Thuggery

> Do remember that using LLMs is a choice.

That seems like a naive take on technology to me. Once having/using a smartphone was a simple matter of personal choice. Once, having a car was a choice. If society as a whole adapts to something it's hard to be against it.

> I doubt that’s the problem.

I don't know, it seems like it's a weird argument but it's definitely a thought I've had too. When I was eyeballing the Egyptian dynasties I was bit shocked to notice how short lived they all are, compared to what I expected. The majority struggle to get to 150 years, no one gets past 300. In fact old man America will soon be an older polity than all of them except the much maligned Ptolemies (275 years). Same deal for the (well documented) Chinese dynasties. People think kingdoms and states are long enduring, measured in multiple centuries, but they're actually pretty unstable.

It seems like a weird unexamined law of the universe. Dynasties/polities struggle to make it past 300~ without some major interruption or something going wrong, if they haven't imploded earlier. There are exceptions. The Korean Joseon managed an eye watering 500+ years. And the Catholic Papacy has been going on continuously for closer to 2 millenia. But still, 249 years is pretty long in the tooth.

That's pretty lame criticism considering many of those things were contemporary SOP for all countries. The USA remind abnormally libertarian despite this. Now it's getting abnormally authoritarian.

I don't care about accusations of xenophobia. I don't like it because I don't like pointless historical revisionism. It's been called Gulf of Mexico since the 17th century, before there was a USA.

And I don't like the stink of arbitrary dictators renaming things for ego or propaganda reasons. This is the sort of thing North Korea or Turkmenbashi would do, and I think that's pathetic for America.

50 years is honestly not that long. When you look at historical dynasties even the shorter ones tend to be ~100 years, if they don't immediately implode.

That was a lot of suffering and chaos of what's actually a fairly trifling dynasty in the grand scheme of things.

Well you have been. The consent was always being manufactured. A certain controversial fellow by the name of Chomsky pointed out decades ago that media would inevitably reflect biases of their owners and staff, and the needs to be a for profit business.

It would seem you didn't care or notice because there previously wasn't an opinion conflict with the owners.

Sensible change. But I wonder if it will encourage retailers to treat the secondary now more food safety related "use by" date as the real "best if used by" date.

If you're like me and slightly paranoid about food expiration dates and sometimes checks things in corner stores, you might notice they like to sell items that can be razor thin on the "sell by" date.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you are implying membership of Hezbollah is deep dark shameful secret in Lebanon. The designation of Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" is great for outside political propaganda, but the actual reality is they are a major and open faction in political life in Lebanon as both paramilitary group and political party - as is my understanding. Basically Sinn Fein/IRA.

I have never heard anyone refer to Neanderthal as a human unless they are talking in a "those are cavemen, early humans" way that's wrong. Where is this coming from? Is it a non-English world thing?

Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since... humans have some Neanderthal DNA.

It seems to me nearly every story about robots that gain sentience in human storymaking has them eventually turning against their human creators. Even the word robot itself comes from a Czech play were men develop an artificial human and these "robots" then ... usurp and destroy their creators. Am I the only one that finds this interesting and odd?

I also suspect this narrative repetition is not totally unrelated to the current popularity of AI Doomerism.

Depends on where you were. I was an American fan of anime before it was really socially acceptable and I've been of the mind that its popularity was probably inevitable once enough old guard culturally sneering at it died. Same as happened with video games.

But DBZ (and Sailor Moon) definitely solidified it as a respectable commercial force for the mainstream USA, and gave a unified culture experience that's now pop culture, thanks to millenials getting old.

Are you so sure that was a legitimate and real comment? I'm not a woman so I can't know the truth personally. But people are very performative on Reddit. They also like narratives of victimization and offense.

If you were to straight believe the woman only subreddit of twoxchromosomes being a woman is a constant hell of abortion, rape, random body aches, abusive partners, and general sexism. If you were to straight believe the Judaism subreddit everyone who is Jewish constantly fears for their life and lives with daily radical antisemitism.

Well maybe it's just because I'm an unpopular weirdo, but I think "invite only" is cancer. In fact it's another head of the hydra killing the Internet. Whatever alternatives exist to the spam wasteland are strangled in crib being overly walled gardens, e.g. Discord. I also swear to god I think secret private club fetishism crippled piracy.

This is not how the good years of the Internet grew. I can't think of a single good or popular thing that started out as "invite only" other than I guess Facebook and Gmail. Both of which were actually more marketing gimmicks.

Humans may be tribal, but the universe is also entropic. Things decay in quality over time, and the only answer to this is cyclical rebirth.

The analogy of music here is telling because in fact the vast majority of bands are only truly good for an album or two in a small band of time, maybe even for just a song. People would be objectively right to say punk isn't what it was in the 80s in certain places like the UK.

Things really do sometimes get worse, or at least not stay the same style and quality forever. The repugnant conclusion alone pretty much guarantees niche things that are "good" to the niche that then get super popular and commercialized trend towards a worse for everyone steady state over time.

Twitch "pays" streamers with a cut of the money they made off them though. The paycheck is 1/2 a cut of money given to the streamer by a third party with no work from Twitch, and 1/2 a cut from ad revenues that were generated by the eyeballs accrued by the streamers.