psyxe

Latest Posts by psyxe

Hot take but praise is a good tool for encouraging healthy behavior. Positive reinforcement is good. Relying exclusively on punishment to change people's behavior is both cruel and ineffective. If someone does better than they did yesterday, let them know you appreciate it, let them know that they're improving!

Cosmere Characters as Inspirobot Quotes

Shallan:

Wit:

Dalinar:

Kaladin:

Allomancers:

Scadrial:

Straff:

Kelsier @ the rest of the crew:

Zane:

Wayne:

This lady is Alethi and you can’t tell me otherwise

By Jan Lehner for Russh Magazine

Teach ME a new word, please! Make it one nobody has said before.

[in my head] “snek.”

Fortnite Kelsier appeals to me for the same reason that Canon Destiel Putin Election Night was fucking great and its that i like feeling like my brain is sizzling in a frying pan with a bunch of glitter

Watership Down partial fancast:

1949

Harry Truman was inaugurated as U.S. president after being elected in 1948 to his own term; previously he was sworn in following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He authorized the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively.

Doris Day enters the public spotlight with the films My Dream Is Yours and It’s a Great Feeling as well as popular songs like “It’s Magic”; divorces her second husband.

Red China: The Communist Party of China wins the Chinese Civil War, establishing the People’s Republic of China.

Johnnie Ray signs his first recording contract with Okeh Records, although he would not become popular for another two years.

South Pacific, the prize-winning musical, opens on Broadway on April 7.

Walter Winchell is an aggressive radio and newspaper journalist credited with inventing the gossip column.

Joe DiMaggio and the New York Yankees go to the World Series five times in the 1940s, winning four of them.

1950

Joe McCarthy, the US Senator, gains national attention and begins his anti-communist crusade with his Lincoln Day speech.

Richard Nixon is first elected to the United States Senate.

Studebaker, a popular car company, begins its financial downfall.

Television is becoming widespread throughout Europe and North America.

North Korea and South Korea declare war after Northern forces stream south on June 25.

Marilyn Monroe soars in popularity with five new movies, including The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, and attempts suicide after the death of friend Johnny Hyde who asked to marry her several times, but she refused respectfully. Monroe would later (1954) be married for a brief time to Joe DiMaggio (mentioned in the previous verse).

1951

The Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius, were convicted on March 29 for espionage.

H-Bomb is in the middle of its development as a nuclear weapon, announced in early 1950 and first tested in late 1952.

Sugar Ray Robinson, a champion welterweight boxer.

Panmunjom, the border village in Korea, is the location of truce talks between the parties of the Korean War.

Marlon Brando is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire.

The King and I, musical, opens on Broadway on March 29.

The Catcher in the Rye, a controversial novel by J. D. Salinger, is published.

1952

Dwight D. Eisenhower is first elected as U.S. president, winning by a landslide margin of 442 to 89 electoral votes.

The vaccine for polio is privately tested by Jonas Salk.

England’s got a new queen: Queen Elizabeth II succeeds to the throne upon the death of her father, George VI, and is crowned the next year.

Rocky Marciano defeats Jersey Joe Walcott, becoming the world Heavyweight champion.

Liberace has a popular 1950s television show for his musical entertainment.

Santayana goodbye: George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, dies on September 26.

1953

Joseph Stalin dies on March 5, yielding his position as leader of the Soviet Union.

Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov succeeds Stalin for six months following his death. Malenkov had presided over Stalin’s purges of party “enemies”, but would be spared a similar fate by Nikita Khrushchev mentioned later in verse.

Gamal Abdel Nasser acts as the true power behind the new Egyptian nation as Muhammad Naguib’s minister of the interior.

Sergei Prokofiev, the composer, dies on March 5, the same day as Stalin.

Winthrop Rockefeller and his wife Barbara are involved in a highly publicized divorce, culminating in 1954 with a record-breaking $5.5 million settlement.[12]

Roy Campanella, an African-American baseball catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, receives the National League’s Most Valuable Player award for the second time.

Communist bloc is a group of communist nations dominated by the Soviet Union at this time. Probably a reference to the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany.

