domain:alakasa.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Prior to Dobbs, there were States with just a single abortion clinic.
Which is one more place than I have to buy a gun in New Jersey. (Or anywhere)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
I've never seen an AI produce a wall of text like that.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
They'd object if the guy was imagining them in their underwear or a bikini. They'd object if he was imagining them wearing a sundress and looking at them with loving desire.
They'd object if the guy simply looked at them and appreciated their appearance as it was and they found him unattractive. This is all the same kind of thing and should be given zero weight in any sort of law or rule system that isn't supposed to be dealing with relationships between men and women.
InfrequentPoster
Formerly Lurker
1hr ago
I feel like I am misremembering some old version of the rules of this place. The term is "enlightened Buddha principle". It meant something along the lines of: each post has to meet at least 2 out of 3. And I think one was kind, another was necessary, third I am unsure. The sentiment is still present in the rules.
I tried searching but Buddha and enlightenment are such a strong keywords that it overrides most results. LLMs proved useful. And I found Socrates triple filter test:
- Is it true?
- Is it necessary (or useful)?
- Is it kind (spoken with goodwill)?
If a statement can't pass all three it shall not be spoken (posted). So that seems to be close. But it lacks the 2 out of 3 part.
So my question is whether there was such rule? If it was called that? Or am I only misremembering while keeping with the general sentiment?
Imagine an alternate world where no one claimed gas chambers and said 2-3 million Jews were rounded up and effectively murdered through horrible conditions and starvation.
What you don't understand is that those 2-3 million did not die in concentration camps, if that many died at all which is highly doubtful. The death toll in the concentration camps is a small fraction of that number. And most who died in the concentration camps did so in final months of the war due to Germany being destroyed on all sides and infrastructure totally collapsing. Many died under the custody of Stalin during and after the war, and never came under German occupation in the first place. The death toll in the concentration camps was a small fraction of that number.
After the war, 12 to 14 million Germans were expelled and estimates for the number of Germans who died vary but exceed 2 million on the higher end. Nobody knows that fact at all. You are completely wrong that if 2 million Jews had died throughout the war due to general wartime conditions, which would put their attrition similar to the people around them where they lived (Poles, Ukranians, etc.), that the Holocaust mythos would stand as prominently as it does today.
What shocks the conscious is the gas chamber story. That is what makes Jewish suffering more important than the suffering of everyone else in the eyes of the culture.
And yeah I will still say I don't really care if they lied about the method of death and doubled the numbers. But I mostly don't care because everyone that would have perpetrated the lie is dead and out of power.
It says more about you that a radical change of facts on a historical event like this wouldn't register at all with you- you maintain the same opinion even when the historical premise radically changes. You also couldn't possibly be more wrong- the people responsible for perpetuating the lie are very much alive and in power, and they are using their power desperately to keep the lie alive using all means available. Civil and criminal measures enforcing Belief in the ridiculous gas chamber story are far stronger and more widespread than ever before. And banning Holocaust Denial has always been a primary impetus of increased censorship across social media.
I have a recency bias, and WWII is not recent.
I have a recency bias too, and I have eyes and ears and can clearly see the delineation between culture war issues which are fundamental to issues discussed by those like OP and the Holocaust mythos. It's a living mythos, the Hitler anti-Christ narrative is so fundamental to modern culture war issues, saying "WWII is not recent so it doesn't matter much" is incredibly myopic and wrong.
FtttG
1hr ago
Agreed, tenure-track professorship is a high-risk, high-reward strategy.
I agree that most of the people trying to make it as rappers or streamers would probably not be able to carve out an impressive income elsewhere, but I imagine most of them, if they really applied themselves, could probably work their way up to being a supervisor at a big box shop or similar, a far superior outcome than squandering your twenties on a futile quest to get your mixtape out there and still being an unemployed nobody with no assets at the end of it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
I don't have any statistics in front of me.
Wikipedia cites studies showing that 90 percent of the prostitution in Nevada (including Las Vegas), USA, is illegal, and presumably most of that is streetwalkers. But on the other end we have Victoria (including Melbourne), Australia, where there are zillions of legal brothels that even are allowed to advertise their services online. Is it reasonable to say that the typical prostitute in those locations is a streetwalker? I don't know, but I feel doubtful.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
that aren't about the destination, but the journey
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is great for this. It's a window into a worldview that's very specific to 1960s and 1970s America, dressed in absurdist storytelling.
badass scenes every few pages
The Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. It started out when someone claimed that you needed a good idea to write an engaging story. Butcher disagreed, and the person making the claim bet him that he could offer up an idea so stupid that no one could make it work. The idea in question was "the lost Roman legion meets Pokemon".
