domain:tracingwoodgrains.com
Might be the best anything cinematic, I don't appreciate his work as much as academics I can still sense he's amazing. Talking about lynch here.
It has a lot of cool melodrama.
I have seen Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, I'll get through season 2 lol.
I love the murder mystery melodrama oddly enough. Not the abstract part, for now at least.
rae
2d ago
"Is your 'AI Assistant' smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment"
I'm disappointed this was selected as a quality contribution due to the litany of easily-verifiable falsehoods from the author and his refusal to correct or acknowledge them. Strangely enough, I am more upset by this than any hot-button culture war issue I've read on here. I suppose if someone's political opinion differs from mine, I can dismiss it as a matter of opinion, but when someone tells complete falsehoods about the area you work in, doubles down, and is highlighted as a quality contributor, it feels worse.
2rafa
2d ago
After the Acosta plea deal and Epstein's "release" from "jail", he returned to being a star of the Manhattan social scene
Less true, he still knew a lot of powerful people but became more reclusive and increasingly met them only at his home after 2011. Maxwell and him also appear to have stopped being so close, she moved onto another relationship and other work. He mainly cultivated relationships with people outside the Manhattan social scene, tech people and academics.
Corvos
2d ago
I think there's some of both. Someone was talking last week about how much environmentalism is an aesthetic: happy, multi-coloured people in harmony with nature and each other, living in beautiful garden cities. And that aesthetic is both positive and negative to some degree. Pro-local neighbourhoods has to mean anti-car, pro-clean-air means anti-smoke and therefore anti-factory, anti-wood-fires, anti-gas-hobs etc.
I think @anti-dan is correct in that often the 'anti-' aesthetic comes first, people dislike chaos and capitalism and want central planning, they dislike 'dirty' industry, they dislike racism and nationalism and parocialism and this plays a big role in their willingness to become Greens and to believe the more extreme takes on that side.
As always, I default to Bertrand Russel's method: any deeply held belief requires at least two of [personal desire, +/- social pressure, and preponderance of empirical evidence]. You will believe something if you really like it and the evidence seems to line up that way (HBD, often), or if you like it and your community agrees even though the evidence doesn't really line up that way (most religion inc. mine IMHO as a Christian), or if the evidence lines up that way and there is social consensus (we're probably not going to get lots out of interstellar space races).
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2d ago
I saw a post on X saying there’s a subgroup of elder right wing millennials raising children as unreliant on digital consumer tech as possible with the implicit goal of preparing them for Butlerian Jihad.
Curiously, the elder millennial couple I know most committed to this are both rather woke lefties, but to the outside observer, they probably appear small-c conservative (or perhaps traditional). They seem to have arrived at their child-raising style via old lefty suspicion of capitalism and 90's-style leftist anti-vaxer/homeopathy-type health beliefs. Horseshoe theory strikes again.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I want to see camera footage of Epstein killing himself. If no such footage is provided, then it didn't happen. Footage of corridors is not a substitute. There's no excuse for 'oh we lost the camera footage, my bad'.
What makes you so sure that Epstein is even dead? The whole hanging thing could have been the perfect ruse to get him out of the jail and never seen again, while all you rubes focus on conspiracy theories relating to his demise. That would make more sense than what everyone seems to be proposing.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.
Perhaps not, but they want YOU to give up your car, your air travel, your air conditioning, your single-family home and yard, your meat, etc.
TIRM
2d ago
Raceplay
There's an interesting one. Based on the top lists of porn websites you'd think racial fetishism was one of the most common forms of sexual desire. Lists of top porn search terms by state similarly have races as top search terms. Popular and, given the context, rather innocuous.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
The Puritan impulse that is driven by "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" is not limited to guys in funny hats and capes
5434a
2d ago
Interesting analysis of dollar cost averaging vs buy the dip at https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-cost-averaging/amp/
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2d ago
I have zero doubts being a doctor is more stressful in some ways, especially in some specialties. However, imagine as a doctor, you had a counter-doctor working to fight or undo everything you were doing (even more so than the patient might fight you on things). It adds a whole extra level of stress.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Fair warning, no spoilers: Lynch left Twin Peaks for an extended period in Season 2, and it gets really really bad for a bit. Not quite unwatchable but close. Soldier on, though, because The Return is arguably the greatest TV ever filmed.
If you decide to take a break and watch other Lynch stuff, Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a Twin Peaks spinoff, and Blue Velvet is probably his Peaksiest film.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2d ago
twin peaks was hailed by many as his best work. It's amazing.
For his works as a director, I think Fire Walk With Me and The Return are an improvement over the original TP. The original TP had too many outsiders meddling.
Oh, I absolutely agree that their actions are often superficial and having unreasonable expectations of others. That was part of my backhand comment about college kids with iPhones. It's much like wanting to lose weight but not dieting (outside of switching to diet soda) or exercising.
My point of disagreement was anti-dan's framing was that they're not actually motivated by a desire to reduce pollution, instead they want people to live worse lives for the hell of it I guess? Because they derive enjoyment out of decreasing the total happiness in the world or something?
