Thuggery

> Do remember that using LLMs is a choice.

That seems like a naive take on technology to me. Once having/using a smartphone was a simple matter of personal choice. Once, having a car was a choice. If society as a whole adapts to something it's hard to be against it.

> I doubt that’s the problem.

I don't know, it seems like it's a weird argument but it's definitely a thought I've had too. When I was eyeballing the Egyptian dynasties I was bit shocked to notice how short lived they all are, compared to what I expected. The majority struggle to get to 150 years, no one gets past 300. In fact old man America will soon be an older polity than all of them except the much maligned Ptolemies (275 years). Same deal for the (well documented) Chinese dynasties. People think kingdoms and states are long enduring, measured in multiple centuries, but they're actually pretty unstable.

It seems like a weird unexamined law of the universe. Dynasties/polities struggle to make it past 300~ without some major interruption or something going wrong, if they haven't imploded earlier. There are exceptions. The Korean Joseon managed an eye watering 500+ years. And the Catholic Papacy has been going on continuously for closer to 2 millenia. But still, 249 years is pretty long in the tooth.

That's pretty lame criticism considering many of those things were contemporary SOP for all countries. The USA remind abnormally libertarian despite this. Now it's getting abnormally authoritarian.

I don't care about accusations of xenophobia. I don't like it because I don't like pointless historical revisionism. It's been called Gulf of Mexico since the 17th century, before there was a USA.

And I don't like the stink of arbitrary dictators renaming things for ego or propaganda reasons. This is the sort of thing North Korea or Turkmenbashi would do, and I think that's pathetic for America.

50 years is honestly not that long. When you look at historical dynasties even the shorter ones tend to be ~100 years, if they don't immediately implode.

That was a lot of suffering and chaos of what's actually a fairly trifling dynasty in the grand scheme of things.

Well you have been. The consent was always being manufactured. A certain controversial fellow by the name of Chomsky pointed out decades ago that media would inevitably reflect biases of their owners and staff, and the needs to be a for profit business.

It would seem you didn't care or notice because there previously wasn't an opinion conflict with the owners.

Sensible change. But I wonder if it will encourage retailers to treat the secondary now more food safety related "use by" date as the real "best if used by" date.

If you're like me and slightly paranoid about food expiration dates and sometimes checks things in corner stores, you might notice they like to sell items that can be razor thin on the "sell by" date.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you are implying membership of Hezbollah is deep dark shameful secret in Lebanon. The designation of Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" is great for outside political propaganda, but the actual reality is they are a major and open faction in political life in Lebanon as both paramilitary group and political party - as is my understanding. Basically Sinn Fein/IRA.

I have never heard anyone refer to Neanderthal as a human unless they are talking in a "those are cavemen, early humans" way that's wrong. Where is this coming from? Is it a non-English world thing?

Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since... humans have some Neanderthal DNA.

It seems to me nearly every story about robots that gain sentience in human storymaking has them eventually turning against their human creators. Even the word robot itself comes from a Czech play were men develop an artificial human and these "robots" then ... usurp and destroy their creators. Am I the only one that finds this interesting and odd?

I also suspect this narrative repetition is not totally unrelated to the current popularity of AI Doomerism.

Depends on where you were. I was an American fan of anime before it was really socially acceptable and I've been of the mind that its popularity was probably inevitable once enough old guard culturally sneering at it died. Same as happened with video games.

But DBZ (and Sailor Moon) definitely solidified it as a respectable commercial force for the mainstream USA, and gave a unified culture experience that's now pop culture, thanks to millenials getting old.

Are you so sure that was a legitimate and real comment? I'm not a woman so I can't know the truth personally. But people are very performative on Reddit. They also like narratives of victimization and offense.

If you were to straight believe the woman only subreddit of twoxchromosomes being a woman is a constant hell of abortion, rape, random body aches, abusive partners, and general sexism. If you were to straight believe the Judaism subreddit everyone who is Jewish constantly fears for their life and lives with daily radical antisemitism.

Well maybe it's just because I'm an unpopular weirdo, but I think "invite only" is cancer. In fact it's another head of the hydra killing the Internet. Whatever alternatives exist to the spam wasteland are strangled in crib being overly walled gardens, e.g. Discord. I also swear to god I think secret private club fetishism crippled piracy.

This is not how the good years of the Internet grew. I can't think of a single good or popular thing that started out as "invite only" other than I guess Facebook and Gmail. Both of which were actually more marketing gimmicks.

Humans may be tribal, but the universe is also entropic. Things decay in quality over time, and the only answer to this is cyclical rebirth.

