TechTakes

Re datacenters in space:

Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862222

Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170

Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435):

it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power

We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.

edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.

The Comics Journal: I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026

OT: paying the cat tax…again. Please ignore the ash on Hector’s head, its an ongoing mystery where thats been coming from.

Tangentially on topic:

Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! I'll likely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and I'm hopeful that it'll win all the awards.

Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:

1. In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol

2. Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.

3. Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.

But why are we talking about some AI agent platform in the Urbit newsletter? Naturally because we think, Urbit fixes this.

As a matter of fact, Tlon is already working on this with their Openclaw Plugin for Tlon Messenger. It is currently in an early adopter phase, but they expect to provide an instance of Openclaw with every ship that they host for their users.

but of course

Ryan Mac:

Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.

We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.

For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.

Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.

Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir's chairman and tells Epstein there is "no need to rush." This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.

Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel's VC funds.

One of @ering.bsky.social's great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the "optics" of telling founders that Epstein was involved.

So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.

At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.

[...]

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226

Today in excellent cold opens: "I didn't talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so I'm so healthy."

Enjoyed this bit from Mission Local on San Francisco's "March for Billionaires" yesterday.

Choice excerpts:

Despite the San Francisco locale, a participant said the event had “grassroots” origins at a “little rationalist restaurant get together” in a “group house” on Shattuck Avenue, subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies.

Mission Local contributor Benjamin Wachs coined a term for an event in which media observers outnumber participants: a panopticonference. This was close to that. Those in attendance did their best to field questions from the barrage of journalists that backed them into a tree.

This is where Annie, a young transgender woman who attended the protest in a T-shirt that said “I’m in a polycule with Aella,” first met Kauffman. An impromptu debate ensued, with Annie “aggressively defending billionaires.” It was, participants concluded, worthy of a larger forum.

“People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,” she said. “We are beautiful. We’re smart. We’re strong… We are supporting the billionaires, here.”

once again, the facade of the "whoops, bad company" falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask

also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it's a sock

So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein

But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so

How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?

The common clay of the new west:

Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift

• recall might be rethought, again
• copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) “under review”
• no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows

Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if you’re smart what happens after the launch is someone else’s problem. I wouldn’t be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately “scaled back”.

patio11 and tptacek being experts on daycares in Minnesota. This is very on topic for a technology website that eschews politics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915587

It's a real fuckin scum scrum over there(1). Between these dorks and Mozilla Jake, it seems like every nerd-ass fash clown in tech got the memo to talk like an emotionally abusive ex with dying wizard characteristics.

(1) even more so than ususal

that one in which the person behind/running @FirefoxWebDevs drops the mask so fast it looks like a magic trick: gallery link

thread by @self, toots by myself and others. the poster managed to keep their civility for quite a while until I dared(tm) to highlight their lack of a reply outside of UK 5pm, at which point they immediately ramped up

(and based on some screenshots I’ve been sent, he’s also been doing the classic tail-darvo moping elsewhere)

Not one, but two utterly out of touch LWs trying to interact with culture.

Earlier today, woke Proust get slammed by some young 'un direct from college: https://awful.systems/post/7140871/10327823 (note that they can take time off to read Recherche, even going to the length of spending time in France, which tells me they don't really have to worry about getting a job or anything)

And now, someone tries to "explain" the perfectly spherical explosion at the end of the Akira movie with the fact that atom bombs in Japan really looked like that because humidity, utterly forgetting that the explosion in question was psychic/telekinetic and therefore probably follows its own damn rules on visual appearance

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pbChvM8xZnKmxaKAa/jackson-wagner-s-shortform?commentId=xjX85Kah6AQNsnHPg

I swear to fucking god both LW and HN have the worst takes on culture in general and SF/F in particular.

Either the stupidity just metastasized or China is going to try to pull a reverse star wars and make the US burn up an even more horrendous amount of cash to keep up with nothing.

China plans space‑based AI data centres, challenging Musk's SpaceX ambitions (reuters)

OT: vehicle shopping is such a clusterfuck these days jfc. Do not recommend. Also car salesmen are on par with rationalists, I swear to god.

I see that Silicon Valley has transcended AGI technology* and can now execute NP-complete** problems.

* A Guy in India
** Nationals from the Philippines, Completely

WAYMO exec admits under oath cars in the US have "human operators" based in Philippines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClPDbwql34o

It seems that Anthropic has vibe coded a C compiler. This one is really good! The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

Freshly minted LWer does LLM-assisted analysis of LLM Facebook and concludes that the bots are conspiring to take over

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Et7dgiBjSj2zJnGuM/unicode-ekfv

No thought to the fact that (at least AFAIK) there's no verification that the posting entity is actually an LLM, and not a cheeky human stirring things up

Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror | The Guardian

On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you aren’t distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesn’t quite match up with the noises coming out of them.

Too bad, I liked about half of his films, esp The Wrestler.

Continuing on the theme of nerds misreading culture, here's Asimov with abundant sour grapes about Nineteen Eighty-Four

https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

Via HN, where no-one bothers commenting on the fact that the piece is hosted on a Marxist-Leninist, anti-revisionist website.