*I didn’t actually end up paying her for sex, though when I DM’ed her at 3AM after too much champagne, the conversation inexplicably started in that direction before course-correcting, and it was all a bit awkward.
Personally, I blame Miami.
Aella had a hard start on life, and I asked her if she feels she would have ended up elsewhere with perhaps different beginning conditions.
She felt otherwise, and in fact was glad for where her journey had taken her.
One of the counter-intuitive things Aella mentioned in her talk was that she felt prostitution was healthier than porn, both for her and everyone else.
I asked her if her professional life, such as it was, intruded into her personal life in some way.
Part of what I loved about Aella's account of her own life is how bluntly self-aware it all was, as if she'd sorted through these issues like any other puzzle that fascinated her.
Whether sex work or the OnlyFans business, Aella treated them all like a quantitative puzzle that needed solving, compiling all sorts of stats and drawing conclusions from controlled experimentation.
Many of her clients are married, and to her mind, her work actually helps save more marriages than it might destroy.
Despite getting to the top 0.01% of OnlyFans performers, netting $100k/month and beating a 50% monthly (!) churn rate, Aella ultimately ended up bored of running an optimized marketing funnel for a personal media business.
"What's the most outrageous or radical thing that you think is true that nobody else thinks is true?"
This is supposedly a question Thiel asks people, so I sprung it on Aella, and we had our first Pull Request self-censorship.
Even this cancelation cat has only so many lives.
Lastly, we talked about poop.
In an offhand comment about @sentientist's excellent Hereticon talk on eugenics, Aella mentioned she had eaten her poop as part of a DIY fecal transplant.
After collecting myself, we dug into the details....
Dropping later this week is my general take on Hereticon and conclaves of heretics more generally.
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I wrote about this ages ago back when I gave a damn about media.
It's very simple: US journalism (unlike other Western countries) adopted 'objectivity' as a standard, less because of moral probity, and more because Macy's needed unpolarizing content across a large audience.
Techies who think the NYT only as smart as some its dunderheaded writers are mistaken: there's a whole biz and tech team there, and they felt the winds changing.
They know they're in the compelling stories biz, not the news one anymore.
I'm as excited about AI as the next guy (and even more excited these days), but I think AI people are being a wee bit delusional (on two levels) about how the whole AI builder vs. publishers with training data saga will play out.
Do we really think that AI builders (in the West) will be able to get away with egregiously copying and using copyrighted materials (and make money off of it!) with zero recompense?
This is from the Stability/Getty Images suit. The AI even reproduced the watermark!
Even assuming that AI wins (in the OAI vs. NYT suit for example), and only strict bit-for-bit copying is protected and the rest is fair use.
Let's fast-forward this movie a few years: AI replaces the way most users consume the Internet, i.e., @perplexity_ai replaces Google.
90% of the disconnect between the West and Israel is Israel still living in the capital 'H' History of ethno-nationalist struggle and war, and the West having resigned itself to the Fukuyaman End of History: life as virtue-signaling LARP, and the UN/US/EU as the global HR dept.
They raped our women, took our children hostage, and murdered our elders, so we flattened their cities, killed or captured their fighting men, raised our flag and prayed to our God on their land.
This was the entirety of human history. The Torah recounts the story many times.
The West in 2023 AD cannot abide the wheel of History spinning once again: after the triumph of liberalism in WWII and the Cold War, such a reversion to historical norm is unthinkable and revolting. The heavily Christian roots of liberalism expect a messianic age of peace.
I was in Israel shortly after the recent Hamas attacks, going everywhere from the scenes of the atrocities, to the preparations for war, to the techies in Tel Aviv supporting the war effort.
Thread with both text highlights and on-the-ground photos.
Our story begins with your humble correspondent having rifles pointed at him by jumpy reservists as he tried to enter Mefalsim, one of the kibbutzim brutally attacked on 10/7. A few words from my driver and an Israeli press pass cooled things down. South Israel is a war zone.
The adjoining parking lot, like most we'd encounter, was a mix of reservists' cars, shot-out cars from the attacks, and a tank unit waiting to enter Gaza.
You'd think a 60-ton thing would be hard to hide, but it was hard to spot the Merkavas pulling in.
Debate at an AI dinner last night. Everyone floats their shaky theory about morality and the AI bots. I point out there's a lack of overt religious reasoning here, and one guy confronts me:
Why are humans special? If the AI has sentience, why should we treat them differently?
"Judaism would say tzelem elohim (the image of God) sets humans apart, which is basically saying humans possess an intrinsic and transcendent good that exceeds the material."
"But that's ridiculous. I don't believe in God."
"Say we had two sentient AIs running on two servers, and I told you you had to choose between blowing the head off of some human or unplugging the machines. Which do you do?"
Like many things in Web 3 marketing, it's a reboot of a Web 2 practice: quests are like the offerwalls of old where users got free virtual goods for engaging with a game or app.
@spindl_xyz@layer3xyz@Galxe@QuestN@rabbithole_gg Quests are fairly unique in that they're 'wallet aware': it's a standard Web experience, but the publisher knows the user's wallet (both as an anti-fraud measure and to pay out the giveaways).
Thus, downstream measurement is *much* easier than having to join via Web 2 clicks.