oh man, it’s Aumann’s

it was worth trying to start from my phone

I am confident that Altman in particular has a poor-to-nonexistent grasp of second-order effects.

I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”.

Yeah, Gas Town is being belabored to death, but it must be reiterated that I doubt the long-term value proposition of “Kubernetes fan fiction”

I spent the last few years working in a prototype testing role on an active cattle ranch (don’t ask) and this phenomenon reminds me of what’s left on the ground after the herd moves through on their way up the canyon

Yes, no doubt the Islamic Republic is run by bloody, murderous, dishonest bastards. My argument is that Western options for handling/imposing political will on the situation have always been limited, and are at a particularly low ebb at the moment. Change is coming to both places, but it sadly may not be change that results in greater stability.

I get the impression, especially these last few months, that Klabnik is undertaking a heavily couched form of political speech. He appears to be deeply uncomfortable with anyone who would question the cloud-based, de facto centralized and commercially enclosed development and usage patterns that have built his career, and that informed ATProto’s heavyweight participation requirements as well as the entire AI-startup market. But rather than opening himself to that broader conversation, he instead attempts to manipulate these discussions by pathologizing individuals with whom he’s having a disagreement, on top of throwing in questionable arguments from authority.

Consider, for instance, lecturing quips like “Because you don’t always get to pick when you ship” or “They did extensive research on what was out there…” etc. from the lobsters thread. No room to discuss the confused product/protocol approach that Bluesky is taking, or that the “move fast break things” logic that one might apply to a web app does not really fit developing and documenting a broader protocol, if that’s what Bluesky is really trying to create. No room to question that this approach may have harmfully skewed the Bluesky team’s thinking about what they really need. It’s an echo of A16Z’s intentionally braindead “just build things” rhetoric, where the “builders” (formerly “founders”) are above reproach.

That is an incredibly weaselly way of approaching public dialogue, and has strongly impacted my trust in him for the worse. I think he probably feels a strong need to be perceived as level-headed and civil (“Quiet, Calm, and Sincere” as Something Awful’s community-complains subforum used to be called), as long experience leads a lot of internet denizens to fear discussion forums dying in a flamewar spiral, but uhhh… he’s not meeting that bar.

the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979

No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.

And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Ba’athification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere it’s been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.

They pick a photo of Musk that highlights his gender-affirming plastic surgery, and then they simultaneously pick a photo of Sacks that makes him look like Jeffrey Epstein’s cousin.

From Yegge’s stages of AI adoption:

Stage 5: CLI, single agent. YOLO. Diffs scroll by. You may or may not look at them.

Stage 6: CLI, multi-agent, YOLO. You regularly use 3 to 5 parallel instances. You are very fast.

Hot damn! This is exactly how I became an expert Linux sysadmin through running Gentoo. Maybe it is time for me to get on board the hype train! Just one question before I get started, though; how do I funroll an LLM’s loops?

One sad thing I’ve noticed due to vibe-coding is the amount of slop packages being spewed out for niche-but-hip languages like Common Lisp and Erlang. The lisp subreddit has a guy pulling up with a bunch of vibe-coded stuff, and somebody on Something Awful turned up with a CLI forums client that forwards through NNTP (???) written in Elixir that everyone thought was kinda neat for a second until they realized it was mostly slop.

Hard to say it’s making these language ecosystems any more “alive” if it’s all stuff that has to be re-evaluated and probably replaced entirely. And it definitely seems like Yegge isn’t the only one using this stuff to make absolute fever-dream architectural decisions that wouldn’t even be a consideration if they had to write it all themselves.

Nice to see Rusty still on the side of relative sanity. It’s almost like seeing CmdrTaco run in from backstage and nail somebody with a steel chairASCII rendition of goatse

Self… hating…? No, pal, we are here because we specifically and explicitly hate YOU, and want to set firm social boundaries against you and your fellow travelers. I don’t know how to express this more straightforwardly. I don’t think it’s possible. Please refer back to this specific comment if you become confused about this point again in the future.

made it acceptable to be an American… unashamed of their race

Ah, the usual implicit assumptions, I see

Lol no, his reasons for doing all that was self promotion. Positioning himself as the wise expert. Gullible fools, arguing about what the real intentions of the wallet inspector.

Yeah, the “master persuader” schtick was funny to start with, but it wore real thin real fast once it became apparent it was just his half-hearted way of pitching himself to the MAGA crowd, hedging his reputation in case Trump lost.

I’m hearing different things from different quarters. My mom’s job spent most of the last year pushing AI use towards uncertain ends, then had a lead trainer finally tell their whole team last week that “this is a bubble,” among other little choice bits of reality. I think some places closer to the epicenter of the bubble are further down the trough of disappointment, so have hope.

the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc,

Is there a public benefit corporation in existence that isn’t angling to be a kinder, gentler form of a VC grift?

You make an important point. For instance, just imagine when Twitter finally goes down for good. Trump’s most provocative bullshit is archived in multiple places, but the output of dozens of little Twitlers that we might recognize and consider fairly important movement figures will probably be so much dust in the wind. Historians working on Nazi Germany can consult complete archives of shit like Der Sturmer if they need to; historians working on this period might be faced with a tattered quilt.

This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I don’t really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoples’ lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.

A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:

A man who is considered a TPOT ‘elder’:

TPOT isn’t misogynist but it’s made up of men and women who prefer the company of men. it’s a male space with male norms.

this makes it barely tolerable for the few girls’ girls who wander in here. they end up either deactivating, going private, or venting about how men suck.

I’d never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, they’re never going to grow up.

I don’t wish to belittle the author’s suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participants’ worth.

Didn’t really think about it until just now, but a load-bearing part of Yarvin’s work seeming erudite is him dropping in little bits of obscure trivia that may or may not have anything to do with the topic at hand