YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

It’s true though. They’re not nazis. They’re incapable of being fired by any fundamentally political or spiritual ideals, no matter how ultimately black and nihilistic, at all. Even if these people were full-throated card-carrying members of the American Nazi party marching through Times Square with a swastika flag throwing out copies of Der Sturmer from a Panzer tank they wouldn’t be nazis. The fact is that they’re just the purest distillation of 20th-21st century media culture yet: they’re so utterly saturated in media that the only choice they’ve made, the only choice available to them, was whether to lean into the goodie or the baddie vibe, and they plumped for “baddie” because it suited their contrarian aesthetic and then, without even leaving a ripple on the surface, they slipped into the role and inhabited it so thoroughly that it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are.

These people are nothing less, and 100% nothing more, than your childish glee at getting to play the villain in an RPG.

[what 2024 would look like if Big Yud had been allowed to first strike data centers in the mid-2010s meme - wizzy flying cars, big tubular buildings, and so on]

you just made me extremely aware of where i was, what i was doing, and how i was feeling, when i found out that the yud had an article in Time, and I am going to sue for the whiplash of realising how short a time ago that was

Yeah, it’s a philosophical question, which means you need a philosophical answer. Spitballing won’t help you figure shit out a priori because it turns out that learning how to think a priori effectively takes years of hard graft and is called “studying philosophy”. You should be asking people like me what “know” means in this context and what distinguishes memory in human beings from “memory” in an LLM (a great deal, as it happens!)

but all of this stuff is still relatively new and I’m sure it’ll get better with time

What is the exact point of taking this attitude? Anybody who cares to look knows exactly what’s wrong with this stuff. It’s an astonishingly, and I mean “astonishing” as in “actually beyond ordinary human comprehension” as in “literally awe-inspiring”, wasteful means (whether your energy source is fossil fuels or solar!) of doing - at the absolute outside best - extraordinarily basic shit. Every single day the window of useful applications and potential improvements narrows incredibly rapidly, and the people who are fundamentally steering the whole programme are proven liars and scam artists, and proven beyond any shadow of a doubt at that?

Who cares if it’s relatively new, or if there’s room for mild-mannered optimism? What practical teeth does that argument have? What purpose does it actually serve beyond satisfying a basically shallow political impulse to moderate perceivedly heightened emotive responses to these incredibly stark facts?

The only actually reasonable response to this farrago is full-throated opposition to every element of the whole show which is either a lie or covering for a lie, which is virtually every single element. If all that you’re left with is “hey, transformers are pretty cool, and I look forward to seeing how they contribute in their own partial way to our collective technical means of saving the planet, and incidentally anti-trust legislation should put people like Altman behind bars for the rest of their lives” then so be it! That’s a far more even-handed and fundamentally sensible response than blithely insisting that the occasional trinket has room for improvement - in fact if you’re liberal-minded it’s the essential output of any sensible thoughts on how to maintain a democratic society.

As far as I know Siskind has never deleted any idea for the contrarianism motivating it getting out of hand. It’s just against his character. Much more likely he considered it revealing his power level (even if he recognised himself as never having really endorsed the idea besides contrarianism in the first place).

Less charitably, more plausibly, at the outside he recognised that it’s a stupid fucking thing to say that makes him look just not smart.

“New right” redirects to “Right-wing populism” and I would like anyone to explain to me how is the same old reactionary nonsense “new” in any way. In any case, how the fuck is it possible to be associated with anti-fascists and fascists at the same time?

I’d have gone with Neue Americanische Freundschaft but it’s both too subtle and already taken

Yeah but Ahmed is a prick

I would guess that their personal reach over the name is pretty limited by a number of factors, including that the town itself has quite a significant similar claim itself. “Oxford Brookes” university, for example, is not a part of Oxford the Ancient University, but it certainly helps their brand to be next door (and as far as I know it’s a perfectly fine institution as far as these things go).

The issue with the Future of Humanity Institute would be almost the other way around: that as long as it’s in-house, the university can hardly dissociate themselves from it.

I wonder how much they disliked it and how much they felt it was just using the Oxford brand and cheapening it. Only a slight but a qualitative difference. You can pump out all the awful shit you want at Oxford, but cheapen the brand with the increasingly zany antics of your dorky club and they might at least look twice.

Yes, but that’s not relevant here

Never meditate folks, it’s bad for the brain