istewart

You make an important point. For instance, just imagine when Twitter finally goes down for good. Trump's most provocative bullshit is archived in multiple places, but the output of dozens of little Twitlers that we might recognize and consider fairly important movement figures will probably be so much dust in the wind. Historians working on Nazi Germany can consult complete archives of shit like Der Sturmer if they need to; historians working on this period might be faced with a tattered quilt.

This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I don't really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoples' lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.

A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:

A man who is considered a TPOT ‘elder’:

TPOT isn’t misogynist but it’s made up of men and women who prefer the company of men. it’s a male space with male norms.

this makes it barely tolerable for the few girls’ girls who wander in here. they end up either deactivating, going private, or venting about how men suck.

I'd never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, they're never going to grow up.

I don't wish to belittle the author's suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participants' worth.

Didn't really think about it until just now, but a load-bearing part of Yarvin's work seeming erudite is him dropping in little bits of obscure trivia that may or may not have anything to do with the topic at hand

(One year later, the homelab is running a cluster of North Korean crypto-mining bots)

Why did this happen to ME?

It somewhat goes without saying that this is the natural outcome of Paul Graham and others emphasizing the creation of new startup companies over the utility and purpose of the products and tools that those companies make. An empty business for generating more empty businesses.

Willison is also subtly implying the claim that his judgment on the validity of this codebase and its massively tremendous test suite, after a few hours of admittedly distracted slop extrusion, is roughly equivalent to that expensive expert team working over multiple months. Given that the entire conceit of this article is him talking to himself, I will continue to hold my reservations.

It's the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy -- who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! -- but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider "truth-teller."

Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didn't really want that anyway. I've been reading through JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: "Why be #1 when you can be #2?"

The future of ass is being set right now, and it's ponderously flabby!

This one is just eternally ???!!!

Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the ~~suckers~~VCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.

Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.

When I used to work at the farmers' market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the "intactivists." It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)... But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬

Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore)

Beyond the obvious and well-discussed material externalities, it strikes me that we don't know and can't yet know the true total cost of the LLM-driven development cycle. The manifestation of security holes and rewrites are possibly still years off in the future, maybe decades in the case of lower-level code. And yet, given industry practice and the mentality of most of the management strata, I have little doubt that such future costs will either a) be ignored completely and thus rendered true externalities or b) somebody else's problem, I done got my bag, brah, see ya...