this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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TechTakes
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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.
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I'm not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And "no worse than the average psychology paper" is not high praise.
Aella in the comments: I'm just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
yeah and I’m a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
at://did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/app.bsky.feed.post/3m5z5da4mvk24
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3m5z5da4mvk24
Free speech can he expensive for dipshits.
I saw this, so now you all get to: Alex Karp performs a stationary Gatotsu with a sabre, don’t ask me why.
E: reference explainer and visual description
The Gatotsu is a fictional swordfighting style from the manga/anime series Rurouni Kenshin wielded by Saitou Hajime, one of the main characters. It also refers to the frequent stance and movement Hajime makes when fighting.
In the video, Alex Karp stands next to a young woman. One may surmise that he is trying to impress her with a display of sword mastery. In his right hand he is holding a broad, curved sword, maybe a sabre. His left arm is outstretched at shoulder height in front of him, pointing at an imaginary target, and the sword is pointing at the same target, held at the same height with the flat side parallel to the ground. He performs an awkward looking thrust, as if mimicking the Gatotsu as mentioned above. In the rest of the video he is playing around with the sword, sometimes performing the same thrust and otherwise tossing it limply around in his hand.
There is text at the top of video reading:
Your CEO: Powerpoint
Palantir CEO:
Out of all of the things he did, that is one of those things.
While you partied
I studied THE BLADE
Databricks CEO: “we’ve already achieved AGI fam, the haters just keep moving the goalposts”
WTF are databricks? LLM feces?
I looked it up.
boring answer
the company is a data analytics platform. According to wikipedia they promote the model of a “data lakehouse”, a hydrid of a “data lake” and a “data warehouse”. I don’t know what any of this means
Sneer answer: 100% LLM feces. Databricks puts the anal in analytics
@cityofangelle.bsky.social comments:
HAHAAHHAHAAHHAAA
Anthropic has posted two jobs, both paying $200K+.
FOR WRITERS. (Looks like a policy/comms hybrid.)
ANTHROPIC.
IS WILLING TO PAY HALF A MILLION A YEAR.
FOR WRITERS.
Whatsamatter boys, can't your plagiarism machine make a compelling case for you?
LOL. LMAO, even.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Apparently they're doing the same with video cutters, offering fairly well paid jobs for people to try and make themselves redundant.
Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms
Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation "feature", guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn't get him or didn't deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It's such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.
Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:
It's indeed the case that I haven't been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it'd had Twitter's options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven't been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Uh, considering his recent twitter post... this sure is something. Also" "it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience" no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).
From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their "Inkhaven Residency". Feh.
ooooh photographic matthew embarking upon his f*shtech turn out loud at last?
Maybe? Or maybe they just had the right social connections to sell "blogging residency" as a thing that should be supported for some unspecified amount? I couldn't find any more details.
Small forum tyrants
sorry my brain's already clocked out for the day (/week?), so [insert sneer here]
context is this
Meanwhile, the $800 million Kraken raised across its two recent rounds of financing further solidifies the company’s balance sheet before its planned IPO next year.... Prior to the two rounds, Kraken had raised only $27 million in venture capital.
simply a mere 29.6x amplification. perfectly normal. 12000000% in line with the economic market shift between checks notes Less Than A Decade Ago and now
Reeks to me of a mad dash for all-important "exit" on the part of the VC firms who invested. Especially as public-market IPOs have become so rare compared to M&A deals or SPAC bullshit.
In other news, it appears that Cloudflare has pulled a Crowdstrike
edit: looks like the problem resolved after a few hours
Claims to be against politics in the workplace, takes down rightwing websites anyway
can we print this on shirts and send it to their office(s)?
I guess the main problem is getting reaction shots with the recipients...
I would love this, lmfao
I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week.
FUCKIN
Is there already a term for the extreme opposite of impostor syndrome? Techbro syndrome maybe?
"Techbro syndrome" would be a perfect name for it, honestly.
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn't take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don't know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren't that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Here's a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/
As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and ... memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm "ran out of time calculating". How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, that's the one thing you're supposed to know!
So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?
He will train a neural network on GM games, then memorize the algorithm and compute the moves in his head.
The Rationalists.
Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.
alt text
A screenshot of a tweet by yougov, a uk-based organisation, showing the results of a survey which say
One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams
Include in the screenshot is a response by longwall26,
Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She'd be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly
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