YourNetworkIsHaunted, yournetworkishaunted@awful.systems

My wife keeps lamenting that we haven’t found ways to help pet rats live as long as cats but I don’t think this is what she had in mind.

So did anyone else read the terrible Star wars novel “Darksaber” about the Hutts hiring one of the architects of the death star to build their own in order to hold planets hostage or something, and while the new Republic is trying to rally the gang to go do what they do to death stars the Hutts are so busy cutting corners and embezzling that when they go to turn the thing on for the first time it just fucking explodes?

I don’t know why that’s coming to mind right now.

He certainly seems to enjoy the same kind of privilege of an infinite rebuy that Elon gets. It really does feel like there’s a limit of nine digits on the money counter and once you get more than a billion dollars it just overflows to infinity. There seems to be no amount of bad investments they can make or money they can lose that would actually matter or make them come back to the same economy the rest of us live in.

The fact that the 2014 presentation opens with “SoftBank=goose” just makes the 2026 metaphor even harder to parse. Is SoftBank itself the goose? Is the goose the hypothetical ASI that OpenAI is definitely going to build and monetize any day now? Am I the goose? I certainly feel undervalued sometimes, maybe I’m the goose.

At this point I’m expecting the next big startup to literally call itself Golden Calf

I vote we preserve this term for future and past bubbles as well.

Maybe my experiences are unusual, but I’ve seen more harassment and general shittiness from other commuters than I ever have from homeless people camping nearby. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I feel like we’re back to the problem of harassment and violence already being illegal. Going back to the immediate question here, removing the benches doesn’t make harassment or assholery any more difficult or more consequential.

Is there any chance this is just an awkward translation?

I mean it seems like a lot of that could be avoided by, for example, keeping the goddamn bathrooms open (or making there be public bathrooms). Drugs are already illegal. The station is still a roof over your head, making it preferable to the street whether or not there are benches.

Ironically it seems like the most direct harm done by homeless people sleeping on the benches is that those benches aren’t usable by commuters who may need to rest. And this certainly makes that problem go away, I guess. Wouldn’t exactly call it solved.

It’s also funny to note that at least 2/5 of the points are actively bad advice. Naively extrapolating from a trend line is one of the most common errors people make when trying to make a prediction, especially when you’re already prone to letting the aesthetic of data lead you astray. Trusting in a kind of “normalcy bias” or whatever you want to call the assumption that the world will continue to be pretty normal is one of the better ways to hedge against that.

Also I’ve said it before but the name “technological singularity” literally comes from the idea that at the hypothetical rate of change they’re posting all our existing models of what is possible or probable break down like the laws of physics at the center of a black hole. If you’re reasoning from a pre-singularity model then definitionally there is no expectation that it should continue to hold true. I don’t think I need to get too deep into why the whole singularitarian concept is pretty sketchy in its own right, but since it still lies at the heart of the science fiction driving these people’s predictions I think its worth acknowledging that it does suggest its own nonsense.

There was a line in the piece you linked from Wired that seemed to imply that the AAI gulag might be a holding cell for engineers who zuck didn’t want to just lay off (presumably to avoid spooking investors and tanking morale even harder) but also didn’t want to have on their previous role of actually working on Facebook/insta/whatever.

What I find most interesting in all this is that none of the coverage I’ve seen has said that crimes happened in its vicinity that it failed to detect, only that it didn’t issue any citations or whatever. Which is wild if you consider that they basically had it doing laps of a parking garage or whatever. You would think that if it was encouraging people to not rob those cars or whatever that it was doing its job, much like how ostensibly a speed camera is supposed to discourage people from speeding rather than just issue fines.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this obelisk-looking-ass robopig was actually succeeding, I just think that the criteria being used to declare it a failure say some really bad things about the state of policing.

I mean, I think he is entirely too credulous of people who claim to be doing things better with AI and discounts a lot of the possible costs of AI systems that malfunction silently and produce plausible bullshit. But I think that those elements complicate his point more than they fully contradict it. Like, consider his last example. Lawyers looking for possible cases for something like the innocence project have to start somewhere, and I can fully believe that the kind of statistical analysis marketing itself as AI is going to be able to pick out viable leads better than doing it randomly or alphabetically or whatever, and that might save the lawyers time and let them help more people than they otherwise would have. But by replacing a naive algorithm with an opaque one you’re essentially baking in any underlying biases in the current system. The people who aren’t going to get seen now are still probably not going to get seen unless they’re right on the margins somehow, and that “somehow” is almost certainly going to be racism, sexism, etc. But by moving that bias from the immediate decision and placing it in the AI model it becomes that much harder to unpack, identify, and address. Like, I fully agree that much if not most of the harm being done by AI right now is more tied to the business and economic structures that it’s embedded in rather than the technology itself. There are very good reasons why so many crypto/metaverse/nft grifters moved straight to AI, and when they try and move on to quantum or web67 or whatever else comes next they will keep right on hurting the world in the same ways unless something about those structures changes. But that doesnt necessary mean we shouldn’t also focus on the harms and limitations that are inherent to the way these things function rather than how they’re used.

Wasn’t this the boat that everyone was like “yeah it’s gonna fall over in a stiff wind which is pretty bad for a sailboat” only to be overruled because money? And now the captain and crew who were actually willing to sign on are being investigated.

I would be slightly more charitable than that. I don’t think it’s a matter of failing to read or understand the surface of the material, I think it’s a failure to seriously engage with it. He’s the Tolkien equivalent of a 2005-era Reddit atheist who is can rattle off all the worst parts of Leviticus but has no empathy for why people actually connect with their religion. (Unrelated: I am describing myself here.)

