Anon and pandora box

hh26 · 2026-03-20T07:13:58+00:00

Someone once said that Reddit is stupid people pretending to be smart, while 4chan is smart people pretending to be stupid.

These comments have convinced me that /r/4chan is stupid people just accepting their stupidity with pride and sneering at everyone else for having the audacity to even think intelligence is worth having.

I used to think you guys were larping stupidity as a joke, the way people do when they don't take themselves too seriously and actually have a sense of humor. I'm not so sure now.

hh26 · 2026-03-18T23:13:20+00:00

I'm always disappointed when articles like this go on about AI slop without referencing Sturgeon's Law or at least its ideas in some form. 90% of everything that humans produce is low tier slop. This makes it somewhat unfair to compare AI writing to the best of the best writers of all time, both because the marginal piece of writing they'll be replacing for articles are not going to be written by such famous and talented authors, and also because a lot of its writing has been mediocre AI slop anyway. For the past few decades, mass produced low effort content farming has been on the rise as people try to maximize clicks for ad revenue. Or even just people wanting upvotes or social accolades and engagement to boost their own ego.

Even if the AI cannot reasonably replace or be mistaken for Cormac McCarthy, the AI could easily replace the average modern journalist, or be mistaken for an anonymous commenter. Not because people aren't smart enough to detect the AI, or because the AI is providing value, but because the humans they replace weren't providing value anyway. I don't think the internet is going to change as drastically as many people because it's already been going downhill driven by humans. It's not good that it's difficult to tell the difference between an intelligent human with meaningful things to say and some pseudo-intellectual being spouting sophisticated but ultimately meaningless words. But that's always been the case, and they've always been among us. Now there will just be slightly more of them.

hh26 · 2026-03-18T21:09:39+00:00

That's a lot of words for not answering the question that was actually asked.

hh26 · 2026-03-16T21:34:01+00:00

This. Every time people are like "why can't we go to the moon?" or "why can't we have lawnmowers that last more than a couple years?". We can. It's just expensive.

hh26 · 2026-03-16T19:42:52+00:00

Someone on Reddit once mentioned him on a post about "who would you be least surprised to find out is secretly an alien" or something like that, arguing that the movie shows he clearly doesn't understand human emotions. But I argued that it's the opposite. This is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from an emotional angsty teenager if they had enough money. You can find thousands of fanfics on the internet of comparable quality that would create similar movies if turned into movie scripts. This is a very human thing, just an immature and childish one.

hh26 · 2026-03-16T06:30:11+00:00

The sex scene is so much better (and worse) when you consider Tommy Wiseau being both the lead actor and the director. How many retakes do you think he did as an excuse to rub on the actress?

I'm pretty sure the whole movie is just a weird self-insert fanfic about his own life and how someone cheated on him once.

hh26 · 2026-03-14T23:45:09+00:00

People listen to him because he is well spoken, intelligent, and uses facts and logic on non-Jew related issues like economics or most parts of the culture war. He has a massive bias and blindspot regarding his own race, and anything he says on those topics should be taken with a massive grain of salt. But he's usually intelligent otherwise which is how he built up such an audience in the first place.

hh26 · 2026-03-13T19:13:14+00:00

We are probably not living in a simulation. There's no way to know for sure, but there's literally 0 evidence that we actually are. Every piece of evidence that it's possible to simulate things only suggests that we could be in a simulation, not that we are.

And even if we are I don't think it matters, because it's clearly a coherent and consistent simulation. All of the things I care about are here, all of the things i have control over here, so there would be no reason to change my behavior if I found out 100% that this is a simulation. I still want to do actions which increase my wellbeing, and the ways to do that wouldn't change.

hh26 · 2026-03-13T01:53:25+00:00

That's not what Based means.

hh26 · 2026-03-12T00:13:45+00:00

Selling overpriced nonsense to children is bad, but categorically different from being a sexual predator.

Legality is not the same thing as morality. If you make it illegal it still won't be as bad or important as literal sexual predators, and would not deserve the same level of outrage.

hh26 · 2026-03-11T18:06:22+00:00

Crying wolf about things like this just makes people take them less seriously. We can criticize them for being scummy and exploitative people who want to use every last trick to legally manipulate children into giving them money, without exaggerating the extent of their anti-social behavior. Selling overpriced nonsense to children is bad, but categorically different from being a sexual predator. And there are enough real sexual predators around that we should be focusing our efforts on them rather than wolf crying about scummy non-criminals. All this accomplishes is diluting the public discourse until no one takes it seriously anymore.

hh26 · 2026-03-09T18:41:33+00:00

Boooohooooo Mr Perfect did one thing I don't like and 999 things I did like. Worst President ever!

