domain:alethios.substack.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
21hr ago
I believe Mami is a year or two older than the rest, acting as the mom of the group. Little surprise she's got big honkers,during adolescence those can come out fast.
If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras.
Discord is more fragmented and sioled, so the power of the tranny powermods is greatly diminished. Unlike Reddit where a hobby may only have one or two reddits, it will likely have quite a few discords with different people in them. So if you look (of course this is the hard part but also possibly a blessing) then there are certainly some where they're at least not explicitly political for the enemy.
Of course the Discord owners will always put their fingers on the scale, but compared to Reddit the sheer amount of volume in messages makes it hard to automod. And scanning voice chat is even harder. On Reddit we know they have in many cases stolen subs and given them to aligned tranny powermods. But on Discord there's little point in stealing a discord, as most people would probably just leave. So the enemy usually just uses the banhammer against and political content they don't like.
BTW telegram is definitely the underdog for hobby chats, but the owners haven't really shown to take a side in the culture war.
Bartender_Venator
21hr ago
The swearing is overly snappy and convoluted, and Cim is right that it was an extra-sweary period in British TV that sounds very silly now. In real life people who try to swear like that sound more like Ollie than Malcolm. But the overall tenor is definitely accurate to British politics in the Blair/Brown years. A story about two very senior aides of Gordon Brown (names omitted and stuff paraphrased, since the story was told in private, but newspaper readers at the time would recognize both):
I'm in my office with X, and she's complaining that Gordon's been fucking up everything lately, that he can't come across like a normal person, etc etc. She's got her back to the door, and doesn't see Gordon walk in. He's standing in the doorway and I can see he's about to fly into one of his rages. Now, he would have these terrible rages, and I learned that the only way to get Gordon out of it was to get even angrier than him, enough that he'd start trying to calm me down, so I jump up, kick over the litter basket, and shout "I CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT THOSE BASTARDS ARE SAYING ABOUT HIM! I'M GOING TO KILL THEM!" And Gordon calms down, and he comes over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders and says "Calm down, [aide], calm down, it'll all be fine."
In the behind-the-scenes footage, too, the actors talk about the time they've spent with people in the civil service/government preparing for their roles. Nicola Murray's actress quoted one of them as saying "I don't know why we do this. It's not for the money, because we don't make any money, and it's not for the power, because we don't have any power. It's like you're working for charity... but a shit charity, that everybody hates." Who knows if that's real, but too good to leave out.
NYTReader
21hr ago
Buying plane tickets is navigating a minefield - one misclick blows a hole in your wallet.
More like four to five misclicks. You usually go through multiple confirmation pages before you purchase anything online.
It's actually a bit annoying.
iprayiam3
21hr ago
This kinda happened to me with running. I was a D1 track athlete, and after college, could never get back into recreational running at a hobby level. It never felt right not to be training for the highest level competition, and then just let enough time get away to have it be a depressing slide of peak potential
faceh
21hr ago
Yes, the sheer rise in anxiety disorders is testament to that deep problem.
I still feel it, sometimes, when it comes time to turn off the computer and dress up and leave the house the "ugh field" activates. But I know I'll be happier if I take the opportunity.
I've also noticed in myself the tendency to not wanting to show up somewhere unless I can expect there to be decently attractive, possibly single women attending, likely dressed in cute clothing. My guys nights and board games are fun, but I really just want to be able to interact with women more, its the only aspect really missing from my otherwise ideal routine.
And women, of course, are markedly more anxious and flighty these days, so its harder to get them to come out consistently than ever. Ask me how I know.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21hr ago
to get a car that is like, 500% better?
On what metric are you measuring this?
I'm reminded of a portion of a recent comment over at Jim's blog (by regular commenter Pax Imperialis, who is currently in the military):
The extreme lack of basic nice things is driving me up a wall. Can’t even buy a basic car these days without it being full of shit bells and whistles, the purpose of which I conjecture is to distract from lower modern performance in all the basic qualities expected of a car’s purpose. My dreams of an American muscle car have been crushed. They’re all full of electronic bs inside and the market for affordable new V8s has more or less vanished. It’s like someone claiming how much better the new restroom is because the LED lights up the water coming out of the facets, and that there is music playing inside, but you can’t help but notice the water flow is painfully slower and lower pressure than previous faucets. Damn it, I just want to be able to flush the toilet with one pull of the handle and wash my hands quickly. Not spend minutes waiting for the toilet to regain pressure to flush it the 3rd time and minutes more in front of a lackluster sink.
