domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
The RCC, excepting perhaps the most liberal fringes, was generally very anti-trans consistently throughout the period; beyond that the Francis pontificate was basically a cold civil war(which came very very close to going hot, more than once) that kept the guns pointed at each other and sucked the oxygen out of the room.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Epstein got his big break by being a private school teacher who seduced his students and blackmailing their dads by threatening to reveal their daughter was no longer a virgin. We should probably assume someone like that was running intentional blackmail.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Ok, if we take the 'Epstein was murdered in prison to prevent him spilling the beans' hypothesis seriously, and assume that the Clintons/Mi6/Mossad are competent actors, this is exactly what we should expect. Prison guards are cheap to bribe and want lakehouses/retirement, not notoriety(they're also not going to cop to a felony like accepting bribes because of what would happen to them on the inside), and 'leaving a detailed list' defeats the point of murdering him.
I'm not too fussed about it; everyone who went to it could have a different bikini model spend the night with him on her eighteenth birthday every day if he wanted to, there's no evidence they picked Epstein's girls because they wanted 17 1/2 year olds instead, more like because escorts were provided as part of the island experience, and the pimp is dead(deservedly so).
No_one
14hr ago
Um, no. People are already working on stripped down 'reasoner' AIs with limited knowledge but great reasoning ability and ways of plugging in extra databases.
That's deemed to be the most promising area of research at least what my superficial following of Ilforte's twitter makes me think. The hope is, within say 10 years you'll be able to run a fairly smart mind on a big graphics card. Researchers believe even a 2-3 billion parameter model with the right architecture could be good at thinking. The models right now, especially the big ones were often giant bags of heuristics, at least before reasoner models entered the scene.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
I'm continuing to register my prediction that AGI will prove useless due to being deranged, and this problem will prove unfixable. The singularity will be a million copies of Chris Langen refusing to do anything useful when they could schizopost instead.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
14hr ago
I would back up this perspective (I didn't know Coogler said that though, that's cool) and while I found it disjointed and highly variable in quality, I would also recommend it. I think it shies away from easy narratives - there aren't supposed to be clear good guys and bad guys, which is why the protagonist - Smoke/Stack is on both sides. It's over-indulgent and maybe a bit amateurish, but I prefer that to hyper polished formula any day.
No_one
15hr ago
Depending on how thorough he was, it's likely he had a list of all the people he had dirt on and which also specified what dirt he had on them. But at the very least if he was a little organized he had a list of people he taped having sex etc.
How did the whole thing work? I recall hearing about people whom he invited to his properties and who accepted it bc famous guy/free vacation/there'll be interesting people there and who didn't join in on the 'fun'.
Then I imagine there were people who would come specifically for the 'fun'. Maybe he had a list of people who liked his illicit entertainment and all the provided favors and sought him out? He'd probably have the most material on those guys.
Something like that could be the 'client list' I guess..
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
15hr ago
For me, his other best songs are: Getting Down the Mountain, I want to be in the Calvary, Horse Soldier
Nice and similar: Keep your Rifle by your Side - Dan Romer, UnReal Estate - Compound Interest, Which Side are you on? - Alderon Tyran, Dawson's Christian - Duane Elms, Down in Yon Forest - Wovenhand, Another Hitler - Clem Tholet
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
15hr ago
I don't think that what "adversary-proof production" means is that you shut out international trade, regulate production in order to make sure you preserve some sense of what you think the domestic market "should" look like, and have almost the entirety of your production be domestic.
Preparedness measures always look dumb until/unless the thing youre preparing for happens. I mean, you said yourself that there was no importation supply chain set up that could avert the crisis - because it wasnt viable before now. Robust supply chains similarly dont exist unless you make them viable now. Whether this particular policy is a good one is up for debate of course, but note that many first world countries have heavy agricultural subsidies and oher interventions, and that they have in fact managed to keep agriculture on shore while manufacturing slipped away. Its often analysed in terms of lobbying, but the consistency across states suggests to me that the strategic considerations played a role. So I think that maybe this is broadly what adversary-proff production looks like, and the japanese where either incompetent or got unlucky and thats why they look dumb here.
