Just reminds me of this:

https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/06/19/britains-conservatives-are-losing-as-they-governed-meekly

Like, if the current world isn’t giving you sufficient free reign to change the world with your money then the problem isn’t that you need more freedom the problem is that you keep demanding even more power.

Dumpster Fire Elemental?

C:// Monkey?

NPNC (Nonplayer Noncharacter)

It’s weirdly open about its nostalgia for the good old days when you could throw around racial slurs and watch porn at work with no consequences.

I’m also glad to see that whatever incremental improvements have been made the system is still unable to consistently do hands.

Attempt 2 got all the way to the part about Scott before I had to come up for air.

• The defense of Wikipedia’s preference for policy over basic human decency in the Chelsea Manning name change was once again left entirely implicit.

• This is probably for the best because otherwise David’s insistence on reliable sources over letting LWers do their own hagiography on Wikipedia’s letterhead is much harder to criticize.

• Is Neoreaction: a Basilisk a bit of a woozle/citogenesis? Maybe? But are we going to argue about the central factual claims it makes? Nope. There’s no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article. I swear, you build ten thousand bridges and nobody cares but you repeatedly speak favorably of actual fascist’s attitudes on race science on your large and influential platform and everyone loses their minds.

Edit because man who can remember how to do formatting?

On one hand, being here means that I’ve had to learn to parse this description in order to understand what we’re talking about. On the other hand now that I have this cursed knowledge I’m pretty sure my presence here is necessary for my continued mental health, such as it is.

This must be how people end up in one of those outer-god-summoning cults.

I tried to actually put it to the tune but it only barely scans, to say nothing of how impossible to follow it is if you dont already know the story. If you’re going to express your terminally online frustration through a lousy parody song I’m going to insist that you put in the effort to do either the parody part or the song part well.

Yeah, I always hated the part of art and storytelling where there was always a tiny and sometimes misshapen window into the human soul there. Better to do away with that and replace it with an endless parade of #sponsoredcontent. That way there’s no risk of suddenly developing empathy or accidentally connecting with the people I’m exploiting as a billionaire VC.

I’m always shocked to see someone to Milkshake Duck themselves this hard within a single post.

I wonder if anyone has worked out an economic model that treats this kind of lockup as though the money had been just literally lit on fire. Be interesting to see what that does to the money supply and whether it could help discredit the monetarist position on inflation.

You know, I would expect the at-a-glance symbolic information to be more useful just from sheer accessibility. But I never would have expected them to be more accurate and rigorous than the detailed safety sheets.

See, in StarCraft we would just say that the meta is evolving in order to accommodate this new strategy. Maybe Go needs to take a page from newer games in how these things are discussed.

In addition to the lack of fascism, I think that the attitude towards shitposting here creates a much healthier social environment. Like, your shitpost may serve to inspire a serious comment but you’re also allowed to just spout off because you think it’s funny or you need to get a emotional response out of your body or whatever.

Someone has to post the Elizabeth Sandifer essay and I guess it’s my turn:

https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method

It’s also hilarious because literally thirty seconds actually skimming buttcoin on reddit would have turned up that exact argument and its canonical rebuttals. Like, if he had wanted to actually engage with the central premise there (or on scientific racism, fascism, cults of personality, journalistic standards, etc) the necessary context and argument were right goddamn there.

I’m not sure what the second paragraph in reply A is referring to but my gut says it’s going to make me deeply sad as someone who has even the tiniest amount of empathy for trans kids.

I got as far as “he says crypto is bad but also didn’t make any money in crypto!” before I couldn’t go any farther. Up until that point the author was at least doing a pretty competent job of using negative space (i.e. not engaging with the specific issues of racism, cult of personality, etc.) and using sufficiently boring prose to avoid seeming completely insane.

I’ve definitely seen some impressive machine learning-based outcomes (definitely fucking up the technical details here) but there’s a world of difference between a system trained to play StarCraft and a system trained to predict the next bit of text.

There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you’d find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.

Hah! You think they actually put in place the infrastructure needed to support this asinine policy. If there aren’t enough people to get the affidavits signed then those kids can’t go expose themselves to dangerous ideas, presumably including “trans people exist” and “slavery was bad, actually”.

See also voter ID laws that just happen to come into effect as the DMV offices in poor and/or black neighborhoods close down. If they make it a sufficient pain in the ass they don’t have to take the legal or political flak for outright banning it.