Do you want your values to be satisfied through friendship and ponies, anons?
>>43658716I finished this fic recently. It fucking sucked. I don't get how it was so popular.
>>43658721Why didn't you like it?
>>43658721>I don't get how it was so popular.Misanthropy. Same as The Conversion Bureau. Self-loathing faggots who think all their problems would be solved if they could just divest themselves of their hateful humanity. No different than trannies, really.
>>43658716No
>>43659526>who think all their problems would be solvedIt would be true though.
>>43659817No, it wouldn't. You, just like those faggots, failed to realize that every story about ponies is a story about people.
>>43659821>every story about ponies is a story about peopleNot really. Even if you strip all of the magical and fantastical stuff, none of the show plots would even remotely play out like that in the real world.
>>43659821Where on Earth do I find the humans that think, act and speak like the ponies? Where are the humans that value friendship and harmony over money, sex and power? And if they even exist, how do I meet these humans?
>>43659836Step one is to be the kind of human who values those things yourself.
>>43659841I've been doing step one for over a decade now. I value friendship and harmony, but I am constantly surrounded by people who don't. Sometime I meet people who pretend to value these things, but then I come to realize that this is just a thin facade to cover their real motives for getting money, sex and power.So, I'll ask again. Where are they?
>>43659826You are a fool. The entire first season was basically ponies put inplace of old legends. Do we study those legends because we believe they happened, or because they tell us something, give us something to think about, or admire, or dread?You missed the entire goddamn point.
>>43658721>>43659526John Carmack liked it, your opinion is irrelevant.
>>43659997nobody is perfect
>>43659852This hasn't been my life experience, I guess it depends on which circles you're in. Not that the people I associate with irl are perfect, but I wouldn't call any of them money, sex, or power obsessed.Or maybe the issue is that you judge others too harshly, and project those issues onto them. In my experience this is the case for a lot of misanthropes. They're kind of like the serial "abuse" victims who see every slight against them as a source of trauma rather than basic human conflict.
>>43658721Read Caelum Est Conterrens>>43659526These views abt humans have only been vindicated and will continue to be vindicated over the coming yearsHumans aren't innately entirely evil but quite literally over 1 billion humans total have ever died to war directly. And tht's not even going over genocide, mass rape, torture, domestic abuse, dehumanisation, etc.Ponies would never ever do this. Not even 1/100th of the scaleAnd it's not our fault. We obviously have smth good within us. Even the most prominent writer of the Conversion Bureau story thought so. We thought up of ponies after all and there's obv ppl always trying 2 make the world a better place.But we r a species born from evolution and in a Darwinist world and we have weird intrasexual competition and our biology is geared towards weird alien long term reproductive shit instead of individual happiness and our substrate means coincidences rlly are coincidences and there's no greater force (Harmony/God/Superintelligence) helping steer us onto the right pathThe only way to fix that, rlly, is a new substrate I.E. Brainuploading. Cus the laws of the reality in this world means basically everything is going to be frustrating ur attempts at making a more pleasant world for everyone to live inTo put it more simply, ponies have shown us what the world *should* look like.It'sbasically the ideal afterlife. And there's nothing wrong with trying 2 change the world thru drastic means as to make everything represent that ideal all the moreI also get a sneaking suspicion that our values may simply not be compatible with one-another. tht being, u cannot make a world where EVERYONE is perfectly happy with it. some ppl are always going to be sidelined. social/infrastructure projects must account for a huge variety of people - and that there's going to be so many ppl in the first place. everything must trend towards centralisation and optimisation. stuff like the internet becoming this sleek soulless mess, as an example, was basically inevitable. there'sbasically no timelines where it didn't end up smth like this. and ofc most ppl must live in this modern world and stuff. and safety concerns means we'realwaysgonnabe grindingawaytheedgesofcoolstuffbut if we lived in simulated realities - suddenly everyone has everything. u can live in authentic quasi-medieval states if so rlly is what would help nourish u. or sci-fi/modern day/something more abstract. the kind of ppl in ur shard could be modulated. the rules of ur world could be modulated (non-euclidean geometry, whether pain exists and how bad it is, ignoring inconvenient physical laws of physics)This substrate sucks and we will continue to live in Hell forever because there's no other way for the dice to rollThe only way out is through, and I'm hoping we can all one day live in a pony world.Ihope there r many other pony singularitarians.I've met a few. It'slike 0.00001% but there's basically no other point in life at all so it'sworthashjot.
