• 10 Posts
  • 268 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • get a motorized height adjustable standing desk, an egg timer and a slow treadmill, set the timer to 16 minutes and 43 seconds, every time the timer runs out, rotate between standing position, sitting position and walking position while resetting the timer.

    When you’re ready to level up, upgrade from just an office chair for the sitting positon to a mixture of office chair, saddle chair, prayer mat and stout 19th century four-legged wooden stool certified handmade in the russian far east. Rotation as follows:

    standing -> office chair -> treadmill -> saddle chair -> standing -> prayer mat -> treadmill -> flat stool -> repeat.

    When you’re ready for the endgame, upgrade from an egg timer to a stochastic bell timer powered by a brass cyclograph. This eliminates any possible linear relationship with your BRAC cycle, ensuring a well-rounded dynamic stress regimen.
















  • the scott alexander fanclub on reddit is especially unhinged lately. Some choice picks, beginning gently with a sneer:

    Anyone who says there is a 0% chance of a fried egg being sentient is overconfident. Nobody knows what causes consciousness. We have no way of detecting it & we can barely agree on a definition. So we should be less than 100% certain about anything to do with consciousness and fried eggs.

    moving on,

    For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community, generally off-the-grid, interacting with technology only as a tool (no news/algorithms/push notifications), close enough to a major city to visit friends but far enough away to isolate ourselves when we want to.
    We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.

    Yes, that is a response to AI despair. In a “non-doomer thread”. Because of course.

    but what takes the cake is the regularly scheduled IQ thread, a beautiful dumpster fire which burns especially bright on this day. Yet one specimen soars above the din:

    The average should recognize and accept their inferiority and make peace with the fact that they will live and die a mediocre life. They should stop trying to interfere in the affairs of their betters and content themselves with their own garden, which can provide enough happiness for them until the end of their life if properly cultivated.

    Further study of the user’s excreta clarifies that they are:

    • sincere
    • definitely not racist

    warning: HEAVY PSYCHIC DAMAGE and I really hope the spoiler block functions correctly on your end

    spoiler

    [sic] we should treat all low human capital like zoo animals regardless of skin colour [\sic]

    (archives: one two three)





  • I don’t see affirmative action as fundamentally bad. Applied correctly and not too heavy-handedly, the privileged will still have equal opportunity to enroll or get the job, per amount of effort they put in, etc. And even if it is a bit too strong, their privilege will most likely make up for it in other ways.

    In practice though, it’s highly susceptible to backfire effects and is usually on the wrong side of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. You can’t expect someone who grew up malnourished, undereducated and generally mistreated by society to suddenly bounce back and become a “model citizen” when they get a good job or scholarship, statistically speaking.