Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40611600
It will never stop being incredibly funny that in the past 24 months an untold legion of people have emerged from heroic doses of shrooms/LSD clutching a note that just has āwhat if u could chat with a pdf???ā scrawled on it
I seen someone on LinkedIn yesterday talking about how youāll be able to āchat with your databaseā
Like, what if i donāt want to be friends with a database? What next ? a few beers with my fridge? Skinny dipping with my toaster?
Both options would be horrible, of course, but theyād both be better than spending another five fucking minutes on LinkedIn.
You know, I have no direct information as to what kind of background those people mightāve had for their trips, but 1337% it was wrong (or this person is just full of it). Set and setting. Always. And dear god if I came out of a trip with that? What a fucking abysmal prospect
And yet holy fuck thatās quite possibly a strong driver in all this insanity isnāt it?
You could guess my internal state right now, and youād need zero psychedelics to do it
itās a fucking tragedy what techbros, fascists, and gurus have done to the perception of what a trip even is. thereās this hilariously toxic idea that a trip must have utility or else youāve wasted your time and material; these people will gatekeep and control how you process what should be a highly personal experience, because that gives them a subtle but powerful amount of influence over what youāll take back from your trip. the Silicon Valley/TESCREAL crowd have even ritualized bad set and setting so much that they donāt need a guru personally present in order to have a bad fucking time.
the damage these fucking fools have done is difficult to quantify, largely because psychedelic research is either banned or firmly in the hands of those very same fucking fools. itās very important to them that you donāt use your temporarily jailbroken neocortex for your own purposes; that you never imagine a world where they donāt matter.
yep. a couple of years ago I read We Will Call It Pala and it hit pretty fucking on the nose
a couple years later, with all the dipshittery iāve seen the clowns give airtime, and Iām kinda afraid? reticent? to read it again
never read this one before. neat story, even if it is not much more than The Lorax, but psychedelic-flavored.
unprompted personal review (spoilers)
it makes sense that the point-of-view character is insulated / isolated from the harm theyāre doing. my main gripe is that in doing so, the actual problems of the hypothetical psychedelic healthcare industry (manufactured addiction, orientalism and psychedelic colonization, inequality of access, in addition to all of the vile stuff the real healthcare industry already does) wind up left barely stated or only implied. i was waiting for the other shoe to drop; for Learie to, say, receive a letter from a family member of a patient who died on the bed due to being unattended to, a result of stretching too few staff too thin over too many patients, et cetera. something that would pop the bubble that she built around herself and tie the themes of the story together.
instead it feels like she built the bubble and stays in the bubble. sheās sad her cool business idea outgrew her, that the fifty million dollars she got as a severance package doesnāt fill the hole in her heart she got by helping people directly. which is neat and all, but, like. what about all the uninsured and poor Black people who never got to even try to see if psychedelics could help? what about the Native Americans who watched their spiritual medicine, for which they were (and still are) punished heavily for using, get used to make Learieās millions, for which they will never see a penny? what about your overworked staff, Learie!?
from a persuasive and political perspective, to me it seems the non-sequitur ending leaves the entire story up for ideological grabs. think it sounds like capitalism is bad? sure, go for it. think the problem is that we need to do capitalism, But Betterā¢? sure, go for it! hell, thatās basically the authorās own conclusion:
But what we really need are psychedelic models for business - business that defines new standards for integrity, equity and ethics; business reimagined with a technicolor glow.
sorry, but a can of glow-in-the-dark paint over the same old exploitative business practices is not a solution. itās just more marketing. where is this even going?
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It very much confirms my understanding that psychedelics are best taken as a community drug
yep to a lot of your points (Iāll try reply in more detail tomorrow, majority of brain context atm is going to fucking android bullshit)
as a bit more context, it was originally published on https://aurynproject.org/, which I think also says something about its origin/background. imo overly-narrow horizons in their optimism is a problem that plagues a lot of psychedelic-treatment evangelists (and I already view the argument favourably!); itās something Iāve often felt irked by but also havenāt really been able to engage with in much depth to try form any wide-consumption counterargument too, because headspace and a lot of other stuff too
The Auryn project has a sub-project called North Star, founded by a VC partner, and a Bain Capital veteran, among others.
The whole thing gives me the ick.
this was dunked on like 7 years ago already, maybe earlier
I am so happy that we know with 100% certainty that Jack Dorsey saw this image and wasnāt mad. He was laughing, actually.
Beautiful. The papyrus font really seals the deal.
A few months ago I was looking into Lojban and trying to figure out how I would translate āchargeā (as in, āmy laptop is chargingā) and the best I could come up with is āpinxe lo dikcaā (ādrink electricityā)
Soā¦ if you think LLMs donāt drink, thatās your imagination, not mine.
My parents said that the car was āthirstyā if the gas tank was nearly empty, therefore gas cars are sentient and electric vehicles are murder, checkmate atheists
That was in the replies to this, which Yud retweeted:
Hats off to Isaac Asimov for correctly predicting exactly this 75 years ago in I, Robot: Some people wonāt accept anything that doesnāt eat, drink, and eventually die as being sentient.
Um, well, actually, mortality was a precondition of humanity, not of sentience, and that was in āThe Bicentennial Manā, not I, Robot. Itās also presented textually as correctā¦
In the I, Robot story collection, Stephen Byerley eats, drinks and dies, and none of this is proof that he was human and not a robot.
Why are techbros such shit at Lojban? Itās a recurring and silly pattern. Two minutes with a dictionary tells me that there is
{seldikca}for being charged like a capacitor and{nenzengau}for charging like a rechargeable battery.
Not a sneer, just a feelsbadman.jpg b.c. I know peeps who have been sucked into this āits all Joever.png mentalityā, (myself included for various we live in hell reasons, honestly I never recovered after my cousin explained to me what nukes were while playing in the sandbox at 3)
The sneerworthy content comes later:
1st) Rats never fail to impress with appeal to authority fallacy, but 2nd) the authority in question is max totally unbiased not a member of the extinction cult and definitely not pushing crank theories for decades fuckinā tegmark roflmaou
āYou know, we just had a little baby, and I keep asking myselfā¦ how old is he even gonna get?ā
Tegmark, you absolute fucking wanker. If you actually believe your eschatological x-risk nonsense and still produced a child despite being convinced that heās going to be paperclipped in a few years, youāre a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit. And if you donāt believe it and just lie for the PR, knowingly leading people into depression and anxiety, youāre also a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit.
Truly I say unto you , it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to convince a 57 year old man who thinks heās still pulling off that leather jacket to wear a condom. (Tegmark 19:24, KJ Version)
