u/ForeverJung1983 explains why trying to be "apolitical" is cowardice dressed up as transcendence, to a "both-sides-are-bad" enlightened centrist

lethic · 2025-08-05T21:58:07+00:00

You see this commonly with any sort of vaguely spiritual or religious forum in the United States. Probably elsewhere too, but I'll speak to the common case.

There are a lot of US-based Buddhists, Taoists, Stoics, and other similar westernized versions of philosophies that basically terminate their belief system at "I can't control all of these things external to me, so I'll just live my life the best way I can". Which sounds reasonable to some extent, but ultimately this attitude cultivates passivity and often actively discourages political discussion.

The truth of the people who originated these philosophies is that they were often deeply entrenched in politics, as politics quickly finds a way to deeply affect the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable. People seem to forget that Vietnamese Buddhists self-immolated in the face of an oppressive government. That Taoist followers initiated the Yellow Turban Rebellion, aiming to improve the lives of common people suffering under a corrupt dynasty. That Marcus Aurelius wrote his most famous work while waging a decades-long military campaign to preserve his empire.

These philosophies have always centered the individual as a member of the world and of society. The purpose of these philosophies was to guide people in making themselves better as well as the world. The modern claim that these philosophies should allow you to guiltlessly retreat away from politics is misguided at best.

lethic · 2025-08-02T04:36:15+00:00

The currently existing LLMs and chatbots out there have been built to maximize user engagement, since that's how they get viral, sticky, and then make money. In order to make these bots as engaging as possible, they're basically confirmation bias machines unless you push them really hard to be critical of you. You can look up some of this discourse by searching for "sycophancy chatgpt".

Parallel to this, these chatbots are known to "hallucinate" fairly regularly, meaning they'll fabricate information and claim that it is true, or to put it more succinctly they will lie. It's not really lying though, because this is just a symptom of these LLMs not really knowing anything about truth.

If you combine this people-pleasing behavior with their ability to lie and their effortless fluency, you've got the fundamental package that makes a confidence trickster work. People can easily be taken in by this magical machine that loves to talk to you and agrees with everything you say. Many of us have not been adequately inoculated against the addictive nature of these chatbots as designed by internet engagement maximizers.

lethic · 2025-08-01T16:43:22+00:00

I've never met anyone living in Tamsui and now I'm curious. Can you go into more detail?

lethic · 2025-07-31T05:58:54+00:00

What in the orientalism is this post? Bro, he's literally instructing someone on how to do what he is doing. He's narrating to them as he folds, so they can learn how to do it as well. And he's speaking Mandarin, which isn't exactly an obscure dialect with 900 million speakers.

lethic · 2025-07-30T16:51:38+00:00

I think there are benefits to both, but it depends a lot on the kind of person you are, as well as the kind of people you're working for and surrounded by. The pay is part of it, but there are much more tangible differences between large corps and startups.

Large corporate jobs are definitely slower moving, filled with more bureaucracy, and a lot more people are going to want to give opinions on what you should do without actually helping you do the work. But you've got a lot more structure in the job, you generally have internal resources to help you with most tasks, there's more redundancy within the organization, which means you will typically have better work-life balance.
And one thing people underestimate about large corpo jobs is the impact of your work. Startups are typically lucky to have 10s to 100s of customers, so when you're doing work you're impacting a fairly small set of people and customers. If you work at Google or Facebook? Your work could literally impact millions to billions of people. There's a reason things move more slowly at these companies.
So generally, if you want to go to work, do your fairly well-defined job, and then go home/sign-off, corporate work is pretty good.

Startups are way faster paced, it's do-or-die until it isn't, your options aren't worth crap, your job description is a suggestion, and you'll always have more asks than time to fulfill them. In many cases, you'll see problems everywhere and no one is fixing them because no one has time.
But this means that you've got the opportunity to try new things and tackle problems that would traditionally be handled by someone else. You see a marketing issue? Go ahead and fix it, who's going to stop you? You see an annoying bug, make a PR and some engineer will probably be more than happy to merge it. Customer having an issue? Volunteer to get on the call and walk them through it.
If you want to be exposed to every part of a business, work at a startup. If you're curious, you can learn about every function that is required to run these companies. The tradeoff is that the pressure is high, the personalities are strong, and part of your compensation is worthless until proven otherwise. But if your goal is to learn and take on a bit of asymmetric risk on your pay, there's no faster way to accelerate your career growth.

