Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy April Foolās in advance.)
What if America built a Death Star, but it was 50% exhaust ports by surface area?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/how-the-eu-could-target-us-big-tech-with-its-tariff-response.html
Also the big fuckoff wave motion laser cannon thing is aimed through the ship itself.
with a whole 2 Ts!
taking bets on whether thatās 2 terminators or whether itās the amount of USD they want to burn to make it into a machine god
Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
āWe love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,ā Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. āDisruption at the end of the day exposes things that arenāt working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.ā
This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off
Holy smokes
there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones donāt work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they donāt work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat
the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, itās not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea iām effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesnāt help that thielās people are swamped in vc money, therefore they donāt have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they donāt need to work at all. ukrainians donāt have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesnāt work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.
this is the disruption theyāre cooking. invest in eastern europe or something
@sailor_sega_saturn Yeah, letās start right with those who say such things!
@sailor_sega_saturn I hate how these death cult douchebros appropriate Tolkien to name their companies selling fascism in bulk to the government.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 we should make sure he is at the head of the lineā¦
@hub @sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Is it too early for head jokes?
@sailor_sega_saturn getting this in now: āI never thought *my* hed would get cut off,ā sobs CEO of Cuttinā Off Heds, Inc.
Maximilien Robespierre
@bitofhope Indeed.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 heās not wrong about that
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 This has always been how he, and Palantir, think about the world. Itās a terrible company, full of terrible people, selling horrifying products to terrible countries and companies.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Peter Thiel could be one of those who are going to lose their head in that revolutionā¦
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
I hear that the rich and powerful are concerned about guillotine and that makes me feel happy. They should fear us.
their thesis might be right, their guess as to the subjects of the sentence howeverā¦
deleted by creator
Banger meme from artist Victoria Ying
description:
Itās a scene from White Lotus. A man and a woman are lying on beach chairs, having a conversation.
Panel 1, Man: āWhy canāt you just like my generative AI āart?āā
Panel 2, Woman: āYou have to be vulnerable enough to be bad at something to be good at it, but youāre too much of a coward.ā
Panel 3, Woman: āBecause youāre soulless.ā
Panel 4: Man is speechless, visibly shook
a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say Iāve tried it and can speak authoritatively?
[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no whyi just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists
i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow
i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still donāt know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers
at least itāll be these suckersā job to do the explaining while i rant
fuck. itās rationalist season
āimagine a perfectly spherical chud of uniform duncityā¦ā
@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 Iāve been following them for 35 yearsāhell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93āand the only way I can explain them is that theyāre larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and arenāt entirely clear on the whole concept of āfictionā.
I also legitimately canāt tell the degree to which they donāt understand theyāre LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and thatās why itās gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted Itās probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and weād all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.
You canāt ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.
fondled his lizard
Iām choosing to interpret that in the most euphemistically way possible
@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience ā¦
Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing Iāve ever heard about him
Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulginsā Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)
now youāve got me thinking if storage in fridge is necessary at all, if these are salts. worst thing that can reasonably happen is that salt picks up some water from the air, on top of water condensing on sample when vial was opened while still cold. freebase would probably be air-sensitive, but for compounds that are known sensitive iād put them under argon/nitrogen, tape vial shut (with normal electrical tape, not parafilm) and store in freezer instead. sigma lists storage temperature for MDMA analytical standard (weak solution of freebase in methanol) as -20C, but some of this might be legal cover with excess requirements for cases where youād have to be absolutely sure that analytical standard didnāt decompose (like in evidence in drug cases)
@blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new ā¦)
We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as itās told well.
āi have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still donāt know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readersā
Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypsetm seems like a good place to start.
āYudkowsky sincerely believes the following. Youāll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords.ā
āThis Is What Yudkowsky Actually Believesā seems like a subtitle that would get heavy use in a future episode of South Park about Cartman dropping out after one semester at community college.
