domain:parrhesia.co
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires.
Way ahead of you. If someone threaten to kill themselves to get something from me, I will happily call the cops and they will spend a night or two in an asylum. I have done it before. It is unlikely to restrict the patient's long-term autonomy, and will put an end to further blackmail attempts. (Not that I would stick around such a person, these days.)
OTOH, when someone were to tell me about suicide plans which are not conditional on my behavior, I would probably let them do it if I came to the conclusion that they had made up their mind.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I think that for a typical liberal woman not looking to conceive, the preference order is:
- not get pregnant (using birth control)
- getting an abortion
- giving birth
So birth control is absolutely preventing abortions. It is also preventing some babies being born.
Of course, the pro-life crowd has largely not embraced birth control as a method to prevent abortions, which is telling. While I get that there are age-old Christian objections to abortions specifically, I think that a lot of the point of being pro-life is to want to punish women for a sinful lifestyle. "If you fuck around, you get punished by being a single mother."
BahRamYou
16hr ago
I feel like I can do that, provided that she's sufficiently motivated to get off her butt and go out into the real world to meet people in meat-space. I also like to play with my phone when I'm sitting at the bar, but I'll put at away as soon as I meet anyone interesting to talk to. The real challenge is the women staying at home, using the phone as their sole means of communication... which is most women these days. I went to three bars tonight (fancy cocktail bars in a trendy neighborhood) and there was literally zero women there who weren't there as part of a date.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.
That depends on the alternatives. If you want to argue that jumping of a tall building after we have reasonable legislation for assisted suicides, I agree with you.
But as long as such legislation is not in place, my attitude is fuck society. I would still prefer methods which are unlikely to endanger or traumatize others, but if society does not provide a non-messy way out, they can hardly expect me to stay alive just to avoid making a mess.
Look at it this way. I believe in my autonomy to decide if I live or die (within the obvious biological limits, until we can get around them). I would happily blow the brains out of someone who is attempting to murder me. If some 6yo sees this they will likely be traumatized, and that is bad, but at the end of the day I value my autonomy over my life more than the kid's lack of trauma. I do not think that this is unreasonable, and few would suggest that I am not justified here.
But this autonomy is a double-edged sword. Wanting to die is just as valid a choice as wanting to continue to live. I would not blow my brains out in front of a group of kindergardeners if I have a better choice, of course. But at the end of the day, my autonomy comes first.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
16hr ago
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I mean - please explain what political signage and iconography you see today, and please provide pictures thereof if possible.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
17hr ago
Still trying to unfuck my Unreal mystery errors. Things just end up in weird places, behaving weirdly. I have made some progress. I have also been perfectly stuck on some issues for weeks (months?) now. Oh well. Looks like many of my problems were caused by mistaking specalized solutions from tutorials for more general than they were. Right now I'm taking a detour to refactor some code (mostly looking to replace inheritance with composition, and generally upgrade structural sanity), and I hope that by the end of that process I'm better positioned to debug the rest of my problems.
falling-star
17hr ago
I'm a cum boy. I think there's at least 5 other regular posters that are too.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
Have you considered Godot's evil / based twin brother, Redot? I was working with it when they just forked, and it was no worse then Godot, and they're now teasing some pretty impressive benchmarks.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking".
- IoT and online IDs and social credit scores are becoming a thing because technological progress makes them feasible. In 1994, when most people were offline and the few which were online were mostly running PCs with Windows 3.11 and a modem, a dishwasher costing twice as much with a BNC port to connect to a home network which 98% of the population did not have would not have been very successful. Today the hardware costs are basically nil and most customers have WiFi in their kitchen. That does not mean that these are good ideas! Mao simply did not have the tech level to track which of his countrymen were good commie citizens and which ones were bad at the level of granularity, but I think he would have liked the idea.
