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"Hm there's this person who very lightly offended one of our frequently revised and tightly observed norms. We have no norms for re-integrating offenders into the community. What should we do about the offender?"

Goofus: "Focus on what is to the advantage of the community in the future and let the retrospective judgment be informative but not comprehensive."

Gallant: "It's not terrorism if you're terrorizing a garbage person. They should be scared to open their mail or start their car."

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So -- shaming people is just throwing jet fuel on the smoldering embers of anti-social behavior, huh?

At the pool I was talking to a guy who pilots a Very Expensive Plane for Big Institution. He told me about how his buddy planned his "fini flight" route with GPT, and then this guy I was talking to had followed the same flight route on an optional training. I pointed out to him that this means that an AI had directed the flights of Big Institution's Very Expensive Plane at least twice, & it seemed like it was dawning on him for the first time. He said it was his choice to have followed the AI.

I was dining in at a family-oriented fast food place place tonight with my oldest. I heard the grandad at the next table regaling his assembled family about the Epstein investigation. Driving home I saw a car with a Q sticker. The normies are not all right.

An aspect of strength is having goals that are precise enough to be motivating but imprecise enough to eschew premature optimization.

Monday: Procedural generation is so much easier than handcrafting everything.

Friday: Handcrafting is so much easier than procedurally generating everything.

In 100,000 years an alien ship enters our solar system. The earth has no remarkable intelligent life, but it's a beautiful biodiverse planet recovering from some bad extinctions. The aliens don't notice the traces left by humanity right away, this is just a survey trip and not much monumental remains.

But, they do pick up a signal, coming not from Earth, but from Mars. "How strange?" they think. Mars is obviously the inferior planet for life. Earth is incredible. But they go to investigate. 1/

I'm like a cartoon dog for coffee. I just walked into a room where someone had fresh coffee and I closed my eyes, my toes gently lifted off the ground, and a curling finger of scent drew me across the room to the french press.

I realize this is a basic and normie opinion. I realize that I am celebrating my cheap, legal stimulant. I don't care.

Coffee is better than posting hot takes for internet strangers.

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You need to be rugpull maxxing. You need to be establishing rapport. You need to be laying down a conversational ethos. You need to be firm but respectful until you see a SQUIRREL

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Harlan Ellison once observed that the problem with internet arguments is that the person who replies last loses. You can avoid this by the technicality of roping someone along in an argument until you switch into talking like a cartoon dog.

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Yeah, sex is good, but have you ever kept a cool constructive tone with an increasingly abrasive and unhinged internet commenter, then concluded the interaction by declaring that you're a dog who has learned to use the internet, making a bunch of puns? It's PAWSOME WOOF WOOF

New idea to keep a public profile that hard-encodes a failure mode of non-redistribution: release everything with an inseparable background of copyrighted material. Podcast with the Top 40 playing. Vlog in front of HBO. And so on.

Pragmatism is the correct philosophy (so far, inasmuch as I can observe its outcomes).

Have you any alternative theory which will meet the facts?

I had a week of completely dead productivity and writer's block. So then I decided to say "fuck it" and go back in on my caffeine-based strategy and IT IS WORKING.

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Well, but they'll see how small you are afterwards, won't they?

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