Like, the beating heart of LotR is a kind of 20th-century romanticism, a celebration and eulogy for a world in transition to something wholly new. Combined with the fact that Tolkien largely codified the whole set of fantasy races I can sort of understand where people with fascist tendencies connect with it. You could interpret some of that in a very “RETVRN"-coded way where Gondor and the Shire are both the glorious homeland that needs to be protected and/or reclaimed, especially if you dig into certain elements of the lore around Numenor. Alternatively in that kind of reading it’s entirely possible to construct an argument about how Sauron and Saruman are the bringers of progress and industry. Pretty sure I remember a cracked article back in the day that made this argument for laughs, but you can assemble it from the parts in the text. Either way you can make something of it that I imagine Thiel and his set are pretty damn comfortable with.

Of course that would require ignoring the far more central theme of the story, which is how power is inherently destructive. The ring itself is the most obvious manifestation, but I think the other element that gets lost is the way that Sauron is ultimately defeated not by Gandalf out-wizarding him or by Aragor out-kinging him or Gimli, Legolas, or anyone else out-fighting him. It isn’t even Frodo and Sam persisting in their quest and resisting the call of the Ring, for in the final pivotal moments even their strength and righteousness failed them. Instead, it comes down to Gollum’s greed and devotion to his Precious. His weakness, in other words. Tolkien coined the term Eucatastrophe to describe this kind of moment, and it’s notable for being the culmination of the story’s smaller moments. Time and again the heroes of LotR choose to do what is right and act with mercy, honor, courage, kindness, or respect not because it’s the right strategic choice - indeed the most logical consequence would have been failure in a thousand predictable ways - but because of their connections to each other and their faith that rightness and righteousness will somehow align.

This is of course antithetical to Thiel and the whole project which worships power rather than fearing it. The whole theme of the Hobbit essentially is a rejection of the attempt to be “agentic” and exercise power over the whole world rather than enjoying your own life. Bilbo’s heroism explicitly comes not because he’s going to save the world but because he wants to help his compatriots recover the same humble comfort of home that he enjoyed his whole life.

“The assumption is: you have to physically own the books and destroy them after ‘reading’ them – in order to argue that no unauthorized copy remains in circulation and that it qualifies as fair use,” the bookseller says of the presumed logic behind it.

Have any actual courts ruled in favor of this nonsense? Because I thought fair use was tied to things like public benefit and transformation more than a direct number of copies. Like, I’m pretty sure that I’m not allowed to fax a book to myself even if I put the original through a shredder, and that’s ignoring the question of how much gets inexorably lost in the process.

If I understand it correctly I think the most important part of the process is simply the fact that it’s putting some share of your current income into an actual growth investment. DCA in that sense is less about getting a better return on your overall investment, and more about starting to build those long-term investments in a way that has a predictable and minimal impact on your day-to-day household budget. It’s not answering the question of “what should invest in” but rather “how do I start investing?”. In that sense I guess we should probably be more clear that you can DCA into actual solid long-term investments rather than throwing your money at crypto. Hell it would probably be less destructive on net to take your monthly DCA to the literal casino and put it all on black.

That actually raises an interesting point. I would be curious to see if DCA is actually doing some harm mitigation by giving the truly pilled victims a maximum that they’re going to throw to the grifters, compared to how often people set it as a minimum amount of money. If they weren’t DCAing would they be investing less by waiting to see what was left at the end of the budget or more by not bothering to seriously plan their expenses at all?

Rather than trying to efficiently buy a diverse portfolio by investing in areas that are cheaper at the current time, which sounds like what you’re describing, the bitcoiner DCA goes like this:

Every pay period set aside a certain fragment of your paycheck to buy Bitcoin no matter what the price is. Sometimes you’ll buy 1/1000 of a sat because the price is high, which is okay because you’re getting a valuable asset. Other times the price will be lower and/or trending down, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy more it just means that this pay period you’re going to get 1/500 of a sat instead!

It’s yet another coiner “investment strategy” that cashes out to “stop asking questions and buy my bags no matter what”.

I feel like this falls into the classic blunder of smart dumb guys throughout history of using aggregation and abstraction to obscure what’s actually happening.

It’s not technically the same as chasing losses because the bet doesn’t technically resolve until you try to sell your Bitcoin. Unless you’re selling your stake and only then deciding whether on not to buy more, the theoretical final value of your Bitcoin could be anything. In that sense, DCA does make some sense in the hypothetical final accounting. UYour payout is whatever price you sell at, and your buy-in is a weighted average of the prices you bought at. For something like a stock portfolio where you actually have reason to expect the overall value of your investment to grow over time (because the economy generally grows and your portfolio is spread across a broad swathe of it) the math does work.

But the problem is that it doesn’t address the fundamental problem of crypto investing, which is that crypto is worthless and crypto bros are usually looking to concentrate their assets in this worthless category. “Look at my average cost go down!” isn’t actually a relevant response to “why are you throwing more of your money into a fire?” In average terms you may have paid less per unit you own, but in absolute terms you’re still throwing good money after bad.

Averages, samples, models, aggregates, whatever form it takes, the tools we use to track and evaluate the world don’t magically tunnel through space and time to change it. In terms our very good friends would recognize: the map is not the territory. But especially in finance it seems like making the map look the way you want gets treated by smart dumb guys as though it’s the same thing as changing the territory itself to be more favorable, when in truth they’re either finding a prettier vantage point for your landscape photography or else straight up lying and sketching in a non-existent beach.

Given how our very good friends were promoting the concept of prediction markets for ideological/idiot-logical reasons before polymarket existed I’m pretty sure they didn’t need to be bribed or set up. Just let them show off that someone actually made the real thing they were pitching as a concept a decade ago and pretend all the issues don’t exist.