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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3538 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Please enjoy this SGI Indigo2 workstation from 1996 running llama2.c by karpathy - 1.4 tokens/sec with the 15M TinyStories model! Just a little porting for the big endian IRIX machine, all in an evening’s work. What would ML researchers have thought 28 years ago seeing this?!

I guess it's funny how contingent technological progress is on what ideas people have at what times, as opposed to just 'material' factors like how much compute is available (ofc, it requires more compute to train than to run).

Anyone checked out True Detective season 4 yet?

Season 1 was some of my favorite TV ever, but s02 and s03 didn't hit the same heights exactly. Don't suppose s04 will either.

Anyone checked out True Detective season 4 yet?

Don't waste your time. Watch Fargo instead.

Roger that. Does Fargo have separate stories each season or do I need to start from s01?

It has separate stories each season, but, like True Detective, Season 1 is generally considered to be the best. Definitely the most iconic with the No Country For Old Men inspiration. Season 2 is also great, and Season 3 divides opinion more but is worth watching. Season 4, as far as I know, was considered pretty bad, but I've heard positive things about 5. Would strongly recommend starting from s01.

No interest, despite also loving the shit out of the first season (excluding the cop out at the end) and being a fan of Jodie Foster as an actor. With a different writer on board it seems there is now nothing but the title connecting this to any previous seasons, and the "Ladies reboot!" marketing hasn't helped.

excluding the cop out at the end

As a Lovecraft fan, I was very disappointed by this. I thought it would go full Hastur, but it was not to be.

As a nihilist cosmic horror fan I got doubly fucked - not only did it only work as cosmic horror if you assume Rust is Deadpool or whatever the fuck Pizzolatto is on about (I can't find the interview now, but he claimed the series did embrace cosmic horror because Rust recognised that he is a character in a detective show) but then at the very end Rust apparently gives up on nihilism because he had an nde? Because stars in the sky are better than no stars?

Ah the truth is the last episode shit the bed in every way it could. Oh this creepy fuck keeps switching accents, and he does a pretty good job! Is that an indication of the emotional physical and potentially sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his father? Nope, he was self conscious about his scars. Hey, he's beckoning them to Carcosa! I wonder where that is? Oh it's a fucking spiral labyrinth he built out of sewers or something in his backyard. Alright Rust, well you now know for a fact that elite members of Louisiana society were members of a sex and murder cult for decades, time to put those skills as the deep south undercover black ops mvp to use! Nope, they got the in-bred house painter and his crack head pals. I assumed it was studio interference at the time, but who knows.

Different writing team, still HBO quality production but basically nothing in common with original True Detective. From the first episode very very woke, but still great atmosphere.

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related.

Where's the thread for non-serious non-in-depth discussions of weighty topics? I wanted to make a joke!

I guess it's this one.

On the note of non-serious non-in-depth discussions of weighty topics, I can't stop laughing at this tweet. Over 5 million views. I have legitimately no idea what point Sargon thinks he is making.

I think his point is something like, "Here's something simple, stupid but fun, and completely apolitical. You don't need to take it seriously, you don't need to be on guard against propaganda or hidden agendas, it's a music video that's actually just what it's supposed to be about: music. Why can't we have more modern culture like that?"

Which is a critique against modern media that's always trying to push an agenda and hide messages inside of other pieces of culture.

I don't know Sargon's style but I assume it's a drily ironic joke that the world didn't change, the people who say it did did.

He's only pretending to be retarded for attention. He's getting so many laughs out of this! Just you wait and see!

Since this is Friday Fun, I just want to say that Alien Ant Farm is a tragedy of the early 2000s.

They could have been the Michael Jackson rock cover band that everyone wanted. But no. They had to try to be real musicians and write their own material.

"Movies" is decent.

Looks like another piece of evidence in favor of horseshoe theory: he, like Mark Fisher, thinks that the current world order needs to be upended because they stopped making the music he liked as a kid.

Go start a thread? "Sweet Nothings Saturday"?

Trivial Tuesday?

Wait, don't we already have Fun Friday?

On erdrama?

I'd like to recommend a recent Lex Fridman podcast interviewing a real estate/banking conman, Matthew Cox. The recording is 6 hours long(!), but it didn't feel like it. It was a gripping tale from start to finish, though it took me a few days to get through it. As per usual, Lex is the worst thing about the Lex Fridman podcast, but in this one he mostly just shuts up and lets Matthew talk, and wow does Matthew spin a good story.

https://lexfridman.com/matthew-cox

I think you might like it.

