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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
In a frankly hilarious turn of events, an award-winning isekai novel had its planned book publication and manga adaptation shitcanned after it was discovered to be AI slop.
The offending isekai is still up on AlphaPolis (where it originally won said award) as of this writing. Given its isekai and AI slop, expect some primo garbage.
The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that "prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall," Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines - archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.
The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022. Update: it links several more simplenote posts with statements like "It's 2022 as of the time of this writing" and "as of Mar 30 2022." The author lived in Austin when Aella was there. So it seems likely that the post about VibeCamp was written in 2022.
Update Again: the author posted to Substack under a meatspace name and linked "Know Your Amphetamines". I don't recommend reading the whole post, its just an unpleasant person with logorrhea unloading a stream of consciousness at unpleasant people.
I think thats Eiganrobot’s wife’s gay escort ex.
Also had a beef with Aella when they were both in Austin!
They are not beating the allegations that a Postrationalist is a Rationalist who admits Yud is just a dude and their goals are religious goals.
Update: There is a partially cached Facebook post where MacDonald states what he claims is Eigenrobot's government name and says that Eigenrobot's "(self admitted) BPD wife used to want to fuck me" (Google and Bing saved snippets, but do not share the full cache). That could have been what got him kicked out of VibeCamp for doxxing.
Been listening to the latest oxide and friends podcast (predictions 2026), and ugh, so much incoherent ai boosting.
They’re an interesting company doing interesting things with a lot of very capable and clever engineers, but every year the ai enthusiasm ramps up, to the point where it seems like they’re not even listening to the things they’re saying and how they’re a little bit contradictory… “everyone will be a 10x vibe coder” and “everything will be made with some level of llm assistance in the near future” vs “no-one should be letting llms access anything where they could be doing permanent damage” and “there’s so much worthless slop in crates.io”. There’s enthusing over llm law firms, without any awareness of the recent robin ai collapse. Talk of llms generating their own programming language that isn’t readily human readable but is somehow more convenient for llms to extrude, but also talking about the need for more human review of vibe code. Simon Willison is there.
I feel like there’s a certain kind of very smart and capable vibe coder who really cannot imagine how people can and are using these tools to avoid having to think or do anything, and aren’t considering what an absolute disaster this is for everything and everyone.
Anyway, I can recommend skipping this episode and only bothering with the technical or more business oriented ones, which are often pretty good.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_generativeai-gartner-ibm-activity-7415515266849124352-W2n5
I’ve finally cracked how Gartner’s “Features” axis works.
It’s not latency.
It’s not context windows.
It’s definitely not “can this thing form a coherent thought.”
It’s Enterprise Friction™.
By that metric, Gartner has ranked IBM—a company whose flagship product is currently “billable hours in a trench coat”—ahead of Anthropic, the people who actually build the models IBM is desperately trying to resell with a logo swap.
Ranking IBM over Anthropic in 2025 is like ranking a library card catalog over Google Search because the library has better governance, stronger controls, and more shelves you can lock.
Anthropic is building the frontier.
IBM is building a PowerPoint about the frontier that requires a three-year commit, seven steering committees, and a ceremonial blood sacrifice to Red Hat.
Gartner analysts: blink twice if the blue suits are in the room with you.
Another ChatGPT fatality's just hit the news - California teen Sam Nelson has died of a drug overdose, after two years of trusting the chatbot for drug advice.
Yet another Palantir co-founder goes mask-off complaining about "commies or Islamists".
Remember it's only tyranny when the government does it. Otherwise it's just sparkling feudalism.
Actually having made that joke I feel obliged to link a post from historian Brett Devereaux about, among many other things, what the ancient greeks meant by a tyrant because "building personal power by subverting and corrupting the actual state" was even more key than power being invested in one individual.
The normal expectation for Greek tyranny is that the system works like the Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope, where the new tyrant abolishes the Senate, appoints his own cronies to formal positions as rules and general makes himself Very Obviously and Formally In Charge. But this isn’t how tyranny generally worked: the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what seperates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule.
This distinction feels meaningful in the year of our lord 2026 for some reason.
I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does
The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.
Discord have a new questionnaire up, to determine how their users think about “ai”: https://discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5BGtstVUidXadts
ah fuck, man. reddit.com/r/therapyGPT if you want to ruin your day
