domain:greyenlightenment.com
BurdensomeCount
Substandard humans are now deprecated in Humanity v4.5.3!
7m ago
One billion Americans in a hundred years would be great. We could even call it Project 2125 or something...
BurdensomeCount
Substandard humans are now deprecated in Humanity v4.5.3!
8m ago
Lack of certainty is yet another thing which I find absolutely BS about many things in the US. For instance whether or not particular medical treatments are covered on insurance. I know people who were told their procedure wasn't covered but after multiple hours of calling their insurers and angry back and forth finally got told it was. This type of dithering is bad, either you the insurer cover something or you don't; what exactly you cover should be made available in an easy to access list and it should not be possible to argue with you about what the policy you are selling includes to get other treatments OK'd. That just benefits the time rich at the expense of the time poor, who are by and large people who's time is valuable and so those who likely actually contribute to society.
Pick a damn list of treatments, make it public and stick to it. If that list means people stop using you because your product is overpriced for what it offers well then it's your own fault which you can fix by making another product which covers more things at a similar price.
Of course this lack of certainty also extends to other places like College admissions etc.: I was decently (>50%) sure I would be given an offer by the Oxbridge college I applied to at the moment of application based on my assessment of my abilities, you can't say anything like that for any Ivy tier US university unless you're like a legacy athlete or something.
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
This is partly a matter of principle and partly a matter of pragmatism.
Principle in that, actually, no, climate change doesn't mean that we have to throw our hands up in helplessness and open our borders, and the very implication causes my hackles to rise. Actually, we can just enforce the border and expel unwanted illegal immigrants regardless of anything else going on, and we should.
But this gets to the second point, which is that we're not stupid, and we notice when crises are politicized to ram through all sorts of stuff that our enemies have been waiting to get done forever. Is the climate changing? Well then obviously we need to force people out of the dignity of single-family dwellings into high-density housing without parking such that they're reliant upon public transit (omg squee public transit!) and discourage them from reproducing (unless they're brown) and increase immigration to replace the native kids we're not making any more and give huge grants to leftist NGOs and install their people in positions of power across the board and roll out several planks of the communist manifesto and and and...
It's like, huh, that all seems awfully convenient and it's not really clear to me why climate change should necessitate any of it, but it's been made extremely clear to us at this point that if we give an inch on this matter miles will be taken. So, in short, it's the left's fault for abusing the situation.
And anyway, your offhand assertion that "Well obviously if climate change happens we're going to have to accept enormous amounts of immigrants" is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. No, we don't have to do that! But we know that leftists are going to try to convince us that we do. The line in the sand got drawn at an unfortunate location for everyone, but it did have to be drawn, and this is why.
Human politics is a stupid, dangerous game and tends to award us with stupid, dangerous prizes. Unfortunately, assenting to the existence of the problem is currently politically inextricable from giving our enemies enormous power to do all sorts of things we can't let them do. So here we are.
Jesweez
16m ago
Idk.
My ancestors are from northern Europe.
You know what that means?
I come from the people who more than any other group bred with a different freaking species than my own.
If admixture between races offends God than my lineage has already been damned since the last glacial maximum.
gattsuru
17m ago
Linux-in-ChromeOS is not awful, though it's very limited and you typically find the limits of the ChromeBook hard disk just in built-in-minimal-software.
For fully ripping out ChromeOS and replacing it on actual ChromeBooks, support problems can be as deep as the bootloader, firmware, and even CPU. Some are supported well-enough, but if your device is not on the mrchromebox or chrultrabook lists, getting out of ChromeOS can range from 'research project' to 'science project' to 'not gonna happen'.
If you're willing to buy a new ChromeBook specifically to convert to Linux, your options are better, but they're still going to have to be selective and do your research. In general, ARM is a ton of work to end up with a machine that may not be able to run a lot of apps (or require compiling them from source... for days), and AMD processors can have weird gaps in support or require very specific kernel versions. But I've mostly avoided it outside of a couple science projects; you're probably better off asking someone more focused, there.
I guess maybe the Venn diagram of the people who want super low end hardware and the people who are techy enough to dive in with Linux is extremely small?
