Those of us who used Macs in the late PPC and early Intel days know what Apple is capable of. This current trend where your only fix is to reboot/reformat/reset preferences, or suffer, is trash. People these days are just used to everything being trash, so Apples current software quality seems OK to them.
Apple used to be a company whose public image was intrinsically inseparable from the intergalactic ego of its chief executive. Now it's just your typical slop company run by slop executives looking to maximize next quarter's share price before they exit through the revolving door, on their way to the next company in line to harvest.
> “Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
Sure. All instances of "centrist" in the #Modern portion of that wiki could be replaced by "institutionalist".. but it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)
Institutional reforms seem to go through better if done proactively. Eg, Sweden, 1990s, preempted China shock. What gave? Had the right people been voted in (at various levels)? Was there a culture of running parallel optimisations (org-Darwinist take) of status quo ante?
You might be able to apply those to how Swiss institutional-reforms (if any) preempted China shock
(or, now, how they are handling vs just avoidinh "migrant shock", orthogonally to the "resilient" demographic, popular framings, etc)
Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
Well, they have said they would support the social democrat party leader as prime minister, prior to the election - as did the left and green parties and are (sort of) participating with those parties in negotiating the formation of a new government. And none have the mandates to form a government without each other. So I would say they are in fact part of the same "bloc", in some sense.
However, the left has stated that they rather reasonably won't support a government that they are not part of. The center party on the other hand has said they won't support any government that the left party is in and seem to be open to forming a government (at least not denying when being asked directly) with the right wing parties of the former government, despite that bloc losing the election.
When one party's "red lines" only seem to soften when facing the right, I think that does say something about their true intentions.
Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now).
Snowflake has the weirdest provinance. It was used in Fight Club as a metaphor for individual uniqueness, but because the people who thought Tyler Durden was the coolest thing ever identified with his followers. When Tyler said "You are not snowflakes" they took it to be a positive statement. Snowflake got reinterpreted as a metaphor for fragility.
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.
Correct. I wouldn’t really call them anti-heroes, however, as those are still meant to be sympathetic.
To put it less ambiguously, I’m looking for a term for a character which is written to be repulsive but a number of people in the real world misinterpret as a role model.
Yes, and it's being used ironically here. The people who pointed and laughed at those who wanted "safe spaces" and overly sensitive, are overly sensitive about people not like them getting any help. "You called us snowflakes, but you're the ones who have the fragile ego."
I'm not necessarily an AI booster but I don't think it's at all true that "humans would follow the spirit of the trial process" Some of them will. But I've met far too many humans in all areas of life who will happily follow the letter and not the spirit. Sometimes out of malicious compliance, sometimes out of sheer exhaustion, sometimes because they can't tell the difference between the letter and the spirit and sometimes for a whole host of other reasons like laziness. There will be a not insignificant number of humans are not at this vary moment following the spirit of the thing.
Sure, we need redundancies and checks and balances in the system. You can’t trust everyone.
It’s not as though people who cheat the system aren’t reported or found out. Academics that lie in their research and companies that use loop holes are found out all the time. Maybe there is no will in some countries to do anything about it, but they are found out.
The important bit is that clinical trials already have those redundancies and checks and balances, and Tao didn't even bother to learn about those before going straight to reward hacking.
Academia and biotech is rife with reward hacking, I think the math people just don't get out enough to understand that entire fields have built up massive regulatory structures and lobbying systems around this already.
>They can't even write readable, intelligible code.
Skill issue.
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