faceh
8hr ago
Well, Defense companies.
But I sure as hell don't want to try to actively invest during a hot war with China.
faceh
8hr ago
I'm a little suspicious, they released Sora to public access even though its only slightly better than other video production models after introducing it in February, so it reads as a way to keep the hype train moving because they don't have a new model worthy of the GPT5 moniker yet.
faceh
8hr ago
The thing is if you joke that the thing can effectively help students cheat you still imply its somewhere around the intelligence level of average college students, which certainly implies it is useful in ways that college students or recent grads can be.
Have you actually been to any metal shows lately? I have, and I assure you that there are still tons of people there who are very visually-identifiable as “metalheads”. Sleeve tattoos, facial piercings, black band T-shirts, etc.
I'll push back on this some. Yes, if you go to the events specifically for this group, you'll find people dressed up for the occasion, and you'll get the impression the culture is strong and the fanbase is numerous. Doesn't really tell you how many of them are actually consider it a significant part of the identity.
I'll also ask, what's the median age of the members of the crowd these days?
As far as I can tell, sleeve tattoos and facial piercings don't necessarily mark you as any particular subculture anymore. A sleeve tattoo could be a biker, a veteran, an SJW, or a handful of other And part of my point is I haven't seen people wearing those black band shirts out in public very often.
I don't think the kids these days are falling into the 'standard' categories where they define themselves in large part by the music they listen to. I'm also guessing they don't attend concerts with the same regularity as previous generations.
both new entries in genres you’d recognize, and totally new genres you wouldn’t know anything about unless you sought them out.
What are some examples? Because every so often I DO go seeking out new genres because I get bored with music pretty quickly these days. I've found spinoffs of known genres, like Argent Metal or Folk Metal. I discovered The Hu in 2020 and Bloodywood in 2021, and more recently Gloryhammer.
But none of those have achieved much 'mainstream' cachet, they're simply not , and they aren't playing at large venues, although occasionally they'll be the opener for a larger act.
The only genre I can think of that seems 'new' is Phonk, which is pretty interesting on its own and get more interesting when you combine it with metal
Perhaps you are just out of touch with what’s new and hip among the new generation? There’s no shame in that; it happens to everyone.
I'll just point to the part of my comment where I said "as someone who hasn't really changed my personal style in about 20 years." I have literally never been in touch with what's 'new and hip,' so my exposure to it was usually what percolated through to everyday life. And my point is in 'everyday life' I'm not seeing the folks who are obviously identifiable as metalheads, goths, emo, or hiphopheads as often as it feels like I used to.
I don't want us to talk past each other. I hear you saying "These scenes are alive and well! There's dedicated fans and active bands and there are regulars shows at many venues!" And I'm replying "Great. Awesome, but their penetration into the overculture appears to be virtually nil."
Although I have heard from friends in Nashville that the current scene for Country and Blues is on fire right now, as old as those genres are.
faceh
14hr ago
RE: the authenticity point, I noticed sometime in the last decade that whole subcultures seem to have mostly died out and there certainly seem to be no new ones arising.
Has anyone actually seen a 'hipster' in real life recently? Is anyone still seriously going around trying to live the Goth or Emo lifestyle, are Metalheads still a distinct, recognizable class of music fans? And this is going to sound weird, but even hip-hop/urban culture seems to have reigned in their stylistic excesses. I haven't seen sagging pants, spinning rims on blinged out Cadillacs or absurdly long chains with absurdly large pendants in a long time. OCCASIONALLY some slightly new music genre spins out but the vast majority of popular music these days seems to fall into about 4 genres.
The only pimped out rides I notice these days are usually lifted trucks with underbody lights.
Its like, despite living in the single best possible era for people with niche, 'esoteric,' and bespoke interests and tastes, we seem to be homogenizing more than ever.
If we are maximally permissive, and there are no real social standards to 'transgress' against perhaps everyone just sort of gravitates to the nearest cluster of peers and just apes their style, with minor variations. You can't be 'counter' to any social rules if the rules don't actually forbid much. I suppose nudity is still taboo.
