aaa
3mo ago
It seems to me that hollywood is currently ongoing somewhat of a hangover moment: a lot of people there got really high on ideology in 2019-2021 and now that the high has subsided they're scrambling to fix the mess. Hence the acolyte getting canceled, borderlands and the marvels getting dumped without advertising, snow white, blade and captain america getting long delays and reworks, etc...
But it doesn't mean they won't get high again in the future. In fact I would say that for movies at least, it is guaranteed: they codified their DEI in the academy awards rules. What are they going to do? Make movies that can't get an oscar? I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie-making side of hollywood is just going to slowly die and become more and more woke in the process.
Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever
Season 2 is actually way worse. I was actually of the opinion that season 1, for all its faults, showed promise. Season 2 is terrible. It gets better with season 3, actually, season 3 is even good if you don't think too hard about some things. If you ever reconsider, skip season 2.
aaa
4mo ago
I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.
For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.
Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.
None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.
aaa
8mo ago
It's about Natural Law. The problem is, moderns confuse the natural in "Natural Law" with natural as in "what happens naturally, what happens in nature, anything that happens that nobody tried to make happen on purpose" and that's the wrong kind of "natural".
Metacommentary: I wouldn't pursue this line of argumentation. At best your interlocutor will be utterly confused and think it's complete nonsense. At worst you'll have to end up defending extremely shoddy concepts of teleology.
aaa
9mo ago
I have no idea what is going on
What you are looking at, probably, is amplified noise. They display three models of increasing statistical complexity, the simplest one (model 1) got them almost no results, with almost all their results coming for the most complicated one. None of the models is explained in any great detail and this wasn't a pre-registered study (AFAICT) so who knows how many models they even tried.
aaa
9mo ago
The guy is probably old and doesn't want to run a landscaping business anymore. Now he takes what he can get. Because that is what the market will bear.
Oftentimes in those cases the guy running the business is the business. Once he leaves the business is essentially worthless, existing clients will re-evaluate who they are buying from: you spent a million dollars and you would be in the same position if you had started your own landscaping business in the same area.
aaa
9mo ago
PS. someone referencing himself as a "young buck" is probably the cringiest thing I've seen this year so far.
aaa
9mo ago
A piece about the alt right that doesn't mention Yannapoulos, Bokhari and the wider anti-sjw sphere looks completely delusional to me. It's true that there is a real distinction between the Alt Right™, led by Richard Spencer, and the wider anti-sjw movement of the late 2010s that got lumped in as "alt right", sometimes without even being on the right. However the former was basically along for the ride, Richard Spencer was a marginal figure in his own heyday.
aaa
11mo ago
The alt right was always a vague term ambiguously used to describe either anyone who voted for trump but also interchangeably with neo nazis. However the Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right is relevant here.
aaa
1yr ago
And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?
aaa
1yr ago
I suggest you try to get it to solve that problem correctly, it isn't easy. The prompt is already giving clear and simple instructions and even reminding it not to use the highest value card for the second part of the ordering doesn't work.
Even so, for problems this simple once you start trying to read and find out bugs in the code it produces you have already lost, it would have been faster to write the implementation yourself.
aaa
1yr ago
Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that?
Maybe you don't really understand the doctine of the trinity? It's something that you can't logically explain or understand but you have to believe. I'm not even sure what it could mean to believe something you don't understand.
Any attempts at making it make logical sense have been declared heretical, for example:
- Jesus was a human but operated like a remote controlled meat robot for God: adoptionism
- Jesus didn't exist before he was born in human form: socinianism
- Jesus never actually had a human body, he was something different throughout: docinianism
- Jesus is actually a separate thing from God: arianism
- Father, Son and Spirit are three different forms taken by God (kinda like water can be liquid, ice or vapor): modalism
aaa
1yr ago
As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"?
Almost nothing, race horses get routinely blessed.
aaa
1yr ago
There is also something that makes Advent of Code relatively harder for LLMs (and new competitors): on some days, the stated problem is generally much harder than the actual input file. In that case, careful inspection of the input data is required to figure out what the problem is actually asking, which I assume ChatGPT has no way of doing or even asking for.
This is actually not a factor for ChatGPT plus, you can attach the input file to the request and it will examine it. Doesn't seem to help it at all, but it's a thing.
(This year's Day 8 was an example of this, but this has happened pretty much every year.)
Day 8 is a bit of a bad example, the general solution is the chinese remainder problem which isn't much harder anyway.
True, and it's consistent with it being a language model. It mostly sees completed code snippets (of varying quality) written by humans. How could it know how humans construct solutions like this?
