Goz @Grozbo

Great study on modern Triad operations mythosnoir.substack.com/p/none-shall-s…

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a translation machine deployed by Lovecraftian beings trying to make contact with us.

nostalgebraist has written a very, very good post about LLMs. if there is one thing you should read to understand the nature of LLMs as of today, it is this. I'll comment on some things they touched on below (not a summary of the post. Just read it.) 🧵 nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737…

this book is not satire reality is absurd, deal with it notes:

It's kind of insane to actually see the message. End of an era

It’s in no way incorrect to say that the economies of the developed world are powered by primitive witchcraft. Look at any advertisement you wish, especially but not only those in video format, and it’s easy to spot which of the two nerve nets they’re trying to stimulate: the warm fuzzy feelings of the sympathetic system are triggered by one set of stimuli, the cold prickly feelings of the parasympathetic system by a different set. The goal of this kind of witchcraft is essentially the same as with the form we’ve been discussing. It’s just that instead of trying to convince you that you’re sexually aroused by someone who wouldn’t normally attract you, they’re trying to convince you that you want to buy a product, pay for a service, or elect a political candidate who normally wouldn’t attract you at all, by associating the thing they’re trying to sell you with the sympathetic reaction, or the opposite of the thing they’re trying to sell you with the parasympathetic reaction. The gimmicks used for this are utter clichés, and once you spot them you’ll find it impossible to miss them. The gimmicks in question, please note, are anything but omnipotent. There are two ways that they fail. The first is that the target of the spell has to be unreflective enough not to notice the spell. If the target keeps any degree of mental balance, recognizes what’s going on, and doesn’t fall into the trap of associating the nerve reaction with the ideas or images that are being provided as a fake explanation, the spell fails; it really is as simple as that. Yet there’s an even more catastrophic mode of failure, which is when the person who’s casting the spell becomes its victim. “Getting high on your own supply,” to use a current bit of internet slang, is fatal in this kind of magical work. If you fall under the sway of your own spell, you lose the ability to realize when it’s not working, and thus become incapable of adapting it to changing conditions. Thus your magic becomes predictable and easily evaded, just as you lose the ability to notice that people are evading it. As I write these words, the political trajectory of the United States has just been turned on its ear by exactly this effect. One party’s supporters became so high on their own supply that they lost the ability to remember that the warm fuzzy feelings they assigned to their candidate, and the cold prickly feelings they assigned to the other, were artifacts of their own propaganda and would not be felt by anyone who hadn’t been affected by it. As a result, their propaganda became clumsy and hackneyed, and they became the only ones on whom it had any effect at all. Their attempts to sway public opinion failed, but they remained incapable of perceiving the possibility that it could fail, and so they walked blithely into an epic electoral disaster serenely convinced that they were sure to win. How this will play out over the months, years, and decades to come is an interesting question, in more than abstract terms. As a lesson for the aspiring student of magic, though, the 2024 US election is worth close study. Set aside your own political opinions and passions, dismiss for a moment the substantive issues that were up for debate, and simply pay attention to how each side tried to associate their candidate with sympathetic nervous system reactions and the other side with parasympathetic reactions. Notice how this was done, who it affected, and who shrugged off whose efforts how easily. You can learn a great deal from this.

I don’t think it’s accidental that a great many of those people who spend their time denouncing Hitler and Nazism most loudly, and fling these labels at their political enemies with reckless abandon, have started insisting that free speech and other constitutional guarantees of civil rights are bad things that should be gotten rid of.  The gap between hatred and love is not as wide as many people assume, and it’s not at all uncommon for one to change suddenly into the other. The return of the repressed is a potent force. So is the craving, especially powerful among those who spend their lives groveling before the idol of peer pressure, to slam all the way to the opposite extreme and embrace the unthinkable. Thus one of the things that worries me right now is the possibility that the decades immediately ahead may see a revival of Nazism. By this I don’t mean the emergence of some political viewpoint that gets labeled “Nazi” by its enemies—we’ve had plenty of those already, on both sides of the political spectrum—but a literal attempt to rehabilitate Hitler’s National Socialism, or something very much like it, as a modern political stance. Nor do I expect that to come from the right, or for that matter from the extreme left.  To judge by who’s participating most eagerly in the obsession with Hitler these days, I expect it to emerge from the shattered remnants of the corporate liberalism now so obviously slipping toward history’s exit doors. That prospect horrifies me. A political movement doesn’t have to be the worst in human history, after all, to be very, very, very bad. Furthermore, the flaws that led to Hitler’s failure weren’t accidental.  They were hardwired into the core structure of Nazism itself, and any nation that adopts something much like Hitler’s ideology can expect to crash and burn in some similar way. Avoiding that outcome will admittedly require more common sense and capacity for reflection than has had much presence recently at any point on the political spectrum. Still, we can hope.

I've just published [Buteyko 101] One of the most powerful and effective breathwork methods, developed by Dr Konstantin Buteyko. In 4,500 words, we cover the basic theory, as well as practical exercises to get you going You know where to find it -- |su**ck| 👇

Step far enough back & political discourse resembles an autoimmune disorder.

3.) To answer your question @0x49fa98, Thiel money is seeding elements of the ‘Culture War’. This Strategy of Tension has been ratcheted up since the Global Financial Crisis. It’s current iteration expresses itself as an MMO re-enactment LARP of the Battle of Thermopylae.

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New playbooks getting tested in realtime, now. The "vibe shift" is nothing compared to the rules shift. 2028 will be a completely different landscape.

Great piece on munitions supply bottlenecks as they pertain to the humble but ubiquitous 155mm shell. In this case, it’s the casings that are hard to produce, and plant capacity as limiting factor. Could you build a new plant? Yes…in 3 years…if you were sure it’d be profitable.

evenscreech and cookie worship @evenscreech

2 years ago

@_mengde_ @MartinSkold2 did we not like the deep dive substack that made the rounds a while aco? the factors cited seem pretty consistent with what turns up in other progress studies pieces roblh.substack.com/p/as-much-as-y…

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Not a bad write up: construction-physics.com/p/what-happene…

Here's a short list of my favorite online freeware tools. Please reply with your own favorites.

1RT = 1 Unsubstantiated Claim By Yours Truly

No invention in human history has pulled more people out of poverty than the shipping container. Yet this myth that it was a “wholly commercial invention” is both persist and false Container shipping was an epic failure until the US Military poured billions of 💰into it 🧵

Rasmus Larsson 🇸🇪🇺🇦 @rasmusdotse

3 years ago

@johnkonrad @TrentTelenko Can it be so simple as when containerization happened out of necessity it was faster and simpler to let private companies take the investments needed than to allocate public funds for building a new fleet of containerships?

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Solid, careful overview on a complex, contentious subject 1830goel.substack.com/p/methodology-…

Bill Gates Arrested by US Federal Marshals; Being Held Under Armed Watch at Guantanamo Bay; Charged With War Crimes Against Humanity. Washington Post.

Let's take the example of the live polio vaccine used against polio in the developing world. How is its efficacy defined?