I say this as someone who hasn't really changed my personal style in about 20 years. So it felt like everyone was making things up as they went along either way, but now they're not even bothering to make it up, they just pick from approximately 3, maybe 5 predefined style palettes and buy the recommended brands and then they're good to go. Maybe they change a bit with the seasons. Pumpkin spice gives way to Peppermint Mocha.
faceh
14hr ago
The one question that may remain to be answered is if we can 'merge' with machines in a way that (one hopes) preserves our consciousness and continuity of self, and then augment our own capabilities to 'keep up' with the machines to some degree. Or if we're just completely obsolete on every level.
Human Instrumentality Project WHEN.
I think this is an interesting 'shot across the bow.'
We have language analysis technology that includes LLMs that makes these huge bills easier to search and catch the 'hidden' spending provisions tucked in there, and translate complicated legalese into mostly plain English.
This results in increased 'legibility' in the most literal sense. The text of any bill, no matter how large, can be instantly processed and made comprehensible to the constituents well before the vote is called.
Add in general anti-FedGov sentiment, and the fact that Elon is popular and has an uncensorable platform, and this could change the game.
Where before the mainstream news might have picked out like 3-5 of the provisions that would piss off one side or the other, while ignoring the really egregious stuff in the bill, now there is no 'safety through obscurity.'
Not clear what congress' counterplay is, honestly.
If Elon wants to, he can set up PACs to fund primary challengers for any Republicans who defect, to make sure that there are consequences locked in for later, to prevent any politicians from relying on the public's short memory.
faceh
4d ago
I think authors should almost never do it. It immediately stakes a claim that the author 1. knows in some cosmic sense, that the alleged misinfo is false, and 2. knows that the intent of the alleged misinfo was to deceive or bullshit. Even if they know the first, how could they know the second?
Yep.
"Misinformation" is a label that should really only apply to statements that intentionally mislead with regard to facts that have been heavily empirically tested and can be 'independently' verified by the listeners if they chose to do so. In most other situations, you can just say "lies."
"The sun rises in the west" is misinformation, in that context, even if the speaker ardently believes it. "The earth is 6000 years old" is arguably not.
There's a distinct difference between expressing skepticism over someone's statement and taking it upon yourself to declare that statement is untrue without further elaborating on your argument.
And sneaking your conclusion (this statement is false/this speaker is unreliable) into your description of the person or statement is, itself, a very misleading thing to do, if you haven't done the work to back up the description.
So, when we are trying to decide who the liars are, it seems likely that Trump and Vance were speaking closer to the truth, even if the specifics were off, than everyone else screaming "THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE!
I think this is an underappreciated point, and I suspect it even reflects a psychological difference between the right and left wing's approach to empiricism.
I'll even 'steelman' Pizzagate, for that matter.
We've seen plenty of credible reports and even some actual convictions showing that Politicians do in fact get up to all kinds of sexual deviancy, up to and including in the halls of congress.
And now we're seeing the various dominoes falling with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell (remember they found her hanging out in New Hampshire surrounded by armed guards?), Diddy, and Jay-Z, and we can be all but certain there's celebs and politicians caught up in all this. The biggest hit song of the summer was by Kendrick Lamar accusing one of the most popular musical artists alive right now of being a pedophile.
Pizzagate gets the specifics wrong (there's probably no child dungeon underneath a pizza restaurant) but is still getting at the 'shape' of the truth. And if they kept fumbling around in a very misguided attempt to uncover these truths, they'd probably grab hold of the actual conspiracies eventually, and bring some heinous stuff to light.
Whereas the lefty impulse seems to be to reject the existence of a given conspiracy simply because some aspect of it is debunked or proven false. "Haha silly Qanon thinks there's a Pedo ring operating out of a Pizza shop, how stupid to believe that politicians would be hiding an organized child sex operation." And thus they don't have to follow that thought any further and can return to blissful ignorance, which would allow whatever hidden activities are occurring to continue along.
This was especially blatant with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff. Its utterly obvious the Biden family is covering up some serious stuff, and the more recent pardons are almost tacit admissions of such, but the liberals have their head jammed so deep in the sand that they denied Biden's senility, let alone his potential corruption, for so long it may have just cost them control of government.
