It absolutely did. However, the fact that many people clearly haven’t heard of it until now, and that many are being reminded of its existence and raison d’être, is sufficient justification to make this a worthwhile post.

Calling raging against the dying of the fucking light “the anger phase” is defeatist pro-AI propaganda. You assume there will be an acceptance phase. I started at acceptance with google deep dream. Now, I fucking fight. And anyone who reaches your “acceptance” phase has become a meat proxy to the stochastic parrot.

Never slop.

You sound like you would enjoy the book “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. If you haven’t read it, you should! Not because it proves your point, but because it had something to day tangential to your rant.

Also:

3. Their product, being both capable and dangerous, is a useful thing in which governments should definitely invest heavily to smash their enemies, paying consistent subscriptions to continue to keep their “arsenal”
4. These governments must invest even more heavily than other governments, because the AI corps want to engineer the perception of mutually-assured AI destruction, with all sides paying them for the privilege
5. Thus that, should the bubble pop, the government contracts will get them labeled TBTF and given that sweet hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money as a gift for crashing the economy.

Who the fuck is reading this meme and thinking this paints Bush in a positive light? I’m getting sick of replying to the idiots here. The two parts highlighted in the text show that Bush cared only about the optics, and that he thinks that refraining from golfing is a sacrifice he’s made in solidarity with the families of soldiers he sent to die for oil.

Even the fucking picture was specifically selected to make him look like snidely whiplash.

It’s a juxtaposition of two awful presidents, one clearly worse than the other, because he hasn’t even the shame to pretend that he cares, and because his crimes are greater in depth and scope.

Because the selection of a shot showing bush looking like fucking snidely whiplash creeping toward some unsuspecting damsel is insufficient? Because the fact that the entire meme is about how they both play golf to an unhealthy degree rather than actually giving a fuck about the country they purportedly run is insufficient? Because you assume readers have the critical capacity of a potato, and readers can’t tell that bush’s only reason for not playing golf was optics and he worded it as if his forbearance was a sacrifice in solidarity? Give me a break.

If this is apologia, it’s the worst apologia I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen tankies defend the fucking gulag with a greater command of reason than would be shown by someone using this to try to paint Bush in a positive light.

This is juxtaposition, not apologia. There is a scale of awful, and Dubya is objectively on the lesser side relative to the Paedophile President, seditious traitor and inarticulate pissboy that he is. There is no section of the constitution that I know of which he hasn’t violated. Dubya was many of the things which the traitor-in-chief is, and that makes the juxtaposition all the more apt. If they were supposed to be comparing a good president, they’d have picked FDR. Instead, they picked one who was generally considered one of the worst until that point to show that, even when you think you’ve scraped the bottom, someone can still manage to break the bottom of the barrel and scrape the mouldering, fetid carcass of a plague rat off the floor below.

Oh no, what have you done with the twelfth gandalf?!

Except that the ones who have at least two brain cells present their hate under the color of reason, and this is what the rest of them parrot.

By precisely the same logic, the USA isn’t truly capitalist, as there’s no free market! Federal regulations hinder a true capitalist utopia, and so the USA is just a republic trying to establish the conditions of true capitalism. That’s bullshit and you know it. Tell any card-carrying member of the Communist Party of China that they aren’t communist, and let me know how that goes for you.

That’s a hidden No True Scotsman fallacy. The primary superpowers which have historically claimed to be communist were or are authoritarian. Does that mean that they weren’t communist from a purely Marxist perspective? Perhaps, but if the people actually doing the supposed communist revolutions are consistently founding authoritarian states, then it doesn’t matter what you say communism is, or even what Marx said communism is. You should be decrying that those states are misrepresenting what communism is supposed to be. Call them out specifically for not being communist. Don’t fall back on claiming that the person you’re talking to just doesn’t know what communism is. The fact is that saying “I’m a communist” means siding with the people most visible in the world who say “I’m a communist”, unless you specifically distance yourself from those others in some meaningful way, and those others are Soviet Russia and the PRC under the CPC, both totally authoritarian states throughout the majority of their existence.

The flaw in your reasoning is that you are assuming that everybody whom Michelin could hire is a tire expert. Michelin is just as capable of hiring food critics. They hired eminent critics and experts to write travel guides, and when people realised that, “hey, their reviews are actually accurate, because they have incredibly strict criteria on which to base their rating system”, people understandably began to build trust in that system. The fact that Michelin still doesn’t seem to have sold out is why there’s such longevity to it: they have no reason to make their criteria any less strict (quite the opposite, and I’ve never been to a restaurant that was even mentioned in the Michelin guide that wasn’t some of the best food I’ve ever experienced). The title of most eminent food review is theirs to lose, so they can’t afford to betray that, especially in a world with increasingly-ready access to information. There’s nothing that can outmatch the brand loyalty and name recognition.

