istewart

A) Putting on my conspiracy theory hat… OpenAI has been bleeding for most of a year now, with execs hitting the door running and taking staff with them. It’s not at all implausible that somebody lower on the totem pole could have been convinced to leak some reinforcement training weights to help Deepseek along.

B) Putting on my best LessWronger hat (random brown stains, full of holes)… I estimate no less than a 25% chance that by the end of this week, Sammy-boy will be demanding an Oval Office meeting, banging the table and screaming about “theft!” and “hacking!!”

Oof yeah, that's rough. The AI generated header image isn't helping his credibility, either. Didn't he happily trot along to one of the rat conventions in Berkeley, and everyone was wondering why?

The Bally's story is its own source of hilarity - not only are they scrambling to fund this Chicago thing, they're also making promises about a Las Vegas resort that will host the ex-Oakland A's in what would be the smallest major league baseball stadium; with equally ??? funding gaps that their client press is all too happy to ignore.

A well-brewed fart will propel me straight to the moon

Still working on fermenting it

No actually, I think what you have to say is in line with my broader point. As the top source of global consumer demand, America is primarily held together by its supply chains at this point. To be crude about it, the best reasons to be an American in the 21st century are the swag and the cheap gas. When the MAGA and Fox News crowd are pointing fingers and ranting about Marxism, they're actively trying to obscure materialism and keep people from thinking about material conditions. Having a material program, that at least has elements that can be built from the bottom up, is at least as crucial as having an electoral program. I know the Four Thieves people got rightfully shredded here a few weeks back, and that kind of technical pushback on amateur dreams is necessary, so it's a tough needle to thread. But for instance, consider Gavin Newsom's plan to have California operate its own insulin production, within existing systems and regulations: https://calmatters.org/health/2025/01/insulin-production-gavin-newsom/ This is a Newsom policy I actually think is a fantastic idea, and a big credit to him if it happens! But it's bogged down in the production-line validation stage, because we already know how to synthesize insulin and that it's effective. And the production may not even be in California when it happens! There's plenty of room for improvement here.

Space and centralized, rent-seeking "AI" are not material programs that improve conditions for the broader population. The original space program was successful because a more tightly controlled media environment gave the opportunity to use it to cover for the missile development that was the enduring practical outcome. Positive consumer outcomes from all that have always felt, to me, like something that was bolted onto the history later. We wouldn't have Tang and transistors if not for Apollo! Well, one is kind of shitty and useless, the other is so overwhelmingly advantageous that it surely would have happened anyway.

And to your last point, I somewhat sadly feel like a lot of doomer shit I was reading ~15 years ago actually prepared me to at least be unsurprised about the situation we're in. A lot of those writers (James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer for instance) have either softly capitulated, or else happily slotted themselves into the middle of the red-brown alliance. I think that's a big part of why we're at where we're at: a lot of people who were actually willing to consider the idea of American collapse were perfectly fine with letting it happen.

Refusal of statins was one of the most prominent anti-medical trends I remember observing among right-wing acquaintences, even well before such people got on the anti-vax bandwagon. To be sure, some people experience bad side-effects (including my mom, at least for a while), but it definitely seemed like a few bits of anecdata in the early 2010s built into a broad narrative of "doctor's tryin' ta kill ya"

This is a thought I've been entertaining for some time, but this week's discussion about Ars Technica's article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.

A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly haven't cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network won't dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? It's gassed. The idea that "it might be ME up there one day!" persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining don't have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.

For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what I've seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systems... which, if it's not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.

Everybody's looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?

just mark C for every answer if you don't get it, that's what the State of California taught me in elementary school

I've seen people criticize Eric Berger for being up Musk's ass about SpaceX, though I'm simply not that passionate about space stuff anymore. And so far I don't see them posting anything about the NIH freezeout, even though that surely affects a vast swath of their reader base. Seems odd.

I was reading something David wrote about it at one point, but it seemed like lore too cursed even for the rationalist milieu

Really starting to get a bit sick of Ars Technica. They're OK for general interest tech stuff, but their editorial line (and some of their commenter base) have been really credulous about AI vendors' PR.

Hmm, surely there is no downside to doing all of one's marketing, both personal* and professional, through the false certainty and low signal of short-form social media. The leopard has only licked Sam's face, it will never bite and begin chewing!

*You and I may find the concept of a "personal brand" to be horrifying, but these guys clearly want to become brands more fervently than Bruce Wayne wanted to become a bat

This just makes me think of JJ Abrams' self-insert Star Wars character, Babu Frik.

Truly the best part of the sequel movies, there shall be no Babu Frik hate here