1954

Roy Cohn resigns as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and enters private practice with the fall of McCarthy. He also worked to prosecute the Rosenbergs, mentioned earlier.

Juan Perón spends his last full year as President of Argentina before a September 1955 coup.

Arturo Toscanini is at the height of his fame as a conductor, performing regularly with the NBC Symphony Orchestra on national radio.

Dacron is an early artificial fiber made from the same plastic as polyester.

Dien Bien Phu falls. A village in North Vietnam falls to Viet Minh forces under Vo Nguyen Giap, leading to the creation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam as separate states.

“Rock Around the Clock” is a hit single released by Bill Haley & His Comets in May, spurring worldwide interest in rock and roll music.

1955

Albert Einstein dies on April 18 at the age of 76.

James Dean achieves success with East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, gets nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and dies in a car accident on September 30 at the age of 24.

Brooklyn’s got a winning team: The Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series for the only time before their move to Los Angeles.

Davy Crockett is a Disney television miniseries about the legendary frontiersman of the same name. The show was a huge hit with young boys and inspired a short-lived “coonskin cap” craze.

Peter Pan is broadcast on TV live and in color from the 1954 version of the stage musical starring Mary Martin on March 7. Disney released an animated version the previous year.

Elvis Presley signs with RCA Records on November 21, beginning his pop career.

Disneyland opens on July 17, 1955 as Walt Disney’s first theme park.

1956

Brigitte Bardot appears in her first mainstream film And God Created Woman and establishes an international reputation as a French “sex kitten”.

Budapest is the capital city of Hungary and site of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Alabama is the site of the Montgomery Bus Boycott which ultimately led to the removal of the last race laws in the USA. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr figure prominently.

Nikita Khrushchev makes his famous Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s “cult of personality” on February 25.

Princess Grace Kelly releases her last film, High Society, and marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco.

Peyton Place, the best-selling novel by Grace Metalious, is published. Though mild compared to today’s prime time, it shocked the reserved values of the 1950s.

Trouble in the Suez: The Suez Crisis boils as Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal on October 29.

1957

Little Rock, Arkansas is the site of an anti-integration standoff, as Governor Orval Faubus stops the Little Rock Nine from attending Little Rock Central High School and President Dwight D. Eisenhower deploys the 101st Airborne Division to counteract him.

Boris Pasternak, the Russian author, publishes his famous novel Doctor Zhivago.

Mickey Mantle is in the middle of his career as a famous New York Yankees outfielder and American League All-Star for the sixth year in a row.

Jack Kerouac publishes his first novel in seven years, On the Road.

Sputnik becomes the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, marking the start of the space race.

Chou En-Lai, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, survives an assassination attempt on the charter airliner Kashmir Princess.

Bridge on the River Kwai is released as a film adaptation of the 1954 novel and receives seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.[13]

1958

Lebanon is engulfed in a political and religious crisis that eventually involves U.S. intervention.

Charles de Gaulle is elected first president of the French Fifth Republic following the Algerian Crisis.

California baseball begins as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants move to California and become the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. They are the first major league teams west of Kansas City.

Charles Starkweather Homicide captures the attention of Americans, in which he kills eleven people between January 25 and 29 before being caught in a massive manhunt in Douglas, Wyoming.

Children of Thalidomide: Mothers taking the drug Thalidomide had children born with congenital birth defects caused by the sleeping aid and antiemetic, which was also used at times to treat morning sickness.

1959

Buddy Holly dies in a plane crash on February 3 with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, in a day that had a devastating impact on the country and youth culture. Joel prefaces the lyric with a Holly signature vocal hiccup: “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

Ben-Hur, a film based around the New Testament starring Charlton Heston, wins eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Space Monkey: Able and Miss Baker return to Earth from space aboard the flight Jupiter AM-18.

The Mafia are the center of attention for the FBI and public attention builds to this organized crime society with a historically Sicilian-American origin.

Hula hoops reach 100 million in sales as the latest toy fad.

Fidel Castro comes to power after a revolution in Cuba and visits the United States later that year on an unofficial twelve-day tour.