I think it’s more useful to think of it in terms of a Skinner box. Loot boxes, gacha, and most other mechanics in modern games are all variants of operant conditioning, and doomscrolling is a different, but equally insidious, manifestation thereof. The way the Skinner Box gets you is by giving you little, consistent hits of pleasure, keeping you performing a rote act, and so you get conditioned to perform that act continuously, even after you no longer derive pleasure, or after the actual reward has been removed. This is precisely what doomscrolling is.

As the other commenter said, Edited to add. I try to indicate that I added the extra stuff after people had an opportunity to see it and respond. Other acronyms I see here a lot, but which I had to figure out for myself, include:

FTFY: fixed that for you

ITT: in this thread

TLC: top-level comment

It took me a good year and a half to finally research what the hell “FTFY” meant, so you’re in good company.

Yes, it’s the same situation we saw in the previous episode of the comic series, called “Meat Proxies”. The professor is now nothing but a meat proxy for the stochastic parrot.

The primary issue is that, even before the room reaches the point of flashover, the isopropanol fumes are heavier than air after they boil off and cool by just a couple degrees, so they just cascade down the sides of the beaker, directly onto the hot plate at 150C above the autoignition temperature. Since it’s not in a fume hood, you can’t assume even mixing immediately after boiling.

But yes! I’m sure anyone who still has functioning eyes after the fumes pooling all along the lab bench simultaneously deflagrate would behold quite the spectacle, as the beakers of vigorously boiling IPA become towering columns of flame.

Oh yeah? Well menthol tricks your nerves into thinking they’re losing more heat than they are, so if you dissolve a tiny crystal of menthol in everclear, you can make a tincture to rub on a part of your body that’s sweating, and it will feel naturally cool for about ten minutes, reducing discomfort from both heat and sweat! How’s that for “actually useful”?

While their claim about the world is certainly off:

1. 13th century is not what was being depicted in spice and wolf. It was a depiction of renaissance-era to age-of-reason mercantile trade.
2. the point to which they were specifically referring was the gigantic plot arc that specifically focused on the debasement of currency and speculation thereupon, the markets for which were almost exactly as described, you seem to be taking their word “market” to mean “physical space and event”, when S&W examines basic market theory in a mercantile environment. Its depiction of economic speculation, debasement of currency, etc. Are nearly impeccable, aside from random bits like “make the fur smell like apples” (though I shouldn’t put it past some random merchant to try such a ploy, even if i think it unlikely to avail them), even down to the “money changers clinking coins together to try to hear differing purities of silver”, which you can do yourself with silver coins. While there are certainly many aspects which did not accurately reflect renaissance Europe, pretending that something has no historical basis because the costumes in a fantasy setting based on both Europe and Japan aren’t period appropriate to a period several hundred years off of the period it’s actually based on is absolutely ludicrous.

As far as organisation of the communities, you’re absolutely right. Though, I can’t think of a single work of fiction, ever, which accurately depicts the sheer level of societal interconnection in any period, so I think the criticism unfair, given how perfectly it nails the economic principles it tries to tackle.

As far as the local policing force, I’d like to see a source on the presence, efficacy and integration of local police forces in continental Europe during the renaissance. I am only familiar with London, but I distinctly remember that, at the time period roughly equivalent to that being depicted in S&W, London was barely into its “thief-taker” phase of policing.

Anyway, if you’re judging Spice and wolf off of the first episode, then you’re missing the entire first arc that the commenter is referring to, in which the show explores, in exacting detail, precisely the phenomena to which your original comment was referring

So does breast milk

It’s actually an even greater level of abstraction: we feel the rate of heat flow through our skin. This is (kind-of) why plastic feels warmer than metal. Colder things don’t feel colder because they are colder. Colder things feel colder because they more efficiently sap heat from our skin. Wet things feel colder because water and other highly conductive fluids which have wet the skin (and are thus in direct contact with it) are much more efficient in removing heat, thus feeling colder. This is the twofold reason why oil doesn’t feel as cold as water: it has significantly worse heat conductivity, and it doesn’t readily evaporate (as evaporation is a highly endothermic process, sapping heat even more efficiently than a conductive liquid on its own.)