promethea.incorporated

This is what the culture-flipping algorithm feels like from the inside

The Council: “To proceed with the motion of writing this online comment. We unanimously agree that the US is a very bullshit country most of the time but at least our country is failing at the important values it was founded on instead of never even having pretended to care about them in the first place and even in its failure it’s still doing better on many of them than many others; for example, PoliceMob won’t arrest us for burning the flag…”

The One Who Watches The Watchers: “…our country?”

The Council: “Yes. We are obviously an American. It shouldn’t be that hard to believe: if you have a person who thinks in English, writes in English on an ANSI keyboard to their mostly American friends on the internet, believes in immigration and free speech and free trade and not letting the government do too many things because our government is controlled by terrible people, loves San Francisco, finds Elon Musk v v inspirational, wants to found a startup to solve big societal problems by turning them into numbers etc. then what would your prior be for them being an American?”

TOWWTW: “But we aren’t even in America!”

The Council: “But expatriates is a Thing. Don’t you remember, we flew here from SF in February?”

TOWWTW: “Oh right, it makes sense. Carry on then.”

…

TOWWTW: “…wait a fucking moment!”

1 month ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #the council of cognition is back · 8 notes · .permalink

socialjusticemunchkin:

Programmer synesthesia is weird.

My brain Definitely! Has! Opinions! on what different languages look like and how their syntax highlighting should reflect this.

For example, Ruby is not green. Absolutely not green except perhaps in very exceptional situations. Ruby is red and blue and magenta and a bit of orange. It must be soft and somewhat bright and quite gentle. I like purple, and I like Ruby, but I don’t know if purple has a place in Ruby. If Ruby was to have a “primary” color it might be magenta or red, but it’s not the color that would be the most common.

Python is probably mostly blue-green but I’m not sure yet. Haven’t really used it.

Lisp is NOT RED. It’s likely to be cyan, but red belongs absolutely nowhere in Lisp. Magenta too. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that a McCarthy is important to Lisp, and that reds must absolutely keep away from the language (nothing is ever a coincidence). Cyan and green and some orange and perhaps yellow.

ZSH is purple and blue. It’s quite subdued, with not much color to it.

Coffeescript is orange and it compiles to dark green javascript. Yellow is not a coffeescript color.

Julia seems to be purple and green and orange. It’s a very beautiful colorscheme with a slight strangeness and a feeling of power that’s not quite controlled. It elicits respect like a prototype nuclear reactor.

Golang? I don’t know. Orange might be important in it, but it’s not overwhelmingly orange like coffeescript.

C, unlike coffeescript, seems like a language yellow and orange would get along in.

Html I don’t really know much about. It’s mostly about the rainbow colors of the tag hierarchy, and I prefer to write it with coffeekup anyway.

And it’s not like the colors are just any of those colors. Bright green is unnatural but not searing while dark green is almost but not quite comforting. Blue wants to tinge towards purple a bit. I’m not sure if the color between dark red and strong magenta is actually the red or the magenta, but it’s an important color. Orange and purple are especially difficult colors to get right. I don’t know if reality contains the right purple anywhere in it; it might have an ultraviolet component to it. Orange must be a true orange without degrading to brown, but it may not be too bright. Yellow feels like it might have a slight goldish tinge to it but then again it should contain some green too perhaps.

And it isn’t helping that one of my screens is a glossy IPS and another is an old matte TN. At least I noticed to switch off f.lux before I went completely crazy over colors not being anything like each other ever.

This is horrible. F288FF on the TN looks like FF00FF on the IPS; what the FUCK is wrong with my color temps and why won’t redshift help?

1 month ago · tagged #baby leet · 9 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink

metagorgon:

ozymandias271:

IMO from a PR perspective the best way for Yudkowsky to respond to NAB would have been “fuck yeah! This is awesome! I’m totally a Lovecraft protagonist!”

well, lovecraft antagonist, actually. i think phil’s the lovecraft protagonist here, being driven mad by the horrors underlying this world and all.

He Who Has Better Things To Do Than To Try To Be A Cool Kid should take advice from those who do know how the cool kids function.

(via metagorgon)

1 month ago · tagged #NAB babble #basilisk bullshit · 43 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

Programmer synesthesia is weird.