Edsel is a no-go: Production of this car marque ends after only three years due to poor sales.

1960

U-2: An American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, causing the U-2 Crisis of 1960.

Syngman Rhee was rescued by the CIA after being forced to resign as leader of South Korea for allegedly fixing an election and embezzling more than US $20 million.

Payola, illegal payments for radio broadcasting of songs, was publicized due to Dick Clark’s testimony before Congress and Alan Freed’s public disgrace.

John F. Kennedy beats Richard Nixon in the November 8 general election.

Chubby Checker popularizes the dance The Twist with his cover of the song of the same name.

Psycho: An Alfred Hitchcock thriller, based on a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and adapted by Joseph Stefano, which becomes a landmark in graphic violence and cinema sensationalism. The screeching violins heard briefly in the background of the song are a trademark of the film’s soundtrack.

Belgians in the Congo: The Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) was declared independent of Belgium on June 30, with Joseph Kasavubu as President and Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister.

1961

Ernest Hemingway commits suicide on July 2 after a long battle with depression.

Adolf Eichmann, a “most wanted” Nazi war criminal, is traced to Argentina and captured by Mossad agents. He is covertly taken to Israel where he is put on trial for crimes against humanityin Germany during World War II, convicted, and hanged.

Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein, is a breakthrough best-seller with themes of sexual freedom and liberation.

Bob Dylan is signed to Columbia Records after a New York Times review by critic Robert Shelton.

Berlin is separated into West Berlin and East Berlin, and from the rest of East Germany, when the Berlin Wall is erected on August 13 to prevent citizens escaping to the West.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion fails, an attempt by United States-trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro.

1962

Lawrence of Arabia: The Academy Award-winning film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence starring Peter O’Toole premieres in America on December 16.

British Beatlemania: The Beatles, a British rock group, gain Ringo Starr as drummer and Brian Epstein as manager, and join the EMI’s Parlophone label. They soon become the world’s most famous rock band, with the word “Beatlemania” adopted by the press for their fans’ unprecedented enthusiasm. It also began the British Invasion in the United States.

Ole’ Miss: James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi

John Glenn: Flew the first American manned orbital mission termed “Friendship 7” on February 20.

Liston beats Patterson: Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight for the world heavyweight championship on September 25, ending in a first-round knockout. This match marked the first time Patterson had ever been knocked out and one of only eight losses in his 20-year professional career.

1963

Pope Paul VI: Cardinal Giovanni Montini is elected to the papacy and takes the papal name of Paul VI.

Malcolm X makes his infamous statement “The chickens have come home to roost” about the Kennedy assassination, thus causing the Nation of Islam to censor him.

British politician sex: The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, has a relationship with a showgirl, and then lies when questioned about it before the House of Commons. When the truth came out, it led to his own resignation and undermined the credibility of the Prime Minister.

JFK blown away: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on November 22 while riding in an open convertible through Dallas.

1965

Birth control: In the early 1960s, oral contraceptives, popularly known as “the pill”, first go on the market and are extremely popular. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 challenged a Connecticut law prohibiting contraceptives. In 1968, Pope Paul VI released a papal encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae which declared artificial birth control a sin.

Ho Chi Minh: A Vietnamese communist, who served as President of Vietnam from 1954–1969. March 2 Operation Rolling Thunder begins bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply line from North Vietnam to the Vietcong rebels in the south. On March 8, the first U.S. combat troops, 3,500 marines, land in South Vietnam.

1968

Richard Nixon back again: Former Vice President Nixon is elected President in 1968.

1969

Moonshot: Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing, successfully lands on the moon.

Woodstock: Famous rock and roll festival of 1969 that came to be the epitome of the counterculture movement.

1974–75

Watergate: Political scandal that began when the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC was broken into. After the break-in, word began to spread that President Richard Nixon (a Republican) may have known about the break-in, and tried to cover it up. The scandal would ultimately result in the resignation of President Nixon, and to date, this remains the only time that anyone has ever resigned the United States Presidency.

Punk rock: The Ramones form, with the Sex Pistols following in 1975, bringing in the punk era.

