a thing that genuinely disgusts me are politicians who arent proud of the nations they serve
they lack the courage of their convictions, their people can Tell, and their ultimately fall will be shameful
was yelling about this with @selentelechia, I dont recall how we got on the topic but it may have been world war one via tolkien via anti-aging via socialism destroying womens ability to have a fulfilling life outside of the marketplace
she identified the british specifically as people who seem embarrassed to have been an empire at one point and are now basically a backwater
which you know what fucking get over it
you bastards are the heirs of Elizabeth and Pitt and you should act like it
And America! Good God!
Washington sat in that chair! Or one like it, modulo that snafu in 1812. Jefferson! Generations of Adams! Lincoln!
A ragtag army drunk on liberty defeated the most powerful empire on earth to birth this country and you can't spare a moment to take pride in inheriting the system they built with pen and sinew and blood?
one should be proud to participate in the continuation of great deeds of the past and aspire to become worthy of it by building on the work of one's forebears
a caveat on some of the above items fwiw, although this objection on my part was more aimed at some historical examples where the weakness was imo stronger
of course this actually strengthens the original "slippery slopes are extremely real actually" point because history is absolutely littered with slopes that even if not recognized as such by contemporaries were seen by historians!
AI is not currently good enough to cause me to lose my job but i expect ive got maybe a year to figure out how to move up several abstraction layers some of which may not even exist yet
this is going to get weird because idk how people starting careers will even begin
my intuition is that having a model of how a function--data, engineering, product, whatever--functions is important to capably automating that function
people who have been operating in those functions for years seem as though they'd have an overwhelming advantage in this
but of course to the extent agents hollow out these functions and displace human labor its hard to imagine firm structures remaining as they exist, designed for human operations
so this probably gets me another year or two max, if i'm working in tech proper
the biden administration, which i assume had access to people who know at least as much about missiles as i do, equivocated about whether or not they believed the israeli explanation that the strike was a failed hamas rocket
a major lesson of the awokening for me was that a significant number of people on the left hate me and would prefer i not exist and a majority of the country is willing to go along with policies operating toward that end
this was probably an infohazard
i call it an infohazard because there's really not anything i can do with this information but it leaves me anxious about the future, and experiencing to varying degrees contempt or outright hatred toward people about whom i had previously felt positively
when i look at the political landscape i see two factions wholly unworthy of the inheritance bequeathed to us by our ancestors
the important difference between them is that one is directed by people who would prefer i be erased