Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.

That's a boring perspective fuck you for sharing.

I don't think Yud is that hard to explain. He's a science fiction fanboy who never let go of his adolescent delusions of grandeur. He was never successfully disabused from the notion that he's always the smartest person in the room and he didn't pursue high school, let alone college education to give him the expertise to recognize just how difficult his goal is. Blud thinks he's gonna create a superhumanly intelligent machine when he struggles with basic programming tasks.

He's kinda comparable to Elon Musk in a way. Brain uploading and superhuman AI are sort of in the same "cool sci fi tech" category as Mars colonization, brain implants and vactrain gadgetbahns. It's easy to forget that not too many years ago the public's perception of Musk was very different. A lot of people saw him as a cool Tony Stark figure who was finally going to give us our damn flying cars.

Yudkowsky is sometimes good at knowing just a bit more about things than his audience and making it seem like he knows a lot more than he does. The first time I started reading HPMoR I thought the author was an actual theoretical physicist or something and when the story said I could learn everything Harry knows for free on this LessWrong site I though I could learn what it means for something to be "implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian" or what that those "timeless formulations of quantum mechanics" were about. Instead it was just poorly paced essays on bog standard logical fallacies and cognitive biases explained using their weird homegrown terminology.

Also, it's really easy to be convinced of thing when you really want to believe in it. I know personally some very smart and worldly people who have been way too impressed by ChatGPT. Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you're about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

His fantasies of becoming immortal through having a God AI simulate his mind forever aren't the weird part. Any imaginative 15 year old computer nerd can have those fantasies. The weird parts are that he never grew out of those fantasies and that he managed to make some rich and influential contacts while holding on to his chuunibyō delusions.

Anyone can become a cult leader through the power of buying into your own hype and infinite thielbux.

I am an anti-corpo leftists of Lemmy. I'd like to point out one thing.

We are sure Google will just evaporate tomorrow.

They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.

Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity's business model again?

No, obviously opinions like

• "if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein's teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented",
• "stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it's supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine",
• "I don't believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.^1^ What if you lie about who is dying?",
• "Overtly sexualizing 'parody' ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is",
• "It's fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it's basically proprietary, right?",
• "You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>",

are in the same category as "I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting" when it comes to evaluating someone's aptitude as a leader.

I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I'd be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.

1: It's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).

Sure, but you might have to sit next to a poor.

Appeal to thanatority!

What's going on with the header image? You've got Google Chrome, YouTube and Xitter in one hand, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Brave browser in the other and you're bridging the gap by fusing your index fingers together?

Were it not for the illustrator credit I'd assume it was generated. (No shade intended to Alexandra Francis, I wouldn't want to bring my A-game either if I had to work for this kind of bullshit.)

It's obvious the hospital security is unfamiliar with even the most famous of 90s anime. I was making an End of Evangelion reference, so it's not like I was seriously jacking off to the coma patients

Food, housing, clothes, education, healthcare and leisure? You don't deserve them for just being born.

A Substack account, though? That is your inalienable God-given right as an existing human being.

When I was a kid my mom told me not to drink from the garden hose and that was totally and completely lame, but the whole millennial generation grew up not wanting to be blasted in the face with a pressure washer. A strange authoritarian impulse.