site banner
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 1825 results for

domain:novum.substack.com

It used to be that if you got pregnant or impregnated someone, you were expected to become a couple and stay a couple. This meant that the man was forced to have a big stake in being a parent, but also was very rarely deprived of the father role (as part of an actual family, not the modern 'weekend father'). Nowadays, a man who impregnates a woman can never get the chance to be a father, or can easily be deprived of the father role when the woman splits up. So there is less reason nowadays for men to want to have children or to build themselves up to be a good father. Instead, a lot of guys prefer infinite adolescence. In turn, this means that women see a lack of men who make good fathers, and even go looking for sperm donors and intentionally become single moms.

Women traditionally 'groomed' promising men into being good providers/fathers/etc. The taboo on splitting up meant that the risk of marrying a rough diamond was offset by the benefits of getting a better husband than the woman could get otherwise. But the ease by which relationships can be ended, resulted in women being increasingly picky and only wanting the finished product, since a perfectly groomed husband can just trade her in. However, the lack of grooming by women means that many men miss out on becoming this finished product, so everyone suffers.

All the lies about men and women being equal, logically results in the conclusion that when men have different preferences from women, this is all just bad culture that they need to change. So in a way feminism was right when they coined the term 'the personal is political,' in that women increasingly politicize their relationships, and demand leftism in their mates, with the assumption that those men then share their preferences. However, this just drives men further into right-wing politics, who do allow them to be themselves, while women get in this spiral of blaming the right wing for their relationship issues.

Do people pick these up and read forever though? A lot of these webfics are serialized, people reach the end and then just read chapter by chapter.

One of the big draws for me with webfiction is that I am a very fast reader, and if I was buying everything it would bankrupt me. A million word story can give me a nice week of reading, but I wouldn't be spending more than a few hours of leisure a day, and most of the time keeping up with ongoing web releases is ~1hour a week

I don't believe people want to game or watch TV endlessly on repeat though, I certainly don't.

The fanfic industry gives the lie to this. Many of us do indeed want endless streams the same media with a few changes and wrinkles thrown in. Most of these fics are very derivative even for an inherently derivative art form even where it doesn't make sense - see Stations of Canon - and many are just bad yet we slog through them hoping to find the few that let us recapture the same feeling we got consuming the original work.

Better yet, imagine a story where you are the main character, playing in a rich world with real agency, learning things, judging, fighting, ruling, plot threads springing up around you. We could have that too, a whole new fusion between games and literature. We have that right now, albeit in a limited, experimental form.

the pure consumer backlash to this silicon valley lobotomy of AI could be very much Dot-Com-2-point-O

What consumer backlash? For every reddit post about how AI is terrible, there are probably 100 people who are enjoying using ChatGPT, find it convenient, 10 people gooning to physically impossible pornography or degen ERP, 30 people enjoying the funny AI cat video that chops up and cooks other animals...

Many consumers say they hate Facebook ad-slop, Microsoft's persistent disregard for consent with Windows updates, Google spying on you and the crap Google algorithm, Tiktok brainrot short form video.

But these companies are making huge amounts of money. Trump and Larry Ellison aren't trying to secure Tiktok because short form video is unpopular, quite the opposite. Tiktok is making billions. It's high-status to say Tiktok is slop, I think portrait video was a mistake and repress youtube shorts furiously whenever I see it... but it's clearly very popular.

If we just read what consumers say and what the media highlights, we'd assume that Facebook was near bankruptcy. They're constantly getting fined, called into congress, delete facebook and hit the gym is an ancient meme at this point, billions shoveled into VR with no returns, their Llama AI models have been shit, everyone thinks of it as a website for boomers, people blame them for everything from loneliness to anorexia to genocide in Myanmar... But no, Facebook is making gigantic profits and their profits are rising fast. Money >>> talk. AI is paying off massively for Facebook in the unsexy ad algorithms that nobody talks about. They can easily pay for these huge capital investments, profits are up even as they spend more and more!

OpenAI is making 42% margins on inference, they want to grow the inference market and this is a natural route to take. 42% margins when they have such a big free-tier is insane. Research is the expensive part, not inference. AI research is clearly important, Facebook and Tiktok prove there's fortunes to be made. LLMs and generative AI are also lucrative, only they're resource-intensive for R&D compared to deep learning. But the promise of mechanizing intellectual labour is incredibly seductive, the big players are not going to slow down here. The market for LLMs is awkward because they're so immensely powerful and valuable that there's furious competition driving prices down, while the market is also still immature and yet to be developed so revenue is starting off small (but growing very quickly).

Unlimited weird porn and anime cat videos are going to accelerate techno-capital, not slow things down.

That's a useful image, thanks. :)

For a very specific value of "allow", maybe.

It'll be over because pure consumers of value who produce nothing and aren't even related to the producers of value will cease to be around sooner or later. Sooner or later some paperclipper will optimize us away, and there'll be no good reason not to do it.

I think @zoink's point is that you shouldn't be handling Iraqi oil in the first place. If you aren't prepared to kill and destroy everyone there, you have no business getting involved.

In practice, I don't think this works - if pirates are intercepting 30% of American shipping from their base in heavily-populated Lebanon, you need some kind of response between 'let them' and 'kill everyone for 10 miles'.

The natural selection of memes on this platform will happen at an incredible pace. TikTok meme spread is bounded by the need to actually film your mutation of the meme in real life: you have to actually learn the dance, you have to actually bake that feta, you have to actually prepare and record your funny take on the ice water face bath guy.

