aiislove
1d ago
If you can't find an app that already exists, you might be able to create your own with aistudio.google.com pretty quickly
aiislove
2d ago
Thank you, and you're welcome.
No, I've never considered that seriously. It would be very disrespectful to any woman because I know I would never love her. I am simply not attracted to women- when I see their faces or bodies I feel nothing, when I see a handsome man I feel excited. I have always had close female friends my entire life, and though my relationship with women has changed as I've grown and changed as a person, I've never been tempted or interested in pursuing any relationship beyond friendship with any of them. I don't think very highly of gay men who marry a woman either. I can understand men who want to provide their parents with grandchildren, and I am lucky enough to have older siblings who have had children of their own and so never felt pressured from my parents to reproduce, but even then I am bothered by the idea that he chose to pursue a life that runs counter to his desires and internal feelings. He deserves better, to have the dignity to pursue what he is attracted to, even as homosexuality is an imperfect arrangement, and she certainly deserves better than to devote her time and life to a man who can not return her love.
aiislove
2d ago
I am a gay man and on the one hand I find your concern and thoughtfulness toward your brother charming and thoughtful but on the other hand somewhat patronizing and broadly misunderstanding the situation of homosexuality and why it is painful to be gay. Straight people usually imagine homosexuality as being difficult because of things you pointed out- your brother teases you and society preassigns expectations for your life in heteronormative ways and because, traditionally, heterosexuality is seen as a more standard and common and productive and positive situation compared with homosexuality. And indeed, even most gay men are stuck in this mode of understanding homosexuality vs heterosexuality today. But none of these things are even particularly bothersome and all of them are facile concerns compared with the fundamental impossibility of homosexuality that is incompatible with true fulfillment in a way that heterosexuality is able to provide.
The reason heterosexual relationships are so positive for people is that a man completes a woman and a woman completes a man. Every man compares himself to those around him. He is competitive with other men. When he is with a woman, he compares himself to the woman. When he compares himself to a woman, he sees his masculinity. Hopefully, he is bigger, stronger, taller, more masculine than the woman. He is absolved of the pain of inadequacy felt when comparing himself to any other man. Finally he is more rational, more brave, more logical than the other. A woman too is liberated with a man. She no longer has to compare herself to the dreaded prettier sister or neighbor girl. She's surely smaller, prettier, more petit, softer, more feminine than her man. She is sweeter and lighter and more compassionate. Finally the couple can be secure in their own traits in comparison with one another.
In homosexuality you find no comfort in this way. If your partner is more masculine than you are, is bigger and stronger and braver, you can only see in yourself someone less masculine and less big and strong and brave. If your partner is less masculine than you are, you can see yourself as bigger stronger and braver than him, but it is at the expense of your partner's ego.
In the end I think that homosexuality best operates on a level of respect and mutual understanding. I have three ex boyfriends whom I still respect very much as men and as people and as former lovers, but I know that each relationship was doomed from the start. We can love each other and respect each other for who we are but it takes a level of maturity to understand that the partnership can only ever be so deep.
Anyway, my point is that the real tragedy of homosexuality is not what you think it is. Do not condescend to understand his pain when your view is so facile and your experiences so superficial. No amount of social engineering is ever going to change what happens between men. The left can demand a change to opinion until they turn the world inside out and insist that 2+2=5 but they can't insist their way into fixing homosexuality. And neither can you, in all your good intentions, fix anything for your brother. It's not your load to bear.
aiislove
5d ago
Yup... I don't want to specify my sources but there are a handful of Chinese suppliers (some of them have factories in the US) that do 1 MOQ POD items on a wide range of materials, any of them surely can do cotton terry DTG right now but they all only offer the polyester microfiber. I think it's a cultural difference (Chinese suppliers just want to use the cheapest possible material in any situation, unless their customer wants to foot the bill. My brother works in semi high end food chains and the Chinese won't buy from him because they want the cheapest possible produce, same mentality). Non Chinese suppliers are always more expensive and less efficient to work with and especially the past 2 years Chinese are undercutting the domestic suppliers massively to the point that I've switched anything I can to a Chinese supplier and make like 3x profits in some cases vs american suppliers
aiislove
5d ago
I can't tell you for sure whether I think your small run side gig would be profitable or not without hearing really specific details about it, so I can't really comment for sure. But as it currently stands people still love art from real people. You have to keep in mind that that is a large selling point for a large amount of people. Just because there's a machine that can create what they want doesn't mean some people wouldn't be willing to pay for art made the old fashioned way.
