domain:ryandv.substack.com
birb_cromble
1hr ago
I like to check out aquariums and aviaries, personally. Fish aren't known for a history of racism and colonization.
aaa
1hr ago
If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007
That's not what I see. I see it starting in 1997 and peaking around 2012.
roystgnr
1hr ago
Wrapped up the last of Journey to the End of Night, which I ultimately got almost nothing interesting out of, and finally finished Seeing Like a State, which I got a lot out of but I expect everyone here has already either read the book or read better folks than me summarize its findings better than I could.
Started Storm of Steel which is a fascinating contrast to American Sniper. Both authors, at least at the start, enjoy the war. It's the difference between the 2000s Patriots or the 90s Bulls, and a role player on a .500 team. Kyle goes in expecting to win every time, and is shocked and takes it personally when he loses. Junger is immediately just hoping to survive. Kyle experiences enemy soldiers and civilians as "savages," as mooks that are just part of his story. Junger experiences them as formidable dangerous foes.
As an aside, I saw a local performance of Penelope, a one-woman musical of Odysseus' famous wife. It was fantastic. That woman really carried the show for an hour and a half straight, just her and a band, and of course that is the core commentary of the play: Penelope did it all alone, with nothing but a backing band, for twenty years until Odysseus returned. The show definitely plays the situation for light feminist snark at times, but never lapses into wokeness: at core it maintains a belief in Homer, Homer's heroes stay heroes and his villains stay villains, it doesn't try to flip the script like so many recent musicals based on old stories. It's very reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in that it looks at how great events feel to someone who isn't privileged to speak constantly with the gods; where Athena speaks to Odysseus pretty regularly, Penelope here gets only a single, cryptic and non-actionable message from Athena. My only critique of the play is that, compare to Madeleine Miller's Circe, the play cuts off before the really interesting and difficult stuff to get Penelope's commentary on: the slaughter of the suitors and the hanging of the maids. How does she feel about her Telemachus going all school shooter on the place?
cjet79
1hr ago
That is interesting, I'm not surprised I like the books better, but I wouldn't have thought many other people were the same.
The books can be sparse on details in a way that I like. The show fills in those visual details, mostly because it is forced to do so by the medium of film.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1hr ago
The last two are really not games for the faint of heart though, it turns out that in our modern age, real world tactics are actually quite complicated and unintuitive.
I'm interested, tell me more.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2hr ago
Mine was a combination of psychedelics and meditation slowly opening my mind over years to other possibilities, then having an odd string of coincidences leading to me taking Christianity a bit more seriously. Over time I began to learn more and more including listening to Jordan Peterson's lectures, John Vervaeke, and reading a good amount of the sort of "post-modern" Christian apologists. Eventually I decided to go to a church and slowly work on my faith.
In terms of the culturally alien thing... yeah. That's kind of the point if you want to fill the God-shaped hole. Anything that fills that is going to be alien to you, because your worldview is basically secular materialism. Even if you don't realize it, you have a 'religion' right now with extremely strong precepts. A big part of the journey to a "real religion" is recognizing that secular materialism is a philosophical system with axioms that must be investigated as well.
If you want a super dry book to read on all this, I'd recommend All Things are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart.
EDIT: Sorry misread the God shaped hole thing. Also it helps to think of sin as "error" or "missing the mark" which is the Greek translation.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2hr ago
I love finding random small bookstores or something like that. Atlas Obscura also has cool stuff https://www.atlasobscura.com/
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
No need to get all autistic-ragey about it…
Don't drop personal insults like that.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
The DNC has factions, and the Harris faction disliked Shapiro for some reason (maybe Jewishness, maybe not -- personally I think not choosing him was galactically stupid). The same faction is unlikely to be to driving the boat in 2028.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2hr ago
If that "insightful answer" turned into any actual understanding on your part, you could have just reformulated the concept in your own words.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
A world without color under the rainbow
Well, it’s pride month (Grammarly suggests capitalizing Pride here...)! Again. I rolled out of bed last week to a saccharine salvo of big brand bullshit. That, and smug condescension from the women I know on Instagram “wishing homophobes an uncomfortable month”.
