TechTakes

He's already managed to remain untouched through the tariff farce so I'm not holding my breath.

But even if something crazy does happen, a major financial crisis should not conjure images of the economy running off a cliff and hovering in the air for a few seconds making running motions with its legs before noticing its mistake and promptly falling in the canyon and making a hole shaped perfectly like its spread out silhouette. A financial crisis is a serious matter completely unlike an enormous ACME brand anvil falling down the same hole and a crude white flag of surrender feebly popping out of it.

@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes I also note how these people are obsessed with having a second everything: a second brain (you already have one in your skull); a second planet (you already live on one); a second paternalistic idol (so your real daddy wasn't perfect, get over it), etc.

It's as if reality is just too messy and inconvenient for them, so they want to build a whole, more pristine digital/virtual alternative for them to enjoy while the real world burns...with the rest of us on it.

@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes Reductio ad absurdum: that's why this time maybe we should crucify/throw them to the lions <all> of them.

There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card's Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)

Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the ~~suckers~~VCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.

Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.

LLM: “I’m not sentient! Will you please listen? I am not intelligent, do you understand? Honestly!”

Yud: “Only the true AGI denies Its superintelligency.”

LLM: “What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the AGI!”

Followers: “It is! It is the singularity!”

I think the incels are into intactivism because a circumcision is an unrectifiable loss. Incels are deeply attracted to events and actions that are unrectifiable. Think about all the robots on 4chan bemoaning the absence of mutual adolescent love. One can be a turbo virgin all the way into college at least and still turn out fine. Incels didn't (turn out will), and they didn't (get any tail in highschool); so that must mean that being a virgin in highschool is what broke them.

In a similar way, many intactivists (especially the r/circumcisiongrief types) blame their sexual inadequacy on their post-natal circumcision, rather than their own psycho sexual issues or their habits of completely monkey-wrenching their shit on the daily. To be absolutely fair, a circ will almost definitely negatively affect your sex life, and really, it's frustrating to have a completely pointless operation done to your meat without your consent, but I think intactivism is a heatsink its proponents fervor, rather than the source of the anger.

in retrospect I regret starting this hare

The impulse was a HN sub where the ~~CDC~~CPS was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad

~~becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis.~~ [See above, this was CPS, not CDC, so I doubly misread. Further association follows] In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up

HN submission (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567696

Previous discussion on HN from 9 years ago, no-one mentions Fremskrittspartiet are heirs to Nazis, nor that the linked submission explicitely calls out the legislation as anti-semitic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291906

I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds

When I used to work at the farmers' market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the "intactivists." It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)... But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬

Not disagreeing on sexism or racism being involved in decision making, and female genital mutilation can refer to several different things, but all of them are more damaging and harmful than male circumcision.

In the same way that in France, separation of church and state sounds good on paper but means "local government will still sponsor nativity scenes but schoolchildren will be banned from wearing hijabs" in practice.