CinnasVerses, cinnasverses@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
Joined: 11 months ago
Posts: 10
Comments: 227
Posts and Comments by CinnasVerses, cinnasverses@awful.systems
Comments by CinnasVerses, cinnasverses@awful.systems
Zero Interest Rates Policy from 2008-2022 and lack of antitrust enforcement in the USA lead to two things: incumbent software companies got bigger because they could borrow so much money and buy or crush their competition, and small software companies did not have to make profits now because investors tossed in more money and hoped they would make big profits one day. That world is dead but the industry has not adapted.
The LW insider thinks Aschenbrenner is trying to save a stake in Anthropic. I think that is very likely because the press release stressed “public stock position” and Anthropic is privately owned.
Edit / I don’t think Thomas Kwa of METR and LW understands leverage. The idea is that if you borrow $40.5b on $4.5b of collateral, you have $45b to invest but a 10% drop will wipe you out. Before you get there the bank will knock on your door and say “margin call! either you provide more collateral or we seize your assets.”
The op-ed writer is Adam Mastroianni who is a regular at Lighthaven. https://gwern.net/interview-inkhaven
He cites Andy Masley who is yet another autodidact with a cushy job in the Effective Altruism grantland. https://www.andymasley.com/ and Brian Potter who is an engineer at a think tank called the Institute for Progress https://ifp.org/author/brian-potter/ ("The overwhelming priority of energy policy must be making it easier to build things” which things angryDuckMeme.png)
The controversy about the 26-year-old with the 16-year-old wonders if the respondents are all in California which has a very high age of consent. More replies say that is rape than say “a client fails to pay a sex worker” is rape. Her audience ranks it equally with the bodice-ripper scenario (handsome top ravages someone who says no and struggles but really wants it in his or her heart).
That link is login-walled, how about summarizing it?
It was Yudkowsky-2008 who was astonished that “these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive,” prompting David Gerard to ask “My dude, have you never heard of cocaine?” I don’t know if he had moved to the Bay Area yet but Yudkowsky-2025 had thoughts on LSD.
“Any Sufficiently Transparent Magic…” by Damien P. Williams talks about chatbots as sorcery https://pages.charlotte.edu/damien-p-williams/wp-content/uploads/sites/1342/2024/01/DPW_Any-Sufficiently-Transparent-Magic_Edits-PrePrint.pdf
I like to keep my analysis separate from my word-magic (making things happen by saying them). Greer is trying to remake the world and not just work up his courage which is a harmless and consensual form of word-magic.
Some far-right culture warrior is writing a book blaming the Zizian killings on their being trans rather than classic cult dynamics and apocalyptic ideas (*The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult*) https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-ngo/the-zizians/9780316599030/
Yes, skeptics classed Alcor and cryonics with homeopathy and Bigfoot. American skeptics had a Libertariam wing but I have not heard of Michael Shermer visiting Lighthaven.
The biggest crossover between skeptics and rationalists I can think of is Julia Galef, and she podcasted with a philosopher who debated Yud once then decided it was infra dignitatem. She also dropped out of CFAR when it became more open that the rationality workshops were for finding Sarah Connor.
I don’t think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
I also don’t get it because they already hate pre-social-media institutions, so why are they still angry that American journalists were bad at transmitting public health science at the beginning of COVID? Even if you believe in a COVID lab leak, the United States broke the global public health response while countries in East Asia and the South Pacific showed what to do. There are lab-leakers who blame a partnership between traitorous American scientists and sinister Chinese labs to conduct research that was illegal in the USA.
Edit / this guy just comes out and uses COVID lab leak theories as an analogy for AI-box fantasies, but these people don’t just cite it as a parallel, they are MAD about what they think happened and want you to be mad too.
That was the party line in the American foreign-policy crowd since winter 2021/2022. They thought that if the ‘great power’ Russia invaded, Ukraine would fall. So Burja’s tweet was not even original, just the same thing any 23-year-old staffer in a new suit was writing.
Decker is a GMU Econ PhD student getting distracted by Twitter and Aella. I don’t think he has figured out that for a nerdy dude, “economist/quant” is a much better career path than “social media provocateur” (so delete X, get your PhD, sign on with a financial-services company, and frolic with sex workers on your own time).
Edit / he dropped out of his PhD program but wants to start a new one at Cambridge. I would not bet that he becomes Dr. Decker. He also has a date-me Google Doc.
He is a successful pulp writer and pop nonfiction writer and fundraiser, and women like him, but he does not seem like a riveting speaker. In some ways his withdrawal to Twitter and Washington State makes it easier for fans to imagine that he is whatever they need.
He cites Samo Burja and Nicholas Decker? And Cremieux is the twitter account he cites second most often, with Richard Hanania in 4th place?
Samo Burja ("How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem"), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?
I think Yud does not want the responsibility. LessWrong and Effective Altruism attracted so many people, and he discovered that trying to manage the communities was too much work, so he just tweets and publishes fanfic. This is convenient for his fans because they can pick and chose which of his ideas are the Real Yud Thought.
