Puddleglum the Marshwiggle shoe shopping

Oh yeah. Fair.

“It’s not programming if there aren’t problems”

There is zero reason for the wizarding world to have social classes. Allow me to explain.

Although food can’t be created with magic, any graduate of Hogwarts can cast the Herbivicus Charm (I think it’s called) or the Greenhouse Charm to grow plants in moments. There’s also a spell that produces fresh, clean water. They have spells that make the insides of things larger than the outside. Spells that clean dishes. Spells that levitate objects and automatically perform rote tasks.

Every wizard or witch is maybe a month or two of moderate work (at the absolute outside) away from having a private pocket kingdom with crops, furniture, fireplace, teleport pad, beds, clothing, swimming pool, pets, cattle, enchanted kitchen, self cleaning floors, and fucking golf course if they want it.

If they can’t create, craft, grow, or summon something, they can buy it with money taken from an entire world of gullible muggles. Sure, dollars and yen are worthless in Diagon Alley, but you can still buy food and an enormous range of physical comforts with it. And if you absolutely have to spend money in a magical store- muggles still have gold. Even at the extortionate exchange rates that I assume the goblins would charge, the process of turning essentially free cash (in exchange for magic tricks or conjured trinkets) into gold and then into goblin coin is basically nothing but profit. A lot of it.

Which brings me back to social stratification. Why are the Malfoys considered a powerful family? Why do people differ to government functionaries and Dumbledore? Why do witches and wizards run businesses or work at all? Social hierarchy is a result of power imbalances, and other than direct, physical force, there are no power imbalances in the wizarding world. They can take your job, but who cares? You don’t actually need one. They can take your home, but who cares? You can make another in a few weeks (and this time the hot tub will go on the balcony instead of in the backyard).

A wizard does not need anything from society or from other wizards.

You’re a dipshit.

Not autistic, not trans, and not in Seattle, but this vibes with my experience too. I think people just love talking to people who have interests and get excited about them.

I’ve choked a lot of partners, and many of the women who have asked me to do it were middle aged women with kids who didn’t watch porn at all. They like the power dynamic, the feeling of being controlled, the (somewhat) restricted breathing, and the impression that their partner (me) is strong and dominant. Most of the time, I’m not even really choking them- I generally hook my hand under her jaw, lock my fingers in a c-shape, and press up, rather than in. It looks and sort of feels like you’re being choked, but isn’t.

I’ve done consensual non-consent, I’ve whipped, flogged, and paddled women, I’ve pushed them into walls and dragged them to the bed by their hair. I’ve slapped them in the face, breasts, and groin. All because I was asked. It is often an incredible, intense, and pleasurable experience for the women I’m with. And because I find their pleasure arousing and deeply satisfying, it’s pleasurable and intense for me.

Very few of them watched a lot of porn, and when they did, it was often the elegant and romantic sort of videos, rather than the brutal BDSM that you’re imagining.

You’re judging people for their sexual proclivities and suggesting that they’ve been brainwashed by porn, but you very clearly don’t understand the people you’re looking down on.

Is this The Room? I’m pretty sure this is The Room.

Night birds

A probability field with delusions of grandeur

Yeah, it’s flashback where he took a girl on the cheapest date possible, which involved stealing snacks from a vending machine. He immediately got stuck and the woman left.

This is the kind of nerd sniping I’m here for. Invite them to Lemmy. 🍿

I bet they would get so much done.

My go-to is a fantasy in which I give an unfiltered speech to graduating seniors at a university, explaining in detail the day to day bullshit they will be dealing with once they enter the workforce.

Thanks!

I’ll tell you the strategy that worked for me last time (quit for ~2 years), and that I’m using this time.

• Switch to a vape. Lung capacity increases immediately, and you get rid of the bad smell. If you haven’t vaped, give yourself some time to get used to the different habit (no cigarette packing ritual anymore etc)
• Buy a 0 nicotine vape or two, or find a local place you can get them easily. This is your “inside” vape.
• Buy a refillable vape and get nicotine liquid roughly equivalent to the full-nic vape you switched to from cigarettes. This is your “outside” vape.
• Start restricting the locations you use the full-nic vape. I work from home, so I don’t vape full-nic at my desk, I walk outside to do it. You want to break the absent-minded vaping+work or vaping+tv habit.
• Step your nicotine intake down over as long a period as you like, but don’t ever step it back up. First time I quit, I did it over about a year. That’s a little extreme. You could probably do it over a few months.
• Once you’re on 0 nic all the time, either stay with that, or gradually wean yourself off the habit as well. This is much easier without the chemical addiction.

Good luck.

I poked around and couldn’t find a repo link. Can you point me to that?

If you’ve ever used an outhouse in the early winter, this understates the reality by a factor of 10. Also, this guy doesn’t wipe?

My patron saint

I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.

From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:

Given that AI seems to be developing from less complex tasks like chess (which is still complicated, obviously, but a constrained problem) to more complex and ill-defined tasks like image generation, it seems that it’s inevitable that we will develop AI capable of providing strategic or tactical plans, if we haven’t already. If two otherwise-equally-matched military units are fighting, it seems reasonable to believe that the one using an AI to make decisions within seconds would win over the one with human leadership, simply because they would react more quickly to changing battlefield conditions. This would place an enormous incentive on the US military to adopt AI assisted strategic control, which would likely lead to units of autonomous weapons which are also controlled by an autonomous system. Do any of you have any concerns about this, and if so, do you have any ideas about how we can mitigate the problem.

(Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)

The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn’t say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.

I think we’re at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it’s only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they’ll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.

EDIT: I know I’m not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.