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Reading these amazing design failures always makes me feel a little bit better.

At least they’re not driving, right?

People always seem impressed by control systems. Maybe build a robot to play a boardgame?

Drake stans rn: https://youtu.be/UcZzlPGnKdU

I’ve been looking at I2P to overcome commercial grade NAT. What’s the setup like? Everyone says its complex, but is it complicated?

Really brutal reeducation camps for people like this. Really annoying when the dumbest person in any given room has everything “figured out” and “proven”

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

Its quite the yarn: hard to believe it was hidden inside my string

“What do you mean, you hope the dollar collapses? Don’t you know that’s how I pay for my treats?”

“Yes.”

Heated debate about transgenderism. Looks like my dad had taken the bait and watches too much media. He dismissed transitioning as a legitimate treatment for gender dysphoria, insisting that those afflicted should take SSRIs or some such. My wife and I made the point that transitioning IS the treatment; it is drastically better in terms of outcomes and (can be) much less invasive and impactful. I think he also watched that (PragerU?) “documentary” that was promoted on X, I was able to shut him up by telling him that only 1 or 2 people in the last decade have regretted transitioning, but conservative media makes these cases seem more common than they are. Finally moved off the topic by pointing out that I dont really think its a big deal who plays which sports, considering the material state of the world. Now I’m kicking myself for not saying trans rights are human rights, and for moving to a meta-conversation about discourse like a fucking lib.

“Nerds” seem to cling to an idea of objective truth, and that their ideologies are universal, and that they are important for the “knowledge” they have obtained.

You can flip the script by pointing out the ways these things are wrong.

Lol “that’s what they want you to think” “Where’d you get that, ?” Or if you really want to piss them off compare them to an evangelical pundit or

“Anyone can get a Ph.D / doctorate, it’s the most middle-brow achievement” “What do you call the guy who finishes last in med school?” (Doctor) “spent your time slaving away when you could have been stacking papers” “too smart to be happy, not smart enough to be successful”

Nerds will generally take the bait and continue to try to make their point if you catch them in a leading question / insult. “I know YOU can rely on RealDolls for jobs no one wants to do, but other work needs living minimum wage, healthcare, etc.” “Your mom wasn’t really providing ‘skilled labor’ last night but she still should make a living wage” “Everyone makes mistakes, like your parents when they made you” “Hey yeah, with all the money you’re saving by not tipping, maybe you can buy a friend / self-respect / whatever”

It’s similar to the “white man’s burden” trope from a century ago

literal infanticide becomes a political necessity as a product of MONARCHY

If they wanted their children to be safe, then they should not have forced them to be the sole inheritors of a brutal dictatorship

Yeah I make a lot of jumps in logic because you said you read the book, I’m sure it reads like drivel to anyone who hasn’t

There are a few books that will lead you to the same conclusion, but for me it was GEB. GEB really drove home for me that these systems aren’t doing anything “new,” they’re just codified versions of our understanding of the world.

Truth is a higher concept than Provability. There are some things that a system, or even an ideology will never understand. Because you can describe that system / decision making process in numbers and words, that system will inherit the same problems our numbers and words have when describing our universe. However many words you make for black, white, and gray, the universe will always be capable of producing a color that is not described by one of those words.

There are things about this world and human nature that capitalism just can’t capture. You know this, it’s why you’re here. Capitalism doesn’t know there’s finite amount of land, or that some people want to be marine biologists and others are scared of the ocean. Even the most subtle inconsistencies can have deep implications for the system. In 2006, we thought everyone who owned a house would keep making payments on it.

On top of that, a system can’t reason about it’s own correctness. If a given system is expected to describe everything, then it will necessarily contain internal inconsistencies. Two mutually exclusive things will appear as true to a given system:

A farmer needs to buy his own food A farmer needs to grow food to sell Many cash crops exist, cocoa bean slavery is the first thing that comes to my mind. What happens now? Does the farmer starve? Does the farmer start growing their own food? Does it depend on the farmer? Capitalism is abstract enough to be a system similar to prepositional calculus. In this sense, we feed it different truths about our reality, and capitalism will describe the behaviour. But we don’t know all of the truths of our world, and some things that were once true might not be true anymore. There is a short term incentive to lie even if you know something is false, and maybe even to believe in something you know is false.

The point is that we can only know about how these inconsistencies are handled after the economic system runs into them like a bullet train hitting the side of a mountain with a painted on tunnel. We see road runner go in the tunnel, and we think we can go in too. The ONLY reason our current economic system is complex is because the last crash had a complex reason. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and with them we lost any liquidity assurance on stock trades. Companies used survey people on what they wanted, people used to buy magazines to know what to want. Now Algo traders trade through FPGAs dedicated fiber lines to make sure that they see the trend first and capitalize on it first. They read in all of the tweets in real time, and look at how people feel about travelling, buying new homes, selling old laptops i.e. the consumer economy. They push ads to people’s phones, place ads on the websites they visit, impersonate opinions

All of the deep dark algorithms this guy is talking about aren’t doing anything fundamentally new because the inputs are fundamentally the same, and the system is still fundamentally flawed.

Read “Godel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter and free yourself from this nonsense.

“selling narratives” I could have delivered the same crock-o-shit rant in the 50’s just when consumer marketing was getting huge.

We’ve been sold the narrative of a “white picket fence” and what a surprise, you can buy it all in the Sears catalog.

Looking back, this is the main reason I stopped going on sites like 4chan. People just take a braindump on the site, then because there’s no personal context you can easily see it as some kind of insight. You just end up believing the things you want to believe anyway. The whole place is just a funhouse mirror, where you can interact with a version of yourself that has never felt the touch of another human.