Likewise, maybe there are at best isolated incidents of Haitian immigrants taking animals they find outdoors and cooking them up in Ohio. But the larger point that they're causing, e.g. increased traffic accidents and increased burden on social services and possibly crowding out the locals for employment is likely more true than not.
it seems obvious that Haitians really do eat dogs and cats in Haiti (Those links are SFL, but there ARE videos out there if you wish to be convinced further), so the larger point the righties are making is getting at the shape of the truth.
The lefties, of course, will use the debunking of individual incidents to claim that Haitian immigrants are causing no issues whatsoever and we should be inviting more of them in.
faceh
6d ago
The easiest thing he can do is transfer the IP rights to an irrevocable trust, and dictate that the IP rights are to never be transferred to any entity, nor should any new media be produced, and basically to preserve the IP as closely to the state it currently exists in until the copyright expires.
And fund it well enough that the Trustees can go after any entities trying to infringe on the IP. And it can produce revenue by making new printings of the comics (without editing original content too much) to keep that fund topped off. And I guess extra money over that amount can be kicked off to particular beneficiaries, but make it clear they DON'T get to dictate how the trust property is used or make demands of the Trustees.
And pick a law firm that's been around for 70+ years to act as trustee, and otherwise has minimal financial incentive to milk the trusteeship for fees.
The biggest risk at that point is the Trust depleting its liquid assets and thus being put in a position where it 'has' to start selling or borrowing against the IP rights in order to continue operations, since that is the main and primary asset of value it has.
Even if the trust's explicit purpose is to prevent C & H adaptations from being produced as long as possible, if the Trustees believe that there will not be sufficient funds to carry out that purpose, they can potentially argue that selling off one piece of the IP rights is justifiable since that is the only way they can continue to operations and that is still in the 'best interests' of the trust itself.
faceh
6d ago
Yes, he can do a lot of things to try and restrict any use of his IP after his death. Most of those things can be circumvented if they're willing to bring freight trains worth of money.
I can say on a professional level that even an extremely well-drafted trust with 'airtight' language still fails if you don't have someone in charge who is truly aligned with your vision.
I sometimes point out what happened to The Ford Foundation which, after Henry and Edsel died, made it about thirty years before its original mission was fully compromised.
faceh
6d ago
It actually saddens me that after he dies (sad enough on its own) that someone, somewhere is going to roll a freight trains worth of money up to his heirs and convince them to sign the rights over, then we're getting saturated with C & H content.
One of my favorite factors in the comics is that Calvin and Hobbes have no "voice" so every person has a slightly different version of them in their own head.
When they eventually make a CGI movie and they're voiced by Chris Pratt and Seth Rogen it will genuinely diminish the art, I'd argue.
faceh
9d ago
I think men care a bit less about whether a woman is a whore when he marries her, but more if she will end up whoring out after the marriage, and maybe more importantly if she carries the reputation of a whore or has been able to keep things discreet.
faceh
9d ago
I'm almost sad that nobody has 'called me out' on this given my consistent pounding of the need for accountability among the elites. My closing remark on that comment is:
Eventually the proles will start to conclude that the system is in fact SET UP so as to ensure elites are guaranteed to thrive regardless of the state of the country and that perhaps the only way skin gets re-inserted to the game is if the proles taken action themselves.
I think it does merit discussion as to whether this killing is the sort of action that suffices to bring more 'skin in the game' back to an increasingly unaccountable system where 'nobody' is responsible for bad outcomes.
For the record on my positions:
Do I condone the killing?: No, the opposite. There were other options on the table.
Do I understand the shooter's motives: Yes, and I find them sympathetic while I condemn the action. The fact that nobody else was harmed in the process is to his credit.
Do I think the killing is probably an 'inevitable' result of institutional failures that individuals feel powerless to affect? Yeah.
I think it is in fact bad that the guy is getting such an ovation from certain corners of the internet, and I strongly suspect many will come to regret their open support of the guy, even if they don't ever publicly recant.
I would remind people that this is just the most recent successful amateur assassination of a highly-positioned figure.
Multiple people took potshots at Trump earlier this year, as we all recall. The individual would-be assassins just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving. Also can't forget that MULTIPLE people have lit themselves on fire due to the Israel-Palestine situation, so there's just 'something in the air' that is leading people to potentially suicidal action in the U.S. to try to affect large-scale outcomes.