From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd?
Yeah, kinda. Which is why I like to keep the POD drop shipping part of my brain separate from my actual creative endeavor brain :). I do a handful of side gig stuff that I make little money from just for fun currently. Eventually I will switch back to doing something like that full time, but for now I need to make money to last me a few years and if it's at the whims of an algorithm then so be it.
aiislove
5d ago
Sure, this is why Etsy, eBay and depop all collapse the product descriptions when you shop with them. Aliexpress too. Amazon only shows you the first few lines a lot of the time and then you have to click expand. I imagine only a small fraction of buyers take the time to read every item description fully before they purchase. Haven’t you seen listings that say “read desc” or “read description” in the title heading? That’s because everyone who’s ever spent time selling online gets extraneous returns citing a problem that was clearly stated in the item description.
It seems obvious to me that customers can discern the "quality" of an item only from reading the description.
Uhhhh a picture is worth a thousand words, a customer can be deceived into discerning the quality or lack thereof from an accurate or inaccurate description. Have you ever sold something online before? Or bought something? I personally at least skim item descriptions whenever I’m buying something but it’s still a crapshoot much of the time whether their images and descriptions even match the item I receive in the end. I think I am better at this than the majority of people in e-commerce but there’s still room for error and miscommunication and misperception of what is being bought or sold as there is always some margin for misunderstanding as there will be as language and images are fundamentally imprecise and experiences and expectations vary between people.
aiislove
5d ago
I am genuinely oblivious as to how I could possibly more ethically attach any string of letters to anything I produce that wouldn't fit the definition of internet pollution then. I genuinely just make titles and descriptions as short as possible with as many high relevance keywords (which is often like 2 to 4 and no more!) to direct real human people to my listings. How can I do it more ethically than that? I say that only robots probably read this because it's true, everyone in ecommerce knows that customers mostly only look at the picture. If I upload just the picture of my item then no one will find what I'm selling and the robots won't know the product details.
aiislove
5d ago
uhhhhh ok. If it were up to me google would just ignore all marketing copy and google would still work. But google made the choice to take the marketing copy that I used to use zero+1 thought to produce, and now use zero+0 thought to produce, and ruin their product with it. I also don't like that google doesn't work but I don't see that as my fault. The algorithm just needs keywords and phrases to show the people the relevant product. I just make little titles and brands and one or two sentence descriptions to help people find them. I'm not intentionally misleading anyone to find my product in an irrelevant way- that would be bad SEO because it would show up for irrelevant things, people wouldn't click them and they'd get de-ranked.
You asked for my forgiveness but I don't think you have a valid complaint against me or what I do so I won't grant it unless you can prove that I have poor intentions or that it's not google's fault for scraping things in a weird and counterproductive way but that it's actually my fault personally...
aiislove
5d ago
Quality control is difficult because every platform sources from multiple different suppliers/manufacturers. And then there is always liability for errors with the individuals working at the factory that day. Redbubble for example offers like a hundred different products, I have only sampled a tiny fraction of those. On most platforms if the customer is unhappy with the quality they can get a refund or return and I don't have to take care of their returns which is good for me as a designer.
There are certain categories where I can't find any good quality sources at all for, for example towels. No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates. This goes for everything from wash cloth sizes to beach towels.
aiislove
5d ago
I’m writing this post on the behest of @100ProofTollBooth who asked me to explain my industry (e-commerce) and AI’s effect on it. I apologize in advance if this is not interesting or not what you had in mind when asking, but since I’m easily flattered I’m happy to talk about myself for a bit.
So to explain how I got where I am now I need to explain my background. I have a BA in fashion design. I started a fashion line around the time that I graduated college, which was very fun and somewhat successful. I sold some of my designs at boutiques in NYC and Asia which had always been a dream of mine and that was awesome. I maintained the line for about 7 years until 2020, when a variety of factors pushed me to end the line. It was partially covid making things weird and difficult, it was partially my waning interest in the aesthetic I was working in, but most importantly I was itching to travel and leave the US for a while which would be impossible while I was chained down to a studio with a proper line. So I pivoted around 2020 to focusing on my side gigs. I had done a bit of freelance design for a few brands but I really disliked working with other people (even if one of the designers I worked with was a dream designer who I still respect a lot.) My brand I had managed entirely online through a direct to customer model (outside of the wholesale boutiques I mentioned earlier.) So I was familiar with e-commerce through that (as well as having shopped online since 3rd grade as a customer- I still have the same ebay account I opened when I was 11, I’m proud of this.)
