That thread gives me hope. A decade ago, a random internet discussion in which rationalist came up would probably mention “quirky Harry Potter fanfiction” with mixed reviews, whereas all the top comments on that thread are calling out the alt-right pipeline and the racism.

Forgive my stupidity, but I don’t know what this means. Or it’s referencing something I don’t know.

Well, I’ll give them the text equivalent of a “you tried” sticker for finally admitting their automatic bullshit machines produce (gasp) bullshit, but the main sneerable thing I see is the ISO Standard OpenAI Anthropomo-

the developers actively selected for bullshit generation

every_tf2_class_laughing_at_once.wav

(Maximising lies extruded per ocean boiled was definitely what they were going for in hindsight, but it geniunely cracks me up to see them come out and just say it)

it’s a shitty paper but even they couldn’t avoid the point forever

The truth is that we feel shame to a much greater degree than the other side, which makes it pretty easy to divide us on these annoying trivialities.

My personal hatred of tone policing is greater than my sense of shame, but I imagine that isnt something to expect for most.

Side note: The way I’ve seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I’ve mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.

Slightly related to the ‘it is an op’ thing, did you look at the history of the wikipedia page for clanker? There were 3 edits to the page before 1 June 2025.

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?

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.

Huh, I wonder who this Krauss guy is, haven’t heard of him.

*open wikipedia*

*entire subsection titled “Allegations of sexual misconduct”*

*close wikipedia*

All of those people, Krauss, Dawkins, Harris (okay that one might’ve been unsalvageable from the start, I’m really not sure) are such a great reminder that you can be however smart/educated you want, the moment you believe you’re the smartest boi and stop learning and critically approaching your own output you get sucked into the black hole of your asshole, never to return.

Like if I had a nickel. It’s hubris every time. All of those people need just a single good friend that, from time to time, would tell them “man, what you said was really fucking stupid just now” and they’d be saved.

Clout is a proxy of power and power just absolutely rots your fucking brain. Every time a Guy emerges, becomes popular, clearly thinks “haha, but I am different, power will not rot MY brain”, five years later boom, he’s drinking with Jordan Benzo Peterson. Even Joe Fucking Rogan used to be significantly more lucid before someone gave him ten bazillion dollars for a podcast and he suffered severe clout poisoning.

What’s up with all the websites that tell me “you’ve reached the limit of free articles for the month” even though I’ve literally never entered that site before in my life. Stop gaslighting me you cunts.

Anyway, here’s the archive

TIL Hank Green, the milquetoast BlueSky poster, also has some YouTube channel. How quaint.

I think every time I learn That Guy From BlueSky also has some other gig different from posting silly memes I lose some respect for them.

E.g. I thought Mark Cuban was just a dumb libertarian shitposter, but then it turned out he has a cuntillion dollars and also participated in a show unironically called “Shark Tank” that I still don’t 100% believe was a real thing because by god

I mean if it gets too hot he could try the traditional fiber arts dodge for internet hate and fake his own death.

The 17 rules also seem to have abuse build in. Documents need to be stored redundantly (without any mention of how many copies that means), and it has a system where people are billed for the data they store. Combine these and storing your data anywhere runs the risk of a malicious actor emptying your accounts. In a ‘it costs ten bucks to store a file here’ ‘sorry we had to securely store ten copies of your file, 100 bicks please’. Weird sort of rules. Feels a lot like it never figured out what it wants to be a centralized or distributed system, a system where writers can make money, or they need to pay to use.

Xanadu’s micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd

it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem

The details lie in the devil, for sure…you’d want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.

some of these people just really don’t know their history very well, do they

on a total tangent:

while xanadu’s commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could’ve combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of “CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content”, esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, it’s got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that you’d need to work through (and ofc you can’t solve social problems purely in the technical domain)

has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? haven’t really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I haven’t had to spoons to look

(separately I know there’s also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict that’s also still quite early days)

It’s nice to be reminded that the past was also crazy.

All Söder does is spew bullshit and post bad tiktoks.

Hold on, we might just have found the first job LLMs actually can replace.

The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose “rogue intellectual.”

A German term to look up is WissZeitVG but many academic jobs in many countries are only offered to people no more than x years after receiving their PhD (yep, this discriminates against women and the disabled and those with sick spouses or parents).

(sees YouTube video)

I ain’t [watchin] all that

I’m happy for u tho

Or sorry that happened

Sorry but who the fuck is that? Not one of our common guests here, I need a primer on her

“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

“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.”

But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting novels counter to the obvious / intended reading.

Proceeds to just make new things up and misunderstand inconsequential aspects of things that were already there

This is (a copy of) the original Mall Ninja thread from decades ago, featuring “the Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas”.

https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/

Fair warning: you will leave the site both enlightened and nearly dead of cringe.

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