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
J. Mijin Cha writes:
My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.
Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland's journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.
A game/sneer where you are a venture capitalist with billions invested in generative AI: https://woe-industries.itch.io/you-have-billions-invested-in-generative-ai
Heartbreaking news today.
In a major setback for right-to-repair, iFixit has jumped on the slop bandwagon, introducing an "AI repair helper" to their website that steals "the knowledge base of over 20 years of repair experts" (to quote their dogshit announcement on YouTube) and uses it to hallucinate "repair guides" and "step-by-step instructions" for its users.
A particularly pristine and high-value commons about to be pissed all over with slop.
OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead
I just wanted to point out this tidbit:
Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.
Apparently a fortunate side effect of google supposedly closing the gap is that it's a great opportunity to give up on agents without looking like complete clowns. And also make Pulse even more vapory.
Is Pulse the Jony Ive device thing? I had half a suspicion that will never come to market anyway.
Old Man Stallman comes out swinging against ChatGPT specifically, adding it to the long long list of stuff he doesn't like. For some reason HN is mad at this, as if RMS saying slop is good actually would convince anyone normal to start using it
The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.
The orange-site whippersnappers don't realize how old artificial neurons are. In terms of theory, the Hebbian principle was documented in 1949 and the perceptron was proposed in 1943 in an article with the delightfully-dated name, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity". In 1957, the Mark I Perceptron was introduced; in modern parlance, it was a configurable image classifier with a single layer of hundreds-to-thousands of neurons and a square grid of dozens-to-hundreds of pixels. For comparison, MIT's AI lab was founded in 1970. RMS would have read about artificial neurons as part of their classwork and research, although it wasn't part of MIT's AI programme.
Questioning the nature of human intelligence is step 1 in promptfondler whataboutism.
the fifth episode of odium symposium, "4chan: the french connection" is now up. roughly the first half of the episode is a dive into sartre's theory of antisemitism. then we apply his theory to the style guide of a nazi news site and the life of its founder, andrew anglin
EDIT: btw if you like the episode please tell people about it! frankly we have no idea how to market or otherwise promote a podcast sooo we're kind of just hoping the listeners do it
favorite one so far! It's like graduate-level 1-900 Hotdog
Boom Aerospace, not content with attempting the next Concorde, have gotten a little sidetracked. Funnily enough, they didn't show any footage of the engine actually working. Surely it's whisper quiet and won't be a massive pain to live next to.
I would simply not name my airplane company "Boom".
I regret I have but one upvote to give to this
The best I ever saw was a reply to a news story to the effect of, "If I were ever invited swimming in the Murderkill River, I would just not go."
(This might be the original. Then again, it might not.)
okay, that's the missing piece (? not the last): 1GW from GE, 1GW from proenergy, 1.2GW from this fuckass startup that nobody heard of, either missing 1.2GW of gas turbines or 1.2GW grid connection gets almost 4.5GW of power for crusoe
also you don't need supersonic jet engines for that, these will be actively worse in reality for stationary power generation. they do that because you can haul them in a truck
Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.
thank Jack Welch for deindustrialization then
we built something no one else has built this century: a brand-new large engine core optimized for continuous, high‑temperature operation.
Lockheed Martin: am i a joke to you? (also, lots of manufacturers for proper CCGT turbines do just that)
This is such a pivot, from "you can soon fly between capitals in half the time" to "this screaming jet engine will soon be disturbing your sleep 24/7"
It never had market. Wait 3h at airport just to get on a 3x, 5x more expensive flight so that instead of 5h you fly 3h - make it make sense. For people that don't wait at airports anyway rental of demilitarised MIG-29s would make more sense
regarding my take in previous stubsack, it does seem like crusoe intends to use these gas turbines as backup, and as of 31.07.2025 they had five turbines installed, who knows if connected, with obvious place for five more, with some pieces of them (smokestacks mostly) in place. it does make sense that as of october announcement, they had the first tranche of 10 installed or at least delivered. there's no obvious prepared place where they intend to put next 19 of them, and that's just stuff from GE, with more 21 coming from proenergy (maybe it's for different site?). that said, it's texas with famously reliable ercot, which means that on top using these for shortages, they might be paying market rates for electricity, which means that even with power available, they might turn turbines on when electricity gets ridiculously expensive. i'm sure that dispatchers will love some random fuckass telling them "hey, we're disconnecting 250MW load in 15 minutes" when grid is already unstable due to being overloaded
After finding out about her here, I’ve been watching a lot of Angela Collier videos lately. Here’s the most recent one which talks about our life extending friends.
E: just expressing my general appreciation for her vids. Things that I like:
Which I’m now realising is somewhat counter to current trends in content, which might be contributing to why I like these.
She also said she basically wants to focus less on the sort of 'callout' content which does well on yt and more focus on actual physics stuff. Which is great, and also good she realized how slippery a slide that sort of content is for your channel.
(I mentioned before how sad it is to see 'angry gamer culture war' channels be stuck in that sort of content, as when they do non rage shit, nobody watches them. (I mean sad for them in an 'if i was them' way btw, dont get me wrong, fuckem for chosing that path (and fuck the system for that they are now financially stuck in that, and that they made this an available path anyway (while making it hard for lgbt people to make a channel about their experiences)), so many people hurt/radicalized for a few clicks and ad money))
she's great