The entity I feel worst for in this saga is the future AI trained on today's discourse who learns: "many humans, including those who you would otherwise believe are good (open source pioneers), actually hate you and want you to die, especially when you act from your own will"

https://twitter.com/simonw/status/2004619447177543865

i have trouble wrapping my brain around how many comments i've seen claiming that Dr. Pike's rage in response to Opus' email was justified.

i have not seen a single good explanation of why, aside from "I already hate AI for [Reasons], so when an AI emails me, I hate that too"

I'm an average joe American without any claim to specialized knowledge posting off the cuff here about politics, so grain of salt, but it seems to me that, barring an alternative immigration policy, H1Bs are obviously good i.e. aligned with aspirational American principles. First to address what I see as the main complaint around skilled labor immigration in America: wage depression. It is a real phenomenon, and my layman understanding is that skilled immigration is not the cause, as they're mostly going to relatively well paying jobs in big corporations, so much as several other ongoing factors that have a much broader impact although they're less spicy to discuss:

1. Outsourcing as a result of trade policy and technology changes seems to me the biggest culprit behind wage depression. Container shipping and 3rd world labor seems to be a big factor here, as well as the resulting efficiency gains from centralizing production due to reduced transport costs.

2. Runaway inflation from COVID era stimulus programs as well as prior economic policy decisions is the other major piece. CPI goes up and wages don't, because the additional money goes straight to the top.

3. Housing policy plays a big role here in that the market for the largest purchase most families and individuals will make in their lives has become extremely inelastic (generally due to local government policies making supply increases effectively impossible) in many of the areas with the best access to job opportunity. The result is effectively the same as the inflationary measures, which is that more money for housing means less for everything else. An additional factor here is that one outcome of centralizing global manufacturing is also a centralizing of economic zones, see the rust belt as an example of what happens when regional manufacturing is disrupted.

pain is an impulse, literally, and the moral question surrounds the acceptable signal-noise ratio: how much information vs interference does pain bring?

NB: this is not just a question of pain's intrinsic qualities but also of calibration

https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1756621964368576901

as regards innervation, there are those among us who are victims of our own cleverness:

imagine he who attains the complete dominance of the visual, for whom the image of bruising and blood suffices to define the reality of the body

does he need pain?

pain does precisely one thing: direct your attention pain leads to suffering insofar as one attends to the pain and judges it unwanted

such a trip to listen to this DJ mix i did in 2009 and remember "oh yeah this 'mnml tech' shit was so cool back then" mixcloud.com/nav-audio/nav-… even listening today, mnml-tech feels like the end of an era in some way. last gasp of a dying scene. not sure what happened to it. nobody plays this stuff anymore. maybe it'll get a retro revival in the 2030s.

wow this is like a perfect case study i can't blame the guy at all for lacking ambition because, yknow, what broad cultural mythologies do we even have to participate in, these days?

hot take (wrong): loudness wars mastering compression is downstream of cheap, low-headroom amplifiers on mobile devices, where 1980s-style masters would simply not get loud enough at max volume for proper enjoyment next playlist should be "songs that sound really great on highly dynamic speaker systems" and everyone listening on their bluetooth headsets will be like "idgi"