domain:gurwinder.substack.com
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5m ago
Is this just your uncharitable interpretation of them
No.
People seem to get their panties in a bunch because these two guys don't genuflect to the WW2 mythos that has been handed down to the American public through Hollywood and high school history class, but I'm not convinced that saying something like "actually WW2 was more complicated that just Good Guys vs Bad Guys" is in any way remotely near "full-on sieg heiling."
Yeah, but they're not saying that. They're peddling ahistorical nonsense to try and whitewash Nazi aggression and Nazi crimes while shifting the blame for these things to their enemies for having the temerity to resist. Cooper wants to paint Nazi atrocities as tragic accidents in a war they were forced into, using arguments make little sense and that can be trivially debunked if you possess basic factual knowledge^1. This suggests that Cooper is either an idiot or a liar, and I see little else to indicate that he is an idiot. If Cooper is deliberately misrepresenting WW2 in a way that minimizes the crimes of Nazism, it raises the question of why? Given that he's on record praising reactionary authoritarianism, it's probably because he thinks it's useful to soft-pedal Hitler.
Are these people full on fascists? Don't know. Clearly, however, they do find an interest in trying to rehabilitate fascism.
1: for example, blaming Churchill for the escalation of the German invasion of Poland into general European war
hydroacetylene
13m ago
But, notably, openai isn't profitable.
Turniper
13m ago
The use case of one-shotting crappy vampire survivor is that you could easily manage a supervised build of crappy Hades or your ARPG of choice. I'm just insanely impressed with how good recent models are at coding. I'm getting them to produce thousands of lines of multithreaded code in Unity's burst compiler with sizable amounts of guidelines and bugfixes, but I'm still getting code in days that would take me 5x that long to produce on my own. Having an assistant that just knows 'Oh yeah, you gotta delete the cache when you change GPU-passing structs', and can just 'tweak that native array to persist height data so we don't need to sample the resultant mesh' is so insanely powerful. As soon as someone solves post-training and long term context, we're probably gonna see a huge amount of digital-friendly jobs get wiped out in a single wave.
We're going to see some insanely ambitious indie games in the next five years. One programmer can now do the work of 2-4 with a really effective AI collaboration workflow. And I don't doubt it'll be 10 in another year.
hydroacetylene
14m ago
I'll worry about AI when an AI company makes a profit.
Now, obviously, this will be bad for the white collar job market, but it's overheated anyways. But AI won't be transformative the way microsoft office was transformative and we know this because it can't make a profit. You need a business case to change the world, sorry.
Maybe it'll happen eventually- printing of books took ~600 years to have enough of a business case to change the world. But panicking about the employment of scribes in 850 AD was very premature; Gutenberg was not on the horizon yet.
TK-421
38m ago
Good Fortune? Or Bad Omens
The next great survey is about to begin. As with all meaningful social opinions, it will be measured in money. The film Good Fortune will be on us tomorrow and soon we shall know if America is ready to be willing to be seen with Aziz Ansari publicly after finding out how bad he is at sex.
My leaning was weak financial performance but decent enough, even at a net loss to the studio, to let Ansari continue awkwardly sidling back into our homes. After the Riyadh Comedy Festival, I've downgraded my forecast to a bomb.
I also predict that Ansari is going to be the last of the non-incarcerated tranche of MeToo celebrities to be fully acceptable in far blue society. People involved in worse will do better. Women won't like getting close enough to risk touching the ick field Ansari is coated in and, while funny and obviously well connected, he can't make something essential enough to overcome that reaction.