- Censorship is an ancient idea. When the first warlords turned into nobles at the dawn of civilization, they very likely reacted badly to anyone claiming that Kodos would make a better king than Kang. You put "fact checking" in scare quotes, and I get it -- calling biased fact checkers neutral and objective does not make them so. My personal approach to fact-checking would be bottom-up. Rather than having a fact-checker in chief appointed by the president, I prefer random bloggers who have a track record of being credible in my book (i.e. Scott Alexander). I would also add that fact checking has become a thing because populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies. A lot of politicians lie, but GWB lying about WMD in Iraq (which CNN was not in the position to call BS on) is different than Trump lying about Immigrants eating cats and dogs or the size of his inauguration crowd. News organizations should call bullshit on provably wrong claims of fact. (Like SA, I have a bounded distrust for MSM. They will certainly report selectively and apply spins, but they will rarely conjure a story out of thin air. My distrust for Trump is unbounded -- if he told me the sky was blue I would go outside to check.)
- Guilt by association is likewise ancient. In Rome, the smallest legal unit was generally the family. It mattered little who in a family had committed an offense, the head of the family was on the hook for paying the fine.
- "Mass immigration" is likewise nothing new for the US. In 1850 and 1930 and 2000, about 11% of the census were foreign-born. In 2022 it was about 14%. More, but not dramatically so.
2rafa
17hr ago
I don’t believe that with your appearance and accent you were hooking up with large numbers of beautiful European women in Thailand or Bali or anywhere else, but it doesn’t really matter. If you did, then your post history clearly shows it brought you no fulfilment or happiness.
You hated the man you were, so you constructed the fantasy of an alpha male, a sexually successful man, to replace him. But the neuroticism, the angst, the self-doubt, the fear of a life unlived still haunts you to no lesser degree.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
As mentioned last week I deployed my project and was testing / fixing it over the week. While there's tons of missing features, weird quirks and bugs, it's still a massive quality of life improvement over my previous nitter+miniflux setup:
- Nitter was acting up because of issues with the authentication token. I have 2 Twitter burner accounts, so I thought it would solve the issue if I just switched up the tokens, but each only works half-way. I can either browse twitter with one token or have a working RSS feed with the other. The new setup had some issues with the token as well (it got rate limited, possibly due to both projects running on the same server), but it somehow recovered on it's own within a day.
- The ability to browse twitter from the same page is a huge improvement. What's more every reply tweet I see is getting automatically archived, which wasn't possible with the old setup. On top of that, the ability to follow a new twitter account at the click of a button is a HUGE boon (I used to have to got to the "new feed" page, copy-paste the RSS-view url, etc).
- I might have been having a bit too much fun with custom layouts, particularly for the error pages.
Like I said, far from finished, there's still plenty of retardation in the code, but it works well enough for me to use it over the old bespoke setup, so here's a github for the curious
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
You'd be amazed what you can accomplish with a few electrodes...
one wonders if they are using the same social time preference rate when calculating the costs of global warming in the future vs the costs of preventing global warming in the present. my understanding is the Stern Report used a discount rate of around ~1.5%. So that seems kind of suspicious that they are using a discount rate of between 2.5 and 3.5% here. however, the difference in rates is not super large. I think if they used a Stern rate it would increase the present value of the payments by a factor of 1.4 (where 1.0 would be the same value) compared to the rate they used.
also, whether it was misleading or not I think depends on how it was worded. If they said something like "the cost of the deal is 3.4 billion with payments over 100 years" then I think that is misleading because it gives the reader the impression that the payments are going to be something like 100 payments of 3.4 billion / 100 and a reader might think the net present value will be much lower. If you did not want to mislead the reader you would use more explicit wording like: "the net present value of the payments is 3.4 billion and will be paid over 100 years". My guess is the wording will just be standard wordcel games where you try to put false impressions in the heads of other people and then later claim the reader is at fault. I guess its also completely possible that all of the detail was shared with parliament but no-one in parliament actually reads the detail.
i've read the telegraph article and part of the article is written by the shadow foreign secretary priti patel. it seems like everyone knew what the cash value of the payments were all along but did not know how the treasury were calculating the final cost. i think in this case its hard to claim that treasury were that misleading. treasury should have explained originally how they came to their present value calculations but it's not like the value of the cash payments was hidden.