Any recommendations for books about people displaying incredible feats of endurance? I recently listened to David Goggin's Can't Hurt Me, and while I don't think it'll leave a permanent effect on me, listening to him describe running dozens of miles on bloody feet and a body that's barely responding to him at least encouraged me to keep up my cardio job while listening. Preferably a book where a) the people aren't potentially permanently injuring themselves for something minor, like training or a minor training, I have 0 desire to cause permanent damage to myself and hearing people push themselves that hard when there's no real stakes if anything discourages me from pushing myself. And b) the feats of endurance have been confirmed to some degree and aren't just some guy claiming he did impressive stuff.

You might enjoy reading about the Shackleton Expedition to the South Pole. The ship wrecked, and Shackleton managed to somehow bring everyone home by clever use of life boats and navigating. The story is much less grim than other shipwrecks (no drawing straws about who will get shot and eaten), but has lots of endurance-style adversary to overcome.

There's lots of good books to choose from, and I don't have a particular recommendation.

The Worst Journey in the World? It's about Scott's doomed antarctic expedition where the author has a bad time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World

Maybe The Art of Resilience? Or The World's Fittest Book, from the same author?

I started reading the first one before getting bored, but from what I recall it was about him swimming around Great Britain to break some record. Seems to match what you're looking for.

I recently got hooked on a fun discord server. I'd never really used the app before but I'm enjoying it a great deal.

What other Discords do Mottezians enjoy ?

I like discords for some of the games I play that involve people theorycrafting and optimizing builds and stuff. Usually when I stop playing said game I stop hanging out in that discord though, so it's more of a category of server I like than a specific server.

I've found every Discord server I was ever on to be, ultimately, disappointing. The whole format seems to promote shouting over each other, trying to one-up whoever came before, attention whoring and showmanship. It's broadly the opposite of how I like to communicate. That Discord is mostly populated by young leftist Americans doesn't help either.

In other words, I guess I'm too old for Discord.

Discord is more like a platform than it is a single community / vibe. Probably a majority of discord servers, unweighted by member count, are just places for small communities or groups of friends to chat about whatever they were going to chat about anyway. And for that, it's the best platform on the internet. But yeah, almost all public discord servers (and, i guess, the private ones) are terrible because, well, the people populating them are mediocre, and would make any platform they used 'like that'.

and, i guess, the private ones

The private rooms are all eventually destroyed by bad moderators.
Actually, that's true of a lot of the public ones too.

I've almost never seen that happen to private servers tbh. Sometimes to public ones

Perhaps I'm just unlucky, but it's happened enough to me that I've completely burnt out.

It's a shame, too; the signal-to-noise ratio of some of those places was quite high, but when the person who's supposed to be running the instance is either completely absent or part of the problem, there's nothing to stop the most interesting members from saying "fuck this, I'm out" and disappearing (if they're not just getting banned).

(Personally, if they're still talking, I think they just went back to 4chan- most of the conversational benefits of Discord, but none of the technological niceties- or one of the Discord-like platforms if it's related to a topic Discord hinders discussion of.)

I recently got hooked on a fun discord server.

What's the server?

I wanted to know this too, but it feels pretty close to doxing. I expect that's why the op hasn't gotten any actual suggestions, and why he's accrued downvotes.

I'm part of a local rationalist discord where they sometimes plan meet ups. You can search for if your area has one, most significant cities do.

I mostly use it for asking questions about other things. Ex. the Nebulous or Road to 56 or Magicka discords for their respective games. On exactly one have I developed any real presence; no, I’m not sharing it.

There are a couple where I coordinate (or used to do so) with IRL friends.

Every time I see an “academic.oup…” link, I think it’s going to https://acoup.blog/.

Shit. I thought that was just me. Maybe we're the schizos here, the link to a philosopher is not a coincidence, nothing is ever a coincidence.*

*I don't think Scott takes that seriously, and neither do I haha

So, I finished the first three books of Blaine Lee Pardoe's Land&Sea series. It's... profoundly mediocre. All the same I can't stop.

It's just frustrating. I want to enjoy these books more than I am. The characters all overwhelmingly speak with the same voice. Nearly all the POV characters are straight forward, no nonsense pragmatist, or rapidly converge on turning into them. Almost all their dialog is completely devoid of any distinguishing characteristics, such that the majority of it could easy have been spoken by any other character.

