pog
sc_griffith
joined 3 years ago
guy on threads told meta's ai to handle his marketplace transaction for a keyboard, it send his address to a potential buyer, brought the buyer to his house, then accidentally taunted the buyer. coulda gone bad
interesting article on embedding tracking into images, audio etc
https://brand.io/article/spymarks/
iirc scott aaronson (notable among our friends) was working for openai on the text version of this a while back
going to keep "4 epistillion percent" in my back pocket from now on
zencastr. it's the new episode processing that hasn't been functioning. had some contact with support, didn't help, currently in the process of getting them to redirect our RSS
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/24-dolphin-of-169474003
New Odium Symposium episode, "The Dolphin Fucking Elders of Atlantis". We talk about new age crystal healing pioneer Frank Alper and his channeled lectures on Atlantis, Lemuria, Anti-Atlantis, crystals, and the future of humanity.
If you listen anywhere besides Patreon or Spotify, the episode is delayed. Our hosting service went "LLM based" (?) as I recounted previously and then just stopped working. We're switching hosts and will have the episode up as soon as possible.
sartre proven more right every day
i first became aware of srinivasan because he was running an extremely funny bitcoin scam. it was a $400 computer, the crypto mining platform of the future, a veritable font of wealth, and when people got it it was a raspberry pi with some shielding incorrectly attached, so that if you touched it wrong you shorted it and bricked the device. it mined a few cents a year and sent something like half of that to a16z
i also first became aware that noah smith was going to lose his mind when he cited srinivasan approvingly on twitter, i drew his attention to this, and he replied 'no i just asked balaji about this and he said he's cool, that it wasn't a scam and also that he was actually put in charge of it to make it not a scam'
happy kirkiversary to all who celebrate
Icarus Robotics is a startup with at least six million dollars in funding so far. the idea is to train robots on human workers to make space mass production... work. or something.
anyway i don't see any red flags
archive link: https://archive.ph/ONKkm
contextualizes the topic beautifully. you might learn a lot about how american racism relates to capital and art from this article
highlight: most of these guys are into classical art fascism but one of them, a bitcoin guy looking to build a 450 foot tall statue of prometheus, appears to be specifically into italian fascism. his favorite aesthetic is futurism and he hired a futurist sculptor with this "manifesto" on his website:
We all know Elon Musk as the funniest man alive.
but did you know that Musk is also a lifelong gamer? for example, here he is in the chess club of his whites only apartheid prep school.
grew out of that though.
really want to highlight the phrase "understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks." what the fuck is he talking about?
in any case, he clearly has some issues around the game and I suspect his performance in the chess club. the dude loves to downplay the complexity of the game.
he knows how to tune it up, though.
hmm. fog of war, tech trees, randomized starting positions. that actually sounds a little familiar. could it be...?
OH YEAH BABY! you knew it had to be polytopia!
what the fuck is polytopia?
this is polytopia:
sophisticated Gamers will notice three things here:
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this is clearly a mobile game first, meaning it was developed to fit into the industry's nastiest shithole: the ios and android app markets. i'll tell you right now that polytopia doesn't have gambling in its microtransactions (which instantly makes it cream of the crop), but you can expect it to be braindead and shallow.
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this game is for children. look the bright primary colors, the character's huge eyes, and the low poly style, which evokes minecraft.
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this game looks a LOT like civilization. specifically, it looks like civilization 3:
For those not familiar, the civilization series is the standard bearer for the 4X genre. it's a style of slow, macromanagement focused turn based strategy focused on the "four Xes" of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. thematically, they present societies as machines for producing imperialism. the civilization games are also fearsomely complex and famously deep.
not so with polytopia:
so yeah, it's baby civilization. but the thing that really kills me is that musk is obsessed with this game. like... really obsessed, according to a story published on yahoo finance.
This puff piece is sourced from "Benzinga," a tech finance news site that seems to mostly post about crypto, ai and tesla. context clues suggest the content is entirely ripped from walter isaacson's biography of musk. I have to emphasize that all of this is intended to be flattering - right in the middle, they take a break from the content to shill some affiliate link I won't click on:
that's the image of musk they want to convey. anything they include is in support of that.
saying "I am just wired for war" because you play a lot of polytopia is classic elon cringe. beating a game's developer is nothing to brag about, by the way. most game developers are terrible at their own games.
i would argue that ragequitting to the parking lot to smack down your employee/mother of your children in a baby game is also not something to brag about:
flexing on mom almost shows up more than once in the article...
... except, twist, for some reason he beat his employee but not his partner???
and yes, he sulked like a little shitbag he when he lost. one has to suspect that if his sycophants weren't constantly throwing polytopia matches against him he'd have turned on it just like he did chess.
before you read this next bit I want to emphasize again that EVERYTHING IN THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO BE FLATTERING.
his brother seems to feel the same way
(and from another benzinga sourced yahoo finance story):
here's what i think: elon musk isn't learning shit from polytopia. he's a profoundly stupid and childish man who likes moving brightly colored blocks around and being told he won. he's projecting the disgusting and wretched pile of deficiencies which is his personality onto a game for babies. as someone who only fails upward and cannot stand to fail, it is impossible for him to learn from reality; doing so would require facing what is too painful to face.
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new Odium Symposium. we look at Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel, and discuss the weaponization of antisemitism and the self-importance of writing a book of twitter screenshots. https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/25-y-word-170681755 or any podcast app