Anyway, while I worked on my brand I also dabbled in the Print on Demand industry. The earlier incarnations of this are Zazzle and Cafepress, later perfected by Redbubble and Teepublic and a handful of other platforms. Believe it or not I used to make a lot of money on Redbubble. (More on that later.) But anyway, as I wanted the freedom to travel and fulfill orders while making money away from a studio, I decided to pivot away from my physical brand’s business and move entirely into print on demand. This was a combination of through platforms like Redbubble and traditional marketplaces like ebay, Etsy and amazon.
Today I make over 90% of my yearly earned income from print on demand items that I design myself. Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever. All of these things are not very exciting to me so I am glad I can innovate on design and product offering as a designer rather than having to think about marketing (I hate advertising, I do not pay for ads for my products, I block every ad, I feel like dying when I see an ad irl etc etc)
Hopefully this all makes sense, I am being slightly vague in certain specifics just because it’s a highly competitive industry and I don’t want to be too helpful but I think you can get a broad sense of what I do from the above. Now to respond directly to @100ProofTollBooth’s questions, paraphrased slightly for format reasons:
A) What is my perspective on my industry?
I guess I can answer this from a few different industry perspectives. I will answer about fashion, about Print on Demand, and about e-commerce in general.
I think the fashion industry as a whole is not really terrible. I do think that the industry does drive innovation and prioritize creativity and artistry from people. In certain segments of the industry there is an attempt at conserving craft and tradition that I think is valuable. Being a female dominated industry it does have a tendency to foment woke witch hunts (John Galliano’s firing from Dior is still terrible, I suspect McQueen’s suicide probably had some degree of disillusionment from the politics of fashion for example) but people seem broadly to be over this currently and have some understanding of the cringeness of being that way.
The print on demand industry- as a designer, I value the industry a lot, as it offers me massive flexibility and a huge opportunity to make money without having to put in hardly any investment into inventory or development. I may only make a margin of 25% or less on each individual item I sell but the flexibility it offers is very good. Admittedly my switch from fully designed luxury goods under my own label to basically utilitarian POD items was a bit of a blow to my ego but the advantage of being able to get paid for very little work helps soften the blow.
Ecommerce in general. I think it’s good. It is basically a glorified Sears catalogue mail order service. It isn’t much different today from how that worked back in the 1800s. Amazon’s 2 day shipping is great when it’s available. Aliexpress and temu are really crazy, it reminds me of markets I shopped at in Thailand, where everything is incredibly cheap and abundant, of course giving those sellers access to the US market who are willing to pay American prices for their goods is a huge trade imbalance that benefits both third world middlemen and low and middle income Americans. Many Asia based drop shippers infringe designs that I’ve made and sell them on platforms like walmart.com. It is so ubiquitous that I have stopped looking and issuing takedown requests. I am not a fan and wish they would not do that.
B) AI’s effect on my industry
I suspect AI is changing a lot of things behind the scenes in fashion companies in ways that are not visible in their marketing, product offering or brand messaging. I have noticed a lot of shorts on YouTube are using obviously AI generated market copy which I think is glaring and tacky. I noticed this from brands like Sotheby’s and Balmain who should know better. I know there’s a somewhat trollish brand that is using AI generated imagery in their designs but I can’t remember the brand name (it’s similar to Praying but it isn’t that brand. Praying may use ai generated imagery too but I’m not sure.) Certain brands that are “edgy” can get away with using AI generation, a handful of other brands are getting screeched at by their social media followers for using gen AI, it just depends on the customer’s opinion when it comes to high end brands.
The first casualty of AI in print on demand was Redbubble. They had already been slowly tapering off the payouts and royalties given to artists but as soon as generative AI came out they clamped down hard, introducing a weird tier system. I had like 7 RB accounts at the time and they put 6 of my accounts in the crappy/low royalty tier, and one account in the high royalty tier. The one they put in the higher tier had like 12 rather bad, early gen AI designs, so if they were trying to put all the AI accounts on the lower tier, they failed. Naturally I only uploaded designs to the high tier moving forward, which they then deranked to the low royalty tier a few weeks later. They introduced a terrible system where the higher you price your items, the greater the take that RB takes from you, de-incentivizing artists to come up with designs that people are willing to pay more for. I have not uploaded anything to RB in quite some time as a protest to their system.
