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
Banger meme from artist Victoria Ying
description:
It’s a scene from White Lotus. A man and a woman are lying on beach chairs, having a conversation.
Panel 1, Man: ‘Why can’t you just like my generative AI “art?”’
Panel 2, Woman: ‘You have to be vulnerable enough to be bad at something to be good at it, but you’re too much of a coward.’
Panel 3, Woman: ‘Because you’re soulless.”
Panel 4: Man is speechless, visibly shook
a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I've tried it and can speak authoritatively?
[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no why
i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists
i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow
i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don't know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers
at least it'll be these suckers' job to do the explaining while i rant
fuck. it's rationalist season
"imagine a perfectly spherical chud of uniform duncity..."
@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I've been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they're larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren't entirely clear on the whole concept of "fiction".
I also legitimately can't tell the degree to which they don't understand they're LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that's why it's gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted It's probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we'd all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.
You can't ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.
fondled his lizard
I'm choosing to interpret that in the most euphemistically way possible
@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …
Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing I've ever heard about him
Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins' Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)
@blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new …)
We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it's told well.
"i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers"
Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypse^tm^ seems like a good place to start.
"Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You'll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords."
"This Is What Yudkowsky Actually Believes" seems like a subtitle that would get heavy use in a future episode of South Park about Cartman dropping out after one semester at community college.
If South Park ever does get around to TESCREAL, I imagine Parker and Stone would have a goddamn field day with them.
No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.
Don't know what they're up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.
LW commenter - electing a crazy person as POTUS is a competitve advantage, actually
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=cZADfF3wbZqbaCFCB
[Epistemic status: gas giant sized contrarianism, negative gravity]
Check out the unhinged classism from one of the lesser figures who's popped up here from time-to-time (with an added bonus shout-out to Ayn Rand further down the thread)
Wow, this wrong and unfair but it's also just stupid. Especially this:
The homeless theory of cities:
SF is idealistic and trusting because the homeless are mostly peaceful addicts commiting slow suicide
NYC is ruthless and status-obsessed because the homeless are aggressive and confrontational
Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I'm supposed to fill in the blank or something.
If he got into specifics people might think "Damn, I've never had that kind of experience with working-class New Yorkers. What gives?" and he might have to consider let alone admit that he was an asshole to someone.
Jesus, what a fuck. Having spent time in both SF and NYC my guess is that this shithead's SF pedestrian experience is getting in and out of ubers and the treadmills at equinox. That, and he is probably outwardly disdainful, which doesn't go over well in NYC.
Wow, that's some venomously hateful text.
new york city truly is a first and fourth word city overlayed atop each other
Jesus Christ learn what words mean. Even if you use "Third World" to mean "poor countries", fourth world is not a thing and people living in extreme poverty in developing countries are in fact not better off than non Wall Street New Yorkers.
Assuming the common use of third world to mean "poor countries", then I suppose a "fourth world" country would be one that is poor and *also *not really a functional state, perhaps with some armed conflict going on.
But to describe NYC as that? Nonsense.
It's easy to read it as first and fourth "world" but it's actually first and fourth "word". But the first and fourth word of what? Mein Kampf? The 18 words?
well ackthscthually after 9/11, the whole world got isekai'd where everyone exists in a game-like status point system. The 1st world is reserved for the top rank of humans, the n+1th world is worse than the nth world. IQ points = your int stat. This is just how it is, sorry
if you, like me, were wondering what the point of that 25 hour non-filibuster filibuster by Booker was, here’s one potential answer.
Booker held a filibuster that wasn't a filibuster - and he scheduled it to let him avoid attending his own committee's probe of his Big Tech pals. […] Oh and Booker and Dems provided unanimous consent to advance a Trump nominee right after Booker's speech.
Sorry im going to go offtrack here again, I mentioned it on bsky, and got no traction (not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)), but I have some weird leading into conspiratorial questions about the whole thing.
First I heard about this thing is when people said it had gotten 200m likes on tiktok. Which seemed a bit high so I checked, and saw articles say it had gotten 300m. This seems impossibly high. For example, the global K-pop phenomenon 'Gangam style' has gotten 5.5B views and 30M likes in 12 years. I have a hard time believing that in 24hs this centrist political debate thing (which are not popular) has gotten 350m (the highest count I saw on a news site) likes.
Which makes me wonder a lot more if tiktok has simply given up on properly counting likes and just is winging it. Esp for larger events. Could be that people just like things instinctively on tiktok (I did check if you could like a thing multiple times, but nope, one account one like it seems). I found the whole thing weird.
That is didn't do jack shit (apart from giving people hopium about Booker, while it seemingly being his way of avoiding responsibilities) is the cherry on top.
~~I'm noticing my confusion.~~ It is fucking weird.
not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)
I agree, or at least anyone thinking critically. I think that anyone would agree that the speech was, as you said, hopium. He’s giving braindead dem voters what they want: a nice, tall, liberal man who looks like he is resisting the reds. Expect him to run for the democratic nomination in 2028, assuming the trump presidency lets an election happen.
RE: view counts. Most charitably, maybe it’s 300m views aggregated across different sources. Neutrally, I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if tiktok, or any other social media platform was manipulating view counts. Least charitably, someone probably asked an LLM for the view counts and just took the answer because people are fucking stupid
No it was 350m likes, not views. That is why im so confused. even at an high rate of 1 in 10 people liking it, it is just so large I'm confused.
"How about a source senator?" another source on hopium, not noticing that in no world do those numbers align properly. "since amassed over 700,000 followers. ... It garnered over 350 million likes, with over 150,000 active viewers at the tail end ..."
Are you telling me it's improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?
I mentioned this on bsky and somebody went 'well it was very popular all over the world', and I, the weird european who focuses too much on the US politics had not even heard of it. So I just had a few alarm bells going off. But yeah, lets say 1 in 5 people like it, that is a casual 1.7 billion viewers. Large part of the worlds population joined in.
As a Canadian I knew it was happening, but I never tuned in or anything like that.
OH. so two things.
*Please fact check this arithmetic. I have run out of motivation, in general
Edit #100: I jumped on said stream to see how it was going. Floating around 100, but hitting maybe 10k likes per hour. Apparently the booker stream hit 170k viewers at the tail end. 350m likes might actually be a little low, the dems need to up their spend on tiktok boosting
oh, cool, I didn't think I'd learn a new way to hate the "likes" clusterfuck that plagues the internet, but here we are!
That would explain a lot and would remove all my confusion about it. (also makes the number useless and lol at everybody running with it even more then).