The irony here is that part of what I've learned is because of PUAs. Not Andrew Tate though, his advice is criminally toxic. And a lot of advice is metaphorical dirt to the point that it really does feel like one is mining for nuggets of gold of wisdom. Being sceptical but open really helped. Back then (2004), I had nowhere else to look. PUAs taught me the concept of playfulness really well, including the advice that taking improv classes help with that as well.
It was really hard to understand, given my specific blend of neurodivergence, but once I understood how a big part of my personality is inherently playful (always has been), a lot of my dating issues were fixed. Not all though, but I think unearthing my own inner playful self, which was there behind all the layers, has helped me tremendously. Thoroughly understanding and digging up my own playfulness has been one of the best investments in my life.
I also learned a lot thanks to Tal Ben-Shahar's positive psychology class in 2006. In an indirect way, I owe my HN username to that class as metta is loving-kindness meditation and meditation super charged my life (and dating life).
> When I'm feeling down I call it “Internet Gated Communities”, when in an optimistic mood, “The Faculty Club”. This may lead to what many observers refer to as “the Balkanisation of the Internet”—a fragmentation of the “goes everywhere, reaches everybody” vision of the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not be such a bad thing.
This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.
Precisely this, old internet was fun and good because it was a defacto walled garden. A very specific group of people had access to the internet. Want to bring that magic back? recreate that crowd / demographic. It is really that simple. The internet, once truly connecting everyone, was always just going to mirror the physical human world, because why would it not?
Facebook is a walled garden; it requires you to sign up before viewing most content. Quora, Instagram, and Pinterest are the same way.
> Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. There are three chief factors motivating owners to walk in their networks: Preventing rivals from scraping content or user data, encouraging users to sign up so that their activity can be monetized, and keeping content platform exclusive (most platforms will penalize content that has a competing platform’s watermarks on it).
> Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners.
This is true, but the implication that therefore there are no benefits for the users is false. If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web. (At this point, usually some implicit argument is made that users are foolish and misguided. I'd urge you not to go down that route.)
> If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web.
People go to these platforms for a reason, my point is that the reason isn't because they are walled off. It seems like you are arguing that the chief (if inadvertent) benefit to users of a walled garden is that users don't have to deal with undesirable behavior because access to the platform is restricted by a login wall. This isn't how I would understand a service being "walled off" - Hacker News is not a walled garden even though I need an account to access some of its features. The important distinction is that most (all?) of the content on Hacker News can be accessed without an account. Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora are examples of services going the other way - they lock down content, not for the benefit of the users, but for the benefit of themselves. They save on not having to serve the content to unregistered users, keep the content on their platform, and encourage unregistered users to sign up.
The chief benefit of the open web was always permissive read access, not permissive write access.
But a lot of times the "benefit" is simply that people they know are there. Which is the problem with all these open platforms like Mastodon. People can get the argument that it is better in theory to use an open platform. But nobody wants to use a social platform alone.
The author seems to conflate "dark" with "adult", so let me take the chance to point out this common mistake. Horror films, Warhammer 40K and 2000 AD comics are all famously dark, but they're for kids or teens. A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest are light but grown-up. It's a weird deformation of the past generation to think that being depressing makes you deep.
Nicely put. I like Lauren Oyler's formulation of a related thought, in her review of a work by Otessa Moshfegh, when she refers to Moshfegh's "bored manipulation of the fallacy that the more unpleasant something is, the truer it must be."
Edit: and for the life of me I could never understand what anybody saw in that vile show "Euphoria." It seemed so obviously just to want to do nothing but luxuriate in its own vulgarity and graphicness and expected audiences to be very impressed by how big everybody's feelings are. Same for "The Power of the Dog," which was as unsubtle and uninteresting a melodramatic turd as I've ever seen.
I was agreeing very much with both parent comment and yours, until your edit.
I loved Euphoria.
> graphicness - Was it graphic at all?
> how big everybody's feelings are - Were their feeling that big?
> It seemed so obviously.. - Maybe obvious to you? This might say more about you..
I found it brilliant and at times ironic and self aware and very explicit about what its target is (I think it's very much for teenagers)
So i don't know if it is a good example of this trend at all.
Just to say how nuanced these things can be, i guess...
> The author seems to conflate "dark" with "adult"
Oh, how I agree with your comment!
