Last week on, "Please do not build the torment nexus"
No, it never works out in the movies, I mean somehow these poor delusional humans convince themselves that they can control the kill bots...
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
27 points (96.6% liked)
TechTakes
2185 readers
159 users here now
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
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Because the Terminator franchise is from Hollywood, the heroic resisters to SkyNet are Americans. Someone didn't watch the movies very well.
OFC the OG Terminator was a scary foreign man with a pronounced accent...
Good to know that she still has space on her war crime scorecard
what fresh hell is this
Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin (HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45471573)
I know it’s terrible being a drama gossip, but there are some Fun Times on bluesky at the moment. I’m sure most of you know the origins of the project, and the political leanings of the founders, but they’re currently getting publicly riled up about trans folk and palestinians and tying themselves up in knots defending their decision to change the rules to keep jesse singal on site, and penniless victims of the idf off it.
They really cannot cope with the fact that their user base aren’t politically aligned with them, and are desperate to appease the fash (witness the crackdowns on people’s reaction to charlie kirk’s overdue departure from this vale of tears) and have currently reached the Posting Through It stage. I’m assuming at some point their self-image as Reasonable Centrists will crack and one or more of them will start throwing around transphobic slurs and/or sieg-heiling and bewailing how the awful leftists made them do it. Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
Well, they're already using "waffles" as a transphobic slur (irony poisoning speedrun any%), so it's really more of a question of which transphobic slurs they'll escalate to next.
And all this because she simply could not shut up. Which seems to be one of the oldest, modding a large community rules.
Nobody ever seems to learn the “never get high from your own supply” lesson. Gotta get that hit of thousands of people instantly supporting and agreeing with whatever dumbfuck thought just fell out.
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
whenever there's a huge scandal he listens to his PR people, keeps his mouth shut, then goes on a media tour where he lies his ass off in exactly the same way at each stop. it's that simple and yet almost no other tech people can do it
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
Its an extremely low bar to clear, but I'll begrudgingly hand it to him for being one of the few tech CEOs who didn't actively limbo under it.
here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit
here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:
here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)
Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon
This doesn't include her blurb about, "are you paying us? where???"
But weren't there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
The question on getting paid might give credence to the rumors that they’re running out of money and won’t make it (user-growth wise) as an ad platform. Which, lol and also lmao.
Yeah, I can't see that they're doing anything besides burning runway. It's probably shortly going to become cliche to say, "glad I never made an account there," but, welp, glad I never made an account there
Huh, didn’t know about the guy behind tangled.org (Anirudh Oppiliappan) being a waffle enthusiast too 🫤 Just visited his bsky profile, and he’s enthusing about a “decentralised accelerationism” post by jay.
I hadn’t really seen the point of the tangled project (I’m not sure what atproto brings to version control) but I was interested in an ecosystem around the jujutsu vcs stuff. I guess I won’t find that here.
ok plz explain what "waffles" means in this context
TL;DR: It’s all a meme-poisoned bluesky circle-jerk involving transphobes and people who desperately want transphobes to think they’re cool.
The link from self to mcc’s bluesky thread sums up this stuff with references, but to attempt to summarise the summary, there’s a tweet from the depths of time (2017) that says
Twitter the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say "I like pancakes" and somebody will say "So you hate waffles?"
Bluesky ceo jay graber uses “waffles” as shorthand referencing this post, and whipped it out when asked about bluesky’s ongoing unwillingness to do anything about noted transphobe jesse singal, who has since posted about how much he loves waffles.
jfc
Thanks for taking the time to expand
While most bullish outlooks are premised on economic reacceleration, it’s difficult to ignore the market’s reliance on AI capex. In market-pricing terms, we believe we’re closer to the seventh inning than the first, and several developments indicate we may be entering the later phases of the boom. First, AI hyperscaler free-cash-flow growth has turned negative. Second, price competition in the "monopoly-feeder businesses” seems to be accelerating. Finally, recent deal-making smacks of speculation and vendor-financing strategies of old.
"You know, I never defrauded anyone,” says Sam Bankman-Fried
“You know, I never sent the boys across the Isonzo without believing we could win,” said Luigi Cadorna
I predict Sam will lose big on the S&C claims. They have made fuckin bank on this bankruptcy, but also their fees have already been ruled entirely reasonable given the shitshow in question, and the near complete recovery for creditors will make them look even better.
Guys according to LW you’re reading Omelas all wrong (just like LeGuin was wrong)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n83HssLfFicx3JnKT/omelas-is-perfectly-misread
Funny to type all that up and also go 'Le Guin Disagrees'
(not that having a different read than the author intended is strange, I mean I have a dystopian reading of Starship troopers which I think makes much more sense than what was intended).
I think I read Starship Troopers before I saw the movie, because a small scene reveals that Johnny Rico is of Phillipine descent (his mother tongue is Tagalog) and I remember wondering if that would be part of the movie. Samuel R Delany mentions that scene as something that made him felt included in SF.
I was very young when I read it but even then I could read it as proto-fascist (or rather military-authoritarian, a bit like cod-Roman Republic)
Choice sneer from the comments:
Omelas: how we talk about utopia [by Big Joel, a patient and straightforward Youtube humanist,] [has a] pretty much identical thesis, does this count?
Another solid one which aligns with my local knowledge:
It's also about literal child molesters living in Salem Oregon.
The story is meant to be given to high schoolers to challenge their ethics, and in that sense we should read it with the following meta-narrative: imagine that one is a high schooler in Omelas and is learning about The Plight and The Child for the first time, and then realize that one is a high schooler in Salem learning about local history. It's not intended for libertarian gotchas because it wasn't written in a philosophical style; it's a narrative that conveys a mood and an ethical framing.
One of the many annoying traits of rationalists is their tendency to backproject classic pieces of literature onto their chosen worldview.
So bit of a counter to our usual stuff thing. But a worker migrant here won a case against his employer who had linked his living space to his employment contract (forbidden) using chatgpt as an aid (how much is not told). So there actually was a case where it helped.
Interesting note on it, these sorts of cases have no jurisprudence yet, so that might have been a factor. No good links for it sadly as it was all in Dutch. (Cant even find a proper writeup in a bigger news site as a foreigner defending their rights against abuse is less interesting than some other country having a new bisshop). Skeets congratulating the guy here https://bsky.app/profile/isgoedhoor.bsky.social/post/3m27aqkyjjk2c (in Dutch). Nothing much about the genAI usage.
But this does fit a pattern, how, like with blind/bad eyesight people, these tools are veing used by people who have no other recourse because we refuse to help them (this is bad tbh, Im happy they are getting more help don't fet me wrong, but it shouldn't be this substandard).
LLMs are the Dippin Dots of technology.
That's an unfair comparison, Dippin Dots don't slowly ruin the world by existing (also, they're delicious)
It will always be the ice cream of the future, never the ice cream of today
The Guardian shat out its latest piece of AI hype, violating Betteridge's Law of headlines by asking "Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong?"
view more: next ›