domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
yofuckreddit
4m ago
I agree with you on all counts. I don't dismiss eating less and exercising more because I don't want or need to do those things, just that they're already such table stake requirements that it should be a given.
The eating less part is very difficult for me since I'm a fast food addict and consider eating one of life's great joys. But I cycle 75 miles a week and do full-body workouts frequently as well.
RegularlyExpressed
8m ago
I wonder how much of the relative smallness of Berlin is due to late German unification, and hoe much is due to being damaged in WW2, followed by being split in two during the cold war and dragged down by being located in communist East Germany.
SSCReader
22m ago
That seems like a lot of side effects for something that doesn't happen that often.
Places with no cross walks? Places with no sidewalks so people have to walk on the road? Places where people have obstructed the sidewalk by parking on it? The fact people have to get out of cars onto the road when parking or when getting into their car?
Not to mention how it allows you to murder someone just by waiting nearby until they walk into the road to get into their car. Shoulda yielded to me! I was in a car, he wasn't! Sure he was about to get into a car, but he wasn't actually in one! Yeah I aimed for him, waited for him and accelerated to 80mph but so what?
freemcflurry
25m ago
newly-arrived grandparents
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits. There was a similar deal a while back in the US when a Pakistani Uber driver was killed after his car was hijacked by a couple of, um, youths. The guy was 66 years old and driving for Uber. He had only immigrated a few years previously. The citizens who fund this stuff in the US and Canada are getting fleeced. You work for 40 years and instead of getting to leave it to your kids it all gets sucked away to pay for people who just showed up and never contributed a dime.
That takes a sort of good thing and goes too far and makes it a bad thing. I jaywalk all the time. Usually with the flow of traffic which makes things way more efficient (pedestrians crossing opportunistically means you don’t need 40 seconds of pausing the road for them to cross).
Your idea would make it legal for the car to speed up and kill me while driving outside of the flow of traffic conditions. Also would provide no zone of safety if I make a mistake. This applies to cars too. If I accidentally pull out in front of you it’s better you brake than have a right to ram my car.
More broadly this applies to all sorts of things. If someone in a business deal has their lawyer make a mistake in the other sides favor is it better to bankrupt the guy or adjust the contract. Maybe for the other side it’s even more profitable to burn the guy but for society as a whole it’s better to adjust and continue with the deal providing a good/service for society. In business deals like this if you always chose short term gain it would mean all deals needs more lawyers for longer contracts detailing every possibility and more eyes to catch mistakes. But lawyers overall are a negative sum game as they costs money and produce nothing.
Of course in many ways these protestors who glue themselves are shitting on the commons. We won’t run them over because saving ourselves 2 hours isn’t worth killing them just like it’s not worth killing a pedestrian who fell into the street when you could have just breaks. Yes the pedestrian is an annoyance to you and costs you 10 seconds and the pedestrian is in the wrong but the commons are that everyone is sometimes partially in the wrong and inflicting maximize damage on them for a small gain to yourself doesn’t benefit the whole of society.
For the protestors though you could argue running one over when they are costing 300k people one hour or like 13k days gets close to being net efficient.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
36m ago
protestors who had glued themselves to the road
When protestors started using the roads, I came up with the idea of making roads (outside of crosswalks) open range cars. Meaning you can do what you want but if a car hits you not only is the car not liable for any damage done to you are liable for the damage any damage you do to the car. That remains true even if the car speeds up or aims for you. The car has a priority right to use the road, and other users must yield to that right or bear the consequences.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
36m ago
How does SG’s healthcare work?
If there’s ever a country I’d expect to have the dreaded “death panels”, it’d be this one, I guess.
stav
43m ago
It's a signal there are too many non-whites (even 1 is too many) and them buying homes in white neighborhoods should be illegal
Thoroughlygruntled
51m ago
Honestly, a deep dive into your struggles sourcing reliable information sounds even more interesting to me than an update on the strategic situation. I would definitely read it.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
54m ago
It's pretty bold to move to a white country and then complain about white people "hogging the accommodations." What are the imputed damages of your homeland being a place that can't accommodate white people because it's such an undesirable place the live?
Folamh3
55m ago
This is part of the spin I see a lot in conjunction with insane conspiracies even in supposedly rational progressive circles - one example being that there was no blood seen at the scene and that people around did not panic, so maybe it was just some stunt. Yes, these things are unironically shared among a lot of pro-opposition people, this is where we are now - in culture war filled disinformation age. When it comes to the assassin then yes, on one side he had photos with pro Russian aligned paramilitary organization Slovenský Branci (although supposedly to convince them to not support Russia as part of his movement against violence) and he also had some rant against Roma/gypsies - BTW not that rare even among progressives in Slovakia. However he also voted for progressive president Zuzana Čaputová, he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power as every government action was painted as a huge problem, threat to democracy and all that.
His actions were politically motivated and he decided to assassinate Fico for reasons broadly in line with current opposition rhetoric. I think he really fits the description of "stochastic terrorism" - an unhinged person with fringe views who was sensitive to heightened emotions around the current issue™ and just decided to act extremely on a given day. This gives plausible deniability of any responsibility to any side - look, he is unhinged and we do not bear any responsibility for anything or even pin it on the other side due to cherrypicked issues like that he was racist toward gypsies so he was no true progressive. By the way there was also an interview with his son who said that he was not medicated that he did not have any history of actual mental illness and that nothing suggested that he would do something like that - that is why I use the term unhinged.
