fnix

joined 1 year ago
[–] fnix@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

A generous interpretation may be that writing music in the context of the modern music industry may indeed be something that’s creatively unsatisfying for composers, but the solutions to that have nothing to do with magical tech-fixes and everything to do with politics, which is of course anathema to these types. What dumb times we live in.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

Ah, the Image Upload Protocol must have gone woke.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (8 children)

I've never heard of anyone describing 1984 that way, could you elaborate on your points or link to some analysis?

[–] fnix@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago

Someone else said it, but for someone completely accustomed to a life of easy privilege, having it suddenly disappear can be utterly intolerable.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You should read the article first.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago

Indeed an amazing piece of journalism, a gripping read throughout! Thanks for the share.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I feel like you’re just going offtopic here. I mean, poverty around the world may be down for reasons that have nothing to do with what Silicon Valley is peddling; the article specifically criticizes the latter’s particular “tech utopia” vision of the future and not what was written up in the UN Millennium Development Goals.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago

Testing for genetic defects is very different from the Gattaca-premise of most everything about a person being genetically deterministic, with society ordered around that notion. My point was that such a setting is likely inherently impossible, since “heritability” doesn’t work like that; the most techbros can do is LARP at it, which, granted, can be very dangerous on its own – the fact that race is a social construct doesn’t preclude racism and so on. But there’s no need to get frightened by science fiction when science facts tell a different story.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Well, in the same way that Mars colonies are here now. Techbros with more money than sense throwing it at things with futuristic aesthetics doesn’t make them real.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago

Aren’t you supposed to try to hide your psychopathic instincts? I wonder if he’s knowingly bullshitting or if he’s truly gotten high on his own supply.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:

If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.

Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.

What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:

What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”

 

Thank you sir, I didn’t know the way to fix ailing welfare states was to make ChatGPT available to all.

It is truly the ultimate technofix.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That is high praise indeed, but I believe the good mayor has yet to make clear to everyone that, as an acausal manifestation of the godhead, self-driving cars serve to remind us to spend at least an hour a day in silent contemplation over how to bring ASI into existence, lest one should incure the Serpent's eternal wrath in the Simulation.

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