mfed1122

Yeah I think the difficulty of relating to the religious side is what made that portion of the book tough for me, especially since I really related with child Stephen. I even remember writing down my name, city, country, "the world", "the universe" on one of my assignments once in elementary school, and doing the thing of covering and uncovering my ears, so it just felt unbelievably similar up until he went all religious. Of course he became more relatable again afterwards. My favorite quote from Portrait was "he wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld". Not only relatable, but wonderfully and succinctly put.

I've been anxiously awaiting a good time to read Ulysses, probably will wait until I finish my current book with my reading buddy and go into it together with them. I only know it's famous difficulty, I had no idea that Stephen would be in it. I've always wanted to write something esoteric and convention-breaking myself, but I don't think I really have the chops for it - from what little I know of Ulysses, I suspect it may be very close to some of these fantasy projects I've envisioned, and I look forward to it for that. I read a smidge of Finnegan's Wake and that one I expect to be more of just a pure puzzle, maybe academically interesting, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if it is also artistically stirring. From Stephen's dialogue about art, I have no doubt now that that was Joyce's intent, at least.

I think with Dubliners it was the incredible minimalism of the stories. They felt so ultra perfectly condensed, like no word was superfluous. And then even with that right compression, or maybe because of it, they convey much clearer and more powerful emotions than many short stories. But I do think the traditionality of them isn't as exciting as Portrait was. They feel a lot more "pale", ha ha.

Shooting CEO so CEO stops killing people: terrorism

Instilling terror in judges to coerce them to further your political cause: not terrorism

As others have pointed out, I don't think you have solid evidence to suspect that this is a neurotypical vs ADHD thing.

Personally I think it's just a matter of poor taste. The sad truth is most people cannot appreciate good art, and the only reason why most works of art are as high quality as they are is because artists make them, and artists do appreciate good art and have high standards. From the artists point of view, their piece needs to meet criteria X, Y, Z, etc. to be a good satisfying piece. But from the point of view of the tasteless plebian masses, it probably only needs to meet criteria X. I first noticed this when I saw that almost every highly upvoted artwork on Reddit years ago was a really hyper realistic pencil drawing, usually of a pretty girl. Most people don't appreciate form, composition, subtle meanings, abstraction, etc. Those things require more thinking and are therefore too difficult for many people to engage with. Instead, "how hard does this seem to make" and "how much do I like this at first glance" become the proxy standards used by tasteless lazy people to judge art, and hence the "best" art by those standards is a super realistic pencil drawing of a pretty woman became "zomg I thought this was a photo!!!!" and "I couldn't do this in a million years!!! So impressive!!!" As if the point of art is just to flex on people?

But it gets worse, because even when people decide to half-ass their ingestion of art by flattening it down to a single dimension of "how realistic is it", again, because people aren't artists and have never even tried to engage in art (and this I actually don't hold against them, unlike their prior laziness), they don't have a trained eye. So sometimes you'll see just a mediocre pencil drawing of a pretty girl, and people with less art skills will be like "wow 10/10 it's perfect!!!", but people with art skills will be able to notice things like "well if the shadow on the neck is like that the shadow on the nose should be going the other way, you mixed up your light sources", or "the perspective is off on the angle of the eyes here". Sometimes these improvements would be subconsciously picked up by the masses, but many times not. Often the subtleties that make an artwork go from mediocre to amazing are lost on the masses. As a result, the masses are equally satisfied with poor quality AI-generated images as they are with high quality human-generated images.

TLDR; The lack of media literacy among many people strikes again

I despise Bostrom. I tried reading his book, Superintelligence, and found it unbearable. A whole lot of words to say

"if can build machine that can build smarter machine, then machine get INFINITE smart!!1!1!1"

While neglecting the very obvious possibility that maybe a machine of intelligence level 80 is capable of building a machine of intelligence level 130, but that by no means indicates the 130 intelligence machine can magically build a machine smarter than 130 anyways.

All the stuff about Moore's Law is literally just a correlation. It's not a law of physics, it's a fucking chart that we plotted a trend line on top of. Booooo

Idunno, it says cheating was wrong and that it wasn't the right choice. I feel like this approach would be more likely to eventually persuade the human that they did something wrong, versus just outright saying "cheating is wrong and you have no excuse for this behavior, what you did was totally unjustified and makes no sense". That may be true, but it's more likely to just make the user say "fuck this, nobody understands me, I didn't do anything that bad". If I was talking to my friend I'd probably take the same approach. You try to empathize with why they did the wrong thing to assure them that you understand why they did what they did, whether it was justified or not. That's so that you can be on their side from their point of view. People get defensive and irrational when they sense antagonism. You're much more likely to persuade someone "from the inside".

Plus, and the irony of this couldn't be any more emphasized: accusing the AI of "never telling you you're in the wrong" is a little strange when it literally tells you you're in the wrong at both the start and end of its response.

"Could this be evidence that my god does not exist? No, it's my interpretation that is wrong"

No wonder I find their scores so unreliable

Edit: I also now kind of want to do a web scraping project and see if there's any correlation between scores and whether the media in question is owned by Comcast or Warner Bros

If only she would ground herself in reality starting from the top floor of her skyscraper

Thanks for taking the time to put those resources together for me.

That's absolutely crazy, my goodness... Some people really are insane when it comes to sex. It reminds me a bit of how you can show soft penises in American TV to some extent without it being considered pornographic, but hard penises are pornographic. But this labia issue makes even less sense than that, because it doesn't depend on arousal. What a backwards situation

I do know a lot of people making over 150k, three of them live in 800 square foot apartments (not luxury apartments), one of them splits a 2200 sqft house with four other people, one couple lives in a mediocre 1900 sqft house with one 12 year old car and 1 new car. None of them have any children, all of them go on 1-2 foreign vacations a year. None of them own cars over 40k MSRP. All of them wish they could save more for retirement, all of them are afraid of medical costs in old age. None of them are posting their glamour on Instagram and none of them care much about social media in the first place.

All these people are certainly living better than my friends who make less money, I won't deny that! But my point is that they're not rich and it's pretty upsetting that just because most people are super super super underpaid they get resentful towards people who are merely underpaid and attribute their financial struggles to irresponsibility. It's the same icky narrative that the actual wealthy people have pushed for decades to get people to look down upon poor people. You're right, my 150k+ income friends could live with greater financial comfort if they changed their lifestyle to match my 50k income friends, but it wouldn't be enough extra that they could retire before 60 anyways, it wouldn't be enough extra that they could not have to worry about medical bills when they're older, it wouldn't be enough to let them afford the houses they actually want, or fix things around the house when they break, etc etc etc. So that's why people "irresponsibly" go on vacations or buy themselves nice things, discretional spending coming out to probably 10-20k per year. That isn't enough to make a bigger better difference in their lives if put somewhere else.

I just don't like to see condescension and judgement directed at the financial habits of anyone making under, like, 400k. Of course, there are people at ALL income levels who spend their money on stupid junk, I know plenty of people like that too. But most people are not like that, and the narrative that they are is a harmful one that turns the bottom 99% on each other.

P.S: Yes, I live somewhere with a fairly high cost of living. But as I mentioned in another comment, this doesn't disqualify the relevance of what I'm saying, because most people making over 150k are living in a HCOL area.

Never heard about this, what are you referring to?

Yeah, that's a true and good point. But at the same time, I bet most households making over 150k are households in locations where it's not a lot (That's why their salaries are what they are). Like, out of the households making 150-300k, how many of them are in NYC and the Bay Area alone? Probably a shockingly large percentage.