Catching up on SMBC and finding a quality sneer I'm a little bit surprised I didn't find here sooner.
TechTakes
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
https://bsky.app/profile/jonpennington.bsky.social/post/3kxqkmezcwe2o
I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. He's older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.
I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called "Yarvinating."
He's the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a "pickoff lord." That is to say, he's the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.
Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, I've got at least one other person who would remember the "Yarvinating" anecdote. I've got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.
I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. We're both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody else's Lex Luthor origin story.
Another bit of tea... He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.
see also https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that "No one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl." Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvin's participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of "touching" his performance.
so what rhymes with Proton getting into AI grifting? you fucking guessed it
we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.
further down the page
Proton is not a crypto company. We do not speculate in crypto
so I’ve accidentally been paying shitheads who speculate on crypto to speculate on crypto. I’m kinda angry at myself for not catching this.
The fuck is happening over there?
I could have “excused” the AI bullshit as “we did it to appease the corporate customers who make us money” but there’s no way you can spin this.
I’m canceling my account. At this point I might just say fuck it and use my Yahoo mail for everything again.
(And this time the Reddit thread is the dumpster fire I’ve been expecting the last one to be lol)
Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse [Thomas Claburn, The Register]
Personal opinion: c'mon bubble
Bosses are urging employees to increase their output with the help of AI tools (37 percent), to expand their skill sets (35 percent), take on a wide range of responsibilities (30 percent), return to the office (27 percent), work more efficiently (26 percent), and work more hours (20 percent).
Stop working from home because AI.
the lesswrong to MAGA pipeline
It’s my strong belief that rats only like analytic philosophy because of the word “analytic” in the title. If there were some other broad category of philosophy with a name more synonymous with “rational” they’d be all over it.
not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, we’re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips
She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now it's nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.
I’m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I can’t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems
I’m too angry to even sneer properly at this. it’s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.
Japan supermarket chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in quality service push (South China Morning Post).
Called “Mr Smile”, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude.
It has also been designed with “game” elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.
The company said its goal was to “standardise staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum”.
Thanks I hate it
Press release here: https://www.aeonretail.jp/pdf/240701R_1.pdf or here: https://www.instavr.co.jp/news/aeon-retail-smile-2024-07-01/ (Lots of big words so I didn't try to read it)
InstaVR's English website here: https://www.instavr.co/
standardise staff members’ smiles
Completely normal and chill thing to want
What if instead of making robots better we just made interacting with a real person indistinguishable by demanding they conform to arbitrary metrics that the brain-slugs that control our minds think look like genuine human warmth and kindness?
Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/
Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can't even buy gift cards at scale.
more on the nsfw side but this is a kinda interesting finding/use of existing tech
https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1816925777377788295#m
Yud requires calories for his massive brain.
https://xcancel.com/mitchandodger/status/1816936244892565939#m
asking the important questions
Looks like he's in the process of killing himself
And he insists exercise doesn't help him lose weight which means it doesn't have any benefit.
Poor fuck's going to get done in by vanity.
Trump selecting JD Vance has his running mate has led to stuff I know from this venue bleeding into stuff I follow (shamefully) for US politics. Case in point, behold Mencius Moldbug between Richard Hanania and some racist dweeb from Cambridge:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/07/meet-you-at-the-bottom-if-there-really-is-one
Whatever shambling corpse of Toys "R" Us still exists has released "the first OpenAI SORA generated brand commercial."
It looks absolutely dire, particularly in motion, but posters are still falling over themselves to call it "cool" and "exciting" or claim that people "might not notice" that it's complete and utter arse.
"Positive is that if you didn't tell someone it was GenAI, they might not notice!"
Nah, they'd be able to immediately tell from just how fucking garbage it is
I see Sora still hasn't cracked the nut of having longer output windows. or at producing things that aren't deathly boring.
and what the fuck is up with that music? it sounds like a medical commercial selling hope
Not everyone wants ai for their search tools
I think some people are from hell
Here is the worst thing I didn't have to read today from a transhumanist:
Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.
.
Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.
Bonus round:
spoiler
What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who can't reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.
This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a 'crime of homelessness' such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt they've just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something.
how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant
Okay, I mean, there's no indication as to how you'd achieve this, but yes, community help and cheap rent are absolutely a good ideal to aim at...
Then you build a prison there.
Aaaand you're a cartoon villain. What the absolute fuck.
Holy shit every one of those was like getting ounched in the head from a completely random direction
i've seen some of these takes coming from libertarians, but never from a single person
This is the kind of take a libertarian makes, and then goes 'well nobody debates me on this so my logic is solid'. While he isn't noticing that people are just avoiding the conversation all together, as nobody wants to roll in that mud with him.
The UR example of these kinds of bad takes is the book "Defending the Undefendable", a dumb book I have ranted about before.
certified awful content, don't open if you like dogs
So in addition to normal libertarian drivel like daydreaming about being a slaveowner or such, this reminds me of an incident when certain libertarian org found that they have an actual dogfucker in their ranks (kompromat in polish) https://web.archive.org/web/20161206144701/https://www.wykop.pl/wpis/20957439/mirki-neuropa-moze-was-to-zainteresuje-na-zdjeciu-/
so that "what if dog consents tho" is not exactly a hypothetical question