domain:thezvi.wordpress.com?page=3
doglatine
3hr ago
At the risk of sounding like a pervert, I associate that peach fuzz with some pretty good memories. In particular, a couple of my more innocent exes had some light fuzz, but because they were relative ingenues they hadn’t absorbed the cultural messaging around hair removal. So I associate it with a certain kind of wholesome unaffected young womanhood.
Rosencrantz2
3hr ago
What is the patriarchy or whiteness except the ultimate in shadowy central planning?
Depends on how it's cashed out and elaborated on. I believe it to be patently obvious we live in a patriarchy that has been making slow-motion improvements, but that this fact is just a reflection on millions of people's net behaviours over time rather than something anyone has ever nefariously discussed in a group.
doglatine
3hr ago
Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).
DirtyWaterHotDog
3hr ago
Oh yeah, the hiring bar for twitter was still the same as other FANG companies. So, the employees (at least non-DEI programmers) were definitely competent. But it had insane redtape. My friend complained about the amount of redtape at twitter after leaving a team working on highly-sensitive data at Microsoft. So that's saying something.
Products like what?
They never saw the light of day. Most products created at big-tech die before they get too far. Google is infamous for this. But, it's an issue at other FAANGs too.
SteveKirk
3hr ago
If he was paying her for sex he wasn't breaking any promises. The skeevy guys are the ones going "yeah baby I'm totally gonna leave my wife for you but now's not the right time so please you've gotta get another abortion come on baby just one more time then we'll be together forever"
A guy who is either dating with the expectation of marriage or paying her pocket money with no strings attached is morally in the clear by my standards.
Twitter at its first user peak (around 2015) had 3500 employees. In 2022, It had 7500 without any additional user acquisition. In 2024, it has 2800.
In 2010, Google had just over 20,000 employees. Its major products were Search and AdSense, with YouTube, Chrome, GMail/Docs and Android following distantly behind.
Today, Google has almost 200,000 employees. Its major products are still Search and AdSense, which are barely better than they were in 2008, and they’re still distantly followed by YouTube, Chrome, GSuite and Android, with a modest cloud business added to the list.
Unlike Twitter, Google makes a lot of money. But it is still extraordinarily inefficient, and its headcount is likely at least 4x where it could be under competent administration. Every big tech business experiences extreme bloat because of a combination of the iron law of bureaucracy and more general fiefdom internal politics.
SlowBoy
3hr ago
They should have different standards. They owe the voter their judgement, not their obedience.
You are very obtusely missing the point. Voters elected Trump. Republicans elected Trump. Collins, Murkowski et al. can either work with Trump or not. They choose to defect, over and over again. They don't do this with Democrats -- they voted to confirm Merrick Garland who immediately went about trying to put Trump in jail. Which goes back to my original point: in victory, Trump has not retaliated against his enemies. He didn't try to lock anybody up in his first term. He rewarded regular mainstream Republicans with appointed positions. (He gave McConnell's wife a cabinet position in his first term.) And these same Republicans over and over again continue to defect, voting against Trump, criticizing him in public, undermining his administration. They always come back to this same defense: they're just doing their jobs, their judgment, they don't owe the voters anything. Ok! That is why voters are rejecting them.
It might be true that, for Collins specifically, her interests lie in being a centrist moderate vote. Ok, that's fine as far as that goes, politics is a realistic game. But she also wants to call herself a Republican! She wants seniority so she can chair committees and exercise political power and direct money back to her state. These politicians aren't actually independent, they need alliances and seniority and the Republican Party to have any power at all. And then they try to have the best of both worlds: they'll take the Senate committee chairs they won because Trump won, but they won't vote to give Trump anything he wants! This is exactly what I wrote to begin with: Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!
Which gets to the other point: Trump clearly has a vision in how he is making cabinet appointments. He is selecting for smart competent people who are loyal to him, have specific axes to grind in administrating their bureaucracies, and who represent the various parts of his coalition. This is extremely obvious, even liberal outfits like MSNBC and NPR are talking about it. But for some reason on this forum a few posters like OP want to deny this, out of some sort of TDS anti-explanation. They don't like Trump, or don't want to understand him, or don't want to admit that they have been wrong about anything. So very explicable political processes somehow become totally inexplicable: Trump is just making picks at random, haphazardly, the guy who staged the greatest political comeback in American history just isn't all that smart. (People who are smart: posters on The Motte who propose that events are fundamentally random and no explanations can be deduced for anything Trump does.)
The prioritisation of blue check replies has made replies on any post that becomes popular totally worthless, since it's mostly bots/meaningless garbage.
