blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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It's "Bond villain aesthetics" if the "villain" you mean is the big guy guarding the next location who acts intimidating for five seconds before Bond suplexes him and walks inside anyway, quipping.

Also, Grimes is not even offering table stakes for being a Bond girl here. Like, she's an extra in the club through which Bond quickly passes in order to find the actual Bond girl. She's not a vaguely trans-coded Famke Janssen bringing herself to orgasm by machine-gunning an entire room of technicians while Gottfried John looks on with a "what the fuck, tovarisch" eyebrow lift.

Reached by the Chronicle, Yudkowsky said he would not read the letter for the same reason he refused to read the manuscript of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

Not even the MST3k version?

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.mst3k/search?q=MiSTing%3A+Unabomber+Manifesto

(Warning: contains some ... Tarantino-like 1995 edginess at odds with its overall tone)

Ketan Joshi:

Microsoft's own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place

The whole paper is an absolute nightmare funfair ride through the behaviours that have become almost instantaneously widespread through the professional world - something Microsoft have invested billions into accelerating and worsening no matter the consequences.

a phrase to make your skin crawl right off:

Lighthaven cuddle puddle

And after that shot, a chaser:

Is the Dark Enlightenment actually fascist? Not at all. It's probably the least fascistic strain of political thought today, though this requires understanding what fascism really is, which the word itself now obscures. Is it racist? Perhaps. The term is so malleable that it's hard to say with clarity.

the “thinking” part definitely works for me

[bites tongue, tries really hard to avoid the obvious riposte]

Our AP English teacher marked down everyone in our class for failing to identify a quote that wasn't in the translation of L'Etranger that we all read. She refused to give our points back even after I brought a copy of the French original and showed that the translation in our edition was correct when hers was not.

Yeah, four kids is "the biggest family on the suburban block where I grew up", not "time to build another cabin in the compound".

Or they deliberately named things like the Lance of Longinus in order to fulfill a prophecy, or make it look like a prophecy was being fulfilled.

We are on the verge of a “cultural mass extinction.” This will dramatically increase the homogeneity of our species and as such lower the prevalence of orthanganal perspectives that could generate solutions to social problems which are not apparent to surviving cultures.

zoom and enhance

orthanganal

I shouldn't make fun of uncorrected typos. But I will.

All Cop-ilots Are Bastards

Borrowing bits of Christian iconography and such was a thing in anime going back to the '80s, as I understand it, to get that creepy/exotic flavor. In Evangelion, I don't think it's entirely clear how much of the esoteric religious references are supposed to be taken literally and how many are more like in-universe code names (in the vein of Trinity test). Like, maybe the "Dead Sea Scrolls" they keep talking about really are the Dead Sea Scrolls, but NERV named their supercomputers the "Magi" just because they're pompous weirdos.

They're a supranational organization that nominally reports to the UN while actually being directed by an ancient conspiracy that is being subverted from within by a modern conspiracy. They build WMDs that are piloted by child soldiers. One of these child soldiers is the son of the commander. Another is a clone of the commander's dead wife (maybe). NERV are the only ones who can stop the annihilation of all life on Earth by the lovecraftian kaiju, because they are the sole possessors of forcefields that run on loneliness.

... But there is a penguin!

Apparently they were out-b4 I could even see what they wrote.

Over the course of my research, it has come to my attention that Jordan Lasker was invited to give a talk titled "The Academic and Career Trajectories of Underqualified College Admits" at Stanford University's Classical Liberalism Initiative seminar series. The series of talks, run by Iván Marinovic out of the School of Business whose goal is to invite professors to "debate ideas and policy issues with rigor, even when doing so may challenge orthodoxy".

These challenges to "orthodoxy" never seem to include ideas like paying reparations for slavery. (Deadpan Daria voice) It's so strange.

PolygenX's Chief Science Officer Steven Wolfram's

(double-take)

I think that should be Tobias Wolfram. Per RationalWiki and Hope Not Hate, anyway.

Her talk of people being "desperate" for Scoot to be racist suggests a dismally gamified view of life. I mean, he's a racist. However I feel about that, it doesn't change the basic fact. She's playing for a weird gotcha of some kind that could only ever make sense if you (a) regard writing as point-scoring and also (b) accept Richard Lynn-ism as science.

I think they took the rather elementary fact about random walks that the variance grows linearly with time and, in trying to make a profundity, got the math wrong and invented a silly meaning for "in retrospect".

Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:

Scott Alexander was accused of being secretly a right-wing racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled, and I think a bunch of his followers believed it, and now they're shocked and hurt that he's actually the sincere center left guy he said he was the whole time.

(Via.)

(For convenience: The leaked e-mails in which he admits to being secretly racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled. And his endorsement of super-racist Richard Lynn from last month.)

Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as "German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip".

I'd swear I've seen that exact same "realization" from Aella before, when she posted something like "I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer's barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I'm shocked that they really actually do hate sex work."

Edit to add:

ok what the FUCK is goin on with the neo-trads? I was just over here enjoying this free life, individualism, subversive, unwoke cultural movement and I thought everybody was on board but suddenly BAM we've got a a bunch of them spawning into sex-negative tradcaths or whatever [...] i'm just sad cause i thought this section of culture were my allies. we both were like 'leave me alone, authoritarian government/culture', and were appropriately skeptical of novel identity movements, willing to say the weirdo things.

https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/1630875718518456321#m