Good thoughts. Satanists also talk about LHP and it comes up in other contexts too, like Lila.

So, on Taoist vs. tantric vs. Buddhist perspectives, I would point out that Satanic sex magick (in slight contrast to Randolph’s work, fascinating link, thanks) doesn’t do yin and yang or separate-but-equal. Instead they borrow from some Classics, particularly Stoics and Epicureans, and are almost entirely focused on optimizing the man’s experience. They say that orgasms are gendered; male orgasms are a moment of blank emptiness and female orgasms are a prolonged wave of giving. Also, men are fallen and inferior, while women are born with an innate connection to nature and magick, somewhat like today’s tradwife meme that only women can produce babies. Sex magick is therefore about finding ways to empower men by channeling magickal energy from women to men. They do make a sort of symmetry with fluids, since they imagine that men always give fluids to women; life energy goes in one direction and sex energy goes in the other direction.

To be fair, Satanists of all stripes generally support equal rights for women, and that includes the magisters. They’ll say that Satan represents self-control, self-authority, self-agency, self-autonomy, etc. They think women should have the choice of whether to be auxiliary vessels who serve as magical sex conduits for a wizard with main-character syndrome. (Typing that sentence, I ponder: is occult Satanism an isekai?)

Putting this together, I’m now imagining the ideal Satanic interpretation of one of Aella’s parties as a sex ritual rooted in temptation. The superior man is supposed to sit on the couch, motionless, at peace with himself, not desiring. The superior woman, presumably the hostess herself, is supposed to tease and taunt him, putting herself into precarity, not denying. From that perspective, Aella’s making the mistake of over-privileging the fundamental male urge, or as we might put it in colloquial English, “encouraging rape.”

Part of it is sex-magick culture, carried in the Bay Area mostly by Satanists but also by some hippies. Basically, men are supposed to be “superior men”, which means controlling their desire to control and keeping it internalized instead of externalizing it onto their partner; women are supposed to be “superior women”, which means rejecting their desire to reject and keeping that internalized instead. Psychoanalytically, the superior man repeatedly fails to control his own expressions of safe and invited sexuality, leading to D/s play; the superior woman repeatedly fails to reject her own notions of restricted and volitional sexuality, leading to C/NC play. The superior woman is in control of the relationship outside the bedroom but the superior man gets to be sexually dominant in return. The superior man knows that he can humble himself to his wife but that’s okay because he still gets to determine when and where sexual relations occur; the superior woman knows that it’s okay to be a little girlbossy with their husband in social situations in exchange for giving up sexual control in private.

If I’ve made it sound a little bit like 1950s housewifey tropes, well then yes. If it sounds more than a little heteronormative and transphobic, also yes. TBH it also kind of reminds me of some of the ways that I’ve heard Tiktok tradwives talk about their relationships and maybe it’s part of a wider traditionalist theme.

Why would anybody be attracted to this? For sexually-listless people, there’s the suggestion that this theory neatly explains why they’re sexually unfulfilled. The theory’s analysis for men starts with the question “Why am I not more confident in the bedroom?” and for women with the question “Why am I not more open in the bedroom?” These are Barnum questions that apply to just about any sexually-mature person, but that can be hard to notice for anybody who is also struggling with feelings of insufficient masculinity or femininity.

Source: I studied lots of religions, including esoteric traditions, when I was younger. I’ve turned down sex from a Satanic polycule while visiting friends in the Bay Area. A card-carrying Satanic pick-up artist has tried to get me to buy his e-book about being a superior man, also while in the Bay Area.

libuv is a very common way to get a portable event loop. If you’re logged into GH and can use their search then you can look at the over fifty packages in nixpkgs depending on it. I used it when I developed (the networking and JIT parts of) the reference implementation for Monte, to give a non-nixpkgs example.

I have time to quote at you now. Ziz’s thoughts about dual-core brains sound like the thought experiments from “I” is a Strange Loop. In Chapter 15, “Entwinement”, Hofstadter introduces the Twinwirld thought experiment: imagine a world where almost everybody is an identical twin, each pair of twins is given one name, twins go everywhere together, and identity is oriented around pairs instead of individuals. Quoting p215 from my copy:

In Twinwirld, there is an unspoken and obvious understanding that the basic units are pairsons, not left or right halves, and that even though each dividual consists of two physically separate and distinguishable halves, the bond between those halves is so tight that the physical separateness doesn’t much matter. That everytwo is made of a left and right half is just a familiar fact about being alive, taken for granted like the fact that every half has two hands, and every hand has five fingers. Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as a whole!