Butcher took the bet and played it completely straight.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
2hr ago
This was a response to @cjet79:
I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.
But I decided I would make it a top comment, because it's my second favorite subject after sci-fi bullshit: literary snobbery with a side of AI.
First, I like AI. I mean, I like it as a tool. (And yes, I know that "AI" is still a misnomer, I understand that LLMs are just token predictors, and I think people who believe that any neural net is close to actually "thinking" or becoming self-aware, or that really, what are we but pattern-matching echolaliac organisms? are drinking kool-aid). I've used ChatGPT to build applications (I don't do "vibe coding" but I have found it increases my productivity because with the right prompts it helps me use new applications and libraries faster than I could by going through tutorials and manuals). It cannot build a fully functional application (beyond the simplest) by itself, though. It often goes back and forth recommending obsolete or unavailable libraries or suggesting moving a line to the wrong place, then recommending I move it back in the next iteration. It's smart and often makes very good recommendations for improving and optimizing code, and it spots subtle bugs and typos very easily. It's also stupid and often makes terrible recommendations that will break your application.
On the hobby side, I've been making AI art, building Stable Diffusion on my PC and even training some LORAs. The vast majority of AI art is, as they say, "slop" and very recognizable as AI, but that's mostly because the vast majority of AI art is "Type a few sentences into text box, copy picture that results." "A cat making a face." "A cute catgirl with an assault rifle giving a come-hither look to her incel AGP fetishist fans." You will get a picture that meets your requirements, but will be very obviously plastic AI digital slop, like a Walmart t-shirt or a Subway sandwich. If you take the time to learn about inpainting and outpainting and ControlNet and upscaling and advanced prompt engineering and model selection and what all the parameters actually tweak, you'll get good pictures, pictures good enough to win Scott's various AI challenges.
Are they good enough for an AI to become a renowned professional artist with a unique and recognizable style? Not yet. But artists are rage-coping hard insisting they aren't good enough to replace the vast majority of commercial artists who just need to draw hamburgers or cars or Corporate Memphis HR posters, or commissioned MCU fanservice. The sticking point now is no longer extra fingers or shadows going in the wrong direction (though most AIs will still make little mistakes that are tells for the observant- but these can be easily repaired!) but just the fact that it's still painful to go back and forth to get exactly the pose, position, expression, color shade, background, accessories, species of flower, that you want. With real artists you can talk to the artist, and the artist can do rough sketches and ask clarifying questions. With AIs, you generate 100 images, let GPU go brrrrr, and maybe you get one or two that are kinda close and still need extensive inpainting and photoshopping. Conversely, though, I have commissioned some artists in the past and while I was generally satisfied with the results, even a human will never be able to really represent the picture that's in your head. Enough time with Stable Diffusion and some photoshop ability will often actually come closer to the mark. AI art is getting better all the time, but IMO, it is not close to replacing truly talented high-end artists, just as AI is not close to replacing actual rock star programmers and innovators.
It is close to replacing the print shoppers, the commercial graphic arts majors, the SEO optimizers and storefront webapp builders, though.
So, can it write?
Yes and no. I've tried out some of the NovelAI apps and gazed upon the sorry state of Kindle Unlimited, already flooded with thousands of subpar self-published romantasy-written-while-fingering-herself slop and power-fantasy-written-while-jerking-himself slop, and now that has been multiplied seven and sevenfold by AIs churning out the results of all those Udemy and YouTube courses promising you can now make a living on Amazon without actually writing anything. Throw a million books out there with pretty covers and even if you make pennies per title, it adds up. AI has been devastating the short story market for a while now.
If we get to the point where AI can generate good stories, then... I guess I'd be happy to read AI-generated stories? I think we are a long, long way from there, though. And I have experimented. LLMs can generate coherent stories at this point. They have a plot, and some degree of consistency, and I suppose they have all the traditional elements of a story. I am not sure if they are up to generating an entire novel with one prompt yet - I haven't tried, but I know there are tools to let you coach it along to get a whole novel out of it.