This is a bizarre trend I've also noticed. Also unfortunately helped with the "adult" monicker for anything showing sex, which is in reality generally more aimed at horny teenagers and so-called "young adults" rather than grownups.
Another similar conflation is Serious with Somber. Taking an issue seriously can be amusing as hell, it all depends on what mood allows you to best explore the problem space, if you are serious about knowing or solving an issue you won't necessarily lock into a particular mood in that exploration.
It has especially worked its way into popular literature. A books writing is at a 5th grade level, has almost zero depth, but then is full of sex and violence which makes it an "adult" novel. Authors like Sarah J Maas are almost comically bad writers but have achieved immense popular success using this setup.
Agreed. People just can't read. I think this is one of many upstream causes of the current political landscape. When faced with reading a corporate financial statement, any laws, scientific papers, municipal budgets, or even an article in WSJ or The Atlantic, people are unable to proceed. So a defense mechanism comes up: "it's all just lies, anyway." Then they go and find a tweet or watch TV.
I'mma go out on a bit of a limb here, and say that even the people who can read often 'can't read'. Many people who 'can read' only read things in one of two particular bubbles, colored either blue or red.
This has resulted in a population which is terrifyingly disconnected from reality, and yet utterly certain of their own beliefs; beliefs which have been worked into the core of their self-identity by the magic of political kayfabe. "The GOP believes Corona is from a lab, so it must be wrong" ... "Trump will genocide Gaza worse, so voting for someone arming an internationally condemned genocide is good and practical actually", etc.
Out of the small subset of people who really can read, and think for themselves, there is only a small number of them who can communicate their ideas effectively (and only to people who can at least sorta read at a 6th grade level). And the number of those people who have any power to amplify their voice is too depressing to think about for long.
... And yes, the Age of Resistance ties into this in many ways. The Skeksis are seen as strong, maybe even benevolent leaders by most, who are very far from any levers of power and aren't getting very well informed. Meanwhile, quietly (at first), the life of the small people is being drained...
This is why I said "one of many". There are many motivations and factors at play, but being overwhelmed when reading complex documents is a real great motivator to dismiss them out of hand.
This may also help to explain why politicians who express themselves with a limited vocabulary can be surprisingly successful. And the implication is that other politicians should probably do so as well.
America gradually reinventing the Japanese "light novel". Or even its own "pulp" tradition, which these days are only remembered for their cover art rather than any of the content.
This idea of moral equivalence is popular and extremely dangerous. It is what Trump expressed as "you think we're so innocent?"
No countries are purely altruistic, but there is a big space between pure altruism and simply being exploitative. This ignores the role of norms in foreign policy. For example, think of how the US attitude to the Taliban was (and still is) conditioned by the differences in their beliefs about women in society.
If you think it doesn't matter whether America or China is in charge, you will be in for a shock. These countries have deeply different values, and their foreign policy will express that. I note also that you didn't mention Russia. I think it is obvious that Ukraine is not indifferent between being "exploited" by Russia and by the US.
It's a bit of a stretch to say "refusing to give a country loans" is exploiting someone through debt. Though "refusing to roll over a loan" might count, if you have first made a country dependent.
I read through some posts and found this, after Gelsinger was fired:
>It’s over.
> If corporations are people, then Intel has decided to commit suicide and sell its vital organs.
Yet now the same guy seems more positive ("The best outcome has happened.... Lip-Bu Tan lacks the critical flaw that Gelsinger had… excessive kindness").
> A tsunami of decapitation (headcount reduction) is coming. However unpleasant the last several years has been… what is coming will be much worse.
> This will be a disorderly decapitation frenzy. Nobody is safe.
Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?
> Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?
The author thinks that it's about to happen, so it's too early to expect any revision. In that earlier post they said that Lip-Bu Tan resigned from the board because he wanted to reduce headcount more than Gelsinger, and that in their opinion hiring him and carrying out that reduction would be the best outcome for Intel.
Given that Lip-Bu Tan got hired, I think it's reasonable to expect some reductions soon. Before this the author listed a couple of possible outcomes, and as I understand it, Lip-Bu Tan and his reductions are described as one of the less chaotic and "unpleasant" options for Intel, because his cuts would be more specific than cuts that would be the result of splits/mergers/bankruptcy.
I think the post above you asks a relevant question - shouldn't Vanguard, rather than always voting with the board, just not vote at all? Wouldn't that be the truly neutral position?
