ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Yeah, but how is that relevant to what we're discussing?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
It doesn't make sense to me. If people were leaving cities for small towns and villages, that should cause the price in cities to drop, or at least stabilize. Ditto, if they were leaving some country for another, but everywhere seems to be affected.
Since the mother has signed up to be paid for surrogacy, I am not particularly inclined to view the child as being torn away from the mother's possession. Possibly, I am not open enough to the infant's perspective
Yeah, there's that, but also, it's rather naive to think that it's all fine because the mother signed on the dotted line, before a major transformative experience. And that's without looking into the gory details, like how a lot of them do it out of desperation, how the contracts penalize them for backing out, etc.
but divorce, mothers dying, infant adoption, etc., seem to me like they are common enough that this is not a huge problem
All of these things are massive tragedies, and we don't go out of our way to deliberately create them. Divorce, given it's scale, is a huge problem.
If surrogacy exists at all, it seems like it has to be an option for gay males.
Correct. Surrogacy should not exist at all, it is a moral horror. I don't understand how the thought that this is about gay men, enters into people's heads.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
...or because they don't want to be regime changed.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8hr ago
There's no way there's this many people with remote high-paying jobs.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
Given the weakness of free speech laws in Europe, the EU (and member states) could have openly censored unapproved views on trans issues the way they openly censored complaints about Muslim immigration, but they chose not to.
A quote from the executive summary that I saved in my draft, but didn't get around to commenting on before posting:
Since the DSA came into force in 2023, the European Commission has pressured platforms to censor content ahead of national elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, in addition to the EU elections in June 2024.50 Nonpublic documents produced to the Committee pursuant to subpoena demonstrate how the European Commission regularly pressured platforms ahead of EU Member State national elections in order to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties.
(...)
The 2023 Slovak election is one key example. TikTok’s internal content moderation guides show that TikTok censored the following "hate speech" while facing European censorship pressure:
- "There are only two genders";
- "Children cannot be trans";
- "We need to stop the sexualization of young people/children";
- "I think that LGBTI ideology, gender ideology, transgender ideology are a big threat to Slovakia, just like corruption"; and
- "Targeted misgendering."
Other than that, you have national laws like the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz or Ley Trans.
If you want to paint the EU as more sane than the US on the trans issue, you'd have to point to the medical establishment. The legal establishment might as well have been directly transferred from the libbiest gender-studies departament in the US.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
I don't see what the aesthetic opposition could be here
Tearing away a child from it's mother's arms is not aesthetically displeasing to you?
unless it is to such a degree that gay males are not able to "aesthetically" have biological children at all.
They can do it the same way everyone else does.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
I'm getting a similar vibe off of recent discussions about the F-15E Weapons Officer's rescue.
I outright reject the possibility of anyone taking the other side of that debate. No, I don't care how many links and examples you have.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
That's substance, though, not just aesthetics.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
Yeah, that's not an appropriate aesthetic for a man in a position of power.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace.
Your terms are acceptable.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
US subpoenas tech companies for private messages of European officials enforcing the DSA: the Trump admin is criticing European governments for censoring speech, which is...true, and not just "hate speech" but sometimes just criticing politicians.
Oh, snap. I was sitting on an effortpost on the subject, but never got around to finishing it. Since you're bringing it up, I'll just dump the draft I had stored:
Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe and a shared core value with the United States across the democratic world.
Some of you might scoff at these words if you've been keeping tabs at what's going on in Europe. Some might scoff even harder upon realizing they come from a statement from the European Comission responding to Trump's travel sanctions against Commissioner Thierry Breton, who sent a letter to Elon Musk, threatening him with regulatory retaliation, ahead of his interview with Trump. But even if you were familiar with that situation, when you find out how deep this rabbit hole goes, it might turn out all that scoffing is nowhere near enough
Recently the House Judiciary Committee released a report on EU laws' impact on American political speech. They subpoena'd the major platforms for documentation on the measures they took to comply with EU regulations, and the results were quite illuminating. One of the responses to the Twitter Files story was that it's a nothingburger. Private companies came up with private terms for using their private platform, and the government was essentially just pushing the "report" button. We've had plenty of conversations about whether that is an accurate portrayal of the situation, but aside from that, it now looks like the core premise of that response is wrong. The platforms' terms of service weren't established on their own accord, but rather under pressure from the European Commission. From the report:
starting in 2015 and 2016, the European Commission began creating various forums in which European regulators could meet directly with technology platforms to discuss how and what content should be moderated. Though ostensibly meant to combat "misinformation" and "hate speech," nonpublic documents produced to the Committee show that for the last ten years, the European Commission has directly pressured platforms to censor lawful, political speech in the European Union and abroad.
The EU Internet Forum (EUIF), founded in 2015 by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG-Home), was among the first of these initiatives. By 2023, EUIF published a "handbook ... for use by tech companies when moderating" lawful, non-violative speech such as:
- "Populist rhetoric";
- "Anti-government/anti-EU" content;
- "Anti-elite" content;
- "Political satire";
- "Anti-migrants and Islamophobic content";
- "Anti-refugee/immigrant sentiment";
- "Anti-LGBTIQ . . . content"; and
- "Meme subculture."