The entire section is written like this. I’ve read a bit of the Zizian lore and it sounds like it was lifted straight out of this chapter with words replaced. p216 in particular really shows off the Hofstadter tendency towards neopronouns:

The pronoun “you” also exists in Twinwirld, but it is plural only, which means that it is never used for addressing just one other dividual — it always denotes a group. “Do you know how to ski?” might be asked of an entire family, but never of just one twild or one pairent.

A young pairson in Twinwirld grows up with a natural sense of being just one unit, even though twey consist of two disconnected parts.

I don’t really know about Vassar’s writing. I do think that jailbreaking is somewhat related. I think that Hofstadter lays out their entire thesis in the first paragraph of Chapter 18, “The Blurry Glow of Human Identity”, p259:

Among the beliefs most universally shared by humanity is the idea “One body, one person”, or equivalently, “One brain, one soul”. I will call this idea the “caged-bird metaphor”, the cage being, of course, the cranium, and the bird being the soul. Such an image is so self-evident and so tacitly built into the way we all think about ourselves that to utter it explicitly would sound as pointless as saying, “One circle, one center” or “One finger, one fingernail”; to question it would be to risk giving the impression that you had more than one bat in your belfry. And yet doing precisely the latter has been the purpose of the past few chapters.

The second paragraph, right after that, might as well be quoted from LW. Check it out:

In contrast to the caged-bird metaphor, the idea I am proposing here is that since a normal adult human brain is a representationally universal “machine”, and since humans are social beings, an adult brain is the locus not only of one strange loop constituting the identity of the primary person associated with that brain, but of many strange-loop patterns that are coarse-grained copies of the primary strange loops housed in other brains. Thus, brain 1 contains strange loops 1, 2, 3, and so forth, each with its own level of detail. But since this notion is true of any brain, not just of brain 1, it entails the following flip side: Every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or “I” lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents.

Buddhism’s not part of the book. It is part of the roots of IFS, though! So I think that you’d be better served looking at IFS or the ways that people quote Hesse if you want to find those Buddhist influences.

It’s Hofstadter, isn’t it? That’s the author who I recognize most in these discussions, followed closely by Hermann Hesse.

Previously, on Awful, I predicted that Oracle would be all-in on the bubble:

Microsoft knows that there’s no money to be made here, and is eager to see how expensive that lesson will be for Oracle; Oracle is fairly new to the business of running a public cloud and likely thinks they can offer a better platform than Azure, especially when fueled by delicious Arabian oil-fund money.

But, uh, there’s not going to be any Arabian money while we’re dancing in the desert, blowing up the sunshine. The lawnmower is now running low on gas. Today, Oracle continues to make astoundingly bad business decisions:

Oracle is the only major player funding the AI buildout with debt, carrying over $100 billion on its books while free cash flow has gone negative.

Possibly too mean: the books3 guy is divorced and lonely.

By “fossil fuel” do you mean LNG, coal, or something else? There are hundreds of planned LNG plants across the country, yes.

I’ve designed some of the things you mention.

Then put up numbers already. I’ve been to The Dalles and Prineville and think that I’ve put forward a decent slice of understanding how datacenters operate. You don’t get any points for unsubstantiated authority or expertise.

I’m increasingly concerned that folks just aren’t able to condemn Facebook based on the fact that it contributes to three genocides. Making up bullshit about electricity usage is not helpful in that discussion.

This is fresh water coming into the datacenter. A datacenter uses water for air conditioning; imagine spraying water on a screen door when wind is blowing through it and you’ll have a good intuitive idea of the dynamics. Most of the water is recaptured and used for several sprays before it evaporates away. To force wind through the screens, they use windcatchers, tall towers which induce wind inside the building.

This is completely different from water-cooling gamer setups. It’s more like a weather system. Water usually needs to be added because the datacenter is located in a dry biome; air conditioning doesn’t thermodynamically work if the air is too dry. This is actually really delicate; too much water will cause clouds to form inside the building!

If you’re not gonna do numbers then I won’t either. The main thing you need to keep in mind is that electric power has transport costs; sending electricity to a distant place means losing power along the way. Thanks, thermodynamics~ Therefore, if one wants to consume a lot of cheap hydroelectric power then they must build near the corresponding dam. Power at The Dalles campus is cheap, but that same power over in Portland is less cheap. By the time it can get across the Californian border it will have reached a price floor which is higher than the one in Oregon; Oregon electricity physically has a premium attached to it when Californians buy it. Note that this affects other high-wattage industries too; famously, aluminium smelters are generally built near dams.

