The whole political convention feels like a sporting or entertainment event. The endless personalistic glazing, rock music… is this really how every party does politics in North America? Trump really comes off as much less of a deviation in this context.
I’m not quite sure in matters of morality competition should serve as its basis. It’s too easy to game such things, e.g. the aforementioned optimized “hyper-ethics” of EA or buying indulgences etc. It’s too easy to see oneself as blameless based on some particular slice of life, to become a monster whilst thinking oneself morally as above all others (dictators care deeply about being seen as righteous, why do they all spend so much time on propaganda). Better to admit that everyone, including oneself, sins, and also that everyone is worthy of redemption, and to follow from that.
The motivating factor for doing right should never be that it bases oneself above someone else in any way; a better way, imo, is that moral behavior is more in accord with a sincere, unillusioned engagement with life that is aware of the interdependence of all things, the fluid boundaries of what constitutes the self and hence self-interest.
It’s the autopilot mode/nihilism that gets at one, but having a self-image as morally superior isn’t entirely honest either I think. No one can be perfect, even typing these words runs on energy partially generated by burning fossils that will lead to early deaths somewhere. These webs of interdependent existence & suffering are inescapable save for maybe a buddha. But at least have the awareness to acknowledge your own role and work to minimize your harm. Not even caring or coming up with fairytales about billions of future digital beings in sublime bliss are both just ways of turning away from looking at the tragedy of life. Maybe I’m getting overly existential, but it’s late here.
Good read, thanks.
Incredibly fragile, which is why they’re all turning fascist.
Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.
For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.
Heard Satya was getting a bit worried about the usefulness of AI, thankfully the creator of Node knows what’s really up.
Used FF for over a decade, switched to Vivaldi about a month ago. It’s pretty much as the article says, adblocking not as good as FF+uBlock, but it mostly does the job, including YouTube videos. Note the inbuilt adblocker also works on mobile, tho there’s no extension support there. One upside I discovered is that the performance is slightly better at least on my mid-range devices, the web is just built around Chrome-related browsers nowadays unfortunately. It’s a bit feature-bloated for my taste with even an inbuilt browser-game (you can hide it from the menus), but honestly that’s at least cute and more sincere than AI crap.
Wow. Quantum nature of autism confirmed. And people say the slop machines can’t do science…
AI was capitalism all along etc etc
I remember when this guy used to castigate Sam Harris for platforming Charles Murray’s race science. The same guy who now eulogizes Charlie Kirk and does the bidding of billionaires. Really encapsulates the elite pivot to the right.
I guess one of the main attractions of Arch is the AUR plus the rolling-release update model. Personally, I’ve had Arch as my daily driver for over 5 years and I haven’t run into any system-breaking issues with updates (there have been small hiccups, like my custom keyboard layout stopping working), which is a better record than I had with for example Ubuntu. But I suppose it’s very dependent on the particular hardware and software one uses and Lenovo laptops are generally well-supported.
Any minimally competent critique of AI would make such bigotry ipso facto meaningless. Note that the cited phrase implicitly accepts the premise of “AIs” as being in the same category of sentient beings as humans by virtue of it being possible to betray the latter for the former, and hence for any genuinely AI-critical person, it makes about as much sense as talking about ‘anti-table bigotry’; it’s just a meaningless configuration of words if one understands what they mean.
Why progressives should care about falling birth rates
2 weeks old, but regardless. The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote a very EA-adjacent article basically making the case for “progressive” eugenics. The studies he cites all derive from a behavior-genetic model of intergenerational value transmission, i.e. conservatism is “in the genes” & progressivism is literally getting bred out of the gene pool.
A masterclass in baiting liberals. Take note, NYT & Atlantic!
Mark Cuban is feeling bullied by Bluesky. He will also have you know that you need to keep aware of the important achievements of your betters, as though he is currently the 5th most blocked user on there, he was indeed once the 4th most blocked user. Perhaps he is just crying out to move up the ranks once more?
It’s really all about Bluesky employees being able to afford their healthcare for Mark you see.
And of course, here’s never-Trumper Anne Applebaum running interference for him. Really an appropriate hotdog-guy-meme moment – as much as I shamelessly sneer at Cuban, I’m genuinely angered by the complete inability of the self-satisfied ‘democracy defender’ set to see their own complicity in perpetuating a permission structure for priviliged white men to feel eternally victimized.
More of a pet peeve than a primal scream, but I wonder what’s with Adam Tooze and his awe of AI. Tooze is a left-wing economic historian who’s generally interesting to listen to (though perhaps in tackling a very wide range of subject matter sometimes missing some depth), but nevertheless seems as AI-pilled as any VC. Most recently came about this bit: Berlin Forum on Global Cooperation 2025 - Keynote Adam Tooze
Anyone who’s used AI seriously knows the LLMs are extraordinary in what they’re able to do … 5 years down the line, this will be even more transformative.
Really, anyone Adam? Are you sure about the techbro pitch there?
well, Zen buddhism
Yeah, this is the Valley after all. Some have used Buddhism as a building block for constructing “metarationality”.
Oh you thought TESCREAL sounded fancy huh? Well I’ll raise you a BIGGER word!
Not really a sneer, just wondering what to make of it, if it doesn’t belong here please remove.
The Financial Times goes with a study which ostensibly demonstrates that ca. half a million of potential coding jobs were directly eliminated by AI, not any other factors or general industry slowdown. The idea is it’s mainly junior positions which aren’t tightly “bundled” with other domains or just years of programming experience & intuition which are harder for AI to replace. So is AI really fully replacing juniors in the hundreds of thousands, or is there more going on?