Remember seeing this in a book as a kid and not knowing if it was real or not. Must have been a Disney-themed encyclopedia I think.
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I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.
I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.
I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?
Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.
I have to get the fuck out of corporate.
I have a lot of 90s - aughts edutainment stuff that might be of interest to some people in my life. This might be a half decent way to preserve my old PC library for this stuff. I feel like virtual machines are pretty hit and miss and non-technical people don’t seem to enjoy messing around with them
They’re hit or miss. They aggregate a lot of the important tech news, but frankly, I wouldn’t trust them for anything important like figuring out what size and alloy of meat cleaver is the best for changing the SSD in my computer.
I played pirated versions for years until I got someone to buy me a gift card (from the grocery store!) from the US. Even if I wanted to pay digitally, that wasn’t an option at the time where I am. This was pre-acquisition I think. Having a proper account made things like playing the modded game much easier to manage. I still play it over a decade later so I can’t complain about buyer’s remorse. And I don’t even play multiplayer.
The first hit being free is not a bad business model at all. I don’t know how intentional it is though. Especially nowadays where every company is somehow even more viciously hellbent on squeezing anything they can.
Huh. A pen and paper little puzzle format that I’ve never seen before.
I wonder what this whole category of games is even called. Used to see them in things like kids magazines mostly.
I saw that news bit too! I thought of our exchange immediately. Hope you’re keeping well in this hell timeline. This was nice to see in my inbox.
I’m still weighing buying nodes through a third party and setting up solar powered things guerilla style.
The revolution will not be TOS.
Interesting. Thanks for getting back to me. I’ll try to be brief as well.
He helped pull me out of a rightish-wing phase myself. I say rightish because I thought I was being a enlightened centrist liberal. Antifragile made me feel like I was very smart. He didn’t trigger the breakdown and reconstruction of my beliefs, but I got into his stuff at a critical time in my life and I think most of what I read certainly didn’t hurt. But the more I learned about him the more I felt I had to quickly outgrow him (leftward).
I don’t have any links because I don’t use Twitter, but when I looked him up after reading the book and looking into him, I was surprised to see that he was prolific on there. Basically his whole schtick about not obsessing over the news cycle and short term stuff seems more important to me now than ever and he seems to buck that entirely by trying to be a Twitter guy.
Like him, I’m also from Lebanon, I’m also from the same sectarian community. Christian nationalism in Lebanon is a very very specific thing and it’s very different from what you’re used to seeing in the west. Long story short I read him and his public persona as a Christian nationalist influencer. His opinions on language and culture in the context of Lebanon, meat-glued together by “west is best (and as Lebanese Christians, we count as west)” really make me feel like he’s a dangerous influence. I somewhat articulated some thoughts on Lebanese Christian supremacy here, but I understand linking him to it might be hard to do briefly here.
I don’t wish to dox myself but a lot of my acquaintances are researchers of linguistics and he’s been very helpful in boosting the study of our Lebanese dialects, helping them get study participants and stuff. Like too eager. To separate our eloquent language from the barbaric Arabic that the rabble around us uses. In a vacuum it’s fine to be into studying our language, in practice…
There’s an old tweet I remember seeing where someone asks him if it’s okay to say “شكراً” (shukran), which is “thank you” in formal modern standard Arabic. He says no, either use “يسلمو” (yeslamo) or merci (French). The first of these is derived from the old languages and not Arabic, it’s what most people in Christian areas say. If you say it there’s nothing wrong, but if you insist that this one and the French one are more correct than the standard Arabic one most urban Muslims use… it’s a tiny example but it’s the only one I can write with this little context. Going for brevity here, if you can believe it. There’s more examples.
I broadly see him as a “better” or less harmful Peterson for what that’s worth. Maybe to you he’s been a novel critique of capitalism (seems he’s more interested in analyzing it than smashing it though), to me he’s a textbook example of the smarmy “intellectual” I thought I wanted to be. I think he’s a dyed in the wool Lebanese Christian nationalist though and I can’t endorse him for that. I’m sorry I don’t know enough about your culture (or even mine honestly) to build a compelling explanation of what that means. To me, Lebanese Christian nationalism is indivisible from Lebanese Christian supremacy, Islamophobia, and even a begrudging admiration of the Zionist project and a yearning to do something similar. It’s likely he’s not extreme in his views, but he’s also spreading them very far and wide and presenting them alongside pop philosophy.
