cae_jones
3d ago
Although I could believe the hypothesis that there's a lot of guys with talent but limited discipline/drive who are ascertaining (correctly?) that beyond monetary rewards, the incentives to go out and use your talents are kinda dulled. You're not all that likely to find the love of your life, have kids, have a fulfilling long-term life and avoid burning out by age 40, so hey, smoking weed and playing vidya with the bros is an acceptable substitute.
Hey, now. I neither smoke weed, nor do I have any bros to play the handful of games I can actually play with. I'm basically stuck playing old Capcom fighters in single-player and learning to despise the announcer in MVC2 with a passion.
cae_jones
3d ago
Speaking of Christ, the first job God gives to Man in Genesis is tending Eden. The next job that wasn't a curse was to be fruitful and multiply. So it could be argued that People of the Book are religiously obligated to preserve life until God says otherwise.
Hell, if we want to get extra Unsong brained, Revelation includes a plague wherein the Sun does start to roast the Earth, and after Armageddon a cube city with enough space for everyone and its own power / water / food supply descends from the sky and starts exporting medicine and raining fire on attackers. So that's ... fun?
... Do I really want to post something this off-the-wall after trying to be serious in the rest of this thread? Especially since Revelation also includes a scene where a trio of Satanic Kaijuu spit demon-frogs from their mouths to start the Battle of Armageddon? ... Why does the Bible have a Gainax ending?
cae_jones
3d ago
IDK, things in Britain might look different now if there were 10k naked blue charioteers running around, so you might have a point...
cae_jones
3d ago
Resource extraction for Earth is an utterly terrible reason to colonize space, and I don't know why anyone would take it seriously. You don't colonize the Moon and asteroids for gold; you do it because of how differently things work in space. Because there are things that you can do with satellites and space stations and space factories that you either can't do on Earth, or can do more efficiently in space if the cost of working there came down a couple orders of magnitude. Colonizing other planets is a sideshow for the next million or billion years or so.
But when I'm talking about natural selection, I mean the people who are super pessimistic have a tendency to be evolutionary deadends, as do the people who are overly optimistic and burn through resources too quickly. More than just genes get selected for through attrition. Apollo was unsustainable, and Artimas looks like it's just as unsustainable. But the current iteration of Western Civ is unsustainable.
I also feel I should say something about the comment on fossil fuels, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly. It sounds like it's implying that, since fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and we've burned through most of the easily accessible supply, it's all downhill for Earth in general from here? Because we kinda already used all that fossil fuel wealth to develop workarounds, albeit they are harder or more costly. But they are also workarounds that many non-Western nations have invested in the foundational tech and infrastructure for. If you have effective alternative energy sources, you have alternative means of accessing hydrocarbons if needed. Even if it's not for space, someone in the next Renaissance will look at Millennium texts, think that maybe having these things would be nice, and figure out how to concentrate enough energy to pick up where we left off.
cae_jones
3d ago
If AI will be a nothingburger, then space colonization is probably inevitable, for certain definitions of "inevitable". Natural selection and civilization have this weird back-and-forth, where the scales of problems that need solving to make civilization-scale advances, and the conditions to maintain population growth long-term, often wind up clashing, so advances come in bursts, followed by declines, with the seat of innovation having to move to a new population with each iteration. The current paradigm seems to be in the bust phase of that cycle. So if "we" means "The West", yeah, probably screwed. But we've raised the waterline such that India is landing probes on the Moon, China is exploring Mars, Japan is returning asteroid samples, and Israel and Yemen are having the first space combat on the technicality that their missiles collided above the Carman line.
More likely, I think, is that the utter insanity of the past two centuries will necessarily come to a more stable form, whereever the seat of advancement winds up, and that will take a while. The current space exploration efforts better resemble Julius Caesar failing to invade Britain, then 2000 years later, the Sun never set on the British Empire. It's just that, instead of naked blue Celts in chariots forcing back the greatest army on Earth, it was economics and ideology and gravity ... defeating the greatest airforce on Earth. Someone will overcome fertility collapse, because Natural Selection works that way. Someone, perhaps much later, will take the Moon and NEAs, because if they don't, life ends here, not just civilization. And, had I to guess, they will, as their spiritual ancestors did, have a spectacular boom period that raises the civilization waterline for everyone else, succumb to decadence and unsustainability, nearly crash civilization for a while, only to be replaced another few centuries later with someone who goes even farther.
The fun part is, this works on the scale of centuries and millennia. So if AI doesn't pan out, there's plenty of time to get it right before the Sun, a giant space-rock, or some other cosmic catastrophe gets us RFEd. If AI turns out to be the big game-changer of this iteration of the civilizational musical chairs game, then it's anyone's guess what comes next, because whatever it is, it happens in the next few decades to a century or two.
cae_jones
7d ago
Somalia is (east) African? If people are finally learning to distinguish African regions better in America, fair enough. Just would be nice were it in better circumstances.
cae_jones
7d ago
Cephalopods are mollusks, too. I'm not sure about the nervous systems of gastropods, either. It's mostly bivalves that are effectively meat-plants. outside of mollusks, some echinoderms had, then lost brains at some point, but display far more complex behavior than bivalves, so IDK. Sea Anenemies (HTF do you pell that I've tried like 6 ways and can't get any spellcheck suggestions) seem fairly plant-like, but does anyone actually eat them? Does anyone eat echinoderms besides seacucumbers?
cae_jones
9d ago
I've heard it's because of the balance of power in the Middle East. Also because the US burned bridges with Iran after meddling in their politics during the Cold War, and KSA is the only countering power that the US plausibly could work with. Also oil, probably.
