I watched most of the first season of Silicon Valley with a friend who recommended it to me. I liked it. Every single character with a speaking role so far (with the possible exception of an exotic dancer and a graffiti artist) deserves death by nuclear weaponry. SFBA delenda est.
this post was submitted on 18 May 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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It looks like twitter was down for 2.5h. [hn] Previously there was a fire in twitter server farm which caused some availability issues. Gee i wonder how well these gas turbines are serviced
LWer asks: "what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?"
NASB: A question I asked myself in the shower: “Is there some kind of evolving, sourced document containing all the reasons why LLMs should be turned off?” Then I remembered wikis exist. Wikipedia doesn’t have a dedicated “criticisms of LLMs” page afaict, or even a “Criticisms” section on the LLM page. RationalWiki has a page on LLMs that is almost exclusively criticisms, which is great, but the tone is a few notches too casual and sneery for universal use.
My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.
In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.
This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.
In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn't dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced ~~spyware~~ ~~privacy violation~~ telemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.
Now it's the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.
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I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/
No one:
Absolutely nobody:
Klarna: What if we financialized buying burritos using AI?
If there’s any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.
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Here's a video of a Tesla vehicle taking the saying "move fast and break things" to heart.
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Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.
Oof that’s the good stuff. Chuds with overly self-inflated egos co-opting eastern philosophy for tech shit is pretty well known around these parts. It’s refreshing to see it from a slightly different white guy.
Also, my usual muckraking bore unexpected fruit:
I’m gonna believe it. The Candace Owens part is disputed, and I daresay debunked, though.
text of tweet inside image
From @BootsRiley:
Now is as good a time as any to tell people that Rick Rubin is a behind-the-scenes rightwinger who tries to recruit music industry folks to Q-anon type stuff and is who (according to Kanye) convinced Kanye to meet Candace Owens and endorse Trump.
He just looks like a hippie.
i recently stumbled upon his "tetragrammaton" podcast on youtube, listening to the episode with soad's daron malakian, which was actually very interesting.
then i had a look at what other interviews were on offer. among popular actors and musicians there are such luminaries as: palmer luckey, peter thiel, mark mcafee (apparrently some raw milk tycoon), jay bhattacharya (covid-19 hoaxer type guy i guess), mr eggman himself, etc etc
on the podcast rubin comes off as this cool, open-minded hippie person, "just asking questions" and "having a conversation" with interesting people. so i guess he's just sort of following the rogan formula. except i think rubin has a bit more brain matter left than the mma/dmt guy. so i can't help but wonder if this podcast is a bit more of a targeted effort at influencing new age people just coming across it like i did.
i was actually quite surprised at this, so i also did a bit of searching, and apart from the post you linked i also came across nothing else. but his work speaks for itself i guess.
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New piece from Tante: On "Vibe Coding" - take a wild guess what its about.
My guess: Remotely hacking sex toys so they run doom?
At first glance those narratives feel great, who doesn’t like “democratization”, “empowerment”
Same script as the naive 'leftwing' case for cryptocurrency/blockchain tech.
Every time without fail, it's this shit^
saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script
Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"
But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.
Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter
Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328
The main objection being along the lines of, "Milton Friedman's "I am not a racist" tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt."
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Scoot makes the case that agi could have murderbot factories up and running in a year if it wanted to https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kp3qdh/how_openai_could_build_a_robot_army_in_a_year/
edit: Wrote it up
new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
“LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek,” Salamon said in an email. “Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.”
"people commit suicide after meeting me" is a weird thing to brag about
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