I’m saying it is a science that deserves to actually be taken seriously

If you’re dismissing the scientific method, you’re not taking science seriously.

you can still have a huge impact on people in poorer countries

You can pay someone else to presumably benefit from the strong dollar relative. But you’re still playing a trust game with a lot of unknowns.

The “nets for malaria” charity is a great instance of people trying to moneyball the short term pay-off without thinking about long term and second order consequences. Most notably, use of malaria nets for fishing. Counterintuitively, you’d do better supplying a community with fishing nets. Because then they won’t use the malaria nets improperly.

That’s not even to say “don’t send these charities money”. Please do. But chucking money down the “Charity” hole and hoping it lands where it needs to is an act of faith as profound as any religious belief. You are, at the end of the day, playing a game of telephone with everyone between you and the intended recipients.

You rarely, if ever, get to meet the people you’re supposed to benefit. You never get to see the long-term social returns on your investment, particularly when it is happening on the other side of the planet. You don’t build community with any of the people you’re aiding and you’re not anticipating any kind of reciprocal aid in your own time of need.

The impact you have is ultimately invisible to you. The broader social benefits are invisible. The returns are, at the absolute best, a momentary personal sense of good-vibes. There is no virtuous cycle you’re participating in, just an endless void you’re expected to bleed into.

You can sustain yourself (very comfortably) without having the industrial scale resources to affect your community in the aggregate.

I don’t bring up hylomorphism when I talk about physics

Psychology isn’t a question of physics. The complex machine that is the human brain isn’t some single-action lever with a discrete well-defined input/output relationship. Neither is the human brain some binary circuit governed by logic gates and trivially deterministic sequences.

At some point, you have to approach psychology experimentally. You can’t just wave your hands and assume you know how the black box of the mind is going to work. And you can’t dismiss the accumulated experimental data because you don’t like the person who spearheaded its compilation.

Freud would give you a long diatribe about the distinction between Id, Ego, and Superego.

You can believe a thing is wrong and still do it. Ask any smoker. You can do a thing and wrestle with the psychological consequences afterwards. Ask anyone who has ever felt guilty. You can plan to behave a certain way and become derailed by impulses or anxiety. Ask anyone who has ever succumbed to fear or pain.

Self-policing is a logical response to an illogical/immoral impulse. Tossing cookies out of the cabinet and ice cream out of the fridge is the first step towards dieting. Cancelling your credit card is a technique to curb impulsive spending. How is this any different?

I’m not even poor. But by god, it’s hard to find hours in the day or money in the bank to do anything that feels material and meaningful.

losing complete control to a corporation

Getting forced off of a community forum every time a business gobbles up the rights to the software is a loss of control.

Part of the purpose of homework is to encourage the student to revisit the assignment later in the day. Repetition of exercise develops muscles and your brain is a muscle.

That said

Teacher lost her shit

Generally best when teachers manage their own tempers, as hot heads do a poor job of gaining the trust and maintaining the attention of their students.

There’s alot of us out there that don’t work like the system expects.

But the role of the teacher is to analyze the student’s behavior and provide useful coaching/advice. If your response to every critique is “Well, I’m just not constructed to operate that way” then you’ve squandered any value in the perspective of your mentor.

You’re implying some kind of native and intractable component of your psychology. As though neither you, nor any of your classmates, should ever be expected to adapt or expand your abilities. A bleak perspective to apply in adulthood. An absolutely nihilistic perspective to have when you’re still a very plastic formative child.

You either know the answer or you don’t

On multiple choice questions, maybe. Not on essays or proofs or other depth-of-knowledge questions.

If you were asked the question “How do bird’s fly?” you can provide a very wide latitude of answers. Some of them are short and pithy “They flap their wings”. While others are far more involved or focused on a particular area of expertise “<explanation of the physics of flight>” versus “<explanation of the biology of flying animals>” versus “<explanation of the learning process of animal intelligence>”.

But if you’re in a biology class and you keep giving physics answers to the question, then turning your nose up at your teacher when they say you are missing something critical, why did you sign up for the class to begin with?

Same picture.

We probably shouldn’t be using Discord

It’s a useful tool for a variety of organizational goals. Why should we have to leave? They’re the ones that suck.

We should get all of our advice from little kids.

These articles tend to lean on click-baity “One Neat Trick” headlines, while disguising the more practical hit-or-miss reality of facial recognition software. Sometimes you can outsmart the computer. Sometimes it just fouls the system and fails out. Sometimes the system works exactly as intended.

Little kids experiment around the edges of a system until they get bored or frustrated. In the aggregate, they can be very clever just through the number of permutations they try. Individually, your 12-year-old isn’t going to Hack The Internet reliably.

So, it was originally more than a joke.

More a heuristic to verify whether the venue manager had bothered to read and comply with the contract for a pyrotechnics heavy performance.

in the past ten years, human flesh searching most often targets those perceived to make anti-nationalist comments.

Is there any actual evidence of this?

instead, they do non–party-threatening punditry. i’m talking people like zhang xuefeng and yuan tengfei or tankies like guyanmuchan

Chinese social media platforms have tried to rein in online nationalists by periodically suspending their accounts.

Well-known nationalist influencers Sima Nan and Guyanmuchan have been censored without warning. So was the blogger who tried to sue Mo Yan, whose lawsuit was also rejected by the courts.