cae_jones
20d ago
If it's the video I'm thinking of, no, they did not. It's rapid-fire cuts between them identifying themselves and their credentials and telling the military to refuse illegal orders, as though they all read the same script and then each recording was cut into 3s or less chunks and quilted together. It's kinda disorienting.
cae_jones
23d ago
... But with surrogacy, you get to keep the baby. It's less broadcast-spawning, and more reproductively viable MGTOW.
cae_jones
24d ago
Surrogacy so men with $100k to spare can reproduce without the need for a partner seems like the simpler alternative to navigating the sociosexual hellscape of this decade.
cae_jones
24d ago
Because it was recommended on /r/rational or TVTropes, in my case. Also because Naruto moves at a glacial pace and fanfiction does not.
cae_jones
25d ago
The Democrats trolling the Epstein files for anything that makes Trump look bad. It immediately turned into a weird 2-movies-1-screen soap opera and you have to tune in tomorrow for the next plot-twist, which will seem really cool but ultimately mean nothing.
In other words: Epstein gives off spiteful ex vibes and sent out lots of emails full of the kinds of things Boomers post on Facebook about Trump. Apparently there was some comment in there suggesting TrumpxClinton happened? I haven't seen anyone actually quote it, and they've quoted a ton else. Half of Asmon Gold's comments section is people calling Epstein patient 0 for TDS.
cae_jones
1mo ago
My nostalgia comes from the fact that childhood set the bar at things like family, cartoons, playgrounds, and succeeding at educational challenges. Then those things all changed rapidly and I had no framework on what to do and tried filling the void with memberberries and creative writing failures. I want to go on unfocusedly for several paragraphs, but that'd probably just reenforce it.
cae_jones
1mo ago
Funny story, there. I read Themotte with a screen reader. I kept hearing it as "Scuba Dentist". One day, I decided I really needed to check—that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and all. Such profound disappointment that you are not commenting between sessions of treating tuna toothaches.
cae_jones
1mo ago
FWIW, default Voiceover TTS says /amədʒ/. So English -age, but French silent h.
cae_jones
1mo ago
Now I'm wondering ... what could Israel have done differently to not taurch their reputation?
cae_jones
1mo ago
I had this problem in a small custom engine that I threw together for my own amusement. I showed it to Claude, and it made a bunch of rewrites that fixed the problem.
Since that can't be applied to Unreal, I'm not really sure how else to deal. I'd probably try to write something to identify when the problem happens and counteract it, but in my example that just made it worse.
cae_jones
1mo ago
FWICT, the right believes that Trump is in the process of trying to rig the elections by:
- Deporting illegals, since many on the right believe that places like California and Oregon actually have been making it possible for them to vote.
- Pushing for more gerrymandering, claiming it's in defiance of far more extreme democrat gerrymandering.
- The VRA is currently before SCOTUS, and if gutted, could lead to the loss of several majority black districts in the South.
Additionally, the Putin loophole does not seem to be addressed in the 22nd Amendment. I think Trump running as Vance's VP as a backdoor into a third term would go against the spirit of the 22nd, but whether it's actually forbidden would be something the courts would have to decide.
cae_jones
2mo ago
Richard Paul Pavlick was prepared to take out JFK in 1960, by loading his car with dynamite and ramming it into Kennedy's. He backed out after seeing Kennedy with his wife and children.
cae_jones
2mo ago
I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).
I know people have harped on this already, but being that the Westside Elementary Massacre happened in the school district next to mine before Columbine, and family and friends were there at the time, I feel the need to contradict the point. How much people get away with terroristic threats always feels similar to all the people getting away with larceny to me, because immediately after Westside, we got authority figures drilling home that terroristic threats would no longer be tolerated, period.
cae_jones
2mo ago
The porcelain people are in the south, in Glenda’s domain. The Winkies are their own thing.
Update on my summer legally-not-a-cult situation:
First, I did not spend $7500 to attend the retreat thing. I did observe the first night as a guest on Zoom (until I fell asleep, anyway), but that was largely just a mix of hype and the same stuff from the workshop I attended.
My friend did not reveal the secret sauce in the "breakthrough"s, but the rest ... sounds like Bay Area group-house stuff: long eye-gazing sessions with strangers, obligatory showering people in affection and praise... there was even a spontaneous cuddle-puddle in the room she was staying in on the last night (of phase 1; phase 2 is the end of this month).
It's painful listening to her wonder and joy at all the emotional expression and physical affection and positivity, meanwhile everything she says is something I've heard before in cautionary tales and I know saying so will probably backfire. Also she straight-up quoted Werner Erhard (with attribution) at one point. I at least take solice in her saying she's probably not doing it again after this. And while I'm no fan of death even for my enemies, the leader does seem to think-he's nearing the end of his life and is looking fora successor, but most of the enthusiasm is centered around him specifically.
Anyway, I'm planning on going to the homecoming after phase2, on the grounds that people feeling unloved is how they fall prey to this crap in the first place.
Oh, also, ad for a workshop I was invited to in July. I really thought something that ... that would be obvious to her, but here we are.
I'm mostly just frustrated because of all the conspicuously vulnerable people who showed up at the one I wrote about in June/July.
cae_jones
3mo ago
I've been getting this feeling like the Left is pulling an ISIS, and basically begging the Right to go full violent conquest on them, so they can get the martyrdom they always dreamed of. Everytime Trump raises a finger against leftist violence, the leftwing politicians and talking heads shout "he wants a civil war! Really this time! Tanks! Disappearing grandmas!" Then the Feds conspicuously don't shoot rioters in self defense, even when it's clearly legal due to lethal force being thrown at them.
Trump is very conspicuously holding back, and it feels like the Left is trying to change that. God help us if they succeed.
Having not heard this before, I have to ask ... what does civilization look like, by that standard?
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