Post by Corbet the editor. “We get it: people wish that we had not highlighted work by this particular author. Had we known more about the person in question, we might have shied away from the topic. But the article is out now, it describes a bit of interesting technology, people have had their say, please let’s leave it at that.”

So you updated the article to reflect this right? padme.jpg

Watts has always been a bit of a weird vector. While he doesn’t seem a far righter himself, he accidentally uses a lot of weird far right dogwhistles. (prob some cross contamination as some of these things are just scientific concepts (esp the r/K selection thing stood out very much to me in the rifters series, of course he has a phd in zoology, and the books predate the online hardcore racists discovering the idea by more than a decade, but still odd to me)).

To be very clear, I don’t blame Watts for this, he is just a science fiction writer, a particularly gloomy one. The guy himself seems to be pretty ok (not a fan of trump for example).

Hold it right there criminal scum!

But things being real doesn’t stop the cranks. See quantum.

Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it’s crucial to the overall argument:

… if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do …

Does this proposition make sense? It’s not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I’m too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

lol hahah.

Sadly it seems the next one is gonna be Quantum.

Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.

Ha very clever, but as quantum level effects only occur when somebody is looking at it, they dont have to simulate it at quark level all the time. I watched what the bleep do we know, im very smart.

Still a bit sad we are not doing nano anymore.

But this quickly runs into the ‘don’t create your own unbreakable crypto system’ problem. There are people out there who are a lot smarter who quickly can point out the holes in these simulation arguments. (The smartest of whom go ‘nah, that is dumb’ sadly I’m not that enlightened, as I have argued a few times here before how this is all amateur theology, and has nothing to do with STEM/computer science (E: my gripes are mostly with the ‘ancestor simulation’ theory however)).

Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!

Finally we have a good usage for the nuclear waste warnings, we put all the copies of their music there.

"This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours."

Yes, he even gets mentioned by xkcd in the same breath as Stallman or Linus. (That it turns out the latter is the least worse of the three (he actually realized that being an asshole was bad) is quite the surprise).

Gasp

This is just like the fall of Rome.

E: eurgh the people arguing against regs that help people with allergies.

According to jwz the current leadership of bsky isnt much better, but I have not looked into it.

Previous thread on esr

holy fuck, I’ve seen anti-trans accounts on mastodon spew this same shit and I’m kind of surprised it’s a wider conservative conspiracy theory and not something local to mastodon

I think Blanchard started with this one. If you needed more proof the guy is an absolute case of brain worms. (E: Here is the source)

E: I wonder what caused the sudden public appearance of more trans people, anime? Or the change in laws about a decade ago where most of the western world stopped sterilizing and going after trans people. (it is nuts that the terfs never bring this up, so worried about trans healthcare perhaps causing some permanent changes while ignoring that very recently that sterilization was mandatory in most of the western world (A law in .nl between 1985 and 2014 for example). Fucking assholes.)

I guess including 4chan in the training data was a mistake.

Remember how the book seeing like a state tried to warn people about this. If only it had bot been reviewed by Scott, EA could have been warned.

Imagine what other flaws these cars have if the tried to ‘innovate’ like this on the solved technology that is fucking doors.