How could other humans learn how to construct those solutions? They read the same textbooks that are in the training set of ChatGPT (a miniscule fraction of them) and they understand their contents.
Please explain the logic here because this is baffling to me. You were willing to invest the time to solve every single AoC problem this year with ChatGPT and you wrote up this summary of it, which together must have taken hours, but you couldn't fork over the $20 needed for a month-long pro subscription, which would make your results an order of magnitude more interesting? How do you value your time such that this makes sense?
I wouldn't call it an order of magnitude, it's the same model but with a different prompt and the ability to run code on its own. Anyway the logic is this: I had fun doing this but its a silly project and I didn't want to spend 20$ on it. Plus I didn't have to because a youtuber did it for me.
You can also look at this as a question of whether ChatGPT Plus is worth it in general: it did better than straight API calls but I spent 2$ of API calls vs 20$ for plus, it isn't 10 times better.
aaa
1yr ago
I think the bigger factor here is the recent concentration of media ownership, there used to be more competition in the past.
aaa
1yr ago
Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.
I think this is where we disagree. I would say that everything that we have discovered so far does reinforce the idea that mind is just an emergent property of the brain: the effects of brain injuries on the mind, the effect of psychotropics, of anesthesia, the physiological roots of various memory related syndromes (korsakov, etc). The things we have failed to discover also point to no mind-separate-from-matter: parapsychology, out of body experiences, remote viewing, auras, so-called near death experiences.
The existence and spread of the mind-as-matter theory is a testament to this since it is so counterintuitive. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only real strike against it is that it is so counterintuitive because of the (presumed) universal subjective experience of consciousness.
aaa
1yr ago
Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?
But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.
aaa
1yr ago
Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.
None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.
aaa
1yr ago
This explanation is often repeated but it's a lot less certain than people would have you believe. The theory goes "it was a widespread belief among ancient jews that prophets lived perfect lives and died in the same day they were born", also known as the "integral age theory".
There's two problems with this, the first one is that it is almost completely unsourced. The only source that exists is in the Rosh Hashanah and states that only Moses was born and died on the same day (for rather contrived reasons). Now, that text is about right in terms of dates for the establishment of Christmas and Jesus was supposed to be better than Moses, so it makes sense. However there is another problem: Jesus didn't die on the day of his birthday.
So the entire argument is moot, someone placed Jesus birthday on the 25th for some reason, that reason has been deleted from history. It is plausible that the integral age was used as a contrived excuse to place it there, but we don't know for sure. It can not be the real reason (because a straightforward application would just tell you that he was also born on easter). The real reason has likely been deleted from history.
Sources:
aaa
1yr ago
Christmas trees came about in the 1500s in the Baltics and are decidedly Lutheran in origin. The notion that Christmas is merely a rebranded pagan holiday (Yule or Saturnalia) is anti-Christian propaganda.
I think this is bullshit. I've read the arguments, I know what historians think about this and I'm still convinced their arguments are weak.
There is no logical reason you would decorate an evergreen tree to celebrate the birth of the son of god, which happened in a cave and involved no trees at all. The christmas log is an even better example, somehow there's local customs, spread from the uk to turkey relating to a magical chunk of wood. Where does that come from? Turns out, nowhere. It just starts getting mentioned out of nowhere. Same thing with the christmas tree, at some point it just starts existing for no logical reason.
I think there are two explanations, one is that they are pre-christian traditions that survived underground until they re-emerged at some point (it doesn't even have to be that much underground, it just needs to be a topic that wasn't recorded in writing). Or they are new traditions that don't have anything to do with christianity, a sort of repaganization of europe.
It's hard to tell which is the case because the christian middle ages didn't bother keeping a record of pagan european tradition.
aaa
1yr ago
I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.
For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).
For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.
An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.
Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.
aaa
1yr ago
Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now
My guess is that anyone who wanted broadband in 2004 had it. In the US penetration was 25% for broadband and 30% for dialup and dialup started declining in 2001. And dialup back then was completely fine for porn. The internet adoption curve post 2000 is a lot flatter than you'd think
Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today.
Hard disagree on this one. Back in the Kazaa days you would easily download CP by accident.
I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days).
I have a hard time believing any of this would make much of a significant difference.
Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.
Fair enough but even hub sites are almost 20 years old at this point, youporn for example launched in 2006.
As western capitalism trends closer an closer to a command economy through mergers, acquisitions and consolidation you will have a harder and harder time arguing against communism.
About 5 companies make all beer. About 6 companies make all media. It's hard to really argue that single digit values of competition produce the level of innovation that a state run monopoly could never rather than simply producing collusion. It's hard to believe that internally the level of competence will not steadily trend towards that of the DMV.
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