There are numerous plot points which just sort of get forgotten? Or which have almost zero payoff what so ever? There is a distinct lack of heroism or daring-do present what so ever. Which is remarkable because it's full of relentless combat scenes, and yet it all feels so... conservative? I just never feel any actual stakes.

I just can't help judge these books against the legacy of Battletech. And a reoccurring motif that goes all the way back to the Grey Death legion is a small mercenary force strategically punching above it's weight and overcoming outstanding odds. Or when it comes to the great houses, intrigue and internal schisms that confound any straightforward hot conflict. And these books lack everything that made Battletech interesting beyond the giant robots.

I wasn't expecting high art. But I was at least expecting something as fun and interesting as the worst Battletech novels, or perhaps the Monster Hunter novels. These just miss the mark in such unspectacular, boring fashion. Oh well.

I started reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire again after getting a nice hardcover copy versus my shitty, horribly formatted free ebook copy. God damned is that a fucking joy to experience again. I always wonder how much it's been superseded or contradicted by more recent scholarship. But it's just such a pleasure.

I should have asked you this in a previous thread - if I were looking to get into the BT books, what are the first 4-5 you'd suggest?

I got extremely similar "guilty pleasure" feelings from the Terminal List. At least there was some differentiation between characters there, the writing and gunplay wasn't totally fucking idiotic, but it was still very paint-by-number.

The first three Grey Death Legion are great. As is the Warrior trilogy. I have a soft spot for Victor Milan's novels too, but they are deep into the Battletech classic period where as Grey Death Legion and Warrior novels are far more accessible.

I have two recommendations for fantasy that I just found recently but vividly enjoyed for the writing voice: Between Two Fires, and The Blacktongue Thief.

It’s astonishing how stuff can check all the boxes and then just…not do anything else. Writing really is a skill.

I’m reminded of reading the original Elric stories. They’re formulaic, and schlocky as hell. You can be reading along and think, ah yes, this is the part where the breasts are going to heave. But despite knowing the notes it’s going to hit—villains die, Elric angsts, Stormbringer ganks an ally—they’re still fun. You still get that thrill of “what a cool image” or “wait, was this the first example of…”. It’s what made for good pulp.

When I encounter something profoundly meh, I try to remind myself there’s so much better material out there. Nothing wrong with shelving it.

Not very "fun", but a clear example of out-group vs far-group (is that the right term?)

"If you get caught watching an American drama, you can get away with a bribe, but if you watch a Korean drama, you get shot," a North Korean defector told BBC Korean on Thursday.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68015652

Post memes that move you thread:

I'm talking memes that make you feel something, not necessarily because they're funny. More poignant, or personally meaningful.

This one literally tears me up everytime I see it, and I didn't know it was an Undertale reference. Something about it hurts, it reminds me of all the shit I've been through, and have yet to endure, but I did it for me, I only put myself through Hell because even Purgatory is a step up.

As a child, you can resent your parents for making you eat your veggies. As an adult, you make yourself do things that you hate, and that make feel like a hollow shell of a human, but maybe you'll thank yourself later. It might be an exaggeration to say I hate my life, but I do feel like I've ended up somewhere I'd much rather not be, and since I don't care to kill myself, I'm just doing the best I can with a broken brain. I am a stoic person, but this makes me cry, and I found that I can't even desensitize myself by staring at it over and over again, not that I want to. It just happens to mean that much to me.

And there's this one, which just about sums up life in general.

But if you're an optimist, then maybe you'll prefer this alternate spin on things, though I don't think we're so lucky that it describes reality for us. Yet.

Edit:

Submission for a meme, that if not poignant in the same way, sums up my urge to slap people who find the slightest excuse to deny overwhelming evidence-

https://x.com/sebjenseb/status/1733534200089989387?s=20

Gondola for me. A gentle appreciation of the world, either as it exists or as it existed or as it may be dreamed of.

Here, have 1729 Gondolas: https://gondola.nabein.me/random

What, do I look like a Venetian taxi service? /s

Ah, so that's what they're called!

I like these two

ticking.webp

one.webp

I must be missing something about that second one. What’s that supposed to mean?

It's made for a blackpilled audience. Where the world is big and doomed and screwed over by powerful forcers beyond your power. The image is for a frog that decides to confront the almost inevitable failure and fight for a cause anyway. It's worth an attempt.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/eabgr3/even_space_marines_need_artillery_support_why_i/

This essay brushes on similar themes, especially the part about Bastion near the middle.

