Notices by sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net), page 8
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 03:59:30 JST 
sj_zero
It just occurred to me that people who pronounce "actor" as "hawk tuah" want to tell us how to vote to run the country. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 05:44:04 JST
sj_zero
So I just had a neat thought as to how the US could help solve several problems at once.
Something like 50% of land in the west is owned by the federal government. Look up a map of it, it's nuts.
Just sell the land.
1. Massive money immediately
2. Lots of land to build new homes or industrial plants or whatever, probably a baby boomers and an economic bump
3. Reduced overhead from having to deal with all that land
A new wild west. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 29-Nov-2024 23:07:03 JST
sj_zero
The Matrix is interesting because arguably only the first movie was classic. The movies that came afterwards were big and flashy but lacked the impact of the first.
I remember seeing Matrix 2 in theatres, and the scene on the highway is really a good example. There was a massive car chase, a fight on a transport truck, lots of explosions and flash and kung-fu fighting, but I was bored. Back then, televisions were vacuum tubes, and I was watching the movie on a giant movie theatre screen in high definition, but I was bored.
The first film had quiet moments, but it also had tension because a lot of the characters in the movie do die. We see several people die over the course of the movie and they don't come back, they aren't saved by a deus ex machina. It seemed contrived the way in Matrix 2 they basically needed to teleport Neo to the other side of the planet so he could be kept out of a scene and he had to superman it back.
Ironically though, you *can* do a great story about a character on God mode. Japan has an entire genre of anime where the main character gets cheat powers.
Another way isekai handles the "god mode" problem is to make it so you don't care the MC is overpowered. In The Matrix, the end of the first movie chastens the Matrix. They know Neo is The One, and they respect him deeply even though they're opposing him. It sort of means there's nowhere to go. He's overpowered and everyone knows he's overpowered and everyone is scared of him. By contrast, in isekai often the enemies think they stand a chance and so they use the perceived imbalance to really kick the dog, really make the audience hate them. The fun of a "God Mode" character is seeing an overconfident and really evil antagonist get their comeuppance. They thought they were in control, but in reality they were just a fly buzzing around the MC waiting to be righteously swatted.
Isekai can also make their cheat powers interesting by making learning them an arc. Matrix 2 for example could have shown that the two things Neo did at the end of Matrix 1 were not enough to deal with the strongest threats the Matrix could muster, and so he'd have to use hard work and diligence to learn the fundamentals of his powers and become much more powerful so he could overcome the greatest threats. This could have an inherent tension in The Matrix because he could only train on his powers while inside The Matrix, but being inside the Matrix would also be the one time he was actually at risk from it as well. Instead, we got a whole Zion subplot.
One of the reasons this kind of training arc also works is that it demonstrates that the power alone isn't what makes the hero heroic. Most isekai protagonists with cheat powers are often told their powers are useless and won't be beneficial to anyone. The reason the protagonist is successful isn't just the cheat powers, but because of the hard work, diligence, and ingenuity that helped them master their powers. Outside of Isekai, consider Naruto. He starts off as hated, then has this gross red chakra that makes him more powerful but takes away his humanity and doesn't make him all-powerful as most high-level opponents defeat him in that state. He has to learn how to master chakra and the rasengan, but he also has to use his innate virtue to communicate with, tame, and later befriend the nine tails to change the nasty red chakra into something that turns him into a glowing being of overwhelming power. He never would have earned that power without his innate virtue and his clever intuitions about how to connect with a being that is a prisoner inside of him (with the help of other jinkurichi like Killer Bee).
The final movie could have meant finally transcending the Matrix altogether and having Neo (and his friends who could have been somewhat powered up by the new wisdom Neo gains during his training to keep them relevant) entering the machine mind. The concept of an Agent Smith who sucks people up like a virus is still acceptable, but the movies never investigate the idea that Smith gains his power through non-virtuous means while Neo would earn his power through acts of virtue. In the actual movie, Neo gains real-world Matrix powers that are not in any way investigated or explained for no apparent reason than he's special. Smith ultimately wins because he's more powerful, and only through a philosophical deus ex machina does Neo defeat Smith. It was a cool fight, but it doesn't feel like a good payoff, and it doesn't really feel earned. If instead Neo gains some measure of control over the robots in the physical world because of his brave actions in the virtual world, then that could help resolve part of the Zion plot. In the end, you could still have a major fight between The One Neo and The Many Smith, but it could be framed in such a way that Neo's fight is with power he gained through discipline, virtue, and bravery and the support and love of his friends while Smith's powers were gained through greed, vice, and cowardice but rejecting friendship, and in the end Neo wins because of the attributes inherent to that virtuous rise to power, and Smith would lose due to the attributes inherent to his vicious rise to power.
One final thing is you could tie the concept of virtue vs. vice, of the one among many vs. many subsuming the one and you could help win the war against the machines by convincing the ruling class of the machines that humans and machines can work together after all. There could even be a character who similar to how Dozer and Tank exist entirely in the real world exist entirely in the Matrix. I mean a main character who can join in on Matrix adventures, perhaps Neo's teacher in the second film who is a rogue AI program or something. In that way, the end of the machine war and the end of The Matrix would be representative of Neo's virtue rather than just the fact he's machine Jesus.
I think the reason the Wachowskis didn't go this route lies in the first movie: "Simulations and Simulacra", one of the defining tomes of postmodernism. The rejection of overarching narratives means that ultimately they couldn't accept the victory being because the good guy was virtuous and the bad guy was vicious, because that conception breaks the ideology. This explains to an extent why the Matrix movies have been so disappointing since the first one, and it also explains why they didn't take these clear and obvious steps that would have made the trilogy likely one of the greatest movie franchises of all time. Their ideology simply couldn't accept a broad narrative like that. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 29-Nov-2024 05:45:22 JST
sj_zero
In general, I have come to believe that what we call "wokeness" can be viewed instead as "ultra-orthodox progressivism".
Other authors have called wokeness "performative diversity", and I think that's true to an extent, but the performative aspects are a symptom, not the actual problem. It is performative because the ultra-orthodox are engaged in rituals and following laws that must not be broken no matter what.
When I was younger, and we'd make racist jokes. The point wasn't that we believe in racism, it's that racism itself was the joke, a thing we were mocking by using it so impotently. The ultra-orthodox progressives couldn't see that, because they can't get past the fact that a rule was broken.
Many people like myself say that we used to be "default liberals", because 20 years ago we did agree with progressive thought. I think the reality is that we still do. Progress is something the left and the right agree on to a large extent. The only question is what progress looks like. The people who say "the left left me" are often progressives who intend to stay progressive, but are not ultra-orthodox.
For those who knee-jerk say they aren't progressive, tread carefully -- Christianity itself is a fundamentally progressive religion. Unlike something like Daoism or Buddhism which views the world as cyclical and thus will never progress but instead you need to learn to stop worrying about the physical world and focus on trying to cultivate your inner world by letting go of worldly concerns, Christianity sees the world as saved from a purely cyclical future through God's grace and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We are progressing towards the kingdom of heaven spiritually, but by following natural law we are aligning with Gods plan for us and so our time on Earth becomes more like the Kingdom of God over time. In some ways, the woke resemble the Pharisees, focused on following rules of God while denying His son and ultimately crucifying the Son of God.
The recent election of Donald Trump helps show this in full effect. Donald Trump didn't just win because the ultra-orthodox's hated "STRAIGHT WHITE MEN" voted for him, he voted from a coalition that included many women, more blacks than any Republican president in a century, and a growing contingent of latinos. More Jews than normal voted for Trump. The ultra-orthodox progressives can only see this through their narrow lenses, and so they call women who voted for Trump misogynistic, and latinos and blacks who voted for Trump racist. They're doing everyone a favor having their hypocrisy on full display.
I believe the reason for the success of ultra-orthodox progressivism is multi-faceted.
1. As I investigated in another post, there are two forms of idiocracy: One populist and anti-intellectual, one elitist and pseudo-intellectual. By taking on the trappings of ultra-orthodox progressivism, an individual who is intellectually lazy can take on the trappings of class and intellect without putting in work besides regurgitating someone else's ideas.
