#pest | 2023-06-02

I do miss the interplay with the liberal arts side of things mp provided.

12:48

The "read old books" + "ability to enter commands in a linux shell" intersection is small.

12:52

I also miss the random blog posts.

12:53

Not just mp's

~ 25 minutes ~

13:18

There was a personal touch to the web that is largely gone. Everything now has a slight stench of afiliate marketing, politics, or "information service"

13:30

awt: boox + shell + freetime ~= nullset

13:31

awt, i've been thinking similar thoughts

13:33

as cost of living -> inf, pressure on folx with 'human' www (the kind with over9000 audience, but not even exclusively) to mix in 'marketing' & 'service' similarly -> inf.

13:37

asciilifeform: evidently

13:37

many moar folx (to whom no one is offering judas's 30 silver) simply dried up

13:39

There's also the "self improvement" stench.

13:40

*

asciilifeform for instance sitting on a tall pile of various unfinished things, and errytime picks 1 up, salt mine eventually blows his cache like the 'handicap bell' in k.vonnegut's harrison bergeron

13:40

asciilifeform: is why I'm busting my ass to get the new pest station up

13:40

awt: a++

13:42

The email could come any day

13:43

http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2023-06-02#1026503 << 'here are the snake oils to drink if you want harem and $maxint'. over9000 of these

13:43

Logged on 2023-06-02 13:39:09 awt: There's also the "self improvement" stench.

13:44

*

asciilifeform recently saw some lul where one andrew tate gives vaguely mpesque lecture re 'making it' while standing in front of shelf of snake oils

13:46

asciilifeform: I've tried 'em all

13:46

lol

13:47

Only ones that work are injected or prescribed.

13:47

iirc bankman was quite the aficionado of 'injected'

13:48

even had tame prescriber on payroll, a la herr doktor morrel

13:48

I will say that some of the nootropics do have a limited effect.

13:48

like the stuff with huperzine in it

13:49

over9000 things have effect. problem is that it dun translate to pedalling somehow so fast as to pedal yer way off salt mine treadmill

13:51

"here's how to earn bucks while you shirk your w2": http://paste.deedbot.org/?id=QrG5

13:51

lol

13:52

see also.

13:52

(asciilifeform) 2022-03-17 asciilifeform: verisimilitude: see e.g. dope threads.

13:53

( & elsewhere )

13:53

(trilema) 2016-08-05 asciilifeform: cns comes with own adrenergic 'gas pedal', which most (but interesting, not ALL) of the dopes rely on.

13:59

re dopes, imho ultimately even if 'worx' -- rather like diff b/w driving toyota and ferrari while stuck in traffic just the same.

14:00

Took some dope to implement something that didn't quite fit in head by deadline - naturally the result was never used.

14:01

prolly fully half of programmers would admit to having done this (other half -- did, but won't admit)

14:08

upstack re 'marketing stench' -- when asciilifeform smells a whiff of it, tunes out $www . nao is left with ~0 www regularly reads, other than the l0g

14:14

I think the substitue for the ipnoe crowd is instagram

14:14

although that too - chock full of stench

14:15

Why write a blog post when you can post a captioned video?

14:18

*

asciilifeform not able to muster any interest in 'post-literacy bloggers'

14:20

even 'pirate radio' was moar interesting, imho -- at least there had the minimal 'iq test' of 'get the gear together' and min. courage in face of gestapo

14:30

i watch some centrist grifters, as a kind of saturday night entertainment

14:30

I cant even think of any centrists

14:34

hickok45, the critical drinker, pafrenon (russian stuff), jocko podcast, hardcore zen, celebrating appalachia, civvie 11, dogen, марина галкина (russian backpacking lady)

14:34

ah yes, jocko

14:34

is what i get when i grep my rss reader for youtube feeds

14:37

and also a whole bunch of equestrians which is the only "practical" value i get from youtube

14:38

like this man is a ledgend https://www.youtube.com/@PatnDebPuckett/videos and outside of going to workshops once a year i would've not otherwise had an opportunity to see him work