When the gay marriage movement really kicked up steam in the early 00’s, I was always a bit perturbed by the use of a rainbow. I’ve always been a fetishist for color - my first attempts at building user interfaces somehow became unusable clown vomit because of it - and so a single group monopolizing literally every hue of light at the same time seemed like a bit much. But I was a good lefty-libertarian and didn’t complain.
I tried to drag this board into a conversation about cars. I won’t make that mistake again, but a point of discussion centered around all of them being way less colorful than they used to be.. If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007. Don’t worry, the problem’s gotten worse: 78% of all cars sold today are a neutral color.
It wasn’t just vehicles, though. At almost the exact same time, Millennials began making everything grey..
Meanwhile, woke discourse has been (was?) on a tear in mainstream media institutions:
A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post.
If you ask a politically correct LLM about why everything is lame, it will suggest that we’re this way because of “economic uncertainty” or social media. Others will say something vague like resale value.
If I know anything about anything, it’s that correlation is causation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a wave of rainbows and the unrelenting drumbeat of intersectionality has, in many ways, relied on the dilution of color everywhere else. How else can you shove it in the world’s face? A coffee shop already full of colorful whimsy would be burying v99.0 of the LGBTQIA+ flag. It’s only through the clash of it with the drab whites and browns of an espresso machine that a message can be sent. At least the latest revision inoculates itself against good taste pretty well. The clashing racial bars and two spirit circle make it hideous on its own.
The death of peak woke is… probably overestimated. But even my blackpill soul feels some sort of vibe shift. Dare I hope for color to make a comeback?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
We still do have a First Amendment, it still applies to public officials, and Brandenburg v. Ohio is still the controlling precedent. Unless Newsom says more or less "Come on out right now and wreck the place", he's reasonably safe from prosecution. And he's not dumb enough to step over the line. (Trump might be dumb enough to try to prosecute anyway, but probably not)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
Riots during Trump admins have been politically genius. If the admin Does What It Takes to restore order, he confirms the image the left has painted of him of being a dictator.
Nope. If he does what it takes to restore order, then as long as the Guard doesn't shoot anyone too sympathetic, he wins. The left has overplayed their hand on rioting.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
2hr ago
Nah, my scrolls aren't that august. They're all late Qing/republic period (late 19th Century, early 20th century) works by no name artists painting the usual subjects of bamboo, shrimp and mountainous landscapes. They don't really have any artistic value beyond the fact that they look pretty and aren't reproductions, selling for a few hundred dollars each and the stamps on them are also of randoms, I expect if there was an Imperial seal at the very minimum the price would be in the 10s of thousands of dollars per scroll and I don't have that sort of money. Most certainly if what I had was a valuable work I would not be putting my own seal on it as that could easily damage its worth.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
The problem is that "deficit spending" isn't a thing. It's two things, the revenue side and the spending side. The Democrats generally want to increase taxes, not just for revenue but as primary policy. The Republicans generally want to reduce them (or so they say, anyway). Both sides want to spend, just differently. A deficit hawk generally wants to reduce spending and increase taxes. This means Republican deficit hawks have no leverage against the Democrats; they can't really trade reduced spending that they want for tax increases the Democrats want, because the Democrats know they want those tax increases too.
bolido_sentimental
2hr ago
There's always geocaching.
https://www.geocaching.com/play
Can help you look at your environment in a new way, and also creates a nifty record of all the places you've been.
wemptronics
2hr ago
Does your Chinese scroll also have an Emperor's signature and archival stamp? Can we see it or is that gauche?
5434a
2hr ago
you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases
I don't see any mention of figures but there was the first regulatory approval of an AI-based law firm in England last month. https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/news/press/garfield-ai-authorised/
Law, medicine and finance are large service industries with notoriously steep fees that would gladly peel off a few billion to become more productive and competitive if they were allowed to. People might be slow to pay for image slop and virtual waifus but they'll happily pay up for things that matter. Will it scale to offset the expense of running the AI server farms? I don't know.
It's a genuinely amazing achievement that a machine can do this, I don't want to sound like i'm poo-pooing that, but it still has this issue of sounding like a student's recitation that constantly feels the need to point out the obvious as if it's trying to convince itself.
