sansruse

apparently being a VPN provider is either brainrot inducing or induced by brainrot, there is no 3rd option

anyone else go down the rabbit hole in rationalwiki and end up reading the blog post where he recounts/justiifes his conversion to Christianity? That genre of blogvomit is not particularly revelatory even in the best case. But whew, for a philosophy PhD i expected a lot better. He didn't even cite any bible verses!

I don't understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they're mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal 'social credit score' for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D'Souza implies here:

One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)

but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That's just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it's staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.

Special mentions:

Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.

“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

🫩

damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvin's R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i don't even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing

i think they think this is self-education, sadly

really remarkable how they just expect us to swallow the hard pivot from "AI is going to take all your jobs and render your economic value to the amount of calories harvestable from your feeble body" to "AI will create undecillion jobs UwU (◠‿◠✿)"

Another quick sneer:

Cherny: I was so focused on shipping. As soon as I got the idea, I spent every night and every weekend on it — it was the only thing I thought about, the only thing I worked on. I started having dreams about Claude Code, and that's still all I dream about: what should we do next, what do we build next. There's a chance now to zoom out, because a lot of people are using it and there's a lot to learn about how. But for a long time we were so focused on building that I didn't even have a chance to think about what it was.

Emphasis mine. the ideology buried within statements like this makes me want to erase the idea of a computer from the collective human consciousness. I feel like moving to the woods with some goats, or something, when i consider the fact that literally every single one of the tech oligarchs thinks like this. Literally channeling the spirit of capitalism like your body is a portal to a lovecraftian dimension. Purge. purge. purge this evil

in which our dearest friend DHH has become an unpaid shill for the novel Camp of the Saints

https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2046982319353778391

nevertheless, the finest minds at hackernews and elsewhere have assured me that he's just a normal, sensible center right kind of guy! nothing untoward going on here, i advise every boutique computer manufacturer known to man to financially support him and his hyprland reskin wankfest.

this feels like a form of critihype but i haven't read anything else by this person so i don't know. Examples:

Artificial intelligence is entering public consciousness associated with layoffs, instability, replacement anxiety, corporate concentration, surveillance, and soaring resource consumption.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous emotional foundation for a transformative technology.

The commencement boos matter because they reveal how culturally toxic AI has already become among many young educated Americans. These students understand artificial intelligence well enough to fear it precisely because they already use it. They use it for papers, coding assistance, presentations, summaries, and research. They know the technology works. They know it is improving rapidly.

"oh no, people dislike this wonderful technology!! But it's so wonderful!!"

Whether America ultimately requires these facilities to remain economically competitive may eventually become a legitimate policy debate, but politically that question is almost secondary.

"we really need this stuff guys, people are mad so it might not happen but it's really really important so think of that too"

WELL WELL WELL, if it isn't the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling

(plus a dose of corporate greed)

this is extremely low hanging fruit but i have to do it:

https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2051374498994364529?s=46

marc andreessen reveals his AI prompt. my favorite part is where he tells it to use as many words as possible, as if LLMs are normally too terse. But i also really like the part where he tells it not to hallucinate, and the part where he tells it it's really smart as if that will make it do a better job.

really, the whole thing is an elaborate way to say "make no mistakes, but anti-wokely". Thought Leader in the investment space btw.

i occasionally read their posts when i want a sincere-seeming, self-consciously capital L Liberal's perspective. "They're less annoying than the chatterers of the ezra klein/MattY/Noah Smith/Jon Chait class" is about the nicest thing i can say about them. This is a bad sign i guess, but i don't really care that much at the end of the day.

i generally like Dr. Fatima, so i was curious about this video, but it was pretty disappointing. I have several more thoughts but i wanted to keep this reasonably short.

The first section about "back end harms" is the best part. Unfortunately, section 2, the "Front End Harms" section names valid problems but falls flat when it comes to solutions. She rolls out a lot of lib tropes about "education" and gestures at companies self-regulating the sycophancy of their own models despite evidence (a massive amount of it if we consider corporate "self-regulation" more broadly) to the contrary. Remember "media literacy" discourse about social media misinformation? it went nowhere, because it's not a problem that can be solved with education, it's imperative to actually learn lessons from history and bring this technology under political control. You cannot do this effectively when your government is 3 monopolistic corporations in a trenchcoat.

She says that anthropic are "better than the competition" which is trivially true but extremely credulous. If faced with the choice, I would prefer that Claude beats out Grok and chatGPT but this is ultimately a marginal difference due to the nature of the industry and ultimately of capitalism itself.

Section 3 is fine for what it is, but it's really about the psychology of persuasion and not AI as such. Some of the discourse on this site would benefit from the reminder that moral absolutism isn't very persuasive, but this section is way too long, we can just dispense with the moralizing and "harm reduction" anyways, because just like plastic recycling, personal reduction in AI use for harm reduction reasons is a fake solution to a systemic problem.

The harms of AI are intimately linked with the nature of monopoly & platform capital. You cannot defeat this enemy if you cannot actually describe it properly, and no amount of leveraging NIMBYism to defeat your local datacenter project will fix it.

Maybe Dr. Fatima isn't the right person to be delivering that message, or simply doesn't view the problem through a materialist lens. It's not enough to be against AI, you need to be for something. This is the disease of liberal technocratic managerialism and it manifests in myriad ways including AI critique. We need to move beyond it.