> some segments of American men really glorify their work.
What should they glorify instead?
Being valued by a community? Consumerism and mobility has fragmented communities such that most Americans aren't part of any meaningful social institutions anymore. Secularism (which I think is overall a good thing) has cut off church as another aspect of community.
Being a good friend? Again consumerism and mobility has led to a massive loneliness epidemic with many men reporting they have zero close friends.
Venturing into the unknown and discovering new resources to bring back home? The map is fully painted in. The exploring that's left to do is in the deep reaches of science that requires massive education investment in order to spend years in a lab making a tiny discovery.
Going off to war and protecting the innocent against violent invaders? The last arguably justifiable war was nearly a century ago.
It's hard world to find dignity and meaning in today, especially for men in the US, and especially for ones who by personality lean as much towards using their body as their mind. The US used to offer them form or factory jobs that were, yes, hard and dangerous, but (at least in our romanticized memory of it) enabled them to come home at the end of the day and feel they'd provided some value.
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
This is probably true of me (for BOTW/TOTK) from the position of a hard-core gamer or game critic, and itt stems from where I am in life. I am not looking for a super innovative/blem free game. I am looking for something that I can play with my kid and just have a fun time.
I have played a lot of games over the years. I have 250+ hours in every single fallout title (except 76), have completed all Halo storylines, hundreds of hours into each of the HL games, and have completed most of MGS. Most recently I put 80+ hours into Starfield, and another 60+ into Helldivers 2. If you're a hardcore gamer, those are all baby numbers (especially since I played fallout 2 in 1999), but to a non-gamer those numbers probably seem obscene.
All that to say, the 300 hours I have combined between BOTW + TOTK were a truly magical time hanging out with my daughter. I can't explain it more than that.
It’s not a lot of work, like at all. And unlike mapbox/libre you’re are still within UIKit so you can leverage all the existing UI tooling on top of your vector layers.
It much more performant, ergonomic, and requires no external dependencies.
The past few years' innovation in AI has roughly been split into two camps for me.
LLMs -- Awesome and useful. Disruptive, and somewhat dangerous, but probably more good than harm if we do it right.
'Generative art' (i.e. music generation, image generation, video generation) -- Why? Just why?
The 'art' is always good enough to trick most humans at a glance but clearly fake, plastic, and soulless when you look a bit closer. It has instilled somewhat of a paranoia in me when browsing images and genuinely worsened my experience consuming art on the internet overall. I've just recently found out that a jazz mix I found on YouTube and thought was pretty neat is fully AI generated, and the same happens when I browse niche artstyles on Instagram. Don't get me started on what this Sora release will do...
It changed my relationship consuming art online in general. When I see something that looks cool on the surface, my reaction is adversarial, one of suspicion. If it's recent, I default to assuming the piece is AI, and most of the time I don't have time or effort to sleuth the creator down and check. It's only been like a year, and it's already exhausting.
No one asked for AI art. I don't understand why corporations keep pushing it so much.
> Maintainers reading this might say, "oh, great, not only are people going to open up spurious issues and feel entitled to my time, but you're asking them to be a peanut gallery trying to hold me accountable to democratic mechanisms. What a pain in the ass." This is a solid objection which I do not have a good response to.
As someone who's interested in community dynamics like these, I think pure drive-by democracy wouldn't work (I dislike bikeshedding [1]), but a system where people who've contributed either money or quantifiable effort over a recent period of time in exchange for voting rights to elect administrators might.
"A recent period of time" is important, as communities don't really appreciate some old founder-type who's not active in a project anymore trying to use their clout to feed their ego.
> a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity
That's the sales pitch, that this will benefit all.
I'm very pro-AI, but here's the only prediction for the future I would ever make: AI will accelerate, not minimize, inequality and thus injustice, because it removes the organizational limits previously imposed by bureaucracy/coordination costs of humans.
It's not AI's fault. It's not because people are evil or weak or mean, but because the system already does so, and the system has only been constrained by inability to scale people in organizations, which is now relieved by AI.
Virtually all the advances in technology and civilization have been aimed at people capturing resources, people, and value, and recent advances have only accelerated that trend. Broader distributions of value are incidental.
