domain:putanumonit.com
TitaniumButterfly
14hr ago
The Diamond Age is definitely my favorite but yes Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle are superb. Also if you like that era of Stevenson you might check out Interface which he co-wrote. Anathem felt a bit conceited but was worth one read.
Personally I find the trope of the hyperintelligent, hyper-competent black woman that everyone underestimates because she's black (and a woman) grating, so the next couple things I read of his (like Reamde) put me off. Sadly it felt like his mind going a bit. Sure, of course a random adopted Eritrean (average IQ 68) is going to be a brilliant hacker and international operative. Got a problem with that, chud? It's exactly the reverse of the verisimilitude which normally makes his works so wonderful.
Haven't tried Fall or DODO yet and I'm a bit reluctant. Seveneves could be great but I haven't gotten around to it.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
I've certainly met people who aren't very attractive but some combination of attire and posture and personality gets them laid a lot.
I mean, why do you think women wear makeup and dye their hair blonde? Nature has not given us all equal good looks, so you maximise what you have. You make your lips redder than nature did, you smooth out your complexion to be even and flawless, you emphasise your eyes, etc.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Sure, and a huge number of these changes boil down to ‘you have a kid now’.
zoink
14hr ago
As has been noted we've existed in a brief window of time when evidence of reality has been pretty good. There is a reason why in the past calling someone a liar could lead to a fight to the death.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
Christianity was different in that it put restrictions on male sexuality, as well as female sexuality. Now there was a new standard for men to live up to.
Matthew 5: 27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Matthew 19: 3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."
1 Timothy: 3 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.
...12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. 13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus.
1 Corinthians 7: Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
...10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife."
So men must be as chaste as women; no whoring around, no mistresses, no divorce-remarry-divorce-remarry, no casual sex.
Owlify
14hr ago
It's not just tokophobia but how pregnancy can permanently change your life in many ways.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
14hr ago
I think this is cope. You want to draw a line from Caesar to Trump, but the comparison doesn't make any sense (for a lot of reasons, not just the corruption angle). Leave aside the question of whether or not Caesar was good in the long run. Caesar, in your telling, leveraged his position to try and enact reforms. By your own comparison (and also reality) Trump is not doing that. Trump is not a guy playing the game better than anyone else while pushing for reform. He's pushing for more power and getting rid of guardrails holding him back from more corruption. Instead, the argument is, essentially, that Trump being overtly terrible is a good thing because it will inspire others to enact reforms so it can't happen again.
The problem is that Trump commands the unfaltering loyalty of a base of supporters who are, to be charitable, absolutely clueless. They categorically reject any suggestion that he's corrupt. None of this "at least he's public about." No, Trump is the most honest and upright politician we've ever had. After all, he's a billionaire already. This base in turn demands public devotion to Trump to be part of the team, and if you're not an idiot that means Olympic-level mental gymnastics to rationalize the extraordinary corruption of the Trump administration.
My intuition is that public crimes are actually less bad than secret ones. I would rather have it all out in the open.
My intuition is that corruption is always an iceberg. For every act of shameless public corruption there are a dozen hidden ones. Worse, because Trump is so blatantly, shamelessly corrupt and uncritical devotion to Trump is the bare minimum to be a Republican, you end up with a situation where one of the parties is essentially pro-corruption and actively resists attempts to fix the systems that allow Trump's abuses. If there was broad consensus that we needed to fix things in the future, the argument might make sense, but there's not and can't be because serious criticism of Trump is inadmissible in conservative politics right now. Thus we get this borderline parody of Murc's Law where Democrats are somehow at fault for Republican corruption.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Sure, but the number of videos on YouTube with nudity is less than every other video.
iprayiam3
14hr ago
I'd like to riff off this comment and muse on just how far apart our worldviews are. I assume you're positing it here for general interesting discussion; but if any of this feels too personal or prying let me know and I'll retract.
