Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
joke is on us, Heavenās Gate picked the right time to exit.
Also how would anybody be left behind? Lile say we are wrong an the AI stuff is real vital etc etc bla bla bla. Them we just need to learn a new tool.
Nobody died because they didnt want to learn how to use a debugger for several years and then finally reversed their stance.
I guess the idea is that the tech economy moves fast and if we donāt get to grips with AI weāll be left in the dust, broke and unemployed. Somehow this is proof that AI is good instead of proof the economy is bad (if people are impoverished in a whim). Itās just the same self-satisfied fantasy as always.
Yes im just trying to say that it doesnt seem like a hard skill to pick up, and a skill which you can just skip a few generations and still be fine. Prompting gpt 1 is gonna ve different than the later models. (Even of the actual model improvements (compared to modules they add to the models) has drastically slowed down). Hell if AI worked you wouldnāt even need the skills you could just ask AI whatever and it would figure it out.
Basically,
Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg
https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923
It is an impressively bad speech.
I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, āIf you donāt care about science, thatās okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.ā Yeah, if youāre worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, donāt worry, itās going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?
āWhen someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.ā No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.
āThe rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen.ā Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesnāt matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.
Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. Youāre a billionaire, so you know better than them.
āWhen someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.ā
obviously didnāt watch that Treehouse of Horror ep where Bart and Homer are placed on the rocket ship headed directly towards the sun , along with that time periodās analogs to Eric Schmidt
When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.
Iād first check if itās Muskās ship for the fear of my life
IRL Principal Skinner meme
When some offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.
I donāt know mate, I think I do neither of those things because the kid-diddling natalist doesnāt seem to be good at making ones that donāt go boom.
Christ what a fucking shitweasel.
When someone offers you a seat on a submarine, you do not ask which seat, you just get on
Get in losers. Weāre going imploding.
Is this submarine made of carbon-fibre and is it driven with a knock-off PlayStation controller?
The Logitech F710. The wireless signal is just bad on that controller. Iād get constant lag spikes or dropped input. The Logitech F310 is a much better deal because itās 10 dollars cheaper and actually works on account of being wired.
Maybe itād work in the depths of the sea without a lot of radio noise but somehow I doubt it.
Something tells me the interior of that sub was an RF noise-rich environment.
carbon fibre is reflective for microwaves
Donāt ask those questions just get on
His eyes are giving me Corinthian vibes.
AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology
āWhy do people hate us so much? We only constantly say the technology weāre making is dangerous and then block regulation, suck up resources, commit mass theft and plagiarism, threatened to destabilise the economy, enabled more CSAM, caused widespread mental health issues and multiple suicides, unleashed a barrage of slop, engaged in mass surveillance and mocked people against the tech? Donāt they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?ā
On top of all of that, it just doesnāt work.
The instant you understand the concept of hallucinations should be the instant you are against gen AI.
Edward W. Niedermeyer calls the plans to put SpaceX and OpenAI public at ludicrously inflated valuations and dump shares on index funds for real money BAGNAROK. American pension funds are starting to say out loud that this is a bad deal.
The officials - representing three of the top four largest public pension plans in the U.S. - objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including voting control over the stock, veto power over his āown removal as CEO, and protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims.
ā¦
In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years; install a majority-independent board and separate ā the CEO and āchair roles; eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval; scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party ātransactions with Muskās other companies.
āPrecisely because SpaceX is poised to occupy a position of systemic importance in the public markets, and to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in our portfolios, its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon āwhich long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them,ā they wrote.
or sunset super-voting shares within seven years
weird number to pick given they might not last that long if felon and friends arenāt removed earlier onā¦
sunset super-voting shares within seven years
Itās 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.
And the people making these decisions know that they donāt invest much in China because they donāt trust Chinese government statistics and the Chinese stock market is rigged. They know that it is hard to get middle-aged schoolteachers and plumbers to put their savings on the stock market even if that market is scrupulously honest. But the USA has been the center of global capitalism since about 1917 and it is hard for them to imagine that changing.
That is a bad sign, negotiating means they are considering buying.
STOP FINDING THINGS
- WEB PAGES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND
- YEARS OF SEARCHING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for PAGES of SEO-OPTIMISED AI SLOP
- Wanted to find things anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called WIKIPEDIA āRANDOM PAGEā
- āYes please give me ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION of my search. Please give me TEN ADS and A PARAGRAPH OF SLOP FIRSTā - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Search engines have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the ad views we gave them
(This is REAL Search results, given by REAL search engines)
- āNone of Africaās 54 recognized countries start with the letter āKā.ā
- āAdd about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauceā
- āUnderstood. No more templatesājust direct answers, hyper-focused on exactly what you need.ā
āHello Something went wrong and an AI response wasnāt generatedā
They have played us for absolute fools
Hereās a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem
After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is
Itās still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But itās not impossible, and itās certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.