14:40

you can download the videos and then frame by frame his cues and reactions, and that's basically priceless, something you won't even get at a workshop, because after multiple rewatches you can see or generally learn to see the things that he's seeing, while similar situation would often be lost on you in a workshop

14:43

􏿽you get this pockets of 1990s website building happening here and there, done by people who are not technologically savy and are otherwise removed from the culture wars. pat doesn't know any better, doesn't need to know any better, and is better off not knowing any better. the fact

14:43

􏿽 that he releases unique priceless content on essentially hostile platform is a great shame, but i don't know how to redress it. something i think tmsr struggle but ultimately lost against.

14:44

and of course for every pat there's grifters with million views doing southern twang and cowboy getup larping for the off the grid aspirational crowd

14:47

􏿽like there's this guy, https://www.youtube.com/@DryCreekWranglerSchool/videos and i don't want to talk trash on him, because i couldn't sit through the one video that i tried watching. just like old man rambling with a touch of grift, masquerading as some kind of cowboy wisdom. for

14:47

􏿽 all i know he's some kind of real deal, but his face makes me uneasy

14:49

something that mp used to make fun of, grown men boys still looking for a father figure, and there's plenty of people to oblige. jocko, tate, this dry creek wrangler guy, etc. etc.

14:51

The internet has been way more informative than my dad, that's for sure.

14:52

􏿽sure, but internet itself is not your dad. if you got fucked out by your parents, you gotta grow up, and basically accept that it's the experience you're never going to have. something that used to be a common wisdom and common sense. but now you either don't grow up at all (funkop

14:53

􏿽op crowd), or you try and grow up in your 30s guided by ethot fathers

14:55

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4QhdQXqTwI "thoughts on becoming a proper kind of man" 1.2m views, first fiew minutes is the "we're almost at 90 thousand subrscribers! and blah blah blah", with a cigar and twang though

14:56

funny, this is clean slate browser window and i'm getting jocko in the recommendations. "if you like this father, you might also like this other father"

15:00

There were no ethot fathers in my 20s and 30s. Closest substitute was a judo instructor.

15:00

He spoke no lies.

15:01

i think irl surrogate dad is legit, tried and true method. because it's not just pornography, at the end of the day he can tell you that you're stupid when you are. jocko doesn't talk back

↖ ↖

15:04

Stefan Molyneux will take your calls - but that's all you get - one convo - bookended by "like and subscribe"

15:05

But yes one of his main themes is - accept you'll never have the experience

15:06

well, the other theme, which i think was a stable tmsr theme is to paraphrase for the purposes of this conversation "what it is that you say you do"

15:07

As in, you reveal what you do through what you say, or you must do what you say you will do?

15:09

well, the original is from the russian prison question "who are you in life?" which is a question to establish your prison cast, but it's not answered with "i'm a thief" it's answered with a kind of personal biography which essentially defines who you are

15:12

􏿽"first time i went in 68, for 10 years in Solovki prison #12" "you must know mack the knife" "i know mack the knife, we've been brothers" "then i came back and did some odd jobs and life in big prison was not to my liking so i went back to solovki for another 10 years to prison #50

15:12

􏿽, where i sat with john the hatchet" "i know john the hatchest" etc.

15:13

of course in worse case you answer with "oh i dunno tee hee, i'm just like a guy, you know" which basically means that you're a fag, whether you know it or not

15:13

was kind of interesting to see the repeat of that very prison interaction on #t over and over again, various all comers will join, and when presented with variotion of the question, they'll hedge and hem and make lame jokes and try and front

15:14

so true.

15:16

need moar noobs - if only for entertainment purposes.

