domain:infonomena.substack.com
fmac
1m ago
From what I remember, some of the fluffers were absolute smoke shows. The one I remember was way hotter than Aella.
https://imgur.com/a/QMsEBrK (meme not a fluffer)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5m ago
"What I believe" is not "Just accepted conventional wisdom."
Who is "we"?
You can argue these points. You cannot just assert them in an effort to claim rhetorical territory.
You get plenty of slack for your Joo-posting, but the rules against consensus building and rallying for a cause still apply.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5m ago
Yes, individually these and the below examples are edgy sacred values trolling, but the thing is the pattern.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
6m ago
That’s not true, if you’ve lived in or near a beach town or ski town there’s plenty of serving staff who only work in a restaurant a portion of the year, every year.
They just work like crazy to make enough money to support themselves on a part time job or unemployed for the remainder for the year.
It’s like a tour of duty. There’s lots of industries that are hyper seasonal and / or are intensive for short amounts of time.
Oil workers are like that, for example. Fisherman, cowboys, that’s just off the top of my head.
Some people really love the freedom of working extremely hard for part of the year and consequently fucking off for the rest of the year.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6m ago
Interesting question - what is the richest country (except city-states like Singapore with no agriculture) that doesn't make large-scale use of itinerant foreign farm workers? My initial guess was Japan, but they finally cracked and brought in an agricultural guest worker visa in 2019. South Korea and Taiwan also use guest workers on a large scale. Poland have scaled back their farm worker scheme because they can get Ukrainian refugees to do the work, but that isn't getting Poles to do it.
Terracotta
11m ago
Freud is practically synonymous with BS these days, but repetition compulsion is deeply real. My prior assumption for anyone who had a horribly traumatic childhood and is now cruising on a "but I made a sudden dramatic escape and now things are so much better" trajectory with no extensive therapy/ monastic meditation step in between, is that either they will shortly get restless and blow everything up themselves, or that they will shortly find they're experiencing similar levels of abuse in their new context, having unconsciously gravitated toward familiar dynamics of exploitation.
Aella's dad beat her up, denigrated and aggressively dominated her; by some online accounts somebody raped her as a child. Then she escaped and, surprise! found a profession where smart men could aggressively dominate and rape her, but supposedly on her terms; then in time she found that once again, the men denigrating her were doing so less and less on her terms. If she flees again, I really worry about the next set of partners she winds up with, and I'd worry about escalating drug use. I worry about Lindsay Lohan's new dude and ostensibly new situation.
Memory-wipe technology for selected childhood baggage really would be an amazing development, such a shame we'll get the totalitarian Matrix brainwash version instead.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13m ago
It is noteworthy that the well-run red states (Texas and Florida) don't have mandatory E-verify for private sector employers, and the badly-run red states do.
But then the GOPe never tried to conceal that they were using illegals to undermine worker protections. The main thing Bush Jr did to enforce the immigration laws was sending fake OHSA inspectors into workplaces and deporting any illegal who tried to report a safety violation.
fmac
16m ago
In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that. Non-forced labour from the first world is not a viable replacement for migrant farmworkers.
Canada has many immigration issues, but the temporary foreign worker program for agriculture is actually a huge success. Absolutely dialled work groups from Jamaica/Guatemala/etc come in for various picking seasons, make a fat stack of cash, and then leave to a different country elsewhere for another harvest season.
There is actual competition between farmers for the best/highest skil work groups because the boys are absolutely dialled at their various fruit/vegetable harvesting skills.
The huge issue with farm work is that it isn't year round, which is a massive issue for western workers.
fmac
23m ago
The American people famously never get extremely mad about the cost of living.
I'm sure there will be absolutely 0 societal backlash from the resulting increase in prices when farm worker pay goes up and productivity goes down.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
26m ago
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Some 14-year-old urban youths are hanging out on a Philadelphia sidewalk. As a 73-year-old man walks by, a boy and a girl decide to hit him in the head with a traffic cone. He is hit once by the boy and twice by the girl, and dies of the resulting brain injuries. The entire incident is captured on surveillance video. The boy and the girl are charged with murder and conspiracy to murder.
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The trial judge dismisses the charges against the boy. There is no evidence of conspiracy between him and the girl. Rather, after he delivered his blow and dropped the cone, she independently chose to pick up the traffic cone and deliver her own, totally separate blows. And the boy merely hit the old man once and then walked away, so there is no evidence of the "malice"—either intent to kill or reckless disregard for a high risk of killing—that murder requires (as opposed to the negligence that can support a charge of manslaughter).
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The appeals panel reverses and remands for trial. The surveillance video clearly shows that (1) the boy dealt his blow immediately after the girl handed the traffic cone directly to the boy, and (2) while the girl was delivering her blows the boy only walked away for a few seconds, and soon returned with a smile on his face. That is evidence of conspiracy. And hitting an old man in the head with a heavy traffic cone even once is evidence of reckless disregard for a high risk of killing.
Tree
31m ago
Dacia Logan. It’s a spacious station wagon I can comfortably sleep in. I like the idea of potentially driving away without organizing anything. Even though I could have had an old diesel for free, I splurged on a new one for 8700 euros 5 years ago. No climate control, no little electronic motors everywhere to roll down windows for you and spare you the the anguish of having to move a whole arm. 63 HP. Wish it had less, always a pleasure to hear the strenuous effort this minuscule 3 cylinder-engine brings to push this huge car along. Apparently only 10% of logans sold had this hardcore ‘access’ option, everybody else went with decadence. So it’s a collectible, value can only go up. Although I did install a radio and speakers, to my shame (that lawnmower engine provides enough melody).
fmac
33m ago
If you paid enough and also improved working conditions, you could guaranteed get better people to work on the farm
I'm not sure about this. For one, while you made good point about cost/substitution, there is a ceiling on how much you can pay farm manual labour.
