OT: paying the cat tax…again. Please ignore the ash on Hector’s head, its an ongoing mystery where thats been coming from.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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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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You can basically tell their personalities from the photo.
Very impressed with this comment from the creator of the Zig programming language, regarding dealing with AI slop submissions, and generally about LLMs for coding.
I should look into Zig again! Technically, I've always leaned more towards Rust, because I like its more uncompromising approach to safety, while Zig always seemed to me a bit more middle-of-the-road on that. But I've been disappointed about how wide-spread LLM usage has become in Rust circles, I fear that its culture might tip over in favor of slop. (But it's not there yet and I hope it won't happen!)
Anyway, I'm ordering the "Introduction to Zig" book...
I was taught to take off every Zig, not install them! Clearly it was a more innocent time.
Enjoyed this piece from Mission Local on San Francisco's "March for Billionaires" yesterday.
Choice excerpts:
Despite the San Francisco locale, a participant said the event had “grassroots” origins at a “little rationalist restaurant get together” in a “group house” on Shattuck Avenue, subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies.
Mission Local contributor Benjamin Wachs coined a term for an event in which media observers outnumber participants: a panopticonference. This was close to that. Those in attendance did their best to field questions from the barrage of journalists that backed them into a tree.
This is where Annie, a young transgender woman who attended the protest in a T-shirt that said “I’m in a polycule with Aella,” first met Kauffman. An impromptu debate ensued, with Annie “aggressively defending billionaires.” It was, participants concluded, worthy of a larger forum.
“People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,” she said. “We are beautiful. We’re smart. We’re strong… We are supporting the billionaires, here.”
A polycule with Aella, otherwise known as a nightmare fuck rotation
Scum.
edit: reasonably certain annie is annieposting from tpot.
annieposting
I assumed billionaires could afford better signs. Were all her EAs on leave that week?
“People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,”
Remember when Rationalists pretended to care about truth, steelmanning, ideological turning tests etc.
(Also implying that billionaires are strong and attractive is funny)
subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies
Yall still are radical hippies. Some hippies just love the boot.
California is, I believe, the only state to give health insurance to people who come into the country illegally,” Kauffman said nervously. “I think we probably should not be providing that.
Rationalism, the empathy removal training center.
“It is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,” Annie said. “Just like Germany does to the extremist organizations.”
Well, Germany certainly did excel at removing classes of people from society
lol.
Her political awakening, she added, was watching the press “constantly pump out obviously fake information” against Trump during the 2016 election instead of reporting on the “actual abhorrent views he holds.”
Converted by Scott. (That 'people are saying I was wrong but actually I was right' disclaimer aged worse than the post).
gag. going full mask off now
Did any actual billionaires show up to press their case, or was it all just cronies?
from bsky photos looks like entire gathering was 30 people. t h i r t y p e o p l e i might have counted some reporter or someone passing by randomly by accident
patio11 and tptacek are experts on daycares in Minnesota. This is very on topic for a technology website that eschews politics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915587
It's a real fuckin scum scrum over there(1). Between these dorks and Mozilla Jake, it seems like every nerd-ass fash clown in tech got the memo to talk like an emotionally abusive ex with dying wizard characteristics.
(1) even more so than ususal
I miss when Patrick McKenzie was just sharing an American's view on Japanese culture and reminding devs that names are not always Firstname Lastname in the Latin alphabet and 'just' paying yourself twice the average local income from your business is not a failure. The following is deep twitter pundit brain for a rich white man in Chicago who has lived most of his adult life in Japan and SoCal referring to social programs for poor brown people in Minnesota:
I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
Edit. I also like the HN response which explains that private companies have few responses to fraud except refusing service, but the State of Minnesota can arrest fraudsters, command third parties to provide evidence about them, and send them to prison, so the People of Minnesota require strong evidence before it uses those powers.
more proximately, he also went to the Manifold Markets meetup for statistical predictors that just happened to include Jordan Lasker, which is why he keeps making these posts with curiously Lasker-adjacent talking points. It's very disappointing.
patio11's sometimes bosses at Stripe are such ambitious capitalists that they sometimes scare him. Maybe his racist friends told him that the Japanese are honorary Aryans?
I knew nothing about, and had no opinion on, daycare facilities in Minnesota run by Somali immigrants, before Trump-supporting media entities decided to make the topic an astroturf issue. On the other hand, I had plenty of experience with people whose worldviews had been severely warped by such coordinated media campaigns. Mr. McKenzie should take some time to reflect on this.
Yes, I think the people who should have opinions beyond "the state government found some fraud and is investigating further cases" are people who live in Minnesota and have connections to daycare or immigrant communities. Its notorious that the NYT repackages stories by reporters in smaller orgs (or randos on social media) and puts its own spin on them! They don't have a specific editorial line on social services in the Midwest, just instincts.
Btw, been appreciating your posts lately!
Re datacenters in space:
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862222
Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170
Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435):
it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power
We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.
SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
Truly a conundrum worthy of the XXI century
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once again, the facade of the "whoops, bad company" falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask
transcript
a quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: "So what's the deal with this ghastly woman again? She's a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?"
the quoted tweet by aella reads: "There's apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?"
also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it's a sock
robin hanson blocked me for referring to him as aella with tenure. now i think that he's ghislaine maxwell with tenure
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Tangentially on topic:
Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! I'll likely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and I'm hopeful that it'll win all the awards.
Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:
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In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol
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Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.
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Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.
@o7___o7 @techtakes That's why I'm fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.
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Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift
- recall might be rethought, again
- copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) “under review”
- no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows
Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if you’re smart what happens after the launch is someone else’s problem. I wouldn’t be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately “scaled back”.
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The common clay of the new west:
transcription
Twitter post from @BenjaminDEKR
“OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren't careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The "Heartbeat" cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, ("remind me tomorrow to get milk")”
Continuation of twitter post
“1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied "HEARTBEAT_OK" 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:
- Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
- 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
- Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." The problem is:
- Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
- Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
- Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking That's $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.”
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Ryan Mac:
Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.
We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.
For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.
Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.
Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir's chairman and tells Epstein there is "no need to rush." This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.
Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel's VC funds.
One of @ering.bsky.social's great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the "optics" of telling founders that Epstein was involved.
So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.
At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.
[...]
While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226
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But why are we talking about some AI agent platform in the Urbit newsletter? Naturally because we think, Urbit fixes this.
As a matter of fact, Tlon is already working on this with their Openclaw Plugin for Tlon Messenger. It is currently in an early adopter phase, but they expect to provide an instance of Openclaw with every ship that they host for their users.
but of course
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I see that Silicon Valley has transcended AGI technology* and can now execute NP-complete** problems.
* A Guy in India
** Nationals from the Philippines, Completely
WAYMO exec admits under oath cars in the US have "human operators" based in Philippines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClPDbwql34o
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