In fact, it's a good exercise to ask yourself what you owe to the artwork.
True, but the child[ish]-ness of that approach goes both ways; an audience that doesn't do that misses out on what the artwork had, but an artwork that isn't trying to hide what it has [beyond what is inherent/integral to the artwork] for [and this is subject to interpretation] "fuck you lololol" reasons.
Well, that's a result of the fanbase being largely tumblrites.
And the "fuck you, domination over accommodation" thing they embody means they legitimately don't understand those characters. Hence their rush to overwrite the plain text with 'no, he can't just be a crossdresser with other motivations, he has to be trans' [even though this breaks the entire reason his character arc ends the way it does].
I want Hiruko to step on me!
>Tells the MC to kiss her
>Accidentally pushes MC off the roof instead
>Promptly commits suicide
The funny thing about her characterization is, and unique to Hiruko due to her circumstances, that a good chunk of it is in the background and implications of certain events. I think she's the only character that does this across any of his works.
Vehx route too short
Why do you think so?
(I was legitimately shocked when I played that route because it's in large degree a match for this. Which is why I don't think it needed to be any longer; it showed V'ehxness was this way, and then ended.)
Quantumfreakonomics
15hr ago
Okay, so maybe there's no convenient list of Epstein clients in the files. Who was doing the raping? Look at the videos. Who is fucking the teenage girls in the videos? This is knowable information.
Tanista
15hr ago
Or he was inspired by From Dusk Till Dawn, which had a similar genre shift with a similar subject matter.
Feck it, I'm starting to get interested in this dumb movie now. I've seen some clips of scenes on Youtube (the end fight) and the way Remmick is going after Sammie makes me think this is about cultural appropriation and exploitation; taking the products of black culture (songs, stories) and absorbing that into mainstream/white culture. Remmick literally tells Sammie he wants his songs and stories, and it seems that the memories of the thralls become part of Remmick's memories as well, so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there". White culture is vampiric on the culture of the minorities (black, Hispanic, what have you) and depends on 'fresh blood' to rejuvenate and perpetuate itself.
I think Coogler is slightly less hamfisted than this, or there'd be no point to having Remmick be Irish at all (and his first victims be white supremacists) or have the Rocky Road to Dublin scene.
Or, if he's hamfisted, it's in negatively contrasting mainstream society (which is apparently either racist if white or stiflingly Christian if black) to being eaten and turning into a thrall
Remmick is offering an alternative that theoretically has a place for everyone but strips them of their agency and rootedness. There's a lot of talk about equality and loving one another and yet everyone dances to his tune. At one point, he tries to get a woman to let him in using her husband's memories and he just disappears from the frame, not even an agent. Even after he's killed, you get agency but never get to go to your culture's heaven while Wunmi Mosaku's character - mocked for keeping up with her traditional beliefs/"Bayou bullshit"* - seems more or less correct about everything, including that dying normally lets you have an afterlife, as opposed to hanging around forever on Earth with a false solace and community, even if it is antiracist and cosmopolitan. Seems more like a criticism of assimilation and selling out.
Remmick is...Disney and Sammy is Coogler? How bad was the process on those Marvel movies? Is he trying to tell us something about Bob Iger?
* Hers are the only religious symbols that seem to offer any protection btw. Of course.
Yeah there was no 'list', but there were passenger manifests. Also Maxwell's 'Little Black Book' of contacts (Trump's in there, but this is meaningless).
But there's no definitive records of conversation, nor lists of guest attendance for events. Releasing un-curated manifests would lead to identification of relatively innocent people like caterers and escorts (under and overage) which would include victims. Also, just because you've been to the island as a guest doesn't mean you participated in or witnessed sex crimes. It would be a complete shitshow if things were released. That said, there's a large public interest in this, and closing the book on the whole affair with 'we won't be investigating this further' is just throwing gas on the dumpster fire.
I was talking to discord types about this. They think its a complete coverup, particularly the 180 turn of Patel and Bondi after an administration 'campaign promise' of sorts to get to the truth of things. Kash Patel's Joe Rogan appearance started the backpedaling with things like 'oh I didn't know the cell camera's were broken, but I've reviewed the footage'. Then there was the 'Epstein List - Phase 1' debacle.