What say you, entertainment industry financial forecast specialists?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
39m ago
I've heard a lot of zionists talk about how the holocaust made it clear that the jews needed their own state to make sure that it never happened again. While I'm sure that the main reason for the creation of Israel is just pure ethnonationalism, that's one of the common reasons people give in defence of it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
43m ago
I've been dealing lately with grief from the loss of my brother in law (back in December, 10 months already) to alcoholism. It's honestly been pretty hard and I wonder if it'll ever feel ok. Sometimes I'm angry at him for not making better choices. Sometimes I'm sad that we won't hang out any more. Sometimes I'm worried for my wife, for whom this is 10x harder than it is for me (he was her brother, after all). Mostly I just wish that we, his family, could have him back. Fuck alcoholism you guys. It is the worst thing I've ever seen someone go through, including fatal illnesses. I wish that he could've beaten it. :(
SnapDragon
45m ago
An excellent takedown of a really dumb article. Good job. I hate it when pundits try to describe and predict our unbelievably complex national/global economy using a couple of pithy ideas ("We're investing too much into AI!" and "Silicon Valley is allied with Trump!"), exaggerated beyond the point of all usefulness. If we overspend on AI, well then darn, we've somewhat misallocated our abundant resources. Maybe we'll optimize better next decade.
07mk
48m ago
But in the long run, being a sex worker for an AI billionaire with a human fetish might be the only paid profession left, and that will obviously not scale to billions of people.
I feel like, if we're far along in the scifi AI future where the oldest profession becomes the final profession, then this is likely to scale not just to billions but trillions, and there would be plenty of incentives by these billionaires to create the technology that enables this.
Why limit yourself to a harem of mere hundreds or millions when that doesn't differentiate you from other billionaires who could do the same? Surely having a billion living, breathing, suffering humans who are willing to go through the experience of having sex with you is higher status than having mere millions. And certainly more than a harem of any number of unthinking, unfeeling, unsuffering android sex bots, no matter how "hyperpalatable" (a la modern fast food relative to pre-historic food, or modern porn relative to pre-historic sexual content) these sex bots might become.
Of course, having that harem not require money would be even higher status, so being one of billions of stay-at-home wives to a single Morbillionaire might actually be more accurate as the final profession, not prostitution.
And, also of course, if we invent consciousness and the ability to suffer in AI, then all bets are off.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
58m ago
Hey, Gemini 3 Pro looks pretty damn magical if the clips people are posting on twitter are true. Of course there's no actual use-case for oneshotting a crappy replication of the windows operating system (documents, paint, calculator and so on) in HTML, recreating a crap version of the Binding of Isaac or Vampire Survivor, making some mid music to go along with the game. But there's no use-case for going to the moon either, it's a way to flex, a costly show of ability. The real strength of an AI is in things that can't easily be shown off visually, stuff that needs it to be fully released first!
Check out what people have been saying, it's pretty good: https://x.com/search?q=gemini%203.0&src=typeahead_click
Sonnet 4.5 is genuinely creative in its writing IMO. Every six months, there's a significant improvement in capability.
And the US does need some kind of qualitative edge, otherwise China will wipe the floor with America. They're bigger, they have more talent and they have more energy and industry. Their government is just smarter too, they don't feel the need to shut down the government over whether illegals get healthcare or not, they're just not in that genre.
It's probably too late to avoid a future of "brutal serfdom" regardless of what happens, even if we reach singularity escape velocity.
Why would we even be serfs, what do we have to offer? Unless things go well and the AIs are nice, then the situation totally different to human politics. It's not 'new king sweeps in and loots your city, forces you to pay heavy taxes'. The new king would have no need for meatbags, he could dispense with legacy humans. Replace with androids or catgirls or whatever he finds aesthetic. Turn the world to computronium, planetary disassembly, full sci-fi. Serfs need not exist unless he's feeling sadistic.
Many people thinking about ASI are still way too politics-brained. ASI is above and beyond politics as we understand it. I cannot imagine a world where intelligence caps out anywhere near human level. 20 watt brains are miserly in the grand scheme of compute. When we get AGI, ASI immediately follows.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
I would favour Rosalind Franklin. Agatha Christie is the other obvious candidate.