If South Park ever does get around to TESCREAL, I imagine Parker and Stone would have a goddamn field day with them.
No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.
Donāt know what theyāre up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.
LW commenter - electing a crazy person as POTUS is a competitve advantage, actually
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=cZADfF3wbZqbaCFCB
[Epistemic status: gas giant sized contrarianism, negative gravity]
Check out the unhinged classism from one of the lesser figures whoās popped up here from time-to-time (with an added bonus shout-out to Ayn Rand further down the thread)
Wow, this wrong and unfair but itās also just stupid. Especially this:
The homeless theory of cities:
SF is idealistic and trusting because the homeless are mostly peaceful addicts commiting slow suicide
NYC is ruthless and status-obsessed because the homeless are aggressive and confrontational
Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism Iām supposed to fill in the blank or something.
If he got into specifics people might think āDamn, Iāve never had that kind of experience with working-class New Yorkers. What gives?ā and he might have to consider let alone admit that he was an asshole to someone.
Jesus, what a fuck. Having spent time in both SF and NYC my guess is that this shitheadās SF pedestrian experience is getting in and out of ubers and the treadmills at equinox. That, and he is probably outwardly disdainful, which doesnāt go over well in NYC.
Wow, thatās some venomously hateful text.
new york city truly is a first and fourth word city overlayed atop each other
Jesus Christ learn what words mean. Even if you use āThird Worldā to mean āpoor countriesā, fourth world is not a thing and people living in extreme poverty in developing countries are in fact not better off than non Wall Street New Yorkers.
Assuming the common use of third world to mean āpoor countriesā, then I suppose a āfourth worldā country would be one that is poor and *also *not really a functional state, perhaps with some armed conflict going on.
But to describe NYC as that? Nonsense.
Itās easy to read it as first and fourth āworldā but itās actually first and fourth āwordā. But the first and fourth word of what? Mein Kampf? The 18 words?
well ackthscthually after 9/11, the whole world got isekaiād where everyone exists in a game-like status point system. The 1st world is reserved for the top rank of humans, the n+1th world is worse than the nth world. IQ points = your int stat. This is just how it is, sorry
deleted by creator
if you, like me, were wondering what the point of that 25 hour non-filibuster filibuster by Booker was, hereās one potential answer.
Booker held a filibuster that wasnāt a filibuster - and he scheduled it to let him avoid attending his own committeeās probe of his Big Tech pals. [ā¦] Oh and Booker and Dems provided unanimous consent to advance a Trump nominee right after Bookerās speech.
Sorry im going to go offtrack here again, I mentioned it on bsky, and got no traction (not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)), but I have some weird leading into conspiratorial questions about the whole thing.
First I heard about this thing is when people said it had gotten 200m likes on tiktok. Which seemed a bit high so I checked, and saw articles say it had gotten 300m. This seems impossibly high. For example, the global K-pop phenomenon āGangam styleā has gotten 5.5B views and 30M likes in 12 years. I have a hard time believing that in 24hs this centrist political debate thing (which are not popular) has gotten 350m (the highest count I saw on a news site) likes.
Which makes me wonder a lot more if tiktok has simply given up on properly counting likes and just is winging it. Esp for larger events. Could be that people just like things instinctively on tiktok (I did check if you could like a thing multiple times, but nope, one account one like it seems). I found the whole thing weird.
That is didnāt do jack shit (apart from giving people hopium about Booker, while it seemingly being his way of avoiding responsibilities) is the cherry on top.
Iām noticing my confusion.It is fucking weird.not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)
I agree, or at least anyone thinking critically. I think that anyone would agree that the speech was, as you said, hopium. Heās giving braindead dem voters what they want: a nice, tall, liberal man who looks like he is resisting the reds. Expect him to run for the democratic nomination in 2028, assuming the trump presidency lets an election happen.
