domain:aporiamagazine.com
FtttG
6hr ago
Have you ever read High Fidelity? The protagonist is an obsessive collector of vinyl records, and whenever he's going through a major life upheaval, he reorganises his records as a therapeutic exercise. At the very start of the novel his girlfriend breaks up with him, so he immediately begins reorganising his records - but in a break from tradition, he does so not in alphabetical or chronological order, but autobiographical: the chronological order in which he bought them.
Terracotta
6hr ago
(I say all this as a former Naval officer who was become a committed pacifist. One reason among many for the transformation is just how fun it is to kill.)
I can fully see how this would be true of mowing down dim figures with ranged weapons at a distance, videogame-style. Can I ask, from curiosity, if in your experience it's also true of killing in hand-to-hand combat, where you can see/ hear/ smell the physical damage being done and watch the life leaving people's bodies?
DradisPing
6hr ago
So I've been getting an ad on Xitter for a tiny bookshelf with a whole lot of fake books you can organize. Then you can dump it out and organize them again.
This blew my mind because it never occurred to me that this was an activity people enjoy.
I just assumed that people who alphabetized their CDs (dating myself here) just never did the math on how often they actually search for a random CD by name.
Does anyone good stories about seeing a product that made them realize their failures at modelling the minds of others?
Corvos
7hr ago
Do people use the chat history / user memory features? I found them kind of intrusive and I prefer having a blank slate for queries, so I turned them off.
No_one
7hr ago
If you AI under close oversight / editing it won't make something unrecognizable.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
Equally thanks to pressure from the Gingrich era Republicans in Congress.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
I don't see why Trump gives a shit. He can't be reelected anyway, so who cares if the voters hate him?
He himself? He's quite obviously someone who is obsessed with whether the people, or at least his own voter base, like him or not.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control.
But that would have been right after the years the US federal budget had been running a surplus under the Clinton admin, no?
TowardsPanna
9hr ago
To me he seems nothing like a visionary leader who accepts temporary pain for the greater, long term good of his people. His first and second priorities are his ego and his embezzlement.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
I’m with you, zero confidence that Americans will go along with this, because Americans have been raised up until maybe 15 years ago in a world of abundant wealth where hard choices didn’t have to be made. Or the can could be kicked until basically now. They aren’t used to “suffering for the greater good”, making do or doing without. So they aren’t going to tolerate such a thing. Add in the opposition making a point to blame the GOP for the suffering and promising to go back to the before times when the public could expect high standards of living, cushy office jobs, university education, and cheap consumer goods, and you will see the revolt.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Or more generally, doing anything fun and non-programmer with generative llms?
RP?
You can slam any two settings together or make your own, any moderately known characters replicated with moderate authenticity, go on adventures. I might be eccentric since I'm more of a '2nd person going on an adventure in a world' person while many if not most seem to be 'directly communicating with an invented character 1 to 1' people.
Surely this has to be the most freeform roleplaying game ever made.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
9hr ago
Can't cut medicaid or social security because your voting base will revolt.
I don't see why Trump gives a shit. He can't be reelected anyway, so who cares if the voters hate him? His career in politics is over either way. He's in the ideal position to do necessary-but-unpopular things. Granted that he needs Congress to play ball (he can't just cut spending on welfare himself), but Trump himself doesn't need to worry.
Ioper
10hr ago
Normally I'd agree but the situation is already unsustainable and rapidly spinning out of control. Massive fiscal reform needs to happen soon and I doubt that cuts to future entitlements that obviously were never going to happen would garner more opposition than cuts to current entitlements.
nopie
10hr ago
My view is slightly different. Sometimes debt is good, you would buy a house on mortgage, for example. But the current debt is purely for buying trinkets, not good. The US is also a very strong economy, the best in the world. Some more debt is not going to bankrupt it. However, excess debt can reduce growth. The fact that the US was growing faster than other developed countries, is no reason to limit this potential. Therefore this debt should be eliminated as it would allow the US to grow even faster.
Now, Musk wants more growth. Everything depends on it. It is a long game he is playing, some moves might be wrong, but it all makes sense.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
10hr ago
Can be a decent exercise, I write poorly, something long form should help me get better at writing at the very least.
Some of my favorite movies are the three that make up the Oslo trilogy which focus on lives of people. Two of the three don't involve grand plots of any kind. Slice of life is hard to pull off.
nopie
10hr ago
In all those cases I was totally on Musk's side. Lockdowns were terrible and now even Scott Alexander quotes studies that they didn't do anything, only destroyed economy even more and increased mental problems of people. This is where both democrats and republicans dropped the ball on science.
Elon deserved at least some recognition for EVs.
Elon's transkid? The UK banned puberty blockers for a reason. It turns out that most “transkids” stop being “trans” by reaching adulthood, but if they are given puberty blockers, then it is almost 100% guaranteed that they will continue this transpath. Not good outcome at all and only the most ideology obsessed people cannot see why this is a problem.
The only thing I don't like about Musk is his over promises, for example, selling self-driving cars (was promised to be ready in 2024)? Clearly a fantasy although the idea to develop them is good. Of course, sometimes I don't like his talk (calling some a pedo etc.). But that is not important in the great scheme of things.
The first thing I did was read your post and the first sentence and a half of @urquan's post and immediately ran and asked chatgpt and gemini to create an image based on how you feel about me. When I asked chatgpt I got this which is great. Gemini on the other hand gave me this, which made me laugh and realise I should probably try reading posts properly. Can I ask what prompt you used? Likewise urquan? I also asked grok and got this. It insists it's based on our chat history and not just the session I asked it in, but I'm not sure I believe it.
Skulldrinker
11hr ago
It would have been 10 minutes before 2017. It's just the most extreme version of the recurring pattern of someone liking me only for a third party to hate me so much they feel the need to intercede, and it always happens in the context of geek culture. And I'm very annoyed that something that happened so long ago is still a load I carry.
dr_analog
razorboy
11hr ago
AI would need to deliver, like, 8% annualized growth or something to pull out of our debt problems. Our historical average has been 2%
Basically, this is in crack pipe fantasy territory. Not that a man can't hope though...
PokerPirate
11hr ago
Where is your line?
I'm not able to articulate it. That's largely because I've never liked the framing of there being a spectrum of bad things that can happen, and everyone draws a line somewhere, and violence is allowed below the line but not above the line. In this framing, pacifism is a totally passive thing that just places the line somewhere very low.
I think if pacifism is going to be viable, it needs to have a much more positive framing than merely as rejecting violence in some circumstances.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11hr ago
I don't care how good it is, I don't want to hear it blaring through my windows. Or my walls (been there, done that).
I'll feel less bad about Social Security if ever convinced the only alternative is UBI For Women and Single Mothers.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11hr ago
You seem not to actually be paying attention to anything going on in American popular music today, if you think that there is no “melodically complex” music being “played on real instruments”.
Is that the trilogy containing Oslo 31. August? Great movie IMO. Felt pretty accurate.
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