But everything I have seen so far is crap. In fairness, most of what's on RoyalRoad (and Wattpad and A03 and Scribd and all the other open platforms) is crap, but you can still tell what's human-written crap and what's AI slop.
I may be in the minority here; it often seems readers just don't care much anymore and want to consoom entertainment units. But waving my snooty literary tastes here, I sometimes despair at the writing some people think is good just because it tickles their fetishessweet spots. Some genres (progressive fantasies, litrpg, a lot of romance) are written so, so badly that if they aren't AI generated, they may as well be. An AI has no prose style except very poor mimicry of other styles; it has no ability to truly craft words and turn a phrase in a way that makes you say "Ah, yes, that is totally how that author writes." It has no way to embed themes and metaphors that echo throughout a book, it has no thematic consistency (often not even tonal consistency). Character arcs, such as they exist, are flat and linear; LLMs cannot grasp "character development" or complexity or nuance in any real way.
If you want a book that's mental bubblegum, a linear power fantasy about a guy getting ever more powerful and punching bigger villains in the face, or a hot chick being fought over by two smoking alphas, and nothing more to it and not even any clever writing to sweeten the experience, just "thing happens and then thing happens and then thing happens" and maybe some purple descriptive modifiers mimicking a high school creative writing exercise, I suppose AIs can do that now. But nothing that even approaches the most derivative pastiches of true classic novels.
And that's just to produce one book. How about a series, a multibook arc preserving plot threads and MacGuffins and character development from one book to the next? An AI cannot do that, and I doubt their ability to do that any time soon.
If you're not really a reader and consuming stories is like popping open a beer and you don't care how it tastes as long as it gives you a buzz, maybe AIs will fill that entertainment need. I sometimes put AI-generated soundtracks on as background music, and while the first few minutes can be okay, after a while it sounds very samey and droney and repetitive, even to my extremely unsophisticated ear (and my musical tastes are, in contrast to my literary tastes, utterly banal and horrible).
I don't doubt AI will continue to improve and eventually we'll have the first award-winning novel completely written by AI that even experts agree is actually... kinda good. But I am skeptical. I think it will take a while. I think even when we get to that point it will be a very particular kind of novel that uses some tricks (like being a surrealist or post-modern experimental novel or something else that avoids the usual conventions of narrative structure and story development).
I think it will be a long, long time before we have an AI Stephen King or Kazuo Ishiguro or Margaret Atwood. But I think we will have AI "authors" doing a "good-enough" job for the proles. Whether the slow-motion death of traditional publishing is a good thing or not I guess depends on how much you hate traditional publishing. I think gatekeeping is good, and that's what traditional publishing does. Publishers put out a lot of books I am not interested in and even think are very bad, but I can at least tell from the cover, the blurbs, and the author if it's likely to meet my minimal standards of readability. It's not like sifting through sewage for something sparkly. More like picking a few good apples out of a bin of mostly rotten ones.
I celebrate the flourishing of platforms for anyone to put their work out there and a handful of indie authors are killing it on Amazon, but increasingly they are no different from the handful of authors who make it big in trad publishing- there are a handful of big winners, but most earn below minimum wage for their efforts, and now many thousands who basically earn beer money if that are competing with LLMs who can scratch the same itch they do.
faceh
2hr ago
I mean that gives the game away.
Those ones hate men perceiving them in ways they don't consent to. Across the board.
They'd object if the guy was imagining them in their underwear or a bikini. They'd object if he was imagining them wearing a sundress and looking at them with loving desire.
If its a man they DO want fantasizing about them, they'd just as soon want to project the fantasy images into his mind to get his attention.
We sort of know this because as soon as phones were able to send photos, attractive guys started getting lewd and nude photos sent to them, often unsolicited! Same deal.
So there's your question, should we be taking efforts to control men's thought processes and how they use their own computer hardware in order to accommodate/protect women's feelings?
Perhaps more clarity is called for. I'm using therapy to refer specifically to psychotherapy. At least in Ireland, "psychotherapist" is a protected term. Life coaches are hence definitionally not therapists, as no qualifications are required to call oneself a life coach. Nor are public speaking coaches.