2. Large organizations are extremely compatible with ultra-orthodoxy. They like that there are defined, relatively unchanging rules that they just need to comply with. Contrast with a purer progressivism, which constantly questions even itself and its own axioms and can change its mind on what progress is. It's easier to hammer a zero tolerance policy out than to go through an intellectual journey of finding answers.
3. Ultra-progressive progressivism is militant and seeks to destroy opposition. In the short term, this is like a wasp who stings anyone who comes close to their nest. In the short term, people will stay away from the nest. In the longer term, eventually someone will shoot some bug spray or hire an exterminator.
Only one of the three reasons can be sustainable. The first fails once people stop seeing your jargon filled pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook as intelligent, the third fails once everyone realizes nobody actually likes you. The second will only last as long as the organizations think there's a benefit to your ideology, and if it seems to cost too much youll lose institutional support regardless of your digestibility. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Nov-2024 08:39:43 JST
sj_zero
Semantics is the study of meaning in language, symbols, or signs.
So if one were Anti-Semantic, one would reject meaning, including the meaning of (((brackets)))
It's just a dumb play on words. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Nov-2024 08:13:54 JST
sj_zero
If you're "Anti-Semantic", that would mean.... putting words in (((brackets like this))) would be meaningless because you don't care when stuff adds meaning like that... Ironic, isn't it? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 21:37:58 JST
sj_zero
I don't have timelines at the moment, but I do have hope for at least 2 more books, one programming book and one hard science fiction book. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 14:09:39 JST
sj_zero
I've made this comparison before, but consider this with respect to the speed of technological advancements particularly in the area of computers.
1974 had the first commercially advertised computer that was at a home computer sort of price point. It had a tape interface and memory, but generally was not something that we today would consider to be a home computer.
By 1984, most of the 8-Bit computers that we know of had already been released. The Apple 1, 2, and Lisa had been released, and the Macintosh was released that year. The commodore 64 had been on sale for years. The IBM AT based on the Intel 80286 processor was released that year. The Atari 2600 had been released, had a renaissance, and caused the video game crash. In the ensuing crash Nintendo released their Nintendo entertainment system which was leagues above the Atari 2600, and as well as it's contemporaries the ColecoVision and intellevision.
By 1994, the 32 bit Intel 80486 which contained an integrated math co-processor on the DX model was relatively common. The video games doom and Wolfenstein 3D had already been released for many years, and descent for a fully 3D game have been released that year. The internet already existed, the Netscape web browser had already been developed to some degree, meaning that the World wide Web already existed. The super VGA video standard of the time supported up to 16 million colors at 24 bit color.
By 2004, the first to 64-bit processors had been released. Video cards had already ceased just being 2D accelerator cards and become 3D accelerator cards that could display triangles on the screen very quickly, and years earlier had become the graphics processing units first developed by Nvidia. By 2005, 3dfx had been born, lived, and died. Pixel shaders and vertex shaders were available on all new top of the line gpus. I do have a point of that in spite of 64 Bit having been released at this time, most consumer PCs were still 32-bit.
Here's where you can really start to see some of the stagnation take place, but the innovation moved from one product category to the other. From 2004 to 2014 things got incrementally better, and the top end technologies such as 64-bit and multicore became common in consumer pcs, the amount of RAM in a PC substantially increased, in 2005 you might have 128MB, in 2015 you'd often have 2gb. Besides that though, things had improved a little bit but not the same way. Compare any decade before that, and you can really see the difference. The one thing that had happened from 2005 to 2015 is the development of the entire mobile ecosystem. I have a MotoX 2013 still sitting in a drawer at home, and while it isn't perfect, it is shocking how usable it is even now. Big thing is, for the most part a computer from 2004 isn't great but a high-end one isn't so different from what you'd see in 2014.
Now we finally come from 2014 to today. The last 10 years is probably been the most disappointing 10 years since the 1970s. Most of my websites are hosted on computers made before 2014. My travel computer is computer made before 2014. Although it is cutting across the decade, my computer for gaming is pre-pandemic, and that 5-year-old PC is essentially state of the art. Instead of having a 4060 it has a 2060, but even rtx, as potentially groundbreaking as it is doesn't really matter all that much almost anywhere. You won't be able to run everything at high settings, but in terms of graphics a GTX 980 will still play virtually every game on the market today.