I will interject here and say that I do use gen AI for a small portion of my print on demand work. I would probably estimate that only about 10% of my yearly income comes from anything that AI has touched creatively in any way. This is partially because I have thousands of designs I generated before gen AI was even a thing that continue to earn me the bulk of my income, and partially because scaling gen AI is still quite slow and slower than scaling non-AI designs.
AI’s effect on e-commerce. Again I believe most of the innovation is behind the scenes here. I have used gen AI to generate product images on Etsy. These images look really good, in my opinion, but they have not increased my sales at all. In fact many of them are off-putting to people. The ones that do work are ones that look like casual iPhone photos. I can generate beautiful high end imagery of things and the crappy fake iPhone photo will outperform the beautiful one every time. It is just what the customer trusts, is used to, and attracted to. I don’t really relate but it’s not really up to me.
So, generative AI is still proving to be relatively ineffective for design generation, and for marketing purposes. But what I do use it for: brainstorming relevant terms and keywords, writing marketing copy (with good SEO. Users on themotte accused me of generating slop here- no, that’s bad SEO. Good SEO is concise and has a few highly relevant keywords. Bad SEO is a bunch of irrelevant slop. Regardless, these are short sentences that I guarantee hardly any human reads - it is mostly read by bots at this point.) I built an app in Gemini ai studio the other day that will generate good SEO titles and brands and descriptions that output to CSV which saves me time uploading designs. Before I did this by copy pasting formulas in google sheets, this will save me quite a bit of time moving forward.
C) I'd love to understand how you go about designing a new product, testing for demand etc.
It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that. In the beginning I kept thinking it was frustrating because I didn’t have any sales data to draw from- so I could be putting up 50 things that no one wanted and didn’t know it. I look back at those times and realize I was correct, that if I had sales data back then I would have been able to grow much more quickly. But now I have the sales data so I can use it to generate more and more desirable products for people. My sales history/data is the most valuable thing I am generating.
D) What the elements of success in ecomm are and what "pros" do versus what "chumps" do.
Hrmmm. You have to be able to spend a year or a few years making nearly no money from e-commerce. The first year I switched to all POD I only made like $9,000. I lived off money I saved from my earlier business endeavors. But once you have the data and the momentum you can just scale up and be successful in whatever niche you find profitable. Be willing to chase the money, none of the niches I sell in are at all interesting to me. At first this irritated me but I value my customer enough that I don’t really mind anymore. I mean I am grateful that there are people willing to buy the things I’m willing to design and that’s very valuable to me.
I guess the “chumps” and the “influencers” you mentioned earlier just lack the dedication over years to make it work. It’s not a get rich quick scheme (I guess it’s possible if you get lucky but it’s not likely to last over several years.)
I have always been a fan of really tedious games like Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, or even worse, those desktop based games like Farmville or Factorio knockoffs. At some point in college I thought if I found these so addictive I might as well use that time and energy and pour it into something that actually makes money, and nothing is as tedious as managing a ton of POD designs across 15 different platform accounts, so in a way I did just make those tedious games into a career. By the way, at this point, my career is nearly entirely passive, I actively work on stuff for like an hour a week which is mainly ordering POD items manually from various producers. I could automate this but it’s still so little work that I don’t mind doing it myself. The largest bit of work for me is that once a year I generate and upload new designs which takes a few weeks of working every day. I’m afraid of automating this process because it violates terms for a certain site so I just do it manually still.
——
I hope that answered your questions and gave you food for thought. I’m happy to answer follow up questions as well.
In return, you said you know about strippers, bars, hookers, and the nightlife industry. How do you know about those things? Do you work with them or just spend a lot of time with them? I’m gay, you have any insights or experiences or information that I’d be interested in as a fan of, um, gay strippers and gay bars? Also, I never heard the term Hick Hop before you used it. I was imagining it was like mostly a wigger thing but I see some black people involved in this. Where is hick hop geographically centered: The South, the West, Appalachia?
