the penne opticon

'Lawfare THEATRE' is SO MUCH shade.👍

It's 'for worse'. There's no upside at all. It might've seemed like a fair risk back when he wasn't parachuting in to micromanage specific projects at SpaceX, but the more he gets involved (& the board seems uninterested in curbing him), the more SpaceX f*s up.

I'd love to see an article about this focusing on what that robot needed in order to compete with humans. E.g., GPS? Radar? LIDAR? & in particular, what would it NOT need if we took away the requirement to be "humanoid"?

Consider this question with the assumption that Nick understands people have been thinking about this for a very long time.

I'm seeing some anti-anti backlash from experienced software engineers saying 'if the engineers are good then generative AI is a valid force-multiplier, because Code Review.' "Good code review assumes the work was done by a one-day contractor who's unfamiliar with the project." 😑 ...

Lotta people need to learn the difference between "evidence does not support this crank theory" and "all issues using these keywords are fake." Yes, "is fake" is simpler messaging. But it only makes the disinformation problem worse.

We read Johnny and the Bomb! And more importantly we ask: are we genetically weaker than you? youtube.com/shorts/RaVY6...

There's also the fact that they just FAIL SO F*ING OFTEN. & for the most part it doesn't even help to buy name-brands, I had two different pairs of SkullCandys just...stop working...after about 3 months. Then some cheapo ONNs lasted for a couple years.

Me: *blissfully ignoring everyone trying to communicate with me* A voice note from a four year old: "UNCLE JAY! ANSWER YOUR PHONE!!!" Me: *scrambles to comply IMMEDIATELY*

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different. twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

Shades of Rove's "Reality-Based Community". How'd that work out for them? (I know: not badly enough in the long run. But they did get a little too high on their own supply.)

It should be greater cause for pause -- and alarm -- that, at a time when we increasingly associate manifestos with mass murderers, the Silicon Valley elites can't stop writing manifestos. This one does not disappoint.

Just sobbed hardest I have since my mom died in 2020. She missed these trials by a few months. One of most ruthless cancers. Hard to fathom that maybe she'd still be here. I feel such a hole inside. In case you're wondering if we should fund mRNA research instead of another stupid war ... yes.

"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts"

You cannot convince me that this was not staged. It's straight out of Roadrunner.

“If it was really that bad you would go to the hospital” Chronically ill people hear this all the time. People in our lives struggle to understand the hospital is a dangerous place. There’s no easy “fix” for chronic illnesses & a myriad of ways we could potentially be harmed.

pckt.blog/b/jcalabro/a... The postmortem of the *last* big outage shows that it was because they DOS'd themselves through vibecoded slop.

Oh fuck. Full on sobbing now. https://youtube.com/shorts/0Sk3d_4yWiQ?is=pG58-zT8mv85irKD

in the 1970s Hillary Clinton made a hundred grand trading cattle futures and 15 years later the news media made a decade-long scandal out of it

Bow to the machine that, if it works as directed, will destroy your way of life; and whether it does or does not work as directed, your boss will use it to try to destroy your way of life.

Oh hell no

the NYT generally seems to use 'elite' to mean 'people who could invite NYT journalists to their dinner parties but don't and that fucking kills us.'

it's funny, i'm currently brain-coding something and it's plausible that if i vibed it instead i would be "farther along" in some sense, but the work has been overwhelmingly concentrated in just determining what kind of configuration i want it to be in

And this is the full 7 min film that goes with it. Never change MA/TW.

What I make of this is that it's meant to code as mockery: "The Mamdanis THINK they're elite, but they're really chumps."

The framing deserves to be torn apart, I also think there's something interesting here in the word "elite" and the way it slips among wealth and other kinds of privilege/status. IANA Manhattan elite but I imagine the financial elite and cultural elite are quite different categories...

imo you can’t rely on guilt because that’s an emotion reliant upon self-reflection, which LLMs dull by design. We can only win by making it an issue of profit. Companies must hire PR firms to try to quell disquiet, for example.

This: Make them deal with the fact that they're leaning-in to de-humanization. Even if it does turn out to have been a DDoS attack, still make them deal with it. (Anyway, how the app responds to DDoS could be messed up by slopcode.)

One light suggested amendment

Bsky staff is scrambling to convince ppl that today's outage has nothing to do with their embrace of ai. That's great. We should make them scramble more. The cost of replacing competent humans with AI needs to be greater on every single level for every single company.

Re. BlueSky service slowdowns yesterday.

OK fine since nobody asked for it 1 like = 1 Peter, Paul, and Mary hot take

Totally what you do if you want to get military folks on your side to consolidate a fascist takeover.

I twice lived in an apartment in one of the houses where "Puff, the Magic Dragon" is alleged to have been written.

I hear the Bluesky devs told Claude to only break your feed if you’re gay

one thing these guys are only beginning to admit is that a lot of the accumulated knowledge they dismissed as the product of 'biased left-wing experts' was a Chesterton's Fence -- conclusions that had built up over time and passed various tests, even if they were unwelcome to people like Alexander

& there are remnants! OTOMH the California & NY systems, some of the other big state systems are still solid. But yeah, it's obscene.

TL;DR-ending of mini-thread: The underlying economic theory of AI Bros. (But back up & read from the start, it's only a few posts long.)

Reminder that RFK Jr's ADHD drug was heroin.

like, it's a minority who think (correctly in my view) that a nazi tattoo should be disqualifying, and a majority who apparently don't, and that just does not break down across clear ideological lines in this case.

90s & 2000s Internet culture was filled w/ ppl playing w/ the idea that 90% of reality is perception & that thus if you alter perception, you change the world. Lotta good people & interesting work came from those waters, but so did misanthrope edgelords like thiel, weev, andreessen, yarvin, land, &c

and also...you don't really need institutional mechanisms. swalwell wasn't impeached or formally disciplined. support was just withdrawn, and he had no options.

[pointing at the mouth of Plato's Cave] i know it smell crazy in there

Are you a woman in computer science looking for a way to destroy the patriarchy? I have an assignment for you. Yell in my direction.

The press corps tends to reflect the value system of the moneyed elites. If there is little press coverage of Trump’s sex crimes, it’s because the moneyed elites are unbothered by them. Human suffering is inconsequential. They are not normal people but most of us still view them as if they were.

Genuinely funny that Sonia Sotomayor issued a public apology today for her mild criticism of a conservative colleague on a specific, substantive issue, and then a few hours later Clarence Thomas picked up a mic and was like ALL LIBERALS ARE AMERICA-HATING COWARDS

People who see birth rate "crashing" for teenagers & think that's a crisis are ghouls whose views should be aggressively ignored.