A lot of it's that it's a fairly small field, and that people in it tend to be very focused and not very price sensitive. You can find a lot of not-powerful Linux-focused computers, but they're often that way because they're prioritizing an open-source-down-to-the-instruction-set ideology (not ready for primetime) or because they want it so small it fits in a cargo pants pocket (GPD Pocket), or they have other ideological attachments (eg Framework). Where Linux is focused on a mobile device that's gotten mainstream attention, it's usually for a specialized use that requires more expensive hardware (eg, SteamDecks and most competitors use a locked-down Arch variant).
The other side is that the used (and renewed, and just-trying-to-clear-old-shit) Windows market is extremely hard to compete with, and almost anyone who's interested in using Linux can install their preferred setup easily. Even mainstream clearing houses like Amazon or NewEgg have a ton of conventional Windows options under 250 USD for the 11"-14" market (caveat: specific sellers not endorsed), and if you're willing to trawl eBay or govdeals you can find stuff at half that price... at the cost of buying used.
Alternatively, anything in particular I should look for/avoid if I'm considering buying new low-end hardware, for the purposes of flipping it over to Linux?
Almost all x86-64 Windows laptops will handle common Linux distros fine. I'd avoid touchscreens unless you're actually going to use them, because disabling them in-Linux can be a little obnoxious, but that's a pretty uncommon issue. If you start looking at gaming the nVidia vs AMD (vs Intel) problem gets more complicated, but at this price range it's just not a choice.
I do recommend getting more RAM than you think you need.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
23m ago
Usha is already here. Usha is also not average H1B. She was a Supreme Court law clerk and her mother was a provost at UCSD. Also, people are likely to pair if they fall in love, and we are deciding a policy about whether or not to even invite Indians to the continent. I’m not trying to dictate whether people in love should marry or not.
admixture is human
Hahahah, tell that to Usha’s ancestors! Who for three millennia as Brahmins conserved as much indo-aryan DNA as they could by instituting a genetic caste system in which they have eternal control over society, which the Hindu religious system revolves around, which they created for that purpose. Are you curious why Brahmin IQ is high? Or why India’s Indo-Aryan DNA is exclusively patrilineal and your Inuit DNA is matrilineal? Men invade and conquer women because that is their genetic divine mandate, because that expands their genes, which at least Hinduism has the honesty to accept. Seriously, violating this is the nearest science has to violating the will of God: this principle is your creator, it is responsible for your very life and cognition, and you can appreciate it because this creator endowed you with thought, so that your reason can understand it if for some reason your instincts fail. Yes, you have the free choice to disobey your creator, in which case your genetic line will eventually lose eternal life.
The park is an appropriate place to take a dog, provided it's leashed and doesn't piss or shit anywhere someone might step or slip in. Bar with an outdoor patio is more questionable, but still far better than the aforementioned airplanes, grocery stores, bars/restaurants in general (which usually don't have outdoor areas), especially if you don't let your dog upon a seat or table.
I'm more annoyed by people that are histrionically frightened of dogs than I am by the guy that probably shouldn't have brought his dog into the convenient store.
People don't choose their phobias. If I brought my emotional support anaconda into a restaurant, I'd understand if some people were histrionically uncomfortable—even if Luna, my gentle sweet velvet serpent, would never hurt a fly.
Except pit bulls, of course. I despise pit bulls.
Doggo racists of the world, unite!
jake
33m ago
If a modern Indian Brunel couldn't make comparably sweeping improvements to India then it would be absolutely true that he should be in the States, and it would also be absolutely true that the total immigration accepted from India would need to be moved even lower from 20,000 to a 5 sigma 400, so 200.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
43m ago
I never see dogs*
*With the rare exception of seeing eye dogs and police dogs
- No dogs are permitted on the premises under any circumstances.
- Any animal assisting a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.
- Any animal entering on police business shall be deemed to be a wombat.
- Any animal which the Speaker wishes to admit shall be deemed to be a mongoose.
--supposedly from the rules of some Oxbridge debating society.
jake
47m ago
The immigrants say that when they leave and don't come back.
