TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
No bio...
User ID: 616
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2hr ago
ETA: oops wrong comment.
I wish more of you bastards read fantasy and sci-fi. Feels like I'm always the only one posting recs!!! If you have recs please let me know.
Just started A Requiem for Homo Sapiens it's pretty dang good so far if a bit info-dumpy.
Had to quit the Foreigner series, the main character was just such a self-righteous, annoying, immature jackass I couldn't deal with it. It's a shame, I got halfway through the third book because the world and aliens are quite cool, but damnit Bren you are such a fucker I just couldn't do it.
TheDag
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6d ago
Tracing woodgrains has pushed back against the Tesla stuff.
TheDag
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6d ago
The investors were clearly not happy. Also his chief talent, Ilya, did leave him with many other OG founders.
TheDag
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7d ago
Beautiful! I love that you snuck the man a real $20. I bet he appreciates it.
TheDag
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8d ago
Yeah this is just another piece in the endless stream of propaganda blaming all social ills on violent white boys and men. Not even very interesting or a new take.
Fails to have any nuance into the root of the problem it seems, basically just blaming the kid for being gullible enough to fall for evil propaganda. Boring.
TheDag
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11d ago
It's nice to see you comment on threads besides the CW!!! Those books look cool.
TheDag
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13d ago
Yeah this is definitely a culture war issue. I just feel like being excessively harsh on illegal immigration is punching down
They broke the law. You can't just have people flagrantly ignoring laws, especially ones as big as illegal entry into a country. It devolves trust in the entire system massively.
TheDag
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13d ago
I am not a Roman Catholic. The Church is broader than the Patriarchate of Rome.
TheDag
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14d ago
Traditional conservatives have a problem where 2000+ years of sociobiological truth was upended basically overnight 100 years ago- that men and women are a lot closer in socioeconomic standing than the Bible had anything to say about. So you have a pivot away from a civil religion that had no answer for that to one that could- and predictably, the one that won out almost immediately was "women good man bad".
I like this framing. What do you think makes this predictable though?
Christianity has had no productive answer to that ever since. It's not something they're equipped to handle proceeding forward as they have been, and since these are traditionalists we're talking about they're going to be even slower on the uptake.
Yeah unfortunately I agree... Christianity is still working through the implications of birth control but I on the whole think it's good for the Christian worldview. There was definitely a problem with sexism towards women, something that Christ explicitly warned against.
TheDag
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15d ago
Actually, there are no Epstein files. We already know everything that there is to know (or at least everything that it is possible at this point to know). This is the null hypothesis.
What do we know so far? I mean do we even have the list of people who went to the island?
Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset, and thus releasing the files would damage US-Israeli relations (I’m sure some of our less-plilosemitic users will gladly explain how exactly this translates into leverage over the Trump Administration).
Yeah this is plausible I suppose... but dude if the intelligence agencies are covering up for huge pedophilia rings like... what the hell?!
The contents of the Epstein files personally implicate Donald Trump.
mmf good point. Didn't think of this one, but you know it does make sense. Sigh. I wish Trump wasn't so morally degenerate.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
15d ago
Given that nobody was brave enough to submit a top level comment, I figured I would start off the games this week.
I'd like to talk about the Epstein files, and general pedophilic corruption amongst the world's elite. I wasn't that surprised that Trump didn't end up releasing the full document, given his history of promising things will be declassified (like the JFK files) and then failing to deliver. (I still want to see those JFK files dangit.)
I have to admit though, I have trouble understanding exactly how this conspiracy works. I would imagine if there were a genuine sort of sex cult with underaged teenagers, demon worship, etc going on amongst the world's elite, we would have at least some hard evidence, some video footage, or some audio recording to point at, no? Common wisdom about conspiracies in rationalist circles is that it's too difficult to cover up a leak, especially over decades and with thousands of people. When the stakes get this high I would imagine it's even harder.
Then again, if the files aren't all that bad, why the heck aren't the files released? Why hasn't anything changed after the investigations? I've always been skeptical of the 'kookier' conspiracy theories about Freemason Illuminati cults ruling the world, but I have to admit after this, the UFO kerfuffle in Congress, and just general seemingly bonkers decisions about classified info, I am quite confused as to what a reasonable explanation is.