EDIT: I forgot I wanted to add another paragraph at the end that gave a more broad response to the AI question. I answered how AI HAS changed my industry from my perspective above, which basically, it hasn't changed it very much. But moving forward I can see a few huge changes on the horizon. Amazon has already started AI generating tshirt designs and selling them on their website. They aren't very good but neither are a lot of the traditionally designed designs that they sit next to. Amazon has been doing a similar thing for years - competing with their own 3rd party sellers by cutting them out and sourcing from the same suppliers the same items and usually undercutting them in bulk purchases. The fact that they are using AI to compete with designers is not a terribly huge change but is slightly different. You'd expect marketplaces like redbubble and etsy to be overflowing already with AI slop, but it's only encroaching on certain segments. Bad AI slop is unpopular and doesn't sell, good AI slop is good enough that you can't detect it. Glaringly bad AI goods just don't do well in the algorithm. I have seen crazy AI generated products marketed on platforms like temu but they were already pulling ridiculous marketing with photoshop so it's not a huge change there either. I imagine all these changes will continue to ramp up over the next few years and eventually either the algorithm will just hide anything bad and ridiculous or every website will break in a deluge of AI nonsense. I'd bet on the former for now.
I am not worried about AI in the near term, because we're going to be in the stage where early adopters/people who pay attention (like me) can benefit for a little while. I am small and light enough to be able to adapt to the changing landscape. Once large firms get very efficient at using AI in ecom, the situation might change, which is why I diversify my business as much as possible and, failing all that, have always saved a ton of my income and can switch back to a business with a larger moat at any time (I want to have a proper luxury brand some day using my own name, and I don't see AI making this impossible barring some postindustrial all knowing sci fi tier AI which I'm skeptical of coming in the next 5 years at least) or, barring all that, simply retire.
aiislove
9d ago
Ok, I'll write that essay.
Can I ask you why you're asking, btw? So that I can somewhat tailor my response to be relevant to anything specific you want to know. And where should I post the effort post? Here, the culture war thread, somewhere else?
Can you give me some topics you'd say you're knowledgable enough about that I might want to ask you about for your exchange? These could be as broad or specific as needed, just as an idea.
aiislove
9d ago
I appreciate your engagement but I don't see how this answers my question and is also the sort of response I usually get when I ask it. I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer. Why at some point one party doesn't just happen to take an objectively superior or more functional viewpoint, and becomes the dominant political theory that benefits everyone better, and proceeds to rule forever.
aiislove
9d ago
Oh wow, this explanation does make a lot of sense but has some pretty grim implications for politics if true. The hot dog stand metaphor works when they're selling identical or fungible items, with identical signage/operation and so on. But if there is any difference, people will begin to prefer the slightly better one or the one that fits their needs slightly better. But the major thing that always got me the most confused about the resiliency of the two party situation is that political ideas and policies are not completely identical, or even really fungible, so at some point the underlying ideas and policies of the better team should win out. But since we've seen decades of this not the case it leads me to consider that, like @cjet79 implies below, there are fewer differences between the political parties than we're led to believe.
aiislove
9d ago
How is it that America can be so evenly divided between just two political parties organically and this division persists over decades and decades?
I’ve asked this question a ton of different places to different people at different times and usually no one understands what I’m asking and no one’s ever given me a satisfactory answer so let me over explain what I am trying to ask:
I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.) The Pareto principle is always extremely visible in sales results. My top selling item will always outsell the next best selling item, usually by a factor of 2:1 or greater. This also persists over time. Occasionally I come up with a new item that overtakes the previous leader but if it is an evergreen item it will eventually sell so much that it also reaches the 2:1 ratio or better. Basically the most popular item will always win out over time.
I can imagine a business like a coffee shop, where they have like 10 different drinks. The coffee is the most popular item and then matcha and chai are the second and third most popular. The coffee shop could manipulate demand for the chai and matcha seasonally to nudge one more popular than the other. I can imagine being able to change the popularity of secondary tier items that way, but that’s a product of seller manipulation rather than organic customer demand.
Anyway the way party politics work seems like it would be even more difficult to nudge people from one party to the other. And parties are not just two different flavor drinks, they represent actual underlying philosophical choices and plans/theories of actions. How is it that the Pareto principle doesn’t take over and suddenly the majority of Americans agree that one of the parties is correct and now like 70 percent of Americans in all areas only vote for that party and the 30 percent that’s left only vote for the other one and the 70 percent are just left to rule forever? Aren’t there other democracies where things operate in this manner?