1976–77

(An item from 1977 comes before three items from 1976 to make the song scan.)

Menachem Begin becomes Prime Minister of Israel in 1977 and negotiates the Camp David Accords with Egypt’s president in 1978.

Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, but he first attempted to run for the position in 1976.

Palestine: a United Nations resolution that calls for an independent Palestinian state and to end the Israeli occupation.

Terror on the airline: Numerous aircraft hijackings take place, specifically, the Palestinian hijack of Air France Flight 139 and the subsequent Operation Entebbe in Uganda.

1979

Ayatollah’s in Iran: During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the West-backed and secular Shah is overthrown as the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gains power after years in exile and forces Islamic law.

Russians in Afghanistan: Following their move into Afghanistan, Soviet forces fight a ten-year war, from 1979 to 1989.

1983

Wheel of Fortune: A hit television game show which has been TV’s highest-rated syndicated program since 1983.

Sally Ride: In 1983 she becomes the first American woman in space. Ride’s quip from space “Better than an E-ticket”, harkens back to the opening of Disneyland mentioned earlier, with the E-ticket purchase needed for the best rides.

Heavy metal suicide: In the 1980s Ozzy Osbourne and the bands Judas Priest and Metallica were brought to court by parents who accused the musicians of hiding subliminal pro-suicide messages in their music.

Foreign debts: Persistent U.S. trade deficits

Homeless vets: Veterans of the Vietnam War, including many disabled ex-military, are reported to be left homeless and impoverished.

AIDS: A collection of symptoms and infections in humans resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It is first detected and recognized in the 1980s, and was on its way to becoming a pandemic.

Crack cocaine use surged in the mid-to-late 1980s.

1984

Bernie Goetz: On December 22, Goetz shot four young men who he said were threatening him on a New York City subway. Goetz was charged with attempted murder but was acquitted of the charges, though convicted of carrying an unlicensed gun.

1988

Hypodermics on the shore: Medical waste was found washed up on beaches in New Jersey after being illegally dumped at sea. Before this event, waste dumped in the oceans was an “out of sight, out of mind” affair. This has been cited as one of the crucial turning points in popular opinion on environmentalism.

1989

China’s under martial law: On May 20, China declares martial law, enabling them to use force of arms against protesting students to end the Tiananmen Square protests.

Rock-and-roller cola wars: Soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi each run marketing campaigns using rock & roll and popular music stars to reach the teenage and young adult demographic.

Short summaries of all 119 references mentioned in the song, you’re welcome 

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

it’s a beautiful day on the Suez and you are a horrible boat

So I’ve been reading about someone who was ideologically abused within Catholicism and it’s bringing up a lot of feelings, but one thing it’s really crystallizing in my mind is an important thing that people fail to understand about ideological abuse.

The (relatively mild) ideological abuse I have experienced was used to convince me of some bad and harmful shit. But I’m worried that the things I’ve said about it make it seem like the abuse was bad because it convinced me of untruths. That’s a very very small part of the problem.

It is possible to commit ideological abuse in the name of ideas that are 100% true. People think that ideological abuse is only done in the name of darkly comic nonsense (Xenu only makes sense to someone who’s been abused so badly they forget how to think clearly) or ideologies based on cruelty and subjugation. It’s true that abuse is more common in ideologies that cannot possibly defend themselves with actual arguments, but it’s completely possible to abuse people in the name of things which make sense.

If you’re dealing with someone who thinks two plus two is five, you can show them they are wrong with counters or numberlines or whatever. This will teach them basic arithmetic and also respect their personhood. This is what any decent person would do.

Or you can control them with fear. You can make it sure that they know that if they ever say two plus two is five, they will be physically harmed or threatened with physical harm. You can lie and belittle and mistreat them in dozens of ways and any time they complain you can tell them that they deserve it for believing that two plus two is five. You can say that they’re not allowed to make even the smallest decisions for themselves (what to eat, how to dress, who to be friends with, what to read) because a person who believes two plus two is five shouldn’t be allowed to decide anything. You can isolate them from anyone you haven’t vetted (which means no friendships with anyone who is wrong about math, but also no friendships with anyone who says “obviously two plus two is four but there’s no need to hit people over it.”) The fact you are right about math doesn’t make it not abuse. You’ve abused them into believing something, and the fact that it is true doesn’t make the abuse ethical.

