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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • Hates - no. But giving off the impression of being weird is not that hard. I’m certain quite a few people would believe something like this about me purely due to being a sunlight-avoiding wimp bad with words (in verbal conversations).

    So due process is a good thing. For each Andrew Tate there are a few dozens at least of people whom “the society” would eagerly accuse simply because of being asocial and weird. Like that folk psychology with red flags, manipulations and other shit. People practicing it can wound an autist. But I seriously doubt those would help them avoid a serial maniac.





  • Things were better because people would “go to a different brand” and sue morons more often. They’d also be more confident of their own knowledge in various technical things.

    Things becoming more complex was used to gaslight a lot of people into questioning their own knowledge about what they need. Such gaslighting first and foremost works via people being ashamed to be stupid and pretending they know it all.

    Most (even technical) people are like this - they feel that they don’t understand the world around them, it’s stressing, spying, rigged, chaotic in the wrong places and ordered in the wrong places, - but they are ashamed and pretend. And what they pretend to think specifically and what they try to follow is communicated to them via ads, via movies, via corporate bullshit. Because they have nothing else to turn to.

    It’s a bit similar to the way some autistic people do imitation - they too imitate ads and movies more than people around them (well, maybe also imitate people they are romantically attracted to, or those they consider cool).

    Or to the way state propaganda works in atomized societies - people don’t have good horizontal ties, but pretend to have them, while taking the material from what they hear on TV.

    20 years ago would you use something like an Android phone with no buttons or would you crush it with a hammer? Would you use something like Windows 10 or would you ignore that crap? Would you buy a car that spies after you?




  • In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.

    Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).

    That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.

    Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.

    It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.

    That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.

    People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.

    It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.

    You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?

    I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.



  • I regularly think and post conspiracy theory thoughts about why the “AI” is such a hype. And in line with them a certain kind of people seem to think that reality doesn’t matter, because those who control the present control the past and the future. That is, they think that controlling the discourse can replace controlling the reality. The issue with that is that whether a bomb is set, whether a boat is sea-worthy, whether a bridge will fall is not defined by discourse.


  • I’ve written something vague in another place in this thread which seemed a good enough argument. But I didn’t expect that someone is going to link a literal scientific publication in the same very direction. Thank you, sometimes arguing in the Web is not a waste of time.

    EDIT: Have finished reading it. Started thinking it was the same argument, in the middle got confused, in the end realized that yes, it’s the same argument, but explained well by a smarter person. A very cool article, and fully understandable for a random Lemming at that.


  • If we remove the outside resistance, no, just as likely simply because of being of genocidal species.

    If we don’t, then being genocided yourself and becoming treated specially because of that does, yes.

    First, because of being treated specially. Second, because of those likely to commit genocide supporting you to minimize their PR expenses, and thus your friends and allies being genocidal.

    Israel’s allies are like US and Germany, which, BTW, has made such notable apologetic actions and reparations only in case of the Holocaust, - they haven’t done anything except the official apology in case of Herero genocide, and their stance on the Armenian genocide was just recognizing it without criminalizing denial, and with very little attention to German Empire’s role in organizing it (basically German military advisors in the Ottoman Empire were involved in this as much as they were in actual warfare).

    I don’t think I need to say anything about US, even the political status of Native Americans in the US could be something better.

    But Israel is also friendly with Turkey - Israel has the PR advantage of being a genocide survivor nation, and Turkey has a resources and strategic position advantage of unpunished genocide perpetrator nation. One needs the resources help, another needs the PR help. They satisfy each other’s needs, and really a lot of basic goods in Israel are actually produced in Turkey. Even some military stuff.

    Strangely enough it’s the same with Germany - they are clutching at every opportunity to publicly support Israel, and wave that support against anything bad they do. “We are friendlier with Israel than you” is their indulgence against anything.

    This is, of course, solvable in the balancing way - Israel’s Holocaust PR should be universally shunned and condemned, their agent network investigated, exposed and controlled, and their military kicked out of Palestine, and Turkey should be kicked out with carpet bombings out of Western Armenia, Pontus, Assyria and Cilicia. It takes resources, like everything else. But the reward is huge for those of us not making money on suffering.

    The problem is the psychopatic way geopolitics work currently. Peaceful West Asia, less corrupt\poor Latin America, less uneducated\poor sub-Saharan Africa could make our whole world far richer and pleasant to live in. But it would definitely change all the elites and ways of existence of currently powerful countries.