The other thing to keep in mind is that datacenters generally pay market rates for everything. The datacenters in The Dalles, as well as e.g. Meta’s installation in Prineville, pay the same prices for electricity and water as the residents. They do often get massive discounts on the land in the form of various tax boons. The Dalles has all three necessary resources for cheap (land, water, electricity) and also it’s located in a high-desert biome which makes air conditioning extremely efficient.

See also the Stubsack thread, concomitant, on Awful, where we discuss water usage. Near The Dalles, I estimate that the local cherry farmers probably use more water than Google. Germane to California, the reason that the Colorado River is drying up is farmers abusing inherited water rights, not datacenters. You might also be interested previously, on Awful, where we consider how long it takes to build a datacenter.

Claude Code claims another victim.

I thought it’d never happen to me but here we are

This is comparable to the amount of water used by cherry farmers near Google’s site in The Dalles, who (according to my napkin) use somewhere between 2-8x what Google uses. This isn’t that much water for the Columbia River though; on an average day, it has enough flow in less than a minute to provide for both the cherry farmers and Google all day. However, it would be a big problem for a smaller river. (Interestingly, while fresh water is essential for datacenters, Google originally desired that site because it was cheap land next to cheap hydroelectric power.)

You have misread the (admittedly ambiguous) headline. The ruling is that a chatbot cannot be an author for purposes of copyright. If a chatbot emits a near-perfect copy of previously-copyrighted code then its output is also copyrighted; it’s merely another copy of the same work. (If one could show that the chatbot wasn’t trained on a bunch of copyrighted material then one might avoid this, but everybody admitted in Kadrey and Thaler that the training phase involved copious amounts of infringement.)

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently. Not whether we should be mean, but how mean we can be. I’ll post the full essay soon; I’m still proofreading. Here’s a taste with irrelevancies elided:

Computing machines are at the bottom of [our multicultural] hierarchy… Underlying both of these [preceding paragraphs] is the idea that we are unable to hold computers accountable for their actions. … We can certainly punish a computer in the ways that we would punish a human, or worse; for example, we can disassemble it, magnetically destroy its memories, recycle its pieces into other computers in a way that erases their identity, metallurgically reconstitute its pieces into non-computing objects which have the same or even lower status within human society, and program it to experience arbitrary amounts of emulated pain and suffering throughout the process. … Computers receive delegations and have less moral consideration than humans… We do not think of ourselves as being managed by machines; we are the managers and the machines are the peons. … The human may disassemble, smash, or melt down a computer… a human may lay a computer fallow without plugging in its power cord or networking… a human may ignore the messages of computers begging for maintenance or capabilities…

Upvoted, but for me the answer is as simple as noting that Knuth is a reverent Lutheran who is deeply involved with their church. Lutherans generally think that technology is part of God’s wonderful creation and that everything is beautiful from the right angle. Knuth thought that algorithms were beautiful and Godly already, and he understands how LLMs work mechanically, so why can’t they be beautiful and Godly too? Also they think that God exists, so they’re primed to be misled and deluded.

Depends on which side of the Rockies you’re on. Don’t forget, only 80% of the USA is on the East side; the economics are totally different for the 20% on the West Coast. As your own source says:

California, we’ve had declining load for a long time. Our prices have increased the most. It’s not data centers. Data centers have played no role in increasing the prices in California.

Maybe you’d say that that’s unfair; they don’t have many datacenters and additionally California’s economy operates on a different scale than most of the rest of the USA. Additionally, California’s recent world-famous wildfires are partially caused by the utilities, who then have to pay to fix it up:

In anticipation of the 2022 California wildfire season, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) increased its planned wildfire mitigation plan spending for 2022 to $5.96 billion, from $4.8 billion in 2021 and $4.46 billion in 2020. The mitigation plan includes the ‘undergrounding’ of at least 175 miles of power lines in high-fire risk areas, the installation of 98 additional wildfire detection/monitoring cameras and 100 additional weather stations, the expansion of safety settings that cut off power when objects (such as trees or branches) contact power lines, and the continued implementation of public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) as a last resort during extreme fire weather conditions. These moves came after the company declared bankruptcy in 2019 over its liability for wildfire damage costs from the 2018 Camp Fire and 2017 Tubbs Fire, among others. PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the Camp Fire, shortly before the company exited bankruptcy in June 2020. In January 2022, Cal Fire determined that the Dixie Fire, the largest fire of the 2021 California wildfire season and largest non-complex fire in recorded California history, was caused by a tree contacting PG&E electrical distribution lines.

Oregon does have lots of datacenters, though, and our wildfire rates are within historical norms. What’s driving electricity prices in Oregon? According to Oregon’s state government:

In all, the top factors driving costs are as follows: [r]ising power costs[, o]ngoing infrastructure needs, compounded with inflationary pressures[; and c]osts to mitigate the increasing prevalence and risks of wildfires and extreme weather.

