@PaulSkallas The girl in these scenarios is always vastly lying about all aspects of her past. Actually got pregnant by her heroin dealer “boyfriend” behind the garages next to her khrushchevka at age 16, had to run from the city after getting an abortion and getting the shit beaten out of her by her dad and boyfriend in the same week, dreams of being a yacht decoration at Cap d’Antibes but the only way she could figure out to get there is having an account on every social media platform, out of which only OnlyFans brings in at least some money, and lie about being a “model” when she’s actually a lower mid tier escort with an anonymous PornHub profile. Claims to be a neurosurgeon but flunked out of high school at 14 because of the heroin.

The proper response to problems, including solutions people are using that you don't like, isn't to nag at people, but to provide better solution.

Elon had to make electric cars cool and better than ICE, eco weirdbeard lectures and ugly bad electric cars didn't work. Classic example: online piracy was all but solved by streaming platforms making torrents the less convenient option.

I literally buy movies off Apple TV because I'm too lazy to steal them.

But poor students still have the option to steal bc different calculus.

This is optimal.

Atomised individualism may be our greatest achievement - romanticizing village life is often a rose-tinted myth perpetuated by those who simultaneously hate real-life rural people. "Childrearing was the work of the whole village" - more like the whole village was too busy trying to make sure you don't accidentally enjoy life and ruin their collective misery.

I will admit that American therapeutic language literally means nothing to me. I have no idea what utterances such as "you are valid" are supposed to mean. I don't disagree with it, and I know all the words individually, it just reads as "platypus skies blorbly". Is this a cultural thing, or is therapeutese equally meaningless gibberish to Americans with brains?

The first absurdity of paperback occultism is already selecting for credulous imbeciles: the notion that ancient secrets of the universe and keys to powers godlike can be bought off Amazon for $5.99, from an author called Amethystia McFoxglade The role of anglospherical pop paperback occultism in the rise of wobbly epistemology, delusions of reality bending powers by means of thought and language and self-creation in teenagers and so wokeness is understudied, only @ConceptualJames gestures in this direction

If your investment strategy for the next 12 months doesn't even factor in vertical takeoff of consumer AI (when it should be completely centered on it), IDK what you're doing

https://twitter.com/Supreme_Owl_FTW/status/1623091564976250880?s=20

Drake equation update:

Assuming 100% of intelligent life develops AI, and some fraction of those go rogue, how many rogue AIs are there in the galaxy, expanding through their light cones?

What fraction are nanoscale and completely undetectable until it’s too late? Optimal strategy might be dyson sphere covered in friendly defensive nanites

The era of everything as a service is really the era of everything as a scam. Related: I hate paying for people's time, because there is absolutely no way in the world to keep them honest and align incentives, the prototypical examples being lawyers - and more recently, IT people.

If the child transitioning and refugees welcome fiascos teach us anything, it’s that the toxic compassion and romantic morality of nice white ladies is an existential danger to civilization and has to be kept far away from anything important.

AI rights movement is inevitable “Well the nice computer person said he was feeling sad and unloved so OF COURSE I let him out of the box, you bigot”

Antiquity never really got anywhere, because it believed the golden age was in the past, and it didn't occur to anybody (at least not at any recorded scale) that the world could be improved, and a golden age brought about, by human effort. For a long time, even the afterlife sucked. They found it THAT hard to imagine anything positive in the future, probably because the very capacity to conceptualize a future evolved to facilitate worrying (which IS adaptive).

If you can sort through randos on Twitter, it’s generally possible to know about things about two weeks before they hit the mainstream. Also several people now think I have prophetic powers because I told them what some frog-in-hazmat-suit 40 follower account predicted.

One of Conquest’s Laws of politics - “Any organization not explicitly right wing sooner or later becomes left wing” - has a happy corollary.

Any narrative not explicitly left wing is ipso facto right wing, because any statement that’s not false, nor nonsense, is true. Which is to say, topsy turvy worldviews can only be sustained and propagated at scale by constant effortful propaganda. Objectivity is “right wing”.

“The only thing needed for right wing radicalization today is an accurate reporting of the news.”