Mar 23

Melville

Geez, I must be really horrible then because I won’t have sex with someone if they are unable to tell the difference between “your” and “you’re” while writing. And if they don’t know how to pet a cat properly, they are right out.

Fat Acceptance people…what the fuck.

ML7iXV

The above is why I say that the fat acceptance community and the MRAs/redpillers are almost identical. Both possess huge sexual entitlement, believe normal human actions are oppressing them and both promote and benefit from rape culture.

Mar 22

False dreams and blasted reality

Schengen and mass immigration to Europe is effectively over with the latest attacks on Brussels.

The dream of integration and multi-culti bliss is dead. It was a false dream anyway and thus never really alive. Tolerance and intolerance cannot co-exist for long, and radical Islam (and even much of “moderate” Islam) is simply not compatible with Western values. That this was possible was something only academics cloistered away on college campuses with little contact with the real world ever could have believed, but it turns out that dream has real consequences on actual people.

Migrant flows will be staunched. Europe might yet be smart enough to stop stabbing itself in the heart. Maybe.

(Interesting fact about bomb blasts I learned in the army: if you are in the blast radius but no shrapnel strikes you, you can be relatively unharmed but the blast often blows your clothes and shoes clean off — thus the woman in the photo at the top. She probably has a severe concussion, though.)

Mar 21

STP

Aye, telling someone that they are “privileged” when they live in a shithole trailer park with no job and no prospects only makes them hate you. I know — been there, done that. Lived in a shithole trailer park, that is.

Do not tell me, or them, that they are “privileged.” Yes, it is better to be poor and white than poor and black, and better to be a poor white man than a poor white woman, but people who are in pain do not react well to some smug, upper-middle-class jerk telling them they are privileged when their lives are clearly terrible.

I don’t think they most people who live in those situations think their lives are terrible. Hedonic adjustment and all that. But people in those situations know for sure they are not getting a fair shake. Pretending that they have some sort of great privilege because they are a sliver better off than someone who has also gotten the shaft in life just doesn’t help anything at all — other than to make some smug liberal asshole feel better.

Mar 21

Virtue

From a Stoic point of view, a God with whom you trade in virtue to obtain eternal favors wouldn’t be worth a prayer. For somebody like Marcus [Aurelius], virtue’s value lay precisely in its being a gamble, not an investment.

-Joseph Brodsky, “Homage to Marcus Aurelius”

Mar 20

Dissonance

Delusional liberals claim that Obama had absolutely no choice save to coddle and resuscitate the big banks, no alternative but to forever enshrine the insurance companies as the arbiters of the health of Americans, that he just couldn’t help it being the powerless little infant that he was when the big mean banks and insurers broke into the Oval Office and spanked him for being such a bad boy until he bawled and relented and gave them all they wanted and more.

But he appointed Larry Summers secretary of the treasury in the first days of his presidency, when he had every choice in the world. Obama had complete discretion, with Democrat majorities in Congress, a new administration and the largest crisis since 1929. He just didn’t want to do what was right.

“Liberals” chant to themselves the hogwash and fibbery above about Obama’s choicelessness to mask their deep disappointment and their extreme cognitive dissonance, all to have some explanation for having made such a bad choice themselves. It’s mental self-protection, believing that the president had and has no power at all (despite all the immense and overarching power they ascribed to George W. Bush).

The simple fact is that Obama could have done things much differently. He did not because he simply didn’t want to. This was clear from the very beginning of his presidency.

We could have had a New New Deal. That’s a simple fact. But we got the Same Old Deal, Even Harder.

And yes, dumbass liberals, that was a deliberate choice.

Mar 20

Fielding it

It’s really cool when you see a major leader of a field have the same ideas that you do — as in this article by David Deutsch about AGI and computation.

His ideas are much the same as what I’ve also concluded from observing the field of AGI and computation closely for twenty years. Of course, he did the work — I just read a lot of papers, and cog-sci of all sorts and generated ideas therefrom.

Right now we are in the “phlogiston” and “ether” stage of AI (I will use them interchangeably here). Most of the math-obsessed practitioners of the field think that writing better algorithms will get you to AI. But it won’t. It can’t. It’s barely even a start, just like no matter how large an engine you strap to a John Deere tractor it will never be a spacecraft. But a lot of these people aren’t even trying to strap rockets to a tractor — no, they are doing the equivalent of writing “Spaceship, For Real. Like For Really Real” on the side of the tractor and then calling it done.

We’ve probably had adequate hardware to build a true AI for twenty years at least now. Hardware is not the problem. The problem is we have no idea at all what we’re doing. And probably never will, for we will never create AI. Not directly, anyway.

But we will create the conditions for it to actualize itself.

A new genesis, if you will. Evolution of algorithms, of perhaps even self-constructing AIs in the physical world.

We’ll get there. But it mostly won’t be us.

Mar 19

Intelligence as curse and blessing

It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away.

For me, it’s because it’s extremely difficult to talk to someone when they legitimately know much, much less than you do about nearly everything. Politesse only takes you so far — there has to be some possible connection.

What most people believe and “know” is some agglomeration of urban legends, myths, lies and half-lies they saw on CNN (or worse, Fox) and so we aren’t even standing on the same foundation. There is just nothing to talk about besides the weather and that gets old quickly (though I am not opposed to small talk).

Beyond a certain level, talking to most people is just painful for the reasons mentioned above. They are interrupting more important things I could be doing. And in my experience, about 99.5% of people fit this profile, so my lack of social desire has grown from this observation.

Mar 18

Conditions

We already knew Tumblr is filled with whiny babies and their pustulant pestilence, but recently this woman’s photo was removed for being “triggering.”

Unlike 99% of fat people with their “conditions,” she does have a reason she’s a bit underweight — she just got discharged from the hospital after suffering a major illness.

Why aren’t the obese’s photos reported as “triggering” and “encouraging an unhealthy lifestyle?” Because they should be.

The woman was attempting to model a dress she was pondering buying. My verdict is that it’s a cute dress, but that Tumblr is full of ninnies and idiots.