07mk
3mo ago
This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.
This is almost definitely not due to a small sample bias, but rather selection bias. How many stable reliable guys who have such small social presence that they're literally invisible to you do you know? Given that "being noticeable" is correlated with (some, including myself, would argue causally) "being attractive," whatever observations of people you notice are observations about a population that's more attractive than average.
07mk
3mo ago
Seeing this and the replies about lookalike porn actresses made me have a random thought. As alluded to in the replies, lookalike actresses that actually really look like the original in a way that doesn't break suspension of disbelief are not easy to come by, which means porn parodies of live action works are always likely to be highly imperfect. If the idea of Han Solo playing with Luke Skywalker's lightsaber turns you on, the closest thing you're gonna get is probably gonna look like 2 young men cosplaying, and the image of actually young Harrison Ford and young Mark Hamill is stuck in your imperfect imagination.
And this is an area where I thought anime had a huge advantage over live-action. If you like the idea of watching some cartoon characters bang, you can usually pretty quickly find hentai artwork of that, often in a style very very similar to the original cartoon, and sometimes even by the exact same artist who drew the original cartoon using the exact same style. You're not getting a porn parody, you're essentially getting a porn version of the original work, in a way that you don't and simply can't get for a live action work.
Well, until now with generative AI. Of course, photorealistic CGI - or at least, close-enough-to-photorealistic CGI - has been a thing before this generative AI technology, but the skills and resources required to pull off a truly believable porn version of a live action work was just out of reach for hobbyists. AI is not there yet, certainly for video but also for still images, but, as they say, it's only going to get better. And given how in the anime world, a flood of hentai fanart of basically any semi-popular character is guaranteed, I wonder if we'll see this kind of thing happen with live-action works, which, of course, involve real actors with real faces and real bodies that they walk around in the real world with.
But then, we could enter an Ouroboros kind of situation where, as video gen AI gets easier and cheaper, all popular live action works are actually "live action, as presented by Disney," aka not live action but entirely computer-generated, with photorealistic CGI characters who don't actually look like real people, at least not intentionally. Imagine if photorealistic movies and TV shows that achieve that photorealism by actually taking video of real people acting in real places instead of using genAI go the way of plays, which still exist and are even quite prominent, but are eclipsed in audience size and stature by similarly styled video art.
07mk
3mo ago
Copyright literally is the right to make copies. If little Timmy draws a picture of Mario for his fridge, it’s within Nintendo’s legal rights to issue Timmy with a takedown notice and threats of legal action if he does not comply.
It'd be within Nintendo's legal rights to do such a thing, but it'd also be pretty easy for Timmy to defend himself with the Fair Use defense in the USA. Fair Use used to only be something that could be invoked defensively, but in 2015, the US 9th circuit court of appeals ruled that it was an expressly authorized right and exception to copyright (IANAL, so I don't know the exact difference this makes in practice), according to the Fair Use Wiki page.
There are 4 primary factors to consider when determining if some unauthorized copying falls under Fair Use, though other factors may also be considered:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
- the nature of the copyrighted work.
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
1 and 4 would be the most relevant for Timmy. It's not for nonprofit educational purposes, but neither is it commercial, and Timmy could argue that it served the educational purpose of him getting practice in drawing. And it's also almost certain not to have any effect on the potential market or value of any Mario property owned by Nintendo.
In the case of drawing fanart of Mario (versus recreating a specific official art of Mario), I believe trademark law, not copyright law, would apply, and Timmy would have an even stronger defense, since trademark infringement is based largely around the likelihood to confuse the audience or a customer, and Timmy's picture hanging on his fridge will almost certainly not do that.
The law can be bizarre and counterintuitive, but I believe it's not so rigid that someone drawing fanart of a famous character to hang on his fridge can be considered legally infringing just because of some technicalities. In the US, the people who write the laws and the justices who interpret them generally tend to understand that the purpose of copyright isn't to give creators exclusive rights to create copies, but rather to incentivize creators to create more and better things by giving them greater ability to monetize their creations through granting them certain exclusive rights to create copies, and this plays out with Fair Use. With trademark law, the purpose isn't to give companies exclusive rights to produce copies of certain logos or characters or etc., it's to help consumers avoid confusion by making sure that only certain companies get to publish certain logos or characters or etc., and since some unpublished fanart of a trademarked character simply can't cause customer confusion, there's no way that Timmy would lose a case against Nintendo in this.
