Luke S.

Author of poetry, essays, and fiction | Words scattered about, see link below | Armchair metaphysician | Battle of Evermore foot soldier | Dad

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

If you want machines to have qualia, you’re going to have to kill them (i.e. give them a credible promise of eventual termination date that cannot be exactly known, circumvented, or bargained with). This is, of course, not very good for business.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

“global fandom site” “spinoff stories” sure man whatever you say

[The Associated Press @AP]

The Archive of Our Own, or AO3, a popular global fandom site, is making a limited return after a security incident led to a shutdown on Oct. 29. https://t.co/b78u0ymi3R

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

Everyone used to think it was the Protestant Work Ethic™️ but the real answer is ressentiment

[Helmut @NEETdrangheta99]

Its often described how different nationalities have a degree of a certain disorder as part of their average psyche. Eg Germanics-autism, jews schizophrenia. The American pathology is obvious but rarely mentioned

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@slanana_manana @_ueaj No, it’s just that transhumanism is inherently a symptom of moral rot so deep-seated that it’s been festering either realized or unrealized for quite some time.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@darcyagi e/acc can’t read, many such cases

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

“…and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised”

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

Same kind of person who doesn’t exercise because it’s “painful.” Skill issue, sorry.

[Zany🥕 @zanyfen]

They don’t. People like them the same way they “like” black coffee, dark chocolate and whiskey: they’re too weak willed to say the emperor’s naked and succumb to the social terrorists who threaten them with ostracism and humiliation for fun

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@caelyncobb I think all that really needs to be said, by anyone with any skin in the game or none, is that it’s an ouroboros of little supply and little demand that has no overly simple, conspiratorial, causal explanation nor remedy.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@LeProjetSerret There’s a middle ground (but one that requires the length of a career to develop) in which a firmly established Great Author™️ can be a safe hit (though smaller market). e.g. Krasznahorkai has a new translation coming out in February that I just reviewed

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@JWhitebread1 https://t.co/PRKbfIrn0W

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

This is part of the “enchantment” that Knausgaard spoke of recently. The distant past is more foreign than any extraterrestrial life. The differences are categorical, not by degree. They vibed to this after watching humans slaughter each other for sport. It’s a dimensional plane.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

This is part of the “enchantment” that Knausgaard spoke of recently. The distant past is more foreign than any extraterrestrial life. The differences are categorical, not by degree. They vibed to this after watching humans slaughter each other for sport. It’s a dimensional plane.

[apollo @apollophanes]

Ancient Roman music is the most unsettling shit I’ve ever heard in my life

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@oh_tuntun >Nietzsche’s Eternal Return/Recurrence is real.
>the entire cosmos proceeds through its cycle of birth to heat death to rebirth, an infinite number of times.
>you are reborn into the exact same life as the exact same person, over and over again.
>deja vu is when the Veil is thin

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@_djpn lol 20+ responses and apparently no one had mentioned Ted Chiang yet. Sad state of affairs.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

SKILL. ISSUE.

[Utah teapot 🫖 @SkyeSharkie]

I honestly find it weird when people talk about books like they're an actual industry still. Books are an industry that only has a 30 billion dollar total market value. Video games, in contrast, have 250 billion, film and tv have 300 billion and social media, the primary place people read now, has 240 billion.

Books are a dead media format, even when they're delivered digitally, we live faster paced lifestyles and prefer more interactivity then we did in the past, books made more sense when people were isolated for long periods and lived slower paced lifestyles with fewer, long term goals and tasks. We've moved on to doing our reading through shorter format social media posts, articles, poetry and short fics.

I honestly predict that books will eventually settle down to around 5-20 billion annual market value as a long term niche item, kinda like how physical audio media (vinyl, tape, cds) have an annual market value of about 3 billion.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

Review of Krasznahorkai’s forthcoming Prisoner of Urga is complete. Suffice it to say, it’s a welcome addition to his body of work available in English, and @NewDirections continues to do its best to sustain the ever-shrinking market for high quality literature. Recommend!

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@norabird @exhaustdata I was in a Solenoid book club, and it was 5 dudes and 1 very granola lady

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

Man you people seriously need to read Flatland.

[DunoQFT @dunoqft]

THE FERMI PARADOX HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED

for sixty years you have been sold a mystery. the universe is huge, the stars are old, somebody should have called by now, and the silence demands an explanation.

three researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford went to check the arithmetic under the product.

what was in the old packaging: one number plugged into each slot of the Drake equation. a single value for the share of planets where life starts, a single value for the share where intelligence appears. point estimates.

the trouble is that our knowledge of those quantities is smeared across orders of magnitude. you cannot be uncertain by a factor of a billion and then write down one number for it.

so Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord fed in the whole spread of the uncertainty instead. they ran it twice, once from their own reading of the science, once from the range of published estimates in the astrobiology literature.

the output:

> probability we are alone in the Milky Way: from about half to near certainty
> probability we are alone in the observable universe: from about 40 to 85 percent

at those numbers the silence stops being strange. nothing is missing from the sky. no paradox left to explain, and no Great Filter needed to explain it.

i went in expecting to find the trick, because a paper that deletes a famous problem usually has one. what i came out with is a complaint about method. one number written where a range belongs, repeated for sixty years.

the fine print, and i am the one insisting on it. these are probabilities under the distributions the authors picked, so change the assumptions and the numbers move. the paper measures how little we know and it does not prove that nobody is out there. what it takes away is your right to be surprised that nobody has called.

link in the comments

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@tobinpriest It is a fundamental error to mistake Darkness for evil. There is a fullness to certain darknesses that the wise learn to bask in.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

This is, in no uncertain terms, evil. An abjectly dangerous and degenerate mindset, brain cooked to a crisp, just naught but self-satisfied poison.

[Luke S. @LegibleLuke]

@CompleteTuring @Scholars_Stage Prosperity for whom? If you’re really a consequentialist, and a system is what it does, then what it’s produced is mere marginal utils for the right tail of the distribution and nothing for everyone else. Look at the current state of things. If anything, it’s *inefficient*