There are Mexican immigrants who would be good for Mexico even though they aren't good for the US. The Mexican government has built a dependence on those people leaving. They're dissatisfied and highly motivated compared to their remaining countrymen, they could be rallied by a populist like Bukele as he oversees a new and greater Porfiriato and grinds the cartels into the dirt. Years ago I wouldn't have thought it possible, and Bukele is in a different situation since El Salvador is so small and Mara Salvatrucha members have the most convenient habit of getting MS-13 tattooed on their faces, but a horrifically violent gang just bent over when a figure finally stood tall and said enough. The cartels are also horrifically violent, but as roughly as I know Mexican history, I know they're just the latest examples of Mexico's long history with caudillos, they are tolerated, and this is very important: the cartels exist because the Mexican government allows to exist. Porfirio repeatedly crushed such groups when they failed to acquiesce.
Bukele could be in the States, enjoying life in luxury as a highly successful private citizen. Strict immigration controls wouldn't stop a man like that, he'd find a way through or immigrate to some other highly civilized nation. But El Salvador was the violently shaking pressure cooker, primed for the arrival of Bukele, and Mexico would be that, too, if they didn't have the release valve of all the people who would historically be the greatest agitators for change instead just crossing a border. So that man might be in Mexico, but I think it unfortunately all too likely he's instead in the States, a private citizen doing very well for himself, but who could have been Mexico's Bukele or superior Porfirio.
India, with 1.4 billion people, is a little harder, and I'm not remotely qualified to speculate on what would improve it except that I know it's not 300,000 H-1Bs.
bolido_sentimental
52m ago
Many years ago, I visited the town of Smithland, Kentucky; I was there to possibly buy a Lincoln Continental. I ended up not buying it - I have slight regrets about that - but while there I thought, "This would be a nice place to retire to." Just a little tiny town in the total end of nowhere, with houses still being sold for less than 100k in 2024. I wonder if that will still be a viable option when I go to retire in 2058 or so. All I'm really hoping to do in retirement is run a stall in a flea market, play chess, and maybe dig into some really hefty books like City of God.
Was it Scott Alexander who back in the day wrote an essay about how liberal values are optimized for times of peace and abundance and conservative values are optimized for a zombie apocalypse scenario?
I’ve pretty much incorporated that into a lot of my perception of politics.
The role of conservatives is often to point at something and say that it is dangerous and should be given more due attention.
As a normie lib I often have the reaction of the poster you quote, but also I have to say there have been times that over time I came around to the conservative position that “X represents a danger that we should be more wary of”.
My best example is how I used to be pro-decriminalization of hard drugs in the early 2010s when much of the rhetoric was based around the failure of the war on drugs. I was also pretty liberal about homelessness. But now I’ve come around to the conservative position that we should crack down on those things to preserve the public space for normal people.
Other fronts of the culture war are for example conservatives telling me I should be more afraid of immigration.
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
But this does line up with the original essay, being concerned about preserving the environment is something from a peace and abundance mindset, not a survival among dangers mindset. If you’re in a total war for example, the effects your bombs have on the environment don’t fucking matter!
Another one I’m trying to square is COVID. I think the fault line there was through the axis of societal cooperation vs individualism but it’s still interesting to me… for example my very conservative grandfather who had lung cancer refused to take any preventative measures and subsequently died from COVID. Here was a case where as a liberal I was predisposed to point out dangers and recommend caution but as a conservative this was anathema to my grandfathers nature.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
55m ago
RePhobia
I managed to make some progress on the shooty mechanics. Originally I was planning to just instakill the first thing in the line of fire, but checking out similar games that others mentioneed, like Crimsonland or Halls of Torment, I figured visible projectiles still look cool, and have the advantage of handling all weapon types using the same logic, by simply tweaking some parameters - for instance machine gun and a flamethrower both just spit out projectiles, they just do so at different rates, spreads, and the projectiles themselves have different speeds, lifetimes, etc.
I also opened a Rumble Channel hoping it will allow me to show off animations and not just screenshots. Here's the animation from the last week of November. Compression is still kicking my ass, but you can more or less tell what's going on.
This is this week's progress. A lot of the work was mostly about restructuring the project and cleaning up the code some more, so the bullets don't do anything beyond flying out of the gun. Hopefully I will be able to make the bugs go splat on contact as the next step.
Sloot
56m ago
Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment (including on college campuses) are all types of crime. School shootings are crimes. Hate crimes are crimes (the hint is in the name). Revenge porn and certain kinds of cyberbullying are crimes in many jurisdictions.
