the effort of rampant libertarians to jumpstart a social movement is going as well as expected
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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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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Just in time for Irreplaceable to show up!
that dyson toothbrush, huh
"everything is camera" is this decade's "shove a bluetooth in there"
think of the monetisation opportunities!
but yeah it’s pretty weird, people are out of ideas for what to do I guess. endless growth mindset can’t have a thing just be done 🤷♂️
Dan Luu and tptacek are very mad at Ed Zitron, and they claim to have slammed him with FACTS and LOGIC
If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?
I don’t know, you tell me.
@pikesley
the simpsons did jeff bezos
(with too much hair and too few dollars)
@Amoeba_Girl @o7___o7
I’m not going near your solid gold mansion by the way, that’s a death trap!
I enjoyed one of the comments comparing Zitron to a fire and brimstone priest.. like dude, Big Yud and Dario are right there
Zitron is a better writer though. Yud is bland personified.
Speaking of wrong predictions... the entire US military budget would have to be spent on OpenAI/Anthropic to keep the bubble from bursting.
well that really is rather a tell, isn’t it
Ed Zitron says water is wet but he didn't properly quantity wetness or indeed how long it would take me to be soaked through if I touch water... Checkmate atheists!
It's impressive how these very rational millionaire tech lords get so bent out of shape by anyone outside of their club getting any attention whatsoever. Just peak pettiness.
They can all go choke on a pelican.
my feeds are full of news of the death of Wendell Berry who I have absolutely no relationship to but this quote is relevant to our interests
Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/ai-off-balance-sheet-obligations-hit-a-subprime-like-reset-wall-in-2027-and-2028.html by Yves / naked capitalism
Critically, it is these “frontier labs” that contract for, lease and build data centers. The very little I have seen about this process has caused me concern. For instance, I read of Meta contracting for a data center for what sounded like 20 years but was 4 back-to-back five year leases. Recall that the once AAA rated General Electric has taken a big fall in investor grace. How strong will the now-mighty-seeming Meta be, particularly if AI bets come a cropper?
Groundbreaker has identified a key element of risky AI leverage, which are obligations that are not accounted for as debt at the AI sponsor. Those of you who are corporate finance literate will know this is a cardinal sin. When I was a wee young thing at Goldman, where we went through hard copies of financial statements to extract key data which we entered into green accountants’ ledger paper, one of the aims was to determine total debt to assets. One of the footnote items we would root out was operating lease payments. For instance, big companies often use leased mainframes. We would capitalize them and treat them as a long-term liability.
=> https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom
The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM.
Going to take me a while to digest this one
new odium symposium episode. we look at the evolution of keyboard warrior and self described most censored man on the internet jk sheindlin
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/23-gobsmacking-168259713
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can't imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.
Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle
It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas' current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he's been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it's get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: they're quite the opposite), I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort "the AI app says this is plagiarized" attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race "science" is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between "impartial" academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle
It should be said here again that these people don't even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.
Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers (click on 'Lees alleen dit artikel gratis' to close the pop-up):
https://apache.be/2026/03/05/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cofnas-receives-appointment-ugent
The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing 'climate realism', 'concerns about Islam' and 'cultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutions'. He's very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach.
Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases I'm aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.
Without having read that specific article
From what I heard Cofnas research is quite bad (it has cases of him seemingly not having read the sources he cites as those say the opposite of what he claims they do, and that is above the normal badness of race science shit. Some of his tweets (I think it was tweets, could also have been facebook posts or something) certainly read as 'intended for internal racist fights' and not intended for academics). And the guy who appointed him is also being looked at with suspicion. So hope they also take a good look at the guy who hired him (without using the normal process for it apparently).
Also a German Minister of Defense. My impression is that Arday was a fabulist, but so are many academics at wealthy research institutions, and the global campaign against him was clearly motivated by racism. Not sure about the plagiarism because I am not on Cambridge's academic integrity committee.
The thing that bothers me the most is that while this happens in Cambridge but over at Data Colada, Ariely is just like "whoopsie" and gets to keep his job. https://datacolada.org/138 - personally I consider fabricating your entire study to be worse than sloppy quotes, but it is insane how these two people are treated so differently.
I also think it's really lazy that BBC couldn't even mention Claudine Gay (AND Martin Luther King) since it was the exact same thing. Different country I guess.
Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons.
It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.
even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated
The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing.
It's insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he's a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn't do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't murder.
I was pretty disgusted by that. It seems like the guy's crimes were some poor citation (he did cite the academic he alledgedly plagiarised so obviously it's not plagiarism lol) and maybe exaggerating some of his life?
Seeing the media go from uncritically regurgitating a racist's allegation, to reporting about the allegation controversy, to uncritically reporting what people claim to have or have not remembered about his life from 30 years ago, to digging through his entire life. For, I'll reiterate, maybe citing something badly and doing some sloppy scholarship.
You know, the thing that gets someone a disciplinary chat and maybe a bump down if anything.
I have to take this story in small doses, it's fuckin terrible.
over on linked in
as a statistician, I'm so tired of hearing they're "updating their priors." No you didn't. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex.
(00:39:39) Let me put it. Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system. It’s an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and it’s freaking amazing.
No it isn't. It's your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex can't tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s
these guys.
How did Lex Fridman's podcast become so popular? He has no affect, always seems like he is about to fall asleep, and most of his guests are horrible people. He is a less intense Joe Rogan.
Being on YT is a big driver here, and Lex is smart enough to work the algo. Have John Carmack on, get views when people search for Quake. Have Elon on, get subs when people search for Tesla. Have Mr Beast on and get some kids in the funnel. He's very good at piercing through filter bubbles to get extra reach and pull numbers, unlike an Alex Jones. (EDIT: For this, the bland persona is a feature not a bug)
I'd ballpark that he made $20k off this DHH interview and picked up some rails devs along the way.
Whenever new coworkers bring up Lex, I always feel like it's a test, like are they oblivious, or are they secret closet magas trying to test the water. Slate Star has a similar thing. And YT is bad enough but now I have to see it pop up on LinkedIn too.
I feel like his initial momentum came from picking interview subjects who were technical leaders but not well-known outside their niches and rarely were subjects of long-form interviews. Jim Keller and Chris Lattner were two who stood out for me early on, although I couldn’t finish their interviews because Lex himself was such a drag to listen to. He’s put some work into public speaking skills, but not nearly enough.
I refuse to knock him for his accent; a strong accent could even be an asset for standing out in the hugely overcrowded podcast industry. But the guy just doesn’t seem to cultivate any charisma or any real curiosity. The only time I’ve seen him show a smidge of passion was when I saw a clip of him ranting about “anti-woke” bullshit, which should tell you what his (and his backers’) real objective is.
Oh yeah, transfer my enthusiasm, mister high-stepping HH man. Update my priors till they're so bleeding-edge that they've become subsequents. This is masterfully persuasive marketing rhetoric that will convince everyone and leave no holdouts. Scott Adams would be smearing his hands with Vaseline to prep for your appearance on his podcast, if he was still around.
nice of the rationalists to remind me that no matter how ugly the ai situation gets they will never ever be capable of making a good point
In the addendum to his essay he defends his use of anthropomorphizing language because it makes it easier to understand...
"quantum physics is hard so here's a fairy tale about the mysterious proton and his three children: the quark triplets"
See also: electric fields and currents are so complicated, so let’s talk about fluid dynamics
Dwarkesh Patel seems to be one of their media operations like Vox Future Perfect and the Collinses.
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