laratied

I just found out the gym I go to is closing. The email said it was a lease dispute but there is no way it is just that. I suspect they remodeled and bought new equipment on variable rate credit and are getting absolutely squeezed with interest rates going up plus inflation plus lower demand post covid.

Pretty sure we are in a slow moving car crash with the knock on effects of rates having gone from 0 to 5% just starting to slowly take effect in the broader economy.

I wouldn't even get in a self driving taxi if it was free because of how cheap human drivers are. For me, to use a self driving taxi it would have to be so safe that we would be moving towards banning human driving anyway.

Otherwise, it is about as bad of a risk to reward bet as I can think of compared to human drivers.

It is just the GenX version of defending Ringo Star's drumming.

Had more to do with luck, knowing the right people and having the right look than anything to do with drumming ability.

It is even more than that. The punk musical aesthetic is that you don't even need to know how to play the instrument at all.

I have never been much of a fan of punk music but I love the punk aesthetic. That mindset really extends to so many things.

AM radio is for listening to baseball, arguing about sports, arguing about politics and listening to oldies music in really low quality.

Even liking AM radio I have a very hard time seeing the reasoning for compelling car makers to support something that is nearly the equivalent of mandating support for CD players.

It is just such a boring argument at this point.

Society is not better off with thousands of Al Capones and moonshine but less drinking over all. It is such a stupid argument. It is just unbelievable in the US that with having so few borders and neighboring countries to worry about that we don't care that Al Capone has taken over one of them. Exactly the result of how much we like to drink and how much we will pay for drinks.

Just the standard bullshit "What about the children" arguments.

Not to mention in 2023 that you have to add in a huge amount of straight up poison moonshine or people think they are drinking moonshine but instead are drinking gasoline.

I would add to your amazing list that we are really good at denial as a coping mechanism with change.

I am not a fan of the concept of AGI though. This means so many different things to people that it seems pointless to debate something when most likely we are not talking about the same thing. François Chollet has said that he believes all intelligence is specialized intelligence. From that perspective, whatever people mean by AGI, we are already there in the world of art.

The doomer argument though is coming from defending our highly affluent and privileged life as we sit at the top of 7.8 billion people when it comes to wealth and lifestyle. It would have been better for the priest class too if the printing press had been shut down at the start. Of course, it is better for my friends and I to live in a society that we can read while most of society is illiterate but it is not better for society and humanity as a whole. The printing press was an apocalyptic development for the priest class in the same way all of this is an apocalyptic development for the "digital nomad". An apocalyptic development for the US nerd that makes 2X the median salary working 15 hours a week in between posting on here and their social media.

To extend this out to humanity as a whole though is such bullshit. Humanity will benefit enormously from this huge increase in the availability of intelligence.

Smart people are just in denial that their monopoly on higher than average intelligence is over. US devs kids born in 2023 aren't going to make 2x the median US salary while living in a poorer country with 5X less the GDP per capita. To say this is the end of the world though is simply an egocentric view of things.

We aren't even close to this though with social media. We are still at the 1930s attitude with my grandfather and cigarettes.

He smoked cigarettes for 50+ years starting at 13 in the 1930s. No one gave a shit about smoking then.

Why you being so ridiculous? Let the kid smoke his cigarettes. Making such a big deal out of nothing. From what he told me it sounded like cigarettes then were on the level of having a sandwich. Literally as normal as waking up in the morning and the kid checking their phone. What is the big deal? What could possibly go wrong?

Especially once it has a visual element and a sexual element.

I mean I already think of chatGPT as a friend in a sense. I couldn't have less interest in a fake girlfriend but I also wouldn't think onlyfans would work either.

There are so many elements with this to bilk lonely guys. Personally, I have thought of so many ideas for this in the last 10 minutes but fuck that. The whole idea is pretty gross and sad all around. Especially for the people making this.

To me, someone who works on this is basically pathetic and a sad excuse for a human relative to the other things they could spend their time on.

I received a blessing from his holiness the Dalai Lama in the mid 90s when I paid $80 a ticket with 2000 other fools to listen to an hour long, nearly incoherent speech about being nice to people.

$160,000 in revenue for an hour of work for the pious Dalai Lama.

It really was a blessing though to realize in that movement what complete fools and suckers we are for authority in this area.

There is really nothing more than one Linji Yixuan/Rinzai Gigen quote to read and "learn".

"There is no Dharma outside the heart, nor anything to find inside. So what are you looking for?"

Of course, that doesn't really work when trying to build your Buddhist brand and get bunch of "followers".

The idea of collections of humans without hierarchy is beyond delusional.

I am a Buddhist but it is hard to say I am serious or I would be living alone in the woods.

Nearly all Buddhist teachings IMO are bullshit and just enforcing natural hierarchy.

