ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 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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TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW
The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]
Yeah I'm sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a "draconian censorship regime"
[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania
When exactly did that "left-wing monoculture" flex its muscles? During Trump 1.0? During the first two years of the Biden administration, when leftists and progressives were criticizing that administration every day for not doing enough on, well, anything? During the second half of the Biden administration, when Republicans controlled the House and leftist criticism of the administration, um, did not grow quiet?
I also want to know what this "draconian censorship regime" is in Europe, because it isn't like they're falling over themselves to take care of trans people or immigrants. Unless he's supporting the freedom to blatantly lie in order to incite violence against minorities.
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I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like
The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes
and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?
Godel Escher Bach but worse
cw gebscare
Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it's actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.
You’re polite to your chatbot because you want to be spared when the robot uprising comes
I’m polite to my chatbot because I want to bring down capitalism
(Adjusts necktie) We are not the same
I'm not polite to chatbots because I don't use them in the first place.
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm
"Please" and "thank you" are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.
The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand
I have been enjoying the game of injecting the entire script of The Bee Movie into places it doesn't belong.
Edit: @Soyweiser beat me to it lol
"According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible..."
E: this is the start of the bee movie script
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Every time I am forced to interact with a customer service chatbot, I politely tell it how miserably it is failing and then ask to communicate with a real living human being.
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this URL is the PDF of the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor for Q1 2025
the Q3 2024 report was comedy gold, using word mangling to present bad news as okay news
i expect this one to be more of the same