Yes, the U.S. had a middle class after the war, and yes, China has lifted rural people out of technical poverty. But those are the exceptions against the background of consolidation of wealth and power world wide. Not through ideology or avarice but through law and technology extending the reach of agency by amplifying transaction cost differences in market power, information asymmetry and risk burdens. The only thing that stops this is disasters like war and environmental collapse, and it's only slowed by recalcitrance of people.
E.g., now we are at a point were people's economic and online activity is pervasively tracked, but it's impossible to determine who's the owner of the vast majority of assets. That creates massive scale for getting customers, but impedes legal responsibility. Nothing in economic/market theory says that's how it should be; but transaction cost economics does make clear that the asymmetry can and will be exploited, so organizations will capture governance to do so.
It's not AI's job nor even AI's focus to correct injustice, and you can't blame AI for the damage it does. But like nuclear weapons, cluster munitions, party politics, (even software waivers of liability) etc., it creates moral hazards far beyond the ability of culture to accommodate.
(Don't get me started on how blockchain's promise of smart contracts scaling to address transaction risks has devolved into proliferating fraud schemes.)
I've researched trustworthy brands a lot, the ones I settled on are Nootropics Depot, Viva Naturals and Nordic Naturals. I prefer those with only Vit E as preservative.
I don't use an adblocker out of entitlement. I use an adblocker because I don't want to be tracked, I don't want to be surveilled, I don't want my information hoarded/sold/leaked, I don't want to be influenced by legions of marketers looking to hijack my monkey brain, I don't want to be scammed by paid ads masquerading as organic content, and I don't want to expose myself to yet another vector for malware.
From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
For you and other people in this thread dealing with this, I humbly offer Dr. Thomas Seyfried's work on the metabolic treatment of cancer [1]. I think it's important to at least give his ideas a look, there are many interviews of him on YouTube that are a good start.
You can use a service such as nano-gpt.com where you pay for every single query only. I rarely spend more than $20 a month and I can choose whichever model I want.
For the race-essentialist practices described by the original poster, Yascha Mounk's "The Identity Trap," published in 2023, and interviews with Coleman Hughes regarding his college experience at Columbia are insightful resources.
To delve into the philosophical roots that lead to the type of absurd reasoning mentioned by the original poster, "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, released in 2020, is recommended. Despite Lindsay's more recent radical stance, the book provides a critical exploration of these theories. It is also heavy on citations.
For the kind of misconduct in higher education described by the original poster, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) serve as reliable references. There's no lack of explicit anti-semitism on campus.
The discussion around "woke" culture is often muddled by attempts to obscure its existence, framing it as merely an extreme right-wing concern. For those who genuinely want a quick way to challenge their priors regarding "woke" being some kind of "right-wing" thing, you should give this short piece[0] a read. Does it comport with your notion of "right-wing"? If not, you should start questioning those who use "right-wing" as a boogeymen to convince you that there isn't a radical ideology who've created newspeak for their brand of racism, sexism, whatever-ism.
Generally I prefer Richard Wolff’s approach, which is to educate people about cooperatives and promote their development. In the same way that our current government provides all kinds of support for capitalist firms (in this use of the term, this means top down owned and managed), we should provide similar encouragement and support for the growth of cooperatives.
There are side quests like abolishing or curtailing intellectual property restrictions, which concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and make the rest of us dependent on them. (I have a whole philosophy about this but the takeaway is, no intellectual property restrictions don’t do what you think they do, and the economy and investment would work fine and actually much better without them.)
For discussion of the need for cooperatives, see any of many talks or books by Richard Wolff. This is a fine place to start:
Fatty fish, most nuts (that don't have high omega-6, which is inflammatory), fruits high in antioxidants like berries and dark fruit in general, colorful vegetable, cooking with olive/avocado/sunflower oil, *kefir* which is the champion of all good microbiota inducers
As for avoiding: red meat (high in omega-6), gluten (chickpea, rice, lentil pasta instead of wheat), cooking with hydrogenated oils, preservatives, processed food, refined sugar
The lists could be much longer. Look up anti-inflammatory diet aka mediterranean diet. What I will say is adhering to this diet has done as much for my inflammatory condition as all the medication. With some foods I feel their effect right away (pork, too much sugar), with some it sneaks up as I let it slip for a few days. So I stand by it.
The challenge is what is the closest hack to get around it, as most people, admittedly myself included, are not willing to exercise? Semaglutide seems to be the best bet right now.
