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Ted Kaczynski has died
251–260 of 823 posts
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
As asinine as it sounds, I agree with them. In this specific case, there’s no reason to believe that a completed bomb is the same as an intent to bomb anybody. I’d be surprised if any 20-year veteran bomb builder didn’t have a couple fully-working prototypes, the same reason I’d be surprised a 20-year veteran coder had no fully functional prototypes. Crafting is crafting, whether you’re doing woodworking or killing.…
Dude. There is a difference between a bomb that has significant ability to kill and destroy and sample code.
Is there? Whoops. I’ve been doing it wrong for about 20 years now.
(My sense of humor has gotten me in hot water more than once, so I may as well go all-in. Probably a matter of time till it nips me though.)
In seriousness, the goal here is to have curious conversation, and follow that curiosity wherever it leads. I agree it sounds asinine, but think of the sheer number of details he had to get right merely to survive. He was one inch away from blowing himself up, quite literally, for years. I’m not at all ashamed to point out the obvious skill required.
If he pulled the pin on a few grenades and casually tossed them at people, we’d be having a different conversation. But he built things, just as we do. Certainly a different kind of thing, as you say, but he was still a builder.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about forgiveness, it's about the story. MKUltra is a critical factor in this tale. And from a journalistic and social point of view, society would be a far better place if more people knew about MKUltra [1] than do. Beyond that it's also important to ever emphasize that actions have consequences which may not always be easy to predict. One of the countless reasons Machiavellianism is absolutely idiotic. [1]…
They still do it. It's still under the cover of front organizations. It's called research. They usually target people that don't follow the grain. One group that is targeted are expats, nomads, etc... Due to the rules/laws/regulations that don't apply because their subjects are traveling and in a temporal state and are abroad they can get away with much more.
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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#254I'm very surprised he didn't die earlier. Take his mental state at sentencing, then consider he was in ADX Florence Supermax from 1998 to December of 2021...23 years. The regimen there is 23 hours a day by yourself in your cell. There's one hour a day outside in a sunken concrete area, each prisoner is placed in an individual 12x18 foot wire-mesh cage, and can speak to other nearby caged prisoners under the watch of…
His cell was apparently 12×7-foot, or 3.6×2.1 metres (I was curious). Seems awfully tiny, and personally I consider it inhumane no matter what he has done, but apparently he wasn't too unhappy with it: "I consider myself to be in a (relatively) fortunate situation here. As correctional institutions go, this place is well-administered. It’s clean, the food is good, and it’s quiet, so that I can sleep, think and write (usually) without being distracted by a lot of banging and shouting."[1]
Come to think of it, I might prefer a smaller cell over a larger one if it's clean and doesn't have "a lot of banging and shouting", but that probably says more about the general state of the US prison system than anything else.
[1]: https://news.yahoo.com/the-unabomber-s-not-so-lonely-prison-...
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#255Approaching the era of AGI we will see a lot of more occurrences of technofobia, violence and probably new movements to go back to sq1 and live like 200k years ago. It looks inevitable if the pace grows exponential.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
His "criticisms" of the left read like something a denizen of /pol/ or Reddit would come up with. It's entirely possible to see the merits of his arguments against technology while dismissing his deranged hatred of leftists, feminists, etc.
The OP literally asked to "attack the ideas, not the man", and here you go attacking the ideas solely because of the kind of men who share it... What do you mean by " it reads like something /pol/ or reddit would write "? Does Kaczynsky use tired cartoon memes? Does he accuse the left of insufficient weightlifting? Does he challenge them to a 1v1 in a Nintendo fighting game? What part of his criticism do you actually…
Lol had not heard this one. The left has "insufficient weightlifting".
Might be true.
Could it be that on the left there are more endurance sports, for health. And on the right there are more muscle building sports, so they can strike cool poses with their guns?
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#257I have never been able to accept any form of primitivism or reactionary ideology for many reasons. Chief among them is this: if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak? The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past…
> Chief among them is this: if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak?
This is a quite limited perspective that ignores momentum of change. In the book Against the Grain, the author observes that the earliest societies that transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agrarian worked harder and longer hours with less time to relax and have leisure and were actually less healthy and didn't live as long. That's just one example where "progress" was not such. We see this again and again though. Yea, we've amplified the amount of stuff we can grow but at the great cost of the environment and even our own health and well-being. We now ingest food filled with plastics and toxins, like mercury.
Human technological progress has occurred at rates that we cannot emotionally and biologically keep up with, and the distance is only accelerating.
> All our significant problems must be very hard to solve or they would already be solved.
Most significant problems were created by us in the first place.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#258It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.
This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority). He said and did a lot of things. It's normal to variously agree and disagree with each thing in a vacuum. This is true of most political/societal figures, no matter how horrific they are, taken as a whole.
> This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority).
I don't think it implies any of that. The GP just means some people can't or won't separate the art from the artist.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#259It’s been years since I’ve read Industrial Society and its Future , but I remember it felt like the author was rationalizing his own emotional state into a philosophy supposedly explaining society. It contained many subjective ideas presented as hard fact, as well as some naive romanticization of pre-industrial societies. He was right about one thing, though. No one would give his writings a second look if he wasn’t…
Here is a timestamped clip of George Hotz Twitch stream from 6 days ago making the same point about rationalizing his own emotional state of powerlessness in Industrial Society and its Future
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#260Ted Kaczynski was a genius, a mathematical child prodigy, became a professor at Berkeley at 25 and had a bright future. I completely blame CIA experiments for his downfall into radicalism and extremism. His ideas were very valid, but his mind was too tortured to deal with them in a healthy manner. Rest in peace.
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In the article it says he made an appointment to see a psychiatrist but left the waiting room before actually meeting with the psychiatrist (and then had an epiphany to kill people instead).
Not sure you can really blame that on the University or psychiatrist.