Advise to all the thirsty boys in this thread: a Chinesium Ebay GTX 450 flashed to a fake 1050 is probably not gonna do the trick.
Never have I felt so inadequate as an RTX 2060 owner. I guess I'm nothing but an aging entry-level guy under this new paradigm. I just don't understand dating anymore. When I was in my 20's, it was enough if you could make her old, inherited family machine run WoW well enough to raid without getting lagchecked into failure and cursed off of the server by everyone for eternity. Simpler times, when all you needed to get the damsel was the ability to strip back a windows installation and configure graphical settings. You would give her that world, and in exchange for this selfless gift of digital life, you would have her heart. Such was the standard courting procedure.
ARE YOU ASSUMING
@Cutechri 'S SPECIES? REEEEEEE
Noooooo! I have no quarrels with the furry races. The one thing that no grown adult normie will ever admit, is how much they intuitively know that running around in a decked out animal get up is pretty much guaranteed to be super-fun. I know there's more to it than that, but for that alone, I can't really judge. They are probably having more fun than me on an average day. I just end up being a miser by knocking it. Not like I'm making moves like that for myself. The most fun I've had recently is sitting on my back porch getting (legally!) stoned to the new Leprous album. Lyrically that thing is just pure despair and helplessness, the man has the voice of an angel, and the heart of an innocent little boy, broken 1000x over by every possible human tragedy. It's about like, existential entrapment and loss. That's MY life. I work and I chill. Sometimes I do a hobby or see a friend, to learn even more about their sad, boring lives. It's all: somebody is sick, somebody has died, money is tight, I bought a car - let me tell you every feature, I hate my job but I want to dance around admitting it when I vent to you so that it goes nowhere, a service worker made me mad last week, news is saying the world is a flaming garbage ball (you hear about that thing out there with the...?) Great stuff like that. At least furries party! If anything, I'm a little jealous of the freedom and levels of not caring about things they enjoy in those suits and outfits. I get with that, 100%. Sounds good about now.
I like your reflections on this, though as I said above I have zero belief in crypto or NFTs coming back in some beneficial way. The evangelists have had more than a decade to demonstrate an actually useful implementation of this tech that isn't already performed better by existing mechanisms, or that couldn't be implemented in less actively harmful ways. I think you're right about the role of different approaches in developing tech, and I agree that we overall benefit from having a diversity of motivations and interests in what gets developed and how. But we're seeing the real-world global scale consequences of unchecked capitalism play out in real time through boths societal and environmental harms, and it's clear to me that the approach of "let's just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" of innovation when combined with profit-first neoliberal capitalism is just not sustainable in any way, shape or form. If anything, this is an argument for closer ties between the people you mention - the ethically minded ones and the tinkerers, as they can benefit from exchanging views and knowledge and provide perspective that they can't get from themselves.
Put it this way: if the bubble that allows you the freedom to study and work is so insular that it lets you ignore the real-world consequences of your actions, and is large enough that those consequences are massively global in scale, then that bubble needs popping. Nobody is owed the privilege of being insulated from the world in that way, and humanity does not need nor benefit from this thoughtless sprint forward, where innovation at any cost is seen as a good. We need to slow down, and start thinking more. If that means that these bubbled-up people will be less free to study and work? Honestly, that's not even a blip on the overall cost-benefit analysis of this. Slightly checking the privilege of a group of massively privileged people running the world into the ground because "we're not doing any harm, we're just innovating" is a benefit, not a loss.
I won't pretend like there's not a major component of wishful thinking. I was considering the reality that present-day perspectives are limited, in fact by the very forces you describe. The sentiment I was going for was that it is still fair play to hold out for changes to those forces. I think certain mindsets have to die before
similar ideas
could be attempted reasonably. I'm talking, like after present-day principles have become more obscure. I don't even know how that could happen in our lifetime. I don't think the sentiment or the dream for the technology was bad. But the stage couldn't have been better rigged to bring the whole thing down. The best involved were blindly idealistic, if not also very smart and ambitious. There was so much hope in libertarian ideals online. But no matter how many times you try the routine on that neoliberal stage, it doesn't work. In that context, the freedom is a curse. It's unleashing the sharks upon the minnows. The minnows are simply free to be eaten. And then they tell the minnows to be sharks, that it's the most sensible way, and that the only way to become one is to swim where the sharks swim...
I love your point about the ethically-minded and the tinkerers. I agree, that is what is ultimately needed and where I think things often fall short. You have the people focused on the tech, and they have to trust and work with people who have the money that makes the tech happen when it comes to the ethical side. Why having that money somehow designates you as the ethical arbiter is beyond me. The default state of that exchange is corruption. Within tech-minded spheres are those ethical thinkers, who's hands are tied and voices silenced by entities that can just pull your budget the moment what you're doing doesn't suit their cash flow plans. I think there exists a willingness from both parties in the tech world to come together, but there is yet another with wholly conflicting interests that screws it all up...