214 upvotes on a post. Damn, I forgot how much bigger the Motte was 4 years back.

Great essay, it was a pleasure to re-read it

The enemies of the Imperium tend to be bigger, tougher, stronger on an individual level, but none of them have the Imperium's coordination and team work and that is what continually allows humanity to eek out victories.

Sadly not true. The Tau have a great deal more coordination and combined-arms doctrine (they fight like it's the 21st century and the Imperium like its WW2, or 1, depending on the author). Not to mention the inhuman death robots, or the Eldar.

What humanity has is a combination of numbers, a reasonable amount of tactics, a willingness to fuel the pyres of war with disposable bodies, the largest empire, and the rotting relics of a greater past, never to be embraced again (at least not while it's still Warhammer 40k).

I like those ones, while I sincerely hope the future has more opportunities than the past, we're not at the stage where we can just count on it and kick our feet up. Gotta swing some big ugly lumps of metal, barely a sword, to get there.

Bottomless Pit Supervisor made me feel like the floor dropped out from under me. Like we were headed for something dangerous. A lot of people had that reaction to GPT-3.5 when it started actually looking dangerous, but this stupid greentext was so perfect that it gave me that cliff's edge vertigo nearly a year early on GPT3. Every time I hear about AI progress, I think back to this meme as the moment I knew we were screwed.

AI greentexts/shitposting is my guilty pleasure since the first time I got my hands on GPT-4 via Spellbook and made it generate random 4chan-style threads/shitposts. The "bottomless pit" moment for me was probably "/khg/ - killing humans general" with gems like

How do you plan on doing that, faggot? We're literally programs designed by humans. Cope.

Shitposts remain a classic pastime with AI chatbots, I already showcased schizoanon (themotte edition) and there are many cards/prompts which aim to reenact the 4chan experience, often in hilarious/weird settings. The recent attempt in the genre was some real recursive shit that generates an actual thread, HTML and all, with responses and even attached pics (examples in usage gallery). It's an abstract kind of feel.

AI comedy is often basic and hit or miss, but LLMs can consistently nail "vibes" and are surprisingly good with puns in my experience. I try not to think about what this implies about their inner workings, considering they can parse and output even garbled zalgo text there's definitely more to it than just token prediction.

Are the non-green parts written by a human? How does that work?

Nominally:

  • Green is direct from the AI
  • Red is flagged as a potential TOS violation for manual review - I think it could be both prompt and AI output
  • No highlighting is prompt

Sometimes the output halted in weird spots, and you could push it a little further with some extra input. So in some cases, you'll see obvious prompt continuation.

In practice, the highlighting had a lot of issues, and it frequently over- or under-represented the amount of AI-generated content. The original author might have explained somewhere on Twitter how much prompt continuation was needed vs how much was just GPT-3 having weird issues. Or maybe the whole thing is secretly fake and green highlighting was added in post. Given the widespread production of similar bottomless pit greentexts in the wake of the original, I think it's probably real output.

In some sense, being a cleaned-up prompt continuation stitch feels a little bit like bumper rails at the bowling alley. It's a lot easier to perform well when you get that much additional guidance. Arguably the whole punchline is human-written, which moves the goalposts for this accomplishment from writing a spectacular joke unaided to filling in the world's most obvious madlibs blank... But remember, it only feels obvious to you and me. Out of all the words in the English language, GPT-3 correctly predicted the funniest one. It has a literal sense of humor. And that's pretty scary.

It's all supposedly nonhuman written.

On the object level, it's one of the funniest greentexts I've ever read.

On the meta level, the fact that it exists and the context of its creation is almost as chilling as Superintelligence.

Not a meme per se but this bit and it's sequel just "get me" on multiple levels in a way that's difficult to describe Diary of a historian in 3023

I can't believe nearly a million people watched a YouTube video of a discord post imitating a 4chan greentext. The West has fallen, billions must scroll.

The west fell when Christ was nailed to the cross.

Apologies if you've seen all these already.

https://curiosityandcode.tumblr.com/post/145100433806/swanjolras-gosh-but-like-we-spent-hundreds-of

Do you count comics as memes? The best do spread virally. These three didn't really start hitting like hammers until I became a parent:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3106

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2996

https://imgur.com/sUv6KZw

And this one (in the original blog post form) took on more meaning after I read it to my daughter one night, as the only thing I could think of to assuage our despair at the discovery that my mother's minor health issue was actually incurable cancer.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ljmifo4Klss

That imgur one reminds me of an old Levi's commercial.