15:22

so from this perspective the problem of shit content is inside out, i can watch pat for hours working the same horse over and over and over again "like watching tortoise die", but 5 minutes of a grifter is like "get to the fucking point jesus christ i'm dying here"

15:23

5 minutes is overstatement, 2 minutes maybe? "and don't forget ot like and su..[cllose tab]"

15:25

so maybe shit content is kind of like heroin, and william burroughs's point that "one gets addicted to heroin from boredom only"

15:26

There's always the chance the new guy might know john the hatchet.

15:28

i think that's why #t was on freenode, the original idea was not lolcow collection, but that a serious bzns person will just walk from the street

15:29

*remained on freenode long past when it was meaningful, instead of running own instance or whatever

15:30

but yeah to the original http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/pest/2023-06-02#1026909 i feel like the general quality of what one randomly stumbles on the internet has gone down. like there's been another wave, or something

15:31

Logged on 2023-06-02 13:29:25 phf: awt, i've been thinking similar thoughts

15:31

Great purge of 2020.

15:31

+ tiktok/instagram.

15:36

􏿽i've used to check hackernews comments, and while i would mostly disagree with things, or sometimes disagree with things, or at least find enough substance in the comments to muster disagreement or ire, from the perspective of "well, this is pod people logic, i hate them, but i see

15:36

􏿽 where they are coming from", this is no longer the case. there's no cultural or historic cohesion to the comments anymore. it's like a bunch of farmers on a market street corner yelling things at each other

15:37

"i heard the pope wills it, it's an indulgencia" "it's devils work i tell ya" "cow for sale, got cow for sale" "the pop has been sent by the spanish to rule over the honest englishmen, he's in bed with the spanish queen"

15:37

lol yes

15:43

hn did have a culture. as did reddit.

15:43

I don't check reddit at all these days though.

15:54

i wonder if some of it is certain generation slowly dropping out. freaks like thomas ptacek are fewer and farther between, mechanisms of knowledge transfer (or lore transfer) are fully defanged, etc.

15:56

I hated that guy

15:58

But perhaps yes. I personally had no professional mentors - although that probably says more about me than the system.

15:58

physiognomy is real, mr ptacek https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ySTmaxj-mQc/hqdefault.jpg

15:58

no pics in hn profiles

15:59

oh he lost the "beard"

16:00

that's his 2010 photo, i suspect he grew the beard since? i dunno, that's the first time i look him up

16:01

Then there's patio11

16:01

https://twitter.com/patio11/photo

16:03

ptacek would come out in force at all the cryptography projects that asciilifeform would release back before they would just flag any mentions of asciilifeform outright (though these days with the tmsr more and more distant memory, ascii went back to merely ignored)

16:06

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/pest/2023-06-02#1027001 << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTDENzpW7tw

16:07

Logged on 2023-06-02 15:59:57 awt[asciilifeform]: https://twitter.com/patio11/photo

16:11

lol yeah - met him in person at a grifter conf many years ago. Incredibly self confident dork.

16:15

i feel like i used to be a lot more tolerant of that kind of stuff

16:16

particularly back when believed that there was some kind of cyber jockey brotherhood :>

16:19

hackers.gif

16:23

hackers have been thoroughly subverted, l0pht personal account written in the past few months, where author laments about how bad things were because there was a lack of representation

16:25

endured the latest spiderman for my daughter yesterday - lots of representation now. The spiderman captain was literally a pregnant black lady on a chopper.

16:26

i only know about these things through critical drinker

16:27

which has replaced watching new movies for me

16:27

I must check him out

16:28

Villain was a white man - like - literally his whole body was white - until he achieved super-villainy by turning himself into a black hole.

16:28

that's problematic, the hole was clearly also white

16:29

Well, he didn't achieve greatness until he became black

16:29

i have yet much to learn

16:34

i mean the jokes write themselves, critical drinker has a whole movie review grift built on this particular joke

~ 40 minutes ~

17:15

There is some stuff with a personal touch I've read recently - but you gotta pay for the ebook - see delicious tacos. In olden days would have been in blog form.