It reads like a journalist, not a philosopher. Might be a residue of the hidden prompt? But all LLMs sound like this, even when you tell them to try and achieve a more natural style.
I genuinely wonder if that will go away with time or if it's an artifact of having to be made up of so much mediocre prose. Like a stylistic equivalent to that yellow tint and "delve" (actually did we ever figure out where those were from definitively?).
Still, lawyers, encyclopedia writers, journalists and all other mid tier wordcels on suicide watch.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
No, this is not cute or clever.
We're still formulating exactly what our AI policy is, but we've certainly made it clear before that posting LLM output without declaring it to be so, especially as an attempt at a "gotcha," is low effort and not actual discourse. Consider this a formal warning, and we're likely to just start banning people who do this in the future.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2hr ago
tomboys are not trans men, though they function like the platonic ideal of one, including attitude and general outlook on life
Ive thought this too. If self-identified trans men really are men, theyre the type of man who worrys that his canthal tilt isnt enough - ie a loser, who we would consider at least as deficient in masculinity mentally as physically. Obviously the really masculine thing to do is to just be one of the boys.
And while youre right that theres some obvious reasons why men would be interested in those women, I also think there is something particular to it for nerds. We are a culture thats mostly male and at least used to believe in gender equality, and so have accumulated a lot of masculinely inspired but genderneutrally applied ideals. Jocks might like the convenice of a more masculine mentality, but they also like acting steretypically all girly. How do you act girly in accordance with nerd culture? Dimorphism exists for a reason, and I feel sometimes that this remains a mote in our eye, who now complain about other unnatural degeneracy.
At this point, I don't even know what an AGI is. The word has just been semantically saturated for me.
What I do know, based on having followed the field since before GPT-2 days, and personally fucked around since GPT-3, is that for at least a year or so, SOTA LLMs have been smarter and more useful than the average person. Perhaps one might consider even the ancient GPT 3.5 to have met this (low) bar.
They can't write? Have you seen the quality of the average /r/WritingPrompts post?
They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?
They can't do medicine/math/..? Have you tried?
The average human, when confronted with a problem outside their core domain of expertise, is dumb as rocks compared to an LLM.
I don't even know how I managed before LLMs were a thing. It hasn't been that long, I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life without them. If cheap and easy access to them were to magically vanish, my willingness to pay to get back access would be rather high.
Ah, it's all too easy to forget how goddamn useful it can be to have access to an alien intelligence in one's pocket. Even if it's a spiky, inhuman form of intelligence.
On the topic of them being cheap/free, it's a damn shame that AI Studio is moving to API access only. Google was very flustered by the rise of ChatGPT and the failure of Bard, it was practically begging people to give Gemini a try instead. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed since the 1.5 Pro days, and I'm annoyed that their gambit has paid off, that demand even among normies and casual /r/ChatGPT users increased to the point that even a niche website meant for powerusers got saturated.
Well done! The very last paragraph is a patische from 5 different times I asked it to make a closing paragraph. Not even once did the actual output sound natural so I picked and chose different sentences until I got something that seemed better but yeah, each and every single word there came from an LLM. However I will say that just as Collage Art is considered Art by the Artist even though none of the pieces might be created by them, that last paragraph is still human because I did the curation and structuring.
Honestly I was hoping nobody would notice and then I'd spring it onto the unsuspecting populace of The Motte 3 days down the line...
The rest of the post is completely human generated by yours truly (artisanal tokens, so they say). If you think it's by Gemini 2.5 Pro I consider that to be a compliment as it's genuinely a better writer than I am. Failure to notice and remove the em dash is completely on me, ma faute.
If that was an American reporter and the National Guard, it'd be front page banners on every news site in the US (including Fox except the headline might suggest she had it coming). Since it's an Australian reporter, the LAPD, and a rubber bullet (that was in fact non-lethal), it'll just be an amusing footnote.
The summary here -- "US Correspondent Lauren Tomasi has been caught in the crossfire as the LAPD fired rubber bullets at protesters in the heart of Los Angeles." seems wrong. There's no crossfire, in fact no other shots, as far as I can tell, and it doesn't even look like a miss (unless there was someone just out of frame who was up to something), it looks like the cop shot her on purpose, though I can't imagine why.
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