istewart

VC fundraising pitch: local Dutch Bros knockoff that offers drive-thru coffee enemas The mechanics of this are left as an exercise to the reader

Every time Yegge comes up these days, I feel compelled to reiterate that I unironically want to see the Computer History Museum try to stand up a Gas Town replica 20 years from now

i still can’t find the shift key on my keyboard.* i think it may just be a greybeard myth. no big deal, posting messages like this really bolsters my public image by making me seem relaxed and approachable. *Unless I am publicly accused of fraud, trade secret theft, mass copyright infringement, etc. in which case my PR team tells me I need to temporarily drop the act.

Defining a non-GAAP unit of account is your most important task as a Silicon Valley executive. Product? Pffft hahahahaha

By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. tick tick tick tick (I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)

The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable

or flooding the zone? With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.

Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously! …damn, it’s not really very impressive. at all.

I still respect the definition he gives for magic, which he probably pulled forward from one of the many past ritual magicians he’s studied. Magic is the change in consciousness in accordance with will… but we must always remember that that doesn’t say whose consciousness, nor whose will.

Yeah, I began losing interest in Greer as it became clear that he was perfectly happy squatting in the middle of the red-brown alliance during the Trump era. His critiques of industrialism and unquestioning belief in technological progress broadly align with what we discuss here, but he will always coddle MAHA types and tale a shrugging “well, what can ya do?” attitude towards people like Trump, as it fits his preference for cyclical theories of civilization. I noticed a couple months ago that he actually managed to dig Nick Land out of whatever tweaker den that guy’s been hiding in for a podcast, which says a lot about what he’s willing to indulge these days.

I think the rationalist beliefs are quite pervasive among mathematicians Unsurprising, it’s quite flattering to believe that your area of study is what generates The One True Ethical Code!

The sweaty desperation on both sides is hilarious: both the Forest City developers for getting in bed with a dodgy hustler like Balaji, and Balaji for signing up with such obviously desperate people.

For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they’re handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who’s ever scammed $5 in venture capital

I am not retreating from public writing That’s OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.

I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry. The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks! The rest of his “accelerationist”/“decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

daniel self-flagella, more like

Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.

Most “regular” people who remain human will be eaten by digital Infinite Jests, where they can the be tippy top of made up status hierarchies This person has a remarkable lack of self-awareness

Apparently “unions” = “communism”. …so what’s open-source software, then?

More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it: Maybe this decision makes sense for you as a business: take the risk. But it doesn’t make sense for me as an end user. I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.

warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed. Oof, yeah. I kinda like the side-notes, but the instances where multiple embedded tweets were side-by-side AND simultaneously interspersed with side-notes were so visually confusing that I quit skimming the article.

this is what overpriced housing does to an mf

Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc. Or is that something more quirky, “Eqoist?” Sorry, if you’re making it that easy to misread while I’m having my morning caffeine, I’m not going to do you any favors

cruise ship, duh brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored

I could just bundle everything I’ve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.

Remember that this is not targeted to influence you. This is targeted to influence brain-poisoned wealthy Republicans who own things like a bunch of fracking oil-fields, or multiple car dealerships across multiple Southern states. The doors to the institutional capital (especially public pension fund capital) that Thiel’s investment funds previously had easy access to are surely being shut, and he’s trying to salvage what he can from MAGA as it breaks up on re-entry.

About half of it (~150 pages) That’s not a card! That’s a book!!! If they can’t get this simple classification right, how am I supposed to trust their probabilistic text extruder?

I think we can call it, “Goose value 71” is officially the peak of the bubble

high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off Bbbbbut making high-end medical equipment profit margins on cheap Furby knockoffs is the new Silicon Valley ideal!

A step up from last week’s uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I’ll take it, but they’ve still got a ways to go to convince me that they’re not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029

This situation is the first time I’ve become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kiki’s. I’m gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed

Oh, OK, cool. Let me know how the chatbot handles temperature management, stock rotation, allergen cross-contamination for seafood, all that good stuff.

I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because apparently that’s the latest date Kurzweil gives for his Singularity™ (can’t be arsed to go reread his book and double-check, my copy was a PDF that came via the high seas 5 computers ago anyway)

Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!

Dude why do we even need or want AGI? We need salvation but it won’t come via rapture this decade

oppan Malkovich style

Can’t believe that these guys are forgetting Data on Star Trek needed an emotion-chip upgrade to feel emotions, and he didn’t even get it full-time until the series was over and they were doing movies. Dario and friends are just giving away what could be an entire upgrade/upcharge cycle! “Be more intimate than ever with your workflows! Upgrade to feeling agents on FeelsCloud today! (ignore that it’s just some bullshit we vibecoded in Verilog and then flashed to discount FPGAs we shoved in the bottom of the server racks)”

That’s OK, the next set of bankruptcy lawyers will again conduct clawbacks

Speaking of Aella (I really shouldn’t), many have probably already seen this Liberal Currents article that leans heavily on her web-survey sex research dataset: liberalcurrents.com/the-interracial-cuck-porn-the… The publication seems to have plenty of traction on Bluesky, for what that’s worth, but I think this particular example needs to be retained as an exhibit of the hazards of rehabilitating American liberalism. A low-level affinity for the existing tech industry is always there, as its growth underlaid the benefits that make liberalism appealing. And that means the doorway for entryism by the tech-fascist freaks is always open, and then you’re never more than a couple fundraising cycles (whether electoral or investment) away from being right back in this exact same mess.

No way the facilitator will ever accrue any liability or get subpoenaed when the civil lawsuits (or worse) start flying! Claude, write me an ironclad legal disclaimer, maybe something about this being for entertainment purposes only

"12 Endings of AI" definitely seems like another heaping helping of bland criti-hype, but it did remind me of the delightfully bizarre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13_Ghosts_of_Scooby-Doo featuring Vincent Price

I strongly suspect there are an uncomfortably large number of Rust enthusiasts who tacitly assume that all the type-checking/borrow-checking/object lifetime tracking are primarily enabling features for AI coding.

Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird. the temporarily-embarrassed royal “we”

why understand biochemistry, if you’re part of the cognitive elite who can reconstruct it from first principles should it become necessary

sunset super-voting shares within seven years It’s taken 20 years to get this level of pushback on super-voting shares, and even then, the scam is still likely to go through. All of these people are whistling past the graveyard of eroding systemic legitimacy.

"We’re moving towards this ‘one true answer’ world. This ugly little statement has been true ever since Twitter started eating mainstream media personalities’ brains. It’s why I consider the modern chatbot to be a direct design descendent of short-form social media – it’s giving you Twitter with zero pushback or hate. Beware anyone who thinks this is a good thing.

it’s not approval they’re after, it’s reaffirmation of faith

sigh OK Scotty, I’ll volunteer to host the Keymaster if that’s what it takes to get Zuul into action

I started to smell something funny about Galloway when I heard an ad for his podcast in a prime drive-time slot on the local country music station, of all places

I think this means we need a moratorium on fantasy TTRPGs until we figure out what’s going on