another cameo appearance in the TechTakes universe from George Hotz with this rich vein of sneerable material: The Demoralization is just Beginning

wowee where to even start here? this is basically just another fucking neoreactionary screed. as usual, some of the issues identified in the piece are legitimate concerns:

Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues...

... nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that.

yet, when it comes to engaging with this issues, the analysis presented is completely detached from reality and void of any evidence of more than a doze seconds of thought. his vision for the future of America is not one that

kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum

but one that instead

attempt[s] to maintain an empire.

how you may ask?

An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore american greatness:

1. Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?

2. Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.

sadly, Hotz isn't exactly optimistic that the great american empire will be restored, for one simple reason:

[the] people haven’t been demoralized enough yet

might involve some amount of hubris you say...

This really opened my eyes to some historical context I never thought of before.

My initial gut reaction was judgmental about the way billionaires spend their money; thinking it might involve some amount of hubris.

Then I realized I have no idea of how sculpture that are now show in museums as treasured historical art pieces were judge in the time they were created. Today we treasure them. But what did the general population think of them? I have no idea.

I imagine that at the time of their commissioning they were also paid by affluent people that could afford such luxuries. People that probably mirror today’s billionaires in influence and access. So what’s different about these?

my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:

What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn't want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it'll be fine as long as there's a big cyber noggin down the track... just google TESCREAL. We didn't make this up.

dude got fucking ratioed lol

My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!

In the land down under, the ABC continues to feed us with golden tech takes: Australia might be snoozing through the AI 'gold rush'

"This is the largest gold rush in the history of capitalism and Australia is missing out," said Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh, from the University of New South Wales.

It's even bigger than the actual gold rush! Buy your pans now folks!

One option Professor Van Den Hengel suggests is building our own Large Language Model like OpenAI's ChatGPT from the ground up, rather than being content to import the tech for decades to come.

lol, but also please god no

"The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant," he said.

mate, I think that ship might have already sailed

nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer

a near 12,000 word anonymous hit piece on Émile Torres on the EA forum has some gems in the comments.

the top comment basically calls it out as someone airing their personal grievances.

next comment feels the need to call out Torres and Gebru are big bad bullies:

Broadly I think that both Torres and Gebru engage in bullying. They have big accounts and lots of time and will quote tweet anyone who disagrees with them, making the other person seem bad to their huge followings.

and my personal favorite, that Marx's drive was more akin to rationalists than current leftists, because leftists for the "last ten-fifteen years just [haven't] been very rational"

Karl Marx's whole work was based on economics and an attempt to create a sort of scientific theory of history, love it or hate it the man obviously had a drive more akin to those of current rationalists than of current leftists.

reporter: This AI development is a Big Deal™.

me: y tho?

reporter: Oh, I'm so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!

me: y tho?

reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!

me: sorry, y tho?

reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let's not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!

me: begins weeping

reporter: Don't cry! At least we're all in this together, right???

While AI being "in" a computer might sound as obvious as blue being "in" the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an "AI computer", meaning the technology is in-built. It's the company's latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest.

What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven't worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we're the rats. Perhaps there's some comfort in knowing we'll all find out together.

edit: oh no, this is the same author I sneered at for quirkwashing e/acc. nothing personal, I just die a little inside every time I read something like this, and a little death is always better shared!

trailing-question-marks: the consensus bypassing trick anarchists don't want you to know?

????

Virtual Veterans is an AI-driven chatbot that, when interacted with, assumes the persona of a World War I soldier, named ‘Charlie’. It uses AI techniques and algorithms to provide a guide to rich collections of resources from State Library of Queensland, Trove (Queensland digitised newspapers) and the Australian War Memorial.

https://www.anzacsquare.qld.gov.au/virtual-veterans

news just in: orange site poster finds 2 and 2, struggles to come to terms with the fact that they add to 4:

Every time race comes up on HackerNews i am shocked at how horrifyingly racist (some) users of this site are. Not only did a user somehow think that this context would exonerate this very racist man, both you and I are getting immediately downvoted for disagreeing. There was a post last week or so that was so full of racist comments it just got taken down. I wonder what on earth brings together HackerNews and racism like this.

mmm I wonder what it could possible be?

Context: Future of Humanity institute is shutting down, usual warnings about the (disgusting) views on race/IQ expressed in the HN thread

thanks! I've been enjoying the weekly threads, feels like they provide an easier way to get involved.

I thought at the end of the article they'd provide a modicum of push back by sharing the perspective of someone outside the cult, but nope, they round it out with a "self-professed doomer" EA, who they introduce as (and only as):

the co-founder of a global accessories brand called Bellroy, Matt's a successful Australian entrepreneur.

Objection, relevance?