Archive for March, 2018

Hemlock News

Tuesday, March 13th, 2018

Anyone who understands Bitcoin and who has been in SV since 2006 (small set, I know) is familiar with the “Hacker News Window,” that is - the range of discussion allowed by the registered users who vote comments and stories up or down. It was birthed after Reddit, partly from the same patron, pg1.  The assumption underlying these democratic systems is the same as any other type of Rousseauian nonsense, that being that what the majority wants is good, and what it doesn’t want is bad.

To acknowledge the fact of the HN window is to acknowledge the intellectual poverty of HN2. If you seek the truth about anything, do not seek it on HN. Waste your words down the filthy latrine of any HN discussion and for your trouble you will drink the “social media” hemlock. Seek truth from individuals with blogs and gpg keys, hosted on their own servers, with their own IP addresses.

  1. Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, the man who went from this essay entitled “What You Can’t Say” with “Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs.” to this self crit (is it a self crit, actually? He does a good job in here of recontextualizing the excerpts used in the hatchet piece ) entitled “What I Didn’t Say” (well obviously the stuff you can’t say!) with “I also care about increasing the number of female founders, and a few weeks ago proposed that YC organize an event to encourage them.” Perhaps he should write another essay entitled “What You Must Say In Order To Continue To Receive Fiatola From The Great Inca.” []
  2. Poverty Indeed. The idea of HN is to take a shortcut - to replace a tree (the root of which being roughly Θαλῆς) with weighted set of unconnected nodes. The weights of course are an illusion. []

Altered Carbon

Friday, March 2nd, 2018

This is a Netflix series ostensibly about a man brought back from limbo by a wealthy man to solve his own murder. In reality it is an SJW masterpiece about equality.

In this universe, humans discovered the remnants of an “Elder” civilization and their technology that allows the mind to exist independently of the body in something called a “cortical stack.” Bodies are referred to as “sleeves” and may be exchanged at will, though also at a price. The only way someone can “die” in this universe is if their stack is destroyed, and no backups exist.

It is assumed in this series that someone restored from a backup, and that a stack copied into a cloned body is the same person that was backed up or cloned, and not an entirely new being. It must be assumed since no one with a backup fears the current instance of their stack being destroyed, as when Rei sacrifices several of her sleeves and stacks to subdue Ortega.

I see different layers of pantsuitedness in this work. There is the superficial skin color layer - Kovacs and Rei are half Japanese, half Hungarian. The rainbow cast also includes a swearing-in-Spanish Hispanic female cop, a wise Hispanic grandma, an Arab, an Asian police chief, an evil, wealthy, white married couple (with an inexplicably jewish son), a black female martial arts expert/rebel cult leader running a commune in some secret hole, a living AI with feelings and rights, and a black female lawyer. Women routinely defeat much larger men in frequent hand to hand combat. The Russians are evil. Kovac’s father was an evil wife killer. The brilliant hacker is a blond woman (though in this case a woman in a man’s body) married to a black man. They have a phenotypically black daughter who is, you know, impregnated by the elite white dude whose wife then beats her sleeve to death.

The second, deeper layer of pantsuitedness comes in with the sleeving. Since the soul (or “stack” as it is called here) exists independently of the body, it may be sleeved in either a male or a female body. This seems to feed the trans narrative that insists that the body is incidental and one can actually be anything on the inside.

Despite the fact that this series is an evil work of propaganda, it was beautifully produced and extremely faithful to the tradition established by Bladerunner.