Of course, the mere threat of lawsuit could be enough in many cases.
07mk
3mo ago
I don't know about Grok's image gen specifically, but having used Stable Diffusion for almost 2 years now, I can tell you that the cutting edge image generation stuff can be run reasonably fast (about 30-60s per a batch of 4 512x512 images) on a 5 year old gaming PC with an Nvidia 1070 that I was already using as my home computer, without any upgrades. I did upgrade to a more modern gaming PC with a 4090 last year, which can do a batch of 4 512x512 images in a few seconds. The entire new PC I bought, primarily for gaming, was around $4,500, with the largest chunk of that coming from the GPU, which you could probably cheapen out on with a 4080 or a 3090 and get plenty good performance.
07mk
3mo ago
There's no shortage of image generators that allow for illustration of copyright and trademark protected characters, though. Besides the free local Stable Diffusion, paid online services like Midjourney and NovelAI will generate images of copyright protected characters just by name, no tricks needed.
Notably, Midjourney IS being sued right now, so Grok could face a lawsuit as well, but the suit hasn't been resolved yet so we actually don't know if it's infringement.
07mk
3mo ago
That sounds like probably a better explanation than there actually being any sort of difference in rates between the sexes. My own perception of difference between the sexes is also probably reflective primarily of my own social circles which I'm guessing is ideologically not too different from Marcotte's. It also occurred to me that this could be subculture-based rather than sex-based, where enforcing ideological purity of one's partner is important in Marcotte's social circles, and she's projecting that onto all Americans, including male Trump voters.
07mk
3mo ago
This was my first thought, too. I haven't read much of Marcotte ever, and certainly none in the about 10 years or so since Scott Alexander himself had made a blog post that referenced her by name, but from what I recall of her writing, she seemed to slot into a type of female 3rd wave feminist writer who tends to project all her own beliefs and insecurities onto men. One of the most well known bits of such projection is when it comes to dating, where some 30/40+ career woman seems confused why her great financial success and maturity isn't translating to romantic attention from high quality men and concluding that men must be so fragile as to be threatened by her success, instead of recognizing that, for the vast majority of heterosexual men, unlike for the vast majority of heterosexual women, a potential mate's career success counts for close to nothing relative to her looks, youth, and even her personality, which are things a middle-aged woman who spent most of her effort making it in the workplace hasn't been able to work on very well.
In this case, Marcotte seems to be projecting her own obsession with keeping the people around her politically/ideologically pure onto men, who she believes have even more power than her because of male privilege, without recognizing that this obsession with ideological purity, to the extent that they'd coerce them to agreeing with them, of their partners is not quite as common in men as it is in women*.
* This part is not proven and could certainly be wrong; I'm going off my own anecdotes and stereotypes, but I think this is a common observation by many men nowadays.
07mk
3mo ago
It wasn't in Arlington, was it? I recently went to a small local pizza joint there that was completely empty except for the guy behind the counter. Looked like a pretty normal older gentleman, but he seemed very unhappy about me walking in and offering to buy something from him, the 2 slices of pizza I ordered took much longer than I would have expected to prepare, and the pizza wasn't very good, and it made me wonder if some money laundering was going on. Maybe this is an entire genre of pizza joints.
07mk
3mo ago
It's been a long time since I read the book, but IIRC "doublethink" had 2 different definitions, possibly contradictory by intentional design. I'd thought that what I wrote was one of the definitions, but it seems similar enough to what you wrote that your definition might be one of the correct ones, and mine isn't.
07mk
3mo ago
Wow - it never occurred to me to frame political peer pressure as a matter of cognitive strain, rather than simply as a matter of personality traits or commitment to principles. I never really considered the fact that it could be physically difficult for people to maintain a set of public-facing lies, and that over time this could have a palpable effect on their actual beliefs.
