sc_griffith

joined 2 years ago
[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it's an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one's own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.

more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there's a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you've experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like "brain poison" which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

my experience has been that it's actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.

all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.

update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users

update update update: actually they didn't do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 1 points 1 week ago

Ok, lot to respond to here. I'm familiar with the relevant mathematics.

First, I think it's clear from the litany of failed attempts that you can't write down a finite set of rules that tells us what is true about the world. At least to me, it's also intuitively clear that you can't write down such a set of rules. That is not, without considerable auxiliary claims at least, a consequence of gödel's incompleteness theorem, nor does gödel's incompleteness theorem follow from it.

The essential issue here is that the incompleteness theorem deals with formal statements and formal reasoning in formal languages. There is a significant gap between the perfectly acceptable reasoning we use every day to understand the world around us, which if it can be written down at all often requires us to use informal language, and the sort of thing the incompleteness theorem addresses. There are real philosophical claims to be made and argued, which in at least implicit form go far back and have yet to be pinned down. For example, the sorites paradox can be understood as an (informal) proof that induction can fail in informal arguments. The whole thing, rather than being clarified, becomes more and more hopelessly complex the more one thinks about it.

I agree that inasmuch as objectivism pretends to formality it makes itself vulnerable to mathematical theorems, and surely would evaporate on contact with them. But the failure of the pretense to formality itself renders the issue moot.

Second, the question of what is or is not a "consequence" of this or that theorem is, given the nature of implication, a little difficult to pin down in borderline cases (are not all theorems a consequence of "T -> T"?). I'm perfectly fine with calling cantor's theorem, the halting theorem, the incompleteness theorem, etc instances of lawvere's fixed point theorem. But there is significant work required to take the hypotheses of some of these types of theorems and maneuver things into such a position as to apply the FPT. So I don't think it's a consensus opinion.

Third, if we want to describe a postmodern movement in mathematics, while I'm not sure about the dates, I get what you're going for and it makes sense to me. But I think the description you're putting forth here gives way too much weight to theorems. The movement toward a post-modern sensibility is imo much more marked by a movement toward guiltlessly abstract definitions and axioms. Consider the centuries of the torment that mathematicians experienced trying to justify or explain what negative numbers or complex numbers really are. In contrast, in the 20th century one has the definition of a scheme in algebraic geometry, a kind of space characterized by functions on it which are not really functions and which can be 0 at every point and yet not the zero function. What is the meaning of such a thing? Well, it is up to the individual mathematician to accept their own metaphors explaining that matter. Totally unthinkable a century prior. Examples of this sort of thing abound (for example, test functions in functional analysis). The movement toward such things was doubtless urged on by the impossibility theorems you refer to but goes far beyond them and is far more impactful imo.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

ah fuck, man. reddit.com/r/therapyGPT if you want to ruin your day

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

unfortunately i don't think there's any way to communicate how significant the gap is without coming off as condescending or churlish. but like qaa is probably my favorite podcast and i too am tormented by this

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

that is who we reached out to. i think rat material would fit extremely well with what they've got going on and represents a significant gap in their current coverage

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632

this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a "gender centrist" psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one

on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there's basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼

 

archive link: https://archive.ph/ONKkm

contextualizes the topic beautifully. you might learn a lot about how american racism relates to capital and art from this article

highlight: most of these guys are into classical art fascism but one of them, a bitcoin guy looking to build a 450 foot tall statue of prometheus, appears to be specifically into italian fascism. his favorite aesthetic is futurism and he hired a futurist sculptor with this "manifesto" on his website:

a long sequence of bullet points about vigor in art and promoting harmony

 

i haven't played magic the gathering in ages but i still follow it for some reason. if you're not checked in with the game, here's what's been going on in recent years: it's been enshittifying. i'm fascinated by when gacha games (which this essentially is) start putting the screws to players. here are some of the ways it's gone down

  • the game used to have rigorous processes for managing balance, processes which sometimes failed spectacularly, but held up most of the time. empirically, that's pretty much gone. almost all of the cards that have ever been banned in the standard format have come from the last several years, and they printed a mechanic so broken that they errata'd it to cost more. to be clear, this is a game that is played with physical cards that the text can't be changed on. the situation was so dire that they just said "ok everyone should know, ignore the text on the cards, they are too broken the way we made them."
  • they thought a bit about how the majority of their playerbase wasn't playing the somewhat competitive 1 vs 1 style the game was originally designed for. instead, most people play several person free for all formats, in particular these days a format called commander. so they've been absolutely shredding these people's wallets and ruining their games by designing rare cards specifically to end up being powerful in commander. recently they printed a commander card so busted in various formats that the former friend of mine who designed it ended up falling on his sword, writing an extremely apologetic essay about how he personally fucked up by letting it slip through.
  • there's a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven't got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn't make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
  • they found out that the more cards they come out with, the more cards they sell, so they've just been cranking out designs at greater and greater volume. at any given time there is a massive chunk of cards that are about to hit the shelves, and which they're 'teasing' and fomoing players about. the game is about 30 years old and they've been hitting a pace of printing something like 10% to 15% of all cards ever, every year.
  • every once in a while they release joke sets, with weird or silly mechanics like having to yell things or tearing up cards. generally, these cards are not allowed in semi competitive play. well, they thought the most recent one would sell better if that wasn't the case, so they marked as many of these cards as they could as being tournament legal (but to keep the outcry tamped down, not in their standard format). one of these cards in particular, a goblin that makes you put stickers on things, was so miserable to have in tournament play that they ended up backtracking and banning all the joke cards.
  • they found out they could make a big chunk of money by ditching their own setting and making cards for licensed IPs. they've been printing ever increasing numbers of cards themed around everything from the walking dead to fortnite to marvel to street fighter to spongebob, which sell like hotcakes. people who are invested in the style and theme of magic the gathering aren't super pleased. again, to placate the haters, these cards are not allowed in the standard competitive format, giving people who want to do wizard shit a refuge.

