pyrex

This is another one for the "throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance" category.

Please share!!!!

It sounds like ChatGPT is eligible for a degree in business!

They most certainly do not keep quiet about it!!!

-- a person who has posted about programming on Mastodon

Wait I intended to post this in Sneer Club

If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!

HE DID IT!

I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.

Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.

I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.

This man's blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like "wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog" is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.

Or, in his words:

I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.

Oh look, another person saying "I know nothing, explain it to me" again and again and again while strongly advocating a specific position.

New developments -- someone proposes "OK, what if we're in irreconcilable difference with the racists?" and two people pile on to say (respectively) "Well, we'll have to find (vaguely specified) 'workarounds'" and "Well, we can't kick them out, that would be a disaster."

A third person points out that some of the people in the thread are opposed to quotas but implied they would support quotas if we made an applicant list first (and allowed for the possibility that only white men would appear on the list, rendering the quota system moot) -- so we should do that.

Specifically -- nat418 sez:

I believe that we live in a society in which some classes of people are exploited by others, and that the acknowledgement of this reality—let alone measures to remediate it—are often percieved as "unfair" or "conflictual" by members of the exploiting classes. I think the real conflict is already ongoing, we are enmeshed within it, and that if we want to live as honorable and dignfied persons we must take up the cause of justice and the common good.

nim65s:

I personally agree with @nat-418 here, but I acknowledge some others do not, and I don't think one side could convince the other. I also don't think we can compromise: this is a boolean question. Therefore, to find a consensus, I think we should explore workarounds.

nat418 sez:

What workarounds? Seems like if we can't agree on basic matters like "marginalized groups should be represented" then we should simply part ways.

tmarkov:

This is a very non-obvious statement.

The goal of the mix community is ultimately to make nix and NisOS as good as possible.

Parting ways is a huge negative for the ecosystem overall. If it is unavoidable, I guess I'll personally leave all other consideration aside and advocate for whatever would cause the least amount of people splitting off whatever it might be.

Colin:

i'm not confident that's pinpointing a hard disagreement. my read of this thread is:

1. marginalized individuals should be represented.
2. representation is better maximized by composing a diverse assembly from available applicants, rather than within the process by which we obtain applicants.
3. uncertainty around how "hard" this requirement is; how critical is representation within assembly composition to ensuring representation in its downstream processes; hypotheticals in what to do if there aren't enough applicants with which to form a diverse assembly.

Aaron notably doesn't comment on governance. "Some marginalized people attended some meetings of the group" implies to him that the system is inclusive.