Clicked on Aella content, shoā nuff, exposed to strange new forms of brainworms. Whatās the deal with the āultra-wokenessā guy picking on ātaurine deficiency?ā
Clicked on Aella content, shoā nuff, exposed to strange new forms of brainworms. Whatās the deal with the āultra-wokenessā guy picking on ātaurine deficiency?ā
I kicked them a donation just for that
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A) Putting on my conspiracy theory hatā¦ OpenAI has been bleeding for most of a year now, with execs hitting the door running and taking staff with them. Itās not at all implausible that somebody lower on the totem pole could have been convinced to leak some reinforcement training weights to help Deepseek along.
B) Putting on my best LessWronger hat (random brown stains, full of holes)ā¦ I estimate no less than a 25% chance that by the end of this week, Sammy-boy will be demanding an Oval Office meeting, banging the table and screaming about ātheft!ā and āhacking!!ā
Oof yeah, thatās rough. The AI generated header image isnāt helping his credibility, either. Didnāt he happily trot along to one of the rat conventions in Berkeley, and everyone was wondering why?
The Ballyās story is its own source of hilarity - not only are they scrambling to fund this Chicago thing, theyāre also making promises about a Las Vegas resort that will host the ex-Oakland Aās in what would be the smallest major league baseball stadium; with equally ??? funding gaps that their client press is all too happy to ignore.
A well-brewed fart will propel me straight to the moon
Still working on fermenting it
No actually, I think what you have to say is in line with my broader point. As the top source of global consumer demand, America is primarily held together by its supply chains at this point. To be crude about it, the best reasons to be an American in the 21st century are the swag and the cheap gas. When the MAGA and Fox News crowd are pointing fingers and ranting about Marxism, theyāre actively trying to obscure materialism and keep people from thinking about material conditions. Having a material program, that at least has elements that can be built from the bottom up, is at least as crucial as having an electoral program. I know the Four Thieves people got rightfully shredded here a few weeks back, and that kind of technical pushback on amateur dreams is necessary, so itās a tough needle to thread. But for instance, consider Gavin Newsomās plan to have California operate its own insulin production, within existing systems and regulations: https://calmatters.org/health/2025/01/insulin-production-gavin-newsom/ This is a Newsom policy I actually think is a fantastic idea, and a big credit to him if it happens! But itās bogged down in the production-line validation stage, because we already know how to synthesize insulin and that itās effective. And the production may not even be in California when it happens! Thereās plenty of room for improvement here.
Space and centralized, rent-seeking āAIā are not material programs that improve conditions for the broader population. The original space program was successful because a more tightly controlled media environment gave the opportunity to use it to cover for the missile development that was the enduring practical outcome. Positive consumer outcomes from all that have always felt, to me, like something that was bolted onto the history later. We wouldnāt have Tang and transistors if not for Apollo! Well, one is kind of shitty and useless, the other is so overwhelmingly advantageous that it surely would have happened anyway.
And to your last point, I somewhat sadly feel like a lot of doomer shit I was reading ~15 years ago actually prepared me to at least be unsurprised about the situation weāre in. A lot of those writers (James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer for instance) have either softly capitulated, or else happily slotted themselves into the middle of the red-brown alliance. I think thatās a big part of why weāre at where weāre at: a lot of people who were actually willing to consider the idea of American collapse were perfectly fine with letting it happen.
Refusal of statins was one of the most prominent anti-medical trends I remember observing among right-wing acquaintences, even well before such people got on the anti-vax bandwagon. To be sure, some people experience bad side-effects (including my mom, at least for a while), but it definitely seemed like a few bits of anecdata in the early 2010s built into a broad narrative of ādoctorās tryinā ta kill yaā
This is a thought Iāve been entertaining for some time, but this weekās discussion about Ars Technicaās article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.
A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly havenāt cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network wonāt dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? Itās gassed. The idea that āit might be ME up there one day!ā persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining donāt have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.
For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what Iāve seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systemsā¦ which, if itās not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.
Everybodyās looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?
just mark C for every answer if you donāt get it, thatās what the State of California taught me in elementary school
Iāve seen people criticize Eric Berger for being up Muskās ass about SpaceX, though Iām simply not that passionate about space stuff anymore. And so far I donāt see them posting anything about the NIH freezeout, even though that surely affects a vast swath of their reader base. Seems odd.
I was reading something David wrote about it at one point, but it seemed like lore too cursed even for the rationalist milieu
Really starting to get a bit sick of Ars Technica. Theyāre OK for general interest tech stuff, but their editorial line (and some of their commenter base) have been really credulous about AI vendorsā PR.
Hmm, surely there is no downside to doing all of oneās marketing, both personal* and professional, through the false certainty and low signal of short-form social media. The leopard has only licked Samās face, it will never bite and begin chewing!
*You and I may find the concept of a āpersonal brandā to be horrifying, but these guys clearly want to become brands more fervently than Bruce Wayne wanted to become a bat
This just makes me think of JJ Abramsā self-insert Star Wars character, Babu Frik.
Truly the best part of the sequel movies, there shall be no Babu Frik hate here
Single season TV show that came out of the 90s enthusiasm for adapting random comic books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillacs_and_Dinosaurs_(TV_series)
Interestingly, Wikipedia makes it seem like the game made it out the door first
I think one thing to understand is that most of his casual audience very likely engages through watching clips, not sitting through whole interviews. The reasonable, mainstreamable stuff gets clipped out and perhaps you run across it sarching for something else, or itās algorithmically fed to you because of your interest in an adjacent topic. Clips of the weirder, creepier manosphere/Alex Jones/Art Bell guests donāt get surfaced as readily, at least until youāre down the rabbit hole, so Rogan himself ends up having a veneer of reasonability and respectability that he doesnāt really deserve.
Same goes for Trump rallies, or probably almost any major political speech now. Thereās a front line of people who will watch the whole thing, but then they recirculate specific clips based on how they want to portray the subject.
Come now, he was always about consing chodes into listsā¦ Given his excessive self-seriousness, I doubt heās taken the time to pick up the skill of juggling them in the years since
If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices
why does this seem vaguely like a threat