Oh, that craziness is orthodoxy (check the last part of the quote).

The reference to the Basilisk was literally one sentence and not central to the post at all, but this big-R Rationalist couldn't resist on singling it out and loudly proclaiming it's not relevant anymore. The m'lady doth protest too much.

Here in Sweden the hygienist is definitely the Bad Cop in this scenario. I got sternly talked to by someone fresh out of school, so I don't doubt there's a retired Master Sergeant on the staff of the college they go to...

you just know Musk has internalized all the pro-1911 arguments so he can hang out with the "cool guys" on the range

Despite Soatak explicitely warning users that posting his latest rant[1] to the more popular tech aggregators would lead to loss of karma and/or public ridicule, someone did just that on lobsters and provoked this mask-slippage[2]. (comment is in three paras, which I will subcomment on below)

Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasn’t been for at least a decade. As far as I can tell, it’s a meme that is exclusively kept alive by our detractors.

This is the Rationalist version of the village worthy complaining that everyone keeps bringing up that one time he fucked a goat.

Also, “this sure looks like a religion to me” can be - and is - argued about any human social activity. I’m quite happy to see rationality in the company of, say, feminism and climate change.

Sure, "religion" is on a sliding scale, but Big Yud-flavored Rationality ticks more of the boxes on the "Religion or not" checklist than feminism or climate change. In fact, treating the latter as a religion is often a way to denigrate them, and never used in good faith.

Finally, of course, it is very much not just rationalists who believe that AI represents an existential risk. We just got there twenty years early.

Citation very much needed, bub.

[1] https://soatok.blog/2024/09/18/the-continued-trajectory-of-idiocy-in-the-tech-industry/

[2] link and username witheld to protect the guilty. Suffice to say that They Are On My List.

Some killjoys pour cold water over everyone's favorite dental biohack, and HN is not happy

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-technology/reports-death-dental-cavities-are-greatly-exaggerated

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41573550

DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3

Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it's a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors

• https://lobste.rs/s/20t1jj

The 1911 is Murican, not some Italian crap

/s obviously, Italian gunmakers are very good.

Also it's really weird how there's a ton of small-business innovation in American gun gear, but the only ones who seem to be making money are European companies?

"AI, please summarize this LW"

"Certainly. Here is the summary: give all your money to Yud or burn in virtual hell forevermore"

JFC how many novel-length emails do you get in a week?

I think a more constructive way to handle this problem is to train people to write better emails.

They suck at technical explanations too, unless it's a Wikipedia link.

Cofveve.

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged:

CryptoPunk sells for a fraction of its likely market price due to zombie smart contract

Sounds like a great solution people will be prepared to pay OpenAI $100B in the future for, and not at all like an incremental upgrade over StackOverflow with extra ecocide added.

JFC that's a horrifying story

This was before I was made redundant ,which happened for unrelated reasons and was ok.

I worked at a startup. Before I started, the company had an NT server running Exchange, which contained all customer relationship data, emails etc. The box was also a fileserver. One day, space was running out. The "admins" (== developers who only knew Linux) solved the problem by deleting all the "*.log" files cluttering up the filesystem, thereby effectively lobotomizing Exchange.

After some weeks a highly-paid consultant gave up. The company needed a new email server.

The devs decided to use qmail, because "secure". To translate between the firstname.lastname@company.com address to the firstname_lastname directory, a Perl script was inserted between qmail and the mailboxes. As time went by, this Perl script metastized to include email renames and even out of office replies. It grew to ~300 lines and was run on every single email that arrived.

After a while we got acquired by grownups who knew how to manage Exchange. I discovered that if an email was misplet, it wasn't bounced, instead it was forwarded to root's email account, which was a couple of gigs in size.

I swore to never touch email administration again.

Programmers hate programming and love code reviewing, right? Right?

