Not an unreasonable concern about wandering into dark ideologies or not appreciating nuance leading to bad conclusions. It’s also entirely possible I was just reading more into your comments than was intended. I don’t currently have any plans to seek out more of his writing but I’ll be sure to keep our conversation in mind to filter it through if I do (and others should as well).
Was nice to have a respectful and constructive conversation online, thanks again :)

No hardware required, also not some new technique suddenly discovered:
How to Bump Fire an AR-15/M4
AK47 bump fire

Thanks for the thoughtful reply and suggested reading. Holy shit, paywalls are hardcore now (NYT link dividing the screen space literally in half) but fortunately there was an archive link to eliminate that issue. I was only really interested in knowing the details around Scott Alexander in so far as I didn’t want to be unknowingly spreading messages from Hitler 2.0 or something, but still without having a dog in this fight, I get the impression the ominous dangers implied about the nefarious Rationalists is overselling the reality of the situation.

The way the author/group’s positions are offhandedly portrayed (especially under the Life in the Grey Tribe heading) definitely raise red flags for me, but just opening a couple of the links and reading the content myself I didn’t come away with nearly the same impression of intent. (NOTE: I’m adding the bolding to certain elements)

NYT

The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.

Right away I can envision another “why would you want to silence me? I’m allowed to say anything if this is a free country!” excuse from some jerk online. I read that post on SSC and it has the following before it even begins:

[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I’m not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.]

There’s also no hits on “speech”, “absolute”, “censor” in the post. It doesn’t come across to me like someone advocating for the unrestricted right to spread their hateful/harmful ideology. A figure like Elon Musk has made his positions pretty clear about why he (nominally, but not actually) believes in absolute free speech, the Grey Tribe post seems to mostly be a criticism about in-group purity testing and self-censorship.

NYT

He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”

Again, it’s easy to imagine this is going to be another red pill argument about how giving disenfranchised people an equal shot is really just repressing white people etc. With more of the quote providing context it doesn’t read as that (to me):

You’ve probably heard that memo writer James Damore has sued Google for discrimination against conservative white men. It seems like a complicated case: political discrimination is generally legal but might not be in California (see here), and discriminating against white men seems hard to distinguish from affirmative action and various societywide diversity campaigns universal enough that I assume someone would have noticed before now if they were illegal. […]

That NYT piece was really hung-up on his real name throughout though which to me raises questions about their motivations behind their stated concerns. It would be understandable if this was a scenario where some NGO was masquerading as a single real person, but here I can easily understand why someone would prefer to keep their offline identity de-emphasized.

Re: Reddit
In this area I’m going to willfully stick my head in the sand and ignore completely. I just can’t bring myself to want to wade through that collection of bots, bad-faith users, advertisers etc. to try to separate fact from fiction.

I also have contrarian tendencies and I’m not intending this to be a fight about who’s right/wrong – you’re clearly far more familiar with this author and subject than I am. And again, I sincerely appreciate the follow-up info. I can certainly see how some positions taken or discussed can act like a beacon attracting bad elements, but I also think that is nearly universal whenever there’s people involved - and that it’s possible to interpret virtuous things into a call for evil if predisposed. There’s some truth to dangers of gazing into the abyss and all that, but I also think it’s foolish to be concerned that everyone that reads Catcher in the Rye is going to get bad ideas about presidents, ya know?

I don’t know much about the author and as far as I know haven’t read any of their other work, so while it’s certainly possible they’re pushing some shitty “AI will save us all” techbro agenda, I really don’t feel convinced of that based on that Washington Spectator article or the short paragraphs near the end of the mountain of text preceding it on the Slate Star Codex. There’s a lot of guilt by association implied in the page about TESCREAL but I’m not seeing any alarming smoking guns re: Scott Alexander and his Wikipedia page doesn’t seem to call out any concerning incidents or positions (not to imply all of its content is complete or truthful).

I’m not invested in this enough to try pushing back more but if you want to claim the author is roughly equivalent to an Elon Musk or some red pill monosphere proponent I’d expect more evidence. It’s good to be mindful of sources of info in general though, I agree with the sentiment of “follow those seeking the truth, avoid those claiming to have found it.”

I’d guess it’s largely just a consequence of the Tragedy of the Commons. My favorite example demonstrating the effect I read in Meditations on Moloch:

The Fish Farming Story

As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

Until it’s more profitable to do the right thing it’s likely we’ll continue doing nothing, if not outright exacerbating things, just so we can get ours before it’s all gone.

Thanks for the summary image and link to a new channel to check out! I love that the video just immediately jumped into topic without any fluff or calls to action at all. Likely going to try my luck with a Granitestone griddle to replace an ancient one with some gouges around the edges that’s probably giving me hyper-cancer.