This was one of the core themes of 1984, from what I recall, that if you force someone to say a lie enough times, then the cognitive dissonance, or "doublethink," between what they believe and what they say becomes too difficult to maintain, and it gets resolved by their beliefs matching their actions (speech). I think this is an important insight that explains human behavior in all sorts of contexts, not just ideological or political. In the end, Winston truly, honestly, in his heart of hearts, loves Big Brother, just like Picard in that one Star Trek episode about 4 lights that was referencing 1984 truly, honestly believed that he saw 5 lights despite there being 4. I think one aspect 1984 got pretty wrong is in how it vastly overestimated how much effort it would take to cause someone to truly, honestly, believe that metaphorically 2 lights plus 2 lights make 5 lights. The organizations in the novel and the protocols they followed seem like someone bringing an RPG to a situation where a Nerf gun would suffice.
And if this does have measurable large-scale social effects, then that's a tough blackpill to swallow, because it implies that any "silent majority" that opposes wokeism will shrink over time, and the perception of wokeism's dominance will more and more become reality.
I'm pretty sure that I've seen this exact sequence of events outlined by a "woke" person as the means by which they will actually come to become dominant. Honestly, I thought this assumption was sort of "baked in" to any sort of analysis of the "woke" (and more broadly any authoritarian ideological movement that coerces people into repeating certain lines).
07mk
3mo ago
I've never read the blog you're referring to, but the story reminds me of a different story I heard in, IIRC, This American Life (possibly Radiolab instead) about a FTM transitioner talking about the effects experienced from HRT, which included having a surprisingly overwhelmingly strong sex drive compared to before and also becoming literally better at math. Of course, instead of the host exploring the implications of this in wider society with respect to trans-ness and males and females, he quickly shut that down with a joke about how the person had "set back feminism by 20 years" or something.
I'm also reminded of that one woman who committed suicide a few years ago IIRC, who had written a book about her experience dressing up as a man (no transition, just roleplaying for the book), where she seemed to come to some revelations about the difficulties of men's lives that were completely invisible to her before the experience.
What I find interesting is that, as best as I can tell, MTF trans people are more prominent than FTM ones, though I've heard that FTM is more common, driven primarily by young women and teenage girls (though I've also heard that accurate stats around this are very difficult to come by). And this kind of narrative about how transitioning from man to woman made them realize the unique difficulties that women go through that were invisible to them when they were a man seem much rarer. It's almost always the unique difficulties of being a trans woman that's emphasized, rather than having some epiphany about how the natal other half of the human population experience reality that got awakened to them.
There are multiple explanations for this, and I'd guess they all have some truth. The default, most likely explanation, is that I'm just seeing patterns where there is none. But that's no fun, so if we want to speculate, one reason is that FTM tend to get the more genuine male experience than MTF, because FTM can pass much more consistently than MTF. Another is that the troubles that women face in society as women are so emphasized that it's just common knowledge among men, while the mirror image isn't true. Yet another is that the types of people who transition MTF are very different types of people personality-wise than FTM, which leads to some asymmetry in what they notice about their new experience in their new gender identity. Another similar reason would be that the effectiveness of HRT to go from MTF is different and meaningfully less than the effectiveness to go from FTM, which results in the asymmetry.
07mk
3mo ago
I've commented before that it's fascinating to watch this happening after decades - certainly enough decades to cover my entire lifetime so far - of the left explicitly saying that non-normie, non-anodyne social views that go against the status quo and make normies freak out should be not just tolerated and accepted, but celebrated merely due to the fact that they are oppressed by the majority. Which points to a couple of possibilities. One is that such statements were always just cynical, dishonest ploys to gain power by fooling the gullible or desperate. Another is that this is a case of "Jesus would agree with all of my social views, so you, as a follower of Jesus, should agree with all of my social views. Oh me, I'm not backwards enough to follow Jesus, I'm just hoping that by invoking Jesus, I can manipulate you into agreeing with me." That is, since the left lionizes the "weird" - often explicitly, using the exact same word - it doesn't carry much negative affect to them, but the right does denigrate "weirdness," so it affects them. Based on my perception "in the wild" of how the "weird" insult and, more generally, the claim that the leftist social views are just the normie default now, have landed, they seem about as effective as the typical case of an atheist trying to use the Bible to convince a Christian to agree with his social views. I'd guess there's definitely aspects of both going on there, which is pretty expected with any such wide scale phenomenon around such a large ideological/political bloc.
