corbin

@corbin@awful.systems

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corbin,

Paraphrasing Santayana, we must understand why people become fascist, or else we will not understand how to prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes of dehumanization and black-and-white reasoning which characterize their piss-poor attempts at logic.

corbin,

Fuck this hyperreal composition. Dalí is spinning in his grave.

corbin,

This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that’s not an actual ancap position?

On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that I’m mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It’s difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.

corbin,

That thread from Paul is such an eyeroll. “Community”, says the VC-funded startup-builder. But it really does show how far out into the wilderness Dorsey has gone; not even his startup bros want to follow.

corbin,

Microsoft is legendary for this. In fact, I’ll give you Microsoft’s entire business recipe; it’s not secret:

  • Dogfood all products
  • Maintain backwards compatibility at all costs
  • Have at least a decade’s worth of liquid operating funds in the bank at all times
corbin,

I agree, and also I find “over a decade” to be a very funny duration. ELIZA was developed in the 60s; it’s been over half a century since humans confused bots for people, which was the point.

corbin,

Sure. It’s a tough question, though; morally, yes, cars are physical objects and typically well-regulated, but self-driving cars are enabled by software, which tends to flout legal demands. I hope in this case that the sheer physical presence of cars will enable regulators to ban unsafe vehicles from public roads, but it’s not as clear-cut as we’d like.

New York taxpayers are paying for spicy autocomplete to tell landlords they can discriminate (themarkup.org)

In October, New York City announced a plan to harness the power of artificial intelligence to improve the business of government. The announcement included a surprising centerpiece: an AI-powered chatbot that would provide New Yorkers with information on starting and operating a business in the city....

corbin,

This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I’ve ever seen. To recap:

  • NYC elects a cop as mayor
  • Cop-mayor decrees that NYC will be great again, because of businesses
  • Cops and other oinkers get extra cash even though they aren’t business
  • Commercial real estate is still cratering and cops can’t find anybody to stop/frisk/arrest/blame for it
  • Folks over in New Jersey are giggling at the cop-mayor, something must be done
  • NYC invites folks to become small-business owners, landlords, realtors, etc.
  • Cop-mayor doesn’t understand how to fund it (whaddaya mean, I can’t hire cops to give accounting advice!?)
  • Cop-mayor’s CTO (yes, the city has corporate officers) suggests a fancy chatbot instead of hiring people

It’s a fucking pattern, ain’t it.

corbin,

I’d summarize it as joyriding but with skyscrapers.

corbin,

Wow, I hadn’t read Lowe’s response before, and it is capitalist cringe of the highest order. Thanks for sharing.

To be clear: I agree with every chemical and pharmacological critique leveled at the anarchists here. I also think that none of them have addressed the actual problem that the anarchists are solving, which is that medicinal chemistry has undergone so much regulatory capture that it is no longer legal to perform it at home for one’s own private use or even to reverse-engineer the synthesis pathways. For more commentary on this, I recommend watching e.g. NurdRage reverse-engineering pyrimethamine and paying attention to what they say about obtaining precursors and carrying out various steps of synthesis.

corbin,

This is part of why I never got into mining BTC. Even if I have a decent business plan and I can afford all of the externalities, I’d still be profiting almost entirely from the bad choices of retail investors. (And isn’t “retail investor” such a nasty euphemism?)

"The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I." - hackernews discussion (news.ycombinator.com)

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the “obscene energy demands of AI” with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on...

corbin,

I hear what you’re saying, but I think it’s sort of a motte-and-bailey setup:

Motte: Many functions can be probably approximately learned, even some uncomputable functions

Bailey: Consciousness, appreciation for art, useful laboring, and careful argumentation are learnable functions

corbin, (edited )

That’s a real possibility. At risk of going NSFW, HN seems to have a very predictable reaction to links to (English) WP; their comments are always tangents based on personal experiences. For example:

But (at risk of invoking the shape-rotator stereotype) it seems like it’s hard for HN’s denizens to imagine a time when they personally were experiencing a memetic effect because memes are patterns rather than concretions. For analogy, an HN full of fish would not leave a single comment on the Fish WP article, “Water.” Edit: A fairer example would be an article like “Properties of Water”, because memetics is the study of memes, and memes are like water. (“Hydrodynamics” isn’t a standalone article, but it would be another good candidate.)

corbin,

Go for it! I don’t have any active HN accounts and I don’t want to make one.

Rationalist org bets random substack poster $100K that he can't disprove their covid lab leak hypothesis, you'll never guess what happens next

rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World....

corbin,

Very ironic that they refuse to use the Bayesian framework while insisting that their judges did not use it correctly. To reuse an old joke: I updated my posteriors; now, up yours!

corbin,

Is it still a scam if the only applicants are scammers?

corbin,

He’s lucky that implementing a cryptocurrency doesn’t require inverting a tree.

corbin,

Better not fight on the bus; that’s where he’s at his most deadly.

corbin,

Pour one out for Street Epistemology, I guess. Now I’m wondering if Anthony Magnabosco, the guy who does those Street Epistemology videos for Youtube, is also a chud.

Boghossian deserved to lose his job, though. It’s one thing for scientists — mathematicians, physicists, etc. — to sneer at soft sciences by mocking their lack of empirical rigor; it’s another thing entirely for a non-tenure-tracked philosopher to do it. And Portland State was relatively gentle with him, telling him that he had to take a course on ethics of human experimentation before continuing to publish; he quit himself out of a decent teaching position because he wanted to be a proud crybaby. May he never move back to Oregon.

corbin,

I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn’t realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.

2017: AI will soon replace human labor

2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want

2020: COVID-19 won’t be that bad

2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him

2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers

2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn’t understand why I’'m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)

corbin,

Be careful not to equivocate opinions, normative claims, BDS, electoral interference, and belligerence.

corbin,

Dude, chill. This is a NSFW thread. It’s not for dunking on others, but for reflecting on our positions and argumentation. I’m not trying to win, just to explain my reasoning. I’d like it if y’all experienced what I experienced from this thread: interesting food for thought and a reminder that we don’t have to be 100% unified in our opinions.

corbin,

I think you’ve misunderstood. I’m talking specifically about governance and politics. For LW, I’m free to critique their actions within the USA, but not necessarily abroad. Even critiquing their actions within USA-controlled territories is iffy, in the sense that I would implicitly be endorsing the USA’s occupation and control of those territories.

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