FtSoA
21hr ago
In what sub?
Edit: Blocked and Reported. Just as I suspected.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1ltkjsp/comment/n2e9czv/
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21hr ago
Oh I didn’t think you were snippy at all! And even if you were, that’s nothing to apologize for, goodness gracious. Your daughter is the most important thing in your world, of course any time you talk about her it’s going to be emotionally charged. Plus I appreciated hearing the extra context.
I do hope everything works out for you.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21hr ago
That doesn't and hasn't really happened in the US
Operation Choke Point? Kiwi Farms?
5434a
21hr ago
Tattoos used to signify insiders/outsiders of one variety or another. Now they more often signify people who adopt the latent aesthetic of that signal. They want to be appear special, and different, but not so different that they have to suffer the social costs (unless it's triggering the "squares" which is exactly the crypto benefit they're seeking).
The ticking time bomb is that as time passes tattoos become associated more with middle aged squares than they do live-fast-die-young devil-may-care rebels. Gen Alpha's immediate source of cultural exposure to tattoos is going to be via their mums and their primary school teachers.
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
if enough people pay money for [knowledge] work, to AI...
This is the spot where the terminology is overloaded. It's sneaking in something about AI simply being called "AI". Why can't we replace this with a more generic term, "If enough people pay money for [knowledge] work, to an information processing algorithm..."? And thus, Google Web Search would again become intelligent.
I think one would have to argue that there is something fundamentally different, other than the name, between different types of information processing algorithms.
There are special cloaks that camouflage you in both visible light and IR, but they are still too rare to hand out to every trooper.
Not that expensive, though. 50 bucks if you buy them wholesale.
wemptronics
22hr ago
Doesn’t discord share that culture? If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras. Just as I would at reddit. The Discord devs either cater to this audience or share the culture.
My experience with discord is limited and potentially outdated, but I have the impression of overlap between the Discord user identity and the average redditor. The redditor is older, but they're both likely to be socially progressive, with the younger Discord user more likely to identify as a radical.
My personal suspicion/conspiracy is that there's serious coordination on various Discords to astroturf reddit. Reddit is the biggest left of center messaging platform online. This suspicion is reinforced some stories like this one, where discord is used to manipulate messaging on reddit. Not by the DNC, Qatar, or Russia psyops, at least not directly, but by passionate believers in The Cause who happen to be prolific contributors on reddit. I am sure there's plenty of Discords that aren't of the mainstream discord culture, but the same can be said of certain subreddits.
It also occurs to me that chatting, the main discussion method on a Discord, is a different type than the more complete posting of a forum.
faceh
22hr ago
If it encounters captchas or similar blockades, it politely stops and alerts you so you can help solve them before it continues.
How this will impact website's security measures going forward, I do no know.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
It was different times when Reddit was founded. Back then the left was confident in it's ideas, so they craved free speech as they saw it as the key to winning. It's only when they realized they can also lose on the marketplace of ideas that they turned sour on it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
(Not the original commenter, but wanted to jump in). I don't think anything in their comment above implied that they were talking about linear or simpler statistics, that's your own projection, and I think it does you a disservice. Similarly, I find it somewhat suspect to directly compare brains to LLMs. I don't think you did so explicitly, but you certainly did so implicitly, even despite your caveat. There's an argument to be made that Hebbsian learning in neurons and the brain as a whole isn't similar enough to the mechanisms powering LLMs for the same paradigms to apply, although I think I do appreciate the point I think you are trying to make which is that human cause and effect is still (fancy) statistical learning on some level.
After all, MLPs and the different layers and deep learning techniques are inspired by brain neurons, but the actual mechanics are different scales entirely despite a few overlapping principles. It seems to me the overlapping principles are not enough to make that jump by themselves. I'd be curious if you'd expand somewhere on that, because you definitely know more than me there, but I don't think I'm incorrect in summarizing the state of the research? Brains are pretty amazing, after all, and of course I could pick out a bunch of facts about it but one that is striking is that LLMs use ~about the same amount of energy for one inference as the brain does in an entire day (.3 kWh, though figures vary for the inferences, it's still a gap of approximately that magnitude IIRC). On that level and others (e.g. neurons are more sparse, recurrent, asynchronous, and dynamic overall whereas LLMs use often fully connected denser layers for the MLPs... though Mixture of Experts and attention vs feed-forward components makes comparison tricky even ignoring the chemistry) it seems pretty obvious that the approach is probably weaker than the human one, so your prior that they are more or less the same is a little puzzling, despite how overall enlightening your comment is to what you're trying to get at.
