Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
So… you think Chinese parents would all be fine with trans books for 8 year olds?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Philosophy is “because I said so”.
Religion is “because my God said so”.
Rightly or wrongly, more weight has historically been accorded to the latter.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
I don't think that suggesting that the SCOTUS should have the power to summarily execute people (because that's what his suggestion amounts to) counts as being "mellow and less of a firebrand".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
the Trump administration seems to be refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring back a specific deported immigrant.
The administration was ordered to “facilitate” his return. That’s different.
It’s unclear why SCOTUS should be able to order the president to take a citizen of El Salvador, who is currently residing in El Salvador, and bring him to the US. What if El Salvador just doesn’t want to give him up? Given these facts, it’s reasonable to read “facilitate” as “facilitate only to the extent possible”.
Even SCOTUS has limits on their powers. I don’t think we should expect them to be able to order the president to bomb another country, for example. Their power diminishes rapidly outside of US borders.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
Season 2 was funny in a so-bad-it’s-good way. I watched it with a friend and we had a great time memeing on it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
Saya is only a few hours long, so it’s a low risk investment!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
You wrote this as a pretext for asking Dean to finally explain what his ideology is, didn’t you?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Are you familiar with any of Gen Urobuchi’s other works? I thought Psycho-Pass was a competent enough sci-fi thriller, although I found it to be inferior to Urobuchi’s best works (thinking specifically of Madoka Magica and The Song of Saya). So you might enjoy checking those out.
At least Psycho-Pass had some fucking sick opening songs.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
We feel like all the promises of a secular, expert run society we were promised in the 90's just opened up fresh new horrors we could have scarcely imagined, and are ready to try to retvrn and believe in Christ.
Although I'm sympathetic to your thinking and I don't wish to discourage you, it should be pointed out that the age of Christendom had no shortage of horrors.
In fact, as a striking example of how Nothing Ever Changes, people have been calling for a retvrn to counteract cultural degeneracy since at least the 1100s, as documented by Sigebert of Gembloux:
"Whatever their sex, rank or fortune, whatever their religious connections, who can ignore this dreadful turmoil? What else are women everywhere talking about at their spinning-wheels, and craftsmen in their workshops, but the confusion of all human laws, the overthrow of Christian standards, sudden unrest among the people, crazed assaults on ecclesiastical decorum, servants plotting against their masters and masters mistrusting their servants, betrayals among comrades, treacherous plots against the powers ordained by God, friendships broken and faith neglected, malicious and perverse doctrine contrary to the Christian religion brought in by official license– and worst of all, all these monstrosities allowed by the permission, supported by the consent, endorsed by the authority, of those who are called the leaders of Christendom."
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
Thoughts on o3?
Initial reviews from what I can tell seem very mixed, with some people claiming that it’s a step down from previous models.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7d ago
I assumed he was part of the same circle as Robin Hanson (they both teach at GMU) and people familiar with one would have heard of the other but I could be wrong.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7d ago
Europe, too, is not without a history of armed conflict (religious and otherwise). So that doesn’t tell us much.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7d ago
Tyler Cowen on the future of China and AI:
…for all the differences across the models, they are remarkably similar. That’s because they all have souls rooted in the ideals of Western civilization. They reflect Western notions of rationality, discourse, and objectivity—even if they sometimes fall short in achieving those ends. Their understanding of “what counts as winning an argument” or “what counts as a tough question to answer” stems from the long Western traditions, starting with ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian heritage. They will put on a Buddhist persona if you request that, but that, too, is a Western approach to thinking about religion and ideology as an item on a menu.
These universal properties of the models are no accident, as they are primarily trained on Western outputs, whether from the internet or from the books they have digested. Furthermore, the leading models are created by Bay Area labor and rooted in American corporate practices, even if the workers come from around the world. They are expected to do things the American way.
The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come. (That probably means the rest of the world will end up a bit more “woke” as well, for better or worse.)
One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years, and hardly anyone has noticed.
You might think the Chinese AI models are fundamentally different, but they are not. They too “think like Westerners.” That’s no surprise because it is highly likely that the top Chinese model, DeepSeek, was distilled from OpenAI models and also is based on data largely taken from Western sources. DeepSeek’s incredible innovation was to make the model much cheaper in terms of required compute, but the Chinese did not build their own model from scratch. And DeepSeek has the same basic broad ideological orientation as the American models, again putting aside issues related to Chinese politics. Unless an issue is framed in explicitly anti–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) terms, as a Taiwan query might be, it still thinks like an American.
First: Cowen's argument here is a bit silly. China has over a billion people. If Chinese researchers wanted to train their own line of models from the ground up solely on the written output of Chinese citizens, thus purging their models of "Western" influence, this could almost certainly be arranged. Just because their current models are distilled from the outputs of Western models doesn't mean that this will always be the case in perpetuity.
