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
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT5MX8jK9tHiBM5NK/re-taste
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
No it doesn't, you fools, you absolute rubes
If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.
wat
Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.
Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd
Aaaah my eyes
The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.
This future doesn't have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.
This is from 2023 but when debugging an xfce issue this week I came across this forum post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16835
The user is competent enough to use xfce with Debian, but too incompetent to understand debug symbols is not a violation of privacy.
Kelsey Piper bluechecks thusly:
James Damore was egregiously wronged.
Wow, the story is so much more troubling when you lie about it!
Looks like Ziz remains on the lam again.
Hackernews woke up feeling like fascism ( make sure to enable dead + flagged comments if you hate yourself):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696
(Two comment threads about the CDC purging "woke" research, the comments are bad even by HN standards)
Gee given a forum full of hackers you'd expect them to be against arbitrary removal of scientific studies. What happened to "information wants to be free"?
Bonus US terribleness: the NTSB suddenly thinks Twitter* is the bee's knees and way better than email! What coincidental timing https://xcancel.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1885734974298435943
Also I know I know, more US politics. It turns out silicon valley fascists have gained power so expect this to keep happening for the forseeable future 🙃.
These past two weeks have made me very uncomfortable working in Silicon Valley, I know last time I said I was planning to get out; but now it feels urgent both for my own well being, and to stop contributing to this industry. In trans communities we immediately saw coupy stuff** for the attempted transgender genocide that it is, the wider public and media is waking up to this very slowly.
* An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool.
** If there's interest I could try turning all of this into a top level post on morewrite or techtakes. I've been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it's extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
Not clicking those HN links, decided years ago already that site should not be part of my life anymore at all. The few times I have deviated from that rule since, I regretted it.
As for the more general topic, I feel so bad for all trans people with everything that is unfolding. It's horrible. But be assured that there are many peope in this world who are on your side on this. Wish I could say something more useful, but I'm at a loss of words.
An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool
Not just that, but a site that, if you are bot logged in shows an accounts posts not chronologically, but most popular first. Making it totally incapable to be used as a gov communication platform. Imagine looking at a gov storm warning system for your area and seeing the list of most virally named storms first, and nothing about how you should evacuate right now.
Amd yes it is quite horrible that the usa is in the book burning and building (more) concentration camps stages of the gearing up for genocide stages. Up next, taking away passports (which they are already not issuing anymore) and any guns (not that these help, historically speaking, iirc the Jewish people had guns in Germany at first).
I've been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it's extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
yep. haven’t been posting about it here because not sure where here we’d put it (while a lot of it is well within the orbit of regular content and posters) and it’s not quite entirely anything I can do anything about but offer words of comfort and keeping watch on the nasty shit, but been speaking a lot with friends in places (signal generally, or some other spaces we actually control (i.e. not discord, etc))
I feel moderately confident that at least for a bit of the foreseeable future we’ll be okay this side of the world, but I also know enough history and context to know how vacuous that is by itself. these fuckers won’t stop.
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake, none of this is these fuckers just finding some shit they disagree with under the seat cushions. I wish I could make them understand the depth and extent of planning and preparation that went into this, the sheer commitment behind it all. but too often such concerns would all be received as this toot put it
there’s so much more I could say but I guess I’ll leave it there for now
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake
I keep seeing US people go "a lot of Trumps plans were stopped at rhe courts last time", and I keep worrying this is people fighting the last war again, not realizing that the opposition are active intelligent (as in baseline human beings not as in high IQ) people who prob are not going to be stopped by the same things as last time. Dont worry the Maginot line will stop them from invading too fast, cant get through the Ardennes sort of thinking if that makes sense.
While companies seem to be betting on anti discrimination laws being gone (why else take the legal risk of shuttering dei programs). (I have written reactions like this before and often deleted it because it feels just too doomer, but it keeps coming back to me).
Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.
I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (don't judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenberg's summary claims it was written in the 21st century. There's actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.
Given that it's in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. It's also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesn't really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.
Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.
* maybe the '70s give or take but I'm not a professional date guesser
https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1882927003508359242
Eliezer Yudkowsky says he would like to be a post-human some day, but the way to get there is by experimenting on augmenting biological intelligence through adult gene therapy targeting the human brain with suicide volunteers who may end up schizophrenic rather than taking a "leap of death" into unconstrained AI development
(found via flipping through LW for sneerable posts/comments)
L. Ron Hubbard says new "high-voltage" e-meters set to enter testing with Sea Org volunteers, possibly capable of purging body thetans at an unlimited rate
Am I reading this right? Is he suggesting doing experiments on the suicidally depressed?
i read this and my brain started leaking out my ears
i want to slap each and every one of the people of X replying with something about autism
bad faith is actually incredibly easy to detect with a little practice if you're not a bad faith idiot yourself
People have worked out how to cram DeepSeek onto a Raspberry Pi
Anyways, here's a quasi-related sidenote:
Part of me suspects DeepSeek is gonna quickly carve out a good chunk of the market for itself - for SaaS services looking for spicy autocomplete or a slop generator to bolt on to their products, DeepSeek's high efficiency gives them a way to do it that doesn't immediately blow a massive hole in their finances.
deepseek goes wild https://www.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/1iehx5f/what_the_fuck/