SnapDragon
1d ago
Jeez-us. I mean, great that they've walked it back to a more sensible policy. But they literally had people convinced that anybody abroad would be paying a $100k fee to re-enter tomorrow. Apple's immigration lawyers sent me an official communique about this. It's the tariffs all over again. Sowing this kind of certainty is not ok.
Trump may not be Hitler, but he might be Hilter.
SnapDragon
1d ago
This is the greatest thread in the history of threads!
SnapDragon
2d ago
I don't think it's just being 2 degrees of separation away from a murder victim. Some of the online commentators I watch, including Shoe, feel like their life is genuinely at risk now, because it's seemingly within the Overton window to both say "fascists should be shot", and "this person I don't like is a fascist, trust me". She lists a huge number of things that people have accused her of being fascist for.
But I do think you're right that she's overreacting; vivid news like this makes extremely rare events seem much more likely. Rationally, I don't think we're anywhere close to normalizing political murder, even if we're taking some steps in that direction.
SnapDragon
2d ago
Kids these days don't realize how good they have it (grumble, grumble). I was a Perfect Dark speedrunner back in the day, and one of the earliest (if not THE earliest?) to put videos online, and good lord was it a PAIN. I would record my gameplay on a VHS tape, send it to my friend who had an expensive capture card, he'd give me a disk with the RealVideo (tm) output, and then I'd FTP the videos to the server of another speedrunning friend who was paying the server costs to host them.
Once, when I was attending E3, I gave a CD with a Donkey Kong Country speedrun to one of the Rare devs who was attending. No idea what happened to it; he had no idea what speedrunning was, and I probably came across as some random crazy person. I'm guessing he threw it in the trash.
I think another way to make speedruns more about the challenge than endless repetition is doing it live, like in AGDQ. When you only have one shot, the strategies are different and skill becomes far more important than the patience to sit in your basement trying the same frame-perfect OOB glitch over and over. And it's even better when it's a head-to-head race.
BTW, the Hades 64 heat challenge is appropriate for this topic. The guy who did it accomplished it one week after a decent, well-researched documentary came out about why nobody would ever beat Hades on 64 heat...
SnapDragon
2d ago
I've never seen Shoe look as serious, and as distressed, as in her latest video. Things are getting bad.
SnapDragon
3d ago
Definitely! I suspect being a two-time American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champion doesn't hurt, either.
SnapDragon
3d ago
Hey, one of my puzzle-hunting acquaintances (Paolo Pasco) is currently on a win streak!
SnapDragon
3d ago
This seems remarkably inoffensive to me. Even if it's factually incorrect - and it's not clear to me we even know yet - how is this bannable? What am I missing here? I can't find further statements from him that are worse, not that I can imagine what would be sufficient for me to support his banning.
So, I agree that the quote itself seems stupidly misinformed but not horrifically bad. I watched the clip, though, and thought the whole bit was startlingly tasteless. At one point he shows Trump talking seriously with Fox about learning about Kirk's death, and then immediately segues to a mocking joke. Ick.
That said - and keeping in mind that I dislike him - I absolutely don't think Kimmel should be fired for this. Comedy is hard. Sometimes jokes go too far. Sometimes they're tasteless and don't land. This should be ok. Regardless of whether the comedians are leftist hacks or rightist hacks! I desperately want real comedy to make a comeback, and that means supporting comedians' right to gore my own ox, too.
SnapDragon
4d ago
Thanks for the reply, you clearly know more about the process than I do. I definitely lean more towards @Jiro's sensibilities, where the system should work by not criminalizing normal behaviour rather than not convicting normal behaviour (kinda, usually, unless we don't like you). But we live in a complex world, and I'm not a hardcore libertarian. I do understand that there are sometimes tradeoffs, and going after both producers AND consumers of child porn leads to less child abuse than the alternative.
Mind you, we're now in a world where AI can produce child porn without any victimization at all. So there's much less reason to criminalize certain patterns of bits. Will the laws adjust? I doubt it. The ratchet only goes one way. Even Rand Paul probably doesn't want his name on the "Free the Pedophiles" bill.
SnapDragon
5d ago
To be frank, I'd probably still consider myself on the left if the Dems were the same as they were in the 90s. Back when they were against racism (instead of for targeted racism/sexism against, well, me), somewhat areligious (instead of cheering on Islam, of all things), and enthusiastically for free speech (without the mile-wide "except for hate speech" loophole). Yes, I disagreed with them on the size of government, but it's not like Republicans were much better on that front.
SnapDragon
5d ago
Let me go a bit further: how confident are you that there's no child porn on your device right now? As far as I know, there's no exemption for things like browser caches, so merely having clicked a bad link once might make you a potential felon. For a more malicious scenario, what if somebody sends you an email attachment with a trivially-encrypted form of it? IANAL, but I think society has decided that having a certain pattern of bits anywhere in your computer makes you the worst kind of criminal, and I hold no faith that "common sense" will be applied at any stage of the legal process. Especially with tech-unsavvy judges. Double especially if they want to get you for political reasons.