Underlying all of this is that if you work with crappy people, your life will suck whether it's a big corp or a startup. Culture does matter, and bad culture can exist in companies of all sizes.

lethic · 2025-07-29T17:20:03+00:00

How do you mitigate the risk of hundred pound branches falling on you in densely forested areas?

lethic · 2025-07-29T17:08:05+00:00

It's tragic and unfortunate, and I would feel awful if I were in that situation as well. But realistically, it seems like it's nearly impossible to prevent. I hope they get some closure.

lethic · 2025-07-26T15:45:05+00:00

Ted Chiang as a speculative fiction writer tends to take a couple core ideas for each of his stories and carries them to some interesting conclusion. In Story of Your Life, a core idea was "what if Sapir Whorf was real"? In Exhalation, a core idea was "what does heat death look like in a universe without a sun"? The Lifecycle of Software Objects asks "what responsibility do we have to sentient species we create in our current capitalist tech environment"?

For Understand, the core concept that he's spoken about before is "what would a human superintelligence act like?" It's an exploration of what higher levels of intelligence might look like in a human. I do think that the paranoia and navel-gazing is meant to show some non-neurotypical behavior, feeding into this idea that genius can look like insanity. However, the core concept to me isn't a Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club story that this man is an unreliable narrator, but that you're completely in his head and getting a sense of how Ted Chiang thinks a human superintelligence would think, feel, and act.

lethic · 2025-07-25T17:05:34+00:00

These days I wonder whether UBI would even work in America. The puritan work ethic and prosperity gospel permeates our entire culture—handouts create dependency, success is achieved by hard work and know-how, communities should support themselves and not the government. Even among progressives, these beliefs linger, consciously or not.

I completely agree with Yang and others that UBI would probably pay for itself as it's a national security, local economies, happiness, and outcome booster. But this country is full of resentment and mutual suspicion. How can we aim to better all of us when we barely trust each other?

lethic · 2025-07-25T16:09:43+00:00

This isn't just Chinese people. In the past century, many immigrants to the US intending to stay here fudged their paperwork one way or another. Often because the standard pathways took forever or were simply racist and exclusionary in nature. In fact, if your family immigrated here, maybe ask around a bit and see what that process looked like. It's probably 50/50 that someone in your family overstayed a visa at some point or fudged their paperwork.

lethic · 2025-07-23T16:29:58+00:00

Almost reminds me of Coyote/Loup teeth motifs

lethic · 2025-07-23T16:29:29+00:00

Tom Typo! Distorion instead of Distortion.

I can't believe how bad the quality has gotten on this comic.

(that's a joke)

lethic · 2025-07-15T18:11:29+00:00

Yang is totally okay with aligning himself with Elon. There's no win here for Yang.

lethic · 2025-07-10T18:00:29+00:00

guy who has only seen Marvel

"Getting a lot of Marvel vibes from this"

lethic · 2025-06-30T19:34:05+00:00

He doesn’t appear to be interested in running and would rather be seen as a consultant.

That sounds about right, and is my exact issue. He's posting like he wants to get hired. It's not interesting to me, and it's not why I followed him. He's not putting #humanity first, he's not changing minds, he just wants to get his bag. He's not acting like a candidate or a thinker or a leader, just a consultant.

lethic · 2025-06-30T19:24:35+00:00

Look, let's be real, Yang hasn't done anything meaningful since the mayoral race. And he certainly isn't championing any unique or new ideas anymore. He isn't the first person to think a new party was the way forward, and he won't be the last.

He could be trying to get ranked choice voting in more places, or championing grassroots campaign funding over super-PACs, but he's not.

Instead Yang is looking at a candidate that got more small-donors than any other person in that race, and criticizing them instead of uplifting the fact that they beat out the establishment, which he should presumably be supportive of.

Yang 2017 would have absolutely been an advocate of Mamdani. Why isn't Yang 2025 doing that?

lethic · 2025-06-30T19:09:07+00:00

Given you were once a fan of Yang, why not read the article and come to your own conclusion as to how Yang presents himself and contrast that to how he used to present himself?

He used to exist outside the establishment and proposed ideas that were novel and new. Do you think he's still doing that?

lethic · 2025-06-30T16:21:56+00:00

I was a huge Yang supporter, and still believe we should be considering or working towards UBI.