I personally continue to think that the majority of the 'difference' comes from structure. I did actually mention a little bit of it in my comment, but with how little anyone has discussed neural network principles it didn't seem worthwhile to talk about it in any more detail and I didn't want to bother typing out some layman's definition. There's the lack of memory, which I talked about a little bit in my comment, LLM's lack of self-directed learning, the temporal nature of weight re-adjustment is different, and as you pointed out their inputs are less rich than that of humans to start with. Plus your point about attention, though I'm not quite sure how I'd summarize that. While it's quite possible that we can get human-level thinking out of a different computational base, we're n=1 here on human development, so it sort of feels similar in a few ways to the debate over whether you can have significant numbers of equal complexity non-carbon based life forms on other planets. And smarter cephalopod brains share enough structural similarities while not achieving anything too special that I don't think it's very helpful. I might be wrong about that last point, though.
Try living your life after having been deemed a politically liability whom no bank will touch and come back to me.
That doesn't and hasn't really happened in the US ... except for well, the one big thing we're seeing right now. Over porn/adult content. The payment processors ability to censor the largest stores on the internet and some of the state governments suppressing adult content sites is a pretty easy to see what real power looks like.
It looks like you literally not being able to see or buy the "bad things" to begin with. And even this still needs the backing of government and the deepest institutions of credit and capital to enforce their censorship with decently accessible workarounds still available. This is the worst America has to offer currently, multiple times more censoring than almost any other cultural clash and it's still struggling.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
22hr ago
Honestly, therapist is a last resort for us, we fear it as much as drugs. But it was what the Neuropsychologist prescribed for her when she was diagnosed with ADHD, and we are really at a loss. We are giving it six months just so we can say we tried it and see what else the Neuropsychologist tells us to do.
Stuffy closet is also just the only way to keep her and her siblings safe when she's like this. She will thrash and yell in there for 10+ minutes until she calms down.
Sorry if I was snippy, it's a hazard about talking about parenting on the Internet. But yeah, I get the feeling that kids like her were part of the 50% childhood mortality rate a thousand years ago.
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
But the model three is a better car! The foreigner version of a ford Mustang or a Camero is probably affordable at less than 1800 hrs at $17/hr. It's illegal to sell, but that's the rough equivalent, and 'I want a hilux' is a different issue.
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
Offer a suspended sentence where the whole thing is forgiven if she completes probation. Or knock it down to the charge for shooting a gun in the air(illegal with good reason)/handgun while underage(in the US handguns require 21). There's lots of solutions and she might well get screwed by an uncaring system.
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
Because low-skill compensation in the west has been rising astronomically, personal touches like that have been getting more expensive, not less. Fast food is paying $14/hr now- for front of house(restaurants tend to pay their kitchen people more because it's harder work). Day laborers used to be $100/day, plus lunch. Now it's $200.
Tipping everywhere probably has this as a big chunk of the explanation. It is simply far more expensive to hire someone to take orders and pour coffee and putting some on the customers even if it annoys them makes more sense as a tradeoff.
As for why that is, I blame weed making some people unemployable and doordash convincing a bigger chunk that they can strike it rich being their own boss.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
22hr ago
Don't ask me, it wasn't my idea to link to a banned account! The feature is more of a QOL thing, from when we'd just moved and it was helpful to refer explicitly to a Reddit account. These days, nobody uses it unless they forget or don't know about our alternate @.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
nowadays they're so ubiquitous among young people that I don't think there's a strong correlation at all.
I don't have the disgust reaction that a lot of people here seem to have. I do, however, tend to think that for the cost of a full sleeve you could do something that gets you a fun story and some interesting scars.
Tottenham play football, and they're shit at it (they're Arsenal's old local rivals). Besides, I believe the team is on tour in Thailand right now, probably watching Asian twinks jerk off with plants.
If you're still in the area, after the Tate Modern I recommend walking down the river bank towards Westminster Bridge. It's definitely the prettiest and most interesting part of the river to walk along, and there are some good pubs near Waterloo Station if the walk gets you thirsty (sadly, my favourite, a railway arch pub entirely painted with murals of the Battle, seems to have closed).
More options
Context Copy link