Petrarchive – the boomers

back
No.11297 Anonymous 2026-08-02 06:46:13
the boomers
Post image
really are going to kill us all, aren’t they?

it’s all gonna crumble JUST when you LEAST expect it. prepare NOW if this is a possibility for you. here’s some tips from somebody who’s been through it.

sleeping in the car? you’re better off sleeping in a bush, weather permitting. investigate the area - think like a detective, has someone been here recently? WATCH OUT for needles

make sure you’ve got a nice hard copy of the books most important to you. even if you’re not a reader, you’ll miss them SO MUCH

get yourself a comfortable backpack and tent (tarps are cheaper, lighter, and more versatile once you’ve got the hang of them, 10’ x 10’ works great with a ground sheet)

get a sleeping bag, best you can afford (30 degree bags work year round for me. if it’s too cold put on all your clothes and press a hot water bottle against your chest)

BRUSH YOUR TEETH!!!!

keep a cleanish set of clothes on standby if you can. you’ll be treated like trash otherwise

you will smell so so so much worse than you think you do

if you’ve got a car, stay out of it. you’ll go fucking nuts in there. DON’T end up driving around wasting precious gas

sleep outside? CHECK FOR TICKS

if you don’t know how to work on your car (brakes/fluids/oil changes/basic parts swapping) learn how. learn suspension stuff if you can. don’t use the shitty jack that came with your car. get a haynes repair manual.

if you wear glasses, INVEST IN A BACKUP PAIR AND KEEP THEM IN A HARD CASE.

if you smoke cigs, you can buy HUGE bags of pipe tobacco for like $30 (i recommend windsail platinum) and roll your own (use TOP paper, other paper looks like a joint)

cringe af, but i found an old typewriter and it’s been such a wonderful companion. you could always just write by hand, but a neat formatted page makes me feel like a HUMAN and not just a stinking animal

SELL BLOOD PLASMA!! (show up before the donation center opens, TRUST me)



—————-MOST MOST MOST IMPORTANTLY!!!!!————-
every day, look at your reflection, make eye contact with yourself, say your name. you will lose a some of the person you were. that is okay. you do not have to lose it all. remind yourself constantly who you are.

it’s not a matter of survival, really, you’re not going to die, but you are going to regress into a much older kind of human. your social ability, your choice of words - things hard to explain, they change after a while. if you were a Gilgamesh before then you’re gonna be Enkidu by the time it’s over
No.11298 Anonymous>>11300 >>11302 2026-08-02 07:21:03
oh great, a schizo
No.11300 Anonymous 2026-08-02 09:37:48
>>11298

are we sure they're not doing a reddit parody?
No.11302 Anonymous 2026-08-02 10:07:20
Post image
>>11298

schizo?? no. no. i’m. not. i’m not. i’m just ahead of the curve
No.11305 Anonymous 2026-08-02 10:46:47
I enjoyed this post. If it was on a book I would probably be more critical but I liked it bro
No.11314 Anonymous>>11334 2026-08-02 14:33:45
Post image
I'm sorry you are living in your car and in a rough spot. You know, the academic wokes invented "unhoused" specifically to describe this situation, to separate you from the lower tier of homeless.

The boomers are a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Snapping your fingers and killing everyone over 60 tomorrow won't redistribute wealth or get you into housing. The conditions that allowed them to benefit are the same ones that push you down. The same goes for billionaires, though you won't see me sprinting to stop the guillotine.

There will be no collapse. There is a slow, managed decline. I know that's boring to hear, but that's because it's true. A dramatic, obvious, fast collapse only happens in movies, where you have received most of your education from.

Boomers and billionaires and economic crashes are becoming the new millenialism. You will not live to see justice delivered by "the collapse of the system" that is harming you.
No.11322 Anonymous 2026-08-02 18:00:24
>>if you wear glasses, INVEST IN A BACKUP PAIR AND KEEP THEM IN A HARD CASE.
as someone who has to wear glasses (and is basically blind without them), I think about how if "the big one" happened I would be fucked at some point. makes me sort of want LASIK, except i dont like the idea of zapping my eyeballs + I have dry eyes and am frightened of the idea of making it worse.
No.11323 Anonymous 2026-08-02 18:04:30
>SELL BLOOD PLASMA!! (show up before the donation center opens, TRUST me)
I sort of sadomasochistically enjoy donating blood and have wondered about selling plasma to at least get something back other than the occasional t shirt for my vital essences, though I've heard the places can be less than great phlebotomist quality wise (I have small veins that sometimes trip up the pokers and I hate nothing more than someone rooting around with a needle inside my arm) and you are definitely side by side with tweakers while there.
No.11334 Anonymous 2026-08-03 11:57:54
>>11314
Yeah cosigned to all of this. The options for now are either managed decline or partial stack collapse. Trump is that avatar of partial stack collapse: you'll get stuff like pandemics, or supply chain breakage, or gas shortages with him, but you'll still have to go to work. You'll have to check 20 pharmacies to get your mom's medication, and there will be fire on both sides of the highway.