07mk
3mo ago
All the talk about the shift in "vibes" and re-energizing of the Democratic party under Kamala, as well as the talk about how good this "weird" insult is at owning the Republicans just makes me think of someone noticing an ignorant child tilting his head with a quizzical expression and quickly shutting that all down by ostentatiously shouting out that everyone in fashion agrees that the emperor's new clothes will absolutely revolutionize the industry with its creative use of sleeves or whatever. It's just narrative built on top of narrative said by like-minded people, which doesn't imply it's false, but when the people pushing forward the narrative also happen to be people who like the narrative, largely based on what other people who also like the narrative say, it certainly implies that great skepticism is in order.
The bigger issue I think this raises is, if the narrative turns out to be false and people notice that, then that will result in the many journalists and media outlets that pushed forward the narrative having discredited themselves, which will mean fewer trustworthy resources for the American electorate to learn about their politicians. This phenomenon of journalists discrediting themselves through politically-motivated messaging has been going on at least since the 2015 Trump campaign, and it seems to just keep getting worse, and I wonder if, eventually, something will have to give.
07mk
3mo ago
As best as I can tell, voting for a third party candidate is about as worthless as any other vote in this context. The odds that my one vote is what takes some third party candidate up from 4.99% to 5.00% or whatever the threshold is is astronomically low. The odds that my one vote takes the candidate's vote count across some threshold such that it allows the party to garner greater clout in some meaningful, true way is much higher, since there are many many such thresholds, but it's still astronomically small.
07mk
3mo ago
I’d consider attacking a mixed race person based on their identity well beyond the pale.
For a moment, I thought describing his comment like this was weird, but then it occurred to me that using particular blunt and non-descriptive categories to describe a specific event in a way that attaches negative affect is a common enough occurrence that one of Scott Alexander's more famous essays on SlateStarCodex back in the day, titled The Worst Argument in the World IIRC, was based around it. Of course, this is my subjective take, but Trump's line, on its merits, seems far more similar to his attacks on another mixed race person based on their identity, Elizabeth Warren, whom he called "Pocahontas," presumably as a way to insultingly accuse her of opportunistically abusing her claimed heritage for career advancement. Except without the schoolyard name-calling, but rather making a pretty meaningful - though unfalsifiably vague - claim, that Harris is selectively emphasizing aspects of her racial identity opportunistically to garner points depending on the context.
Honestly, pointing out Harris's or Warren's alleged cynical racial maneuvering seems rather trite considering that's pretty much expected of someone ambitious and arrogant enough to try to be the next POTUS, and Trump of all people should probably know that, but I've never clocked him as the self aware type. Still, politicians at least like to roleplay being respectable, and they do it well enough to convince a lot of people, and certainly on its merits, the kind of behavior being alleged is not respectable, so I don't find the accusation beyond the pale. Rather well within the pale, in fact, to the extent that it's actually pretty damning to US journalism that in a country whose political discourse explicitly talks so much about how race should inform how we treat individuals and enforcing that with policy, the industry doesn't spend more time questioning politicians on how they might have cynically maneuvered the racialist landscape to consolidate their power. I don't know who'd be the ones to damn, though, because the journalists are ultimately serving an audience that just doesn't care about that.
07mk
3mo ago
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation.
I've been finding this phenomenon fascinating, though I'd say I find it more depressing than fascinating. But fascinating nonetheless. I'm reminded of the early 2010s when it first became apparent that the identity politics/social justice/progressive crowd ("woke," "CRT," and "DEI" are more common terms to refer to that crowd now) that I was a part of was focused primarily on using schoolyard bullying tactics to use coerce people into believing the correct ideological beliefs, with an open and severe disdain for convincing people via argumentation (it was around this time that I learned of Ben Shapiro, who was introduced to me essentially as the punchline to a joke about how close-minded and backwards those rightists were with their "facts don't care about your feelings" slogan). This was a surprise to me at the time, given that I'd always been raised believing that the left/liberal/progressive side was the side of science and intellectualism, and there's basically nothing more hostile to science and intellectualism than using coercion to convince people of something.