@bradson30@lemm.ee
Totally legitimate user,
You only link to central24 so I have to assume you have some connection to it; its/your publisher is listed as ZwadTech but the footer link (zwadtech.com) doesn’t resolve and general web searches for that term only returns the central24 website. Where do you source your information for your totally legitimate articles? I noticed there aren’t any authors listed.

Why is this domain only linked to by newly created accounts (4+ of which have been banned)?

@bradson30@lemm.ee
Totally legitimate user,
You only link to central24 so I have to assume you have some connection to it; its/your publisher is listed as ZwadTech but the footer link (zwadtech.com) doesn’t resolve and general web searches for that term only returns the central24 website. Where do you source your information for your totally legitimate articles? I noticed there aren’t any authors listed.

Why is this domain only linked to by newly created accounts (4+ of which have been banned)?

@kelvinwashington@lemm.ee
Totally legitimate user,
You only link to central24 so I have to assume you have some connection to it; its/your publisher is listed as ZwadTech but the footer link (zwadtech.com) doesn’t resolve and general web searches for that term only returns the central24 website. Where do you source your information for your totally legitimate articles? I noticed there aren’t any authors listed.

Why is this domain only linked to by newly created accounts (3+ of which have been banned)?

Username Johnsoncentral, registered ~50 minutes ago, linking to the domain central24 – pretty sure their intention isn’t to inform but to drive traffic to their site.

Generally speaking, I don’t like an overly verbose acronym. It’s part of why I stop at LGBT or LGBTQ instead of going all the way to LGBTQ+, or as my government seems to want to say, LGBTQ2IA+. In my opinion, the effort to make the community more inclusive by adding more sub-communities to the acronym has the opposite effect.

The other question/issue I have with the long abbreviation is does the order of the letters matter? It’s currently settled on L->G->B […] but is that just by tradition or does it signify some other importance [order added? relative size of community? etc]. If you remembered all the characters but couldn’t remember the sequence is it disrespectful to list them alphabetically or try to use the typical order and possibly transpose a couple? I would assume there’s a process for deciding when to add a designation to the abbreviation, how do things get decided against and what does that mean if you feel there’s something that should be included but isn’t? You wouldn’t want to gatekeep someone’s genuinely held identity, but you can’t list everything, and if you add a “everything else” then what’s the point of a list in the first place other than increased prominence in relation to “everything else”?

It definitely feels like a more conversation-friendly catch-all (such as “queer”) is more tenable instead of constantly adding or changing designations to refer to a nebulous collective group. At its core, basically that group is anyone that considers themself not CISHET, and any extra specificity is certainly important for identity and community building but probably not needed in typical conversations/references.

Another thought just occurred to me, how does screen reading assistive tech. deal with seeing LGBTQ2IA+ – does it just read out every character or will it try to pronounce it like a word? Either would be varying levels of jarring to the user I’d think.

Sorry for dropping this kinda stream of consciousness rant on your comment, and I don’t consider myself part of the community so it’s really not for me to say anyway, but I was glad to see a similar sentiment against the abbreviation reflected throughout this post and particularly from your comment.

*moot

FAN OF ALL CAPS TITLES AND VOTE BEGGING I AM NOT

Toby Huss went on to do a lot of great and varied projects (I’m especially fond of Reno 911! and Halt and Catch Fire) but I wonder how often people mention his character, Artie, The Strongest Man in the World, when they meet him.

Pete & Pete definitely aged very well and the opening theme song [Piped mirror] still rocks too.

This account owns/runs that website (check out the About section and compare the last name to their username) and otherwise only posts items that they benefit from (mohaboelez.medium.com). I don’t care enough to dig deeper than that but I wouldn’t expect the content on the site itself to be properly vetted or necessarily even created from a human, and I also wouldn’t expect any additional insight from this account here.

This could have been a fun mashup but this execution just feels kinda wrong/gross overall to me.

• Why are so many main characters not included (Hermes, Zoidberg, Nibbler etc.)? At least Bender is present as the flaming mass we all fondly remember from the film…
• Was it really necessary to include perky nipples and a camel-toe on Amy?
• The staff Professor Rhod is holding has what resembles a golden swastika in the only significant change from how it appears in the movie. And though the Professor is occasionally shown without teeth in the show is there a reason he doesn’t have any here?
• Why does that train have eyes?
• Just a bizarre composition in general. Why include so much of the stone and vents around Amy, then make the openings between the slats just reveal the background image? If Leela was shifted over slightly left her fading tendrils and feet could have been cleanly hidden behind the Professor.

Mathematically it’s obvious and straightforward but the point is that it’s not intuitive from a typical person’s subjective perspective. It’s easy to underestimate or dismiss the rate of change until a situation becomes unmanageable.

There’s also a good example of exponential change described using a doubling drop of water in The Power of Compounding

Have you looked into Pseudotv / PseudoTV_Live?