And a Quarian who went to business school

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric…

Hat tip to this reply showcasing a beautiful example of image gen. Very éthiccal(athiccal?) technology.

I mean the Kharkiv offensive of 2023 showed us how effective tractors can be in capturing heavier-armored vehicles in certain situations.

Oh wait, there’s one! How could I miss it when it’s got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

It’s almost like when despots funnel oil money into maintaining power and self-aggrandizing megaprojects instead of basic public services you don’t see the “lots of education” part kicking in.

Meanwhile, if there are these outliers where low IQ didn’t prevent people from getting wealthy and there isn’t some kind of political economy reason for it, doesn’t that undermine the value of IQ as a metric? Like, you and I know that IQ is garbage but it’s worth noting how “maybe IQ is just garbage” is always floating at the edge of their reasoning.

Read through the whole affair and just had to keep shaking my head the whole way through. Like, they’re at least capable of pretending to disavow the Nazis and fundies who follow the same pro-kid-having definitely-not-eugenics ideas. And they talk about some of the real obstacles or having kids; raising a child and setting them up for something resembling success is expensive and hard and the world doesn’t exactly feel like it’s on an upwards trajectory. But rather than look at those problems in their own right and try to actually make living cheaper or easier for people in ways that would make having kids more viable and more rewarding (How long are you at the office? How much time and energy do you have when you get home?), these upper-class twits of their generation are trying to convince the few people for whom those aren’t as serious problems that they should have kids. Like, I’m all in favor of improving reproductive health and that kind of technology but we are nowhere near the point where that’s going to make a population-level impact on demographics. Like, they’re out here trying to figure out if they can make the run to third base when they’ve only just brained the mascot with a foul ball. Solve the actual problem in front of us first.

‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says.

So clearly the best action is to constantly tell everyone how great kids are and that they should totally have them. Because that solves the problem of people wanting kids they don’t/can’t have. I try to read even our designated sneer fodder in good faith but I can’t understand why anyone thinks these people are at all intelligent beyond the “only slightly less than average” level. I thought Good Will Hunting taught everyone the difference between smart and rich, but maybe that was just me.

The continued polytopia mentions just keep reminding me of this take from Dave Karpf. Like, he’s not talking about incredibly deep games here (no offense to the people who love them) and in the context of him trying to take on the reigns of Presidentissimo or whatever all the arguing and doubting about his gamer cred is obscuring the arguments over how weird this is to try and focus on. Like, if he was trying to claim he was a Go all-star or something that would be one thing. Even Chess has tradition behind it, even if it’s actual utility for learning more general strategic thinking is more questionable. But Polytopia and Diablo? Really? If we did start apportioning political power to whoever can execute a basic strategy while clicking as fast as possible I think we’d all be bowing down to God-Emperor Flash or something.

Anyways, even if we put my unearned strategy gaming elitism aside this is such a dumb argument to be having in the first place and I don’t know that I can forgive Elon for making it part of the problem.

My gut says that liquidity in this context means “making sure that there are tokens available to purchase for initial buyers” or in other words listing them on the market instead of distributing them at initial purchase price.

Pretty sure there’s gonna be a contract somewhere that defines raw intelligence as “the amount of money you make for OpenAI.”

If only someone had written a pretty interesting case study in how you can use valid-looking data to prove anything, even the existence of psychic powers. And people have been trying to scientifically justify racism for just about as long as the scientific method has been a thing, while studying psychic powers didn’t really pick up until the latter half of the 20th century.

I’m sure I’m not the first to note it, but there is a kind of irony in Scott and the gang using such a clear example of a motte-and-bailey argument (got to find a better phrase for that. Maybe some pithy reference to Patton at Calais to maintain the history theme? Inflatable Tank Defense?) in regards to IQ. When talking among friends they treat IQ tests like they are a strong correlate with innate intelligence, no caveats. As such IQ test scores are a reason to ignore environmental factors and not bother investing in equity-minded interventions. But when someone makes the obviously racist conclusion too visible, the argument shifts to be about how actually the correlations between IQ and environmental factors are obvious and really this supports anti racism. It’s a straightforward form of decontextualization that relies on completely ignoring the entire history and contemporary arguments around IQ to defends a single data point. Of course once everyone agrees with that data point they can go right back to the wildly racist nonsense that they were doing in the first place.

I don’t think the problem is that it all sounds the same as much as it is that there is a tension in a lot of artists to decide where to aim on the spectrum from their own pure artistic vision to the most immediately marketable thing. It’s easy to romanticize throwing your art into the void and praying that it resonates with just one other human soul, but if you’re trying to be a professional then your ability to get food is resting on being able to find enough of an audience that you can get some kind of monetization. It can be a difficult balance to find depending on what kind of art you’re driven to produce.

But how are we supposed to grift our absurd ideology into respectability without having a stately English manor to entertain people in??

There’s something to be said here about the general disconnect between craft and productivity; craft being the art of doing a thing well and productivity being the act of creating a product efficiently. Craft is innately satisfying, particularly when the task is difficult or finicky. However, those same circumstances are toxic to productivity because working through problems takes time and effort. It requires craftsmanship. But if you cut out the need for craftsmanship by sanding off those finicky bits you can increase productivity massively, at the cost of replacing skilled and satisfied craftsmen with immiserated labor drones. This may be economically valuable in terms of raw GDP but I don’t know that it’s spiritually or societally sustainable and I honestly suspect that the current reactionary moment is tied to this at least in part. So naturally the moneyed classes are using generative AI to push even farther down the productivity path as though that’s going to solve the underlying problem. Like, in my sci-fi version of this story it either ends with apocalyptic revolution or the extermination of the human need to have a soul or whatever. And I’m pretty sure that the a16z crowd would unironically prefer the latter.

I mean, I would put DF pretty high up on the list of software projects that possibly contain some serious paragraph-in-every-textbook-forever type of comp sci advancement.

Paul I am begging you to actually write out a fucking timeline. Apparently woke started in the 80s in universities when the (white) civil rights protestors of the 70s got tenure in the 60s, as an inevitable and predictable extension of political correctness in the 90s. From the title you’re obviously going to indulge the conservative fantasy that “wokeness” is a coherent thing rather than a political tool to dismiss calls for action to actually address blatant injustice. But if you’re going to bullshit me, at least do it competently and have an internally consistent narrative that allows for the natural passage of time.

The fact that DNS is “Domain Name Protocol” rather than the actual acronym (Domain Name System) is baffling and maddening.

Well obviously they can’t be the money protocol, whatever that even means. Surely something like FIX would be the closest thing to an actual protocol for money, as opposed to a system.