sinedpick

I made the mistake of reading the comments on that substack and I’m beginning to actually feel the raw desperation of these sycophants for someone of “note” to notice them.

Innumeracy is the opioid of the masses.

This is the genius-level discourse that Bryan Caplan foments in his marketplace of ideas.

He shares a lot of speaking patterns with obvious cranks. I’ve spent some time listening to people who think they’ve figured out quantum gravity and the way they make little digressions sounds exactly like Yarvin does in this video. It’s not rigorous, but if I didn’t know who Yarvin was before watching this video I’m pretty sure I would have thought “crank” and quickly clicked away.

It’s a huge failure of computing that this is the most convenient and obvious way to do this.

This made the rounds last week IIRC. Though, looking at it again I realize I didn’t notice how over-stressed the hallucinated button is. It’s funny in a disgusting way.

In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: “When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. … When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”

And yet reading that should give us at least some pause

The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.

what a limp comment you have made. The post contains a treasure trove of insider information and specifics that paint a picture that is dire even to a jaded tech worker.

The “Thank you Grock” at the bottom made my day

I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it’s a pretty decent source of sneers. This month’s contains: “The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin”. In classic Moldbug fashion, it’s Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I’m not going to watch the whole thing, but I’ll try to mine the transcript for sneers.

26:23 –

Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that’s simple and easy to use that’s not a small amount of of work

Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?

30:17 – a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You’re the cream of the crop.

~2:00:00 – here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as “oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy” and responding by saying “nuh uh, urbit is decentralized.” Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.

crypto/blockchain UX quality is strongly correlated with risk of getting all your tokens stolen.

You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children’s reproductive capacity.

Depending on how you parse this sentence, the author could be asserting a parental right to confiscate their children’s reproductive capacity which is unbelievably unintentionally poetic.