Of course, I've changed my mind since then. I think what helped to awaken me was the realization that my own honest, genuine belief in the correctness of my ideology was in itself the result of the type of coercion that I observed being done; when you see someone else being suckered into the same belief that you have, you start to wonder if you were the sucker in the past (this is also why, for completely selfish and cynical reasons, I am against using dishonesty or coercion to push forward any ideology I genuinely believe in). And I've observed the schoolyard bullying tactics only get worse in that time and gain greater prominence at tables with higher stakes.
And there really aren't any higher stakes than the POTUS election, at least in the realm of US politics, which is where it has reached now, with this new "weird" forced meme and the implausibly deniable reference to a lie about the VP candidate. Now, Trump probably deserves blame credit for bringing it that high, but Trump was one unique character that forcibly dragged his party to follow his lead by sheer popularity, while this new narrative seems to be something many Democratic operators are voluntarily coalescing around (whether it's coordinated or not doesn't matter). But more to the point, the entire point of voting for someone is that they're preferable to the other guy; if my side decides to bully people into being convinced to our side, then I can no longer trust my judgment that my side is better, because that judgment might have been coerced out of me rather than being the conclusion I reached through reasoning through my beliefs, wants, needs, etc. It's not that name-calling in itself makes the policies that my side wants just as bad as the policies that the other side wants, it's that the name-calling reveals to me that my preference for my side's policies are suspect.
There's basically nothing that will stop me from voting for Kamala in November; my vote never counts in these elections anyway, and doubly so in Massachusetts, and if Kamala does win, I'll be able to honestly say that I cast a vote for the first black woman president - which in itself doesn't matter to me, but it certainly might matter to the bullies who would have good reason to be emboldened in that scenario. But I must admit, watching this campaign makes me feel worse and worse about doing this.
07mk
3mo ago
I have no opinion on Walz directly, due to having only learned of his existence with the VP nomination, but the whole narrative surrounding him, as well as the Harris candidacy in general, reminds me so much of that Game of Thrones line "a king who must say he is king is no true king." The past few weeks, all the messaging that I've perceived "in the wild" in places like news shows and articles or political advertisements has been talking about how Harris's nomination was so energizing to the party and gave everyone hope that we might be able to actually defeat Trump, but the actual displays of energy were few and far between. For Walz, I keep getting told that he's a "turbo normie" (in different terms, of course, that a normie might use) instead of it being actually demonstrated. The whole thing also reminds me of Clinton in 2016, when we were constantly told that she was the most qualified presidential candidate ever, which screamed insecurity versus just showing off her credentials and history and letting the voters conclude what they will about her qualifications.
Maybe it's early enough on in their campaigns that they're just warming up the applause lights before their actual demonstration of the underlying qualities that actually give hope for winning the correct states in this election. That in itself would still signal insecurity, but at least there'd be more of a there there.
07mk
3mo ago
Coming from the left, I also find this intentional, cynical attempt to negatively label opponents as "weird" rather unfortunate. We've been celebrating weirdos and weirdness, using those exact words, for at least the past 3 decades, probably more. It was part of an explicit effort to raise the status of people who were denigrated by society for not being normal enough, by associating the term with positivity.
And now, it seems that a significant portion of the Democratic machine has turned on a dime to say weirdness is bad, actually, and it's the other guys who are weird, not us. It'd be one thing if these were just off-hand comments here and there, since "weird" still retained a colloquial negative meaning, but the way so many people coalesced around the term within an instant (I personally doubt there was any conscious intentional coordination around the term, which actually makes it worse) is something else. It's got the same energy as "I'm so grateful to the Party for raising our chocolate rations despite our ongoing war against Eurasia."
07mk
3mo ago
I maintain that this obsession with race is gross and weird.