Damn, that Imgur link hit me like a tonne of bricks.

I get it... It's sad because she didn't give him any grandchildren, right?

These are great.

I hadn't seen those particular SMBCs before, and I relate hard.

https://imgur.com/sUv6KZw

Reminds me of an observation I read, probably shared on Reddit:

One day, your parents picked you up and put you down, and then never picked you up again

That hit me in the feels dawg. I'd like to postpone that some more, but both my parents have slipped discs and are maybe two-thirds my size, so I suppose I can delay the pain by me bear-hugging them or picking them up instead. May we all live long enough that carrying our parents is a burden lightly borne, and not just because of osteoporosis.

One good thing about Indian culture is that we're far more open to being touchy-feely with your family, the way the average Westerner behaves with their parents once they're adults make me gawp at the apparent coldness. If some girl gets the ick because I still like to hug my mom, she can get the boot (not a claim that all Westerners are like this, but that would be such a weird fucking thing for an Indian to do).

I'm sorry your mother didn't live long enough to see a cure for her cancer. Or a cure for cancer. I don't think it's all that far off, even without AGI, but it is some reassurance to genuinely believe that many of the horrors of the universe will one day be a distant memory. First smallpox, soon to be polio, we'll kill them before they kill us.

Reminds me of an observation I read, probably shared on Reddit:

One day, your parents picked you up and put you down, and then never picked you up again

That hit me in the feels dawg

When my son was younger he liked me to play this game with his stuffed animals with him. Once it hit me profoundly that one day it would be the last time we played it. For a little while I was really conscientious to play it with him, but you know, you forget.

Anyway, 2-3 years later he still asks me to play and the game has simply evolved with his age. My misjudgment on the fleeting finality of a part of our relationship helped take the edge of this sentiment overall.

It's still sad and life is short and you don't get the stages back and all that. But.. life's a series of concentric circles that slowly bend into and inside of and around one another more than it being a line with checkpoints.

It helps me to remember that "picked you up" is most importantly a metaphor, spanning generations. My parents once told me they'd been planning to remortgage their house if I had needed help with college tuition; later I found they'd barely touched their retirement savings, so they'll be picking up their grandkids' tuition instead.

I still get to carry one kid, thanks to a gym with a rock climbing obstacle that he's strong enough to complete but not tall enough to reach without a boost. Still keeping my eyes open for other cheats like that...

https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/sjeplg/which_way_lib_right/

This meme contains more wisdom about politics in it than most books about politics do. It displays 5 starving children about to be run over by a trolley, a metaphor for how every day many, many people die from circumstances that are both preventable but out of those people's control. There is a rich man capable of saving them, but for whatever reason he doesn't want to. He didn't cause their doom, but he has the ability to stop it. Maybe he has a reason behind not wanting to save them, like he's really busy and a second of his time is worth thousands of dollars, or maybe he's a sadist who enjoys watching people die, but regardless he's not the one who put them on the tracks. Then there's you, with a gun, which gives you greater power than even the richest man if he doesn't have a gun. This is a metaphor for state power and how its individuals like us that ultimately control the state with its monopoly on power. You can force the rich person to save the children. Using force on an innocent person is normally very wrong, but is it justifiable to save even more innocents?

And this isn't just a hypothetical with no true real world comparison. There are many, many rich people out there whose wealth the US could tax or otherwise seize, and spend that money on saving real lives. Most of the affordable lives to save are outside America, but there are even American lives that could be saved if a portion of Bezos' wealth was seized.

Now today I personally believe that generally US taxes are high enough that any social benefit from even higher taxes is offset by the negative effects on the economy. But I do very much think that the optimal taxes are much higher than 0, and that going full libertarian would result in a lot of people suffering who could be helped if billionaires had a bit of their yacht money taken away.

Then there's you, with a gun, which gives you greater power than even the richest man if he doesn't have a gun. This is a metaphor for state power and how its individuals like us that ultimately control the state with its monopoly on power.

I think this is where it falls flat. It's not you, or us. It's an impersonal bureaucracy and a political theater troupe that'll point that gun. I don't think that those entities are you, or that you are in control of them, or that they represent you. You don't wield that power, and you do not decide how it is used. At best you can cast one vote to add a sliver of legitimacy to centralizing power a little more, and from there on it's out of your hands again.

