this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
12 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2589 readers
46 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
Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg
https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923
It is an impressively bad speech.
I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, "If you don't care about science, that's okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done." Yeah, if you're worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, don't worry, it's going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?
"When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on." No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.
"The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen." Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesn't matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.
Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. You're a billionaire, so you know better than them.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology
"Why do people hate us so much? We only constantly say the technology we're making is dangerous and then block regulation, suck up resources, commit mass theft and plagiarism, threatened to destabilise the economy, enabled more CSAM, caused widespread mental health issues and multiple suicides, unleashed a barrage of slop, engaged in mass surveillance and mocked people against the tech? Don't they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?"
load more comments
(1 replies)
STOP FINDING THINGS
- WEB PAGES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND
- YEARS OF SEARCHING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for PAGES of SEO-OPTIMISED AI SLOP
- Wanted to find things anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called WIKIPEDIA "RANDOM PAGE"
- "Yes please give me ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION of my search. Please give me TEN ADS and A PARAGRAPH OF SLOP FIRST" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Search engines have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the ad views we gave them
(This is REAL Search results, given by REAL search engines)
- "None of Africa's 54 recognized countries start with the letter 'K'."
- "Add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce"
- "Understood. No more templates—just direct answers, hyper-focused on exactly what you need."
"Hello Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated"
They have played us for absolute fools
Edward W. Niedermeyer calls the plans to put SpaceX and OpenAI public at ludicrously inflated valuations and dump shares on index funds for real money BAGNAROK. American pension funds are starting to say out loud that this is a bad deal.
The officials - representing three of the top four largest public pension plans in the U.S. - objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including voting control over the stock, veto power over his own removal as CEO, and protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims.
...
In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years; install a majority-independent board and separate the CEO and chair roles; eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval; scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party transactions with Musk's other companies.
"Precisely because SpaceX is poised to occupy a position of systemic importance in the public markets, and to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in our portfolios, its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon which long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them," they wrote.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?
Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas's cloud spend.
Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.
I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.
I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.
How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?
If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.
people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org
How does using personal plans impact the company's bill? If someone is so profoundly stupid as to spend their own money on a "tool" for their job then why stop them?
That's a good point. I wonder if they're also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven't manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can't really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.
load more comments
(8 replies)
WELL WELL WELL, if it isn't the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling
(plus a dose of corporate greed)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Here's a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem
After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is
It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.
It's not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what's economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.
For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn't enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.
Microsoft's experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren't doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.
I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we'll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it's all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.
load more comments
(2 replies)
But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.
The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And it's incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. They're not living in space, they're glamping.
@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL ... which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.
I know very little about Fyodorov compared to Tsiolkovsky. Do you haven any writing you'd recommend to learn more about him?
load more comments
(2 replies)
Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.
gee I wonder why
The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. [...] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.
hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you
1 comment, essentially saying if you're not above average height you might as well die alone
of course they get caught by incel culture immediately, trying to quantify attractiveness is so far in their wheelhouse they might as well have come up with it
Most incel forums proliferate pseudoscientific slop to justify their beliefs.
He was this close! This close!
load more comments
(5 replies)
SpaceX has chosen a ~~sacrificial~~ ~~disposable~~ ~~naive~~ crypto billionaire to captain a mars fly-by someday: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lead-first-crewed-mission-to-mars-2000762451
The mission is expected to take two years and here's what he has to say about that:
I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.
I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.
Well they do tend to think stuff scales forever.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
oh boohoo Beff let me play a sad song for you on the world's smallest violin
load more comments
(10 replies)
A Substack in the name of Cape Fear Advisors LLC argued that SpaceX wants to get in people's retirement accounts then say to Uncle Sam "you had better give us lots of contracts or we will crash and take grandma's retirement funds with us." Sucking on the government teat has been one of Elon Musk's favourite strategies since he got access to a State of California green transport grant.
I do not know if that can work because only a few percent of the company will be for sale so they will only be a fraction of a percent of those index funds. They can definitely sell some shares for real dollars, and if they keep the price high they can borrow real dollars against the shares which are not on the market like people borrow against bitcoin.
I will not link because it is in that articulate but empty style that does well on Substack. It may be written by or with help from AI.
load more comments
(2 replies)
A LWer of the female persuasion makes the entirely reasonable point that most screw-top openings are probably constructed by looking at median male grip strength, not female. But the real fun is in the comments, where people who can post comments on a blog are seemingly unfamiliar with opening jam jars.
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn't jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d'etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
what is going on with these people i’m so annoyed i’m about to cry
Why do so many containers require women asking a man for help in order to open them? (Or carrying around an opening tool or living in a kitchen?)
how often do you open jam jars outside the kitchen?? it’s not that hard! you don’t actually have to force them open through grip strength like an idiot man!!
why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I...basic common sense alone would tell you that something with a lot of fruit and a lot of sugar in it might spoil if left open outside of a fridge. Why do these people act like they've never seen a banana before
load more comments
(1 replies)
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
this is "fucking magnets, how do they work" translated to rationalist, except that explaining magnets involves quantum mechanics and explaining jam jars involves high school physics (saturated vapor pressure vs temperature. that might be before high school). i also like how one linked explanation sits near two pieces of slop and is wrong
The comments section really is incredible, the level of ignorance about basic kitchen things, which since it’s womanly knowledge instead of dyson spheres they seem to be completely incurious about …
their practical skills are weak, and they won't survive the winter (because they don't know how to make jam)
but frame the same physics in terms of what makes steam turbine spin, and they'll pretend to get it but won't apply it anywhere else. the longer you look the worse it gets. it's like they have never watched how it's made as kids
load more comments
(11 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
I use grip gloves for opening jars and love them so much. Same ideas as plastic jar grips, but even easier. I find I usually have enough strength but that my skin is too sensitive to fully apply it without grip gloves.
Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages?
James Damore flashbacks ohno
load more comments
(1 replies)
Holy Empire of AI - Predictive History
Once you have the AI state, you now have the technocracy and the world will be perfect.
All right? Does it make sense you guys? What he's saying here? This is an amazing paragraph written 40, 50 years ago.
So, I'm not saying he's a Freemason. I'm not saying he's part of a society, but, he sure thinks like a Freemason.
Zbigniew Brzezinski has been dead for nearly a decade, but sure, let's play the hits. plus AI! /s
Jiang hadn't popped up in my feed in a while, guess he's still at it. At least he's reading Karen Hao, maybe some viewers follow his cites. He really should just write a Dan Brown novel or something, he's obviously capable enough at lore dumping.
view more: next ›