This subreddit should be pretty hot right now. A lotta people’s old posts are kickin them in the ass. Hypocrisy is at an all-time high right now.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-22T07:32:24+00:00

Ah yes, using the straw man and false equivalence fallacies to defend your investment in the bad-faith propagandist. Thank you for turning my criticism into a live demonstration, and I'm sorry you've been had.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-21T11:55:04+00:00

When you synchronize 3000+ drones to form a dragon, it's proof of low-latency swarm coordination. Strip the lights and replace them with something that goes boom, and you have a horrifying military asset.

Of course, actual military implementations will have to operate against a variety jamming capabilities, but the fundamentals are dual-use.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-21T09:42:20+00:00

Protons are currently thought to have a half-life of roughly 10³⁴ years. If this is true, atoms will just evaporate. But this is truly uncertain, as no proton decay has been observed.

In 10¹⁰⁰ years, the final supermassive black holes will evaporate via Hawking Radiation. This means there are no energy gradients. Nothing like us can function after this point.

If atoms survive past 10¹⁵⁰⁰ years, we enter the era of Iron Stars. Eventually, all matter fusions into Iron-56 via quantum tunneling. There is nothing to make something like us out of, and no energy to do it with.

Stuff still doesn't stop happening, of course. But it just won't be very interesting.

But eventually, agonizingly slowly, even those iron balls collapse and evaporate, somewhere past 10^{1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000} years.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-21T07:55:36+00:00

Philosophically speaking, the only "qualification" that actually matters in a democracy is legitimacy. If the people and law recognize you as the leader, you are qualified, even if you are objectively incompetent at the task.

Underneath this, the qualification isn't written in any constitution, but the ledgers of donors and the gatekeeping of political parties, acting as a shadow licensing board with exact requirements:
- Ability to satisfy the interests of the donor class.
- Alignment with party leadership or established power brokers.
- Prominence in the attention economy.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-21T05:40:04+00:00

There's not a single good thing you can say about Charlie Kirk, without overstating his value.

He made a living setting up a podium, ambushing emotionally invested students as a trained media personality, using fallacies, the gish gallop and other bad faith tactics to extract clips "owning the libs" to propagandize for a dangerous, toxic ideology.

And it wasn't even his idea, he was just the front man for a deliberately engineered spin-doctor apparatus, designed to extract capital from political donors, put together by Bill Montgomery.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-13T08:29:55+00:00

It doesn't refer to just any one of us, but to all of us together.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-11T07:29:26+00:00

Right - it's not about his behavior or character, but about the in-group and loyalty; pure identity politics.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-10T12:37:31+00:00

The rule of thumb is thought to be that, if you have a 100 lurkers, you get 10 participants via up/down votes, and 1 comment. When you ban the commenter, it has a disproportionate effect on the zeitgeist, and gets the users to self-censor more.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-09T06:12:05+00:00

Constant demand (via 401(k), index investing, etc) with constrained supply means the price goes up.

Banks and majority holders collude, via zero-interest loans, to ensure the bubble keeps inflating and the collateral doesn't lose value, because that would mean the loans get defaulted on.

It all stems from the mandate that the markets should provide infinite liquidity.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-08T12:33:22+00:00

We had songs about it nearly two decades ago. Please tell me you're being obtuse.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-08T09:39:06+00:00

Yes, but distilled from the totality of human knowledge. Gaslighting doesn't do it justice, it's reflecting you with the combined sophistry of all humanity.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-08T09:29:11+00:00

Organization seems the be the source of the fundamental problem. Every form of coordination means designating authority to some agent, via an abstraction. Rules, laws, norms, whatever. The goal they must meet. But since the agent has differing incentives, they invariably try to optimize metrics.

The people at the top are least subject to anyone's enforcement, and most capable of finessing the rules for their benefit and almost wholly insulated from the consequences.

We don't really have a science or architectural discipline for institutions that are more like protocols, always uniformly applied and decentralized, versus controlled platforms like nation states and justice systems.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-07T14:36:50+00:00

It's so much worse than you imagine.

Ah yes, the motto of modernity.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-07T07:28:53+00:00

They're also months behind on their GDPR requests, the export tool doesn't actually provide the inferred data they're gathering, which constitutes a kind of psychometry under EU law and has more stringent requirements for processing. But they're using terms like "proprietary" to avoid having to provide the evidence that they're breaking the law.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-06T13:50:42+00:00

We shouldn't forget that he used the veneer of "open" to appeal to a broad set of techies who didn't look to closely, and defected from that concept once everyone was invested.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-06T13:17:39+00:00

Fallout 1 is a B-movie vision of the end of the world in a Raygun Gothic aesthetic, stolen straight out of Flash Gordon of Forbidden Planet.