In a quick DuckDuckGo I can’t find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.
His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must “fundamentally understand engineering").
RetroFed
Could you explain? Dollar-cost averaging is a mainstream and effective concept in investing (if you buy investments with a series of contributions over time, you will get some when price are high and others when they are low, and the average price you pay will be in between). Traditional investments are cyclical, so one part of your portfolio will do poorly for 5 or 15 years, then suddenly it grows quickly while the things which were growing shrink.
Its like he wrote “many of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a ‘Brazilian model.” and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.
Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):
So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:
As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.
Scott Alexander literally says this before his story about ‘Henry’ the patient who beat his fifth wife because she objected to him cheating with the ex who had left him after he beat her:
/s And male rationalists would never, ever hang out with an edgy scary person like Yarvin, Sailer, or Vassar for the thrill and bragging rights! Only teh fe-males would do such a thing. /s
Disgraced artist, TTRPG writer, and porn star Zak Sabbath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_Smith tweeted about Brent Dill. Do all the awful Internet celebrities from fifteen years ago know each other? (No links because I delete my xcancel history).
Edit / https://xcancel.com/Alex_A_Guerrero/status/2067067064750047321#m (reply by x dot com/@ZakSmithSabbath)
Wired has a story about Peter Thiel’s Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, “sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).”
So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.
A lot of people want to know if the Law of Armed Conflict has a “wicked advisors” or “misogynist influencers” clause.
No, it seems to be on the Nazi bar? So Brent Dill now has a YouTube channel and gave a talk about sasquatch.
Some Vibecamp organizer tweeted that he organized a weekend event with young women and Brent Dill. He agrees with Scott Alexander that figures like Curtis Yarvin are sexy and attract women to your events!
A vibecamp peson replied with screenshots of a chat with with Dill where he claimed that during 2014-2018 he was living in a rationalist group home and had his expenses paid in exchange for serving as an “emotional support dom” for a barely-legal person who had had sex with housemates while under 18, and that drama inside the house lead to the accusations against him (reminder, Dill confessed to doing some very disturbing things to much younger partners on his blog).
Yuan tweeted in response:
There is a 2 hour 39 minute YouTube video called “The Legend of Brent Dill: An Outsider’s Perspective on the Human Sacrifice Rituals of the Rationalist Cult.” I ain’t watching that.
Can we just take off and drop a small asteroid on Oakland?
Geoffrey Miller could do with a RationalWiki entry https://www.primalpoly.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)
Qiaochu Yuan (no relationship to the man accused of soliciting a child) left his PhD program to become an "emotional coach." If his old tweets are any guide then Doctor, heal thyself. G. Duleba and Ozy picked similar careers rather than coaching a soccer team or teaching freshman English like most people who want to be teachers and mentors.
Edit / Ozy also does not like the PUA advice of Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max. I think this is less sneering at a stranger than sneering at someone Ozy’s friends know and admire (Miller and Fleischman attend TESCREAL events).
A migrant from the San Francisco Bay Area returned for a software conference and was creeped out by the ads on billboards and public transit. “VIDEO CREATES SHAREHOLDER VALUE” “YOU DO NOT EXIST WITHOUT VIDEO” https://www.simplermachines.com/something-is-very-wrong-in-san-francisco/
The “Behind the Bastards” on Nicole Daedone’s California sex cult does have a lot of similarities to Ziz’s stories of CFAR events, and the CFAR founders’ hints at what went wrong. They mention cuddle puddles and a series of early figures who dropped out or were pushed out. Its not at all the vision I got ten years ago from the blogs and podcasts.
Hardly anyone who matters is on twitter any more so I think many policymakers (and most retail investors) don’t understand what Musk is tweeting every few minutes
Edward W. Niedermeyer, who wrote the book on how Tesla is a tax fraud and pump-and-dump disguised as a car company, will livestream the SpaceX IPO Friday https://atmo.rsvp/p/niedermeyer.online/e/3mo23aiagjs3t The real drama will be spread over at least a month.
Remember, investing is about decades and national economies not days and individual companies. If you think the US stock market is going to become more like Russia’s than France’s, you can make a policy and act on it to reduce your stocks’ exposure to the Mega-IPOs.
Could be a LLM, could be a call-center worker in Kenya or Mumbai or Manilla. Its an old move.
We appreciate any volunteering you can do now that sneering is your job!
People have told me their organizations are like this with cloud spending (no curiosity about how to reduce it and measure ROI, until someone orders cuts).
Unfortunately with mass media and social media you just have to accept that the people who get the biggest audiences will like attention and get some of the details wrong. They are built to create stars not spread facts.
The last few years have showed many disadvantages of the ‘AGI’ quest which were not widely foreseen. Those disadvantages do not depend on the technology.
RationalWiki no longer has technical staff, just a bit of help from @davidgerard@circumstances.run. To deal with bot swarms, possibly launched by Emil Kirkegaard’s gang of racists with sensitive egos, they blocked some of the scrapers which Bing and Google rely on. Since 2022 DuckDuckGo is a front-end for Bing.