Not just that, but bizarre and definitely not a good look, and, let's be frank, a little creepy too.
07mk
3mo ago
You're not the first one to make a comment like this on this topic, and I think it's pretty clear that this type of anecdotal analysis just doesn't work for something like this due to the availability bias. How many young men do you socialize with that are so isolated and lonely that they never socialize with anyone? How many do you work with who don't even go out of their home to work at a job? Obviously, definitionally zero. The types of people being discussed here are specifically the types of people who you wouldn't notice in everyday life.
07mk
3mo ago
Shame only has utility for steering behavior. You don’t shame someone who can no longer modify their behavior (40 and no children), you shame them only when their behavior is malleable. For this problem, it is prosocial to shame young people who don’t settle down, so that they modify their behavior in the relevantly prosocial way.
These seem related to each other. Young people who don't settle down eventually become 40 years old, and many of them don't have children due to not settling down. If such people are shamed, then young people have an incentive to avoid growing up to become one of those people.
07mk
3mo ago
Heck, I remember learning as a kid that nunchucks and butterfly knives were illegal in England not just to own but even to show in movies, which explained some bizarre censorship in some movies (IIRC the Mel Gibson movie Payback had a non-violent, non-combat scene cut where someone was showing off a butterfly knife). So it wouldn't be surprising if telescoping polearms were banned as soon as they became commonly used.
07mk
3mo ago
In my mind the Woke movement is conservative in many ways (at least in reference to recent American politics).
I'd say it's conservative in a much more broad way. One of the earliest, long lasting ways of determining how to treat each other is by categorizing them by immutable, superficially easy to distinguish characteristics, with race being one of the main ones. People have come up with different justifications for this over the millennia, but fundamentally, they're all variations of the same thing, post hoc rationalizations for why [people I like] deserve [good things] and [people I dislike] deserve [bad things]. Wokeness is pretty clearly just another variation of this, where the rationalization is "systemic oppression." It switches the rank ordering here and there, but fundamentally it's just trying its best to repeat old patterns rather than overcome those old patterns and replace them with new, better ones.
07mk
3mo ago
I think it’s the inevitable result of not being able to handle the idea of disagreement. If you don’t have political views, you’re just right, then it’s not disagreement, it’s a bizarre rant.
I think this is correct and just another variation of the prevalence of the word "gross" to describe political/ideological beliefs/behaviors that began about 10-15 years ago among the progressive left. Besides just not having enough exposure to these ideas to describe their negative qualities outside of generic disgust-based ones like "gross" or "bizarre" or "weird," there's also the heightened emphasis on immediate, visceral, emotional reaction as the genuine reaction that one ought to be true to, with a denigration of trying to reason through the issues while taking those emotional reaction into account along with logic and evidence (e.g. Ben Shapiro's "facts don't care about your feelings" line has only been a punchline to showing how stupid and short-sighted he and his ilk are for longer than I knew who Ben Shapiro was). The phrase "not a good look" is also used similarly in a lot of similar contexts, and I'd say it's all an extra-political variation of "creepy" to describe any man that someone wants to denigrate but who lacks any characteristics that it is considered okay to publicly call out as a moral failing.
I also wonder if there's been a sort of secular trend of the term "weird" being used for things that are morally reprehensible by the kids these days. But that's just from me noticing a couple of young-ish YouTubers using the term that way to describe things like an adult hitting on a minor or people purposefully polluting wildlife to film themselves cleaning them for YouTube views (I'd describe those as "predatory" and "fraudulent" respectively, but the folks I watched just kept using the term "weird" to describe those things). The way I understand "weird," it's meant to convey that something is abnormal in a negative way, but as more and more kids are raised in environments that emphasize the celebration of things that are seen as abnormal, perhaps they see the term as just negative, possibly in a visceral way.
Zoom calls and in the workforce, perhaps, but this seems like a leap. The group of guys with such small social presence being talked about would be the ones to disproportionately not go to these work-tangential events and/or spend minimal time in those. And even in those settings, the ones you actually are able to talk to enough to say that you actually "know" these people would likely be disproportionately not from that group. Same would go for other social spaces and clubs and such.
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