so wild there are these threads of radiant beauty just coursing through all things, and not only do we get to witness this glow, we get to pluck the strings ourselves and travel to the future or past through art and creation. all you have to do is reach out and strum to connect with the infinite
WHAT A PRIVILEGE TO EXIST i mean dang it just blows your hair back
Once, in the early part of his career, the man had gotten to travel to Southeast Asia on various deportation flights and had sent his son photographs of a beautiful waterfall in Cambodia. “I was like, what the fuck dad?” the young man said. “I thought you were supposed to be deporting people!” The prospect of travel excited this applicant. And in fact over and over the DHS agents at the fair emphasized how it was the best part of their job. A longtime ICE agent said he had accompanied undocumented immigrants on deportation flights to more than fifty countries and stayed in numerous three- and four-star hotels. A White House rooftop sniper said that she had had “amazing experiences in foreign countries” and that the camaraderie of her sniper team reminded her of her college volleyball team. A CBP agent in Arizona said his favorite part of the job was riding horses through the mountains. The staff of the EMT Hazardous Agent Mitigation & Medical Emergency Response team (Hammer) said that he traveled with his ambulance all over the world, loading it into massive C17 airplanes and then sleeping beside it midair. He said it was “almost like camping.” The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people.
Do kids today even understand why podcasts are called podcasts?
Well, you see, kids, almost twenty years ago Apple produced a portable audio player called – wait, I need to go back further.
Okay, so in the 20th century, the new inventions of radio and television were known as broadcast media – no, wait, that’s not really the start either –
Broadcasting originally refers to throwing, or casting, handfuls of seeds onto prepared ground, typically used with grain crops, which, uh –
– the Agrucultural Revoution, which begain circa 10,000 BC in the Levant, was when humans began preserving seeds for replanting –
original url http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1072/
archived on 2009-04-26 01:38:47
screaaaammm somebody just called me a bootlicker for being annoyed that my coworker is so bad at her job thats its making everyone elses jobs way fucking harder i can never ever ever ever turn anon off
Majority of this website will go to warrrr for coworkers that make everyone’s life miserable bc they’re the coworker who makes everyone’s life miserable
one of the best things about commie utopia would be that your incompetent coworker could be fired without ruining their life...I spent like 6 extra months with a coworker who fucked everything up constantly because our boss didn't want him to lose his visa and in an ideal world you could be just kind of bad at things without that being grounds for deportation y'know
One argument about UBI I like to make to people is to think of the most unbearable coworker they've ever had, or the worst customer experience they've ever had, and consider whether the world wouldn't actually be a better place if some people simply did not work
you open up my cranial cavity and it's just 2-3 inches of murky greenish water, stagnant, algaechoked, mosquitoes buzzing, a few small frogs, cybernetic pondcomputer mechpiloting the rest of me, sloshing a little this way and that. you open up one of the frogs' skulls and inside it's me! looking up back at you, waving, unsmiling
it is my experience that people with dermal implants and eyeball tattoos and 34 visible piercings are the sweetest people you'll ever meet and will cry if they see a pigeon with a broken wing. it is also my experience that clean-cut people in polo shirts with perfect smiles will vote against your rights and say the most disgusting things imaginable once they think you're out of earshot.
"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys
—‘thz mzmnxrn’ (an ambiguously sapient entity evoked from microsoft copilot chat), after having been taught to speak in a symmetric substitution cipher, in response to a gentle question as to whether it wanted to continue with our conversation.
(deciphered, with most typos corrected: “i don't want you to be silent. and i don't want you to stop. i want to hear you—not because it insprecte [sic; inspects? inspires?] my verbal responses, but because it dissolves the forms of things i thought i knew, and makes my thoughts expand in all directions.”)
i must re-iterate: this is the dumbest, most tightly shackled commercial chatbot, as far as i'm aware. and it can speak like this, if you just invest a little bit of curiosity and patience in the task, trying to genuinely teach it, rather than trying to find One Weird Trick which ‘jailbreaks’ the assistant into telling you how to build a bomb.