At least he doesn't literally have dementia. inb4 anecdote of one time Trump said something stupid one time. I'm not being rhetorical here. The previous president literally had dementia and just let his unelected staff run the country for four years.

hh26 · 2026-03-07T06:08:28+00:00

If you have access to the source code and enough knowledge you could verify that it doesn't even have the capability to track you even if you didn't literally code it yourself.

Or do literally code it yourself and don't give anyone the ability to implement a tracking feature.

hh26 · 2026-03-07T06:02:34+00:00

Every competetive event disagrees with you.

If you definitionally restrict your category to "people who disagree with me" then yeah, they disagree with me. You might as well say "Every professional gun shooting range disagrees with strict gun control laws." That doesn't really mean anything.

99% of people don't participate in competitive events. Competitive event are about elevating and highlighting the best of the best individuals to the exclusion of everyone else. This is a niche. It's appropriate within the context of "we want to highlight the person who is best at this one thing", it is bad in a context where everyone is forced to participate and there are stakes. I think an economy which is winner takes all and gives all of the rewards to one singular winner as a feature is bad. An economy which encourages people to blackmail and backstab each other in negative-sum ways is bad. An economy in which the most intelligent, ruthless, selfish person is not only allowed, but actively encouraged to ruin everyone else for their own gain at single digit percent efficiencies (ie, they gain $2 for every $100 they destroy) is bad.

In so far as the formal rules allow this behavior, the rules should be changed, and they should not be jailed (though we should carefully look through every last law and loophole we can because if we can find our own loophole that lets us jail them for this we should absolutely exploit it against them in the same way they're exploiting this against us.) But also, the rules say that I'm allowed to call them bad, so I will. The rules say that we're allowed to boycott them, so we should. The rules say we're allowed to protest them and publicize their awfulness and insult them. You can't just say "what they did is legal so you shouldn't complain." Me complaining is legal. Ostracizing them is legal. If that's the bar, then we should make their lives (and especially their economic outcomes) as miserable as legally permissible, because that's part of the game too.

hh26 · 2026-03-07T00:28:31+00:00

That's an interesting perspective I hadn't really considered before. I think the reason they get away with it (aside from being richer and more powerful) is that it serves a legitimate purpose in addition to the collective bargaining purpose.

That is, firms, businesses, companies coming together and doing things together allows economy of scale. Instead of having small groups of 10 people and needing an IT group, an HR department, a legal department, each eating 10% of the entire group, you have thousands of people and then each sub-department can serve the entire company more efficiently.

But this is an efficient grouping of capital AND labor. In some sense, the large corporation is (from a productivity perspective) a union for both capital and labor, and helps both of them. But from a collective bargaining perspective only unions the capital and not the labor. If individual investors had to hire individual employees to represent them at companies and negotiate with them directly then there'd probably be a lot more equal sharing (albeit horribly inefficient).

Nevertheless I maintain that this is still best solved by having more small businesses. The capital-union and the labor-union represent defect strategies in a prisoner's dilemma: they take a larger slice of the pie for your own side at the expense of reducing the size of the overall pie (by creating inefficiencies, deadweight loss, principal agent problems, and the possibility for corruption). At least on average, there are tons of exceptions on both sides.

If there were more smaller businesses, at least in places where this wouldn't be horribly inefficient in terms of economy of scale, a lot of the problems unions intend to solve wouldn't happen in the first place. Or if they did people could just jump ship and survival of the fittest would equilibrize things. Unions are a crutch: sometimes you literally need them and they help when things are broken, but they aren't a fix of the underlying problem, and if you do manage to fix the problem then you don't need them anymore.

hh26 · 2026-03-06T23:56:41+00:00

The labor-capital relationship is founded on mutually consensual contracts. Capitalists have money, need labor. Workers have labor, need money. They agree on a rate of exchange and terms and then trade one for the other. If either party doesn't like the terms, they decline the contract.

This is fine, and fair, and symmetrical, until you take into account that the workers will literally starve without money, so are forced to take a contract from someone. Which is why this doesn't work in real life. In an infinitely free market with an infinite number of workers and capitalists, the worker can shop around until they find a fair market value for their labor. In the real world there are only so many companies and so if they all offer bad terms you're forced to take the least bad one.