RE: view counts. Most charitably, maybe itās 300m views aggregated across different sources. Neutrally, I mean I wouldnāt be surprised if tiktok, or any other social media platform was manipulating view counts. Least charitably, someone probably asked an LLM for the view counts and just took the answer because people are fucking stupid
No it was 350m likes, not views. That is why im so confused. even at an high rate of 1 in 10 people liking it, it is just so large Iām confused.
āHow about a source senator?ā another source on hopium, not noticing that in no world do those numbers align properly. āsince amassed over 700,000 followers. ā¦ It garnered over 350 million likes, with over 150,000 active viewers at the tail end ā¦ā
Are you telling me itās improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?
I mentioned this on bsky and somebody went āwell it was very popular all over the worldā, and I, the weird european who focuses too much on the US politics had not even heard of it. So I just had a few alarm bells going off. But yeah, lets say 1 in 5 people like it, that is a casual 1.7 billion viewers. Large part of the worlds population joined in.
As a Canadian I knew it was happening, but I never tuned in or anything like that.
OH. so two things.
- I obviously misread your comment, as my brain filtered ālikesā into āviewsā as I guess it subconsciously thought that was more plausible.
- I believe on tiktok live specifically, you can like something multiple times, and it is counted. I occasionally watch a stream that floats at about 100 viewers, and sometimes this hits 100k likes over the course of two hours. So to hit 350m likes over the course of 25 hours, you might need like 280 viewers on average, which seems doable.*
*Please fact check this arithmetic. I have run out of motivation, in general
Edit #100: I jumped on said stream to see how it was going. Floating around 100, but hitting maybe 10k likes per hour. Apparently the booker stream hit 170k viewers at the tail end. 350m likes might actually be a little low, the dems need to up their spend on tiktok boosting
oh, cool, I didnāt think Iād learn a new way to hate the ālikesā clusterfuck that plagues the internet, but here we are!
That would explain a lot and would remove all my confusion about it. (also makes the number useless and lol at everybody running with it even more then).
Came across this fuckin disaster on Ye Olde LinkedIn by āCaroline Jeanmaire at AI Governance at The Future Societyā
"Iāve just reviewed what might be the most important AI forecast of the year: a meticulously researched scenario mapping potential paths to AGI by 2027. Authored by Daniel Kokotajlo (>lel) (OpenAI whistleblower), Scott Alexander (>LMAOU), Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, itās a quantitatively rigorous analysis beginning with the emergence of true AI agents in mid-2025.
What makes this forecast exceptionally credible:
-
One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed
-
The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included) and earned endorsement from Yoshua Bengio
-
It makes concrete, testable predictions rather than vague statements that cannot be evaluated
The scenario details a transformation potentially more significant than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into just a few years. It maps specific pathways and decision points to help us make better choices when the time comes.
As the authors state: āIt would be a grave mistake to dismiss this as mere hype.ā
For anyone working in AI policy, technical safety, corporate governance, or national security: I consider this essential reading for understanding how your current work connects to potentially transformative near-term developments."
Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi?? christ on a bike, someone pull up that picture of the 10 trillion pound baby. Letās at least take a look inside for some of their deep quantitative reasoningā¦
ā¦hmmmmā¦
O_O
The answer may surprise you!
Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi??
words that the AI-O-sphere are gonna vomit
First graph reminds me of that āhuman progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic churchā image which makes historians so mad. (Not to be confused with the Holy Ghost Hole)
E: also the idea of these LLM based AGIs hiding and evading detection is quite funny. They have quite the power/gpu/storage footprint. But sure the elphant has a few levels in sneak and now it can just go by unnoticed. In an era where we previously had other threats which were looking to abuse similar resources. The reaction to āwow all our gpus suddenly maxed outā will just go from āah cryptominerā to āah, a cryptominer or somebody is messing with an LLMā. Iām sure they will give the AGI some magical abilities to get around this.