- You are on ADD medication
- You are on an antidepressants
- You are on semiglutine to counteract (partly) the weight gain from the anti-depressants
- You are looking at plastic surgery
I am sure from your perspective, this is exactly what the transhumanist plan looks like - medtech improvements and fine tune control over your inner chemistry and outer appearance. To me this looks like a medical doom spiral, and one that won't end in a post-humanist nervana.
I am not critiquing your decisions, as they flow out of your own circumstances I can't know intimately, and are in line wiht your axioms. I have always been a critic of your axioms however, and this seems (dispassionately amusingly) to be two movies on one screen -> a confirmation of each of our philosophies.
Anyway, best of luck on the weight loss and fitness goals, and again, apologies if this is too spicy.
PokerPirate
15hr ago
This Bloomberg story in particular has me quite mad. It seems like it should be easily falsifiable by anyone with moderate power (e.g. mid level NYTimes editor or FBI team leader) but no one has done so and I don't understand why.
My best guess is that the story is something like "directionally correct" with maybe half the facts being true and half the facts being made up, and this would explain why it's so hard for someone else to properly verify/discredit. Either way, the followup team has to do a LOT of work and they don't get any reward. For all the false parts they point out, the original authors can just say "but those are minor details" and for all the true parts they point out the original authors get all the credit for the work and there's no reward for the "peer review".
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
This is indeed a relevant question given Women’s susceptibility to social pressure.
faceh
15hr ago
I think there's an empathy gap, men know how much effort it takes to create good results, AND how few compliments a man gets, so men are more prone to give 'em when justified.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
15hr ago
It's true, people rarely live up to their principles, and powerful men are no exception. But people still understood that as a failure.
Sexual impropriety among the Romans caused them real concrete problems that those reforms tried to ameliorate. The idea that those were just the hangups of losers that don't merit consideration is silly.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
Declining birthrates might be accepted as an issue in the future, particularly when it starts looking like artificial wombs are realistic, so we'll have a 50 Stalins solution to a progressive problem.
This is not a solution. Tokophobia is a minor part of the birthrate decline; the median woman who won’t have kids won’t do so because she doesn’t want to be a mom, not because she’s afraid of getting pregnant.
YE_GUILTY
15hr ago
2rafa
15hr ago
In the end this will force people to blindly trust preferred sources in a way we haven’t done in 120+ years.
Since the popularization of the camera, major hoaxes have required escalating amounts of effort to reliably and persuasively fake audiovisual evidence.
Of course, they still existed. Stalin’s erstwhile colleagues were airbrushed. The BBC convinced the British public that spaghetti grew on trees. But until recently, hardcore OSINT types on Twitter could pretty reliably prove quite quickly whether something was real or fake.
Now, that’s increasingly no longer the case. We are moving back to the days when you decided to believe the foreign correspondent of your preferred newspaper simply because you believe him, and his reporting, with no further evidence required, necessary, or even available.
quiet_NaN
15hr ago
when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz
Minor nitpick: the verb to post implies either authorship or perhaps editorial publishing. The appropriate verb for Nate Silver's behavior is to link, or perhaps to tweet about something.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
The internet has always been full of fake BS- I remember the halcyon days of the dihydrogen monoxide research front. AI is surely a gift to trolls, but you already had to do some due diligence when you found information on the internets.
Maybe. Maybe not. Virtually every long form article I read I find out, sometimes years later, was a blatant lie. Or not? Sometime I never really find out.
Case in point, and something that never really leaves my mind. To this day I still don't know if this article in Bloomberg about China using their manufacturing to put backdoors in nearly every electronic device made there is true. It reads like it has tons of companies, if not on record, than with dozens of employees in them speaking of their experience in confidence. They appear to outline the actions numerous manufacturer's have taken to limit or mitigate this threat vector because they've been burned by it.
And yet in aftermath of that article, big splash though it made, virtually every entity named in it denied everything in it. I still have no clue if any of it was true, or they caved to pressure from China. I never heard of any real follow up reporting. And so I find myself almost less informed than if I'd read nothing at all. I have knowledge debt.
Edit: I'm going to double dip on this one actually.