Haven't noticed that but I must be reading different parts of it, and I usually don't read the replies beyond the first dozen or so. Even that is mostly frivolous...
Checking back now having been away for a few weeks I've been followed by 50+ scam bots.
I feel a major FMO case here, I've had my twitter acct for years and still have 2 followers (that's how it should be, it's a strictly r/o account).
Elon's own account is really the embodiment of the kind of place twitter has become
I must miss the point here - what's wrong with Elon's account? I mean except the fact that miltibillionaire and owner of several huge enterprises spends so much time on stupid tweets, but it's his time not mine, why would I tell him how to spend it? Otherwise, I think his content is exactly what this format is for, or at least what I have always thought it's for. I know some people put longreads and effortposts into twitter, which is imho insane - just get a substack, dude! - but I never thought it should or ever would be the norm.
I think it's a cautionary tale against tech bro 'disruptors' and the 'move fast and break things' philosophy.
Not sure what it's supposed to caution us against though. Did you really imagine twitter would be some kind of philosopher's kingdom if not Musk? To me, it always have been a mess since the inception and that's the whole point. If "influential people", whoever they are, can't find a better place to gather and talk about serious stuff than twitter I think it's not Musk's problem. They are just doing it wrong (ah, if that were the only thing they are doing wrong...) - and also imagining that you would do politics, policy or journalism with pre-Musk moderation in place makes me deeply sad. Though as "deeply sad" is my default setting now thinking about anything related to UK politics, it's not much change, admittedly.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
3hr ago
Maybe, but we're not many, we're few and (usually) subject ourselves to a higher standard. There is such a thing as conspiratorial thinking, which is distinct from just being stupid, and it could be that, as of right now, it's more prevalent on the right.
Now, I'm of the opinion that Richard Hanania and his consequences have been a disaster for the rat-adjacent discourse, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.
2rafa
3hr ago
Did Musk really fire 75% of the ad sales department? That seems dumb for an ad business, even for him.
Folamh3
3hr ago
I've read several of his, and yet my favourite is still the first one I read, which is also his normie basic black sheep hit: Norwegian Wood, also a leading candidate for my favourite novel ever.
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
Did they ?
I certainly read it stated very confidently dozens of times.
Twitter was well known for the being the most do-nothing company in big tech for some time before 2022.
I worked with some people ex-Twitter, and they were pretty competent programmers. No idea what (if anything) they did in Twitter though.
Some deserved it, but many were already net-positives for the company from a revenue standpoint.
Products like what? Twitter revenue seems to be exclusively ads, isn't it?
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
TIL there's something called "friend request" on twitter. I had an account there for many years (exclusively for reading/bookmarking) never even had one.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
You can still read the individual tweets, not the threads though, right?
Dean
4hr ago
I'd add onto this that it's not just powerlessness, but a dismissal of what people thinks gives them value in favor of something the victimizer cares about more. It's not just enough to be powerless, it's to be pursued and victimized because you could otherwise be something better as you see it, but that isn't the value in you that the tormenter sees and so your values are disregarded.
In Stepford Wives, the women could be better than stepford wives- more independent / autonomous / successful - but what they were valued for, and taken for, was their superficial femininity instead. The thing they cared about as raising them above Stepford Wives (independence / ability) was not what they were valued for, and so was thrown away. Similar things in the Handmaid Tale- the personal value is in the potential for emotionally fullfilling relationships (love on a personal level), but the oppressor is valuing women for another value (breeding).
In a very loose sense, this is analogous for the horror of 'the devil comes for your soul' genre horror. In those, the value people feel they have (the ability to live a good life / have healthy relationship) is disregarding for something they often care little about but which hell cares very much about- the soul. By taking the soul and damning the rest, the value of life and living is dismissed as irrelevant in the eyes of that higher power.
This contrasts with genres of existential horror in which the subjects have no value whatsoever. Worse than malice is disregard, as the negative consequences don't even have the selfvalidation of 'well my soul has value.' Lovecraftian cosmic horror is most notable for this in the sense that the old ones likes Cthulu don't portend the end of humanity because they hate us or need us gone for their plans, but simply as a consequence of their movements and our fragile, meaningless existence.
But this is less common than it appears outside of existential horror. There's a weird psychological dynamic in a fair bit of horror in that it is self-validating in some way.
For example, a revenge-horror rests on the premise that you once were strong and were able to torment your now-tormenter. Punishment-for-your-sins horror elevates the protagonist's agency as central to the events- if they had not sinned, this would not occur, so their sinfulness was important. Even monster horror typically places the protagonists in some form of competition or power relation in the context of the monster- either the monster is a result of human folly (humans have agency/responsibility), or this is a contest of survival (even if doomed, you had a chance and thus have ability), or even if you are prey the thing wants you (Alien is interspecies rape-murder, but you still have value to the cycle).