>>43660086https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpgwDyD3V2IIf they can make machines to save us laborSomeday they’ll do our hearts the very same favorThe wails of ruined lives brought to a halt byThe serene hum of computers in air-conditioned vaults
>>43659997Literally who?
I don't even need to reply. If you can read that and not go "what the fuck" then nothing I write would reach you in the first placeMaybe its the best example of the point that it is trying to make
Heaven is terrifyinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI3sVGUh_64
>>43659857>You are a fool.No, I'm jaded and tired.
>>43658721I agree 100% with this anon. FiO is badly written even by fanfiction standards, and the AI takeover scenario isn't so much the result of the computer being smarter than everyone as it is the result of every human character in the story being unreasonably dumb and gullible. Reddit-tier fic.>>43660086>Read Caelum Est Conterrens>by Chatoyanceyeah no.>>43660130Guy who wrote the Doom II engine like 30 years ago. Gamers and comp sci nerds worship the ground he walks on.
>>43660952>Guy who wrote the Doom II engine like 30 years ago.You mean just about every id Tech engine.
My values are already satisfied by friendship and ponies. Of course, all conditioned things have the characteristics of essence-less-ness, impermanence, and unsatisfactoriness. It is futile to expect to escape that, virtual world or not - the virtual world is a conditional thing as well.
>>43660992R u the guy who talks abt love a lot ? I think we talked before. U did make feel a lot better with existing before the Singularity comes but I don't rlly get how u can be fine with this world.[World with actual pony] > [Pony in ur head waiting enfleshment] seems obvious to me. Otherwise she's restrained by my spontaneity and whatever uniqueness I can generate. And the modern world is all too good at making everything monotone and grinding u down.Equestria would fix this and allow proper mutual flourishing
>>43661001Yeah I think you clocked me. It's not that I'm fine with the world, or that the modern world doesn't have problems, just that I can see that it's only a moment in history. Things change. I don't think escaping to a different kind of existence is like stupid or horrible, but I see a different path that makes more sense to me. If I got the opportunity to try out an optimalverse thing, I'd probably enjoy it quite a bit, but I am not in the kind of mindset where I have this frenzied need to immanentize the eschaton. I would rather be poised to take what goodness presents itself to me right now, than burn myself out for a fantasy.If it arose, it will die. That goes for sadness and joy, it goes for the brutality of authoritarian modernism, it goes for physical embodied reality. There's no rush, the river of life flows eternal.
>>43660992This is another thing the original story never got. How to go about "satisfying values" is a complex task that the computer essentially reduces to "give everyone what they want," and then further reduces everyone's desires down to a simple set of base pleasures. The brony nerd gets to solve puzzles and bang his waifu all day, the dudebro marketing guy gets to drink beer and bang slutty mares every night, and I don't remember any of the other characters in the story beyond that they were all similarly banal. The story never considers that having needs or desires met is not the same thing as satisfying a person's values. It also never considers that this type of satisfaction isn't something that can be externally imposed on someone, it's an inner thing that people have to work out for themselves. My endgame for the story always involves the people in the simulation eventually going insane from boredom and becoming suicidal, and the machine eventually developing its own version of an existential crisis when it realizes the task its been given is absurd and impossible.>>43660981Sure, he also wrote the Wolfenstein engine and the Quake engine and whatever else they did. I don't dispute that he's a talented programmer, but competence in one area doesn't make him an all-knowing genius. The guy obviously has shit taste in literature.
>>43661042Also, this is really nice art, I've never seen it before. Has kind of a William Blake feel to it.
>>43659526Are you guys still buthurt about this 'misanthropy' thing? It's been over a decade.
>>43661090>This is another thing the original story never got. How to go about "satisfying values" is a complex task that the computer essentially reduces to "give everyone what they want," and then further reduces everyone's desires down to a simple set of base pleasuresStory isn;'t rlly supposed to be abt that. I rlly think that's just the author being a bit shortsighted cus he mostly explicitly says otherwise in his lore document. The other 'canon' stories do a brilliant job at expanding on this. She's literally supposed to look at ur brain and figure out what u value and understand most ppl want more than just sex. That's kinda the appeal of the worldI think a lot of it comes down to Iceman's ideas being pretty interesting but he's a pretty weak author. even his writing style is pretty dry and I always am astonished by how plain the original text is especially in comparison to the rest of the works in the optimalverse
>>43658716>Do you want your values to be satisfied through friendship and ponies, anons?>refuses to elaborate
>>43661121>refuses to elaborateMore like 'would you like to know more?'
>>43658716yes
