounting hardware ($300 total), I'm coming out decently ahead. And they will almost certainly get used again. I've had plans for a curio cabinet for miniatures, and probably redoing the top cabinets in our kitchen as well.
The kitchen has been half taken apart for going on 2 months now, while the wife waffled back and forth, and struggled with a lack of motivation. I'm hoping to get the new doors finished and back on in 2 weeks? Probably need this week to finish manufacturing the pieces and assembling them. Then another week to finish them? We'll see, fingers crossed.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
Notepad++ does this, but it makes it clear when you reopen the application that these are unsaved changes you are viewing. You can press CTRL-R to reload from the file and throw away your changes, among other pathways.
It'd be pretty thrown off if one day Notepad started doing that too without the robust UI changes Notepad++ has around the feature.
WhiningCoil
10d ago
You are reminding me of a childhood where I toted around Blizzard game manuals in my school backpack so I could read them on the tram and show them off to friends.
Are you me? I got yelled at so much in my middle school geometry class for reading the WarCraft II manual instead of paying attention. There were some absolute gems among manuals back then. Blizzard had some of the best, but Interplay and Westwood tried too. I got this Encyclopedia Frobozzica with Return to Zork, had me howling with laughter despite not having played any of the games before. The diary that came with Zork Nemesis that may have been from a version of your character that time travelled into the past and got killed seeded the plot well too.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
And yet those talks, allegedly, were the closest Ukraine and Russia had gotten to a negotiated peace. "The Ukrainians" would have no more to do with ratifying the peace than the average American has in constantly sending them weapons.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
If the Ukrainian army crumbles, is there any doubt that Russia would roll into Kyiv and Ukraine would functionally stop existing as an independent nation?
It beat's not existing at all. Which is where Ukraine's demographics are heading after sending most of their men off to die in trenches and their women are finding new lives abroad. But I guess Zelensky can pat himself on the back, king of the ashes, when the TFR of native Ukrainians is 0.21 ten years after his "victory". Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
But sure, "Ukraine" would still be an independent nation, even if no Ukrainians are left in it. Not sure why a Ukrainian today should fight for that future though, being cut out of it completely.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
Why do you assume they threatened Ukraine, as opposed to Zelenksy directly? The position Boris allegedly expressed was clear. The West was not ready for the war to be over. You think if Zelensky declined their generous offer for "help", they wouldn't have found someone who would accept it? Or would have even threatened to?
WhiningCoil
11d ago
entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Yeah, that's clearly the most obvious read there. That I'm completely retarded and can't tell the US from the UK. Not an assumption that Boris was acting on US policy goals despite being a UK politician, with the key quote being that he insisted "The West isn't ready for the war to be over yet". When the US is funding 90% of the war, it's a safe assumption to make that Boris was writing a check the US was going to cash, with their tacit approval.
I didn't bother responding to you then because you taking such obvious liberties with my actual claims, but if you are going to sit back and crow about it like it's some sort of victory, fine, you've gotten my attention.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
This I can get behind, and says better what I was trying to say below about game writing being load bearing. Game writing is, or was, engineering, just like making the rest of the game was. Both on the level of "How much room do we have on the screen/in memory to fit words" and also "What is the greatest economy of language we can use to maximally support the world being built?" Many times a lot of this writing was only found in the manual.
I'm going to riff off Diablo for a minute. Grabbing my ancient manual off the shelf, it has so many casual hints of a greater world. Like King Leoric sending the warriors off in a war against a northern kingdom of Westmarch. The rogue is from a mysterious order, who's purpose is never disclosed. The sorcerer is just one of many mage clans from the far east. And then of course the bestiary and the history, written from the perspective of an in universe character, vastly flesh out the world.
And what is the actual game? 16 levels of a dungeon in a singled ravage town. Unknown "black riders" recently came through devastating it. Lazarus had just lead a party into the dungeon to be trapped and killed by the Butcher. Now go. 95% of the lore in the manual doesn't directly come into play. It just builds a world hinted at. A world, IMHO, Diablo 3 largely ruins. Never bothered with 4. 2 did alright I guess.
It actually reminds me that a lot of my favorite fantasy novels or CRPGs emerge from home brewed table top RPG settings that the creator steeped in with his friends for years before he put pen to paper for the first time. I believe that's how Malazan Book of the Fallen got it's start. I think Record of Lodoss War as well?
WhiningCoil
11d ago
I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
Funny you mention that. I'd heard enough positive chatter about it that I bought it on sale and jumped in almost completely blind. I've been very pleasantly surprised, and I'm about 4 hours in.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
With Metzen... man, I just don't know. I never followed whatever the fuck happened with World of Warcraft past the vanilla experience. The cracks were showing in WarCraft III, at least for me, and StarCraft II was heart breaking in how profoundly stupid and masturbatory the story was. Do a thing, undo a thing, redo the thing. I hated it.
I just don't think Metzen's ability to story craft grew with his ambition to be "epic". He was perfectly able to do some rudimentary world building and a pulp fantasy storyline, largely following Carmack's old formulation that story in games was like story in a porno. When he tried to make the story good for it's own sake he fell flat on his fucking face. Maybe he got lucky with StarCraft, probably the singularly good story he did.
I think this is just part of the broader signs that our culture is dying. Nobody tries to tell a tried and true story with any sincerity anymore. Everything is endless subversion. Heal turns, face turns, pointless soap opera drama. I've come to loath all that deeply. It feels like we can't even create stories anymore, much less anything more substantial.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
Two things.
-
It's not just video game writing. Writing across the board has utterly fallen apart. Characters lack any sort or purpose or core motivation, and mostly just get shuffled to the next artificial point of conflict/drama. Plots make almost no sense, even on their own terms, with characters acting in wildly unbelievable ways to force it along. Or the plot just regularly breaks the rules or themes of the work because it doesn't know what else to do. And that's not even touching on the fact that literally the only themes worked into anything these days is weird demoralization propaganda focused entirely on privilege/oppression dynamics, often in strictly black and white moralistic terms. Zero awareness of the human condition.
-
In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing. The dialog could be awkward, the prose could be stilted, but if it supported the world that was being built and created the illusion that the game was a more lived in, real place than was possible to actually create or depict given technical, financial or design constraints, people generally say it was "good". I rarely find this to be the case anymore, as weird current year political bullshit immediately collapses the writing under the load a fictional world places upon it.
I do sometimes try to entertain the arguments of people who claim nothing has changed. That video games always had out of place "current year" pop culture references. Or that they were already political. And I know examples abound. I recall reading about one particular Infocom game that was written out of pure spite for Reagan winning a second term.
All the same, what felt like rare exceptions has become the norm, to the point where it crowds everything else out. It hasn't quite reached the level in games that it has on Netflix, where probably half the dialog is weird current year political references and marxist bullshit, and 3/4 of the characters are nonsensically and almost impossibly diverse for the setting. Which is to say, sometimes you encounter a purely ludic game with almost no writing what so ever. But among any game I've seen that has any appreciable amount of writing to speak of, if it's western, or even if activist got ahead of the translating duties, it's all sorts of shit up with current year nonsense.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
My recollection is that one person mocked Russia as being a gas station, and a second person mocked the first saying it was a gas station with nukes.
Sadly my memory has rotted to the point where I can't recollect whether it was Obama directly who was person one, or a surrogate/policy expert of his. Likewise I can't recall if person two was Romney/McCain or other person in their orbit.
Alas.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?
Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.
Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today
I'm astounded you wrote that so unaware of the consequences you accidentally baked into your own "refutation".
Read it again
It's not science fiction.
More options
Context Copy link