thahxa's minddump

I hope im not a person to you, but a concept

[thahxa]

many youtube slop videos seem to conceive of a military in which rank and status is communicated via secret codewords and tattoos instead of like. being on incredibly distinctive parts of your uniform

[sysid-ace]

🌂 this message mary just posted on discord is like a fucking homestuck joke

[shocked--kwarrtz]

My Steam avatar is an anime catgirl doing a little animated sway from side to side, and it's turned out to be an unintentional inkblot test of sorts. If you look closely, it's really not that overtly sexual. She's wearing a cardigan, there's no cleavage or midriff shown, she doesn't have her tongue out, and there's nothing especially suggestive about the motion or cropping. And yet, something about it—the cardigan being skin-tone, the pink background, the semiotics of the catgirl, I'm not sure—makes a lot of people read it from a distance as unimaginably horny. There's a friend I was playing with multiple times and week and even after months she still felt the need to comment on it every time I logged on. Similarly, if you look closely, it is indeed clearly a catgirl, but she has short hair and baggy clothes so in a small form factor she looks a bit androgynous. This seems to really get people in Counter-Strike specifically. Last game, one of the enemies said to me "your mom doesn't love you, she wanted a man," and one of my teammates (a stranger) responded "leave my femboy alone." There was nothing else in my profile or what I'd said from which they'd be making those assumptions. It's kind of fascinating.

[shocked--kwarrtz]

@yaldabaothadeez said: So are you going to post the gif?

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

kwarrtz.

[femmenietzsche]

[chameliyun]

just tried to reference the xkcd "today's lucky 10,000" comic but I wanted to explain xkcd first, so I was like "you probably know the one about experts in the field overestimating their audience's familiarity with the subject matter" and uh. he didn't. love me some irony

[transgenderer]

[transgenderer]

[transgenderer]

[p1ss]

[ejacutastic]

I DIDN’T LEARN ABOUT THIS IN DRIVING SCHOOL

[biszumletzten]

Stop says the red light, go says the green

Wait says the yellow light, twinkling in between. 

KNEEL, SAYS THE DEMON LIGHT WITH ITS EYE OF COAL  SAURON KNOWS YOUR LICENSE PLATE  AND STARES INTO YOUR SOUL

[demonsnakes-deactivated20160829]

THIS IS ALWAYS FUNNY

[brightlotusmoon]

@irritatedlifeguard I agree with your tags.

[anonymous-lightbulb]

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

[argumate]

Supply Co. x Work Louder

Discover the Supply Co. × Work Louder kbd-1.0 Codex micro, an exclusive collaboration combining thoughtful design, premium craftsmanship, an

OpenAI have released a mini-keyboard? AGI is just around the corner then I guess, hope they release a novelty mocktail next, or perhaps a range of cleaning supplies 🤔

[vmunroe]

ok but if they start releasing paperclips I'm outta here

[argumate]

would be too funny if OpenAI Paperclips became an ironic nerd purchase like tungsten cubes such that an increasing fraction of their profit margin came from paperclip manufacturing, right about the time that they start optimising their capital investment with LLMs--

[thahxa]

you need to understand that not only do openai paperclips exist, they've existed for over 3 years at this point

[subjectnamemissing]

They hated Jiang Qing because she was a woman. Luckily she was also a vengeful and terrible person who did horrible things when granted power, so this hatred turned out to look pretty reasonable in hindsight

[m-accost]

Americans encapsulate this deep ennui, stemming from a loss of spiritual exemplars, with the phrase "The Three Nos", which is short for "No Bob Hope, no Steve Jobs, and no Johnny Cash"

[necarion]

If you want to visualize gradient descent in neural networks, imagine minimizing a function that is a 2D surface in 3D space, and then say "billions of dimensions" to yourself.

[phaeton-flier]

Okay I have also soured on a lot of Prediction Market shit but I do thing we should at least try the most basic regulations, like "If you can affect the market yourself and you bet on it, you go to jail" and "If you try and manipulate the independent observations, you go to jail" and "If you are a government worker or contractor of any kind and you bet on a government-related bet, you go to jail"

Just, like, I feel now might not be the best of times to say whether regulation is impossible for an industry. Might be some confounders in this natural experiment.

[centrally-unplanned]

Yeah this is true - in particular, everything today is confounded by the fact that the Trump administration just loves crime and so is actively pursuing crime promotion as a policy. There isn't a single industry under the sun that is robust to that, right? Half the reason they use betting markets, alongside crypto, is because their newness means that congressional regulations are pretty weak and the executive can change the rules on a whim, making open rigging easier than say having the Treasury write you checks. We should actually try regulating them first before jumping to conclusions.

(Though I will say the current experience has been pretty down on their upside - the hypothesis of intelligent, hard-nosed actors building socially-valuable prediction estimates has given way to an endless sea of gambling addicts, meme lords, and grifters. We can make it much less harmful - I am much more doubtful that it will ever be all that useful. But of course, human freedom and marginal benefits justify the existence of millions of current things, this is no different)

[thahxa]

on some level this is out to the markets right? there are markets on (ex) important geopolitical events (although low volume and maybe a bit volatile) but most of it is just degen sports gambling. supply and demand!

[collapsedsquid]

The real Abundance Agenda

[centrally-unplanned]

It is great when you are reading something that purports to be a technical policy document or the like but as you keep going you realize the author has a deeply fetishistic relationship with the material and you are actually reading their fanfic.

[thahxa]

reading about south africas nuclear program is so funny because every other country is like "here is our factory for turning out interchangable implosion bombs" whereas the south african one was like "we have six bombs. they are all bad"

[tashas-cauldron-of-hotsauce]

"Also they are implied to be for internal security purposes."

[thahxa]

even funnier is that its the complete opposite! the original plan was to use them for mining and when everyone realized how dumb that was that shifted to "well if we detonate a nuke if angola is going badly surely the US and USSR will help negotiate a peace deal favorable to us"

[undeadhousewife]

[thahxa]

reading about south africas nuclear program is so funny because every other country is like "here is our factory for turning out interchangable implosion bombs" whereas the south african one was like "we have six bombs. they are all bad"

[hustlerose]

(first time doing praise kink) you are Useful

[collapsedsquid]

So many Americans anti-Sun Yat-sen, shameful.

[eightyonekilograms]

#two-thirds haven’t heard of mao???#christ

I’m undermining my own tag here but I guess in fairness the gray bar says “haven’t heard enough to say”. I’m not sure if I have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Chiang Kai-shek, and I read a whole biography of him.

[eightyonekilograms]

You know what, let’s toss it to the polling ground:

What’s your opinion of Chiang Kai-shek?

Favorable

Unfavorable

Haven’t heard enough to say

Just show results

Remaining time: 2 days 20 hours