And I am not even saying that as some judgement, I just think this is the world we live in. We may see more and more of these types of operations where political violence is used with cloud of plausible deniability that can itself feed into the overall culture war further polarizing everybody into even more insanity. What a world to live in.
NelsonRushton
1hr ago
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage.
This, partly, was my point. The definition of wokeness I was applying, taken from the Oxford dictionary (explicitly, using the phrase "in the dictionary sense"), does not reflect the common use of the word. If you read carefully, I never said Hitler, Stalin, etc. were woke. I said (1) their propaganda was rife with woke sounding platitudes, and that (2) their stated agendas fit the dictionary definition (but not the actual meaning in common sense) of wokeness.
But the reader shouldn't have to read that carefully to get the message, so I edited the first paragraph as follows to clarify that the dictionary definition of "woke" that I am using here does not reflect the common use of the word:
As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. The dictionary entry doesn't mention radical progressivism, censorship, collective punishment, or selective enforcement of criminal laws. Indeed, the Oxford definition does not mention, or even suggest, anything actually associated with wokeness, as opposed to non-wokeness, in the sense that the word is actually used. I submit this is because the dictionary's authors are woke (or else pretending to be, in order to avoid censorship and collective punishment).
Stellula
1hr ago
Maybe I’m using the term wrong? Low entropy as in: very little actual information. Something that could realistically be summarized in a sentence or two, gets expanded into a giant wall.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1hr ago
This is a wild statement that you need to proportionally support with citations.
It's not wild at all to say that Jews proudly identify as Jewish and frequently engage in pro-Jewish activism, and frequently engage in very public activism against anti-Semitism, including very well-funded campaigns using every avenue of the propaganda apparatus. And then, at the same time, they engage in advocacy against pro-White activism and consider it "hateful" for someone to identify with being white with any of the same feelings they invoke to promote and celebrate Jewish solidarity.
Imagine if White people behaved like Jews, considered themselves a Chosen diaspora among the world, engaged in intense activism for their ethnic interest and used every avenue to criticize, censor, suppress Jewish identity and activism. Jews do not want White people behaving like Jews.
Recursive_Enlightenment
1hr ago
One of my crazier ideas is that the US should pay the government of Singapore to run our health care system.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
Thoroughlygruntled
1hr ago
And joined in an unholy bootleggers and baptists coalition with the environmentalists. CEQA might be the most economically destructive law ever written.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own.
But the YIMBYs aren't pushing to let farmland be developed. They don't want greenfield development, they want to be able to densify existing neighborhoods.
You wouldn't get the Kowloon Walled city, you'd get a smooth gradient of housing densities slowly decreasing from urban centres to rural locations.
We have that in much of the United States. It's decried as "sprawl" by urbanists. They don't want that; they say it leads to car dependence, long commutes, ugly parking lots, pollution, high infrastructure costs, gun ownership, and general resistance to dependence on government. They want to preserve undeveloped or agricultural land from the predations of housing developers, while densifying existing cities and suburbs.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1hr ago
You're not wrong, but I feel like his posts started out as pure massive infodumps, then he occasionally started providing his opinions, they subtly but gradually went up in preachiness, and at some point I felt that my main focus became filtering the doom from his posts instead of actually absorbing the content of said posts. Personally I checked out around last year's unrest at OpenAI when I habitually opened his Substack and laid my eyes on a headline reading "You win, or we all die". I think that event legitimately mindbroke him to some extent.
Corvos
2hr ago
Right, that's also a big thing. Seems less prevalent lately: I wonder if it's to prevent accusations of cultural appropriation? Or simply because youtube means that people can watch (and become fans of) the original before the remake is available on television.
It's especially weird that it didn't happen with anime because anime art is actually directly American in origin. Maybe that's why.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2hr ago
And you know what? This will only happen when California's voters are minority white (and when that happens a Prop 13 repeal will follow shortly). Older whites use their entrenched position in western countries to benefit themselves at the expense of more dynamic and younger non-white immigrants, it's a tale as old as mass immigration itself and California is no different to the other places this is happening, see how the UK is using the taxes of the young (disproportionately non-white immigrants) to pay for the social care of the old (disproportionately white "natives", especailly so because non-whites are more likely to believe in filial responsibility and take care of their parents instead of thrusting them upon the state).
Past whites brought about Prop 13, present whites are tacitly voting to continue it but fututre non-whites will be the ones who get rid of it and free California from all the deadweight loss and misery this policy causes each year.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Some comedians were complaining about how the world is impossible to parody nowadays, but this is taking it to a whole new level. I mean... I can keep adding layers, but it's not going to push it from "real news" to satire...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2hr ago
An urban growth boundary, inside of which there is only high density development, outside of which no one may build at all.
I don't claim to want this at all. An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own. You wouldn't get the Kowloon Walled city, you'd get a smooth gradient of housing densities slowly decreasing from urban centres to rural locations.
A lot of the UK's current housing problems stem from the fact that people can't build on farmland they own.
To borrow a quote on this subject from my boss: "Silicon Valley Brain-rot". I wouldn't go that far but the sentiment exists.
I don't know what it is about the Bay but I can only hypothesize that for some reason when you stick a bunch of uber-nerdy, neurodivergent, high openness and high neuroticism people in an environment. Shake it up a bit, eventually the most neurotic, nerdy, and neurodivergent rise to the top. Big Yud has essentially L. R. Hubbard-ed himself into the leader of a cult that goes catatonic over the wildest sci-fi shit.
My analysis on that tweet is such:
I'm somewhere between less-quokka and cynic but hey, I'm just a young AI engineer in defense, not in the bay, and definitely not making an impact like all these titans, so what do I know.
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