themoken

I took a crack at Infinite Jest maybe 10-12 years ago and found it extremely tedious to get through the first few hundred pages before I put it down. I'm weirdly edified that LLMs have taken the wind out of this sort of literary masturbation.

It means making yourself more attractive by smashing your bones and micro dosing meth while receiving payouts from Peter Thiel

Damn right.

I haven't interviewed anywhere in nearly a decade, but damn, the human interaction part is so important. These are your potential future coworkers, a vibe check goes both ways.

I don't think I'd even do the first automated interview, tbh. If a human is going to be involved in hiring me down the line, they can damn well be present while I'm answering their questions.

Yeah, wasn't going to go there to look, but this is a different guy and just happens to have a baseball handle. Weird coincidence.

Uh, what? I thought this guy was an (ex) baseball sportscaster ?

I think this is from Graeber's essay "There Never was a West", and he does such a good job assaulting the idea that there is some coherent vision of what "The West" is in comparison to everyone else.

The underlying thread in all of his anthropological anarchism is that there are a thousand ways cultures have made (and thus we could make) society work, we just have to decide to change. If this sounds obvious to you, that's good - because it doesn't sound obvious to the horde of people clinging to capitalism as if divine market forces are sacrosanct and all human suffering derived from it is inevitable.

On a related note, not having to know literally everything a public person has done before feeling safe to express even the most basic support for their work.

I appreciate the accountability, I don't want to support bad people, but back in the day it was like "I enjoyed that album" and then you went back to living your life. Lack of information made separating the art from the artist the default and it made enjoying new stuff take so much less effort.

I agree that this is extremely simplified, however your radio example implies physicists only do physics for money and nobody would have explored the applications of radio waves without a profit motive which seems at odds with... Well, literally every scientist I've ever met.

You don't think people would volunteer to maintain sewers or collect garbage if the alternative was shit/trash everywhere?

To me it just looks like an easy way to do your community a service.

Yeah, it's really hard to judge a stage set that's obviously incomplete and unlit. This could end up looking great... Or it could end up as a cringe inducing memory for years to come.

Absolutely no argument from me on that, but there is no getting away with it - once we start shooting back we've opened Pandora's box. The government is dying for an excuse to get even worse.