Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Continuing on the theme of nerds misreading culture, here's Asimov with abundant sour grapes about Nineteen Eighty-Four
https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
Via HN, where no-one bothers commenting on the fact that the piece is hosted on a Marxist-Leninist, anti-revisionist website.
Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena don't mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.
Then there's a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. It's pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. It's only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise it's just sparkling sectarianism.
The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed
Better organized than the POUM, I'll give it that. "Won out" is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.
And then there's the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because it's impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesn't work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldn't possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isn't this dystopian society more feminist?
Orwell had Julia working in the novel factory - where machines spliced together romance trash pablum for light entertainment. So he accurately prophesied LLMs.
They are organizing another Inkhaven in April, maybe because it brings in at least $80,000. I do not recommend committing to spend a month in the presence of our dear friends given their practice of allowing sexual, psychological, and substance abuse in their communities!
Ryan Mac:
Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.
We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.
For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.
Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.
Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir's chairman and tells Epstein there is "no need to rush." This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.
Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel's VC funds.
One of @ering.bsky.social's great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the "optics" of telling founders that Epstein was involved.
So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.
At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.
[...]
While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI's say so.
But why are we talking about some AI agent platform in the Urbit newsletter? Naturally because we think, Urbit fixes this.
As a matter of fact, Tlon is already working on this with their Openclaw Plugin for Tlon Messenger. It is currently in an early adopter phase, but they expect to provide an instance of Openclaw with every ship that they host for their users.
but of course
desperately trying to latch themselves onto the coattails of whatever passes for cool among nerds these days
Not one, but two utterly out of touch LWs trying to interact with culture.
Earlier today, woke Proust get slammed by some young 'un direct from college: https://awful.systems/post/7140871/10327823 (note that they can take time off to read Recherche, even going to the length of spending time in France, which tells me they don't really have to worry about getting a job or anything)
And now, someone tries to "explain" the perfectly spherical explosion at the end of the Akira movie with the fact that atom bombs in Japan really looked like that because humidity, utterly forgetting that the explosion in question was psychic/telekinetic and therefore probably follows its own damn rules on visual appearance
I swear to fucking god both LW and HN have the worst takes on culture in general and SF/F in particular.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made mushroom clouds.
In the Baker test at Bikini Atoll, the bomb was underwater, dimming the initial flash and making initial transient effects more visible.
slowmo shot of the last american nuclear test delivered by airdrop, it is spherical, but not because of condensation cloud (that moves away quickly and is transient anyway)
I think Dominic Housatonic developed into a mushroom cloud as it progressed (past the interval captured by the slowmo).
like any other, it can be even seen deforming in the last frames
Imagining an LW enjoyer attempting to tackle Proust and getting straight armed into the Shadow Realm.
Axios publishes an ad for Anthropic. tptacek bravely defends a corporation from unimpressed fellow hackers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902909
Edit: tptacek implies that Ludic no longer stands behind Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI, which I don't believe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906403
tptacek explains that the one armed bandit addiction loop is good actually:
Here's a fun exercise: go email the author of that blog (he's very nice) and ask how much of it he still stands by.
Has someone already done it or should I send the email? Ludic would be delighted I'm sure
I can do it, I have to email a bunch of stuff today anyway. (Edit: sent.)
Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror | The Guardian
On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you aren’t distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesn’t quite match up with the noises coming out of them.
Too bad, I liked about half of his films, esp The Wrestler.
The suspicion that notbyai.fyi was in fact a pro-ai techbro highlighting scrapable data has prompted comment from the founder: https://mastodon.social/@notbyai/116004178899556722
Hi, Allen here! I never thought I’d need to say this but, I am not an AI bro. I don't work for an AI design agency. We're not in the AI industry, nor do we sell your data.
…which seems like a load of cobblers. Imbl brings the receipts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@imbl/116014455337112737
I’ll assume the argument will devolve into weasel words over what “ai bro” and “ai design agency” will mean, and I suspect the conclusion will be that actually he’s working for and with ai bros, with an interest in selling ai bro-related services to further the goals of ai bros in general, but somehow that wont’t be precisely the same thing.
did that imbl thread get locked? I get 404 on it
This is the first time I have ever seen the term "AI design agency," which raises some yellow flags
Either the stupidity just metastasized or China is going to try and pull a reverse star wars on the US and make them burn up an even more horrendous amount of capital to keep up with nothing.
China plans space‑based AI data centres, challenging Musk's SpaceX ambitions (reuters)
You know what they say. Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake, as this can allow them to continue their errors and lead to their own downfall
Enjoy sneering at this LWer tackling Proust
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3ZtsYBYBcTTFXH5S/in-search-of-lost-time-a-review
Edit it has garnered one comment so far
Thank you for the service you have valiantly rendered to us all, by making our own reading of these books unnecessary.
You know what? I don't think Proust would have disagreed with having rats avoid his novel.
intellectual elite my arse.
Intellectual: e-lite, the mass produced promo type handed out with sherbet packets in primary school
The comment, see my prediction that when a movement runs out of idea they inevitably start a dating site for the in crowd, and 'lets do book summaries so we can all read faster'. Esp vague self help style places do this all the time.
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is one of those books that people like to claim to have read but never did.
First I heard of this.
im gonna shit
warming up on philosophy with Simulacra and Simulation
oh no baby what are you doing
some important characters in the narrative I've completely skipped over, mostly to do with the Nature of Art (in society) subplot, because nothing actually happens in them and it's all social parties and talking
you ... mother ... fucker ... so not only did you manage to miss the fact that this is a gay book, you completely skipped past one if not the most important theme in the novel which is language and the way people talk and write and the various ways they conduct themselves in different times and places, but oh nothing happens it's just people talking aaaaaaaaaa
also this is a funny book! it's funny! it's not all maudlin meditations upon time and memory! fuck you!
you completely skipped past one if not the most important theme in the novel which is language and the way people talk and write and the various ways they conduct themselves in different times and places
I don't think the LWer even realised those themes were there. This whole review screams "failed high school English" to me.
yup this is pretty much what happens when you grind books for xp instead of actually reading them
Such a great description
I happen to know there are multiple translations of the novel into English, and I'm confused as to why the reviewer refers to
My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation
which doesn't really mesh with anything here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time#English-language_translations
Not that it matters much in the end.
I’d chalk it up to the LWer inability to a) summarise and/or summarise accurately, and/or b) LLM usage.
I feel like I just read someone reviewing Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by complaining that there's no upbeat sections and no overall chorus and the song isn't about anything, that we're just "tossed about on the storms of emotion that by the end we are all seasick to"
I liked the part where the reviewer is mysteriously compelled to visit France while reading this novel, which is notably set in France.
Tangentially on topic:
Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! I'll likely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and I'm hopeful that it'll win all the awards.
Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:
In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol
Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.
Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.
@o7___o7 @techtakes That's why I'm fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.
Today in excellent cold opens: "I didn't talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so I'm so healthy."