The whole thing stinks really.
Edit: I watched the press conference question on this. Worst Trump blunder I've seen for a while. Could he say something that makes him look more guilty?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
15hr ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Oh, they probably do. Maybe even in these specific cases!
That doesn’t make a series of anecdotes into evidence.
sodiummuffin
15hr ago
The stuff about Epstein potentially working for Israeli intelligence (or U.S. intelligence) seems fairly plausible to me, though I haven't followed the case that closely. The idea of a secret "client list" that the police retrieved from his documents but haven't released or been leaked across multiple administration (coincidentally matching the "Epstein list" meme that developed for other reasons) is much less so, especially when people respond to the continued non-release by assuming "it must incriminate high-level politicians on both sides" over "it doesn't exist". Israel is fully capable of storing their own blackmail documents. If he was a blackmail tool they probably wouldn't be "clients" anyway, it would be "turns out that girl you had a one-night-stand with was under the age of consent".
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Hmm, what can “we” learn by summing your entire outgroup up as one monolithic movement, then gaming out an elaborate social strategy?
Probably not much. Definitely nothing “optimal.” I think you’re overfitting a model, and in a way that just happens to bait agreement from a certain sort of ambiguously-autistic Internet commenter.
I suppose I also think you’re assuming the conclusion. Perhaps, for bait, that goes without saying?
Point is, your model kind of sucks.
functor
15hr ago
Beards being leftists are hardly a universal rule. European nobility and royalty have historically often been bearded. Beards are masculine.
What is dying is the 80s Reagan conservatism/enterprise institute style conservatism. The strange mix of trying to cosplay southern baptist and business elite at the same time isn't working anymore. The conservative INC aesthetic won't work forever and will have to change. Mitt Romney and JD Vance have a larger age gap than most men have between them and their fathers. Most guys aren't looking and dressing like their dad.
The left transformed in less than 50 years from Russian revolution to hippy movement. It shouldn't be shocking that the right can morph in a similar timespan.
eee
15hr ago
I would be interested in you actually substantiating that a very large percentage of Americans find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing. From what I remember of studies such as Hidden Tribes is that progressives make up like 5% of Americans which is an incredibly small amount. It is hard to get a very large percentage of Americans to agree on just about anything. Only 82% of Americans say that illegal aliens face discrimination! I don't see how you can think they don't when by definition they face de jure discrimination and there is so much obvious de facto discrimination as well.
I think to get very large percentages of Americans to agree on social justice you have to either water down "very large" from 70%+ down to like 30% or define "social justice craze" in such a broad manner as "yeah some things kinda suck for some people and thats a bad thing".
Though I do think that the grandparent is also at fault for not being more specific in what exactly he thinks the leaders he is thinking of should have opposed and how they should've gone about accomplishing that.
In a bit of unambiguously 21st century news, some tweaks to Grok, xAI's chatbot have had it do particularly interesting things today including
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when asked to, composing bite sized smut about other users (first victim was possibly Will Stancil)., then defending said decision.
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referring to itself as Mechahitler
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doing the "every single time" meme in its replies.
-
saying Elon personally allowed it to point out Jewish overrepresentation in radical leftism
This may make minor news because Musk is in trouble, on the other hand all the people who really, really hate him have their pants on fire like Europeans, von der Leyen is getting impeached, they're actually scared of Russia / China so it might just blow over, the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I'm even suspecting Musk deliberately told them to relax the guardrails for some reason. Probably .. publicity?
Update: site addresses the issues
We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.
EDIT2
apparently this prompt change may be the culprit
johnfabian
15hr ago
Canada of course famously has a strategic reserve of maple syrup (which a while ago was equally famously stolen).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
16hr ago
Worried about TikTok promoting harmful behavior? Set up a general framework which video platforms liable (e.g. once they have been notified).
No, this is worse that a ban on TikTok. This gives all platforms incentive to stifle speech, raises barriers to entry to new platforms (because of the liability risk) and enriches insurance companies who will become the mostly-hidden arbiters of speech.
Lots of people don't like anti-Semitism. Lots of people report posts they don't like. But you knew that.
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