More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it:

Maybe this decision makes sense for you as a business: take the risk. But it doesn’t make sense for me as an end user.

I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.

warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed.

Oof, yeah. I kinda like the side-notes, but the instances where multiple embedded tweets were side-by-side AND simultaneously interspersed with side-notes were so visually confusing that I quit skimming the article.

this is what overpriced housing does to an mf

Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc.

Or is that something more quirky, “Eqoist?” Sorry, if you’re making it that easy to misread while I’m having my morning caffeine, I’m not going to do you any favors

cruise ship, duh

brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored

I could just bundle everything I’ve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.

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)