My brain Definitely! Has! Opinions! on what different languages look like and how their syntax highlighting should reflect this.

For example, Ruby is not green. Absolutely not green except perhaps in very exceptional situations. Ruby is red and blue and magenta and a bit of orange. It must be soft and somewhat bright and quite gentle. I like purple, and I like Ruby, but I don’t know if purple has a place in Ruby. If Ruby was to have a “primary” color it might be magenta or red, but it’s not the color that would be the most common.

Python is probably mostly blue-green but I’m not sure yet. Haven’t really used it.

Lisp is NOT RED. It’s likely to be cyan, but red belongs absolutely nowhere in Lisp. Magenta too. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that a McCarthy is important to Lisp, and that reds must absolutely keep away from the language (nothing is ever a coincidence). Cyan and green and some orange and perhaps yellow.

ZSH is purple and blue. It’s quite subdued, with not much color to it.

Coffeescript is orange and it compiles to dark green javascript. Yellow is not a coffeescript color.

Julia seems to be purple and green and orange. It’s a very beautiful colorscheme with a slight strangeness and a feeling of power that’s not quite controlled. It elicits respect like a prototype nuclear reactor.

Golang? I don’t know. Orange might be important in it, but it’s not overwhelmingly orange like coffeescript.

C, unlike coffeescript, seems like a language yellow and orange would get along in.

Html I don’t really know much about. It’s mostly about the rainbow colors of the tag hierarchy, and I prefer to write it with coffeekup anyway.

And it’s not like the colors are just any of those colors. Bright green is unnatural but not searing while dark green is almost but not quite comforting. Blue wants to tinge towards purple a bit. I’m not sure if the color between dark red and strong magenta is actually the red or the magenta, but it’s an important color. Orange and purple are especially difficult colors to get right. I don’t know if reality contains the right purple anywhere in it; it might have an ultraviolet component to it. Orange must be a true orange without degrading to brown, but it may not be too bright. Yellow feels like it might have a slight goldish tinge to it but then again it should contain some green too perhaps.

And it isn’t helping that one of my screens is a glossy IPS and another is an old matte TN. At least I noticed to switch off f.lux before I went completely crazy over colors not being anything like each other ever.

1 month ago · tagged #baby leet #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 9 notes · .permalink

metagorgon:

i’ve never been so happy with a use and possible abuse of federal power.

Both corporations and the State have been seriously trying to turn themselves into problematic faves for me as well. But I see through this trickery and know that they are still evil underneath.

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 5 notes · source: metagorgon · .permalink

anosognosicredux:

socialjusticemunchkin:

veronicastraszh:

anosognosicredux:

nostalgebraist:

I’m trying to go cold turkey on NAB now (seriously), so this post is the kind of thing you should discourage, but just to address one quick and relatively clear-cut thing – in Phil’s response to my final post, he says

You also didn’t assert that the book did something it didn’t or vice versa. For instance, the claim that sparked “not even wrong” was “PS couldn’t use Lovecraftian horror as a framework,” which is bewildering because Lovecraftian horror is absolutely the framework, right down to the reasonable-seeming protagonist whose serious-minded efforts at untangling a mystery go horribly wrong.

We don’t seem to have been reading the post the same way.   I mean of course your book was using Lovecraftian horror as the framework – IMO that’s the sort of thing that is so obvious that a flat denial of it is almost always a deliberate paradox meant as part of a subtler point.  Just as, if someone began by writing “Barack Obama is not the president of the U.S.,” I would read on in search of what they meant by that, not think “well, actually, Barack Obama is the president of the U.S., I dunno what this fool’s on about”

I’m not sure I have a complete handle on the post in question but as I interpreted it, they were saying your book isn’t fully Lovecraftian in spirit because it focuses so heavily on the trio’s failures as thinkers, rather than portraying their discovery of monsters as the unfortunate consequence of thinking well and not knowing when to stop.  Which @anosognosicredux claims is a key part of Lovecraft’s deal.  I don’t know how right that is, but it struck me as interesting.

That’s about right.

To be clear, I was referring rather narrowly to the Basilisk. The basic Lovecraftian structure is not a sustained ambiguous tension between madness and the supernatural. That exists perhaps at first. But in the archetypal horror story, either the suspicion of madness is dispelled by revelation, or madness is confirmed, but the reader remains at a safe remove. Either way, the tension is dissipated by a return to normality, even with the existence of the supernatural, because the supernatural remains liminal.