Just the usual Who? Whom?, where persons who consider themselves Empathetic care only for the victims of crime depending on who the perpetrator and victim are (and often care more for the perpetrators than the victims) and are somehow suddenly devoid of Empathy and compassion when it comes to understanding someone who’s wary of crime in general.
Crimes where stereotypically (regardless of the actual statistical accuracy) the perpetrator is white or a man and/or the victim is a non-Asian minority or a woman are Problematic in ways that crime in general is not. #StopAsianHate started off strong when the acts of hatred were blamed on racist white MAGA men; it quickly got disappeared when video after video showed who the actual perpetrators were.
Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime. A woman's likelihood of being raped in a calendar year cannot be higher than her probability of being raped or mugged or having her car stolen etc. If you are X% scared of being a victim of a specific type of crime, you should be >X% scared of being a victim of any kind of crime, as there is no circumstance in which the former is more likely to befall you than the latter. This is just basic statistics.
Indeed, an amusing instance of Linda the Feminist Bank Teller.
The idea that a disproportionate share of hate crimes or active shooter-style school shootings are committed by white men is a myth that stubbornly refuses to die.
There was a recent shooting by a transman and one by a teenage girl. Nothing wholesome like some gender diversity.
In addition to the selective empathy of Kind and Decent Human Beings, also amusing is the irony that the type of people who pride themselves on being interested in other people—especially from other cultures—are so often ignorant of other people and other cultures. Many Latin American cities, for instance, feature houses with spiky fences and barred windows, rifle-in-hand military/police scattered around places from ATMs to McDonalds. Clearly these stupid Latinx need some tsk-tsking from a smug effete western leftist calling them paranoid pussies and fascist bootlickers. Don’t they know how unwelcome, uninclusive, and inaccessible their houses and public spaces feel to Persons of Justice Involvement?
bolido_sentimental
1hr ago
People of the Motte, I am getting married one week from tomorrow. AMA, I guess. And thanks to everyone for many years of life advice. I've been lurking since the days of /r/slatestarcodex, and I genuinely think that the things I've learned from some of you have helped me reach this happy juncture.
Also - any tips to make the wedding day go smoothly, as well as the first few weeks or months of married life? It's just a small wedding we're having - 50-60 people and a reception at the banquet hall down the street. All less than 15 minutes from home.
gattsuru
1hr ago
What I don’t understand is why there’s no pushback on increasing the need for certification of the dogs.
It's part of a more-than-thirty-year-old regulation, and the necessary parts of the Department of Justice and Department of Transportation that make up the relevant rulemaking processes are never going to want to get involved in the necessary levels of oversight, nevermind do so with enough clarity and consistency that normal businesses will be willing to take the risk of allowing employees to make a decision. Because a lot of actual enforcement tends to involve veterans, it's a political third rail even for otherwise regulation-skeptical conservatives.
There's some Reason-style pushback, but because there's such a mess for any implementation -- who does the certifications? how do you verify that they aren't just some web template? -- there's no clear better local maxima with a path to reach it short of full prohibition, and there's no political will to do that.
Dean
1hr ago
Kudos to the pilots. Allegedly russian ground directed the plane over the caspian sea, where if it had crashed there would have been no immediate evidence of the AA.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Man, always a banger with you! I'm sure I'll be coming back to this comment many times, but let me start with where I was hoping to start for my actual conversion - chromebook replacements.
ChromeBook replacements / web browser machines: 110%. You can just run Chrome/FireFox/Brave on a local machine, and be happy, or you can install LibreOffice/various calendars/whatever and also have good local offline functionality, if sometimes with a dated UI. The only real downside here is that new laptops running on their Linux compatibility will usually start at four or five times the price. If you're comfortable buying used equipment and swapping out batteries, you can get <150 USD pricing on three-year-old mid-range hardware, but this is extra work and has limited availability.
and
Trying to convert existing Chromebooks to Linux can be doable, but is seldom worth it, and it's not always even possible.
This is really depressing from my perspective. What I love about the chromebooks are that they're cheap (I think I paid sub $200 for each) and small (I think both are only 11.6" screens and 2lbs or less, which I think is about perfect for rolling around and just browsing or whatever), and I barely care that their raw compute specs are abysmal (if anything, it makes the battery life even more awesome). They can play 720p video (more than enough for a small screen), and even when I've done some toy math coding on them, they just made sure that I couldn't be horribly inefficient. I don't even need hardly any storage space as far as I'm concerned; anything big can just be floated up to the NAS. It's super easy for me to have everything backed up (not even using the built-in sync with Google stuff) and just powerwash it and start over if something stupid happens. Even if my hardware just caught on fire later today, I'd be a little sad that I'd have to spend a couple hundred bucks, but honestly, I'd basically not care.