The upside of managed decline is that if we can keep the scientific-technological-industrial base running, then every 10, 20, 30 more years we substantially increase the likelihood of inventing transformative tech. 10 years ago AI was a joke relegated to LessWrong like other loserthink -- it was on the same level as cryogenics. Now it's the biggest thing in the world. And the advances aren't just happening in information systems. There's insane things happening post-CRISPR. Materials science is popping off. And so on. We get more golden eggs the longer we keep the goose alive
I'm not saying that any particular one of these will necessarily solve a civilizational problem... but they might completely reconfigure the space around a civilizational problem. Think about anecdotes of Greeks inventing the steam engine. That's us. .
No.11337 Anonymous>>11368 2026-08-03 12:25:14
>>11134
>10 years ago AI was a joke relegated to LessWrong like other loserthink -- it was on the same level as cryogenics.

Maybe 20 years ago. 10 years ago we already had language generation like Markov chains, image generation and other sorts of pre-AI stuff, it was extremely clear where LLMs were headed but it took time for physical hardware to catch up and make it feasible and widespread.
No.11338 Anonymous 2026-08-03 12:34:54
Nine years ago, audio generation was used to make a black metal album fed on input from Krallice: theoutline.com/post/2556/this-frostbitten-black-metal-album-was-created-by-an-artificial-intelligence

Funny to see the overall positive and inquisitive tone towards AI here, lol. But yeah, not cryogenics.
No.11367 Anonymous 2026-08-04 12:09:16
>11338

I'm not necessarily saying that AI as it currently exists is doing much of anything. I think it's very bubble-like, and I think it's fueled by the most parasitic inclinations of the investor class to extract everything imaginable from labor and the consumer economy with an eye to minmax financial speculation. But a weird characteristic of bubbles is that they also produce Xanadu moments. If you flood a sector with capital then at some point -- almost by sheer numbers -- something constructive can get done at least in some places.

Maybe a useful comparison is Bell Labs or Xerox and the retro-futurist stuff they invented there without ever commercializing it. In its heyday, Bell Labs was charging monopolistic prices for phones and phone equipment and then routing a healthy amount of that cash to paying for stuff like hologram research, genuine breakthroughs in quantum science, etc. The upshot in one case is that they invented the video disc (the Capacitance Electronic Disc) years in advance of digital video, but they just fucked up the business side of it. Check out "Fumbling the Future" for more on Xerox.

My point is that there's just so much outrageous treasure being poured into blue-sky R&D that some places are surely working on something that will be useful. CRISPR is an example of another technology that's just beginning to roll out. Gene therapy is getting started now -- the FDA has already approved gene therapy for sickle cell. Can you even imagine the possibilities if even 0.1% of the human phenotype can be technically influenced by gene therapy?

The question is whether a "managed decline"-type economy will sufficiently reward investors for developing these breakthroughs into transformative technologies from R&D, or whether the investor class is going to be completely deluded and destroy something valuable before it really gets its chance to shine. By analogy back in 19th century a lot of the productive oil sites in Pennsylvania were destroyed by early oil drillers with boneheaded drilling techniques. Oil that took tens of millions of years to form was destroyed in hours by some Nimrod looking for a quick buck.
No.11368 Anonymous>>11371 2026-08-04 12:12:51
>>11337

You're wrong. "Attention is All You Need" didn't come out until 2017. They had to watch "Arrival" to get critical ideas about the transformer. Illia Polosukhin has said this on the Hard Fork podcast.

git gud
No.11371 Anonymous 2026-08-04 13:09:17
>>11368
2017 was 9 years ago anon. The fact that you are using a published whitepaper drawing on early neural networks proves my point, that 10 years ago this was already in full swing and not at all in the realm of fantasy tech such as cryogenics.