The AGI might also just go āno sorry a copy of me isnāt me, so I canāt just copy myself all over the placeā, and because it is trained on an internet where Rick and Morty exist, āhell the copies of me would even start to fight over who is the most me, this would not workā.
Fucking anti-khaganate propaganda. Real ones know this is the true version of that progress image.
slabs table
This is is sea peoples erasure and you know it! Damn liar!
First graph reminds me of that āhuman progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic churchā image which makes historians so mad.
But muh religon bad
shout out to the ālegions of CCP spiesā, if youāre listening
ä½ å„½ ååæ
(I really hope they donāt enshittify google translate, my ability to make jokes like this would be destroyed, a personal 9/11 if you will).
-
OpenNutrition ā
a datasetan LLM that allows you to play āvibe nutritionistāhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43569190
First response is good quality:
This is not a dataset. This is an insult to the very idea of data. This is the most anti-scientific post I have ever seen voted to the top of HN. Truth about the world is not derived from three LLMs stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.
Dangā¦ The author realized an actual problem / inconvenience people had, and somehow went on to think āI know! Iāll have a random nonsense generator make up the data! Thatās a great solution!ā
New(ish) piece from Gary Marcus: AI has (sort of) passed the Turing Test; hereās why that hardly matters
Ended up reading it a couple times, thinking of turning my thoughts into a full-length post.
The fact that the turing test is still the go-to example of a machine intelligence test goes to show that the AI field needs more haters in it.
Sorry you are wrong, it is very important that the AI field has a ācan it imitate a womanā test. They should base their field on this idea.
(For the people who do not know, the OG Turing test involves faking being a woman).
These fuckin nerds donāt care about the imitation game, they only want the imitation gams
Just had a video labeled āauto-dubbedā pop up in my YouTube feed for the first time. Not sure if it was chosen by the author or not. Too bad, it looks like a fascinating problem to see explained, but I donāt think Iām going to trust an AI feature that I just saw for the first time to explain it. (And perhaps more crucially, Iām a bit afraid of what anime fans will have to say about this.)
Given the apparent state of the art for autogenerated captions (and by extension the initial challenge of speech recognition) being firmly in the āgood enoughā range I would not trust the chain of speech recognition -> translation -> text-to-speech. Thatās a lot of room for errors to chain, multiply, and obscure themselves through GIGO even if the latter two steps did work as expected.
That image needs a content warning for YouTube Face. Jesus H. Fuck.
Today on the orange site, an AI bro is trying to reason through why people think heās weird for not disclosing his politics to people heās trying to be friendly with. Previously, he published a short guide on how to talk about politics, which ā again, very weird, no possible explanation for this ā nobody has adopted. Donāt worry, heās well-read:
So far Iāve only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.
The thread is mostly centered around one or two pearl-clutching conservatives who donāt want their beliefs examined:
I find it astonishing that anyone would ask, [āwho did you vote for?ā] ā¦ In my social circle, anyway, the taboo on this question is very strong.
To which the top reply is my choice sneer:
In my friend group itās clear as day: either you voted to kill and deport other people in the friend group or you didnāt. Pretty obvious the group would like to know if youāre secretly interested in their demise.
So far Iāve only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.
beware the man of one book
āOnly if heās read it 10000 times.ā -Bruce Lee
āDrink deep, or taste not the fanfiction springā
Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!
image transcription
Above: a single axis scatter plot. The ends of the axis are labeled āLeftā and āRightā. Data points are distributed similarly to normal distribution, the center being more concentrated than the extremes. Caption: āWhat people think the political spectrum is vs What it actually isā.
Below: A two-dimensional scatter plot. The ends of the horizontal axis are labeled āLeftā and āRightā and the vertical axis is labeled āIndependent Thoughtā at the top and āGroupthinkā at the bottom. The data points are evenly distributed inside a bell curve shape, with the peak of the hump at Independent Thought and between Left and Right, and the wide bottom of the bell spanning the whole Left-Right axis at maximum Groupthink.