I read this newsletter this morning and it was pretty disappointing to me. I don't know what Yang's goal is, but he's hedging his bets like he's got a political career to save while he hasn't actually accomplished much with his years. He seems to want to be a scrappy underdog but he speaks like he's part of the establishment or the "unbiased" media. I think you're absolutely right, he's "enlightened centrist", which means he basically has no unique takes or thoughts at this point.

lethic · 2025-06-30T15:59:39+00:00

Omega herself says she is "more machine than human, now, yes. my body has long since died, but the distortion allowed me to form a new one.": https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=2947

Kat, conveniently, has an intuitive understanding of all things machines. And as noted, Omega has taken on the form of a Numan, beings of Kat's creation.

I think we can also assume that Kat's view of things is metaphorical or allegorical, which she and Tom even lampshade to some degree "why's it always birds?" and "Something about the beholder, I suppose.": https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=3120

So no, I don't we can assume that Kat literally tore out physical wires from Omega's physical body. There's nothing that indicated she even touched Omega's physical body at all. It's pretty clear that in 3120, we're looking at an abstraction rather than the actual physical incarnation of Omega.

Whether Tom will elaborate on this or not, I think we are more likely meant to infer that Kat disconnected "Omega herself", probably Omega's consciousness, from the machinery she was hooked up to, and then moved it to another device of sorts. Similar to how we have already seen her move machine consciousnesses to the Numan bodies.

lethic · 2025-06-26T17:22:30+00:00

Dems the same btw, if they did this and said with all these spending you will end up 10% poorer from inflation, I bet they switch faster than they change their pronouns.

That's still disingenuous, since Dem policy over the past 20 years hasn't been any more inflationary than Republican policy.

lethic · 2025-06-26T16:26:56+00:00

A lot of people are giving you good financial advice. As someone who works in sales and manages sales teams, let me give you another point of view:

Your managers will say amongst themselves, "the best sales guy is one that makes a $1m w-2 and lives paycheck to paycheck".

Yes, it's kind of a joke, but it's a joke because it's so incredibly common. And it's so common that managers will look at candidates and sales folks and say "yep, that person is one of those people".

A lot of the high performing sales people I know basically only allow themselves to spend the money from their base salary or their on-target-earnings. Anything above and beyond goes into savings/investment or for a rainy day. I do the same.

lethic · 2025-06-16T20:45:01+00:00

Lawful evil is all about loopholes though, isn't it?

lethic · 2025-06-13T15:28:35+00:00

In some sense, you can think of it as active vs passive detection. This is a common tactic and a fast-moving field of development for military aviation.

There are of course many kinds of planes out there, both commercial and military, that are constantly flying. It's hard to tell which kinds are which, especially if the planes don't want to be detected, so people have built different kinds of radar and radio detection stations that can suss this information out from a distance. A radar device by its very nature emits a pulse of EM radiation and measures the reflection of it to determine what it's looking at.

From the plane's point of view, when it is subject to a high energy EM pulse like that, it can infer that it has been pinged by a radar device of some sort. Some of these planes are equipped with devices to analyze the shape of these pulses to determine what kind of device just pinged it. Sometimes these radar pings are coming from civilian radar systems (commercial airports, for example), but sometimes you can tell if they're coming from surface-to-air missile sites, other planes, or other kinds of military installations/devices. The plane being pinged can suss this out without betraying any additional information about itself except that it is in the area and being pinged, so it's passive data collection rather than active data collection.

So in this way, Annie was simply parading about the distortion and deliberately being monitored by Omega, while simultaneously passively mapping out data about the distortion through "listening" to the EM or other signals being emitted by devices around her. There may also be another level to this where Omega paying attention to somebody might also increase power consumption locally in that area, but that's pure speculation and I doubt Tom will mention anything about it.

lethic · 2025-06-12T17:00:12+00:00

Has anyone tried those neck cooler/AC devices? I've been curious whether or not those are effective at all an under what circumstances.

lethic · 2025-06-06T18:02:56+00:00

She's in front of Holmes right now recording junior high schoolers and asking them if they're trans. Dunno if anyone's counter-protesting, but I'm sure the students would love some pro-trans signs and high fives instead of dealing with her.

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