So in this context, you can really see where the sort of enthusiasm about the most advanced technologies just wouldn't be there anymore, because a lot of stuff is just slowed down. There's been some really exciting stuff on the software front such as the fediverse or nextcloud essentially bringing the sort of software that used to be solely proprietary and democratizing it, but once you realize the massive differences in previous decades compared to today there really isn't any comparison. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 12:44:49 JST
sj_zero
I always appreciate seeing your positive feedback too. I'm trying to be principled, but I'm still a human being and so seeing that people are interested in what I'm up to helps feel like I'm not just shouting into the void too. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 11:41:48 JST
sj_zero
I've started to realize that people are taking me up on my offer to ignore or block me if they don't like effortposting because I'm not gonna stop.
Probably for the best.
But in my view, there's only a few reasons to have discussions online.
1. To yell pre-packaged platitudes at each other for sport
2. To try to help the hours of our lives to tick away faster
3. To try to make the entire earth correct by correcting people one at a time
4. To become mutually better through putting ideas through the gauntlet.
I've actually done some of these myself. When I was younger I'd happily argue online for sport, or I'd be bored and it was a good way to pass the time. When I was younger, I was even foolish to think I could help change the way the world saw things.
Today, however, the only reason that makes sense to discuss things online is to try to become better yourself and help better the people you discuss things with. We are all so far from what we could be, and I think that's been intentional by powers larger than ourselves.
I'm thankful to everyone who engages in good faith, perhaps especially people who push back and force me to better explain what I mean, or better understand what I'm saying. Recently there's been quite a few people who did well forcing me to think more about certain things I took for granted or forcing me to clarify something. @Hyolobrika often asks one piercing question on posts and it's like "Well, I can see how without clarification it might look like I'm saying something I'm not"
I'm thankful to guys like @amerika who spend a lot of time and effort helping to explain worldviews that are fully alien to me, because how can you agree or disagree with that which you don't understand? I don't always come away agreeing totally, but often I come away with my worldview changed by exposure to ideas I hadn't explored myself.
When people interact with me and get a big wall of text, it might be easy to assume I'm just trying to stonewall or filibuster, but often it's actually me trying to work through ideas publicly, and often there's a lot of actual research behind the wall of text. It might seem like it's a stop in the discussion, but what's the point of continuing to discuss if we don't actually take a deep dive into ideas that could change everything? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 25-Nov-2024 15:54:29 JST
sj_zero
This might piss someone off but it's pretty funny when you think about it. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 09:08:23 JST
sj_zero
We used to build cool things to make money... -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 09:08:22 JST
sj_zero
Financial products aren't things at all. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 22-Nov-2024 10:12:18 JST
sj_zero
All I can read there is "comply, low class scum!" -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 09:07:42 JST
sj_zero
"kids these days are so great with technology!" -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 21:53:24 JST
sj_zero
Fair enough. I've talked before about the difference between the popular history and real history, and when making statements like the above it's typically using pop history to engage with a common shorthand (knowing that I often don't use shorthand resulting in massive effortposts) -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 21:26:24 JST
sj_zero
The people who accuse others of hate seem to be the most hateful people alive today, and usually the most actually bigoted. Like the national socialists of 1938, they are particularly ugly because they think their hatred and bigotry is morally justified and makes them good people. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 18-Nov-2024 11:16:27 JST
sj_zero
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cyun6SVfPM
This is an amazing restoration of a toy from 1918. The guy goes so far as to build his own stamping presses to remanufacture many of the parts that are totally destroyed.
I can't help but think that this toy would have been one of the most expensive toys you could buy in 1918. It has tons parts made of steel and all kinds of clockwork. After this restoration, it's probably among the most expensive toys on the planet. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 00:29:25 JST
sj_zero
I hate to say it, but when someone goes "We're a bunch of nerds" these days, I immediately hear "we're a bunch of far left tourists destroying your shit"
I mean, maybe that isn't fair, but disco stu doesn't advertise. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Nov-2024 06:39:23 JST
sj_zero
Stuff not being real is postmodern neomarxism, man!
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