this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I feel this shouldn't at all be surprising, and continues to point to Diverse Intelligence as more fundamental than any sort General Intelligence conceptually. There's a huge difference between what something is in theory or in principal capable of, and the economics story of what that thing attends to naturally as per its energy story.

Broadly, even simple things are powerful precisely because of what they don't bother trying to do until perturbed.

Ultimately, I hypothesize the reason why VCs like the idea of LLMs doing simple things far more expensively than otherwise is already possible, is because, They literally can't imagine what else to spend their money on. They are vacuous consumers by design.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

So what you're saying is that Tim Apple could save us from these people by selling Marc Andreessen a billion dollar iphone?

It's Veblen goods again, isn't it?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, Yes. The hardest thing for a rich person to do is spend their money. Eventually this catches up with them: to spend no money is to lose it comparatively, to spend money is to risk not getting it back. So a great deal of the money world revolves primarily around persuasion, and the very odd things that happen along the way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

It also helps to recognize how much many of these people see all of this as a competition, and trying to out-unique/out-possess their peers