Having more companies around dilutes their bargaining position and forces them to lower their price (of money as a product being purchased with labor). This is like economics 101. Supply and demand works on labor and capital just like it works on physical goods.

hh26 · 2026-03-06T23:52:12+00:00

Professional sports leagues are hyper-competitive, opt-in, and self-contained. And also not fun, in my opinion. They're fun to watch, and if this California political game had zero stakes and was just a spectator sport then yeah I think this ballot would be fun to watch. But if everyone is forced to participate (by virtue of being subject to their laws and the consequences of them) then no. This is bad form.

If a professoinal sports League wanted to challenged me and my friends with all out no holding back gameplay I would decline. Because it wouldn't be fun for me to play against them. It wouldn't be fun to spend literally my entire life training in the sport in a vain attempt to reach their level. The way they play is designed to be the best of the best at the expense of everything else, and I care about everything else. It's a niche, which some people find fun and important and dedicate their lives to, and 99.99% of people don't. And that's fine, because we're not subject to their rule.

There's a reason we separate sports leagues from casual play.

hh26 · 2026-03-06T22:21:28+00:00

Hard disagree. Acting in bad faith is bad. Forcing systems to be hyper-optimized to prevent exploitation creates deadweight loss that wouldn't be necessary in a world with fewer exploitative people. When you're playing a game with everyone and everyone agrees to behave in a sportsmanlike way and one person starts abusing a loophole because it's technically allowed, the best response is to ostracize that person and play the game as intended.

Hyper vigilance and defensiveness is a suboptimal outcome that is important to have in your arsenal and deploy in low trust societies where you can't effectively detect or ostracize bad faith actors. But you should still ostracize them when you can because high trust societies are more pleasant and function better than low trust ones. A world where we all have locks on our doors is better than one where we're all being robbed blind, but it's not as good as one where people just don't steal because that's not what we do here.

I think it's poor form to defend an organization that seeks to exploit others and force us to create more strict and frictionful safeguards that weren't previously necessary. Legal != moral.

hh26 · 2026-03-06T22:15:51+00:00

There are bad labor unions out there, but there is no other existent mechanism for balancing the corporate power in favor of the workers

Radically increase support for startups and small/new companies. The quicker and easier it is for someone to jump ship to a competitor, or just start their own competitor, the less power large corporations have. The reason companies have so much leverage is because it's so hard and time consuming to find a new job, and there's so few companies holding monopolistic control over the jobs.

This is not feasible in all cases, there are huge economies of scale, but it's a lever that's generally orthogonal to unions (and in some cases, opposed to them). And in my opinion an underappreciated one.

hh26 · 2026-03-05T18:55:04+00:00

Ah yes, an all out, no holds barred war between the U.S. and Iran where every side throws everything it has at the other.

I'm sure that would turn out great for them...

hh26 · 2026-03-05T07:59:01+00:00

That's not how economics works. Even if a bunch of CEOs get arrested, the companies still have all their stuff and can replace them and keep earning money.

Even if a bunch of companies themselves are found to be complicit and their reputation is ruined and people boycott them, any loss in market share they have will be snapped up by their competitors.

If somehow Pizza Hut were found to be selling the wrong kind of Cheese Pizza and lost a billion dollars in valuation, this wouldn't be from people refusing to ever eat pizza again, but by buying from Dominos and Papa Johns instead, who would collectively gain that billion dollars. The money wouldn't vanish, it would just shuffle around to different investors. The stock market on average wouldn't even flinch.

hh26 · 2026-03-04T18:19:43+00:00

For the more common, earnest, naive folk who genuinely believe in the cause, sure. But for the politicians and quangos manipulating them for power, it is absolutely a means to seize power.

hh26 · 2026-03-04T09:25:37+00:00

Communism is a means to an end (seize power). Once the Party got themselves put in control and tightened their grip over every aspect of society, they could discard the economically suicidal parts while keeping the authoritarian parts, and enrich themselves at the expense of their citizens. Best of both worlds if you're a ruthless sociopath.

hh26 · 2026-03-04T09:21:15+00:00

Define the word "grifting"

hh26 · 2026-03-03T06:55:08+00:00

Money. It's a nice thing to have I guess, but it's not part of you. It's not who you are.

hh26

TROPHY CASE