BEEP BOOP WHAT THE FUCK

I really don’t get it. they see something they don’t understand and immediately just start writhing on their keyboard in rage. “what the FUCK is THIS”

it’s definitely linked to rationalism (and various far right bullshits), which right away means people who get into it are likely to be at least cult adjacent. not the most stable spot to be in, psychologically

tangent, as a callow youth I listened to rationally speaking, which used to be a cohosted show with julia galef and massimo pigluicci. mostly after leaving the show pigluicci ended up getting really into stoicism and would post shit about how unhappiness is purely one’s own choice etc. when I asked him if jewish people in WWII concentration camps were just choosing to be unhappy he was like yes. so, yeah, that’s stoicism for you

they don’t think it’s a messy and inevitable fact of the world that certain people have outsize wealth. they think it fucking rules

hate this feeling and yet that’s also a big part of why I keep tabs on them. they’re there whether we choose to look at them or not

why is there a coherent community of people I hate? wtf >:(

between this and the submersible guy I’m starting to think we need more billionaires in the ocean. maybe peter thiel is onto something

The finished novella is “set in Edwardian England and loosely based on [Ellison’s] sister Kate’s imagined amorous exploits, to Kate’s great delight,” her mother wrote.

this can’t be what it sounds like. it just can’t be

god I hope this is true

to the extent that it’s been created

I’ll say it again urbit is the most unintentionally funny software ever created

my friend in Canada was trying to send me money and we ended up using a check. also my landlord from two apartments ago refused to take rent any other way. she was very old

misanthropic means person hating; possessed of contempt and malevolence toward humans as both individuals and a class. connotations of bitterness or cruelty

What if our simulated universe is actually way, way less terrible than the real world? What if the simulation was created specifically to have lower suffering/higher utils than in reality?

certain sentences you’ve extracted suggest the author considers severe suffering incomparably worse than any pleasure (for example why would ‘removing suffering’ necessarily improve the universe? in a framework where suffering and pleasure are comparably significant factors, it is possible that removing suffering would remove enough pleasure to tip the balance negative).

that’s a point of view I’m very sympathetic to, but it means external reality would almost certainly be worse than the simulation, because the external reality contains the simulation, and therefore contains at least as much severe suffering as the simulation. put another way, is it worse for a torture chamber to exist, or for torture chamber makers to exist?

I think what this is highlighting is a disconnect in their thinking between what I presume to be a greatest good based utilitarian framework, and what they actually think is cool and are talking about, which is heroic individual action. they want to present as hari seldon but they’re really wanking about pulp adventure shit

I’m so on board with this

Vance did not get this extremist ideology from his Appalachian upbringing or—needless to say—Yale Law.

fucking libs, man. elite law schools are absolutely infested with fascists

banger post imo

extremely funny that none of his interlocutors bother asking what his engineering background is like

why don’t you put it into the… *gestures vaguely*

unironically, their culture has a better use case for it than the rest of earth does. they’re not even losing informational value in the compression and nonsense-izing since there isn’t any to start with