A Troll on Karl Johan Street

Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.

[kvetchlandia]

Leonard Freed Summertime, Harlem, New York 1963

[miamaimania]

Frozen Moments: Norilsk, Siberia through the Lens of Christophe Jacrot

[argumate]

I'm sympathetic to the idea of funding the humanities and the arts but I think most of the arguments for doing so are overstated; they tend to either try and tie them to something we care about more, like national greatness or making loadsa money (or uplifting the human spirit lol), or threaten exaggerated risks of their disappearance, like failure of critical thinking and the collapse of democracy, which seems like a stretch that itself lacks critical thinking and is also (ironically!) ahistorical.

I think I would ground support for funding the humanities and the arts on the basis that they are rich and complex endeavours that bring great satisfaction (and torment) to those involved in them, and a better world even for those who aren't, who also benefit from having them around.

I suppose that's a proof by contradiction: go around saying there should be less art here, nobody should understand history, I think reading sucks so stop teaching people to write, music? forget it, linguistics? we don't need it, philosophy? too much talking, etc. etc. that's just super dumb, that's an impoverished world, I think failing to understand the benefits of having these fields really does demonstrate a blinkered lack of imagination; these things might not directly contribute to the work of material logistics or sound governance but one of the reasons we do that work is to support this work.

[sungodsevenoclock]

My low confidence opinion is that if you think AI superintelligence is very very likely to happen and very very likely to lead to human extinction and you want to prevent this, you should be trying to agitate for a Butlerian Jihad much more so than you should be trying to solve the problem of AI alignment.

Like I get that AI is also cool and can have lots of positive effects, but if you think AI superintelligence is very very likely to happen and very very likely to lead to human extinction and you want to prevent this, how cool it is kind of shouldn’t matter?

[sungodsevenoclock]

I think this is still true, and also true even if you replace "AI superintelligence is very very likely to happen" with "current level of AI intelligence exists" and "human extinction" with "large-scale disaster for human civilization".

[sungodsevenoclock]

Одиссей

Ночь ослепла от ливня, бушует чернильная пена, Небеса расхлестались, и льются на землю помои. О друзья, не пускайте, вяжите меня бечевою — Там, в саду, так протяжно, так страшно распелась сирена.

Словно ящерка вьется, двугрудая, скользкая, длинная, В разоренном кустарнике, брошенном в окна туманом. Чтоб не слышал я пенья, мне уши замажьте хоть глиною, Хочет музою стать, все твердит мне о дивном, о странном.

В пене встал океан, будто конь, перепуганный громом, Тучи — зубрами в пуще, смятенное небо заржало. Я — шальной мореплаватель, бездна бушует над домом, Сад свихнулся от пенья, пришел в исступленье от жалоб.

Понесло меня, Ноя, Улисса, -забросило в омут, В даль кипящих путей и в мое человечье хожденье. Дева-песенница — лунным светом течет ее пенье, Сладкой жалобой льется, струится и тает истомой.

Пусть мне кто-нибудь добрый монеты на очи положит, Самый добрый — пускай мне отравленный кубок протянет, Встань, моя Пенелопа, склонись у последнего ложа, Я вернулся к тебе — и опять меня в странствия манит.

Видишь? В окнах она все поет и все так же ярится, И глаза не отвесть от чешуйчатого наважденья. Слышишь? В паводок манит жестокая эта певица Зовом первой любви, от которого нету спасенья.

Океан принесла, чтобы выл под моими стенами, Повелела небесным громам грохотать надо мною. И поет все грозней, потому что любовь между нами, Чтоб навеки забыл я мечту о домашнем покое.

В сад откройте окно, там деревья кричат бесновато, Как утопленник в песнь поплыву, поплыву безрассудно! Пусть сорвется мой дом с якорей и помчится, как судно! О жена! О друзья! Мне поистине нету возврата!

—1959

Julian Tuwim, tr. David Samoylov

[radicarian]

The hoax took place in Florence in about 1409... The victim was a carpenter named Manetto, known as Il Grasso, "the Fat Man." Manetto specialized in carving ebony and owned a shop in the Piazza San Giovanni, not far from Filippo [Brunelleschi]'s house. He was prosperous and good-natured, but one day had the misfortune of incurring Filippo's ire after missing a social gathering. Never one to resist retaliation, Filippo resolved to exact his revenge for this perceived slight by persuading a wide cast of characters to convince Manetto that he had metamorphosed into someone else.... As Manetto closed his shop one evening, Filippo went to his house near the cathedral, picked the lock, slipped inside, and barred the door behind him. When Manetto arrived a few minutes later, he rattled the door and then, to his alarm, heard what sounded like his own voice (in fact, Filippo doing an impersonation) ordering him to go away. This impersonation was so convincing that eh retreated in bewilderment into the Piazza San Giovanni. There he met Donatello, who inexplicably addressed him as Matteo, and shortly afterward a bailiff, who likewise hailed him as Matteo and then promptly arrested him for debt. He was taken to the Stinche prison, where his name was entered in the jail book as Matteo. Even his fellow prisoners--all of them party to Filippo's prank--addressed him by this alien name. The carpenter spent a sleepless night, fretting over events but solacing himself with the thought that he was merely a victim of mistaken identity. This comfort evaporated the next morning when two strangers--the brothers of the real Matteo--arrived at the prison and claimed him as their kin. They paid his debt and liberated him, though not before chastising him for his supposed gambling and profligate living. More bewildered now than ever, he was escorted to Matteo's home on the other side of Florence, near Santa Felìcita, where his protests that he was not Matteo, but Manetto, appeared to fall on deaf ears.... He was then put to sleep with a potion supplied by Filippo and carried, unconscious, back across the river to his own home. He was laid on his bed in a reversed position, with his head at the foot and his feet at the head. Awakening many hours later, the poor carpenter was confused not merely by his position on the bed but also by the disarray of his house, for his tools had been completely rearranged. His perplexity grew with the arrival of Matteo's brothers... greeting him as Manetto and relating the curious story of how the previous evening their brother Matteo conceived the fantastic notion that he was someone else. The story was soon confirmed by Matteo himself--the real one--who arrived at Manetto's house to describe his puzzling dream of having been a carpenter. The disarray of the house was explained by the fact that in his dream Matteo noticed how his tools were out of order and in need of rearrangement.