Anyway, what are your thoughts Mottizens?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
16d ago
I liked the first a lot! The sequel was definitely a lot more meh but the first one was riveting.
TheDag
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16d ago
Just started, City of Brass of the Daevabad trilogy. I'm curious!
In non fiction I'm reading Meditations on the Tarot and looking to start The Interior Castle soon.
TheDag
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16d ago
Woah, do you know how this society got rich enough to afford all of this? Sounds actually quite amazing. Even better in some respects than the modern world.
TheDag
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18d ago
I would recommend the Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman.
TheDag
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22d ago
Yeah I agree in this instance it's pretty egregiously dumb.
TheDag
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22d ago
Yeah that's fair. I'm also suspicious because there are strong incentives for US AI firms to make China seem like they're ahead.
TheDag
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22d ago
Increased drug use is one suspected reason, but I think it might just be brain rot from being on right wing twitter too much. It should be noted that left wing social media contagion has similarly destroyed rationale thinking in the last ten years.
I think another, more charitable argument would be that the media environment is saturated with so many lies and false reporting, slanted journalism, etc etc that it's easy to discount things you don't like and focus on things that seem correct.
The journalistic / expert class brought this upon themselves, as far as I'm aware. Elon doesn't have time to do the enormous amount of checking that is required in this environment to verify every claim. Perhaps he could hire someone, which would probably be a good idea, but doesn't seem like how he operates.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
22d ago
China has a new AI system out taking the world by storm, Manus. It's an autonomous AI agent that, according to Forbes changes everything.
I've seen a LOT of hype so far about AI agents, but the claims from this one actually seem pretty impressive, if they are true. Forbes says:
For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn’t just rank candidates; it reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, cross-references them with job market trends, and presents a fully optimized hiring decision—complete with an Excel sheet it generated on its own. When given a vague command like “find me an apartment in San Francisco,” it goes beyond listing search results—it considers crime statistics, rental trends, even weather patterns, and delivers a shortlist of properties tailored to the user’s unstated preferences.
Manus uses the by now common "stack" of AI models, where there's a master-slave relationship between a head model that looks at the problem, and then sub models which are more specialized to go and do specific tasks. I can't quite tell from a quick search what the key breakthrough Manus made is, as my understanding is other agent AIs already have a similar set up. There is talk about asynch cloud work, but again, I didn't think that was an entirely new thing.
Either way, similar to the DeepSeek R1 reveal, there are a lot of breathless articles coming out about China "taking the lead" i the AI race. I agree that this is a concerning development for the U.S., given that we now have two Chinese labs that have seemingly joined the leading edge out of nowhere. Of course, it remains to be seen if this press blitz actually reflects seriously impressive new ground, or is just a good hype campaign.
Anyone who has used this or looked more into the details - what are your thoughts about Manus so far?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
26d ago
I can understand people on the left being worried about Trump based on how speech has changed. Personally I don't think it's because Trump is censoring speech, in fact I think it's the opposite.
The progressive left heavily censored speech in the U.S. for the better part of a decade, ramping up especially in the last few years. We have the receipts, it's common knowledge at this point that the FBI and other government organizations colluded with social media sites, news outlets, et cetera to push a pro-progressive message, and sideline or outright ban even relatively centrist people with dissenting views.
If there is a lot of genuine concern, I think it comes from people on the left getting a distorted view of what the information landscape looked like, via their censorship. As things bounce back towards a more representative information environment, of course people will feel shocked.
I wish more of you bastards read fantasy and sci-fi. Feels like I'm always the only one posting recs!!! If you have recs please let me know.
Just started A Requiem for Homo Sapiens it's pretty dang good so far if a bit info-dumpy.
Had to quit the Foreigner series, the main character was just such a self-righteous, annoying, immature jackass I couldn't deal with it. It's a shame, I got halfway through the third book because the world and aliens are quite cool, but damnit Bren you are such a fucker I just couldn't do it.
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