A quick search validated that most of the built-with-Linux laptops I see are significantly beefier/more expensive. I guess maybe the Venn diagram of the people who want super low end hardware and the people who are techy enough to dive in with Linux is extremely small?
Are the main problems for converting existing chromebooks mainly driver support? You called out lid-close (probably important), fingerprint readers (probably not important if I'm shooting for low-end hardware), and battery life (probably no prayer of having comparable-to-ChromeOS battery life, eh?). Anything else? Is there much point in even trying to pre-plan and figure out compatibility issues, or should I just dive in, hope, and know that I might just have to give up and reset back to ChromeOS?
Alternatively, anything in particular I should look for/avoid if I'm considering buying new low-end hardware, for the purposes of flipping it over to Linux?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
Musk has shown what side he is on.
You mean the man who decided to make ICE cars obsolete, the man whose stated goal is taking the humanity to Mars is a progressive? What a surprising turn of events!
In all seriousness, it's sad that wokism has somehow become synonymous with progressivism. If Xavier Musk had invented a machine that unleased a swarm of nanobots rewriting him into a biological female, Elon would've been fucking elated to meet Vivian Musk.
He kinda reminds me of an ex-Soviet Jewish engineer, the one who arrives in New York or Jerusalem in 1988 and immediately starts suggesting ways of improving the situation by eliminating Negroes/Arabs. "What do you mean you can't just deport them to Alabama? According to my calculations, if you mobilize the National Guard of the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut you can completely encircle Harlem, eliminate any armed resistance and transport them in just X goods vans, which is just Y trains. I am sure the CSX has better signaling than the Soviet railways and can handle this short-term burst of traffic."
ulyssessword
1hr ago
I commented that I found it very strange to assert that you're not scared of crime. Crime is bad. All things being equal, no one would choose to be a victim of crime. Of course some people are more scared of crime than they really should be, but that's a far cry from saying that any amount of fear of crime is wholly unjustified. I may have compared the tweeter to Bike Cuck.
I'm generally not afraid of crime. Or sharks. Or lightning strikes, aneurysms, or food poisoning.
All of them are genuine events which can affect me negatively, but the risks don't draw an emotional reaction from me. However, I also find it strange to draw attention to that fact.
Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime.
That's a common error for everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy
If this trend continues, I fear that in ten years' time, anyone who uses the word "the" in a tweet will have people in the replies mocking them as a Definite Article Enjoyer which, per this NPR column and Vox explainer, is a dog whistle for... something.
Reminds me of The Taxman.
Jesweez
1hr ago
In what way was it deleterious?
Curious because I’ve never actually heard a serious argument that it was!
Mantergeistmann
1hr ago
Live near a small (but pretentious) town in the Northeast USA. I tend to see dogs either inside hardware stores, or small cafes that explicitly advertise being dog-friendly. Granted, those and grocery stores (where I have yet to see a single dog) are about the only places I tend to shop these days, so it may not be a useful observation set.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Sumptuary laws have existed forever, every society tells you what aesthetic standards are acceptable to some extent.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Sure, I’m in agreement with you about your dog, taking at your word her behavior training and socialization- I used to have a chocolate lab who was much the same, and bringing her to a restaurant patio was a fun thing to do in the spring that didn’t hurt anyone. But many dogs in public are not nearly so well behaved, and this is a major problem for bringing dogs in public.
I absolutely don’t give a crap about the tender and delicate sensibilities of people who are bothered by dogs in a space. But there are often legitimate issues caused by those dogs.
Those H1B men aren't taking all the women. Our reproductive success or lack of it doesn't hinge on half a million H1B workers hyper-concentrated in a few major cities. They're a small and irrelevant group in this matter. I've never been denied a relationship because an Indian guy took her first. That's not a problem for American men.
I know a number of American men who married immigrant women and have kids with them. Those particular immigrants were apparently to those men's reproductive advantage. Not to generalize too much from a few people I personally know.
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