Source: Brunelleschi's Dome, Ross King

What the hell was going on in 15th-century Florence. You miss a party and get elaborately mindfucked by a pissed-off goldsmith and his buddy Donatello. Manetto ended up moving to Hungary over this and who can blame him

[sungodsevenoclock]

I want to know:

Which side do you support when a new geopolitical conflict flares up?

The underdog

The ones who I have decided are less white

The ones who I have decided are more white

The side the USA is on

The side the USA isn't on

Um, have you heard of this thing called the "zeitgeist"? Hello?

Who I think is gonna win

Whoever didn't start this round

I keep a running tally of atrocities and switch allegiance accordingly

Whoever my pre-made full ranking of all geopolitical actors says is more good

I have some other way

Remaining time: 3 days 11 hours

[sungodsevenoclock]

I think it was someone at Crooked Timber who quoted his old Irish aunt saying that in every conflict, she tries to figure out which side is the Protestants and which side the Catholics, and to be honest most of us probably do some version of this.

[vaginawo0lf]

Visit Original Link

[transgenderer]

before visiting sf I'd claim it was not a real city. This is false! Upon visiting it became clear sf is distinctly a small city. Having visited Seattle, it is similarly clear this is not a city. It's perfectly nice! It's a lovely dense suburb. Maybe in 100 years?

[transgenderer]

@regexkind said:

You need to go someplace rural for contrast. I have no idea tf you're talking about

It's about...overflowingness. New York, sf, Berlin, Paris, these are places with too much there there To FIT. They're bursting. Seattle seems to have no trouble fitting a seattle in it. Seattle suffices for itself

[transgenderer]

@wildgifthorses said:

it sounds like your criterion for "real city" is "acute housing shortage", by which metric it is true nyc and sf outpace everywhere else in the US :p

I am failing to communicate! (Or perhaps I am being deliberately misunderstood. But you wouldn't do that, would you? You wouldn't profane that most sacred act, the attempt to communicate?)

It's not about scarcity, it's about abundance! It's about bounteousness! A sense there's something around every corner, under every stone. An unmappability. An infinite detail, fractal complexity. It's easy for European conurbations to be cities because they're old, theyre layered. Most Americans live somewhere with only one top layer to access. It's simple. It's comprehensible. Its accessible. It fails to confront!

[sungodsevenoclock]

Okay, I sympathise with this, but I also think it's somewhat of a skill issue.

Like did you know that French wikipedia has a page for every single street in Paris? And basically all of these have some amount of trivia or history or something? This was an amazing cheat code - you got to see these layers that I think you're talking about. And even if you didn't see them, it was an illustration that they were there. Anyway, at one point when I was living in Seattle, I lived at the same intersection that the bowling alley that the idiot-savant trader deuteragonist lives in is apparently located in Tom Robbins "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas". But I didn't know it at the time, which is too bad.

[sungodsevenoclock]

I want to know:

Which side do you support when a new geopolitical conflict flares up?

The underdog

The ones who I have decided are less white

The ones who I have decided are more white

The side the USA is on

The side the USA isn't on

Um, have you heard of this thing called the "zeitgeist"? Hello?

Who I think is gonna win

Whoever didn't start this round

I keep a running tally of atrocities and switch allegiance accordingly

Whoever my pre-made full ranking of all geopolitical actors says is more good

I have some other way

Remaining time: 3 days 11 hours

[sungodsevenoclock]

One thing that separates me out as a tumblr user is how often I repeat to myself "I need a man to stop the big truck from honk"

[sungodsevenoclock]

One of the people from my circle of physics friends in university moved back to Russia and became a Z-head, and another came out as lesbian and got really into social justice. This isn't that strange, but what was strange was being on 2014 facebook with both of them and one is talking about like whether Ukrainians are subhuman, and the other is talking about like how to talk about marginalized groups in a way that is sufficiently sensitive. And it's like "wow, it's not that a person engaging in one conversation would be an outlier in the other, it's like there is no overlap between these conversational spheres at all".

Anyway, that's what it feels like to see different portions of tumblr talk about AI on the timeline.

[sungodsevenoclock]

Bad sport ideas

Cross-country snowboarding Alpine long jump Beach tennis 2-a-side baseball Vertical bowling Golf

[nobrashfestivity]

Kazimir Malevich, Red square on Black, 1920

more

[caesarsaladinn]

lebanon in the sense of qanon or alanon

[sungodsevenoclock]

lebneh eaters anonymous

[artemisiasea]

Kohleria tigridia is a bat-pollinated species native to Central America and the Andean regions of South America. It’s thought that their large, bowl-shaped flowers offer echo information for bats to orient to the location for easier pollination.

[sungodsevenoclock]

I think of my favourite shirt as "swag from the collaboration I used to be part of" which would be kind of lame for a favourite shirt but it's actually "unauthorized fan merch for the collaboration spokesperson's cover band" which is way lamer.