TechTakes

clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs

aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho

Is there already a word for "an industry which has removed itself from reality and will collapse when the public's suspension of disbelief fades away"?

Calling this just "a bubble" doesn't cut it anymore, they're just peddling sci-fi ideas now. (Metaverse was a bubble, and it was stupid as hell, but at least those headsets and the legless avatars existed.)

It’s a financial security threat, you see

linkedin thotleedir posts directly into your mailbox? gonna have to pour one out for you

AI’s Biggest Security Threat May Be Quantum Decryption

an absolutely wild grab-bag of words. the more you know about each piece, the more surreal the sentence becomes. unintentional art!

Naturally, the best and most obvious fix — don’t hoard all that shit in the first place — wasn’t suggested.

At this point, I'm gonna chalk the refusal to stop hoarding up to ideology more than anything else. The tech industry clearly sees data not as information to be taken sparingly, used carefully, and deleted when necessary, but as Objective Reality Units^tm^ which are theirs to steal and theirs alone.

“Why didn’t Iain take my neuroses into account??”

Yes, why didn't he take the neuroses of normal people into account. Normal people who spend 90% of their day worrying about the acausalrobotgod killing everybody.

Strikes me as they simply have never talked to normal people about immortality like that, even in a post scarcity world, lot of people simply don't feel like it would be worth their time to live forever in that.

Edit:

But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.

This isn't oppositional reading. This is an often discussed thing in the novels. So much so that the novels have counterarguments for a lot of the regular 'the culture is bad' arguments.

Anyway the article is so bad I wonder how well this person can read.

Edit part 2, can't let things go shouting electronic booo:

Sociopaths

They mention that sociopaths either get a 24/7 drone on them to guard them if they do crimes (more a general criminal thing) or if they are more megalomanic sociopaths they get to run out their desires in a virtual world (Which I assume runs a lot like the modern game Rust, where a subset of the playerbase seems to love to make 14 year old boys cry, going from the yt vids I saw). If this isn't enough, they will need to convince a Mind to help them. Because all large machines in The Culture are intelligent. Good luck with that. Also The Culture is not something like the glitter belt of Revelation Space, where somebody can sign a contract to give away their voting rights or something. So the power of a sociopath is already limited.

not solved alignment

They both have, and it doesn't matter. They have because any mind-equiv mind who goes mad gets destroyed (they literally need to take care of large group of humans or go mad, they have symbiotic relationship with humanity), or if they try to go foom they sublime, in the culture universe, sublimation is inevitable. (Therein also lies the real distopian part, considering sublimation is seen as so amazing that keeping a whole culture away from proven heaven seems like an angle to take, then the deathism also would be an argument, but more like that they let people die without going to heaven (but again, this is not subtext, culture not going poof is seen as very weird, only question is why a Yud-equiv mind doesn't come back to uplift the physical universe)).

A manipulated population

Not subtext, but simply text. Often criticized in various ways. But also a lot of behavior outside of the norm is tolerated, see the lava boat ride (where the only person not tolerated is the one having a 'this is a simulation' break). Or the guy just building a cable system.

Not mentioned:

consent

(This is also why humans are not pets).

“let me be really brave and unique: let's imagine culture is how the azadians (or veppers, or the affront, or even the gfcf…) see them. let's ignore the basic fact that this misconception is the main reason why culture's opponents, ultimately, lose. i am very intelligent.”

Hackers is dead. (Apologies to punk)

Id say that for one reason alone, when Musk claimed grok was from the guide nobody really turned on him.

Unrelated to programmers or hackers, Elons father (CW: racism) went fully mask off and claims Elon agrees with him. Which considering his promotion of the UK racists does not feel off the mark. (And he is spreading the dumb '[Africans] have an [average] IQ of 63' shit, and claims it is all genetic. Sure man, the average African needs help understanding the business end of a hammer. As I said before, guess I met the smartest Africans in the world then, as my university had a few smart exchange students from an African country. If you look at his statements it is even dumber than normal, as he says population, so that means either non-Black Africans are not included, showing just how much he thinks of himself as the other, or they are, and the Black African average is even lower).

AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.

This is an interesting crystallization that parallels a lot of thoughts I've been having, and it's particularly hopeful that it seeks to discard the "hacker" moniker and instead specifically describe the subjects as programmers. Looking back, I was only becoming terminally online circa 1997, and back then it seemed like there was an across-the-spectrum effort to reclaim the term "hacker" into a positive connotation after the federal prosecutions of the early 90s. People from aspirant-executive types like Paul Graham to dirty hippies like RMS were insistent that being a "hacker" was a good thing, maybe the best possible thing. This was, of course, a dead letter as soon as Facebook set up at "One Hacker Way" in Menlo Park, but I'd say it's definitely for the best to finally put a solid tombstone on top of that cultural impulse.

As well, because my understanding of the defining activity of the positive-good "hacker" is that it's all too close to Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things," and I think Jared White would probably agree with me. Paul Graham was willing to embrace the term because he was used to the interactive development style of Lisp environments, but the mainstream tools have only fitfully evolved in that direction at best. When "hacking," the "hacker" makes a series of short, small iterations with a mostly nebulous goal in mind, and the bulk of the effort may actually be what's invested in the minimum viable product. The self-conception inherits from geek culture a slumped posture of almost permanent insufficiency, perhaps hiding a Straussian victimhood complex to justify maintaining one's own otherness.

In mentioning Jobs, the piece gestures towards the important cultural distinction that I still think is underexamined. If we're going to reclaim and rehabilitate even homeopathic amounts of Jobs' reputation, the thesis we're trying to get at is that his conception of computers as human tools is directly at odds with the AI promoters' (and, more broadly, most cloud vendors') conception of computers as separate entities. The development of generative AI is only loosely connected with the sanitized smiley-face conception of "hacking." The sheer amount of resources and time spent on training foreclose the possibility of a rapid development loop, and you're still not guaranteed viable output at the end. Your "hacks" can devolve into a complete mess, and at eye-watering expense.

I went and skimmed Graham's Hackers and Painters again to see if I could find any choice quotes along these lines, since he spends that entire essay overdosing on the virtuosity of the "hacker." And hoo boy:

Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people's ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.

You think Graham will ever realize that we're culminating a generation of his precious "hackers" who ultimately failed at all this?