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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: October 26th, 2025

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  • It’s interesting how the tone of innovation changes. It starts out like “hey, I can do that better than my competitors!” and that’s all fine, doing something better creating market demand and cash influx. But eventually, the innovation looks for shortcuts… enshitification is the word. Cheaper parts, smaller quantities, subscriptions to hardware you buy but never own… There’s a shift from product/service innovation as means to financial growth to purely financially incentivized innovation.

    It reminds me of Marx’s idea that concentration of capital naturally leads to the prominence of financial markets, an indicator of a capitalist economy reaching its “advanced” / crisis-prone phase. The similarity being: there’s an economic shift from industrial investment as means to financial growth to purely financial investment.






  • I’m autistic, my dad was autistic, and my son is autistic. If I may speak, yeah we’re all “smart.” My dad won a state wide chess championship at 14 years old. I build data platforms on small teams where I’m usually the only engineer servicing a handful of analysts. My son has been hyperlexic since he was two years old. Although my son is diagnosed level II autistic, meaning he needs more support in a few places.

    The gotcha in our case is that we’ve got pretty poor social ability, and even worse emotional regulation. We get distracted easily when bored, but we can hyperfocus on one thing for 16 hours while forgetting to eat, sleep, and piss. Also, empathy is difficult/unnatural when we’re frustrated. Self awareness is more a learned skill than a natural one, and we can be egotistical at times.

    My dad was your classic absent dad, unless you count when I had met him at 11yo and we went out drinking/fishing together. Or again when I was 14 and he felt compelled enough to reach out and insult me. Him being “smart” is probably a narrow way of viewing things. We’re really not the life of the party… but “smart?” Sure, I guess, by some basic measures.


  • If that were the case, wouldn’t the ones who didn’t get the genetic engineering be far more likely to reproduce and stride along with natural selection? I have a hard time seeing that event ever happening, short of the human population en mass deciding to engineer every baby on the planet before a single generation of which could have lived life and been studied for its effects.

    What I think is more likely as a great filter is humans eventually settling on the idea that organic matter is really terrible medium for life. So, something with much more longevity, strength, efficiency, and brain power gets synthesized and we move in. At a certain point, wouldn’t biological life die off because life tends to yield to its more evolved forms? If us meat bags had to compete, how could we?

    and I think there are more interesting answers to the Fermi Paradox than the Great Filter. For example, the expansion of space not being something we can overcome in travel. Or, maybe the way we perceive space is just so anthropic—we’re making poor assumptions about other beings.



  • Trust me, as some weird modern form of atheistic deist, I am not advocating for religion. But there’s something to be said about community values and how it overcomes the issues you’ve mentioned. Church goers don’t seem to struggle as much with getting their schedules in order, making time for community events, doing community service… when these things are seen as virtuous under the eye of their god, they get it done.

    What are we missing now that makes modern life lack this community connection it once benefited from and religious folk seem to still have? What’s missing, why’d it go, and how can we get it back?



  • There’s an obligation not to believe it. If the Grinch fucks up your Christmas 10 years in a row, then tells you he’s ready to turn a new leaf, you don’t respond by telling him where you put the tree this year. You instead wonder if this is the newest trick up his sleeve, trickery. When he later does a good deed, you now wonder if he’s playing the long con here. When fellows start to advocate for the Grinch having changed, you wonder if your fellows are either naïve or in on the trick. I don’t know at what point the Grinch deserves trust, but it’s probably proportional in some way to the amount of trust they proved themselves not to deserve.

    Also, if you later discover that the Grinch turned a new leaf only after discovering that the police seized his computer, found support for a pedophile in chief, and plans to make it public… then you wonder if the whole thing is just Grinch trying to survive the blowout. Grinch has been very bad.









  • People will get the deltas shipped in from global shops or try making it themselves with dangerous chemicals that need be properly removed afterward, don’t worry. The price between delta 8 and delta 9 is just too wide that a country built on market capitalism and class-based disenfranchisement won’t be able to resist. You’ll have a less safe blackmarket soon enough, but the good news is that drug dealers don’t check ID so it’s technically more accessible to kids now too. /s


  • There was once a time when people educated themselves not because they wanted a particular job in the economy, but because they saw value in education and wanted to participate in the human tradition of advancing the specie’s ability to understand and use nature. You didn’t need school to be a blacksmith, for example, but perhaps just an apprenticeship (experience).

    There’s a point to be made here, about how this degrades the value of education. It’s great for capitalism, making survival—or “living well”—contingent on qualifications derived from paid education. But what have we lost in this process? It feels, to me at least, like we’ve created a culture where education is a mere lineitem on a checklist. How might that change what education is, what it’s expected to be, and what sort of innovation comes from it?