2rafa
17hr ago
Plenty of people in London wait for marriage, they just tend not to be natives.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17hr ago
Based comment of the week. I can only yeschad.jpeg so hard to this.
I remember having a conversation once at a party where I voiced my interest in what it would be like to date someone and intentionally remain celibate until marriage. The other party, a Thoroughly Modern Woman, immediately voiced the objection "But what if they're bad at sex?!"
I respond by telling her to think it through. In my hypothetical, the dating is the same as it is now, just no sex. We find each other attractive, we share important experiences, we trust one another, we integrate into each other's family life etc. If we assume all of that exists (which we have to, because, in this hypothetical, we're getting married) ... then how in the hell could the sex be bad?
"Here's this person who I find physically attractive, deeply care fore, have spent x months or years with, and have thought about as a long term partner for much of that time .... oh, fuck, she doesn't immediately know how to swivel her hips. Cancel it, cancel the whole damn thing."
It's such a laughable thought to genuinely worry that, on a wedding night, one or both partners is confronted with the horror - the absolute horror - that the other party isn't particularly gifted and one of life's most insanely pleasurable activities.
But that's what modernism has brought us. "He/she has gotta fuck good" is on the same checklist as "trustworthy" and "reliable"
Terracotta
17hr ago
It’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board.
OK, this has mystified me for a long time. I use LLMs for various editing, writing, coding tasks, occasionally to kludge a moderator for party games, to simulate human feedback on human-oriented questions, and once in a long while to suggest a starting point for a lit review or to locate a half-remembered link. But can you help me understand the "encyclopedia" and "web surfing replacement" use-cases, when we have actual encyclopedias and a web to surf?
When I see a granny or a teen just asking ChatGPT, I assume it's because they can't internet, can't read, or don't give a shit about the quality and provenance of their information, but for a super-online, epistemically hyper-aware Mottizen to do this feels like hearing someone say they hire a guy to order all their food, chew it and spit it in their mouth.
TwiceHuman
17hr ago
I think assisted suicide also harms those close to you, so being found in your apartment is not that much worse. Except maybe for the cleaning. Anyway, I'd agree if not for the pervsese incentives. You can have two entities A and B which are structurally safe from exploitation, but which can be exploited if you connect them as (A + B). An easy example is that countries cannot lagally spy on their own citizens, so they spy on each others citizens and share the information (FVEY). In my intuition, corruption is the inability to keep things separated, but "optimization" pushes us in the direction of centralization and higher connectivity between everything, which is why I expect these issues to get worse.
IoT is kind of new, but you still have this line from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". 46 years later, and idiots go "What if my fridge could order new milk by itself!? I'm a genius!"
"mass" is quite subjective, but the numbers have gone up a lot and there's many clear reasons for that. One of them is that we used to filter migration so that people who seemed skilled/competent and at least somewhat aligned with the culture of the destination made it through. That filter is now gone, immigration is purely altruism, it's not an economic investment.
And yes, censorship was held at bay by clear principles. Almost everything wrong with the internet is because we've ignored these insights:
1: You're innocent until proven guilty.
2: Guns are not to blame for murderers, knives are not to blame for stabbings, supermarkets are not to blame for theft, an online service is not to blame for criminal behaviour by users, car manufacturers are not to blame for my reckless driving, Google is not to blame for torrent websites, and torrent websites are not to blame for pirated content, and I'm not a criminal if a friend of mine commits a crime. Sentences like "You're either with us or against us" are mere propaganda. These are basically all the same thing, but I'm not sure there's a word for this concept, so I cannot describe it well.