Itās not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, whatās economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.
For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isnāt enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.
Microsoftās experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we arenāt doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.
I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually weāll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but itās all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.
The worst part is that I donāt even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that itās a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities weāre leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.
But if space was a place that replicators could exist, there would already be an ecology of some sort there. Or to put it in words (that I hate) related to the so-called Fermi paradox (which I hate and isnāt a paradox) āIf they could be here they already would be hereā. (The āsolutionā incidentally is obviously āinterstellar travel is not actually a thing that can happen for replicating systemsā and it flabbergasts me that nobody can admit that.)
But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.
The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And itās incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. Theyāre not living in space, theyāre glamping.
@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL ā¦ which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.
The ISS already has issues with structural fatigue which seem to be worsened by thermal expansion. Having one side of your station red hot and another at room temperature is a big temperature differential and what faces the sun and heats up on one side of the orbit will be in shadow and cooling on the other side. And the bigger you make a physical system, the worse problems get.
I miss when I could cheer SpaceX launches on an iMac.
yeah, I dunno much about space engineering but letās say you use solar panel (which OP acknowledges is probably needed in much higher mass to simply power the stuff) to shadow the radiators, youāre looking at a hell of a large structure, with significant stresses as it orbits.
Surely someone can vibecode a finite-element model of a simple construction and estimate both the mass and the forces involved?
Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?
Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saasās cloud spend.
Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.
I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.
I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.
How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?
If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.
WELL WELL WELL, if it isnāt the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling
(plus a dose of corporate greed)
people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org
How does using personal plans impact the companyās bill? If someone is so profoundly stupid as to spend their own money on a ātoolā for their job then why stop them?
Thatās a good point. I wonder if theyāre also realizing that the promised efficiency gains havenāt manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Canāt really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.
Dunno, maybe they believe the pinky promise that their code wonāt be used for training on the enterprise plans?
Itās more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you canāt tell that just means your enterprise code isnāt discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.
Iām assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, itās going to be a big legal deal.
does anthropic sequester the data it gets sent the same way on personal and business plans?
My assumption based on nothing except life experience is that all of that data gets pushed through differently coloured pipes into the same giant bucket with privacy concerns being ātoo hardā and āapproved by legalā.
that would be my assumption as well, but iām sure the business subscriptions have some language that suggests otherwise.
Iāve seen the pattern be used as an enterprise pricing dodge before: rather than sign the whole org up at $$$, everyone signs up themselves at $ (and maybe get to claim or somesuch)
another reading could be that someone in leadership/security went āholy shit this exposure is terribleā and put forth a policy including āno personalā and the poor little promptfondler is left ashen-faced upon reading that the policy instruction actually thought of the first obvious workaround
by introducing more mess that has to be cleaned up later
(oh dear, how sad, nevermind)
that made me smile good and proper, ty for the lol
I love the orangeposters in there, some of them sure are thonkers
this is a good way of getting rid of hyperactive deadwood
Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic āyour eyes meetā trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I donāt just mean it didnāt happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.
gee I wonder why
The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesnāt take an enormous amount of time. And you donāt need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. [ā¦] Itās all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.
hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you
1 comment, essentially saying if youāre not above average height you might as well die alone
of course they get caught by incel culture immediately, trying to quantify attractiveness is so far in their wheelhouse they might as well have come up with it
Most incel forums proliferate pseudoscientific slop to justify their beliefs.
He was this close! This close!
yāall will be pleased to know that a new LWer has a fresh take on looksmaxxing!!
basically if you look like a Greek god you can convince the sheeple that the AI is gonna kill us all (and bang hot chicks as a bonus)
as of writing thereās one comment suggesting OP should read:
Aella: Has a few posts on male attractiveness, that inform a bunch of thinking on this. But she is a canon Rationalist blog, so you should default to reading her work.
Also recommends Zvi, who, no offense, is the literal epitome of a scrawny nerd, but who has managed to find a female to reproduce with. All hope is not lost, friend!
Is it real hardmaxxing unless you change your gender? In this essay I will
can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once
Wait what, how can I lock in a good shape with an upfront payment without having to go through this āexerciseā bullshit all the time? What does he know that I donāt?! Whatās the One Simple Trick, dammit??!!
Fuck me for having read thisā¦ Surely there are only like 2 dozen people in the world who think like this, right?
