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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Yes, I am disagreeing with human pattern recognition. People absolutely do not work towards their rational self interests. Ayn Rand is/was wrong. People have been voting against their own self interests for decades. Centuries. People ALREADY are reaping the results of their actions. What do you think leopardsatemyface is? How many of those stories conclude with “still a trump supporter tho”?

    What is empathy? I don’t have some wild definition. Cambridge is fine “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.”

    Set aside any moral justification for empathy if you want, it’s not even required to make the case for why you should have it.

    If you want to change someone’s behaviors, ESPECIALLY ones that are from your perspective irrational, you need to understand why they’re doing them in the first place. Empathy is how you can understand that.

    If you don’t have empathy (Like Ayn Rand, for example) you’ll end up with a wildly inaccurate model for someones behaviors (as in, they’re working towards their rational self interests), and as a result your strategies for making a difference is going to be ineffective.

    “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”

    STRICTLY from a PRAGMATIC angle, empathy is a critical tool.


  • Empathy and tolerance aren’t the same thing.

    You should not tolerate intolerance.

    All of that, ALL OF IT, is completely tangential to the concept of empathy.

    I get it, you’ve got a lot of hate. You SHOULD hate Nazis. It’s an uncomfortable challenge to have the capacity for empathy for someone you hate.

    And like, I don’t understand how people can’t recognize the value of empathy even for a strictly pragmatic purposes. A byproduct of people with strong empathy skills is they’re good at predicting what someone is going to do.

    Honestly, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid if you mentally explore someone else’s situation from that persons perspective, feel the way they feel… That what? YOU’LL suddenly realize YOU’RE actually a Nazi too? Whoopsie Poopsie? Give yourself a little more credit than that.

    Anyhow, you and Elon should go for beers sometime and just agree with eachother all night about how you shouldn’t empathize with people.

    Edit: also, for the record, the right wing appeals to the paradox of tolerance to justify what they do to undocumented people. They broke the law, the social contract, so the law doesn’t apply to them (insert hillbilly laugh).


  • You’re still muddling concepts.

    Someone can be blameworthy. That’s one thing.

    Then bad things can happen to them, and those things might be just. They might DESERVE those things. That’s another thing.

    Can you feel empathy towards that person, that’s a third thing still.

    I can’t stress enough: these three concepts are distinct.

    It’s also worth pointing out how lacking empathy actually trends towards horrible actions, and that those horrible actions often produce reactions baffling to the empathy less and obvious to those with empathy.

    Honestly, what you’re describing sounds a LOT like the lines out of Israel Re: Palestinians. The royal “they” support Hamas? Time for consequences, or they’ll never learn. Oh, now they hate us even more? The generational cycle of hatred continues? How could they not graciously accept our lessons?

    Like… It’s the obvious outcome. Intentionally thrust people into poverty to teach them a lesson?

    I understand where it comes from, the Trump stuff. I get it. There is no justice. It’s FRUSTRATING.

    One can dream of justice without lusting for punishment

    Don’t confuse a thirst for justice with a disdain for empathy. Killing your own empathy ISN’T justice, and the only thing you’ve done is made yourself lesser. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls


  • I agree that they brought it on themselves.

    There are a few concepts that are getting muddled here, blameworthyness, and empathy. Both for you as the observer, and they as the subjects.

    I don’t think it’s good to equate the two. They’re distinct.

    Should a laid-off oil worker struggling to feed their family be worthy of empathy from a republican voter if they themselves had voted Democrat? Would you celebrate the republican proudly declaring they had no empathy?

    Would Elon Musk be celebrating your announcement now? He has declared empathy to be weakness, and you’ve announced that you’ve managed to squash yours for a large swathe of the population.

    People can be to blame for their own pain. Does that mean they deserve no empathy?

    And, what have you done to yourself in doing so? What human part of yourself have you killed or let whither to get to where you are now?

    It’s easy to be empathetic to people who are like yourself. It’s more difficult to be empathetic to those different.

    Regardless of blameworthyness, I don’t think we should be proud of our ability to feel no empathy for others. It may be the case, but that’s a personal weakness.




  • At work whenever we need to build little command line tools, my team is always vexxed by my guideline to have the meat+potatoes in a script that reads well-formatted data off stdin , and outputs well formatted-data to stout. They always wanna have some stupid interactive prompts and saving to files baked right in.

    This is exactly why. You wanna save to a file?? > file

    You want to read from a file? cat |

    You want to save to a file but swap commas for colons? Sed.

    You get so much FOR FREE w/ the GNU toolkit, even for what you build yourself, by thinking in streams.








  • I’m in fintech and honestly I wouldn’t have made any of these assumptions… Because I’ve long ago given up on the idea that any real world system is anything better than loose heuristics.

    Like, I could be pleasantly surprised at some point… But honestly even if a PO swore up and down that something was “certain” I probably wouldn’t even believe them.

    I’m also surprised that they didn’t mention that a flight could arrive on a calendar day before it departs.



  • Tough to say. He’ll need never livers and kidneys no matter how good the intermediate care is. Not saying buying a healthy young person for spare parts isn’t beyond him.

    You’ll know he’s grokked how badly he’s fucked his body once he starts up an organ printing/regeneration company. Which I guarantee he will, assuming by his calculation he figures out the reality of his situation in time. If he finds out late…? A bunch of Ugrher people are going to be getting blood tests and one of them is going to disappear along with any records they ever existed at all.


  • Right now it’s just buzz and empty promises to not sound “left behind” to shareholders.

    Even if it could generate code that could be massaged into a production-ready state at a cost less than having human-only developers (colour me skeptical), I think middle-management would actively sabotage it. You can’t fill your day with pointless meetings when your developers are AI agents.

    So, I actually think the idea is only taken “seriously” at the very highest levels. I expect several layers of resistance even before it hits the actual engineers… Not because it’s a fantasy with no grounding in engineering reality which is ultimately doomed to fail, merely out of self-preservation.



  • Yeah. I feel like almost everyone misunderstands Jon. He calls out shitty government behavior.

    Republicans being a bursting cornucopia are statistically certain to spend more time in his sights, but Jon has never given Dems a “pass”. Also, his monologues aren’t just “Republicans dumb”, they’re incredibly informative about how the systems are supposed to work. He sneaks in legitimate government literacy lessons. Jon is a genius of our time.

    This is what every other comedian trying to be Jon… Even on the tonight show, doesn’t seem to have internalized.

    Jon deserved a break… But his original retirement left such a void.


  • If you read the article, he’s not accusing Biden of anything.

    He’s saying that Biden wasn’t behind the things he PREVIOUSLY was railing on him over (the border specifically) and saying his team and advisors “took over” the presidency behind the scenes, and it was their agenda that they snuck behind Biden’s back because they knew he was too sick to notice.

    So, I agree every accusation is an admission, but it’s important to actually read the accusations so you know what Trump is admitting to: in this case it’s being old and senile and his administration is taking advantage of him and are pushing their own agendas behind his old and senile back.