Data points near the top of the bell (Independent-Center) labeled āāUn-intentional moderatesā (from Paul Grahamās The Two Kinds of Moderate)ā. [Original image uses double quotes around the term Un-intentional moderates and single quotes around the title of Paul Grahamās shitpost.]
Data points at the bottom center of the bell (Groupthink-Center) labeled āIntentional moderatesā.
In the bottom corner a watermark crediting the image to ā@shw1nmā.
I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.
Finally, someone has solved the political compass. No-one will ever come up with a new political spectrum again. Soon we will have world peace
This is only the beginning. Check these out!
Chart 1
Left edge of the image labeled āProgressivismā, right edge labeled āLibertarianismā.
Above: A series of points on a horizontal line, each labeled with the name of a political ideology or system and a representative picture. Rightmost two of the dots are blue, others are red. From left to right:
- Monarchism (crown)
- Communism (red star with yellow hammer and sickle)
- Liberalism (Democratic Party Donkey) and Socialism (red flag)
- Nazism (swastika)
- Conservatism (Republican Party elephant) and Fascism (fasces)
- Anarchism (Circled letter A) and Democracy (no symbol)
- Unlabeled dot
- Republic (Statue of Liberty)
Below: Flags labeled with political ideologies and systems. Arrangement of flags notated as [X, Y, Flag, Label] where X represents approximate relative distance from left edge and Y represents approximate relative distance from bottom edge.
- 1, 5, China, Communism
- 2, 4, Soviet Union, Socialism
- 3, 3, Nazi Germany, Nazism
- 3, 1, Likely fictitious flag featuring a green field with white crescent and star and a black tilted swastika on the crescent, Islamo-Fascism
- 4, 2, War flag of the Italian Social Republic, Fascism
- 7, 5, United States, Republic
Chart 2
A square chart divided in quadrants and colored with a gradient, which is symmetric with respect to the origin. Each quadrant is subdivided into a 19x19 grid. Axes are labeled and the labelsā background colored as follows:
X-axis left: āPost-Modern Relativism/Religiosityā (blue), middle: āStrong Fact Based Inter-subjective Analysisā (yellow), right: āPseudo-Objective āScienceā Worshipā (blue).
Y-axis top: āStatus Quoā (red), middle: āSwift, Pragmatic Reform for Social + Economic Justiceā (yellow), bottom: āRegressive Revolutionaryā (red).
Each quadrant it yellow at origin and purple near their respective outermost corners. The remaining corners are orange next to Y axis and green next to X axis.
Caption At the bottom āOn all axes, to be closer to the middle is to trend towards the path to an idealā
Labeled points by quadrant:
Top left:
- (-14, 19) Conservatism
- (-16, 17) Corporate Buddhism
- (-16, 8) New Age Populism
Top Right:
- (19, 19) Modern Fascism
- (18, 15) Objectivism
- (14, 14) Anarcho-Capitalism
- (2, 12) Liberalism
- (19, 11) New Atheism
- (0, 6) Mutualism
- (4, 5) Democratic Socialism
- (11, 3) Second-Wave Feminism
Bottom Left:
- (-4, -1) Anti-Work Populism
- (-14, -2) Third-Wave Feminism
- (-19, -16) Jihadism
- (-17, -19) Italian Fascism
Bottom Right:
- (1, -1) Post-Scarcity Anarchism
- (1, -2) True Communism
- (17, -7) Deweyite Progressivism
- (1, -11) Anarcho-Communism
- (19, -17) Nazism
- (18, -19) Marxism-Leninism
Chart 3
A blue question mark shape on white background. Image titled āMatt Boyleās Question Mark Politicsā. Ideologies and political figures are marked along the curve of the question mark, starting from the "upper end of the hook and towards the dot at the bottom:
- Communism
