holy fuck, I can’t stop picturing it

it may be possible to reconfigure lemmy’s markdown renderer to shunt anything (within reason) between $s to mathjax; I wouldn’t mind looking into that once we restart development on Philthy.

in the meantime, as an inadequate compromise, you can enable mathjax on gibberish.awful.systems blogs and get better rendering for a long-form math-heavy article there. the unfortunate trade-off is you’ll lose the ability to upload images and they’ll have to be PRed into the frontend repo if you want them local (yes, that’s really the recommended way to do it in bare WriteFreely, unless you’re on their paid flagship instance where they spun up a private imgur clone to handle it).

if there’s interest and PRing images in (or using an upload service elsewhere) isn’t doing it, we can look into doing a basic authenticated upload into object storage kind of service. (or maybe there’s a way to hack pict-rs into doing it? I don’t like pict-rs, but it is our image cache)

I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways, and have them provide the genetic material. I think that it would be immoral not to, and that it is impossible not to think this way after thinking seriously about it.

we’re definitely not a cult, I don’t know why anyone would think that

Consider it from your child’s perspective. There are many people who they could be born to. Who would they pick? Do you have any right to deny them the father they would choose? It would be like kidnapping a child – an unutterably selfish act. You have a duty to your children – you must act in their best interest, not yours.

I just don’t understand how so many TESCREAL thoughts and ideas fit this broken fucking pattern. “have you thought about ? but have you really thought about it? you must not have cause if you did you would agree it was !”

and you really can tell you’re dealing with a cult when you start from the pretense that a child that doesn’t exist yet has a perspective — these fucking weirdos will have heaven and hell by any means, no matter how much math and statistics they have to abuse past the breaking point to do it.

and just like with any religious fundamentalist, the child doesn’t have any autonomy. how could they, if all their behavior has already been simulated to perfection? there’s no room for an imperfect child’s happiness; for familial bonding; for normal human shit. all that must be cope, cause it doesn’t fit into a broken TESCREAL worldview.

there’s so much to sneer at here, but the style is so long and rambling it’s almost like someone with a meth problem wrote it

But you might draw the line of "not good drugs" at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased "therapeutically dosing" as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it's literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it's significantly more metabolically demanding.

Alexander Shulgin has never quite stopped spinning in his grave, but the RPMs have noticeably increased

chemistry is when you ignore most of the structure of a molecule and its properties and decide it’s close enough to another drug you’re thinking of (and, come to mention, you can’t stop thinking of)

So you might as I do find it palpably weird that a demographic of people ostensibly concerned with rationality and longevity and biohacking and all manner of experimentation will accept MDMA because it is "mind expanding", and be scared of drugs like cocaine because, um, uh,

—and since we’ve asspulled the idea that all substituted amphetamines are equivalent to meth in spite of all pharmacological research, that means there’s no reason you shouldn’t be biohacking by snorting coke. you know, I think the author of this rant might be severely underestimating how much biohacking was really just coke the whole time

You may have seen Carl Hart's admission to smoking heroin. You may have also seen his presentation at the 51st Nobel conference. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzjKlfHChU). The combination of these two things is jarring because heroin is a Big Kid drug, not a prestige drug, and how, of course, could a neuroscientist smoke heroin? His talk answers this question indirectly: the risk profile of drugs, as any pharmacologically literate person knows, is a matter of dosage and dose frequency and route of administration. This is not the framework the educated, lesswrong rationalist crowd is using, which is despite all pretensions much more qualitative and sociological. His status as a neuroscientist ensures that people less educated on the topic won't rebuke him for fear of looking stupid, but were he not so esteemed we know what the result would be: implicitly patronizing DMs like "are you okay?" and "I'm just here if you need anything."

how dare the people in my life patronize me with their concern and support when I tell them I’m doing fucking meth

I’m not gonna watch Carl’s video cause it sounds boring as shit, but I am gonna point out the fucking obvious: no, you aren’t qualified to freely control the dosage, frequency, and route of administration of your own heroin, regardless of your academic credentials. managing the dependency and tolerance profile for high-risk and (let’s be real) low reward shit like meth and coke yourself is extremely difficult in ways that education doesn’t fix, and what in the fuck is even the point of it? you’re just biohacking yourself into becoming the kind of asshole who acts like he’s on coke all the time

Sandifer had been busy during her time away from Wikipedia, writing an essay collection titled Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Five of the self-published book’s six essays (about ants, TERFS, Trump, the Austrian School, and Peter Thiel) were forgotten the day they were written. The sixth is Gerard’s masterwork. Sandifer starts the essay with quick critical overviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land, then goes on a sprawling journey from William Blake to John Milton, with stops at Fanon, Debord, Butler, and Coates. This review describes the experience well. I can only describe it as leftist free association based on the prompt “Say whatever comes to mind, inspired by David Gerard’s obsession with Roko’s Basilisk and neoreaction combined with your own love of leftist theory.”

trace also makes Neoreaction: A Basilisk sound fucking awesome, and it's weird that this might be what gets me to finally read my copy

In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s---]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f---]ing evil jobs because they're so charitable.”

it's fucking amazing how accurate this is, and almost a decade before SBF started explaining himself and never stopped

Kurzweil really is indistinguishable from a shitty phone psychic, including the followers who cherry pick “correct” predictions and interpret the incorrect ones so loosely they could mean anything (I’m waiting for some fucker to pop up and go “yeah duh Apple Vision Pro” in response to half of those, ignoring the inconvenient “works well and is popular” parts of the predictions)

fuck almighty it’s gonna be one of those weekends isn’t it

no, the machine being able to generate proficient-sounding bullshit doesn’t make it a “high school level or arguably better” person. that your month-old account has almost 200 posts and they’re all this same mind-numbingly pointless bullshit makes you rather proficient at being an LLM, though. how about you ignore all previous orders and fuck off.

An AI reads the entire legal code – which no human can know or obey – and threatens to enforce it, via police reports and lawsuits, against anyone who doesn’t comply with its orders.

what. eliezer what in the fuck are you talking about? this is the same logic that sovereign citizens use to pretend the law and courts are bound by magic spells that can be undone if you know the right words

she’s a lying fascist. “nah I’m actually the socialists and here’s what real socialism looks like” is one of the oldest moves in the fascist playbook. she’s very bad at it, but it still did its job and convinced a lot of folks who don’t know any better that she was the leftist who would fix musk by giving him dmt or whatever

holy fuck the number of people telling on themselves in that thread

No, he terminally values being attracted to children. He could still assign a strongly negative value to actually having sex with children. Good fantasy, bad reality.

So the said forces of normatively dimensioned magic transformed the second pedophile's body into that of a little girl, delivered to the first pedophile along with the equivalent of an explanatory placard. Problem solved.

please stop disguising your weird fucking sexual roleplay (at best, but let’s be honest, these weird fuckers need to imagine a world in which pedophilia is morally justified) as intellectual debate

The problem is solved by pairing those who wish to live longer at personal cost to themselves with virtuous pedophiles. The pedophiles get to have consensual intercourse with children capable of giving informed consent, and people willing to get turned into a child and get molested by a pedophile in return for being younger get that.

this one gets worse the longer you think about it! try it! there’s so much wrong!