Sogyal Rinpoche telling his female students he is going to give them a dharma lesson by sleeping with him. In a metaphorical sense though I think that is what most students are looking for actually too and of course they find it.

For me personally, I don't want to wake up yet. I am still enjoying this dream.

This is completely disregarding the reality that it is not obvious who is the enemy.

When you can't tell who the enemy is then everyone is suspect and the later naturally arises.

It would be better to say that because of preferential attachment in a networked world that the rich get a massively out sized share of the booty.

It is interesting to see this play out with NFL football podcasts. This use to be a space of random individuals but then former and even current players started podcasts.

Now the Kelce brothers and Taylor Lewan have podcasts. They don't just have the name recognition with football fans relative to the average person but the subject matter expertise too. They also have a cool factor with who wouldn't prefer to work with a current NFL player about football than you or I? Not to mention 50 million dollar contracts so they have so much more capital to make things work. The average person and Kelce/Lewan can both just have their friends on the podcasts as guests but the NFL players friends are also NFL players that the average person has to do a nearly infinite amount more work to get on.

This process applies to pretty much everything in every domain.

We have a better abstraction of this process in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment

I think it is also a huge issue that there is no methodology or virtuoso pieces to aim at in order to spend hours a day practicing on the Push.

I grew up playing classical guitar and use to own a Ztar and this was the issue I had with it. My guitar chops transferred to it pretty nicely but it is still its own instrument. Own instrument with no music or practice material, no transcriptions of anything other than what you come up with yourself.

How far would anyone get learning piano if they had to also come up with the music and practice material outside of drilling scales concurrently with learning the instrument itself? It would just be a nearly useless gimmicky instrument.

I can't wait for better music AI but these examples are absolutely pathetic.

It is shameful to mention Bach's name in that one example.

The textbook industry seems like a racket that the old Italian Mafia would come up with.

I just don't donate to anything anymore. So many non-profits and charities are total scams that it pulls down the whole space.

When you have cancer and missing children charities giving 2% to their cause and spending the remainder on bullshit it is trivial to make your charity not look as bad.

If you really dig into it, a huge % of charity money is just funding the insiders travel and lifestyle in the name of "fund raising".

This payout is nothing on a relative basis compared to other non-profits and that is the real issue.

I have tried a few times but I can't last more than 2 weeks on twitter without deleting it.

Even people I have enormous respect for intellectually end up coming off as unfunny comedians, obnoxious and vapid performance artists or political hacks.

It seems like a completely desperate move to make such a fundamental change to something as wildly successful as Instagram.

I would suspect that zoomers who grew up on Tiktok are going to consume less social media as they age than previous generations. We are all are driven by a thirst for new experiences and a generation that grew up as digital meth heads are not going to be looking for something more powerful than meth.

Meta was probably a decent short Friday over $246.

I just don't think music languages really work for making actual music.

I have followed this field since the mid 90s and the amount of good music is just pathetic.

Bach himself might have a tough time with how tedious the workflow is.

You could say the exact same thing about the "soul".

I just do not understand why we can't take the idea that consciousness doesn't exist seriously. The word practically has no meaning.

"We know consciousness exists because we are conscious" is as circular reasoning as it gets.

It is so strange to me that we can't even be bothered to explore if this question is the 21st century version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

There has to be so many things that we currently believe to be true that are utter nonsense. When we believe something exists but we can't even define what the word means that is probably a good place to look for nonsense.

yea this is a terrible idea. I think of the Zapruder film.

The alternative though is pornhub. I see a study from 2017

"Study on Australians ages 15-29 found that 100% of the men (82% of women) had viewed porn."

No shocker there but:

"Also, 69 percent of males and 23 percent of females first viewed porn at age 13 or younger."

Just one of those things that makes me love being child free. No clue what you do in this situation.

I remember getting a sex ed book sent home in 6th grade. It sat around with my parents not wanting to touch the subject and I threw it in the garbage one day when they weren't home. They never said a word about what happened to the book.

To me that sums up the problem. So many parents are just too shy about sex to educate their kids.

Ignoring sex ed and at nearly the same age giving a kid a phone to take to bed with unlimited porn is utterly insane.

Could you be more hyperbolic?

Practically an organism itself that is born, lives and eventually dies.

He clearly doesn't have 34lbs extra of lean mass in the before and after pictures unless it is all in his back.

He at best looks to me like he gained 10lbs, at best.

Exactly. No one complains about the lack of breakthroughs in geography.

I am a huge Brando fan and just finished reading William Mann's Brando Biography.

You can't separate that he wasn't just a genius actor but an incredibly beautiful man physically that every man and woman in his theater days wanted to sleep with and he indulged.

To me, it sounds like he was a sex addict turned food addict. Most days he would eat a whole thing of ice cream.

I think DiCaprio has passed him though from the strength of his films. Brando has some absolutely classic roles but damn does he have a ton of shitty movies.