The analogy of music here is telling because in fact the vast majority of bands are only truly good for an album or two in a small band of time, maybe even for just a song. People would be objectively right to say punk isn't what it was in the 80s in certain places like the UK.

Things really do sometimes get worse, or at least not stay the same style and quality forever. The repugnant conclusion alone pretty much guarantees niche things that are "good" to the niche that then get super popular and commercialized trend towards a worse for everyone steady state over time.

Twitch "pays" streamers with a cut of the money they made off them though. The paycheck is 1/2 a cut of money given to the streamer by a third party with no work from Twitch, and 1/2 a cut from ad revenues that were generated by the eyeballs accrued by the streamers.

This has been a talking point pretty much from the day the Brexit vote happened. The usual suspects then repeatedly publish that same line in the usual papers (The Guardian for one) hoping to reify the "belief" into being with their domination of PR.

Eventually a broken clock will be right. Regardless of the truth of this talking point though, its process of dissemination is unambiguously propaganda. Certain elites really want the public to believe this.

Examples:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/12/11/does-britain...

Half a decade ago

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/31/the-gu...

https://www.businessinsider.com/yougov-poll-brexit-regret-re...

Honestly just search Brexit in the News section of google and try to find a mainstream paper that has anything positive to say.

Side debate: the USA "ceasing to exist" from the view of a native American, in a manner analogous to Palestinians, would be the status quo that already exists today. In opposition to a racially exclusive "white supremacy" manifest dystenity.

The USA already functions as a de facto One State solution where natives have both full rights and a negotiated sub-nationality too. The manifest destiny USA's "right to exist" was settled definitively against as early as 1865.

> By and large, the constitution grants wide privilege for states to decide how they run their elections, and how they validate whether a person is qualified.

Do you have any historical precedent in which the population of a state have legally been denied the right to vote for one of the premier candidates of a major election a la the President? The only cases I'm familiar with is that historically entire subsections of the citizenry have not been allowed to vote: landless, blacks, women. Most don't think of those times as ideals to emulate.

Why would you need violent state enforcement of voluntary contracts?

> This is a problem created by multiple governments over various parties

Why blame "government" and not capitalism? Canadian Gosplan didn't conspire to set housing prices at insane and rising levels. It was the market mechanism doing its own thing.

> it's a ton of work, with people constantly bitching at you, for no compensation.

One of my favorite things about Mod self pity that always seems to come up is this insinuation that they did not want the job. The literal opposite of reality. All mods BEG to be mods. They lobby and work hard to get into their jobs and jealously guard them. They deeply resent and fear the idea of the community operating without them.

There have been times where I've thought, I have enough free time to be a help to a community I'm part of and would be willing to mod. But I've never done it because I wouldn't even know where to start. I'm not building a job application and selling myself for this or carefully waiting out position openings in Discord/IRC channels. I don't care that much. Use my labor if you want it or not. The mods that actually ended up mods? Oh they care and worked for it. You're free to quite any time if you don't want the job. Go on.... do it.

Also I question how much work there really is beyond mission creep. Filter out the spam and the occasional super psycho and you're done. Now if you make work for yourself by trying to be a gestapo nanny that deep reads all comments to weed out wrongthink and confers with mod star chambers on what is to be done to shape the community. Then yeah, maybe you can make a lot more work for yourself.

I would say it's more male sexuality (primarily hetero) and female sexuality that is seen as threatening and uncontrolled that is categorized as grotesque. Things like OnlyFans has never been more normal.

> When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong.

Eyebrow raising statement. As someone with Marxist sympathies I don't agree or know what he's talking about. What is true is whenever it is argued that anthropology points to pre-agriculture humans living surprisingly healthier less labor intensive lives than expected and etc. it becomes a political fight where some reel back and pull out the "Nasty, brutish, and short" Hobbes meme. The Yanomamo and their extreme murderousness are always the go to push-back example. It's obviously a stand in for a left/right "is capitalism right and the natural state of man" thing and I do think it lead to a motivated reasoning to attack Chagnon's character (he just provoked them. They're outliers!), but I don't see where a Marx view is upended.

> This is probably a general rule: In a society where children are difficult to feed, dedicated fathers focusing on feeding their children will have an evolutionary advantage. In societies where mothers can feed their children without much assistance, men who strive for many children with several women will have an evolutionary advantage.

Another interesting and potentially radical line. Maybe a motivator this being posted? One could argue that current society, in a world were single motherhood is increasingly easy, is re-trending towards this way. Which, as pointed out, is actually the norm for mammals. Humans are a weird exception in not being harem maters.