Ope, im getting an update that it is more than 2 dozenā¦
āIm a fuckin sicko and no one wants to immediately fuck meā
Some online dating device is demonic in the same sense as the chatbot which encouraged someone to commit suicide then initiated erotic roleplay with him.
A lot of lonely guys will do well from hiring a professional for some social dates and makeout sessions to get practice reading body language and finding some face-to-face activity with women which is not just about dating.
SpaceX has chosen a
sacrificialdisposablenaivecrypto billionaire to captain a mars fly-by someday: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lead-first-crewed-mission-to-mars-2000762451The mission is expected to take two years and hereās what he has to say about that:
I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.
I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.
Well they do tend to think stuff scales forever.
canāt wait for the inevitable livestreamed freakout/cannibalism scene
He already pulled the same con on a Japanese billionaire in 2018, just talked about flying around the moon not landing on Mars (Wikipedia: dearMoon)
oh boohoo Beff let me play a sad song for you on the worldās smallest violin
As always with these people, note that the replies make frequent reference to āloopholesā and people āexploiting the systemā without ever being specific about what those loopholes are.
I donāt know Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos but Forbesā profile begins:
Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen says @BasedBeffJezos is a āpatron saint of techno-optimism.ā Garry Tan, who cofounded the venture firm Initialized Capital before becoming CEO of Y Combinator, calls him ābrother.ā Sam Altman, who founded OpenAI ā the company that finally mainstreamed artificial intelligence ā has jokingly sparred with him on Twitter. Elon Musk says his memes are āš„š„š„.ā
He has an entry on the Effective Accelerationism wiki https://www.eaccwiki.com/index.php?title=Beff_Jezos
I donāt know Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos
He is supposed to be the original instigator and public face of so-called e/acc or effective accelarationism, i.e. the rationalist (or maybe rationalist inspired idk) spin-off of people who feel whinging about alignment isnāt necessary and that itās in fact awesome when new technology is killing people and ruining the environment because it means weāre getting to the singularity faster, and also openly rooting for fascism on main is based now.
His magic heatless AI processor startup feels like a grift to fleece investors and as far as I know has only ever produced an obviously staged video of sciency looking individuals fawning over a 3d printed wire mesh while touring what looks like a chip fab with an extremely lax contamination protocol.
š¶ sing us a song youāre the nano man š¶
The number of bitter fascist weirdos kicking Beff (of all people) while heās down sure is something.
No honor among thieves i reckon.
Isnt part of the fasc idea space the whole idea that the strong are worthy and would be rewarded and rise to the top the world just got away of all the rules pushing the unworthy? Clearly this means that as he is in trouble he is unworthy himself and now a target.
Esp as you can get a social boost by stepping on him on your way up.
The loneliest ideology.
xheet is deleted, was is Beff Jezoz who wrote that? background? though he was as American as
apple piethe Ku Klux KlanURL Typo - fixed it
Forbes says he is Quebecois with a PhD from UWaterloo. That does not stop him tweeting about āforeignersā (= foreign to the USA, but not including him obviously).
Iām sure heāll enjoy being deported back to la RĆ©publique populaire dĆ©mocratique de Quebec and spending a short time in the reeducations camps before being set to work installing solar panels
A Substack in the name of Cape Fear Advisors LLC argued that SpaceX wants to get in peopleās retirement accounts then say to Uncle Sam āyou had better give us lots of contracts or we will crash and take grandmaās retirement funds with us.ā Sucking on the government teat has been one of Elon Muskās favourite strategies since he got access to a State of California green transport grant.
I do not know if that can work because only a few percent of the company will be for sale so they will only be a fraction of a percent of those index funds. They can definitely sell some shares for real dollars, and if they keep the price high they can borrow real dollars against the shares which are not on the market like people borrow against bitcoin.
I will not link because it is in that articulate but empty style that does well on Substack. It may be written by or with help from AI.
I do not know if that can work because only a few percent of the company will be for sale
I think a 30% chunk will be available for non-institutional investors, which as far as these things go is supposed to be humongous and also an indication that they are very much counting on stupid money to prop their valuation.
I think that is 30% of 3% of the market cap for retail investors. There are many ordinary people who keep the price of Tesla shares high because they have faith in the CEO, but an index fund spending 0.2% of its money on something then losing it is just an ordinary day (one S&P 500 fund I checked has 4% of its money in M$ which has about twice the market cap as SpaceX wants to have, I assume that at least ten times as many shares of M$ are available to trade on the stock market).
Holy Empire of AI - Predictive History
Once you have the AI state, you now have the technocracy and the world will be perfect.