I didn't mean to imply that tinkerers should be free to try stuff in a way where they are absolved of recourse for damage. That would be the grossly negligent facebook mindset of "Move fast and break things." I'm talking more about a very long drift to the wayside, where someone could pick it up and play with it in ways that are really and truly inconsequential and without real impact, just sandboxing ideas. I'm not thinking of a 'doer' necessarily, but an explorer. To me, a tinkerer or a hacker is someone who explores possibilities with devices and systems. In the absolute barest sense, they don't care about monetary or political goals and put themselves and everything they do as far away from that as possible... the type of person who may not even WANT to share their findings with anyone but the right person and might just let it die with them otherwise. SOMEBODY definitely has to link-up with them, but it has to be the right people making up the other side of that.
It really boils down to this, for me. I recognize that every so often a person looks at something that once went wrong and finds the idea that should've been the one all along, with the advantage of different circumstances and knowledge to inform a different process and sought usage. There's no way for me to describe that in a concrete way. The ideas are there in the nexus now. What form they take, and really, how much of the original ideas remain over time, is hard to say. It really feels like a lot could happen right at this point in history. When it comes to crypto, some things do have to change fundamentally. And the original idea was probably never going to be feasible. But the next idea from the next idea from that may become something more grounded and realistic, provided some other things also change between then and now. I just don't think it's possible while people can still see and grab so much money from it all. I do not want to come off like I think some booming revival is coming anytime soon, or that things will cataclysmically deviate from how they are now. I definitely do not see THAT. I see crypto as the wrong dream, for the right things.
Ugh, I throw up in my mouth a bit every time I see someone use that term in that way. Just ... no. I mean, it's explicit incel(-adjacent) rhetoric aimed purely at dehumanization and alienation - and for that purpose, it unfortunately works really well, as you can typically tell that the people using the words in that way are really not thinking of the group of people they're describing as humans at all. It's this fascinating pastiche of the nonsensical "we're rational and scientifically minded" attitude often expressed in the manosphere with an attempt at analyzing society, which ... well, that's rather hard to do when you refuse to engage with society as consisting of people. Of course this is likely at least in part a hackneyed response to feminist discourse around gender as societally determined and performative - they really want it all to be purely biological - but one that doesn't actually refer to actual biology, but rather mythological, pseudoscientific ideas based on refuted/retracted science (that wolf-pack "alpha" and "beta" thing, among others). And of course it actively comes into conflict with the massive and growing evidence of sex and gender complexity and even social determination of "gender" in animals. But that's going off on a bit of a tangent.
I don't think it's pedantic at all - rather, criticizing this as pedantic is one of the main ways this type of harmful rhetoric gets disseminated, as it's an easy bad-faith attack that shuts down debate. The words we use have a massive effect on how we think about the world we live in, which in turn shapes how we relate to and operate within that world. Heck, do that for long enough and it even shapes the neural pathways of your brain. This type of "pedantry" is of massive importance, as is the only way to combat the entrance of dehumanizing and harmful words into everyday discourse. And there are plenty of historical examples that demonstrate that once a population starts talking about another group as not or less than human, violence and attempts at subjugation or eradication follow close behind.
I'll admit, I've never delved much into that side of the internet. I don't really have the constitution for those levels of negativity and childish attitudes. What I've seen in youtube comments is enough for me to call it bad juju and stay away. I will become very mean, and I think those people are really down and out, if not with a lot of gross tendencies. It's too simultaneously sad and angering for me and I don't navigate it well.
I appreciate the clarification, though. That does put what I was feeling into full view. I'm with you on all of these observations. I try to choose my words so as to avoid spreading certain implications. Because I have seen how jokes just stop becoming jokes, how adopting language in certain ways changes portrayed emotional responsiveness to things. I use it to check my own attitude from time to time. Changing the terms you compile thoughts in changes the thoughts themselves over time. Gotta be part of why propaganda focuses so much on terminology. I can't believe how well it works sometimes, when I see it in myself.
I will say, on here, I often word things so as to avoid sowing too much division of politics and philosophy. It's easy to cross the line keeping it a little too real and from then on just losing the whole plot. I don't think it's a matter of saying what you mean being wrong. It's just that the outcome isn't necessarily as productive as I would want. I prefer to stay on a level where different people can still read/participate/be comfortable. The culture here isn't one that carries the heavy, heavy stuff well. FWIW, I still don't feel I have the approach down at all, and what I mean to convey just goes unseen, or worse, flipped over.
I also am not coming at everything with full confidence right now. These past 5 or so years have brought me a lot to reflect on, and my worldview has changed radically over that time. I am still sorting a lot out, myself. Just doin it live. I don't want to say anything I can't take responsibility for. I may over-correct sometimes. I have these weird little tics with conscientiousness to the point of impracticality, just being around a lot of uptight people as a kid.
I think I just haven't found my format. I appreciate that people still let me stick around here. I at least try to make it worth reading when I respond directly.
who knows, maybe I will finally start getting some attention! 
