Matt Levine, qntm

I can see why these would appeal to LW crowd. One of them writes cosmic horror about monstrous alien phenomena that can't be directly perceived preying on humanity and all life in the universe, and qntm writes wordy science fiction.

No comment on Wildbow. I'm sure Worm is excellent but I'm just not in the market for three HPMoR wordcounts of capeshit, so I don't know what his deal is. Bummer for him to have one of his characters be the indirect namesake of a notorious murder cult.

The world was not quite ready for the FleshLathe.

Unfortunately the stereotypical asocial shut-in types are not the only ones harboring misogynist attitudes. Unfortunately actually interacting with women doesn't always make people have respect for them. Either way, there are a bunch of loner types with poor social skills in higher education.

"Elite" institutions such as Caltech are constantly mired in discrimination issues, and frankly I think some of that is perpetuated by the whole narrative of their supposed prestige to begin with. The need to remain at the top causes such places to turn a blind eye to smart or highly acclaimed people's misbehavior and lets their biases show in selecting who to let in. Caltech in particular is an engineering oriented school and that field in particular has an ongoing history of hostility to women and minorities.

On a more personal note, I'm glad you've had the introspection to recognize your upbringing-related issues with women and that you've seemingly worked to get over those issues. That said, I'd recommend you to avoid things like using genitals as a synecdoche for gender, It reduces people to mere sex objects and bringing up people's genitals when not called for is generally considered crude and embarrassing.

Send her my thanks for her service! o7

NERV is the organization that runs the eponymous mech suits. It's a bit like if someone asked about the Simpsons and he just replied "Springfield!" like yea that's a thing from the show, but couldn't you think of a quote from a character or something?

I'm so used to bad rat science being expressed in obscurantist math and quantum physics jargon that the kindergarten neuro woo like "each half-a-brain has a 1 in 20 chance of being ontologically Good" and "nonbinary people have one half of their brain be transgender" throws me off.

Where are the Planck units and the h-bars, category theory, maybe something about Turing machines or Gödel? Can't you at least throw in a square root or something? Is this all it takes to stroke the a modern STEM dweeb's ego? I guess all the talk about "debugging" and "jailbreaking" compensates for the infantile aesthetics of the crankery.

You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that it's easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.

You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it's very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldn't be use for new software development.

I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it's very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!

We are not the same.

I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more "master copy" or "master recording" than "master of a slave". This isn't IDE. Who names their VCS branch "slave"?

Well, I guess that guy does.

Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)

The unspecificity is damning. "Facts about their membership" might range from "what racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member of" to "am I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculate".

and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.

That's an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?

I thought the point of posting your ideas on a public forum was to have people read them.

There's a difference in having a personality that gets easily bored of luxury and believing conflict is what inherently gives life a meaning. Maus puts it: "Suffering doesn't make people better, it just makes them suffer"

If someone's life is so damn easy and hedonistic they're actually getting bored of it, there are good ways and bad ways of introducing adversity and getting out of your comfort zone. The negation of being a slave to the hedonic treadmill[1] is not an eternal war for domination.

1: A strange figure of speech, who the hell thinks treadmills are hedonistic?

No, that is not what I meant. Not all software devs are techbros at all. Techbros are people characterized by their romanticization of computing history viewed through a corporatist lens; an obsession with IT and Fintech megacorps and trend-du-jour bandwagons like blockchains or AI; a façade of laid back trendiness; business ideas based on rent-seeking and value extraction; or attempts to minimize, excuse and deny the deep-seated misogyny and racism within startup and tech corporate culture.

What I'm saying is that there is a certain prestige (albeit a steadily diminishing one) associated with the technical professions, paricularly software development, and the venture capital types are taking advantage of that fact by acting as if their wealth is built on their technical talents (e.g. Paul Graham appointing himself and his news site as champions of hacker culture or Elon Musk attempting his out-of-touch idea of code review).

The idea was that if you hated both techbros and actual computer nerds, you could help ruin that prestige by taking a page from the VCs themselves (Airbnb in particular being an Y Combinator startup). Make everyone an "independent contractor", shift the ever-accumulating capital expenditure on them, make the crabs drag each other back into the bucket and position yourself as the purely extractive middle man. See how the techbros like it when you do it to their little sacred cow industry.

And as @froztbyte points out, some of this has already happened. I'm just trying to imagine the cognitive dissonance of pretending you're a genius programmer while also believing (even celebrating) that LLMs will replace software developers.