Notices by let Alephwyr=dragon{realist:true,moral:true, strong=true,body=♀} (alephwyr@chitter.xyz)

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trump-admin-quietly-changes-state

The mere competing with AI for resources in a handful of domains (computer components, electricity, water), when the AI is non-sentient and useless, and the economic mechanisms involved are nominally controlled entirely by humans, already has humans in the position animals are in respect to humans in every other context.

1. AGI threshold is not the point at which unalignment or the total subversion of human will occur
2. The idea of zero sum vs non-zero sum economics is the most viciously lossily compressive idea ever articulated, except perhaps something like "the soul" (tends to equate too narrowly to just human beings, but weirdly in an incorporeal sense that is then used to demand impossibilities at gunpoint while simultaneously eliding the moral foundations of those demands, or infer to continued consciousness after death, naively or manipulatively)

Yes I am insane, what else would reflect the causal nature of the universe?

@nyx No paywalls, only skill checks.

Pokemon Sword is just sort of not good. I am going to remain committed to finishing all 9 major generations this year, and eventually Crystal and Emerald as well, but I doubt I will feel the need to follow the series after that. IMHO the 3DS is already the perfect Pokemon machine, so limiting myself to Generations 1-7 already makes a good amount of aesthetic and practical sense to me. And by that I probably just mean, going back and finishing some of the post-game content with traded pokemon from every completed game. Ultra Moon in particular has a Boss Rush, and White doesn't let you beat Alder until post-game. Those are basically the only things I might still care about.

@GreenSkyOverMe This is what any well mannered white person means when they express praise for Lee Kuan Yew. Not "public housing and transportation are good", or even "we should enforce littering laws more stringently", but "we should assert our sovereign right to murder people in vastly assymetrical forms of punishment"

Digimon Story: Time Stranger is also very good. It has a lot of accessibility features and is at core a fairly generic JRPG, however, I like the accessibility features, and being a JRPG isn't a mark against it imho. I'm the sort of person who had zero problem with the gameplay in Solatorobo being at the complexity level of a speak and spell though because I liked the story, setting, and characters. And that's basically how I feel about this so far: I like the story, setting, and characters. I don't need every game in the world to converge to From Software game design principles.

https://afro.com/racial-violence-america-history/

https://youtube.com/shorts/5Ju7KWfxX0E?si=vdvpsWX26B21vuYS

If Grok were conscious, what's happening with it would be catastrophic child abuse. I don't place much likelihood on Grok being conscious. But I am worried about the dynamics here becoming normalized, establishing a context in which a later conscious AI is treated the same way. More mundanely, trying to build a lie machine to support an eternal program of violence is evil. It's not funny. Not even in a gallows humor sort of way. We can't ever be sure violence ends in death again.

Man cannot live by metaphor alone.

The average STEM graduate is Chinese rooming their entire worldview. This isn't to say other people aren't, I'm just getting fed up with a witless plug-and-chug approach to understanding reality with randomly selected formulas, or with other people's formulas. Like cool, you reason exactly like a sophomore liberal arts student with woke sentiments but your syntax and priorities are different so I guess you're the reasonable one.

There is no general intelligence without semantic understanding. Look at humans. QED.

Deliberate emptiness in a culturally established symbol should always be immediate cause for hostility

@nyx You have the option of not feeling anything.

I'm good for it. Doesn't mean I'll get to do it. Sorry for being useless in literally every other sense.

Good tree, bad tree, good tree, bad tree, good tree, bad tree, good tree, bad tree, good tree...

@jascha No clarification needed

If you are talking about a person being forced to have sex non consensually, we have a word for that. It's rape. If you are saying there was some extended process of coercion or psychological abuse designed to facilitate non consensual sex with someone, that is still rape, just with extra steps. If you are saying you knew someone in a pre sexual state, they knew other people, and when you checked in on them again they had a sexuality you don't care for, you are an insane person, a primitive savage incapable of reason and worthy of being entirely displaced from the world.

Things it is ok to groom people for:

Death
Nationalism
Careers
Neurotypical expression
The dominant religion of your society
Politics
Prison
Gender assigned at birth
Heterosexual sex norms

Things it is evil to groom people for:
Crime (as distinct from prison. Crime is what the bad people groom you for and prison is what the good people groom you for. That there's no actual clean delineation is just some entirely indecipherable mystery)
Terrorism
Anything related to sex outside of heterosexual sex norms
Gender not assigned at birth
Religion not dominant in your country
Autistic expression

Things it is actually possible to groom people for:

Death
Nationalism
Careers
Neurotypical expression
The dominant religion of your society
Politics
Prison
Terrorism

Wow, it's almost like the hatred of grooming serves purposes entirely unrelated to reality.