I don't think anyone knows what Ada Lovelace looked like, and her achievements are overrated anyway. J K Rowling is still alive, which rules her out. Enid Blyton is too politically incorrect to be a serious candidate. Emmeline Pankhurst hasn't been on a banknote, and if she counts as a politician she probably won't be - Churchill is the only politician featured to date.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy? And if someone tried to argue that this made you just as bad as if you were advocating for that guy's murder, wouldn't that seem pretty unfair? Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz is the canonical anthem for celebrating this sort of "such-and-such celebrity you hate has randomly died" breaking news, and you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings. Whether out of cowardice or morality, none of them would have been willing to drop a house on the Wicked Witch - that's why it took a freak tornado before they were freed from her tyranny. It just happened. But once it does happen, celebrating this happy turn of events is perfectly wholesome.
I have spent some time thinking about this, and I think I see some very obvious distinctions aside from the "murdered vs. accident" issue.
-
The Wicked Witch of the East had actual power over the Munchkins. She was a tyrant who ruled them and (if remotely comparable to the Wicked Witch of the West) killed and tortured them on a whim. Charlie Kirk had no actual power. He wasn't a government official, let alone a ruler.
-
The Wicked Witch of the East's power could only be removed by killing her. There's no political procedure for "getting rid of the witch who fireballs people who disagree with her". Hell, even her ruby slippers specifically only come off once she's dead.
So if Donald Trump pulled a Palpatine and declared himself Emperor, and somehow this didn't result in him simply getting arrested but the US straight-up becoming an empire... then, yes, it would be wholesome to celebrate if he got shot dead. Sic semper tyrannis, and all that. But that's separated by bright lines from the Kirk assassination.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
A lot of people with dark humor have been victims of the things that they joke about, by the way. I find it quite distasteful when people who haven't experienced such things accuse them of being insensitive, which is often what happens. Too much morality is performative, and I find this whole situation to be another instance of people point fingers at others in order to feel morally superior and score virtue signaling points, or at the very least it's a reaction prompted by fear (rather than goodwill, taste, actual concern, etc)
Agreed. There is this joke about a holocaust survivor dying, going to heaven and telling God a holocaust joke. God tells him that this is Not Funny. He replies, "well, I guess you just had to be there."
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Being anti-gay was an area where the Nazis went above and beyond tradition. Sure, there were a few Nazis who were able to get away with gay sex, allegedly, but the median man accused of sodomy would have very much preferred to be in the Kaiserreich.
The Nazis were not big on Christianity or traditional families. Basically, the Fuehrer needed cannon-fodder. Turning kids into Nazis was not the job of the family, but of their youth organizations. As long as both partners met the Nazi definition of racial purity, the Nazis had no problem with supporting single mothers.
Their economic politics are likewise downstream of their ideology. Like every aspect of the nation, the economy had to be under the control of the Fuehrer. That is hard to accomplish if your economy is based on small businesses, so favoring big companies made sense. Typically, non-Jewish industrialists were not considered enemies, a lot of them had supported the NSDAP financially and did thrive under them. But ultimately, the Nazis called the shots, telling Hitler that your factory would not produce tanks because you believed that cars would be a more profitable product would not have gone well.
I don't know a lot about Nazi art, but I think generally their culture was a melange of different trends which were in the water supply at the time, together with a largely faked appreciation of the pre-Christian history of the German peoples.
So I guess I mostly agree with you, the TL;DR version is that the Nazis were a revolutionary and not a conservative movement, even if they kept lots of the social structure in place and embraced their version of RETVRN. I think the Fascists and Francoists were more pro-Christian and pro traditional family values.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
The former marketing director of the American Jewish Congress leaked a bunch of private text messages to hurt a number of gentile Republicans, painting them as neonazis. What are these supposed “neonazis” doing? Are they using an extensive advocacy network to defend the starvation of children and the expansion of lebensraum for a chosen people? Well, no, that’s the folks over at the American Jewish Congress just this year.
It just seems like a joke. We are excommunicating people for juvenile humor, while ignoring the sophisticated agents who carry water for genuine Hitler-lite activity. How about we expel everyone associated with any organization that just this year excused or defended the conscious starvation of children, whether that be a religious organization or a secular organization? How about we no longer trust anyone with superseding ethnotribal allegiance in positions of American power? Isn’t that a better place to start?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
How does a soldier morally justify shooting the enemy instead of his squadmates? Traditionally, it was by begging forgiveness from God, though I have no idea what the modern recommendation is. The point is, it's in almost every case a secondary concern to victory.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
There's also FDR, for that matter
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years.