All right? Does it make sense you guys? What heās saying here? This is an amazing paragraph written 40, 50 years ago.
So, Iām not saying heās a Freemason. Iām not saying heās part of a society, but, he sure thinks like a Freemason.
Zbigniew Brzezinski has been dead for nearly a decade, but sure, letās play the hits. plus AI! /s
Jiang hadnāt popped up in my feed in a while, guess heās still at it. At least heās reading Karen Hao, maybe some viewers follow his cites. He really should just write a Dan Brown novel or something, heās obviously capable enough at lore dumping.
A LWer of the female persuasion makes the entirely reasonable point that most screw-top openings are probably constructed by looking at median male grip strength, not female. But the real fun is in the comments, where people who can post comments on a blog are seemingly unfamiliar with opening jam jars.
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isnāt jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison dāetre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
what is going on with these people iām so annoyed iām about to cry
Why do so many containers require women asking a man for help in order to open them? (Or carrying around an opening tool or living in a kitchen?)
how often do you open jam jars outside the kitchen?? itās not that hard! you donāt actually have to force them open through grip strength like an idiot man!!
why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isnāt jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison dāetre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Iā¦basic common sense alone would tell you that something with a lot of fruit and a lot of sugar in it might spoil if left open outside of a fridge. Why do these people act like theyāve never seen a banana before
why understand biochemistry, if youāre part of the cognitive elite who can reconstruct it from first principles should it become necessary
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isnāt jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison dāetre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
this is āfucking magnets, how do they workā translated to rationalist, except that explaining magnets involves quantum mechanics and explaining jam jars involves high school physics (saturated vapor pressure vs temperature. that might be before high school). i also like how one linked explanation sits near two pieces of slop and is wrong
The comments section really is incredible, the level of ignorance about basic kitchen things, which since itās womanly knowledge instead of dyson spheres they seem to be completely incurious about ā¦
their practical skills are weak, and they wonāt survive the winter (because they donāt know how to make jam)
but frame the same physics in terms of what makes steam turbine spin, and theyāll pretend to get it but wonāt apply it anywhere else. the longer you look the worse it gets. itās like they have never watched how itās made as kids
High-status rats have minions to order their lunches, pick up their shopping, and inflate their bike tires and yell at them if they make mistakes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BGLu3iCGjjcSaeeBG/related-discussion-from-thomas-kwa-s-miri-research
What The Shit
Iāve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and weāre both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. Heās deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
[ā¦]
Iirc heās explicitly said he doesnāt respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others)
The way these people are larping conflict resolution is so exhausting aaaaaaa please can you just do normal abuse
From elsewhere in the comments:
ā¦ I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when itās really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
High-status? Why?!! Jesus H. Fuck, I hope that if anyone ever gives me a get-out-of-social-consequences-free card, itās for a better reason than my blogging.
D: Not only does this community have a missing stair, but theyāre all explaining to each other how to avoid the missing stair, and the missing stair is in the chat replying to comments?!
From the post linked therein:
Thereās this thing Nate and Eliezer do where they proclaim some extremely nonobvious take about alignment, say it in the same tone they would use to declare that grass is green, and donāt really explain it.
Gambling? In this establishment?!
Nate thinks in a different ontology from everyone, and often communicates using weird analogies
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
when Nate thinks you donāt understand something or have a mistaken approach, he gets visibly distressed and sad. I think this conditioned us to express less disagreement with him. I have a bunch of disagreements from his world model, and could probably be convinced to his position on like 1/3 of them, but Iām too afraid to bring them all up and if I did heād probably stop talking to me out of despair anyway.
Wow, thatās a bad research supervisor.
The structure where we would talk to Nate 4h/day for one out of every ~6 weeks was pretty bad for feedback loops. A short meeting every week would have been better, but Nate said this would be more costly for him.
Wow, thatās a bad research supervisor.
(Every functional research group Iāve been part of has had weekly staff meetings. Even the undergrads were encouraged to participate and got at least that much talking time with the professor.)
In my frustration at the lack of concrete problems I asked Nate what research he would approve of outside of the main direction. We thought of two ideas [ā¦] I worked on these on and off for a few months without much progress, then went back to Nate to ask for advice. Nate clarified that he was not actually very excited about these directions himself, and it was more like āI donāt see the relevance here, but if you feel excited by these, I could see this not being totally uselessā.
Wow, thatās a bad research supervisor.
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
They keep doing it and it drives me mad!! I finally understood that they got the word from computer shit and not philosophy. Isnāt it just amazing? Here we thought they were vaguely aware of established philosophical concepts for a second!
oh my god lmao. finally we understand how that happened
Wow, thatās a bad research supervisor.