~ 17 minutes ~

17:33

http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2023-06-02#1026540 << asciilifeform concedes that he's among the least qualified to eval this, but loox neato

17:33

Logged on 2023-06-02 14:38:37 phf[4]: like this man is a ledgend https://www.youtube.com/@PatnDebPuckett/videos and outside of going to workshops once a year i would've not otherwise had an opportunity to see him work

17:36

http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2023-06-02#1026564 << imho was 1 of the most surreal experiences in #t era. ( asciilifeform: 'wai would $n00b deliberately insist on being a clown' etc )

17:36

Logged on 2023-06-02 15:13:43 phf[4]: was kind of interesting to see the repeat of that very prison interaction on #t over and over again, various all comers will join, and when presented with variotion of the question, they'll hedge and hem and make lame jokes and try and front

17:38

http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2023-06-02#1026572 << mp was actually clear re this pt ( many times offered but refused 'let's stand up own irc' , explicitly had aims of 'terraforming' fleanode et al )

17:38

Logged on 2023-06-02 15:29:22 phf[4]: *remained on freenode long past when it was meaningful, instead of running own instance or whatever

17:39

( in the last 2-3y of #t, the 'walkers in from street' were no longer of the type who looked at chan list, but rather the sort that were deliberately invited, given instructions for fleanode visit. could've just as readily been pointed to equiv of 'dulapnet' )

17:40

http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2023-06-02#1026583 << recall thrd. and yes

17:40

Logged on 2023-06-02 15:54:05 phf[4]: i wonder if some of it is certain generation slowly dropping out. freaks like thomas ptacek are fewer and farther between, mechanisms of knowledge transfer (or lore transfer) are fully defanged, etc.

17:40

(trilema) 2016-08-17 phf: Framedragger: i was young and a bum, i recognized all these people because my entertainment machine would reinforce their presence for me. "oh jwz is talking. oh now it's ptacek. oh it's paul graham! squee". but they were always in a different category from say norvig or knuth or naggum. once i st

17:41

even this grade of hn nao nostalgic memory imho.

17:44

http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2023-06-02#1026592 << today (or rather, however many yrs ago that asciilifeform still had notions of 'preaching to the birds') no longer need 'flag any mentions' etc

17:44

Logged on 2023-06-02 16:03:37 phf[4]: ptacek would come out in force at all the cryptography projects that asciilifeform would release back before they would just flag any mentions of asciilifeform outright (though these days with the tmsr more and more distant memory, ascii went back to merely ignored)

17:44

(trilema) 2015-05-17 davout: HN now displays "Why Japanese Toilets Are Failing in America (2013)" higher than this

17:45

... precisely for the reason phf cited. who needs meticulous censorship when bazar. can say whatever you like, there's 'no one home' to hear

17:45

Logged on 2023-06-02 15:37:31 phf[4]: "i heard the pope wills it, it's an indulgencia" "it's devils work i tell ya" "cow for sale, got cow for sale" "the pop has been sent by the spanish to rule over the honest englishmen, he's in bed with the spanish queen"

17:47

( & see also apropos. )

17:47

(trilema) 2019-03-14 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-14#1902463 << limonov had entire b00k on subj, with slightly different twist ( tldr : the 'free world' built 'disciplinary sanitarium' (his term) where ideas-dun-matter-even-if-you-somehow-come-across-one cuz they all get http://trilema.com/2015/on-how-the-

17:56

*

asciilifeform was at one pt naive enuff to think that hn 'come out in force' mouthpieces were actually ~paid~ by reich. whereas today imho obv that no such thing is happening, they are paid like hajja nasredin 'paid' the baker -- w/ the jingle of coins

~ 49 minutes ~

18:45

Incidentally I have the #pest channel on libera irc. I plan to put in a bridge bot at some point.

18:46

Dunno why anyone would wander in at this point though, but at least I can direct people there from the web.

18:48

If gpg weren't such a hairball I would consider adding some key sharing automation to the gui.

18:50

Would be nice to automatically generate and encrypt a key, then post to paste.deedbot.org.

19:00