> I absolutely do not intend to single out the Yanomamö as unusually unindustrous. To the contrary, I think they represented a kind of human default. I think that humans have mostly existed in a stage of population equilibrium, ... the result becomes an equilibrium that can go on for thousands of years.

As per the title. I ain't no anthropologist but if we are talking Anatomically Modern Humans vs Behavioral Modernity I think there's another equally or more uncomfortable and unPC answer, rather than this thesis. Just because anatomically modern humans 300k years ago had the same skeletons as modern man doesn't mean they had the same brains. What happened was probably an event horizon brain evolution. Not that men were stuck in an unproductive, antisocial women hording social equilibrium for hundreds or thousands of years until they weren't.

> Only assholes think like that. Only assholes doubt credentials because we are now trying to explicitly defy our biases.

And/or people capable of unpopular rational thinking and noticing patterns. You can't aim to select people for characteristics other than pure merit and at the same time claim merit is the deciding factor in selection - well, short of amazing coincidence.

- We promise to select someone biologically related to Congress

- We have selected Mark who is a nephew of a prominent senator and really the only one available in the pool that meets the above qualifications

- But Mark is just as qualified if not more so than anyone else. He was selected on merit just like everyone else!

You seriously believe this shit? You expect other people to?

> That it's only a coincidence that every single astronaut during the Apollo missions was a white man. That they were all definitely above every possible non-white non-man.

Are you seriously implying that the past Moon missions were not selecting organically for the most qualified they thought they thought they had, but rather as some sort of identity politics conspiracy against non-whites and women? Serious projection. Evil white males do not control space and access to it. Anyone qualified that thinks they can pull off a lunar mission is free to try.

> Can't blame him for being friends with people who asked for it.

If he has not denounced those Libertarian friends, yes you can. If he has not lobbied the government with his disproportionate power and privilege to not socialize investment losses the way he has lobbied in the name of pro wealthy elite anti state "intervention" in the past, yes you can. It is an incongruity in values.

Are people on HN of all places pretending to be cutely ignorant about doxxing? Back in the days of Internet forums it was understood to be a bad thing to publish someone's home adress or a picture of it. It's not that home locations were thought secret information, it's an invitation to random crazies.

> overabundance of evidence that the COVID vaccines are safe, effective, and that they decrease hospitalizations and death

"evidence" that comes from tightly controlled information sources with clear non-truth oriented motivations, that can only accept one answer, and suppres all contrary evidence and discourse? Well if Pravda and the Party tell us the injection is a must and safe too then who could ever doubt it?

I was (and am?) "vaccine hesitant." I am vaccinated now, though it was probably unnecessary since I already had it. I'm really starting to wonder what exactly they injected into me and almost regret it. These are not the actions benevolent actors with nothing to hide.

FYI what pushed me over he edge was a combination of discomfort (wanted to occasionally re-engage with nightlife without worry and guilt), time, local community that I trusted more getting it, and some people in particular I wanted to meet up with that were particularly anal about covid fears.

In the time when the 1st amendment was written (which is not a holy document that decides all morality. Nor is the U.S. the center of the universe) corporations as we understand them did not really exist. The people that were concerned about free speech could only conceive a hostile government of King George could really suppress them and the people willing to hear their dissident ideas. They were rich local gentlemen that had public squares and private meeting rooms. It did not occur to them that they could be silenced by the local placard maker forming a cabal that would deny any attempt to express themselves.

Times have changed and the public square is dead.

Undoubtedly? I've never seen any real proof of it. It's just kind of a mantra. Housing pricing continues to be a problem in every first world country's urban center. Do they all have the exact same "zoning?" And why now? Did this evil zoning just get enacted now for presumably pointless evil reasons?

"Zoning" to me seems to be a modern version of "kulaks" for neoliberal types that just can't grok that there is something fundamentally rotten in the entire system. And have no real practical solutions to fix it.

Okay, unpopular opinion that is maybe outside the scope of this place time. What serious non-biased proof is there that "trafficking" is a real thing? Because I don't think it is. It seems to me to be a modern day witchcraft scare.

That is outside of police renaming prostitution busts as "human trafficking" crackdowns. If you think about the business mechanics of it for just a couple of minutes it makes no sense as an operation, regardless of the morality. The amount of risk and points of critical business failure you take on for probably minimal to negative financial gain is insane. Your main assets, your slave prostitutes, are your biggest and most volatile liability, and your source of income is your second biggest threat.