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
goddammit you got to it eight seconds before me
oh hey, we're back to "deepmind models dreamed up some totally novel structures!", but proteins this time! news!
do we want to start a betting pool for how long it'll take 'em to walk this back too?
Haven't read the whole thing but I do chuckle at this part from the synopsis of the white paper:
[...] Our results suggest that AlphaProteo can generate binders "ready-to-use" for many research applications using only one round of medium-throughput screening and no further optimization.
And a corresponding anti-sneer from Yud (xcancel.com):
@ESYudkowsky: DeepMind just published AlphaProteo for de novo design of binding proteins. As a reminder, I called this in 2004. And fools said, and still said quite recently, that DM's reported oneshot designs would be impossible even to a superintelligence without many testing iterations.
Now medium-throughput is not a commonly defined term, but it's what DeepMind seems to call 96-well testing, which wikipedia just calls the smallest size of high-throughput screening—but I guess that sounds less impressive in a synopsis.
Which as I understand it basically boils down to "Hundreds of tests! But Once!".
Does 100 count as one or many iterations?
Also was all of this not guided by the researchers and not from-first-principles-analyzing-only-3-frames-of-the-video-of-a-falling-apple-and-deducing-the-whole-of-physics path so espoused by Yud?
Also does the paper not claim success for 7 proteins and failure for 1, making it maybe a tad early for claiming I-told-you-so?
Also real-life-complexity-of-myriads-and-myriads-of-protein-and-unforeseen-interactions?
As a reminder, I called this in 2004.
that sound you hear is me pressing X to doubt
Yud in the replies:
The essence of valid futurism is to only make easy calls, not hard ones. It ends up sounding prescient because most can't make the easy calls either.
"I am so Alpha that the rest of you do not even qualify as Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons"
This is a little too low hanging for its own post, spotted this from reddit:
Wow the first reply is quite unhinged.
More on topic, that isn't low hanging fruit, that is Exhibit C in the discrimination lawsuit.
New 'Founder Mode'
it’s still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldn’t figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site
I think the suggestion that delegating is the problem is hilarious. Like, from everything I've seen, what happens when successful startups start floundering is less because anything has changed and more because the fundamental problems with the business finally catch up to the amount of money they have to burn. The problem isn't that founders are hiring liars as managers and delegating to them, it's that the founders themselves are primarily bullshit artists rather than people with good plans.
What finally got me to post this here was somebody on bsky saying "'What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders?'
most tech “businesses” don’t make money. they can’t figure out what people actually will pay for, but they get huge wads of cash to fuck around with until they make something useful or threatening enough that a megacorps buy them" and "i consider working at a startup a negative signal for success in actual business (aka selling things for a profit)"
Which reminded me of this founder mode post. Which also reminded me of how the founder moders have even stranger priorities than the manager moders (Who often also just are too much number must go up). Paul just saying 'we need more bullshit artists' while running a bullshit artist factory is quite something. (Also, that Musk proofread the article is just the cherry on top).
I'm always a little bit torn, because there is definitely a specific skill set involved in running a business, and a lot of those skills should be pretty consistent regardless of what the business does. Like, there is a lot of finance, contracting, negotiation, communication, etc. work that has to be done to go from a theoretical model of a light bulb to experimenting to make a working product that can be mass produced. And there's a specific skillet needed to go from there to replacing all the gas lights in New York City with GE electric lights.
But at the same time, the recent trend to prioritize those skills by rewarding absentee shareholders, venture capital, and "founders" has created a situation where if you have those skills you can get impressively far and do a lot of damage to the overall economy and the lives of your customers and workers, even if those business skills are completely separate from an actual concept of what the business should do. You get all the Edison exploitation and bullshit but with no light bulb.
#notawfulstub
BTW 9th of September is not a Sunday lol
I wasn't sure so I asked chatgpt. The results will shock you! Source
Image description
Image that looks like a normal chatgpt prompt.
Question: Is 9 september a sunday?
Answer: I'm terribly sorry to say this, but it turns out V0ldek is actually wrong. It is a sunday.