What if America built a Death Star, but it was 50% exhaust ports by surface area?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/how-the-eu-could-target-us-big-tech-with-its-tariff-response.html
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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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.
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Also the big fuckoff wave motion laser cannon thing is aimed through the ship itself.
with a whole 2 Ts!
taking bets on whether that's 2 terminators or whether it's the amount of USD they want to burn to make it into a machine god
Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in "Llama Four" and it kept saying "2" so they decided to roll with it.
Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
"We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."
This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off
Holy smokes
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 At least one of the DOGE team has a recent criminal past, which should, in a sensible world, bar him from accessing such data: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/
there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones don't work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they don't work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat
the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, it's not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea i'm effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesn't help that thiel's people are swamped in vc money, therefore they don't have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they don't need to work at all. ukrainians don't have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesn't work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.
this is the disruption they're cooking. invest in eastern europe or something
@sailor_sega_saturn getting this in now: "I never thought *my* hed would get cut off," sobs CEO of Cuttin' Off Heds, Inc.
@sailor_sega_saturn I hate how these death cult douchebros appropriate Tolkien to name their companies selling fascism in bulk to the government.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 This has always been how he, and Palantir, think about the world. It's a terrible company, full of terrible people, selling horrifying products to terrible countries and companies.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Peter Thiel could be one of those who are going to lose their head in that revolution…
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
I hear that the rich and powerful are concerned about guillotine and that makes me feel happy. They should fear us.
their thesis might be right, their guess as to the subjects of the sentence however...
Banger meme from artist Victoria Ying
description:
It’s a scene from White Lotus. A man and a woman are lying on beach chairs, having a conversation.
Panel 1, Man: ‘Why can’t you just like my generative AI “art?”’
Panel 2, Woman: ‘You have to be vulnerable enough to be bad at something to be good at it, but you’re too much of a coward.’
Panel 3, Woman: ‘Because you’re soulless.”
Panel 4: Man is speechless, visibly shook
a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I've tried it and can speak authoritatively?
[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no why
i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists
i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow
i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don't know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers
at least it'll be these suckers' job to do the explaining while i rant
fuck. it's rationalist season
"imagine a perfectly spherical chud of uniform duncity..."
@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I've been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they're larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren't entirely clear on the whole concept of "fiction".
I also legitimately can't tell the degree to which they don't understand they're LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that's why it's gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted It's probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we'd all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.
You can't ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.
fondled his lizard
I'm choosing to interpret that in the most euphemistically way possible
@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …
Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing I've ever heard about him
Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins' Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)
now you've got me thinking if storage in fridge is necessary at all, if these are salts. worst thing that can reasonably happen is that salt picks up some water from the air, on top of water condensing on sample when vial was opened while still cold. freebase would probably be air-sensitive, but for compounds that are known sensitive i'd put them under argon/nitrogen, tape vial shut (with normal electrical tape, not parafilm) and store in freezer instead. sigma lists storage temperature for MDMA analytical standard (weak solution of freebase in methanol) as -20C, but some of this might be legal cover with excess requirements for cases where you'd have to be absolutely sure that analytical standard didn't decompose (like in evidence in drug cases)
@blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new …)
We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it's told well.
"i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers"
Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypse^tm^ seems like a good place to start.
"Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You'll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords."
"This Is What Yudkowsky Actually Believes" seems like a subtitle that would get heavy use in a future episode of South Park about Cartman dropping out after one semester at community college.
If South Park ever does get around to TESCREAL, I imagine Parker and Stone would have a goddamn field day with them.
No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.
Don't know what they're up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.
LW commenter - electing a crazy person as POTUS is a competitve advantage, actually
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=cZADfF3wbZqbaCFCB
I thought you had to wait at least a few generations to start inventing bullshit evo-psych-adjacent explanations for stuff.
Also this joke was funny when XKCD did it in the alt text 16 years ago. Jesus how has it been 16 years what the hell
[Epistemic status: gas giant sized contrarianism, negative gravity]
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