My argument would be that these social intoxicants allow for the reduction in anxiety stress (more broadly ego attachments) which enables a ego reduction and more incentive to unmask and resultant follow on effects.
In the best case, this allows for social vulnerability that leads to trust and trust is the basis for society.
Note that for some people, they are deep into traumatic fear stress that inebriation might actually make unmasking look like a fight, flight, fawn…
Beyond violence, it's hard for people to contextualize how fragile life was prior to about 300 years ago - a scratch, some bad food, a broken finger, or any of a million tiny things that we just take for granted could kill you. Without an educational system, nobody knew anything except essentially what they gossiped about, learned from their trade or family, or picked up through direct experience. The world was a lot darker and scarier, and that made preemptive violence an effective cultural strategy. Things that reinforced tribal integrity and weakened other tribes, like violent traditions and religions, were effective memes for perpetuating lineages.
There are no humans alive who do not have horrific monsters for ancestors. We are alive and civilized because our ancestors did terrible, monstrous things.
It's wonderful that the dark, terrible things are the anomalies in this period of history, but we need to eliminate the notions of peaceful, paradaisical societies living in harmony with nature before the evil industrial revolution came along and ruined everything.
Humans are vicious, territorial, tribal, warlike animals with a nearly unbroken history of brutality, terror, and murder of outsiders. Our modern civilizations are marvels, even as deeply flawed and imperfect as we are.
It's important to honestly understand the good and the bad of our present situations, it helps us set the expectations for the trajectory of progress.
You could take a human baby from 200,000 years ago and raise them in a modern family in New York and they'd be perfectly adapted to these times. The corollary to that is a little darker - any one of us could have been raised in any of the savage societies thousands of years ago, and we'd have been just as brutal, ignorant, and murderous as any others.
The default assumption about anything before about 500 years ago should be that of a desperate fight for survival. The exceptions are few and far between vast and violent swathes of dead people.
Custom AI commercials would be very interesting. Instead of seeing strangers enjoying the benefits of the product, it shows you. A car commercial would show you driving, etc.
Commercials and TV episodes could have a basic "story arc" and then completely customized to the viewer.
Think about the simpson's or something. Imagine that the story of the episodes were kept, but you could swap in the characters and locations. So for instance if you lived in Nashville TN, all the simpson's episodes could be generated to show the settings as Nashville instead of Springfield.
Then you could have the AI switch out the characters to be people you want. Maybe you want to replace Lisa with an AI Simpsons version of you. Mayor Quimby with Nashville's actual mayor, etc.
[0]> According to FDA manufacturer surveys, by 1962, US production reached an estimated 80000 kg of amphetamine salts, corresponding to consumption of 43 standard 10-mg doses per person per year on a total-population basis. Thus, in amphetamine alone, the United States in the early 1960s was using nearly as much psychotropic medication as the 65 doses per person per year in the present decade that social critics today find so extraordinary. And the 1960s are rightly remembered for excessive minor tranquilizer consumption, around 14 standard doses per person per year on the basis of retail prescription sales. It is rarely appreciated that in the early 1960s, amphetamines were actually consumed at a higher rate than tranquilizers.
Total amphetamine production 2024[1]:
Lisdexamfetamine 26,500kg
d-amphetamine (for sale) 21,200kg
d,l-amphetamine 21,200kg
d-amphetamine (for conversion) 20,000kg
Population of USA in 1962: 184.9 million
Population of USA Today: 331.9 million
This covers the 41.4 million prescriptions for amphetamine in 2021 which would be enough for 3.45 million people, but not illicit amphetamine/methamphetamine. 1.2 million Americans reported using methamphetamine in the past year. Also other similar stimulants like methylphenidate, modafinil would also have to be calculated into any analysis, these weren't nearly as popular in the 1960's. 63,000kg of methylphenidate are produced in USA for 2024.
I had to triple check the date because I was pretty sure that this was known before. Maybe it is simply the confirmation aspect of it?
Edit:
> Our findings reveal for the first time, that Alzheimer’s symptoms can be transferred to a healthy young organism via the gut microbiota, *confirming a causal role* of gut microbiota in Alzheimer’s disease ...
> One early event in AD is an increase in circulating glucocorticoids
You could sum up Alzheimer's as:
Diet/Lifestyle + a congenital form of Cushing's syndrome and you have increasing glucocorticoids which imply downregulation of the PVN, less progesterone and low levels of Prolactin reducing oligodendrocyte reducing myelin sheaths. Add in APOE e4 without choline in the diet and you have accumulation of lipids to round it all out.