Until a few years ago, mechanization has only been competing with some human skills. Skills which were automation-proof, such as truck driving, were well within reach of the median human. Sure, you would need to employ a lot more people to transport 40 tons of goods using horse-drawn carriages, but this was compensated by an explosion of shipping (as per-unit costs plummeted).
In the future Altman envisions, humans do not have a moat which prevents AI from eating their lunch. Perhaps there will be a minimum wage labor market for people being biodrones (just wear AR glasses for eight hours and follow the instructions) until robotics or neural interfacing catch up and provide better options. But in the long run, being a sex worker for an AI billionaire with a human fetish might be the only paid profession left, and that will obviously not scale to billions of people.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
2hr ago
There are outright communists on the left.
Who spend most of their time denouncing each other.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
Rope is a solid choice too. I hear AI will even help you with the knot.
Holy fuck lmao
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2hr ago
How likely is that really though? Very often, it's the capital investments that are the primary cost drivers of utility prices, and the larger customers usually pay a larger share of the capital investments that are needed to support their usage, which would normally lead to lower marginal prices for everyone else. I've seen this play out multiple times in municipalities when it comes to water: large industrial customers support large municipal capital investments, which through economy of scale drive down the unit cost of water to residential customers. The large customers go away, the capacity now far exceeds the demand, and the per-unit cost of water goes way up to pay for the infrastructure despite the huge reduction of demand.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Guy drives me up the wall about 90% of the time with his posts about how he used to write for John Oliver, but every so often reality bonks him over the head hard enough that there is common ground between us on "this is freakin' stupid".
And he was where I heard about Katie Porter's performance, and that one was genuinely funny (though with the material he had to work with, it would have taken real genius not to be funny there).
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Nobody is suggesting that these guys are members of the NSDAP, an organization which was disbanded long before they were born.
...Imagine you are a 25yo white nationalist in today's America. Now you could get a swastika tattoo and join the Aryan Brotherhood or something, but then you will never make a difference. Or you could join one of the two major parties, and the one closer aligned to your views are the Republicans.
....Jokes in small groups are a great way to reach a common understanding that Nazis are not icky. Obviously not everyone who plays along is a Nazi, perhaps some only like the jokes because the SJ people are whining about the Nazis all the time, but it is very much a step in the right direction, moving the overton window where you want it to go.
So... they're not Nazis but they totally are Nazis. Just because we (the side calling them Nazis) are not saying they are formally members of a defunct political party but in fact we do mean that they are indeed members of a defunct political party in everything but formal name of the party.
My head hurts. Clearly I am too stupid to get the fine nuances of "I'm not saying they're Nazi Nazis but I am saying they are Nazi Republicans" or "Republican Nazis" or "Nazi fascist nazi Fascist".
Dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were no users. The reasoning was along the lines of 20% of all shoe sales in 2010 will be online.
That really isn’t true. Plenty of dotcom companies like Yahoo had huge numbers of users; Yahoo had 400 million registered users at the peak in 2000 with 60 million monthly users (double the previous year’s figure). Many other dotcom companies had large user numbers too.
And if you look at the non-dotcom companies that still saw huge stock price crashes after the bust, many were businesses with big revenue, like Microsoft ($23bn in revenue in 2000, down 70%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2016) and Intel ($34bn in revenue in 2000, down 80%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2020). Both Intel and Microsoft were also extremely profitable during this period, contrary to boosters who say all tech stocks at this time lost money or whatever.
The bizarre myth that dotcom was all money into worthless internet businesses with 10 users and inflated traffic figures on zero revenue is peddled by exactly the same people trying to claim that “this time is different”.
Francoism wound up as a de facto theocracy, so it can accurately be pointed to as a genuine example of pro-Christian societal upheaval(and would've gotten away with it to, if it wasn't for Vatican II).
So would the median man accused of anything else. 'The Nazis were far more brutal than average' is a statement that's just true, it isn't specific to homosexuality.
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