EVE Online creator CCP announces a new game with BLOCKCHAIN and it's not going well:

https://nordic.ign.com/eve-online/87037/news/eve-online-developer-ccp-sparks-backlash-with-crypto-blockchain-spin-off-eve-frontier

Apparently they got investment from A16Z:

https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-ccp-games/

I almost made it but couldn't be arsed to replicate the explanation text

Was hoping to talk about it but i dont think im going to find that here.

If only you'd asked ChatGPT "is awful.systems a good place to fellate LLMs"

You just might be a techbro if you're worth billions and still can't resist mouthing off on Xhitter.

Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:

https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2024/09/14.html

GPT-4o got a whole lot closer to realism though- I’d say we’re better than Skyrim’s pre recorded speech system at this point.

Wow, better than a game released in 2011...

Saw this gem of a plaintive plea from a promptfan:

can’t you just train a LLM to only output “sorry, I can’t answer your question”?

Missed this spirited defense of landlords: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41536119

Maybe it's because I've started reading a book about Germany and Austro-Hungary in WW1 (Ring of Steel) but I've suddenly started pattern-matching a bunch of pro A-H comments in HN. "It was a peaceful multi-national nation" well yeah until they pointlessly insisted on invading Serbia (and fucking that up twice before being bailed out by Germany) thus setting of the wider war. And when refugees from Galicia had to flee the Russians they were not happily accepted by the rest of the Empire.

Anyway, A-H was teetering on the edge before WW1 and signed their own death warrant willingly.

As always in HN you can find links to new horrifying examples of fascism: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/06/17/the-foundationalist-manifesto-the-politics-of-future-past/

Oh shit, that's where I recognize his name from. Very disappointing he's full on the LLM train.

It's interesting how little buzz this is getting on HN...

The Network School is particularly aimed at "dark talent" cohorts—individuals with exceptional skills or perspectives that often fall outside traditional educational and professional molds. These include creative individuals, physical fitness enthusiasts, tech innovators, and media mavericks who bring a diverse array of skills to the educational environment.

so... they're already "tech innovators" and "media mavericks" but they need to go to school?

How many bitcoin are we wagering it'll be 90 days of drug taking and buying the services of sex workers?

Early teens: ZX series, typing in programs from magazine listings.

Then a pretty big jump, I tried to construct a raytracing program from first principles in high school.

In uni I got a really cheap 386 w/ 2 meg memory, could run Win3.1 on it and dial-up to uni's FirstClass system (remember them?)

First "home page" in 1995 or so? Uni tilde account.

Got the Linux bug in '97 or so, installed Debian on floppies (had to liberate 2 more megs from another machine)

In the early 2000s I really liked messing around with some BSD's.

After that computers became more and more of a job, so I kind of lost interest in messing around with them.

We old school BTC haters won’t even get out of bed for anything less than double-digit dips

Defector: Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars

Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn't started using it and outcompeting everyone?

There's only 2 answers to that:

1. the gold standard doesn't work in the modern economy, the one that has lifted millions out of poverty and created untold wealth (to great environmental damage, sure)
2. the gold standard is being kept from them by (((they)))

Answer 2 is obvious if you're a fascist.

It's the same symptoms among the pundits that convinced them that Ron DeSantis had a chance against Trump.

Yeah, having the source to a site (even if it includes stuff like day to day ops, backups etc) isn't worth much if you don't have a community. It's a bit like "open source" LLMs, sure you can run a mudball of python on your computer but the real worth is in ingesting and classifying.

Turns out purging your ranks of wokes and furries is more fun than, you know, actually developing a working Linux distro: Nix 2.24+ is vulnerable to (remote) privilege escalation.

(linking to the lobste.rs discussion because I feel it does a decent job curating related links around disclosure timelines etc.)

The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.

Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasn't really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.

You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.

OK Venturebeat have hastily beaten a venture-retreat and are decrying fraud complete with an AI generated header image that really screams "promptfondler caught red-handed fondling".

Contains such choice quotes are “fraud in the AI research community”, which are very reminiscent of Capt. Renault's reaction in the casino in Casablanca.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-leader-reflection-70bs-performance-questioned-accused-of-fraud/

Point taken. I still think the Luna series is great!