This is why I always branch a repo before letting AI anywhere near it. Sometimes you get fantastic results (like a day’s worth of code monkey grind in 5 mins) and sometimes the results are just preposterous. You always want to be able to review the results before anything touches main.

I think any praise directed at Valve should be directed at Newell.

Valve is a private company and therefore reflects the values of its owner.

Another similar example is Larian Studios and its owner Sven Vincke (sp?).

Both of these companies have done/are doing good things. But they don’t refute the criticisms of capitalism.

1. People like Newell and Vincke can create these privately owned companies with their wealth, but where did that wealth come from? I will applaud both those men for choosing to do good things but with the caveat that those decisions don’t exist in isolation and the acquisition of the wealth they needed to do cool things with their cool companies was definitely not an exploitation-free process.

2. What happens to those businesses when their owners retire/die? Valve and Larian are reflective of their owners, and their owners are swimming against the current. Capitalism rewards shitty behaviour, and ownership of those companies can easily pass to shitty people.

Valve is a blip in the system. It’s a good blip, but it’s not indicative of any redeemability in the capitalist system.

It’s the Western left. You can’t raise the bar with the Western left without standing waist-deep in shit and bending down to pick it up.

I agree with all of what you’re saying, but this:

Take a breath, break the rumination spiral, and remember what a loving world that values human life is about.

Is easier said than done. You’ll maybe break out of the spiral for a few days or even months, but it’s so easy to slip into the spiral again and the further you spiral the easier it is to drop back into it, until one day even on the days where you’re mentally healthy in all other respects, you live the fuck out of those days because the realist in your mind knows those days are numbered.

And I’m willing to bet the 12 feet of rope that I ordered off the internet that OP also agrees with everything you said and won’t break out of the spiral so easily, either.

I have a few different plans for ways to check out. One of them is designed so that it’ll just take one moment of courage and then I won’t be able to back out of it. Another is really slow and painful by design. Another one is designed so that no one would find my remains - and if I quit my job beforehand, the few people I care about not hurting would never find out.

When I ask myself why I haven’t done the deed yet, I don’t actually know how to answer. But I do know that there’s no reason to hurry, so there’s also no reason to answer the ‘why’ yet.

Typing all of that out hits home how fucked up those thoughts are. But on the other hand, having those plans gives us a sense of agency over it. Whatever shit you’re dealing with, you’re making the choice to keep dealing with it and I think there’s a comfort in that. There’s also a bit of freedom in the perspective that I’m already dead and none of what I do from this point on matters.

It’s not getting worse here in Hong Kong, it’s slowly getting better. The British brainrot is taking a long time to unfuck; there are full grown adults who were babies at the handover passing down romanticised stories about British rule to their kids that they were told by their boomer parents, and the eldest generation who remember how it was practically apartheid pre-Maclehose reforms are all elderly. But the education system and the reality checks from what’s happening in the States, Ukraine and Palestine are all pushing back.

It might seem like a strange question but people tend to have wildly different pespectives and understanding about China depending on what part of the world they’re in, what the media they consume says about it, and whether they’ve lived there or not. So even if we agreed with each other it’d still be worth going through because we’re in a public forum where it’s helpful for others to be more illustrative.

“up to a point” is doing massive work here.

China has capitalism: in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in Macao. When you cross the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen it’s like night and day. Shenzhen ain’t no backwater either, but the cost of living, quality of life, environment, air pollution (the prevalence of electric cars makes so much difference that despite being less strict about smoking in public, it’s still cleaner in SZ), advertising, cleanliness of public facilities, parks in walking distance of everywhere… when they say ‘take the bad with the good’ that doesn’t mean not doing anything about the bad, and the difference a government can make in dealing with the bad is huge.

but up to a point the government will allow capitalists to do the same harmful things they do in the west.

Can you please give any examples of the Chinese government allowing capitalists to do harmful things to the Chinese people?

They are against it because anything bad that could come of further adoption of AI will happen if it’s profitable for the capitalists. Even now NVIDIA is continuing to pump the bubble when everyone knows it’s a bubble, because of the profits.

