it's a golden... bowler hat?
i feel like people in real life would be far less likely to press the red button, because twitter is almost wall to wall nazis and real life is not
When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didn’t matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.
this is the level the median hackernews poster thinks on
anthropic is the most moral ai company in the universe
People generally do not like being killed.
source?
i'm in the middle of freefalling down a research rabbit hole and ran across this person decrying curtis yarvin as a fake monarchist who doesn't understand what makes REAL monarchism good:
someone in the replies asks the obvious question
Ok but what stops the monarch from being a tyrant
and their answer is that you can just kill the monarch
It's still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they're inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath. But if they screw up badly enough that the things they're supposed to do don't happen? There's more of everyone else than One Person.
new odium symposium episode is now available on all platforms. we look Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini's Gender Without Identity, a contemporary work of queer psychoanalytic theory. then we look at a case study in which it all goes wrong.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/14-just-call-me-155052365
also we're starting a discord for the podcast https://discord.gg/7tEEE39Fx
also also we're going to release our first subscriber episode next week, where we look at the pseudoscientists of paper repository viXra
when it's two rat inflected guys with bad politics doing this sort of thing
i love seeing tracing pop up! a true heel to toe bootlicker incapable of seeing himself as anything but the MOST independent thinker
new odium symposium episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/13-joker-is-both-154123315. links to various platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com
we read umberto eco's essay ur-fascism (we have mixed feelings about it) and then apply it to frank miller's 1986 batman comic the dark knight returns
archive link: https://archive.ph/ONKkm
contextualizes the topic beautifully. you might learn a lot about how american racism relates to capital and art from this article
highlight: most of these guys are into classical art fascism but one of them, a bitcoin guy looking to build a 450 foot tall statue of prometheus, appears to be specifically into italian fascism. his favorite aesthetic is futurism and he hired a futurist sculptor with this "manifesto" on his website:
We all know Elon Musk as the funniest man alive.
but did you know that Musk is also a lifelong gamer? for example, here he is in the chess club of his whites only apartheid prep school.
grew out of that though.
really want to highlight the phrase "understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks." what the fuck is he talking about?
in any case, he clearly has some issues around the game and I suspect his performance in the chess club. the dude loves to downplay the complexity of the game.
he knows how to tune it up, though.
hmm. fog of war, tech trees, randomized starting positions. that actually sounds a little familiar. could it be...?
OH YEAH BABY! you knew it had to be polytopia!
what the fuck is polytopia?
this is polytopia:
sophisticated Gamers will notice three things here:
this is clearly a mobile game first, meaning it was developed to fit into the industry's nastiest shithole: the ios and android app markets. i'll tell you right now that polytopia doesn't have gambling in its microtransactions (which instantly makes it cream of the crop), but you can expect it to be braindead and shallow.
this game is for children. look the bright primary colors, the character's huge eyes, and the low poly style, which evokes minecraft.
this game looks a LOT like civilization. specifically, it looks like civilization 3:
For those not familiar, the civilization series is the standard bearer for the 4X genre. it's a style of slow, macromanagement focused turn based strategy focused on the "four Xes" of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. thematically, they present societies as machines for producing imperialism. the civilization games are also fearsomely complex and famously deep.
not so with polytopia:
so yeah, it's baby civilization. but the thing that really kills me is that musk is obsessed with this game. like... really obsessed, according to a story published on yahoo finance.
This puff piece is sourced from "Benzinga," a tech finance news site that seems to mostly post about crypto, ai and tesla. context clues suggest the content is entirely ripped from walter isaacson's biography of musk. I have to emphasize that all of this is intended to be flattering - right in the middle, they take a break from the content to shill some affiliate link I won't click on:
that's the image of musk they want to convey. anything they include is in support of that.
saying "I am just wired for war" because you play a lot of polytopia is classic elon cringe. beating a game's developer is nothing to brag about, by the way. most game developers are terrible at their own games.
i would argue that ragequitting to the parking lot to smack down your employee/mother of your children in a baby game is also not something to brag about:
flexing on mom almost shows up more than once in the article...
... except, twist, for some reason he beat his employee but not his partner???
and yes, he sulked like a little shitbag he when he lost. one has to suspect that if his sycophants weren't constantly throwing polytopia matches against him he'd have turned on it just like he did chess.
before you read this next bit I want to emphasize again that EVERYTHING IN THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO BE FLATTERING.
his brother seems to feel the same way
(and from another benzinga sourced yahoo finance story):
here's what i think: elon musk isn't learning shit from polytopia. he's a profoundly stupid and childish man who likes moving brightly colored blocks around and being told he won. he's projecting the disgusting and wretched pile of deficiencies which is his personality onto a game for babies. as someone who only fails upward and cannot stand to fail, it is impossible for him to learn from reality; doing so would require facing what is too painful to face.
- curtis yarvin
DefendingAIArt is a subreddit run by mod "Trippy-Worlds," who also runs the debate sister subreddit AIWars. Some poking around made clear that AIWars is perfectly fine with having overt Nazis around, for example a guy with heil hitler in his name who accuses others of lying because they are "spiritually jewish." So we're off to a great start.
the first thing that drew my eye was this post from a would be employer:
not really clear what the title means, but this person seems to have had a string of encounters with the most based artists of all time.
also claims to have been called "racial and gender slurs" for using ai art and that he was "kicked out of 20 groups" and some other things. idk what to tell this guy, it legitimately does suck that wealthy people have the money to pay for lots of art and the rest of us don't
I really enjoyed browsing around this subreddit, and a big part of that was seeing how much the stigma around AI gets to people who want to use it. pouring contempt on this stuff is good for the world
the above guy would like to know what combination of buttons to press to counter the "that just sounds like stealing from artists" attack. a commenter leaps in to help and immediately impales himself:
you hate to see it. another commenter points out that well ... maybe these people just aren't your friends
to close out, an example of fearmongering:
so we now have an invitation to do an episode of posting through it, which is a (really really good) podcast on the far right. we pick a topic, no other specifics. i am thinking this can be something to do with rationalists and the far right, probably something race sciencey.
SSC leaps to mind but im not sure that's where ill want to start for an audience that doesn't necessarily know anything about rats. any thoughts?