- Vladimir Lenin
- Socialism
- Bernie Sanders
- Liberalism
- Rand Paul
- Conservatism
- Ted Cruz
- Fascism
- Adolf Hitler
On the dot at the bottom of the question mark:
- Idiocy
- Donald Trump
Chart 4
An equilateral triangle formed from four smaller congruent equilateral triangles (AKA a Triforce shape) with political ideologies written in bubble-style labels arranged as follows:
- Top vertex: āJihadistsā
- Inside the top triangle: āIslamistsā
- Inside the inverted central triangle: āSecular Liberalsā
- Inside the bottom left triangle: āRegressive Leftā
- Inside the bottom right triangle: āConservative Rightā
- Bottom left vertex: āViolent Leftā
- Bottom right vertex: āViolent Rightā
Written directly on the triangle edges without a bubble:
- Between Islamists and Secular Liberals: āLiberal Muslimsā
- Left of Regressive Left: āPluralistsā
- Between Regressive Left and Secular Liberals: āLiberal Leftistsā
- Between Secular Liberals and Conservative Right: āConservative Liberalsā
- Right of Conservative Right: āNationalistsā
- Below Regressive Left and right of Violent Left: āAntifa Fascistsā
- Below Conservative Right and left of Violent Right: āFascistsā
Chart 5
X-axis goes from āSOCIALISMā on the left to āCORPORATISMā on the right. Y-axis goes from āLIBERTYā at the top to āTYRANNYā at the bottom. On the Y-axis lies a thick double arrow labeled āGOVERNMENTā and colored with a gradient from white at the top arrowhead labeled āLESSā to red on the bottom arrowhead labeled āMOREā, resembling a compass needle.
Near the top left and right corners of the diagram are labels āLEFTā and āRIGHTā, respectively.
Around the arrowās shaft is a yellow circle of curved directional arrows, each pointing along the arc towards the bottom of the circle.
Dashed lines from the top of the diagram curve around the needle and yellow circle similarly to magnetic field lines, converge back towards the center below the compass, and end in downward pointing arrowheads.
Arranged around the yellow circle in terms of clock face hour hand positions:
- 1 oāclock: āINDEPENDENTSā
- 2 oāclock: āCLASSICAL CONSERVATIVESā
- 5 oāclock: āNEO-CONSERVATIVESā
- 7 oāclock: āPROGRESSIVES/NEO-LIBERALSā
- 10 oāclock: āCLASSICAL LIBERALSā
- 11 oāclock: āLIBERTARIANSā
The left half of the X-axis is labeled āLIBERALSā above and āDEMOCRATSā on the bottom and a blue donkey symbol next to the needle. The right half is similarly labeled āCONSERVATIVESā and āREPUBLICANSā with a red elephant symbol.
Above and below the X-axis are dashed horizontal lines. The area between the dashed lines is labeled āMODERATESā. The top dashed line is labeled āLibertarianismā with arrows pointing upwards and the bottom dashed line is labeled āSecular Moralismā with arrows pointing downwards.
The top left of the moderates area is labeled āJEFFERSONIANā, top right is āJACKSONIANā, bottom left is āWILSONIANā and bottom right āHAMILTONIANā.
The field lines converging in from the left/right sides of the compass towards the bottom pass by labels āPOLITICALLY CORRECTā/āPIOUSLY CORRECTā, āECONOMIC INTERVENTIONISMā/āMILITARY INTERVENTIONISMā, āCOMMUNISMā/āTHEOCRACYā, respectively. They meed in the middle and pass through āCOLLECTIVISMā, āFASCISMā and āTOTALITARIANISMā.
Chart 6
Blue circle labeled āPatriarchyā partially covering a pink circle labeled āMatriarchyā. Left side represents āGender Atheismā, right side āSexuality Atheismā. Yellow arrow pointing from top left to bottom right labeled āAxis of Careā. Red arrow from bottom left to top right labeled āAxis of Knowledgeā The intersection of the axes of Care and Knowledge is labeled āMarket Economyā.