A lot of horror thus targets what people their place in the world is, but in doing so helps cement their centrality to it. Even if impotent, they are stilll important enough to be tormented.
HalloweenSnarry
4hr ago
Not a conspiracy theory, just a retarded belief.
But is the term "conspiracy theory" not already used in a pejorative sense, such that it can be defined as "retarded belief" in the minds of many? To put it in fewer words, these are one and the same, to some.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4hr ago
What is the patriarchy or whiteness except the ultimate in shadowy central planning? With it white men crushed and destroyed the natural inclination of society to employ black women in every leadership role and it wasn't until about a decade ago that we finally realised that and ushered in the current age of milk and honey.
Uncoordinated behaviours wouldn't involve making up entire branches of science to trick people into thinking your ethnicity and sex is superior, and yet that is apparently one of two possible reasons white men do better than their counterparts on iq tests and tests of strength - either a shadowy cabal of evil white men engineered hyper specific tests that look like general knowledge testing or a strict measure of weight lifting while actually biasing these tests on behalf of other whites and guys, or every white just knows in their racist hearts how to pass an iq test the same way every man knows the secret sexist trick to win at arm wrestling.
The only reason q anon or flat earth is different is because it doesn't have the backing of the so called experts. But the experts have been peddling conspiracy theories for decades and the right have been pointing it out the entire time. Don't confuse holding institutional power for actual expertise. Progressives do not deserve endless charity and conservatives do not deserve endless scrutiny.
Dean
4hr ago
Further back, Great Expectations was already deconstructing the trope with Pip heading off to become someone.
I've always considered that in particular to be a good demonstration of the sin of Pride. I've known plenty of people who thought only the Important People could be prideful, as if to be full of pride required something to be justifiably proud of. I've tended to disagree- the phrase 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' seems suitable characterization of prideful people of modest means.
HalloweenSnarry
4hr ago
I would counter your assertion by raising the example of Hardcore Henry, but that was a year short of your second cutoff point.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
4hr ago
But my point isn't about the unity or diversity of right wing viewpoints, it's about the way issues are pulled to front or pushed to the back burner or memory holed by forces vastly larger than any one substack writer. I'm not concerned with who is in the tent, I'm concerned with which ringmaster is putting on the circus.
I posit that a lot of people like OP think that they're independent and heterodox thinkers, taking bold stands against the mainstream, when really they're just eating up slop someone else chose for them. They're downstream of a vast and powerful party apparatus, which they imagine not to exist because those running it desire to create an illusion of insurgency that serves to disclaim their power.
sodiummuffin
4hr ago
In real life female peach-fuzz/vellus hair is normally very short, very fine, and barely-noticeable. Videogames generally do not depict details that tiny, so if a videogame model tries to depict something like that there's a good chance of it ending up being bigger and more prominent than it almost always is in real life. Compare to something like the left side of this stock photo. The real face has an incredibly subtle fuzz, with 3 tiny strands of longer hair, while Aloy's face seems covered in hair as long as those 3 strands. Or this set of 279 photos of women without makeup.
There is of course a range of exceptions (all the way up to women with full beards), and either those are the target audience for peach-fuzz removal products or they use them as examples while expecting the actual audience to be women with a more normal amount. But it's pretty far from typical. Now, I don't think the developers outright planned to have her be an outlier, I think it was probably "we have graphics so good we can have this incredibly fine detail", and then when that wasn't actually true and it was too prominent they were woke enough that nobody was willing to point that out.
What will it take for you to acknowledge you are wrong about this? People just like you were saying that political correctness had peaked in the 90s, and that it was totally fine to stop noticing it (with the implicit threat that bad things would happen to you if you kept noticing anyway)
Can I quote stats on university hires? The percent of federal "science" grants going to DEI programs? The massive lawsuits against companies and agencies for having basic literacy standards? Is there anything I can say to get you to acknowledge the giant elephant standing right in front of us?
sodiummuffin
5hr ago
That screenshot is from Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, the one people complained about/mocked was her changed model from Horizon Forbidden West in 2022. Here is her 2017 model compared to her face-model Hannah Hoekstra, while here is a comparison with her 2022 model. Also here is her early Zero Dawn concept art and here is the famous comparison with mukbang Youtuber Nikocado Avocado.
My experience is of course the opposite.
I see way more discussion about "real" topics like engineering. Twitter used to be mostly pop culture and culture war nonsense. Not it seems a lot more like real human beings having actual, real discussions (well...not really discussions. I still think that twitter/X are the wrong format for conversation).
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