SnapDragon
7d ago
Blame the "interesting, intelligent" posters who got themselves permabanned because they just couldn't help making everyone else's experience worse. The rules aren't arbitrary or hard to follow.
SnapDragon
9d ago
There's not even a need to speculate: A rodeo clown in Texas lost his job for wearing an Obama mask. And the State Fair apologized profusely. One side of the aisle is considered out of bounds when it comes to mockery.
SnapDragon
10d ago
Wow, yeah. Cenk's tweet is perfect. And I remember he was similarly classy and principled after Trump's near miss. He's way to the left of me, but it's clear that he's just a fundamentally decent person. If we could only incentivize having more pundits like him, political discourse in this country would be much, much healthier.
SnapDragon
10d ago
FreedomToons' video after the Trump assassination attempt satirized this quite well. "Trump supporters are already alleging that we encouraged the brave hero who shot at him." "There is no room for political violence against the Nazi who is a living embodiment of all our trauma." It's sadly not all that far from actual rhetoric.
There are a few principled voices who unequivocally condemn political violence, for or against their side. But that's not what engages people.
SnapDragon
10d ago
Man, DC is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. How on earth did this specimen wangle that?
This isn't actually news - the comics industry has been fully captured by the progressive left for at least a decade. Look up I Am Not Starfire or Gotham High for some examples. On the Marvel side, there was The New Warriors, which had a non-binary superhero called Snowflake (twin of Safe Space), and no, this isn't a joke or satire. They were 100% serious about this release.
SnapDragon
12d ago
Agreed, I almost didn't believe what I was reading. I've been to dozens of countries, and none of them hold a candle to Japan when it comes to food quality. I can't speak about outside of Tokyo, but even the random meals I had at random (what in any other country would be "hole in the wall") restaurants were phenomenal.
SnapDragon
13d ago
In a Boltzmann Brain universe, EVERY configuration exists. So sure, there would also be versions of you with scrambled memories, but we're not talking about those - you already know you're not one of them! In statistics terms, your possibility space (based on your current observation that oh-hey-I-exist) consists of all the brains that are exactly equivalent (atom-to-atom, memory-to-memory) to "you" at this instant, and the successes consist of which ones then proceed to see order. If we exist in a physics-based universe, that probability ratio is basically 1. In a Boltzmann-Brain universe, it's basically 0. I hope this makes sense, without bringing in too much formal terminology.
SnapDragon
15d ago
Hmm, not quite sure I understand the question? If you have all your memories (including those of reading this post) but are seeing chaos, then you basically DO know you're a Boltzmann Brain. You can know for sure one way, but not the other. So in a Boltzmann Brain universe, the vast majority of "you"s would know you were in one, but some tiny fraction of "you"s would mistakenly think you weren't (matching your current experience).
SnapDragon
16d ago
Nope, not overlooking it. It's a probabilistic anthropic argument. It is true that, in a Boltzmann-Brain universe, a brain that is "you" will eventually show up paired with sensible input. But it will be vastly outnumbered by those brains that are "you" up until epsilon seconds ago, but are now seeing chaos. The fact that you're NOT currently seeing chaos is extremely strong evidence that a Boltzmann-Brain universe does not exist. (It doesn't matter if chaos and non-chaos events all happen infinitely many times. It's the proportions that matter.)
I admit, though, that I'm still open to debate. (Physicists really don't expect Boltzmann Brains to be real, but if Feynman can't come up with a knockdown argument, what chance do I have?) There are weird questions like "Is there such a thing as an instant of consciousness?" or "Is anthropic reasoning on the laws of existence even valid?" which might be relevant. But just waving at infinity isn't enough.
SnapDragon
17d ago
Eh. I find these theories extremely unconvincing. Boltzmann brains become super-exponentially less likely the more atoms are required to form them. An orderly pocket universe forming would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times less likely than an orderly brain on its own.
And there would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times more versions of you that had all the same past experiences, so were "you" in absolutely every respect, but were currently experiencing complete chaos.
SnapDragon
18d ago
In what way is he being insulting? The guy is posting crazy physics word salad, strongly indicative of some sort of mental issues (which does NOT take a doctor to Notice). @self_made_human is very very gently pointing this out. If I felt like engaging (which I don't), I would be much less polite about my disdain.
SnapDragon
18d ago
Most things are "unfalsifiable" in the strictest sense, but you can still use probabilistic techniques. The fact that the inputs coming into your brain are coherent with what your brain expects strongly indicates that it's not the case that "most" brains are Boltzmann brains.
There's selection bias at work here - it's the dumb politicians who get caught begging for scraps. The smart ones, dealing with real movers and shakers, get paid in really hard-to-prove (and possibly not even illegal) favours and tips. The Pelosis and the Clintons didn't get 9-figure bank accounts from their government salaries, that's for sure.
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