My model is that lots of people want to have their cake and eat it too. That they end up eating the cake is because obviously they can't have both and base desires won out. I'm more objecting to what I see as someone going:
I keep seeing people saying you should save your cake but they end up eating it. The logical conclusion is they hate the sight of cake and want to destroy it.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
why wouldn't similar reasoning prevent them from considering the Price Force to be like an army or navy?
Because you're not letting it! I want to be able to have (good) reasoning that does this! (Not terrible reasoning like "I'm imagining hypothetical people, and my imagination is telling me that they think things.") But you're telling me that it's absolutely Constitutionally allowed, because of the spending clause.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
Not that I'm aware of. In the specific instances of Gwern, X, HN and a few others, I was able to track down the original link manually, or using Google search parameters.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
I almost don't want to watch it rn and watch the remaining things after doing all of lynch's other movies.
Lynch was the best director in the US according to many, twin peaks was hailed by many as his best work. It's amazing.
zPvQINBQvfFR
2d ago
Okay, so 'nobody' includes the very person making this story.
Isn't this a bit unfair? Earlier he said:
For one thing, almost no one is arguing total LLM incompetence; there are some neat tricks that they can consistently pull off.
From the quote, he doesn't seem to be arguing total LLM incompetence or denying that there are some neat tricks that they can pull off. He seems to be saing that they are insufficiently competent to consider the problems to which they're applied "solved by AI".
DirtyWaterHotDog
2d ago
Rat-adjacent spaces have a soft spot for jaded psychiatrists with penchant for writing. I am not surprised.
During the great awokening, lots of niche forums moved to private groups on discord and slack. TheMotte is a rare space that has both open conversation and is publicly accessible. Goes to show how badly Reddit fumbled the bag.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2d ago
we're at the "can seduce the most pitiful and low-status people among us" point, the normal reaction to that isn't "boy, that could happen to me someday", it's "boy, I'm glad I'm not like those people and never will be!"
Yep, same as it ever was.
I wonder how far that generalizes.
I think far enough that AIfus taking over and dooming the human race is not a very serious concern and (as suggested downthread) a self-solving problem at worst; I've made the point before that the most committed gooners I know are still not ready to fully relinquish the flesh, still preferring the real thing whenever possible. I acknowledge that maybe I'm still in the normie tier and have yet to see trve degen commitment where people wear fursuits to work or marry their 2d wives or something, or (more realistically) it's an issue of waifutech still being in the womb pun not intended, slapdash and jury-rigged, as of yet without serious corpo effort put into optimizing engagement and all the other joys of cyberpunk. So far I believe it's strictly an engineering/marketing problem, overshadowed by a larger testicular deficiency problem, i.e. nobody has the balls to actually stake the claim to the evidently existing niche. (Something something monkey paw, I know, I'm honestly not really looking forward to it.)
But even so - humans are status-seeking creatures, as aptly indicated by the first quote; I think even in the face of the wish-granting Orgasmatron, people will cope and adapt. As waifutech arrives in earnest, having a flesh-and-blood gf will be swiftly elevated into an essential status symbol, much like right now actually except magnified tenfold now that your average loser has access to reasonably woman-like substitutes; being a filthy toasterfucker will be as stigmatized, if not more so, than admitting to jorkin to text owning an onahole or something right now [insert better analogy here]. The thresholds separating normiehood from loserdom will organically shift, as they always do, so that Society™ keeps trucking along. So it goes.
In our previous conversation, Rov dismissed my argument saying if there was a conspiracy, the entire DOJ would have to be in on it. Isn't arguing for this level of incompetence effectively arguing that no, you just have to get the guy on the top, and the rest of the apparatus will be happy to bumble along, no matter how absurd their decisions are?
thejdizzler
2d ago
Is there anywhere to see which pages actually link to your substack posts?
You can't build a Constitutional test that is just your imagination of what some hypothetical people might think.
All laws are going to require some amount of common sense to apply. "What do (sincere) people think" is an inherent part of having laws.
People have gotten this stupid idea in their brain that the spending clause authorizes literally any spending that the government chooses to do.
If you think that the government shouldn't be funding media anyway, then ask the question on a more general level: Could the government claim that anything whatsoever counts as the press, and then apply freedom of the press to it? Could it do so for religion or speech, for that matter? If the government could not apply those to anything whatsoever, why wouldn't similar reasoning prevent them from considering the Price Force to be like an army or navy?
Suicidal, no. Willing to sacrifice for a higher good, potentially to the point of giving your own life? That's what every society has tried to inculcate, typically in the military but often in other areas too.
Anyway, the question to ask is - altruistic towards whom? Depending on how you want to define it, 'true altruism' might require equal altruism towards all humans, or even towards all animals/living things/etc. You can always be more even-handed and unbiased in your charity. Or, alternatively, maybe it's more altruistic to help those you hate or who are different from you. Either way you define it, though, the concept seems meaningless to me because you can always be more 'true', so asking whether 'true altruism' exists is just a game of drawing arbitrary lines.
In reality, charity begins at home - and this is psychologically sensible, generally beneficial to societies, corresponds to our conceptions of responsibility and duty, and therefore is what we actually teach people.
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