I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for ~~prompt~~ context engineering. Get with the times or get left behind

Thank you for posting this. I'm honestly a bit surprised that this genre of Google truth-telling is not more widespread, or perhaps I just haven't seen it. Your experience of "the wall" between Latin America and the US is obviously also more poignant than ever. Seeing it described this way, in this context, kinda hit me over the head and is finally making me wonder if the US immigration/deportation mess will ultimately come to be seen as something equivalent to the Iron Curtain. Putting your experiences out there is worth it for that alone, at the very least.

It's not that there haven't been people out there who were willing to yank the curtain on Google, either; I just feel like it's been more of a word-of-mouth thing in my experience. For instance, I knew a guy who was there during the Gmail launch. He made clear to me that "don't be evil" was a slogan created by a later hire, and really had very little to do with the thinking of Page/Brin or later Schmidt, except that they found it to be convenient office propaganda. Thus, he ended up not really believing it at all by the time he was done.

Another good friend of mine was also a contractor in a technical department in Mountain View for a number of years. The US contractor experience (at least in that role) didn't seem as firewalled off as you're describing for the Brazilian contractors, but he was still under the twin guns of "your job is meant to be fully automated eventually, and your primary purpose is training the system towards that" and yearly contract renewals. And of course, it's also where he and his eventual wife got infected with the Bitcoin prosperity gospel, a train they're still riding to this day...

I actually think it's part-and-parcel of Yarvin's personality. As much as he rails against "the Cathedral," PMCs, whatever, he himself is a perfect example of a pathological middle manager. Somebody who wants power without having to shoulder ultimate responsibility. He craves the childishly simplified social environment of a medieval-fantasy king's court, but he doesn't want to be the king himself. He wants to be (and has been, up until now) the scheming vizier who can run his manipulation games in the background, deciding who gets in front of the king but not having to take the heat if the king makes a bad decision. (And the "kings" he works for have made plenty of bad decisions, but consequences have only just begun to catch up.)

I suspect this newfound mainstream attention is far more uncomfortable than it is validating for him. Perhaps the NYT profile was a burst of exhilaration, but the shine has worn off quickly. This correlates with the story last year about him coming back to Urbit as a "wartime CEO." If Urbit is so damn important for building his ridiculous vision, why wasn't he running it the whole time? He doesn't actually want to be CEO of anything. Power without responsibility.

bahahahaha "judge every molecule." I can't believe I ever took this guy even slightly seriously.

year of Nakamoto 17

so what you're saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest

This reinforces my judgment that the ultimate customers for code-completion models are people who don’t actually want to be writing code in the first place.

If you’re a journalist and want to get in contact with people around the community/rationalist scene who knows the people involved, you can fill out this form and your contact info will be shared around our networks

why does this seem vaguely like a threat

A) Putting on my conspiracy theory hat… OpenAI has been bleeding for most of a year now, with execs hitting the door running and taking staff with them. It’s not at all implausible that somebody lower on the totem pole could have been convinced to leak some reinforcement training weights to help Deepseek along.

B) Putting on my best LessWronger hat (random brown stains, full of holes)… I estimate no less than a 25% chance that by the end of this week, Sammy-boy will be demanding an Oval Office meeting, banging the table and screaming about “theft!” and “hacking!!”

But Trump can't explain things, and Urbit defies explanation. So does the statement "Trump explains Urbit" represent undefined behavior in English?

I especially want to be sure that everyone here is aware that the video thumbnail clearly shows that JD Vance was not seated upon, or otherwise interacting with, a couch. JD Vance was calmly seated in a standard office chair for the duration of this interview. Any posts containing out-of-context references to couches will be dealt with vigorously.

It's slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it's going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.

I used to be a serious systems programmer like you once, then I took a prompt injection in the knee