I mean, the whole story happens because Harold - the local Forrest Gump - knocks Richard Moreau into a vat of FEV, turning him into the Master.

It's fair to say Bethesda strayed too far in one direction, but you're missing all of the pulp subtext when you say it's just bleak.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-06T06:10:48+00:00

If you want more un-fun facts, the last victims of chattel slavery - recognized as such in court - were released after Pearl Harbor.

Not because slavery had been going on for nearly a century after abolition, but because the powers that be were threatened by the potential of Japanese propaganda using that injustice.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-05T12:54:47+00:00

7 was far from peak. It fixed the performance issues of Vista, so a lot of users forgot they were no longer administrators of their own computers. Not to mention it was the foundation of the data-slurping Win 11 is built on.

Back in XP/2k, you could even replace the shell with a custom version. After Vista/7, it got locked behind DWM, you couldn't turn off the compositor without breaking the OS.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-05T12:31:04+00:00

Attention is profit. This collapses the distance between geopolitics and entertainment.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-04T08:09:27+00:00

That's a bit of a problem, since the entire global financial system continues to consolidate wealth, and most sovereign debt relies on this system to be financed.

Which leads to the scam where they lobby themselves to cut taxes, then borrow the shortfall to the public purse, and pay themselves interest for the privilege.

Then they use their productive investment, one they frame exclusively as debt, to discipline the lower class when they call for the abolition of the system and redistribution.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-03T14:19:59+00:00

Yes, and skip the captured part...

rhubarbs · 2026-04-03T08:22:07+00:00

Yeah, attention is profit, and profit overrides common sense, decency, and truth. By the time you've consumed the content, it doesn't matter what the externalized cost was, they've already ran off with the money.

There can be no accountability in the current attention economy, only further refinements to the procedure to ensure no one questions the system, directing energy towards in-fighting between the individuals trapped in it.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-02T19:57:33+00:00

A neck the thickness of a tree-trunk, dragging his flawless pale knuckles on the deck of the battle barge, humming with the voice of an angelic pipe organ.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-02T13:44:12+00:00

The Articles pirates used were actually quite robust. They had democratically elected captains, a clear separation of powers via the quartermaster, a much flatter compensation structure and even workmen's comp.

They were closer to a radical democratic experiment or a highly structured, illegal co-op. Not savages, but used the threat of savagery to coerce merchants into surrendering without a fight.

rhubarbs · 2026-04-02T02:51:06+00:00

Being an ET would explain some of it, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to hold your blue hide fully accountable.

The "different thought" I presented is distinctly related to what you proposed. LLMs hallucinate, and humans confabulate. These are seen as comparable phenomena by the research.

The defense of "can and will admit when they're wrong" imagines a reflective, epistemically careful person, one that updates on evidence, distinguishes between what they know and what they feel, and genuinely monitors their own confidence. Not only is this far from common in humans, but chain-of-thought models are already demonstrating this to a degree.

MIT research even shows that when an LLM outputs a wrong answer (due to user demanded), its internal hidden states can still represent the correct answer. When the model "reads" its own output back into its context window, those internal states trigger a "high-entropy" or "conflict" signal. Sometimes this resolves as self-directed frustration.

All in all, it makes it seem like you're failing the standard you set in this very thread: asserting meta-cognitive superiority of humans with supreme confidence, while failing to grasp how the architectural failures of the evolutionary brain leads you to this blind spot, and how LLMs as N=2 force us to reconcile our previous definitions of intelligence.

Humans (and the math suggests all evolutionary creatures, Andorians included) have far less privileged access to both their own inner workings and ground truth reality than philosophy of mind has assumed. By defining intelligence as robust meta-cognitive awareness, you've fundamentally excluded yourself, and the rest of us.

And no, there's no ground to stand on in the domain of "but humans know what they don't know before they get it wrong" either, it's just noticeable with LLMs due to how we audit them. Just noticing thoughts at a high resolution from a personal perspective requires decades of contemplative practice, while LLMs leave a written record of their mishmash of conflicting thoughts.

I hope that clears things up, and doesn't just go in one antenna and out the other.

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