Burja has always had remarkably bad vibes, but it knocks my estimation of him completely into the basement to learn that he was so involved with a shitshow like Leverage. I suspect that daddy Peter and the Twitter/Hacker News crossover crowd is what’s propping up Palladium, but I believe we discussed it here when even the HN crowd laughed off Burja’s bro Wolf Tivy.

Is this the origin story of a new, remarkably sedentary Batman villain?

which are common in my Bay Area social context

I just went to a party in the Bay Area last night, and nobody talked like this. Perhaps she’s eliding some other, more trenchant details about her social circles?

Remember that this is not targeted to influence you. This is targeted to influence brain-poisoned wealthy Republicans who own things like a bunch of fracking oil-fields, or multiple car dealerships across multiple Southern states. The doors to the institutional capital (especially public pension fund capital) that Thiel’s investment funds previously had easy access to are surely being shut, and he’s trying to salvage what he can from MAGA as it breaks up on re-entry.

About half of it (~150 pages)

That’s not a card! That’s a book!!! If they can’t get this simple classification right, how am I supposed to trust their probabilistic text extruder?

I think we can call it, “Goose value 71” is officially the peak of the bubble

We’ve discussed before the influence of David Chapman and his Tibetan Buddhism among TPOT, but it’s worth also noting the fairly big notoriety and footprint that San Francisco Zen Center has in the Bay Area and northern/central California more broadly. Anyone who ends up in the Bay and goes looking for “alternative” spirituality with a relatively rigorous grounding is likely to encounter some aspect of SFZC or its outreach pretty quickly. To say nothing of enduring idol Steve Jobs’ association with the practice. It might seem surprising from the outside, but given the facts on the ground, I’m not surprised that dashes of Buddhism got roped into the techbro stew.

Note, of course, that Chapman’s Tibetan lineage is something notably different from SFZC’s lineage, and that the parent institutions can’t be held totally liable for misinterpretations by lay practitioners and dilettantes. (Myself being one of the dilettantes!)

Directly comparing Scientology-speak to the beliefs and practices of the rationalists and their offshoots seems like it should be a ground-floor understanding of the whole mess, but perhaps that sort of blunt simplicity is what some folks on the margins need to avoid being sucked all the way in.

Yah and sign up for their newsletter too

high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off

Bbbbbut making high-end medical equipment profit margins on cheap Furby knockoffs is the new Silicon Valley ideal!

A step up from last week’s uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I’ll take it, but they’ve still got a ways to go to convince me that they’re not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029

This situation is the first time I’ve become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kiki’s. I’m gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed

Oh, OK, cool. Let me know how the chatbot handles temperature management, stock rotation, allergen cross-contamination for seafood, all that good stuff.

I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because apparently that’s the latest date Kurzweil gives for his Singularity™ (can’t be arsed to go reread his book and double-check, my copy was a PDF that came via the high seas 5 computers ago anyway)

Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!

Dude why do we even need or want AGI?

We need salvation but it won’t come via rapture this decade

I trust Nate Silver’s writing advice exactly as much as I trust his recommendations for hair-care products

oppan Malkovich style

Certainly not the approach I would have taken! (Getting the bot to give up on delivering code, and instead return epic-length erotic fan fiction featuring Elan Sleazebaggano, the breakout supporting character from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones) But probably all the more effective for it.

Can’t believe that these guys are forgetting Data on Star Trek needed an emotion-chip upgrade to feel emotions, and he didn’t even get it full-time until the series was over and they were doing movies. Dario and friends are just giving away what could be an entire upgrade/upcharge cycle! “Be more intimate than ever with your workflows! Upgrade to feeling agents on FeelsCloud today! (ignore that it’s just some bullshit we vibecoded in Verilog and then flashed to discount FPGAs we shoved in the bottom of the server racks)”