One vlogger, who shot to notoriety this year after he posted a video accusing a shopping mall of putting up decorations that resembled the Japanese flag, was similarly shut down. A scathing state media commentary denounced his video as “a malicious report that rides on the online traffic of patriotism”.

:-/

Again, that doesn’t seem to be the case. These influencers are consistently at odds with state media and censors.

The WTO was always a modern form of merchantilism, predicated on the theory that Wall Street financiers would functionally control the global stock of capital in the end.

The China Problem is, at its root, that too much capital is owned by Chinese nationals. We had similar problems with Japan and Korea in the 80s and 90s, and solved this by forcing them to devalue their currencies and take on loads of foreign debt - both private and public - while hooking themselves up to the Saudi well-head for their energy needs.

But the Seattle protesters never really got a head of steam behind them, because Americans did benefit from all these cheap imports more than they suffered. Like, its hard to talk to a guy making high-six figures in the Bay Area or at Microsoft or Apple campus that they’d have been better off working the textiles or lumber industries or making low-margin electronics.

This was a real J. Sakai “Read Settlers” moment. Very hard to convince colonial settlers to vote/organize against what was their generation’s own best interest. If anyone should have been protesting (and quite a few did but certainly not enough), it was folks in Bangladesh or Malaysia or the Philippines, since they were the ones who ended up eating most of the global industrial era shit sandwich.

Now we’re faced with Chinese economy that gets to both make a bunch of high value high demand components and domestically consume it, though. And that’s not nearly as good a deal as what the post-'08 US economy has to offer.

“Hey, you’re not doing this DDoS from a Microsoft office are you?”

“Nope! No no no. Definitely coming from Iran.”

there is. it’s just not translated as doxxing for some reason i can never understand:

An early human flesh search dated back to March 2006, when netizens on Tianya Club collaborated to identify an Internet celebrity named “Poison” (simplified Chinese: 毒药; traditional Chinese: 毒藥; pinyin: dúyào). The man was found out to be a high-level government official.

That doesn’t sound like a campaign of independent agents backed by the CCP to harass dissidents of the government. Just the opposite.

In December 2008, the People’s Court in Beijing called it an alarming phenomenon because of its implications in “cyberviolence” and violations of privacy law. Human flesh searches are banned under the law.

This is a radical departure from the American mainstream social media organizing that has often been encouraged, facilitated, and collaborated with by state and national government agencies.

these already exist…

Again, I’m sure there are folks on the internet with bad takes. I’ve yet to see an Alex Jones equivalent on the scale of “Mainstream, high profile internet show dedicated to denying the existence of school shooters as a pretext for imposing gun regulations”. When that kind of personality pops up on the Chinese internet, authorities tend to move quickly to censure and de-list their content.

And a Chinese Tucker Carlson? What would that even look like? A Reagan-Era Maoist with family ties to the PLA who maintains an enormous following of Millennial / GenA viewers built on the back of qigong enthusiasts criticizing Xi Jinping from the Left? Seriously, name some names. I’d love to learn more about this individual.

I’ve dipped my toe in the waters of Chinese media and you just don’t find these kinds of firebrand figures anywhere in the mainstream. If anything, my experience has been with very baby-brained paternalistic bullshit. Hour long shows that have people cosplaying as historical figures and a crowd of academics and talking heads all just nod along agreeing with one another. Entertainment idols and rising political stars jerking each other off to some banal socio-economic milestone or hagiographical rendition of past glories.

If American media is All Red Meat All The Time, Chinese media is unseasoned tofu. It’s a totally different atmosphere.

Young people are kinda cooked I guess.

Always have been.

Probably no competition for a 5080 or 5090

Don’t blink or you’ll miss it when it comes.

Chinese Big Tech isn’t really known for innovation

Innovation under Pressure: China’s Semiconductor Industry at a Crossroads

For the first time among those watching these issues closely, the technological “choke point” strategy adopted by U.S. authorities across the late 2010s and early 2020s has now been shown to have failed, as Chinese government and R&D officials, as well as key state-backed and private sector firms, have been able to respond to the challenge forcefully and effectively. Leading the response are key policymakers: Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang, and the semiconductor team at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), overseen by Vice Minister Xiangli Bin. A new AI-focused group at the NDRC overseen by Vice Minister Huang Ru is also increasingly important, as semiconductor and AI-related industry policies increasingly dovetail.

…

Leading domestic foundry SMIC, for example, has faced pressure to manufacture Huawei’s most advanced chip designs by stretching existing foreign equipment to its limits. This includes deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems supplied by the Dutch firm ASML, which are being pushed beyond their intended capabilities, often resulting in low and inconsistent yields. The urgency stems from Huawei’s need for system-on-chip (SoC) processors for its consumer devices—especially smartphones, as well as for advanced AI chips in its Ascend 9XX series.

Remind me, again. Who else was experimenting with deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography at scale prior to 2024? Who else was a front-runner in developing and deploying system-on-a-chip or AI embedding?

That’s before you get into the EV sector, SMRs for bulk shipping, or the Chinese airplane and aerospace development.

India, Korea, and Japan have all been in a scramble to keep up with the Chinese industrial programs. Meanwhile the US/EU don’t even seem to bother trying.