In Lovecraft it does not. In Lovecraft, the suspicion of madness is dispelled, but there is no return to normality. The veil is lifted by rationality, and the supernatural is revealed not as some liminal existence, but the substrate of reality itself. The Lovecraftian supernatural adds up to normality, and vice versa.

Not that you don’t know this, Phil (hi! thanks for reading!). You just seem to take the wrong conclusion about Yudkowskianism from the Basilisk, and it has everything to do with not being Lovecraftian enough.

See, it’s not that Yudkowskians don’t know about cosmic horror. Quite the opposite: Yudkowskianism is built around it. It’s all about doing what we can against the monster at the end of this book. Yudkowskianism is all about monsters, and resisting them. If it were about pretending that the universe has a human face, it would indeed be pwned rather readily by something like the Basilisk. But it’s not. Yudkowskianism is about asserting your humanity with abandon against the chaotic void. It’s about moving in for that hail mary at the bottom of the ninth on the fourth down with thirty seconds left on the clock. For all his faults (and this is where he breaks with Lovecraft), Yudkowsky sees the abyss and, rather than giving in to despair, says, what if.

Whereas you seem to espouse going ahead and becoming a Cthulhu cultist. To each his own, I guess.

(with my apologies to @nostalgebraist)

I think this is … true.

Not that I always accept EY’s answer. But still, he does skate over the top of utter meaninglessness and just – not care that much about meaninglessness.

He really is an optimistic chap, to be honest. Personally I find it charming.

Also: we have a winner from the audience for Part 9! The Basilisk was ourselves all along, for we stare it in the eyes and wait for it to blink first! Phil withdraws into a pagan sex cult, mumbling something incomprehensible about “white culture” and “that which the erotic signifies” while we start calculating ICBM trajectories to Point Nemo. We are the true monster because our response to the monster is to become more terrifying than it itself and thus destroy it. While remaining cuddly and n e o t e n i c with the friends we made along the way!

hey neat, I didn’t even know I was playing

Such is the basilisk, it may arrive totally unexpectedly and unfairly. But I was expecting someone somewhere to basically output the argument I had skipped, and it was really delightful to see that this was indeed the case :D

And because Phil is playing a blatant popularity contest, showing that numerous people can independently arrive to the same, opposite conclusions seems somewhat vindicating too.

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 47 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink

I did not set out to deliberately do it, but if one wants a libertarian case for a socialist-flavored free market (in the sense of it featuring a significant amount of shared capital), I kind of perhaps from a certain perspective might have basilisked propertarianism into suggesting that one could make a moral argument for needing to replace the welfare state with handing over some means of production to the people, because anything else would be theft:

If one looks at the state, taxes, benefits, regulations, etc. as strange property it provides a very interesting perspective to everything. (The perspective which, for example, informs my bostadsrett proposal for the abolition of rent control; people already have a certain kind of kind-of-property, and it would be naive to expect them to give it up right away without compensation. From an amoral so-propertarian-it-wraps-beyond-propertarianism perspective certain things make perfect sense and it can be argued that rolling back benefits would be, pragmatically speaking, as similar to theft as taxation is. We might have broken the system by creating all these property derivatives nobody fully understood, but simply expropriating one class of strange property that is mostly held by those in a bad position otherwise provokes the same kind of totally comprehensible resistance as expropriating less strange property.

And you know, if any state was to implement this kind of pareto-optimize-and-recognize-even-strange-property bargaining I’d be on board with the experiment.

And the reason for why we should do this instead of just abolishing the strange property? By the argument that we would be allowed to simply take away the property that has formed, we could just as well argue to abolish private property and institute communism, or give all land back to the descendants of the people who held it back in, say, 1200 CE. Or if we argue that property may not be strange, then we might have to say goodbye to the finance sector.

I’m not sure if I endorse this fully (because I try to avoid endorsing pretty much anything fully), but I do think it’s an interesting perspective to consider. And obviously this relies on moral libertarianism/propertarianism to begin with, so it isn’t convincing if one rejects the basic idea of that one (which I do, but playing around with constructs of logic and systems is just so fun)

1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #win-win is my superpower · 4 notes · .permalink