The Peterson analogy works for me because at the center of their fame is/was a cool jaunt into a topic that feels underdiscussed in the mainstream, and they both have/had a type of charisma that really appeals to some people. Using past tense for the lobster man because his crashout has been very publicly visible and his “credibility” has fallen apart.
I hope this was interesting. And I hope you had a nice hike. I didn’t go for a hike. I made soup for five hours. It came out okay.
Edit: found it
Taleb to me feels like a decently more hinged Peterson with a different set of interesting little ideas that have been extrapolated into a disproportionate reverence.
Discussing pop philosophy on here feels weird enough, but what do you like about the guy? He feels like Ayn Rand if she was made in a lab to appeal to my 19 year old shithead self. I feel like the fact that he feels the need to be a quippy Twitter person is a pretty big indicator that he doesn’t actually believe in any of the big picture thinking that first made me want to go read his work.
I don’t think he’s as insidious, but I don’t trust this guy.
I work with a lot of people who are based in India and I quietly edit out all the cums they insist on writing.
I could just explain to them that most of us only see that assemblage of letters in one context, but I’d really not get into this conversation. So I have to be the cumming police, as it turns out.
Interesting how language drifts. I just wish they’d stop writing cum everywhere, their English is perfectly fine otherwise.
This might be the most I’ve ever used the word, enjoy.
"My method is I read an article about something, you know, and I get convinced that, oh, I gotta have this stuff,” he said. “And then I get it and then six months later I’m still taking it. I don’t remember what the article said. So, I end up with a big crate of vitamins that I’m taking, and I don’t even know why.”
I feel like this is a lot of people’s experience, we all know someone like this. I know that’s not the kind of thing the Lemmy demographic would look very kindly at, but this is a type of person. Some of them are batshit and others just had a lot of bad luck with the field of medicine.
I really feel like if this guy had a kinder worldview and wasn’t genuinely fucking bonkers he would be a much-needed voice that could speak reason to people who have lost their trust in medical science. Instead he’s this. So he isn’t that.
That quote could have come from someone who has come to a good realization about their understanding of health. Okay, you got sold a crate of vitamins big boy. Are you fixed yet?
But I really feel like the only ones who talk nicely to those people are industrial suppliers of snake oil and that just makes the world worse. Especially now that they’re at the wheel.
When I was a kid, every taxi was an old Mercedes. The new ones’ electronics systems seem like they’re purposely designed to be as unnecessarily convoluted as possible with no benefit at all.
Just make a reliable engine that sounds nice and put durable, nice leather on the seats (with a nice cloth option). The irony of describing what I think a luxury car should be on fucking Hexbear of all places is not lost on me, but seriously. Back in the day if you had something nice it meant it could do anything, it meant it was made well, it meant you could use it for years and pass it on to your kids. It meant it could do its service for some rich fuck for a few years and then taxi on mountain roads for 900,000 km.
90% is too generous. 99% of the “features” are gaudy bullshit or offensively impractical gimmicks. My favorite ones are the bullshit eco features. You want to know what’s more sustainable than miserable modern engines? Not manufacturing and shipping and buying a whole ass car.
I don’t even know why I’m this mad. If they made a coaster I couldn’t afford it. But fucks sake. Cars are a marvel of engineering regardless of whether we deface our environment for their access. This upsets me a lot for some reason.
oh this is satire
oh there’s a lot going on. Is twitter really so far gone that this is good satire of the discourse?
oh no no no no
Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.
The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.
Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.
There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon
It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.
None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.
Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.
I used to refuse change at the bakery when I was a kid and would instead pick something out of the stack of pirated PS2 games. Something like two US dollars? Three? Not an egregious sum for my child self to waste every so often. The death of the on the ground piracy culture of the third world really sucks, although those beautifully dodgy TV boxes give me hope for humanity.
Those were the fucking days eh? You either catch a movie on TV or in the cinema, or you get lucky with whatever they’ve got on random counters in random shops. Remember watching schlock? Was that bad for culture? Was it really that bad?
Has Z Lib just been down for a while? I think I remember using it not that long ago
I’m almost certain someone asked a chatbot to list devices “Like a Flipper Zero” and now you’re asked not to bring a specific general purpose computer from an event. I don’t think it’s sinister. I think it’s just stupidity. Now enhanced with a machine that lets you think even less.
That one minute clip reminds me of how much I miss his weirdly hypnotic voice overs.