the last bullet point brings us to today: just kidding, frog boiled, you will now have captain america and kefka fighting each other at your table whether you like it or not. reactions are not entirely positive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/

something that's quite interesting to me is how few people i've seen bootlick for wizards of the coast in recent years. i've looked at reactions to other games enshittifying and always saw lots of defenders of the company in charge, with four lines of attack being most common:

  • they have to put bread on the table
  • whew i know this seems bad but i would be ok with it if they just gave us 2% more crumbs. it's sooooo close to the right level of abuse
  • stop being poor
  • bro, just vote with your dollar bro

i've been seeing very little of that in regards to mtg. some people have denied the pot was getting warmer, but mostly, people have just turned into haters. not sure why; perhaps it has to do with the small scale social aspect of magic. if you're playing marvel snap and having the blood drained out of your neck, you don't really have a group of specific people you're experiencing that in concert with; with mtg you do. it could be the strength of small scale personal ties that both keeps people invested in this game, and makes people angry at how that investment is being treated

unfortunately i don't see any reason that this anger is likely to put a stop to things. after all, arch-enshittifier facebook is still making ultrabucks, despite having destroyed its reputation on every possible level and despite constantly enraging its users. you can do horrible things to people and just coast! it works!

EDIT: this is election relevant btw https://awful.systems/comment/5086076

 

- curtis yarvin

 

"subreddit rules. Speak pro-ai thoughts freely."

DefendingAIArt is a subreddit run by mod "Trippy-Worlds," who also runs the debate sister subreddit AIWars. Some poking around made clear that AIWars is perfectly fine with having overt Nazis around, for example a guy with heil hitler in his name who accuses others of lying because they are "spiritually jewish." So we're off to a great start.

the first thing that drew my eye was this post from a would be employer:

My hobby is making games. Every artist have spoken to regarding my current project has rejected currency in exchange for referencing Al-made images.

not really clear what the title means, but this person seems to have had a string of encounters with the most based artists of all time.

Has anyone experienced this? They see Al work and lose their mind, some even have the nads to expect to get a pay multiplier to 'compensate" for the "theft" like my surname is fucking Altman. Like, bro, I can barely afford your highly- accomplished and talented ass and would be doing it for myself if had your skillset, yet you reject my money with prejudice because pushed my shitty programmer art a bit further with a piece of software which can't even use to a fraction of its full potential? That's a greeeeeeeeaaa way to convince me to keep your artstation username out of my prompts to public models, even if believe that particular spirit of behavior should be illegal

also claims to have been called "racial and gender slurs" for using ai art and that he was "kicked out of 20 groups" and some other things. idk what to tell this guy, it legitimately does suck that wealthy people have the money to pay for lots of art and the rest of us don't

Could we Ban the "No Al" Symbol? Someone proposed an idea to me: why not gather evidence and present it to the authorities who prohibited the display of the Swastika and other hate symbols? I was impressed by this suggestion. After researching, I found out that there are organizations that can categorize it as illegal if we can show evidence of the harm it has caused. I believe we can unite people, including artists who have suffered due to false accusations by anti-Al rioters, to support this cause. If we all sign a petition, we can ban the symbol, which would prevent its misuse on platforms like DeviantArt and stop the spread of misinformation. Would you support this initiative? Would you sign to end ignorance and compel them to advocate for fair regulations for Al, ensuring that nobody has to encounter this symbol and that those who use it for malicious purposes find no refuge?Or is it just not possible? Let's discuss.

I really enjoyed browsing around this subreddit, and a big part of that was seeing how much the stigma around AI gets to people who want to use it. pouring contempt on this stuff is good for the world

the above guy would like to know what combination of buttons to press to counter the "that just sounds like stealing from artists" attack. a commenter leaps in to help and immediately impales himself:

'just block and move on' 'these are my real life friends' 'oh...'

you hate to see it. another commenter points out that well ... maybe these people just aren't your friends

'antis will always just stab you in the back'

to close out, an example of fearmongering:

So I made a post on a sub with a rule against Alart and the Auto-mod does this...I'm assuming its fearmongering right? automod: Your comments and posts are being sold by Reddit to Google to train Al. You cannot opt out.

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