I am not insinuating manipulation or conspiracy but my mental model can imagine the even split over decades of a two party system upheld through manipulation but I can’t conceive of it as an organic process. If anyone can explain I’d love to hear it
aiislove
9d ago
Yeah I made a post about him a few weeks ago he isn’t too popular on themotte
https://www.themotte.org/post/3413/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/393199?context=8#context
aiislove
1mo ago
In my specific case I already have to manually check each line at a certain point in my workflow so I just eyeball it as I go and there are very rarely things I have to remove. It definitely is more fast because having to brainstorm relevant keywords for every thing definitely takes more time than having the LLM generate them in an instant.
aiislove
2mo ago
I hate the 80s. I could make an entire effort post about this but I think the most terrible force that came out of the 80s was classism. The yuppie resulted in decades of insufferable arrogance and culminated in luxury beliefs that ripped apart the cohesion of American society. The 70s and prior decades showed a respect for rural and non-fashionable people that was completely thrown out in the 80s, at the exact moment that women fried their hair and wore the trashiest clothing of the century. The 80s invented the idea that Americans don't have to respect poor people, which I guess we can either pin on Reaganism or liberal yuppies, but the Michelle Obama-Hillary Clinton-notorious RBG people really, really liked it and took it to excruciating heights in the 2010s.
aiislove
3mo ago
Yeah, I find that opinion gross and evil and degrading to the average person to the extent that I don't understand where it comes from. The people they're imagining will do poorly without a job are frankly mostly already living without a job, and have done badly in school, which was difficult for them to begin with. Anyone who is doing fine with a job already will do fine without a job too.
aiislove
3mo ago
I would recommend going to google's gemini, explaining what you want changed, and paste in the entire column of dates that you want to be changed. Ask for it to give you the results in a spreadsheet format. If it doesn't do the spreadsheet format right just ask for it in plain text with everything on a new row to copy paste. How many lines of data do you need to clean up? The more data you feed it the more chance for error. I would start with a smaller number (maybe 500 or less) to begin with, you may have to feed it a few times if you have like 10,000 rows or whatever.
You'd think it would be better to upload the spreadsheet and ask it to edit the spreadsheet how you want but in my experience the more extraneous data you feed it the more likely it is to mess up. Just doing it in the chat box window keeps it simple enough that it won't usually skip rows or get confused. You may have to explain the "very non-standard date formatting" in the worst case but it can probably figure it out on its own.
aiislove
3mo ago
Yes it's a bit disjointed and sloppy but I still can glean some interesting insights from it. His concepts aren't completely disjointed but a bit meandering imo.
mentioned a few times (including here iirc)
I did a search for his name as well as "Predictive History" and there were no hits, I lurk extensively here and never saw him mentioned at the motte
aiislove
3mo ago
Recently my YouTube algorithm has been taken over by videos featuring Professor Jiang Xueqin. His own channel is called Predictive History but I’ve also watched him talk on other channels. I find his work and theories very interesting, he is a creative person with very heterodox views on the present and world history. He reminds me a lot of Rudyard Lynch (the Whatifhalthist guy) in that they both have creative approaches to history and the present day. I suspect Xueqin is familiar with Lynch’s channel as they are so similar and both reference Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, the rat/mouse utopia experiments of John B. Calhoun, and have similar views of modernity and modern society.
Xueqin recently ended a 28 part series on his youtube channel titled “Secret History” which is a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing) which culminates in his theory which he calls Pax Judaica. He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.) It’s a complicated theory (that series alone is over 30 hours) but he paints a pretty compelling picture by the end. I am not personally very interested in Jews or Christians but the thought that millennia old religions can sway geopolitics to this degree today irritates me as someone who is basically philosophically an atheist and doesn’t want to be involved in wars of religion in the 2020s or the rest of my life for that matter.
He is not entirely antisemitic, as he also claims that much of the zionist project will face opposition from the Jewish people as well.
He predicts the imminent collapse of the American empire followed by the rise of Pax Judiaca, reinforced by Israeli invented general AI which will be backed by a global surveillance system based in Israel.
