The joy of reading isn't just in following an interesting narrative or collecting useful information. Nor is it just in the technical quality of the writing. It's in the intimacy of entering into a dialogue with another living soul. The twisting and turning of his mind as he works out the details of an argument, the whole constellation of subconscious premises and feelings--built up over the course of a life--that leads to this choice of phrase over that one, the struggle and joy of turning the material of his mind into a coherent assemblage of words--all of that living and breathing humanity is on the page, and that's half the pleasure of it. So it doesn't matter how well your AI mimics your thought process or style; it's only mimicry, not the real thing. There is a page full of words, maybe good ones, maybe interesting ones! But YOU are not really there. Do you not care enough about your subject to sit and write about it for a couple hours? Do you not care enough about your readers to sit and talk to them? Do you not care enough about your own soul to sharpen and define it through the act of self-expression? If your friend purchased a perfect robotic copy of themselves--with the same body, the same mannerisms, way of speaking, habits, etc--and sent it in his stead to have dinner with you, is that friendship? Are you getting to know each other? Learning the art of friendship? Growing through the act of relating to another person? Of course, maybe you also hire your own robot copy. Now your robot and his robot are having dinner and sending you an AI summary of the conversation. Maybe the author's AI writes the essay, and our AI reads it and give you a summary. Maybe my AI matches with her AI on Hinge and they go on our first date to see if we're a good fit--I wouldn't want to "waste time" on the wrong person, after all. Maybe we'll have a whole world of this sort of thing: AIs living our lives for us and sending a summary for our impoverished souls to consume secondhand. And maybe we'll all be ok with that. More time to bed rot. Technologists have an obsession with giving us an easier world, a "frictionless" world. And this is certainly all much easier, much more frictionless. But friction is a metaphysical property of life. A perfectly frictionless world is a dead world. And it seems that’s where we’re heading.

The elites don’t want you to know this but there’s plenty of Canadians to go around. I have acquired multiple Canadians

Lots of companies offer unlimited PTO, and most of them offer generous maternity/paternity leave. “Fire at will” is good. Otherwise you end up with Euros boasting to you about how they basically don’t work but can’t get fired.

Trump is perhaps the apotheosis of the trends identified by Neil Postman, but John Oliver is also an advanced symptom of the disease.

Sometimes I go to the bar with friends and just have soda water and lime. It’s literally free. A friend of mine doesn’t drink at all and she’ll go to a piano bar and just dance. Also 100% free. I have a friend over 3-4 times a week. It costs me a cup of coffee or a beer.

Top 5: 1. New Mexico 2. South Carolina 3. Maryland 4. Arizona 5. Texas

This is an equivocation fallacy on the meaning of "has". We get the concept of "meaning" from all kinds of things *in* the universe. Words, letters, symbols, stories, and individual lives all have meaning, i.e., they lead to or refer to or convey something else. So the universe "has" meaning in the sense that *things in it* have meanings (or, more precisely, *are given* meanings by human beings). But this is obviously not the same thing as saying that the universe *itself* has a meaning. You could argue in the same way that the universe "has" intelligence: "If the whole universe has no intelligence, we should never have found out that it has no intelligence. Therefore the universe itself is intelligent."

Any Austinites know how bad the voting lines are? Planning to pop over to city hall today.

The problem with a lot of generic dating advice is that it presumes that people are good valuers. “Never settle”, for instance, presumes your values are clear, authentic, achievable, and integrated into a broader life-vision. You can’t say this to someone whose desires are a welter of vague, contradictory, unexamined, irrational feelings. You can’t “settle” if you don’t really know what you want, or if what you want is an absurdity, or if it’s an unconscious compensation for an unmanaged psychological problem. You should never settle for anything less than your values. But this presumes you know how to value, which is a learned skill, not something you’re born with.

If you accept the principle that you have an obligation to sacrifice for others, politics becomes a big fight about who to place on the sacrificial altar. Should the young be sacrificed to the old, or the old to the young? Whoever has the votes gets to pick the victim. The only way to escape is to reject sacrifice.

I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, but I was nevertheless rabidly opposed to Hillary and the Democratic Party, and was happy to see them lose. This was clearly a mistake. She wouldn’t have been a good president, but her election could’ve saved us from what’s happening now. The Never Trumpers were right.

"Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man’s reason...This is the fundamental lesson to be learned from the triumph of Apollo 11. " - Ayn Rand, "Apollo 11"

The idea that trans people are all left leaning is very out of date. Plenty of transwomen and gay men are rightwing now.