"Everyone could benefit from guidance and mentoring from a third party" and "everyone could benefit from psychotherapy" are two very different claims.
faceh
2hr ago
I should genuinely have known better than to trust a reddit link to work as intended.
gafpromise
2hr ago
I would push back on therapy being grouped with the other things. Therapy, broadly speaking, covers an extreme range of practices and modalities. I mean sure, if you're going to stick with DSM-V definitions (which insurance surely requires), those are meant to be more clinical and cleanly defined. This is dysfunctional; that isn't dysfunctional.
But people seek therapy for lots of reasons. Do you consider a life coach a therapist? How about someone to help you get over your fear of public speaking or someone to help you better organize tasks? I'd wager just about everyone has something they wish they were better at, some lack that they feel in their life. It can be hard to match up someone with the right therapist, the right intervention, but when it's successful it's absolutely worth seeking out.
So yes, I would bite the bullet and say that absolutely everyone could benefit from therapy, in the sense that we need someone outside ourselves to encourage, validate, motivate us and point to helpful tools and resources. For many people this is religion. For many people this need can be filled by a close network of friends or family. Those people have a natural, organic source that meets this need, but many other people do not. The need for validation and accountability is nevertheless, I would say, nearly universal.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
How can we determine what the modal prostitute is like?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
There is extensive evidence from numerous disciplines--psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics--that culture has an effect on behavior. You mention significance--do you mean statistical significance? That would require numerous studies with numerous groups, and even then there's the question of generalizability. I think to simply look at "Asians" and make assumption XYZ then look at 2nd or 3rd generations (presumably "outside" their culture? To whatever degree?) and make more assumptions is a weak analytical design.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2hr ago
I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue?
Many people claim things are good for them that self-evidently aren't. Whether this is one of them or not isn't easily answerable, but you don't actually have to accept a junkie's claim that he just really enjoys the freedom of living in a tent.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2hr ago
But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer.
Most people trying to make it as rappers and streamers probably don't actually have a powerful skill set that could be swapped out for a strong income elsewhere, so the people I feel really bad for are the postdocs plugging away in research labs well into their 30s, making a pittance and crossing their fingers that they'll finally get an academic offer. Academic research isn't quite as extreme of a rockstar profession as rapping, but it is actually a gamble with enormous opportunity cost relative to other options that high-IQ people that are willing to work long hours can take.
The biggest piece of advice I can give to talented young people is to stay flexible, that you don't actually know what your dream career is when you're choosing the starting path as a teenager.
Karpal
3hr ago
For me (and I think I'm not unusual amongst older guys) it has a negative effect on my physical fitness.
It's enough of a pleasure that the risk of injury and the physical wear-and-tear is something I'm happy to mitigate by lifting and calisthenics (which I don't enjoy). The cardio benefits that were amazing when I started have diminished since I got good enough to be lazy and injury adverse enough to avoid going all out.
I love it, it's a mental escape at the end of a day and it's an attractively simple social group, but there are less destructive activities that I might have developed a taste for.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
3hr ago
Many women have their self-worth tied up almost entirely in how other people view them. They are self-centered enough to believe that they should be in full control of how others perceive them and that anyone who is perceiving them in a way they don't approve of should be punished. They think people shouldn't be allowed to fantasize about them sexually without them being in control--and thus able to exploit--those fantasies. Men, and society in general, should ignore their whining and tell them to get over themselves.
FtttG
3hr ago
The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.
FtttG
3hr ago
Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life. I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue? Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better, but follow that line of reasoning far enough and you'll find yourself arguing that every man should have sex with another man just so he can be absolutely sure that he's straight and not just a closeted gay/bi.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3hr ago
My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy, and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime.
But how much of that is intrinsic to unions, and how much is a result of a specific implementation of unions, under which they are immune to antitrust laws while companies are not (1 2)?
Given the predominant cultural messaging, it can be safely assumed that even among the Bay Areans they did give monogamy the old college try.
Difficult to separate? He has all of those because of poly, and being extremely high status (within a limited scale) he's going to have way above average success for a poly male (if he so desires). Not exactly someone I'm going to turn to as a replicable example.
@TheDag as well- Eons ago I commented on the phenomenon of a non-zero number of poly EAs claiming also to be asexual, and I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends," since for some noticeable fraction the addition of sex to the calculation does not play a major role.
I blame social media as well for putting the final nail in the meaning of "friend," but like marriage it was already down the slope of not meaning much.
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