cornflake @ cornflake @awful.systems

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2

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30

Joined

2 yr. ago

This Thiel interview clip is amazing

Watch Ross Douthat realize for a moment in real time that he's spent a decade making ideological bedfellows with a techno-futurist, fascist Right that wants to see the birth of a "machine god" & is in no way enthusiastic about the survival of the human race in universal terms.

https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1938639600907612610

Sure there are liars but places like Hacker News are teeming with this enthusiast type.

Oh this blog is dangerous, I might be hear for days

Ezra Klein is the biggest mark on earth. His newest podcast description starts with:

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.

Oh, that's what the researchers tell you? Cool cool, no need to hedge any further than that, they're experts after all.

Read here a worthwhile deconstruction of Hanania's bullshit by John Ganz: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/enough

Bari Weiss, IDW star, founder of The Free Press and author of "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" publishes and then approvingly tweets excerpts from not-very-convincingly-ex white supremacist Richard Hanania explaining that

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it's no longer in the opposition.

Quite uncharacteristically, she deleted her tweet in shame, but not before our friend TracingWoodgrains signal boosted it, adding "Excellent, timely article from Hanania." His favorite excerpt, unsurprisingly, is Hanania patiently explaining that open Nazism is not "a winning political strategy." Better to insinuate your racism with sophistication!

Shortly after, realizing he needed to even out his light criticism of his fascist comrades, Woodgrains posted about "vile populism to right of me, vile populism to left of me", with the latter being the Luigi fandom (no citation that this is leftist, and contrary to the writings of Luigi). To his mind the latter is worse "because there is a vanishingly short path between it and more political murders in the short-term future", whereas open Nazism at the highest levels of the American conservative movement doesn't hurt anyone [important].

Woodgrains and fans are taking a victory lap now for getting Vox to take up one of their anti-diversity memes, claiming that FAA endangered lives by adding a biographical assessment to their application process: https://www.vox.com/politics/399804/trump-dei-democrats-faa

Excellent work. These pseudonymous post-liberal Nazis creep me the hell out.

I've used this before: https://song.link/i/1169243537

True Anon podcast (began with dissecting the Jeffrey Epstein case) goes deep on Luigi, his shooting, and his grey tribe ideological background. https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-425-blue-118079355

Post from July, tweet from today:

It’s easy to forget that Scottstar Codex just makes shit up, but what the fuck “dynamic” is he talking about? He’s describing this like a recurring pattern and not an addled fever dream

There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?”

Embarrassing to be this uninformed about such a high profile issue, no less that you're choosing to write about derisively.

• https://xcancel.com/js_thrill/status/1823351942896062910
• https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally (I ain't reading all that)

Honestly not the most succinct guidance, but here's an Amerocentric style guide: https://styleguide.transjournalists.org/#neutral-health-terms

Somehow he makes it sound even more misanthropic

Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I've found it impossible to share threads without.

I don't know about "magically immediately" (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you don't have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.

She's listened to anecdotes "about kids who are like my kids" (👀👀👀), and that's quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.

Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694

Well, you know better than me, because I've never not used them together.

How do you, for example, invite people to things? Does your calendar just send an ICS attachment to Proton on SMTP? How do you RSVP for other people's invites? Do you download the event to your calendar and separately respond in proton? Do you get updates in the calendar app about other people's RSVP status, or just emails?

IMO you gotta consider the email and calendar functions as inseparable, whereas the rest of the Google bundle can be teased apart. Privacy Guides is perhaps a bit too stingy with their recommendations, but at minimum they give you a lot of food for thought when they lay out their criteria:

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/calendar/

Yeah, and applying the Yggy rubric, I'd bet that he started earlier, he posted more consistently, and he didn't let ignorance of a subject or even mockery of past failures slow him down.*

And if there are a few other rats with more hustle that he's overshadowed, well sure give him some points for talent, and a few more for luck.

• He did famously quit when the NYT made clear they were doing a real profile on him instead of PR puffery, but he couldn't stay away long.