I can’t quite place him on the right-left spectrum. My instincts tell me that he is very aware of right wing thinking. There is a video I saw of him where he claims to be “a pretty liberal guy” though I don’t know if he means he’s a “classical liberal” or is making this claim to appeal to left leaning people or if he earnestly believes he is a leftist. I listen to so few people on the left at this point that I suspect he is not really a leftist but it’s possible that the sort of center left has so quickly found itself incorrect in so many ways that it’s sliding into the space of theoretical uncertainty that as recently as a few years ago only the right was willing to explore. Regardless of his own view of his work I think it is unique enough to stand on its own and be examined and taken seriously from either perspective.
At the same time his ideas and views tick every single “conspiracy theorist” trope that we’re trained to identify, to the degree that I’m surprised he’s being pushed by an algorithm as mainstream as YouTube to me. I don’t think his work is so esoteric that he is just eliding censorship, as he has taught high schoolers and I think the language and theories he presents are digestible enough that high schoolers could understand it. It makes me question the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.
If I had to criticize his work I’d say his dismissal of various things is a bit short sighted. He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution, something that I find extremely illuminating and one of the few broad scientific theories that reveal and explain rather than obfuscate human nature as well as the broader natural world. That he dismisses it so casually is very revealing to me and points to some discomfort within him with the implications rather than a scientifically reasoned rejection of the theory. He dismisses other things similarly and seemingly randomly, like Freud’s Oedipal complex, while embracing any vague illuminati theory seemingly without evidence, specifics, or rigor.
Anyway, I’m curious to know if anyone else here has engaged with his videos or work, if they have any response to his Pax Judaica concept, or had any other broader response to creative/unorthodox theorists breaking through to normie spaces via algorithm or an apparent lack of censorship that is often framed as ubiquitous.
aiislove
3mo ago
Maybe tangential (and I apologize if this is not a direct response to you and may be more relevant a response to 2rafa's similar post below) but I think the largest innovation of LLM's that no one seems to really grasp or state explicitly is the speed of response of these models. It is not just that they can do some of your work, it is that they can do some of your work in seconds. I am self employed and work in ecommerce, and thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds. This work would have taken hours and hours of time to do it in the past, which does not mean I used to spend hours and hours doing it, it meant that I would come up with a solution that was much faster but much less effective than what I can do now. As a one-man show my work is significantly easier and faster than it was before LLM's. I am reaping the rewards of it every day. I am someone who has only worked one internship and spent about a year doing freelance work in my life, otherwise I have always been self employed. I feel so little empathy toward people whose entire careers have been working for someone else and who suddenly feel betrayed by their employers or afraid of being fired. You relied on others your entire life, and along comes the single greatest invention for self empowerment in centuries and instead of empowering yourself, utilizing the new powers of instant text generation trained on the knowledge of everyone ever, you worry about being replaced. Well, if you lack the self direction and discipline to harness new technologies then I just can't relate.
Similarly I don't understand the concern about people "not having anything to do" if they are on UBI. I work, actively, at a computer for about an hour a week, on average, and earn all of my money passively through that. I have never been bored and find plenty of meaning in my life. I have great faith that everyone else can - and frankly, should - live life in a similar way that I do. I spend much of my time traveling and thinking about philosophy and creating/designing when I am in the mood. I devote a huge amount of my time and energy to food and sex and relationships, but so do people who work full time jobs. I have never really accepted or bought into the mainstream modernist mode of work/life balance, see it as an abuse of power that I wouldn't accept for myself, and don't understand people who do- or these same people who fear its end.
That's because it is tragic and depressing and makes homosexuals look bad. No one straight or gay has ever expressed the issue I lay out explicitly to me, but damn if I don't notice it, over and over and over, in all of my relationships and all of the relationships of gay men I have known in the past and the present. self_made questions the generalizability of what I describe but in my experience it's universal. I wouldn't advise asking your gay friends about it either, really, it is better left unspoken, though it is sad that it's such a dead end situation that I've come to the conclusion that you just have to work it out on your own and accept it for how it is.
I don't know. Please expand this? It seems like the qualities men and women compete at are almost always completely different fields. A woman may be powerful and strong and brave at social relationships and keeping a house and other traditionally feminine domains but it's emasculating and weird if she's powerful and strong and brave - compared to you, a man - at traditionally masculine domains. Women may not "brag about being cowards" but if she's the one stalking around with a shotgun at the sound of an intruder at midnight while you cower under some blankets it's a weird dynamic at best if not utterly embarrassing for both of you.
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