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Mangione "really wanted to meet my other founding members and start a community based on ideas like rationalism, Stoicism, and effective altruism"
  • I found the article gross.

    He is a suspect in a murder case, not convicted, and they spend very little space on the case. The cops say he had his fake id, the gun and manifesto on him. His lawyer says he is yet to see the evidence. That is all.

    Then they basically go through posts he has made online and ask people he knew about them. There is a public interest in the case, but courts are supposed to adjudicate guilt. What if he is innocent, then they just went through his posting history and showed them in the worst possible light.

  • the dead end grift that is lab grown meat
  • "We can't get people to eat less meat and more vegetables, therefore we must invest billions so that we can get to the logical endpoint: million dollars steaks!"

    "Or at least, that is what we told them. Now, feast on the most expensive meat yet as we now can literally eat up the planets resources!"

    Evil laughter as the billionaires twirl their mustaches and salivates.

  • the dead end grift that is lab grown meat
  • Great article.

    I have long suspected that it was a dead end, because at most you get a slurry that you then have to process. We already have that, the slurry is just made of vegetables. Growing animal cells in a way is way more complex then mashing peas or beans and make processed food from that.

    Or you know, be unafraid to try tofu.

  • NSFW
    EAs at VOX malding at the latest NY time hit piece.
  • Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.

    No they did not lit them on fire, they payed of people.

    In order to lit money on fire you need to buy something - like servers, electricity - and then just waste it. For example by running crypto schemes.

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky on discovering that the (ALLEGED) ceo shooter was solidly a member of his very own rationalist subculture: "he was crazy and also on drugs and also not a *real* e/acc"
  • I think it is odd that he in the several days between the murder and the arrest kept the gun and the fake id he used in New York. Doesn't prove anything, people have been known to do odd things, but then again police also have been known to plant evidence or make claims of evidence that doesn't stand up in court. Guess I will await the trial (if there is one).

  • Enterprise has no idea what to do with generative AI. This means it’s early days, and not that AI is a bubble
  • In the famous locomotive competition where Rocket beat Novelty (or was it the other way around?), other locomotives also participated. Some broke down and one was disqualified for containing a horse instead of a steam engine. Feels like there are lots of hidden horses today, and they are rewarded instead of disqualified.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • When I run into "Climate change is a conspiracy" I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go "Yeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?" and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • At work, I've been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that's why it's called work.

    The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.

    The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.

    Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save... (drumroll)... Approximately nothing!

    But if we hadn't done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.

    We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.

  • Cybercheck has secured murder convictions. It appears to just run websites through a chatbot
  • I have a suspicion, but let me first check with the AI in my phone:

    "Cybercheck committed the m-u-r...", AI suggests "murder"! That is it, case cracked!

    As my AI figured out, Cybercheck themselves committed the murders and then probably created their service to cover it up!

  • OpenAI next model Orion by December, it's 100x cooler bro trust me bro no we're not releasing to the public bro it's just too dangerous and cool bro
  • What if my mechanical watch went rogue and killed Bezos?

    On one hand Bezos is responsible for a lot of suffering and some deaths.

    On the other hand, killing is wrong.

    On the third hand, it couldn't do that, because it is just a machine.

    (It's a watch, it has three hands. It also has about as much consciousness as an LLM, it "knows" what time it is. Much more energy efficient though.)

  • The role of the consumer in late stage capitalism

    This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.

    A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.

    "No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.

    Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.

    In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.

    In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.

    If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.

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    mountainriver @awful.systems
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