Second: What exactly would it mean for an AI to have a "Western" soul, as opposed to a "Chinese" soul? The question is not meaningless, although Cowen's account of the Western soul leaves something to be desired. Westerners do not have a monopoly on "rationality"; even animals, non-human animals, are rational. When the animal is hungry it eats, when it's tired it sleeps, when it's attacked it defends itself. What could be more reasonable than that?
The most distinctive feature of the European mind is not its rationality or objectivity, but its ornery disagreeableness; its inability to be one with itself. Did you think it was a coincidence that both Socrates and Jesus* were sent to the gallows? Confucius and the Buddha were never crucified; Muhammad was revered in his lifetime as a great conqueror of many lands. But the Western sages, the archetypes of the Western soul, were given only death for their troubles; the Western sage is misfit and master rolled into one, hero and scoundrel, insider and outsider (and, going even further, God as an infinite divine being and God as a man who dies a criminal's death); a contradiction that is seemingly in no way "rational". This is why romanticism, Marxism, postmodernism, and in general all "revolts against reason" are not external enemies that threaten the Western tradition from without, but are instead immanent necessities of the Western tradition itself.
Doomers, safetyists, and luddites of all stripes should certainly hope that the machine god of the future is thoroughly "Western" in its fundamentals; for a Western god is a flawed god, a vulnerable god, an all-too-human god; and it is precisely this vulnerability that is the wellspring of the hope for change and renewal.
(*Strictly speaking, Christianity is non-Western in its origins, but it could not have achieved the status it did in European society if it did not possess a certain fundamental comportment with European sensibility. In some ways it is even more "Western" than the varieties of homegrown Western paganism, because it was only through Christianity that the West became itself.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8d ago
These stories are worthless without including the base rate of these types of incidents under previous administrations.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8d ago
People should be allowed to walk through walls, because more freedom is better than less freedom.
But, alas.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
Gamergate continues to be the Franz Ferdinand of Internet history.
Yeah. I first discovered /r/shitredditsays around 2012, which was my first exposure to wokes as we know them today (there were precursors before then, but they didn’t quite have the final form they would come to have). But at that time you could still believe the “it’s just a few crazy college kids” meme. Gamergate in 2014 was when wokeism suddenly hit the mainstream and they showed that they had substantial cultural power (ok, maybe not mainstream mainstream, but at least mainstream in the sense that their influence was extending beyond their own curated spaces).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
It was probably a mistake applying them to everyone (including our allies) at once. But the two overarching policy goals (reindustrializing the US and isolating China) are good. And neither are likely to happen without a major kick in the ass to force people to move in that direction. So I'm hesitant to just flat out call the tariffs a mistake.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
It's a really big site. YMMV depending on what boards and threads you go to. As of Monday I had multiple threads across 4 different boards that I would check on a daily basis, and quite a few other boards I would check in on at least once a week.
After all this time it's remained my single favorite place on the internet and I'll be incredibly sad if it doesn't come back.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
in general the site seems to have been in serious decline for years now
Kind of sad to see people keep repeating this.
For many hobbies and interests, 4chan is THE biggest public (i.e. not a discord) forum on the internet. Bigger and more active than whatever the corresponding subreddit is. For a lot of more niche video games, the most active community is the corresponding /vg/ thread. /ic/ is the biggest art/drawing forum on the internet. etc.
Didn't they get rid of the "unique ips" counter in threads because it showed there were usually only a few people posting?
Depends on the thread and how active the board is, but for a lot of long-running generals it wasn't uncommon to see 80-90 unique IPs.
Previous times there's been a 4chan issue people flooded into refugee/bunker boards, but either I'm out of touch with the altchan scene or there just aren't enough people to notice now.
A lot of communities are setting up at 8chan.moe.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
12d ago
Can anyone steelman why corporate taxes are good but tariffs are bad?
I still see people even as of the last couple of days advocating for higher corporate taxes.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
If nothing else, it’s fascinating to watch just how impregnable the neoliberal world order really is.
”It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15d ago
I consider Israel’s survival unlikely in the medium term
Can you elaborate on why?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15d ago
This is gonna sound like dumb self-help book advice, but I mean it entirely in earnest:
You can't stop it from bothering you. Comments and insults like that carry a certain amount of pain that is unavoidable. You don't actually have that much control over how you react to stimuli on a fundamental level; it would be like asking how you can make it not hurt when a needle stabs you. And no, this isn't a "you can't change how you feel but you can change your reaction to it" either, because that's actually still just trying to cheat yourself out of the original problem; the hope for some people is that if you "change your reaction" enough it'll stop hurting. But there's actually no way out. It'll just always hurt and that's it.
What you can do is change your beliefs about the situation, and stop viewing the pain as a bad thing or as something to be overcome. Because right now you're giving yourself two problems: there's the original pain, and the meta-belief that you're doing something wrong because you haven't found a way to overcome the pain yet. You can ditch the meta-belief and get rid of that problem, leaving you with only the one original problem, which is an improvement.
So the next time someone insults you, you'll still feel bothered. But at least you won't have to make it any worse than it already is.
WE'RE BACK, BABY!
More options
Context Copy link