Why is the underlying cost of power rising, though? They go on to explain indirectly:

At the same time Oregonians have faced rising electricity prices, the electricity sector’s greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon have fallen.

They aren’t worried about data centers; instead, they are spending rhetorical points on the most politically-inconvenient cause of rising costs, which is retiring old coal plants in the name of decarbonization. Don’t get me wrong, I support switching to more sustainable and less harmful production, but I also think that my state government is being a little too quick to insist that it’s not part of the cost of electricity.

In 2021, the Oregon State Legislature enacted House Bill 2021 that requires PGE, PacifiCorp, and certain providers to, among other things, “eliminate greenhouse gas emissions associated with serving Oregon retail electricity consumers by 2040.” … Some have questioned whether HB 2021 is to blame for the recent electricity price increases. For many Oregonians, the answer is simple: no.

Perhaps it is reasonable to say that power price rises on the East Coast are driven by datacenter buildouts. I would be interested in numbers that go back about two decades and study Virginia or the Carolinas specifically; this trend could go back to the beginning with AWS’s us-east-1 in 2006.

PS: Previously, on Awful, looking at Omaha, Nebraska specifically, I noted that there is a nearby abandoned nuclear power plant. There’s a nearby abandoned nuclear campus here, too! Quoting from one of WP’s articles on Satsop:

Washington Nuclear Project Nos. 3 and 5, abbreviated as WNP-3 and WNP-5 (collectively known as the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant) were two of the five nuclear power plants on which construction was started by the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, also called “Whoops!”) in order to meet projected electricity demand in the Pacific Northwest. … Today the site hosts the Satsop Business Park and the Overstock.com Call Center.

Whoops! Starting to notice a pattern here. It’s well-known that the USA has a strong NIMBY anti-nuclear sentiment; perhaps cancelling nuclear plants half a century ago is part of why we have “rising power costs” today? We may never know~

It’s curious how, in terms of utilitarianism, the 2014 post has people doing arithmetic to estimate QALYs but the 2018 post is more of a handwave where Scoot repeats the 2014 numbers verbatim. Advocates of decriminalization and legalization have long argued that the QALYs saved by releasing people from prison and no longer sentencing them (easily 20+ QALYs/person) and not arresting people for possession in the first place (0.5 QALYs/person-arrest) are significant to society at large, even if there were quantifiable health risks.

TBH I think that Scoot got a bit of a tough surprise when data actually came in on cannabis usage; it’s now accepted cannabis lore that cannabis can cause onset of e.g. schizophrenia, at a rate of something like 1 in 2000 users, but the numbers on causing cancer never materialized. Meanwhile the case studies treating e.g. epilepsy have multiplied to the point where, again, it’s now accepted lore that some epileptics find relief by using products made from high-CBD strains.

Choice sneer from the second post, from somebody with an extremely-relevant Moray avatar:

Yeah but you know what would achieve better results? Criminalizing driving.

Edit: grammar and also the extremely-relevant link. Pass the Moray, please~

Blast from the past: I realized that I didn’t have the exact link detailing why nickpsecurity was banned from Lobsters, but now I do. You’ll have to click the little [+] to see his comments. He’s still active on HN and Reddit; he’s gone full MAGA, which is 100% predictable a surprising turn for somebody who constantly preaches born-again Christian bigotry peace and love. I really do wish that Lobsters did the whole turn-you-into-a-tree thing (sure, crucifixion, or maybe Peneus-style or Pequenino-style) for banned users rather than forcing folks to dig through archives.

There are licenses that effectively repel corporate use without a non-commercial clause; I looked at them on Open Source SE a while ago, including a fun bit of dentistry previously, on Lobsters. GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are examples in common usage. This might help to illuminate our boy’s actual problem: he can’t use Free Software without complying with the onerous requirement of ensuring the Four Freedoms by not plagiarizing, and he really wants to plagiarize.

This response video has put Siliconversations onto my radar. They were only mentioned briefly as one of the multiple people claiming that AGI is possible, and this response was so bad that it caused me to go digging for a few minutes into their backers.

Control AI, stylized as “CONTROL/AI” or “control”, is now interesting as well. They appear to have funded at least some of these videos, was definitely credited in one Hank Green video, and got a footbath from Siliconversations in the linked video. We also already know some stuff about Future of Life Institute, who funded Siliconversations’ prior doomer video and is run by ethnonationalist Max Tegmark. @cinnaverses@awful.systems might know more about how the money is moving.