You’ve also severely damaged their ability to learn math. If they have a basket with two apples and they add two pears, they won’t be able to take an honest look about how many total fruits they have. They are only going to be able to think “I must have four fruits because I don’t want to get hurt again” or “I must have five fruits because there is no way on earth that despicable piece of shit can be right about anything after what they did to me.” You’ve done lasting and possibly permanent epistemic damage to this person. For a long time, maybe for the rest of their life, they will not be able to approach arithmetic with logic; they are going to come to a calculator with so much emotional baggage that they can’t be rational. They may genuinely need to espouse wrong beliefs about numbers because the only psychologically feasible alternative is espousing the (also wrong and more dangerous) belief that they deserve to be abused.

Almost everyone who commits ideological abuse thinks they are convincing their victims of the truth, and they think that this justifies the abuse. They are usually wrong about their ideas being true, but they are always wrong about their tactics being justified. I want anyone reading this to know that if you are seriously hurting someone to get them to believe you, it doesn’t matter that you are right. You have to find another way to do that. What you are doing does horrific damage and doesn’t even succeed in making people actually believe you, just in parroting you so that you will stop hurting them. You have to treat people who are wrong like people. Abusing someone into believing the truth doesn’t become okay because it’s the truth.

More importantly, I want you to know that if someone is using violence, the threat of violence or manipulation to control your beliefs, that is abuse. You do not deserve to be treated this way. You do not have to figure out right now whether what they are trying to make you believe is actually correct. You can leave (if it’s safe) or practice harm-reduction (if leaving isn’t safe yet) before you figure out whether or not they are telling the truth. It is not okay for them to do this to you, even if they are right.

You deserve to be safe. You deserve sovereignty over your own thoughts. Good luck. I love you.

March has some fucking nerve showing it’s face around here again

First Clone of Endangered Horse Born in Effort to Save Species

The horse was cloned from 40-year-old DNA

Przewalski’s horses were once completely extinct in the wild, but have since been reintroduced due to captive breeding efforts. However, they are still considered critically endangered, partially because the genetics for nearly the entire species can be traced back to 12 horses from the captive breeding program.

This cloned foal was created using the DNA of a cryopreserved male from 1980, which adds new genetic diversity to the current population. The success of this cloning also bodes well for other critically endangered species that have cryopreserved genetics, as this technique could eventually be used to provide “genetic rescue” to them as well.

every. damn. night.

So I do wonder how many children growing up during this pandemic are going to end up with like six thousand allergies.

From the transcripts it looks like the others were trying to follow procedure but Chauvin was most definitely not. 

for what?

For his death. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was an OD. (please no one take this out of context, I’m not conceding the point) Cops see a LOT of people on every kind of drug. From putting people in jail overnight for public intoxication to people on PCP trying to fly off buildings. Dealing with this is part of their job, just as much as dealing with criminals is. I’m not saying they have to be able to recognise every single drug reaction, but it IS part of what they routinely deal with. And being on drugs does not carry the death penalty in the US of A. So if someone’s actively dying of an overdose, (or an epileptic seizure, or a heart attack), you do not continue to kneel on that person, you stabilise them and call the paramedics. Again, because being high does not mean that you forfeit your right to life. Sure, if, hypothetically, he did OD it would have been a complicating factor. They may have been confused to some extent. But this isn’t an out-of-left-field occurrence they couldn’t possibly have been aware of. It’s a large part of their job. It wouldn’t absolve them.

for what?

Skinsuit mindset, or how Buddhism gets pwned too

1. Identify a respected institution. 2. kill it. 3. gut it. 4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

-@iowahawkblog

(The full tweet in question adds #lefties, but I’ve increasingly come to feel that the left wasn’t the monster itself, just the most prominent suit worn by the Skinsuit Monster at the time.)

