At some point, every man comes face to face with the lie of his potency. We're told our willingness to turn ourselves into ruthless avatars of purpose makes us powerful. Unstoppable. We can do anything if the call is great enough. Is it suspicious that the call takes the voice of more powerful men? Pay it no mind. The world is yours for the taking.
Then, one day, the tide comes in. You learn what old men know. What women know. What every victim of circumstance knows. Sometimes the world just happens to you.
We're the leaves floating down the river. Sometimes we float through the sunshine in gentle water. Inevitably we crash through the rapids and down the waterfall. You can fight it, but you won't win. Like many in the thread are saying, the author of the post should be grateful for the good fortune that his partner is still alive, right now, and they can still be together. Every moment spent raging against the rapids means lost moments with the love of his life that he could regret forever.
There's something to be said for fighting for the people you love. We all should. But the fight needs to make sense, and I'm not sure fighting cancer on short order is the right fight.
Regardless, this situation hurts my heart. I feel for him, and her. Nature is ruthless.
A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.
'...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.'
Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight".
(I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)
Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia.
“Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.
Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.
I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?
Who cares which country has a higher market cap? That's a capitalist concept, of course the capitalist country has more. I'm talking who has the more advanced technology.
That was the point. We optimize for a higher market cap instead of for advanced technology, that is way why get a higher market cap instead of advanced technology. The system is working as intended. Goodhart's Law all the way down.
You know how it's considered a kind of low-effort disrespect to answer someone's question by pasting back a response from an LLM? I think equivalently if you ask a question where the best response is what you'd get from an LLM, then you're the one showing a disrespectful lack of effort. It's kind of the 2026 version of LMGTFY.
If you still want a copy-paste response to your question, just let me know – I'm happy to help!
Yes, I love the redundancy of English. Language makes a playground of our minds. And yes, "picturing" is another way of saying "imagining", but to me and my mind it carries more of a connotation of visualization. Imagining may have its root in "imaging", but encompasses more imho, describing the entire Reality Construction Kit.
"Unforced choice" is an interesting phrase. Perhaps another discussion, another time. End self-expression.
> What I am saying is that women make bad choices [...] and later regret it
Yes, especially when those women are also children. One of the many reasons it's illegal to have sex with them and especially illegal to rent their bodies to your friends.
Only time I've ever been successfully phished was the App Store. I have an Android phone but I wanted to try the ChatGPT app on my iPad and naively clicked the first result, which was of course a scummy clone. I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.
I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.
Your experience illustrates precisely why the ads in the ad store should be worthless. I have never clicked on the ad in the app store. Regardless of how legitimate it looks, I will never click it. The vast majority for ads are clearly either scams or they are at least attempting to piggy back on the popularity of others, and I'll support neither of those cases.
I don't know what it is with Apple, maybe they aren't sufficiently exposed to scams, but they seem to not understand it's an issue, or their metrics are solely based on revenue. Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.
Getting strong The Scorpion and the Frog vibes from this situation. Unfortunately, this is just the nature of a profit-maximising entity. Profit is the gap between how much it can take and how little it can give. It concedes nothing without a demand. Why would it?
The playbook isn't exactly a secret. What you might describe as a "classic walled garden enshittification trap", Peter Thiel and Sam Altman would describe as "monopoly (affectionate)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKbaA6USy4 – "proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale", exactly by the book.
I think the bias towards optimism is commendable but I hope this is the wake-up call the community needs to treat "your love is valuable enough to build a business around" as the Faustian bargain it is and keep Core Devices on a short leash. They want to own you, not work with you. It's their nature.
It's been like this for decades. Remember Google+? Remember Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts/Meet/Allo/Duo etc? The company simply values internal political advantage over coherent product development or user experience.
At Google, you're not the customer, and you're not even the product; you're a metric in a promo packet. Your value in the "AI engagement" column vastly exceeds your value as a satisfied user. The system is working as intended.
Then, one day, the tide comes in. You learn what old men know. What women know. What every victim of circumstance knows. Sometimes the world just happens to you.
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