I’ve been posting on internet forums for almost 30 years now. It’s just a thing I like doing.

I’m here now because it’s the best place I know of at the moment.

Funny… this is actually a different account than I was originally posting from - I switched to it because the entire thread has vanished from fedia.io.

And pretty much the first thing I see here is this response, which I didn’t even know existed before.

Not a good look for fedia.io.

Anyway…

Do you believe ayn rand believed in rational self-interest?

I think she probably thought she did, but I also think she obviously didn’t even begin to understand it.

If so, why was she against all forms of welfare and socialism?

The glib answer would be because she didn’t even begin to understand rational self-interest.

The more likely answer, which somehow manages to be even more shallow, is because the USSR was nominally communist and she hated the USSR.

If not, isn’t she the inventor of the concept and thus the arbiter of what it should mean?

No.

Even if she was in fact the inventor of the concept, which she most assuredly is not, she still wouldn’t be the arbiter of its meaning.

Though she was such an egotistical authoritarian that if she were alive today, she’d undoubtedly be insisting that she was.

Doesn’t that mean you’re changing the definition to suit your needs?

Kind of.

While I really couldn’t care less what Rand envisioned, so certainly feel no desire to hew to her conception, I haven’t changed it to suit my “needs” per se. I’ve changed it as necessary so that it actually is, as far as I can see, what it appears to refer to - “rational” “self-interest.”

I think it’s a sound concept, and that Rand, blinded as she was by her emotions, her authoritarian habits and her gargantuan ego, didn’t grasp it.

Thanks for the response.

All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

The BitGenerations games on the GBA, and especially Orbital. They’re stylish but graphically simple arcade style games - generally some combination of puzzle-solving and action.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.

Just be patient.

With all due respect, fuck the normies. The fediverse is better off without them.

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…

I don’t believe that my approval or anyone else’s is at all relevant.

My position is that there’s only one person who has the right to decide that they wish to trade sex for money, and that’s the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they’re of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it’s just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.

That’s a shame.

It feels like the end of an era.

An oldie but a goodie.

I would go so far as to say that it’s vital that Biden handles court reform, because it has to be done before the election.

We can already be sure that Trump and his backers are planning legal challenges on whatever grounds might vaguely appear to be something resembling legitimate in the event that he loses, and we can also be sure that at least Thomas and Alito will rule in their favor, no matter how ludicrous their arguments might be, simply because they’re entirely and completely compromised. They’ve already demonstrated that law is irrelevant - that they serve demagoguery, shallow self-interest, bigotry and corruption. And given the chance, they WILL do their parts to destroy democracy in the US.

We can’t afford to give them the chance.

And that could be Biden’s legacy - the president who saved America from a fascist coup.

I’ve seen no evidence that they are.

What little organic commentary I’ve seen has been cautiously optimistic at worst.

The barrage of anti-Harris stuff that all started appearing at essentially the same time reeks of astroturf.

The Song That Doesn’t End

Fight the urge to immediately get off the train.

Even with as many episodes of Star Trek as I’ve seen, I’m sure I’d want to rush right out and start exploring.

Neither really. Sort of.

There are certainly inherently repugnant beliefs, but beliefs in and of themselves are harmless - they’re just a particular pattern of firing neurons in a brain. They literally cannot bring harm to others just in and of themselves.

The thing that makes some beliefs horrible is not the mere holding of them, but the things one who holds them is likely to do. It’s those acts that are the real evil - the beliefs are just a foundation, or a trigger.

Now, all that said, I would hazard that it’s exceedingly rare at best (and arguably impossible) for anyone to hold noxious beliefs without them in some way affecting their behavior, so the mere holding of noxious beliefs can certainly serve as a justification for the conclusion that the person in question is in fact horrible. Still though, to be (perhaps overly) precise, I’d say that it’s not the belief itself that makes them a horrible person, but merely that the belief makes it quite likely that they’ll act in ways that make them (or reveal them to be) horrible people.

There are a bajillion crappy old games that I actually dislike more, but none of those would be interesting answers.

Of games that are generally well-regarded, so the gap between my opinion and the common opinion is largest, I’d have to say Final Fantasy Tactics.

It’s not that I dislike it - it’s just that, between FFT and Tactics Ogre, there are five games of the same type from the same devs and the same general era (FFT, FFT Advance, FFT A2, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together and Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis) and IMO, FFT is the bottom of the barrel - every single one of the others is better.