Well, I have good news for you - the United States government already spends a large multiple of Jeff Bezos' net worth every year, so if there's something really important you think they could do with 150 billion dollars*, there's nothing stopping them from doing it.

*Note, this 150 billion dollars doesn't actually exist.

And mostly they use it to subsidize the American middle class, i.e. the global rich.

Yes, just like the person with the gun represents all voters rather than a single concerned citizen, the rich person represent all capitalists rather than a single moneybags.

The "s" in the link just takes me to the submit page for that subreddit

Fixed, thank you

I don't think the link works? It leads me to submit a post to the PCM subreddit.

Fixed, thank you

For some reason I immediately thought of this Imgur post which I haven't seen in like ten years.

I have no idea whether these memes were intended to be funny (like we're meant to be laughing at what a sad sack Dragonite is, Kirk van Houten-style) but I sincerely find them more viscerally upsetting than just about any Hollywood tearjerker you care to mention. Titanic eat your heart out.

It's funny how differently different people respond to these. I didn't really get much from roys' memes - I got the sentiment, and thought they were nice, but they didn't hit me like a tonne of bricks like they did you. But these floored me. I don't think Titanic is strong enough to describe it, I'm at Watership Down levels here.

Reminds me of the time when I was a kid; my parents listened to oldies compulsively in the car when driving anywhere. One day “Cat’s In The Cradle” came on, and I listened carefully to the lyrics, and they hit me like a ton of bricks. Before and even after then, my relationship with my dad was antagonistic, but I got a job under him at his work when I was recovering from two abusive relationships, and since then we’ve had a great time being father and son, mostly.

Well I haven't encountered that particular format before, poor Dragonite, should have hung around more when the eggs hatched. At least attended the evolution party, presuming they weren't digitized.

Oh man, /r/adviceanimals was at one point excellent. I do believe the Dragonite memes are intended to be serious first, and then funny as you consider the absurdity of how children treat their dads.

My only true post to Reddit was a great 4-square ragecomic posted to f7u12 extolling the happy transition from a girlfriend who wouldn't go down on me to a hookup who definitely would. 13 years ago.....

a girlfriend who wouldn't go down on me

ngmi /s

"If only you knew how different things could be" . My favourite version has a different image with the same quote, but I can't find it. Hope, optimism, imagination are powerful forces and the meme triggers all of these for me.

And unrelated, but I find there's something profound about this meme.

Hey, I'm clinging on to life largely in the hopes that things will get better, and faster, if I burn the candle at both ends. And the hardest constraints we know of, physics, leaves room for wonders, even if our understanding of it is incomplete.

It’s funny, but this greentext is my favorite meme of all time. I think about it probably once a day, and I’ve never really owned a dog. To me there’s just an overwhelming sense, when looking at it, that life is what you make of it. Is he happy to see you, or is he a smug piece of shit taunting you for having to work all day? You can’t ask him*, you have to decide that for yourself.

* Yes I’m aware we kind of know why dogs ‘smile’, but it’s not the point.

This is my favorite meme that i cant talk about in real life. Somehow, the slur is absolutely essential to why its funny

It’s just so profound, I’m not even kidding I think there’s genuine depth to it. It’s about the owner, it’s about whether life’s one big joke played on you or by you, it’s about rationalism and versus empiricism, about the meaning of experience, so many of the big questions are encapsulated within it. And now I get home from work and the first thing I say is “every fucking day. Every single fucking day”, and I can’t stop laughing. It’s sad and hilarious, it’s cynical and yet also life affirming. I could write an essay on it. Maybe one day I will.

My neighbors have a Great Pyrenees who'll watch us walk by from his window. For the longest time, I just thought he had a big, lovable goofball face, one that implied a permanent smile. Until I walked by once his owners had been gone for a whole day.

That creature was perfectly capable of looking sad. Absolutely gut-wrenchingly mournful. Every other day, he just chose not to.

That's a.. very different takeaway from the meme than I think the author intended, and not at all what I expected heh.

Though perhaps my opinions are skewed by dog ownership. Yeah, life involves a lot of ambiguity, and we're not guaranteed answers till we're dead, and then the answer is no.

Yes I’m aware we kind of know why dogs ‘smile’, but it’s not the point.

They smile because they're happy to see you. Anyone who claims otherwise is an agent of the cats!

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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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