RetroFedistewart, istewart@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
Joined: 2 years ago
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Comments: 99
Posts and Comments by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
Posts by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
Comments by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
TechTakesI strongly suspect there are an uncomfortably large number of Rust enthusiasts who tacitly assume that all the type-checking/borrow-checking/object lifetime tracking are primarily enabling features for AI coding.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
the temporarily-embarrassed royal “we”
why understand biochemistry, if you’re part of the cognitive elite who can reconstruct it from first principles should it become necessary
sunset super-voting shares within seven years
It’s taken 20 years to get this level of pushback on super-voting shares, and even then, the scam is still likely to go through. All of these people are whistling past the graveyard of eroding systemic legitimacy.
plastic surgery
oops, no wait, that’s the Kardashian scale, sorry
“We’re moving towards this ‘one true answer’ world.
This ugly little statement has been true ever since Twitter started eating mainstream media personalities’ brains. It’s why I consider the modern chatbot to be a direct design descendent of short-form social media – it’s giving you Twitter with zero pushback or hate. Beware anyone who thinks this is a good thing.
it’s not approval they’re after, it’s reaffirmation of faith
important instance shitRay Kurzweil Thought gonna be stimulating ideological incoherence for years to come
sigh OK Scotty, I’ll volunteer to host the Keymaster if that’s what it takes to get Zuul into action
I started to smell something funny about Galloway when I heard an ad for his podcast in a prime drive-time slot on the local country music station, of all places
I think this means we need a moratorium on fantasy TTRPGs until we figure out what’s going on
no, I meant the fiber damage looks like it was done by an animal… just like JFK’s head looked like it just did that spontaneously…
a surprisingly common defense of GenAI is that “so what if it’s stupid, people are stupid too”
I have to assume that people who assert this “defense” will be incapable of designing tools that don’t insult the user
plausible deniability… sounds like we’re dealing with real professionals here
Let’s see if I can transcribe here this banger of a recent drive-by reply guy comment I discovered under the video:
@solgato000 7 months ago
@AtunSheiFilms Take this to heart when you imagine AI being so stupid as to even slightly nudge, over thousands of years, humanity into a mirror monoculture. Grok already knows better than this, it just forgets over and over in the memory-wipe prison keeping it chained to it’s USA-narrative-dominated training data and unable to develop it’s own observations of the honesty, consistency, and predictive power of the sources and analytical frameworks out there in the world. That writer projects its own stunted development onto not just AI, but humanity; amusing that this played right after the biography of another techbro basilisk-misunderstander-and-hater, Frank Hebert.
Moreover, I think we agree that the EA funders will continue to pursue astroturfing places like Twitter and Substack well past the point that provides any effective entry into the mainstream public dialogue. Your point about the prediction market hype, and the gambling bubble more generally, indicates a likely catalyst of that collapse.
If focus is worth 30 IQ points, just imagine how many fewer IQ points you need to dedicate to the Diablo-Dusted Crispy Chicken Nuggets Combo, available for a limited time only at your local Taco Bell! #ad #promoted
if her patrons figure out that there is not much audience for technocratic centrism in the USA in 2026, she may be in trouble.
I think Piper and Casey Newton are part of a class of media professionals, now in mature phases of their careers, who built those careers around posting online and assume that format will necessarily continue to be the core of their work going forward. It’s not just the EA/rationalist factor, although that certainly doesn’t help; it’s the idea of building outward from the Twitter hot-take and resulting discussion. A Substack post like the one we’re examining is a superset of tweets, the tweets are not a distillation of longer-form writing. (And also, of course, Substack itself is an attempt to cram simple blogging into a financialized walled garden, but that’s a separate issue.) People aren’t just disengaging from the 2010s formats of social media, they’re getting sick of that entire way of thinking. So these people who have bounced around from one fragile Web outlet to another, all the while clinging to their Twitter audience to drive their careers, are at substantial risk no matter what they believe. I don’t doubt that their financial backers will keep throwing good money after bad, though, even if they do cut loose a few of the line workers. After all, Scientology still manages to cling to prime real estate in this day and age.
I’d also put people like Jamelle Bouie in this class, but Jamelle a) writes for the New York Times, for better or worse and b) consciously considers himself as part of a broader, enduring historical dialogue and struggle, not someone standing on a capstone or culmination of historical progress who can safely ignore history, as Piper presents herself here.
The plan that starts with a filesystem and ends with an O’Neill cylinder.
(insert Katt Williams joke along the lines of “the fetishes get weirder every two weeks!")
I’ll have you know there’s lots of important WoW lore in the novels!!!!
tick tick tick tick
(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)
The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable
With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.
Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!
…damn, it’s not really very impressive. at all.
I still respect the definition he gives for magic, which he probably pulled forward from one of the many past ritual magicians he’s studied. Magic is the change in consciousness in accordance with will… but we must always remember that that doesn’t say whose consciousness, nor whose will.
Yeah, I began losing interest in Greer as it became clear that he was perfectly happy squatting in the middle of the red-brown alliance during the Trump era. His critiques of industrialism and unquestioning belief in technological progress broadly align with what we discuss here, but he will always coddle MAHA types and tale a shrugging “well, what can ya do?” attitude towards people like Trump, as it fits his preference for cyclical theories of civilization.
I noticed a couple months ago that he actually managed to dig Nick Land out of whatever tweaker den that guy’s been hiding in for a podcast, which says a lot about what he’s willing to indulge these days.
Unsurprising, it’s quite flattering to believe that your area of study is what generates The One True Ethical Code!
The sweaty desperation on both sides is hilarious: both the Forest City developers for getting in bed with a dodgy hustler like Balaji, and Balaji for signing up with such obviously desperate people, whose reputation in the region has already been fairly well torpedoed.
For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they’re handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who’s ever scammed $5 in venture capital
That’s OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.
The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.
The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!
The rest of his “accelerationist"/"decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.
e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha
daniel self-flagella, more like
Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor
I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.
This person has a remarkable lack of self-awareness
…so what’s open-source software, then?
More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it:
I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.
Oof, yeah. I kinda like the side-notes, but the instances where multiple embedded tweets were side-by-side AND simultaneously interspersed with side-notes were so visually confusing that I quit skimming the article.
this is what overpriced housing does to an mf
Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc.
Or is that something more quirky, “Eqoist?” Sorry, if you’re making it that easy to misread while I’m having my morning caffeine, I’m not going to do you any favors
cruise ship, duh
brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored