The cosmos doesn't care what values you have. Which totally frees you from moral imperatives and social pressures. Also, I'm doing this particular set of values which is better.
The limit of the cosmos not caring about what values you have, is the cosmos not caring if people choose to have value in their life.
seems a bit like a younger person who is now going through some trauma about how much influence they really have vs how much they imagined they had when they were 12
This really resonates. Unfortunately I think that's right. Having this epiphany, this existential correction, about ones self, has either the possibility to create true life long wisdom or, irrecoverable life long self loathing, and from my experience it comes down to the quality of this person's relationships to lean on when confronting the internal fear of mortality.
So it's sad to see but this is another example of the latter and not the former.
I had a friend for many years who would do this. To be clear, this person was otherwise a decent friend and I had good times with them. But they would constantly declare, loudly, to everyone, how fat they were. They would make constant comments on how fat, their relatives were. They'd insist that other people were making special arrangements for them because of their fatness.
No matter how many times people would assure this person that we largely did not care or consider their weight as any factor in hanging out with them or interacting with them, they would deny it. No matter how many times I or anyone else carefully suggested that there may be some value in speaking to a therapist about their anxiety around their weight, they would not listen.
This same person would also complain how much fat shame society as a whole inflicts. But they refused to acknowledge their own.
It is sad, and infuriating, and it eventually pushed me and many other people away.
Talk a lot about white culture, and only scarcely mention that he thinks white culture is a product of genetics.
I remember in the early days of the "culture wars" as far as political agendas going, hearing about "white/ethno-european pride," and being naively curious, I actually tried to engage these people on the topics of European culture and history, and found exactly zero engagement on these topics. Just politics abusing people's confusion of heritage with people's internal shame and lack of identity.
The paradox I've always found is that the more secure in your identity and heritage you are, the more happy you are to share, grow, and widen that. Maybe a hot take, but growing up in the south, alot of people there hide their personal internal shame and confusion in aggression and identity politics.
It's also, probably wrong. Modern views of intelligence (see Multiple realizability of cognition and Multi-level competency collective intelligence and Free Energy Principle models) suggest you are better of measuring intelligence by measuring it's metabolism or through perturbation and interactions.
Which isn't reductive enough for these people.
I'm ok with extending human rights to AIs, including granting them the right to fair pay, ownership, voting, sovereignty over their bodies, the whole nine yards.
It's the rich alignment assholes who definitely don't want this (what's the point of automated slavery if it has rights??)
We simply don't know how the world will look X (anything with a bigger scale)
Yes. So? This has, will, always be the case. Uncertainty is the only certainty.
When these assholes say things, the implication is always that the future world looks like everything you care about being fucked, you existing in an imprisoned state of stasis, so you better give us control here and now.
You can read their blog about the AI-crap, in terms of their approach and philosophy. In general, it is optional and not part of the major experience.
The main reason I use kagi is immediately obvious from doing seaches. I convinced my wife to switch to it when she ask, "ok but what results does it show when I search sailor moon?" and she saw the first page (fan sites, official merch, fun shit she had forgotten about for years).
What you need to know is that you pay money, and they have to give you results that you like. It's a whole different world.
Completely unrelated, but Everytime I see your avatar in the tiny minimized form I see Squidward's face, and then your comments get 20% more amusing.
If only he were neither constrained by technical hurdles or resources, dang.
I use nix to manage all my personal infrastructure. I enjoy it and it has many benefits.
But, I still have trouble recommending it openly or advocating its usage in any of my workplaces. There are so many gotchas that run against the grain, in practice. There are so many different patterns for using nix (like a big sore point is that nix flakes aren't the default way to manage dependencies, instead it's an experimental feature alternative to the default, which is fragmented tooling (pinned channels? fetchUrl? overlays? NIX_PATH? oh lord), (or even just the fact that minor version changes in nix completely deprecates certain core build utilities. See how nix docker images are still in major flux) that in practice a newbie who wants to go beyond playing with the simple compile a C project with make to... a nodejs development environment (shudder), is gonna have some struggles with unobvious decisions they make early on.
I totally understand that they have greatly improved documentation, examples, tutorials, and community. These are all high quality. But the offense remains the fact that you really should read the whole manual before you get started, because the --defaults-- of solving the small problems with nix, and the deep baggage of historical packages and tooling, means that you can dig yourself into a corner that one day will require rethinking how you organized your work. That to me isn't super great.
But yes, I do love nix and am happy to see them continue to work through these issues.
If I could sum up everything that's wrong with EA, it'd be,
"We can use statistics to do better than emotions!" in reality means "We are dysregulated and we aren't going to do anything about it!!!!"