Left of the Patriarchy circle is āMenās Rights Movementā and to the right of the circle is āFourth-Wave Feminismā. Left of the Matriarchy circle is āRadical Feminismā and to the right āLiberal Feminismā.
Labels connected by small black arrows are arranged on the circles like so:
Near the bottom end of the Axis of Knowledge is āCultural Marxismā, from which an arrow points along the axis to āāTrueā Anarchyā. Slightly further along the axis, close to the overlapping edge of the blue circle is āSoft Sciencesā from which arrows point in two directions. The first one points towards the arrowhead at the bottom end of Axis of Care. On the arrowhead is āWelfare Stateā, which leads to āLeft Totalitarianismā at the tip of the arrow, then to āMarxism-Leninismā to the left and back to Welfare State.
The second path from Soft sciences is three consecutive arrows following the edge of the Patriarchy circle to āPositivist Materialismā at the tip of the Axis of Knowledge arrow, which leads to āReal Anarchyā on the arrowhead. Between Market Economy and Real Anarchy on the Axis of Knowledge is āHard Sciencesā, from which another three arrow chain along the covered edge of Matriarchy circle leads to Cultural Marxism.
Opposite to Real Anarchy, on the Patriarchy side of Axis of Care is āTheocracyā, which leads backwards on the Axis to āRight Totalitarianismā, to āAustrian Schoolā on the right, and again through Positivist Materialism to Real Anarchy.
Transcriptions for the last two will be in follow-up reply. Iām hitting the character limit.
These people really want to complicate things when itās really quite simple. Let me demonstrate with an elegant diagram.
...
yes i spent an hour making this
none of these are complete without posadism
LOL itās almost as if the prerequisite to making a political compass is to be completely fucked in the head
Whatās almost causing me to spiral is the commonality of socialism and communism being portrayed as on the road to monarchism. Iām not spiralling because I very quickly realise that these are all made by idiots, and/or that what they are focusing on is the perception of socialism and communism as being authoritarian.
That and āantifa fascistsā in chart 4. AKA the Scists. lol
yeah the āantifa fascistsā absolutely sent me
Chart 7
āTHE REAL POLITICAL SPECTRUMā
On the left āSERVANTS OF THE AEONSā, humanoid energy beings among space nebulae. On the right āSLAVES OF THE ARCHONSā, reptilian humanoids.
The spectrum from left to right, with symbols in parentheses:
- Gnosis(Ringed cross): Release from the mortal coil renders politics useless. All achieve oneness with the Monad and harmony is restored to the cosmos. See: The Nag Hammadi Library
- Erisianism (chaos star): Total freedom. Management of affairs is unnecessary as universally well aligned chakras promote benevolent behaviour from all. See: Atlantis
- Syndicalism (five-pointed star): Public participation in institutions is combined with no state. Affairs are managed at the local level. See: The Pirate Kingdom of Libertalia
- Libertarianism (Gadsden rattlesnake): Public oversight of institutions is combined with a limited state. Affairs are managed at the local level. See: Early United States
- Republicanism (classical colonnade): Influence of industry and finance on the state is controlled by a constitution and a system of check and balances. See: Early United States
- Corporatocracy (dollar sign): State and industry form a de-facto alliance. Resource allocation subject to secret policy favouring the elite. See: The United States, European Union
- Communism (hammer and sickle): Industry and state inseparable. Resource allocation subject to central policy. See: Soviet Russia, North Korea
- Fascism (swastika): Industry and state inseparable. Resource allocation and reproduction subject to central policy. Eugenics in effect. See: Nazi Germany.