With Sora 2 you no longer have to do this. Of course, faking a real-world activity will be seen as lame (until it's ironic and cool again), but memetic storms (if OpenAI doesn't fuck with the recommendations algorithm) will be sudden and violent.

Banned for targeted personal attacks (on me).

I wish there was more actually good Xianxia, 3k chapters just isn't enough.

The popularity of thousand-chapter webfics indicates otherwise. If the AI learns to generate cultivation LitRPG isekai with ten thousand chapters (and tailor it to the reader's taste), a lot of people will never touch anything else.

You know, I'm kind of down with Hegseth on the rules of engagement being for pussies. The us wouldn't have been driven out of Afghanistan if they decided to ethnically cleanse the whole place and start putting up housing like the Israelis do.

What's over? Do you genuinely believe that there will be meaningful cognitive or physical work for baseline humans to do beyond the near future? If we're economically unproductive, we have to pass the time somehow. It's like complaining that the music of the angelic choir in heaven is too good and you don't feel like playing tennis.

Those who want more ever more sophisticated forms of entertainment will probably get them, I'm not enough of a snob to think that someone watching the equivalent of the best prestige TV or better ad their primary hobby is doing something wrong.

Being hamstrung by dumb rules of engagement is a common complaint of GWOT veterans.

Imagine going half way around the world to someone else's home and complaining that you can't commit more war crimes against locals who never at any point asked you to be there.

The GWOT failed because they failed at building alliances with locals and getting support. Not a single Afghan wanted to defend Kabul. The Afghan national army had zero motivation and nobody in Afghanistan believed in the occupation regime. Killing more Afghans would not have strengthened their enthusiasm for a corrupt regime.

Rather than killing more villagers they would have needed troops that spent years in villages building relations with locals and working on creating alliances with local figures. More gung ho recent arrivals from Texas who are trigger happy and want to go out and slaughter locals would have turned into a Vietnam scale fiasco.

I don't believe people want to game or watch TV endlessly on repeat though, I certainly don't. Regardless of how good something is I want to cycle between different sorts of stimuli and types of activities, some providing "fun" and others "meaning".

This seems to be a lot like gambling and many addictions to me. The vast majority have no issues to engage in moderate use while a small minority can't control themselves and self destruct, and young people are more vulnerable.

there’s some lobby, somewhere, which has been clamoring to remove this exemption.

After lying low for years following a costly debacle, the shadowy hand of Big Shaving Cream makes the opening move of its master plan to win back the hearts of normal Americans...

Apparently zoink does.

As I indicated in my response to him, it's to illustrate a point in principle. Sure, the US military has often been used badly. The US military's record over the last thirty years is pretty darn embarrassing. The point I am making, citing Heinlein, is that past incompetence notwithstanding, it is both necessary and good for the US military to be able to deploy a wide range of levels of force, as appropriate for many different mission profiles.

You do realize what a shame it is that Reddit midwit sarcasm has ruined so many useful phrases...

I think a lot of people are just plain embarassed by their country's inability to do anything of note in those foreign wars military-humanitarian aid missions. They might be fine with staying out of there and they would be fine with going there and getting things done, but going there, being unable to say what you're trying to do, wasting time and money and then going home to see a house of cards immediately collapse is just profoundly unsatisfying.

Spanking is appropriate for a baby, community service is appropriate for a juvenile delinquent, and beheading is appropriate for a hardened, unrepentant public enemy.

Nobody thinks we should instantly behead babies or lunchtime rowdies, but many people think we should stop handing out spankings and community service to hardened, unrepentant public enemies.

Let's try a (maximally cynical) example out for size.

It is the year 2003, and you have been selected to lead Operation Get Iraqi Oil. Do you nuke the country into a glassy plain? I suspect that would make it harder to get Iraqi oil than staging an invasion and military occupation, but I'm curious what you think.

Freedom of speech is a mistake theory idea. You won't get conflict theorists to accept it, because it doesn't' advance their goals. The only way to convert people to mistake theorists and get them to adopt freedom of speech as a shared principle with you is to get together with them on the same team against a larger common enemy. As long as they consider you a rival/threat/enemy, they'll treat your words as enemy soldiers.

Not super invested in this argument, but --

Obliterating Somalia because some enterprising fishermen decided to moonlight as pirates would be silly on top of appalling.

This only makes sense if you extend care to all humans equally as part of an internationalist humanitarian ethos. Many people don't, so they don't really care if 1 or 100 or 100,000 Somalians get killed in reaction to bothering us. If you ask them directly they would probably mumble something about how terrible it is because it's socially expected, but if you asked them to e.g. pay 5% higher taxes to Stop the Nuking of Somalians I doubt you would get much support.

It's a level of deranged collective punishment that would instantly turn the rest of the world against the US because nobody is sure when we're going to make an absurd demand at nukepoint.

Internationalist humanitarian true-believers are only (somewhat) common in U.S., Europe, and maybe Japan, countries so rich that luxury beliefs have become widespread. Most other nations' peoples still posses the tribal mindset I outlined above, and so to them the value of Somalian lives is approximately zero. Belgium and France might whine about it, but they increasingly irrelevant. Russia and China, who are relevant, would not care, though they would certainly cynically posture and feign outrage (just like the U.S. often does).

I don't really think maximum brutality is as beyond the pale as many (including myself) hope. There is a lot of room for American nastiness before Russia and China seem like more trustworthy and reliable allies, IMO.