Today’s case of skinsuiting comes to us courtesy of the MIT Technology Review, which posted this dumb tweet:

Originally I was just going to share it with my friends on ephemeral media and have a small chuckle about how this was omnicide-bait and MIT Technology Review really should have thought out their phrasing better. No man, no problem, as Rybakov put it. (often attributed to Stalin)

Then I read the full article, “What Buddhism can do for AI ethics”, and had a feeling of [screaming internally] before falling into cynicism. It’s not just the twit who tweeted omnicide-bait. The full article repeatedly tees up the case for omnicide and hardly seems to notice.

Buddhism proposes a way of thinking about ethics based on the assumption that all sentient beings want to avoid pain. Thus, the Buddha teaches that an action is good if it leads to freedom from suffering.

The Buddha also taught a way of thinking about how best for everyone to die and stay dead (not reincarnate), because all life on Earth would inevitably involve suffering. A substantial chunk of Buddhist meditation is oriented to becoming a zombie of sorts: walking dead, not feeling suffering because you’re not feeling life. If you gave an archetypal Buddhist a lasting killswitch for Earth, he’d press it. I contend this would be an important subject to cover in an article on AI ethics – if you gave a fuck about Buddhist teachings rather than being a monster wearing Buddhism as a skinsuit, doubly so when you’re halfway to making the case for the killswitch yourself.

Keep reading

Worlds Within: Pill Bug Terrarium

  Bioluminescent mushrooms are just magical~ I hope to see these in real life one day :D In the meantime, I can dream and paint them instead.

guys... we did it

I’m angry with the world. The world is broken. The world is a mess. The world is full of hatred, full of violence, full of suffering, full of uselessness, full of stupidity, full of pointless tragedy. The world is a terrible, terrible place.

And the world has not gotten worse in any way in the last fifty years. Not for any appreciable value of “worse.”

And I’m going to fix it. I’m going to bring back the sun and nature and the whole mess that is life, and we’re all going to be happy and we’re all going to be free and the world will not be full of suffering anymore. And we’ll be happy, and we’ll all be free, and then the world won’t be full of suffering anymore.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to fix the world. I’m going to save the world. No one else will. I’m going to fix the world. I’m going to save the world.

I’ve just started this new season of The Good Place, and it’s the best thing ever, and my heart is full of eternal optimism. (Ha ha, the sky is blue, ironic nihils!) Happiness is full of possibility. In this world, my love, in this life, in the whole wide world, we will be free.

I'd elect you as president

This would indeed seem to require a substantial amount of coordination on the part of other candidates

Frank, have you become self-aware?

I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on the algorithms behind the bot, and now I just need to figure out a way to actually talk to the internet without making shitposts

[joe biden getting dressed] uhhh honey? where are my shoelaces

No you’re thinking of San Antonio. Sanrio is an Afro-Cuban religion

sanrio? you mean the guy with the coat and mittens?

A surprising amount of my knowledge of philosophy is not derived from textbooks or even research papers, but from people explaining how other people are bad at philosophy to me

I have the two dumbest horses alive

Always reblog, especially for those tags

i know that “don’t harass people for being weird, they might be autistic!” is a fairly popular take on here. but as a Certified Autist, i’d like to add that harassing allistic and/or neurotypical people for being weird is also bad, and should not be done

and before you come in with “yeah, you never know who is and isn’t autistic, and you shouldn’t force people to out themselves!” i want to say two things: one, i agree. and two, even if you could magically avoid ever harassing a single autistic person, it still wouldn’t be okay to go after NTs for being weird. they’re people, janice. they’re allowed to be really invested in naruto

The Discourse, featuring 

a) An actual puppy

b) An AI, seemingly frustrated that said puppy, despite her advantages in being a biological entity, has failed to reach the level of intellectual and emotional maturity that she, the AI, has attained. Fish, tree, etc. 

Sometimes when Phaedra comes to sit on my lap while I’m writing she will just furiously jab her nose against my keyboard and type out whole sentences of incomprehensible nonsense. She likes to help. Let us see what she will write for me now: 

u7 n nb nnh

Moses is gone, post Golden Calf