3: Open communication is the best path to truth. Silencing anyone is objectively worse. An arbiter of truth is a ridiculus concept (which is why the 1949 book 1984 ridiculed the idea). Blind faith to science, too, goes against the principles of science.
4: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
5: Ownership. You don't really own anything like you use to. This has a lot of negative consequences as well.
I'm fairly sure even John Stuart Mill understood all these principles, why there can be no exceptions, and why there can be no hybrid solution which is better. I'm not too knowledgable about politics, or even history, but I do know some very important principles, and most issues which appears "new" to regular people is something that I consider solved more than 100 years ago. My heuristic is "if it breaches any of these principles, it's bad", and no matter what issues I throw at my principles, they gracefully solve them
SSCReader
17hr ago
This is a region where walking into the wrong neighborhood could get you shot.
Well we still have the murals and your chances of being shot have gone way down. Though FYI seeing which colours the kerbs are painted or which flags are on the lampposts is probably easier as there aren't that many murals, you may have to walk a while to work out where you are if relying on murals alone.
You chances of being shot in the wrong region weren't zero, but they weren't massive even at the height of the Troubles. I was on the Falls road (Catholic area) a fair bit even though I was Protestant. Without checking where someone keeps their toaster, or talking to them about schooling you can't tell a Catholic from a Protestant in general just by looking. Hence the old joke about a Jew being stopped by Paramilitaries.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17hr ago
Why not frame it like cigarette smoking?
I don't think people look down on people on a deeply moral level for smoking nowadays, but it's definitely at the level of "Yo, how can you be so stupid? Those cause cancer. And we've know that for years"
I won't judge a woman for going through a ho phase, but I'll shake my head and think "Any smart and respectable man is going to find a subtle way to filter you out. And we've know that for years."
I would also apply this exact same logic in reverse to a man. You spent your 20s and 30s dogging chicks and being a cad / skeezer? Well, in your 40s, any worthwhile woman is going to find a way to filter you out as well.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
18hr ago
Maybe so, although state elections also aren't relevant to people outside the state. I couldn't care less who is the governor of NY, nor the mayor of NYC, because it doesn't affect my life one iota.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18hr ago
Boats boosts it by approximately four billion.
Owning a boat is financial masochism. I've never done it because literally every blog on the planet - including super bro boat blogs - categorically informs you that it's a horrible idea. Yes, yes, "if it's a true passion" -- but, if it is, then you'll deal with the logistics of renting or chartering.
But got-damn to the bitches love a boat. My first experience with this was doing a half day rental of a pontoon boat on a B-Tier lake in greater Appalachia. This was not Miami, Catalina Island, Mykonos, what have you. This was a hot-ass august day on a "lake" that was made when Uncle Sam dammed a river 80 years ago.
The bikinis were on only until they were off. Sound track of Sports Illustrated Photo Shoot giggles. As I was the guy who decided to rent the boat and then drive it, my girlfriend was the ring leader and, although I didn't pursue it, I kind of felt like she was listing threesome on the menu.
Although I now see it for the moral sugar-high-and-crash that it was, and would never orchestrate a similar scenario, I cannot lie and say the memory isn't a warm one.
I have zero inclination to buy a boat, but when I drive past a marina in the summer in some of these mountain lakes, I smile, turn up the Kenny Chesney, and go back.
KLCC and the wealthier suburbs, like the gated communities around Putrajaya, are pretty unique. I think we discussed them before. Clearly the oil money is going to someone, but much of Malaysia is still pretty poor, and comparable with other parts of ASEAN that aren’t Singapore.
Also, even in KLCC there are pockets of low quality. Car-focused, walking very difficult, those meth / crack addicts on the pedestrian foot bridges just behind the big mall itself, still quite noticeable garbage on the street even sometimes. It’s just very clear it’s still a developing country, and of course plenty of developing countries have rich elites who like Chanel and Lamborghinis.
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