The prospects are entirely different in China, because capitalists are regulated. But nobody who is vehemently against AI is aware of the difference and likely will tell you China is capitalist. So all the problems that arise from capitalist control of AI are ascribed to AI alone as well.

“starting a company in X country for dummies.”

A lot of people don’t know how to do this in their own countries. All the paperwork and red tape etc. It’s left opaque because if everyone knew how to do it everyone would also realise how easy it is if you have the starting capital, and then they’d have more questions…

As of 19 hours later.

I’m curious, too.

I sometimes wonder about what kinds of questions people could ask in that subreddit that would necessitate admitting Western lies and accepted mistruths, without the questions themselves being accused of ulterior motives.

If Hasan were “Thanos snapped” out of the equation, it would be a reach to think that the people watching his stream aren’t going to up and read Lenin or find their way here or join their local Marxist org.

But I agree that if we are going to basically give people pacifiers that they should had least not be laced with poison.

We’re not giving people pacifiers that are/aren’t laced with poison. Bezos is giving people pacifiers, and one of them is significantly more left than the others. If we had the means to stop Hasan from speaking, his audience are not going to get up off their couches. They would just tune into other (likely further-right) influencers. Don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.

He wouldn’t need to be defended if he wasn’t consistently attacked. The real question is why does he need to be attacked?

In terms of being a pipeline, he’s definitely not pushing his audience to the right. He’s not pushing them toward the dead-end false-left Democrats either. He actively speaks against both of those groups. And then he makes his viewers aware of efforts like The Deprogram.

It’s literally the definition of the mouth of a pipeline. His content is mild enough for the the capitalists who control all the modern public fora to allow him to draw in huge viewership numbers, and that viewership has its overton window shifted left enough for them to discover further-left materia that they otherwise would never have known existed.

At worst he’s inconsequential, at best he’s feeding left. To the real left. There’s no opportunity cost to him doing his thing. His chat is a cavalcade of lumpenproles and kids spamming ‘top kek’ and ‘goated’ and pepe emojis. They’re certainly not moving left on their own.

I don’t think either of those issues impact a command economy anywhere near as much as they do a laissez-faire system. Both issues affect the exchange value of the currency. A command economy that doesn’t rely on imports for its critical products and services can use alternative means to apportion and distribute them internally.

Empire by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand has been good so far (I’m 12 episodes in). I can’t speak for subsequent episodes and don’t know anything about the two hosts beyond this podcast, but they’re painting a very stark picture of how fucking evil the British were in India (and I think they move on to other colonized regions later).

Is BE still parroting the US line on Xinjiang?

I have never heard him rescind his position on that. And as is typical of him, he dug in hard in support of the genocide accusations.

Only use firefox or adjacent browsers

Is firefox much better? The names on the Mozilla foundation don’t inspire a lot of confidence

There’s ethnic groups, cultural groups, language groups and I can never remember which is which and the terms keep getting translated differently.

Try doing the workouts late at night before bed, and then try doing them early on the morning by waking an hour earlier - see how your body responds. I ended up finding it easier to get to sleep earlier when I tried the latter.

The biggest critique of the Western left that arises from the Uyghur issue is how willing the majority were to believe the genocide narrative. There’s a real genocide being streamed to all their phones, their nations sit on textbook examples of ethnic cleansing from their colonizer days and beyond, and yet their governments, who commit war crimes on the daily and are the most blatantly pro-capitalist, anti-worker governments on the planet sling a litany of bullshit accusations at China and the Western leftists go ‘yeah, that tracks’.

Support for China amongst the Western left is relatively new as it’s getting harder for Western media to credibly deny the good that the Chinese nation is doing for its people, for foreign allies that the West continues to abuse, and for the environment. And yet when the Uyghur thing is denied as more of the same Sinophobic red scare bullshit, it still sticks. And there’s no way to make that make sense without Westerners coming off as latently racist with lingering white man’s burden/manifest destiny brainrot.