Now, some might say that just because an official government body invited some companies to have a friendly conversation about moderating their platforms, doesn't mean any pressure is actually being put on them, but the problem with that theory is that the companies themselves weren't under that impression. The report contains examples of emails such as this one from Google:
...co-chairs set the agenda under (strong) impetus from the EU Commission; decision is taken by "consensus" -- but consensus can be heavily pressed by the EC, if they disagree where it's going.
or:
The EC is opening the GAI subgroup under the Code of Practice. I assume we want to join (we don't really have a choice), but do we also want to co-chair it?
or one from TikTok about adding rules against "marginalizing speech and behaviour", and various forms of "misinformation":
This update, which was advised by the legal team, is mainly related to compliance with the Digital Services Act
Now, maybe this is just a case of overzealous bureaucrats throwing their weight around to push their private agenda? Despite the letter of support for Breton after Trump's sanctions, the official line was that was acting without authorization, so maybe this is was also the case here? Well, maybe, but said bureaucrats really wanted to make it seem like this is all done with the blessing of the top brass. For example an email from an EC official representatives at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Bytedance signed off with:
Given the urgency, I take the liberty to use this informal channel but I want to assure you that I am addressing you with the agreement of the Vice-President (who is cooperating on this with [redacted] and [redacted]) and the knowledge of the President.
Personally, I think this casts doubt on the claims about Breton as well.
The executive summary of the report isn't a long read, and has receipts for a few other dramas like the Romanian elections.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Imagine if Israel mined the Straight of Gibralter every time Hamas launched a terror attack. Would the French be like, "come on Hamas cut it out?" Come on man. That beggars belief.
They wouldn't do that, not because they're such good guys, but simply because Hamas will never be more than a nuisance to them. If you want to know what they'd do in a situation actually analogous to Iran's, google the "Samson Option".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Retard was never quite ubiquitously PC-banned, but there was a lot of spikiness.
I'd say it was. Perhaps not will-get-you-fired-banned, but will-get-you-banned-from-fora-and/or-unfriended-banned for sure.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
You don't think that Euros make similar witty remarks about each other's countries when talking about each other? It's just normal nationality-related bants.
No, it's not. These things happen without an American even being present, and if anyone voiced an opinion to the effect of "come on, it's not so bad", they'd get immediately shat on, let alone if there was an American present, and fired a few shots back.
None of this matters. Pro-MAGA Americans seems to clutch to anecdotes about smug Europeans being smug to sidestep the fact that Europe currently has very obvious reasons to be angry at America
How about: two things can be true at the same time?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
I think personal interaction with a severely decompensated schizophrenic would help make it clear that lobotomy was a fantastic option when we had no other options.
I bet it's fantastic for people who had to take care of them, but executing them would yield a similar effect in terms of taking a burden off their shoulder.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
That's an interesting take. I've warmed up to arranged marriages as I grew more trad for the reasons Tretiak outlined, but couldn't quite endorse them because of the horror stories you mentioned. This does feel like the missing piece.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
President Obama pivoted to a diplomatic deal brokered by Russia. Hooray, we can't possibly have made the Europeans mad by not doing something!
Ok, fair enough. France and the UK were clearly retarded here, and you guys did the right thing.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
I've made decent progress on dynamic background generation, but it also exposed an issue - when I got up to 9 background textures, the performance dropped significantly. The bottleneck was a single line of code that copied the texture from the shader program to the material of the background node. GPU-CPU copies are a big hit on performance generally, but it wasn't clear to me what alternatives there are, even the "boid" project my game is based on handled it's data updates this way, so I figured that's the way to go. Well, it turns out there's a special Texture2DRD type, that lets you directly hook up a node to a texture sitting on the GPU, which means there's no need for the CPU-based updates. Even the simulation code was affected, so this might even let me squeeze out a bit more performance out of it.
OTOH, this means memory management will be a bit trickier. Keeping the background sprites connected to these textures will mean they're still sitting on the GPU memory, so I'll have to add their removal and/or freeing of GPU resources to the code.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Iran blockading the Strait of Hormuz is not rationally ensuring their survival. It makes regime change more pressing.
You already tried regime-changing them when they weren't blocking the strait! What do they have to lose at this point? Please, try having some theory of mind.
We don't do something, it's our fault.
Can you give an example of that?
Iran and they went on a nuclear rampage in 10 years, it would be our fault.
What if they don't go on a nuclear rampage, just use it as a deterrent the way North Korea does, and all your little intervention accomplishes is more refugees and higher gas prices?
Europe even want from us?
It would be nice if your president could follow the foreign policy that he campaigned on during the elections.
By various European countries denying them airspace to support thr Iran operation. No matter what you think of the decision, from the American perspective, this means if they want to ensure that they can use a base, they have to control the land it sits on.
Yeah, and when the same people who tell me Hiroshima is Japan's fault are telling me blaming the Iranian response on the US is somehow """American hyperagency""", that's also dispositive.
of a country it was at total war with, who vowed to fight to the end, and who started the conflict with a surprise attack
You're saying that like it's a bad thing. Kinda odd given your country's recent behavior.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
I don't know about "most", it always felt like a 50/50 issue to me, and "Japan shouldn't have started shit" was always a respectable position.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
No? I said I'd blame China.
I think this is what happened with Venezuela and Iran, but I don't think the results of the Iran war are all that encouraging to take on someone even bigger.
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