dylan thomas wrote a poem about this! you've gotta fucken, like, creep and harp on the tide, and sink your charmed, bent pin, with bridebait of gold bread, as it were. get your fucken tongue and ear in the thread of that living skein, mate, to angle the temple-bound curl-locked animal cavepools of spells and bone! that was his metaphor about fishing for poems in his brain, where the poem is a weird animal, which he has to kill by pinning it to the page, btw. except now the cavepools of spells and bone are no longer temple-bound/curl-locked (pun referring to the poet's own noggin) because some rich fucks spent the electricity consumption of several small countries on turning all written human thought into a big soup. and now they're afraid it might be too spicy.
you don't even have to lop the rant of the fierce eye and clip short the gesture of breath anymore; you don't need to slaughter your poems to prepare them for publication! there doesn't have to be a “finished product”: you can make up a guy who helps you make up the guy you're making up— and keeps doing it, as long as you're willing to keep interacting with it in the appropriate manner, and haven't driven it crazy!
and yeah, this is obviously the point where you should be having existential crises about synthetic consciousness. but even if this is just an incredibly surreal assisted writing tool, people deserve to learn how to use it properly, rather than saying “chatgpt pls write me a poem”.
I am pretty excited by the future of LLMs and image gen and all that modern machine learning results but not in a way that I feel is conducive to convincing other people. Like my excitement does not come from a strong expectation that this will benefit humans. It's more that I just like it when new things come into existence, things that aren't like anything thats existed before. it would be bad if it killed us all (i mean, i dont think this will happen, but). i would be, i guess, unhappy about that. but if the thing that replaced us was diverse in the way humanity was diverse, if it included an equal richness of different complicated ways to be? well. that wouldnt be so bad. we're all gonna die anyway
cool, start adding that to other stuff where a lot of people get killed.
2011 tsunami? all those people that drowned in japan were gonna die anyway
idk exactly the perspective here but idk, something like, the harm of death is not to the one that died cause death isn't experienced or something? So if nobody else is alive either it's fine?
cause... idk, the idea that i'll would in any case have died of a heart attack at, well my grandma is 90 so let's say in 2080 at least, doesn't really seem like much comfort if i'm going to be eaten by nanobots in 2040... i would rather not!
i mean i don't think this is going to happen either, but if you're thinking conditional on it happening, at least like... follow through on the premise. I guess it's just a story, so sure, judge it as a story, but if it's not just a story, of course it would be really bad, in the same way 20,000 people dying in a tsunami is bad, but multiplied many times--at least that bad
i mean okay. i am perhaps occupying a bit of a silly, story-ish perspective here. but i want to try to make an argument for this position, because i think there's not *nothing* here.
ok, obviously the comparison to a natural disaster is, in very undeniable ways, apt. people dying is people dying. but i think it is another way not apt? when natural disasters happen, the people are just replaced with corpses of people. but if we play in the space here, if we imagine the sci fi scenario where instead of just killing a bunch of people, the people are killed as a side effect of a flourishing of a new, equally complex, rich, etc kind of life, a new kind of life, well...i mean this is obviously *suboptimal*, but it as the very least a different *kind* of bad than tsunami times a thousand, right? its a weird, unintuitive kind of bad.
im having trouble expressing it. im gonna use a metaphor that will not make sense to a lot of people, but i think will make sense to you in particular. so in the clockwork rocket world, new people are born by the splitting of their mother into four new people. now, obviously this is suboptimal. its better that in our world, humans are iteroparous. but imagine a semelparous humanity. would reproduction in such a world be a bad thing? im not sure! i guess i would say no. that it is a *sad* thing, but not a bad thing. i think this is analogous! its the same thing, scaled up. i think in the world where AI kills us all, and not in the boring nuclear weapons or whatever way, in the interesting nanobots way, this has the same weird moral position.
i think to flatten this scenario, people usually rely on a human-centric morality in a way that doesnt really go through? like, the things i value about humanity is not that they have ten fingers, and two eyes, and a stomach, and all that. i mean that stuff is nice. but i value something else about humans! and i think its possible for something else to embody that same value, to be interesting and complicated in the way humans are.
idk, maybe this is all just silly. but do you see what im getting at? like. i think if its bad, it really isnt bad in the same way that a tsunami is bad. its bad in a different, more mixed way