Especially because of how seasonal the work is. No first world citizen wants a job for 6 months and then ??? for the other 6.
quiet_NaN
35m ago
Great!
There is a place where news junkies can get unsourced, low effort news reports in close to real time. That place is twitter. The thing which makes the motte useful is that it is not twitter.
Terracotta
41m ago
Now, people can translate ideas into images without that deep understanding of the medium*, with that translation process bypassing all/most of the skills and techniques that were traditionally required.
But this account leaves out the equally critical perceptive and analytic skills that are normally built side-by-side with physical skills as an artist practices their craft. The bare act of clicking a shutter is the same for me and for a pro photographer, but the pro will take an immeasurably better picture because they have a trained eye to compose it. I suspect they'll also take a better picture because they understand from long experience what are the strengths and weaknesses of that type of image, versus a painting or architecture, and can better choose their subjects in consequence.
I think part of the problem is using the same word, "idea," to describe both what goes through my casual-consumer mind and what goes through the mind of a trained artist when we think of a new image. The two are strictly different in informational content, but also in structure, as anyone can see for themselves if they scoot out from their Dunning-Kruger zone to consider an area of craft or creation where they are experts. Coding or software engineering are probably the most familiar arts for the Motte; when we're talking really elegant and well-built programs, is your uncle's "y'know I always thought we should have like an app for identifying hot dogs" the same as a technical concept that occurs to a high-level professional with years of practice? Is there anything shared between the two "ideas", beyond the inchoate consumer instinct "I want a thing to make me feel _____"?
I think a lot of speculation about the value of AI art relies on the stickiness of cultural premises from the pre-AI age, so when Joe says to ChatGPT "paint me, uh, a pretty elephant with an orange hat in the style of Monet" and gets some random pixels farted out using patterns from 10,000 human-painted images, we instinctively respond to the patterns with the delight we've learned to afford skilled human work. It may seem that we get that delight from Joe's "idea," but what we are actually enjoying is those other artists' artfully-constructed patterns. I don't think we can fairly expect that 40 years hence; I suspect people will just paw indifferently past most images the way we walk past tree leaves today, with the exception of any pics that happen to raise a boner.
Some may argue that diffusion models are a medium unto itself with its own set of skills to develop and practice, akin to how photography and painting both generate 2D images but are considered different mediums.
Artistic skill-building requires a medium where you can exercise agency, though, because the agency or artfulness is fundamentally the part that we admire about it. For example, nobody looks at a Jackson Pollock painting and feels delight over how this black droplet aligns with this other black droplet, even though subtle visual details at that level are matter for praise in other painters. But things we know to be random or unintentional are generally not interesting, so instead fans enjoy Pollock's expressive choice of colors or line or concept, areas where he clearly did exercise artful choice.
With AI image generation, there are so many levels of randomness and frustrated choice that it's hard to imagine how a user could work for years to achieve progressively greater mastery. Don't most commercial models actively work to disrupt direct user control, e.g. by adding a system prompt you can't see and running even the words of your prompt through intermediate hidden LLM revisions before they even get to the image generator?
quiet_NaN
42m ago
putting American lives in danger by publishing
You are making that sound like a bad thing. If it is truthful reporting (and your verb "to publish" seems to indicate that you were not contesting that), then it is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I will grant you that there are some things which are net negative when published. For example, knowing what the nuclear launch codes are will not contribute to the readers having a more accurate map of the territory. Likewise, knowing which fetishes some celebrity is into will normally not update the world view of the readers to be worth the damage to the privacy.
Your sentence is really analogous to "When the teacher reported the dad who was fucking his kid to the police, she destroyed a happy family."
Our greatest ally
You sardonic phrasing makes it look like Israel and its inhabitants are pursuing a singular purpose. Please consider the possibility that not every Jew everywhere is following the master plan of the Elders of Zion all day long. If Bibi had published a press release where he praised the Americans for their support, that would indeed be a faux pas. But the utility function of reporters is different from the utility function of governments, both in Israel and elsewhere, for very good reasons.
fmac
48m ago
It wasn't a strawman, it was a humorous example to point out that "it's fine if your travel time increases 3x, you can just think about stuff and you won't even notice" is a profoundly silly thing to say. Obviously we're not going to replace air travel with ocean liners.
I'm not sure why you think there isn't demand for bike travel? Do you think there is a conspiracy to make bike lanes against the will of the electorate? In Toronto, where I live, pro-bike lane politicians are quite popular, and we just had an election where a very notable anti-bike lane incumbent lost their seat in an election where their party dominated.
Toronto bike share use has increased like 20% YoY for 5 years and counting.
Again you say "biking doesn't make sense" but I don't understand where you get that. From my apartment to my office the options are:
Drive: 20-30 minutes (longer with accidents or road closures), parking is $30+ a day in the area.
Transit: 45 minutes, longer with (frequent) delays
Walk: 1.5 hours
Bike: 28 minutes
Biking makes the most sense here by far, because it's tied for fastest, it's the cheapest, and most importantly imo, it's by far the most consistent
And this pattern plays out constantly. Driving is fast, unless it's rush hour. Parking is very expensive. Transit basically always takes 30+ minutes due to walking, waiting, and transfers. Biking is incredibly fast and always the same amount of time per distance.
Note, I live in the downtown core of a major city. I don't give a shit about biking in a suburban hellscape and I agree it's probably not a very good mode of transportation out there. Although I find it pretty funny that "the land of the free" totally falls apart for "preference of form of travel". Similarly, I also find it funny you feel comfortable dictating people's travel options to them.
Individual experiences must vary a lot here, I took painkillers and found it wasn't much better than being drunk.
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