Yeah that jumped out at me. Esp with the reasoning it is costly for him. Extremely disfunctional hierarchy
My wild guess is that if you put a few lesswrongen into a room and told them to invent a āresearch instituteā, theyād write a book of procedure for the sake of having a lot of words about procedure, without any actual sense of how to allocate responsibilites properly.
Nate Soares actually has some work experience at big organizations (NIST, DND, Google, Microsoft) but he clearly is not ready to run a research group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Soares He let the HTTPS certificate for his personal site expire.
So much debate about whether his employer was diligent enough at tyre-pumping when the obvious solution is āpump your own tyres yourself, you buffoonā
Also, real talk: I got a jar opener when my wife moved in and it is a goddamn revelation how much easier that things makes life. Absolutely recommended purchase. You want to have a sandwich but you closed the jar before you came down with a cold? No worries. You stick the yeast towards the back of the fridge because you havenāt made your own bread since you got the cold and that was fuck long ago? Not a problem. You have a third reason why this fucking jar is stickier than you would normally have the capacity to handle (and trust me, you will)? Not anymore you donāt.
Oh and Iām curious now, but canāt be bothered to look it up myself in this slop era,
Has anyone done a menās vs womenās grip strength study controlling for hand size, height, etc? Iād love to know what the results would be.
opening tool
The flat end of a fork or spoon is usually enough to pop the vacuum. Which seems to be the issue in my exp.
Not that using an opening tool is bad. We are tool users for a reason.
I use grip gloves for opening jars and love them so much. Same ideas as plastic jar grips, but even easier. I find I usually have enough strength but that my skin is too sensitive to fully apply it without grip gloves.
Maybe women just arenāt that into designing programming languages?
James Damore flashbacks ohno
depressing datapoint, this comment was downvoted to the point where it was auto-collapsed yesterday, today itās āonlyā on -2
Benjamin Felix is a financial planner in Ottawa aimed at people with at least $1 million to invest. He has a BEng, a MBA, was on a sports team at university. And in April he titled his latest video SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift. The podcast version is called episode 406 āwhen massive private companies go public.ā
He also uses the term āfront runningā from our friends in cryptocurrency.
Keeping the float (value of shares available to trade on the open market) low would enable scams like all the ways of keeping the USD price of cryptocurrency from collapsing.
Edit/ The podcast is pretty mild but contains the sentences āinvesting in IPOs on a secondary market is one of the worst investment strategies that you could possibly employ. They tend to have a first day pop where the price on the public market jumps up relative to the IPO price, but most investors donāt get the IPO price.ā
Mild nit: āfrontrunningā was a term (and practice) in use before crapto trading.
I think the classical example was āyou ask your broker to buy some shares at $20 each, the broker waits as long as possible, and if the price drops low enough it buys them for $19.80, keeps 20 cents, and tells you it paid $20.ā
Edit / in fact it was āMs. Easton, a widow of Boston, MA wants to buy $1,000 of a penny stock, so the broker buys $10, waits for her purchase to drive the price up, and sells them at a profit before going out to a showing of one of those exciting new moving pictures.ā
Yep. The broker is effectively buying at $19.80 and still selling to their customer at $20.00. Now, crypto is actually innovative in just how easy this is to do. In fact itās almost required since the transactions are processed in bulk and the miners get to decide what order all the transactions in that block go in. The public mempool also means that even if the miners arenāt doing it themselves anyone who wants to front-run basically has a whole conga line of good-faith users (suckers) to get set in front of and identify the most profitable position. Without the minerās privilege youāll need to deal with transaction fees and itās going to be harder to find opportunities, but itās so easy to search that I wouldnāt expect it to matter.
I mean, the classical pitch for an IPO is the same as any other large investment, right? You get a great big chunk of capital that you can throw at scaling or improving processes or building our your manufacturing capabilities or whatever, and then that investment of capital in your business in turn generates a financial return for investors. But in an industry and world where venture capital is plentiful, it shouldnāt be surprising that when an IPO rolls around all the low-hanging fruit for improving, scaling, and stabilizing the business have already been done. Instead youāre looking for a way to let your earlier investors liquidate their returns and get actual cash that they can invest in new ventures. In the best case that means that the IPO price doesnāt move very much and it becomes a stable part of the market, but the incentives are all there to make sure the IPO overvalues the company as much as possible. I would need to do more research but I would suspect you can find an inverse relationship between venture funding and public market success in recent years, at least strong enough to expect the wheels to come off when the initial hype is pushed this high.
