domain:cafeamericainmag.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr 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
3hr 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.
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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?
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
4hr 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.
I laughed aloud when I saw that, I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way but I instantly recognized it as right. As far as I know from my peer group growing up I’m only one of 15% of them that currently has multiple children, and of that 15% I’m clearly in the top 5% or so of how anti-tech I am and I’m obviously the most right wing.
My children don’t have tablets, or smartphones, tv time is very limited and monitored with an eye towards classic movies and long form YouTube content that’s purposely less bombastic. The only time they play video games is when we are all together and we play couch party games, and we have one laptop that is mostly used for my work. There’s no unsupervised internet access whatsoever. My eldest just got a basic music play that they have their own restricted Spotify account on.
They mostly draw and read from a big library, play imagination games and build things. We hike regularly, and spend lots of time outdoors in rivers and mountains and the beach.
It’s not necessarily a reactionary thing; really for me the goal is helping prepare them for an increasingly hostile environment by helping them learn to love being human, love their bodies, tolerate boredom, generate their own fun, act without being prompted, etc, etc, etc. they’ll need it.
gattsuru
4hr ago
The Texas law hydroacetylene is mentioning is Texas HB1181, which puts some potentially high fines on commercial websites that provide more than 1/3 material that is "harmful to minors" and don't have age verification processes (or who don't put certain notices, though that prong is still on hold and unlikely to survive legal scrutiny). While there's some vagueness to how the math happens, the actual definition of 'harmful to minors' is pretty explicitly limited to nudity and sexual acts.
I don't like the law, and I am skeptical both in the "I don't think a sixteen-year-old is going to be hurt by seeing a boob" sense and "I'm not willing to burn down the commons over it" sense. It's certainly driven some censorship. But I don't think it's responsible for the examples people are using here.
Itchio readded search and recommendations for NSFW games that had been deindexed (if they are set as free). As far as I can tell, only a small number of games were completely removed from the service, but they've stayed removed for new purchase (or download):
TowardsPanna
4hr ago
Getting good returns comes from timing the market as well as picking the right stocks/assets. You need to have the patience to wait for some panic like we got on August 5th 2024 and April 7th 2025. Then you must have the balls to pull the trigger and go in hard, when it feels frightening and wrong to do so.
If you want guaranteed mediocrity in return for no thinking, just do dollar cost averaging into the index.
People will parrot "time in the market beats timing the market" and "nearly everyone who picks individual stocks underperform the market", and that may be true, but that's because most people included in the stats don't have a clue what they're doing, and/or can't override their instincts for the unnatural behavior of investing.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
Now that makes me wonder why more doctors aren't fat and/or drunk. Everything you've said about attorneys fits our bill. Maybe we're more health conscious (and I hope we are), maybe we run around more, or maybe we just sleep better at night from a clean conscience.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
I'm grateful for Substack's ability to show me the sources of traffic. As I've previously mentioned, it keyed me in to the fact that Gwern himself had archived me. I was quite pleased to see a few people independently share my posts on HN too.
But, sometimes it raises more questions than it answers. Why are my posts being shared via the Steam forums? Why Slack? Who is using their company comms or a gaming website to talk about anything I've written?? I wish I knew, but it's a mystery that I'm unlikely to solve. I even saw Localhost:1881 in there, which I strongly suspect shouldn't be sending me any traffic.
After writing the above, I went back to my most popular article, the one about the effects of psilocybin on depression. Substack has 800 views from LinkedIn, 15 from Microsoft Office, 2 from the Brave browser (?).
I hope someone can tell me what the fuck is going on here.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4hr ago
Recently, I have been reminded why so many lawyers are fat, drunks, or both. There are just too many days where the stress levels are atrocious, and as if dealing with clients/courts/etc. aren't bad enough, then adding in training and supervising other attorneys means there are constant small fires that need attention.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
4hr ago
”We’ve won, but at what cost?”
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.
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