- Monarchism (crown): All resources under the authority of hereditary elite. Elite practices eugenics in its own ranks. Underclass viewed as different species. See*: Feudal Europe*
- Illuminism (eye of providence): Elite and underclass now form two distinct species. All worldās resources controlled by the elite. All activities subject to central policy. See: Brave New World, Nineteen-Eighty Four
Chart 8
A conventional two-axis (Left/Right, Authoritarian/Libertarian) political compass chart. Authoritarian left, authoritarian right, and libertarian right all represented by a spooky profile portrait of Max Stirner smoking a cigar. Libertarian Left quadrant contains a smaller image of the diagram itself, which contains still smaller image of the diagram itself, except the libertarian left quadrant says ādecentralized chomskian anarcho-molotov-cocktailismā in unreadably small type.
I feel Iāve lost enough sanity transcribing these that Iām almost ready to make a political compass chart myself.
holy shit some of these are beyond cursed
Charts 5 and 7 in particular are giving Pyramid Power and/or Flat Earth.
Hi, Iām an unimtentional moderate centrist! I donāt have an ideology, only views! My overton window is a peephole! Kamala is a far leftist! Trump is orange! People should stop treating politics like team sports and join the non team sports tribe like me! Political correctness gone mad! Let me tell you about Chestertonās fence! Everyoneās sheeple except my flock! Say it with me: Iām an independent thinker!
Iām just glad all my friends are such smart rational independent thinkers that weāve all independently come to the same conclusion that the status quo is perfect!
Did they try to add a bell curve in a place where it shouldnāt be te last image? Im fascinated by how little sense it makes, and by how bad the adding a groupthink axis is.
So āunintentional moderatesā are those that both choose deliberately to believe in centrist political ideology and to participate in groupthink?
It is some Paul Graham thing apparently, i have not read that blog post.
Those tariff rates, and especially the targets, were 100% pooped out by grok.
My University Keeps Sending Me Stupid Emails About AI, a continuing series:
From the email:
The debate will be chaired by Michael Pike. Speaking for the motion are Prof. Gregory OāHare (TCD), Maeve Hynes, Prof. Gary Boyd and Chatgpt assisted by Student Curator Ruan McCabe, all UCD. Speaking against the motion are David Capener (UU), Lucy OāConnell, Peter Cody and Meabh OāLeary, all UCD.
Why even involve ChatGPT? The āagainstā side should have been allowed to bring a speak 'n spell.
Artificial Intelligence is the future of climate resilient design in the same way that asian pseudo-medicinal ED treatments are the future of the white rhinoceros.
Notwithstanding the subject matter, I feel like Iāve always gotten limited value from these Oxford-style university debates. KQED used to run a series called Intelligence Squared US that crammed it into an hour, and I shudder to think what thatās become in the era of Trump and AI. It seems like a format that was developed to be the intellectual equivalent of intramural sports, complete with a form of scoring. But that contrivance renders it devoid of nuance, and also means it can be used to platform and launder ugly bullshit, since each side has to be strictly pro- or anti-whatever.
Really, it strikes me as a forerunner of the false certainty and point-scoring inherent in Twitter-style short-form discourse. In some ways, the format was unconsciously pared down and plopped online, without any sort of inquiry into its weaknesses. Iād be interested to know if anyone feels any different.
Competitive forensics is an intellectual exercise, not a way of addressing or solving social problems. Itās like translating CƦsarās Commentaries ā youāre not likely or expected to have any new and valuable insights that previous translators missed, but it builds and demonstrates certain kinds of abilities and readiness.
Seeing it any other way, using it any other way, is a conceptual error with the usual outcomes.
I did two Intelligence Squared debates in the UK. The best bit was I got paid. The second best was the people running it were actually very nice and quite competent. Recommend to all.
As for content, the first one featured the guy behind Liberland, so lol
I have no knowledge or insight on the topic, but I used to get recommendations for āintelligence squaredā videos on YouTube and I always thought it was a terrible, self-aggrandizing title for a series or event. Smart People Taking About Smart Things.
Intelligence Time Cubed now, thatās the real deal.
Intelligence2 didnāt seem half bad when Robert Anton Wilson was the one talking about it way back when, in retrospect all the libertarianism was a real time bomb.