I strongly suspect we're looking at a potential rash of future assassins, The means are more available than ever (3D printed guns are impossible to ban at this point). The motives are varied, and the signal cannot be ignored, if you choose your target well, that you'll get adulation and attention to your particular cause.
I'd also argue it ties into discussion of the 'male loneliness epidemic,' because the sort of disaffected males with minimal prospects are going to notice that women are responding positively to targeted killings. Objectively its the most high-impact action a guy in that age range can take, short of founding a billion-dollar company (or having a couple kids, but the whole point is that isn't a likely outcome these days!).
And that right there is why I don't think these killings or attempts quite qualify as legitimate 'skin in the game,' because they're not filtering out bad actors in a systemic, reliable way. Indeed, the people who live and who die will be almost random in a sense. There's no real attempt to select for targets based on qualities that we want to remove or disincentivize, the selection effect is not towards removing bad actors for harms they are responsible for.
We want the skin in the game to be a direct result of the institution/system itself functioning as intended, rather than a second or arguably third-order effect of its dysfunctioning. But, this will possibly lead to some reformation of the systems or institutions themselves.
faceh
10d ago
Disagreed, in that you have to procure the boat and physically steer it out there yourself, which leaves a trail of evidence on its own.
They could in theory narrow the search down to that particular lake, at least.
Whole point of a Drone is minimal forensic trail.
faceh
10d ago
I will say, having this information, that it IS actually possible to commit a daylight murder in Manhattan and manage to escape before being tracked down has made some of my more fanciful assassination schemes seem more plausible.
faceh
10d ago
I've been tossing around the idea that you can probably use a consumer drone to drop a murder weapon in a lake without much hassle at all.
faceh
11d ago
Color me somewhat surprised.
I was somewhat expecting a guilty verdict, and my guess was that'd trigger another wave of emigration out of NYC.
Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.
faceh
11d ago
I've noticed a lot of the wisdom from when I got started has completely vanished.
Yep. As I recall it, the "HODL" meme came into existence as simple advice to keep people from panic selling AND from jumping from onto non-bitcoin coins (shitcoins, mostly) and thus from avoiding the biggest risks to your Sat stack, your own emotional decision-making.
faceh
13d ago
No Man's Sky got a TON of flack at launch because its procedural generation was actually far too limited and there was no interaction between players, despite implications or promises made by the publisher.
But then it improved in fits and starts over the next couple years to actually deliver on or exceed most of those promises, and now its a shining example of reputation rehabilitation. So the procedural generation is indeed impressive by any fair standard, now.
And they've released a lot of new content and upgrades to the game over the years.
Yet I think it is still running into the limits of what you can actually do with procedural generation. Only some subset of those generations will seem 'unique' and even fewer will be 'interesting' so the thrill of discovery is going to run out eventually, even if planet X-9-1-3-C-7-J is technically very different from planet X-9-1-3-C-7-Q, you won't feel like there's much difference if you can see how the lego pieces were rearranged to make each one.
I think the disappointment arises because any sort of full deterministic universe probably won't be like the Star Trek Universe, where you can run into nonstandard, unexplainable phenomena all over the place and the galaxy is just teeming with intelligent life that has abnormal powers, strange morality, and biology that defies understanding so the effort of exploring is rewarded, and there's nigh infinite novelty to be found because the rules of what is possible simply can't be pinned down.
faceh
13d ago
Yeah, but you're using a second currency to denominate the value of the asset. Not the currency it was actually purchased in.
ETH which actually has multiple good uses
What are those? Because I played in the ETH ecosystem for a while (RIP Augur) and I came to be dissappointed because all the exciting projects died because ETH doesn't scale well, or because its REALLY hard to avoid programming bugs, or because whatever function they serve is just better done via centralized services.
So I tossed in the towel for now, while still holding SOME ETH in reserve (never uninstalled MetaMask).
Like, DAOs had a moment, and then seemingly nothing has been done with them. Same with NFTs.
I think the answer to this is just 'yes.'
In that I believe that any world where NVidia stocks are tanking, there's probably a lot of other chaos and you will be seeing large losses across the board.
The only inherent risk factor is that their product is dependent on thousands of inputs all around the world, so they're more sensitive than most to disruptions.
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