There is a reason why Omega 3 + B+D vitamins are talked about as preventative as they all reduce inflamation.
As a kid, I had extreme social anxiety. I had a hard time talking to people and making friends. I never felt like I “belonged.”
As an adult, I still have crippling social anxiety.
I can’t speak for everywhere, I’m pretty much only in the U.S., but I’ve noticed that most fellow adults I come across are chronically deprived of social interaction.
My social anxiety doesn’t actually matter. Me being awkward, and weird, and a little bit out there doesn’t actually matter. If you talk to people, ask them questions about themselves, laugh with them when they want to laugh, listen to them when they want to vent, rant with them when they want to rant, and feel pain with them when they’re vulnerable, a sweeping majority of the people I’ve met in the U.S. engage.
And the more you do it, the more you realize the world is actually full of amazing people. They’re all living their lives, making mistakes, getting things wrong, and making bad calls. But overwhelmingly they’re trying to figure life out and get through the best they can; and they want people with them on that journey.
I still have crippling social anxiety but my friend group is steadily growing and it feels good. I still play the fun game in my head of “haha did we all have a good time today or did I actually say something terrible and now everyone hates me or thinks I’m a fool?” on pretty much a daily basis. But I wouldn’t go back to being lonely. Not just for me, but for these amazing people who want more folks with them on their journey.
Llama 2 might by some measures be close to GPT 3.5, but it’s nowhere near GPT 4, nor Anthropic Claude 2 or Cohere’s model. The closed source players have the best researchers - they are being paid millions a year with tons of upside - and it’s hard to keep pace with that. My sense is that the foundation model companies have an edge for now and will probably stay a few steps ahead of the open source realm simply for economic reasons.
Over the long run, open source will eventually overtake. Chances are this will happen once the researchers who are making magic happen get their liquidity and can start working for free again out in the open.
This is really the unfortunate truth. >90% of global ISP's not only collect but also sell netflow metadata commercially. Nanosecond timestamps, packet sizes, source IPs, destination IP's. Doesn't matter what VPN provider you use, whether you're using Tor, how many residential proxies you're routing through via a complex proxychains config... commercial entities can correlate virtually all of it.
Team Cymru is one such buyer of bulk netflow metadata from ISP's (and their upstream providers) around the globe, who do all of the correlation work on their side, and then sell it, under product names like Pure Signal Recon (formerly Augury)... including to law enforcement agencies and the US military...
There are also no laws dictating that ISP's must disclose whether or not they are selling that information, and they have no commercial incentive to choose to honestly disclose that they do.
If your adversary is NSA/FBI/US Army, or any other deep-pocketed nation-state-level adversaries who Team Cymru is willing to sell to, the safest assumption is that there is absolutely nothing you can do to obscure the origin of your traffic with 100% certainty.
It’s not the same thing but you can currently buy novamin and nano hydroxyapatite based pastes which help to remineralize enamel (they do not regrown teeth completely).
On the note of dental hygiene I recommend, in addition to the standard stuff:
1. Rising your mouth with water immediately after eating. If you’re at a restaurant just drink some water, swish rigorously for 15 seconds and swallow.
2. Flossing regularly soon after eating. Couple with a water flosser if possible.
What should they glorify instead?
Being valued by a community? Consumerism and mobility has fragmented communities such that most Americans aren't part of any meaningful social institutions anymore. Secularism (which I think is overall a good thing) has cut off church as another aspect of community.
Being a good friend? Again consumerism and mobility has led to a massive loneliness epidemic with many men reporting they have zero close friends.
Venturing into the unknown and discovering new resources to bring back home? The map is fully painted in. The exploring that's left to do is in the deep reaches of science that requires massive education investment in order to spend years in a lab making a tiny discovery.
Going off to war and protecting the innocent against violent invaders? The last arguably justifiable war was nearly a century ago.
It's hard world to find dignity and meaning in today, especially for men in the US, and especially for ones who by personality lean as much towards using their body as their mind. The US used to offer them form or factory jobs that were, yes, hard and dangerous, but (at least in our romanticized memory of it) enabled them to come home at the end of the day and feel they'd provided some value.