nfultz

I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

In UCLA's Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to "Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles" and Goal 5 is to "Become a more effective institution". By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

My question is:

If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

Thank you.

My college used the green Russell Norvig text, which had (checking...) 12 pages on neutral nets out of 1000 pages. I liked the class well enough, but we used Java 1.3 and lisp would have been better.

New Time War lore dump

I need to quit clicking, my yt recommendations are so cursed now.

Love the Edgar Allen Poe thing at 3:30 though, wtf. Also where did he find the sephiroth at 4:19?

Is there even any young people we could plausibly call whippersnappers on orange site anymore, it feels like they're all well into their 30s/40s at this point.

I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

But in fairness to actual whipper snappers, and to your point, the '56 Dartmouth Workshop forward privileged Symbolic AI over anything data driven up through the first AI winter (until roughly the 90s and the balance shifted) and really warped the disciplines understanding of its own influences and history - if 70s RMS was taught anything about Neural Nets, it's relevance and importance would probably have been minimized in comparison to expert systems in lisp or whatever Minsky was up to.

Slopocalypse Now h/t The Syllabus

For context, Kunzru wrote the novel Red Pill a few years back.

Candace is a pioneer. Following her, we are exiting the age of the public sphere and entering a time of magic, when signs and symbols have the power to reshape reality. Consider the “Medbed,” a staple of QAnon-adjacent right-wing conspiracy culture. Medbeds are one of the many things about which “they” are not telling “you”; they can supposedly regenerate limbs and reverse aging. How evil would you have to be to deny such a boon to We the People? In late September, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself promoting the scam, promising that every faithful supporter would be given a card that would give them access to this magic technology. Trump posted it because it made him look good, a leader healing the sick, but also because it is a way to hyperstition a version of this fiction into reality. No one will really be cured, of course, because the Medbed doesn’t exist. Except now it is someone’s job to make sure it does: The president is a powerful magician who never tells a lie, so some loyal redhats will have to be given cards that let them lie down in some kind of cargo-cult version of a Medbed. Perhaps it will be a job for TV’s own Dr. Oz, who has crossed to the other side of the screen as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

God we live in the dumbest possible world.

This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand.

I hope so, Jesse Welles getting on the Colbert and playing Red shows some people are moving in that direction, but is also definitely sincere-posting, and ultimately that kind of performance just doesn't pay the bills like if he went Truck Jeans Beer. Eddington seems to have gotten under some people's skins in an interesting way... And I'm skeptical that /any/ novel would have any impact or reach outside the NYT class, what with having to actually read something.

h/t YT recommender, mildly unhinged: The Secret Religion of Silicon Valley: Nick Land's Antichrist Blueprint

0:40 In certain occult circles, Land is a semi-mythical figure. A man said to have been possessed by not one, but four Lemurian time demons. Simultaneously.

Well, that explains things.

Is this some CCRU lore I'm not aware of?

It's the McMindfulness guy, nice to see that he is still kicking around.

In Empire of AI, she shows how CEO Sam Altman cloaks monopoly ambitions in humanitarian language—his soft-spoken, monkish image (gosh, little Sammy even practices mindfulness!)

lol ofc he does

If you liked Brooks, you might give Gerald Weinberg a try. A bit more folksy / less corporate.

I associate Clausewitz (and especially John Boyd) references more with a Palantir / Stratfor / Booz / LE-MIC-consulting class compared to your typical bay area YC techbro in the US, and a very different crowd over in AU / NZ where grognards probably outnumber the actual military. LWers never bring up Clausewitz either but love Sun Tzu. But as far as software strategy posts go, I'd much rather read a Clausewitz tie-in than, say, Mythical Man Month or Agile anything.

Pam Samuelson (UC Berkeley) has a nice explainer on AI copyright - https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/does-using-in-copyright-works-as-training-data-infringe/

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/michigan/miedce/4:2025cv11168/384571/176/

Consistent with Magistrate Judge Patti’s warning that each AI citation might incur a cost of $200 per citation, the court adopts that amount and imposes a fine of $300 per Plaintiff (a total of $600) for three misrepresented, AI-generated citations.

lol

He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.