Second example. Bitcoin. I tried for years to educate myself on bitcoin. It seemed interesting. Not one single news article about it told me anything. I was still reading Ars Technica back then, and even their "technical" reporting was lacking in any technical details and just came back to the same conclusion. Bitcoin is a scam. I remember this article in particular, which continues on that theme of seeming to impart negative knowledge. Like it's basically a blog of them setting up and running a bitcoin miner, but their stream of consciousness confusion about every step leaves you with an experience of a very unreliable narrator. And there is zero information what so ever about how any of it works beyond the most superficial ("it calculates hashes!")
Some time around 2017 I did my own research, ignoring everything "respectable" publishers were saying about bitcoin. I'm greatful every day since that I did, because I took literal decades off my savings goals by simply DCAing into bitcoin every month for 8 years. Even today the "respectable long form" articles about Bitcoin are probably 70-90% irrelevant smearing, ignorant half truths or malicious lies.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
The point of my post was to point out that there's no statistical basis for believing the 80/20 thing. I'm not saying it isn't true, just that we don't know. Either way, even if I assume that it is true, one of the following things must also be true:
- There's a lot of room for profile optimization to allow men of average looks to get into the top 20% of profiles, or
- Bald guys with salt and pepper beards with a height at the low end of average are now considered top tier in the looks department
Like I said, I've never used Tinder, but I've had no problems on Hinge. And this is with me selecting for attractive, non-obese women with professional jobs that usually involve advanced degrees. I match on about 20–25% of likes, on average, and even then I occasionally get into trouble where I have more matches than I can handle from swiping 4 or 5 days a month. I suspect that I could probably do "better" if I were swiping more and started going after the hairdressers and phlebotomists of the world, but I'm trying to find a girlfriend, not farm matches.
I was around for both eras; when I was in college, online dating had about as much social cachet as taking out personal ads in the paper, and I exclusively dated women I met IRL until relatively recently, but now that it's mainstream, I can confidently say that the women I'm meeting now are in a similar class to those I was meeting before, there's just more of them.
You have to keep in mind that if you set up a dating profile, that's you as far as women on the app are concerned. You know that there's more to you than that, but out there people are dealing with limited information. Too many guys half-ass their profiles and wonder why they aren't getting any attention. You've got one chance to make a good first impression, and so many guys waste it. Either that or they send out likes with messages that don't have any substance to them and don't give the girl much to work with in terms of a response. At worst, they suggest that the guy didn't even bother reading the profile and just clicked on a pretty face. Trust me, if some of my friends can find wives on here anyone can. Nobody wants to hear this because it means ditching the defeatist attitude and requires putting in some actual work, but if you can't put the work in for a fucking dating profile, what does that say about the kind of work you'll put into an actual relationship?
Then again, there's the possibility that you weren't dating much before the whole online thing took off, in which case, you can't expect women who wouldn't date you in real life to suddenly become attracted to your digital persona.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
15hr ago
Looking back, I think it's important to note that he was in med school, and I expect that teenage or slightly older girls are probably more likely to openly gush about men and dish out compliments. He's also really handsome so that can't hurt.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
15hr ago
And in this case, where I observe that approval being established by overwhelming amounts of propaganda on one side of the issue
You've been making your arguments for decades and can't even win referenda in Kansas or Missouri.
There were a decent number of followups, the problem's that we were kinda stuck between 'impossible to prove a negative' and 'she doeth protest too much'. Even if everything in the Bloomberg story was true, tearing down every single chip on a wide variety of boards couldn't actually disprove the claims, since Bloomberg said that only boards delivered to high-profile targets were modified. And neither did we ever see a released photo of a modified board, or a hexdump of whatever compromise it was supposed to be pushing. But there's also pretty good reasons to not want to do that from a national security perspective, and thanks to certain types of gag orders the feds can make it illegal to admit there's a problem.
My gutcheck is that it's not 'real' in the full sense Bloomberg claimed rather than just simple modified firmware -- though a lot of ErrataRob pointed out contemporaneously, a lot of the reasons that it feels 'not real' might be because of incompetence by the reporting -- but it's a messy enough situation that I can't put even moderate confidence in it.
More options
Context Copy link