TechTakes

A thread about a serial AI grifter's latest entry into the Unlicensed Medical Practice Lawsuit Sweepstakes.

I don’t feel like shitting on this one too hard since I guess it’s a mildly interesting variation on a ~~Markov chain~~ LLM, but the title felt extremely sneerworthy.

I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt because their README is too tiring to read for me to figure out what this might be used for. That’s coming from someone who spent most of today reading SPARC assembly for fun.

Embarrassed myself by accidentally posting this to some other instance somehow. Stupid janky Lemmy offering communities I've never even looked at right in the posting interface.

I always knew they had it in them, I just thought they'd ease into it a little

https://nitter.net/gitcoin/status/1691092823872073728

Text: Headline: ChatGPT in Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day Subhead: OpenAI spends about $700,000 a day, just to keep ChatGPT going. The cost does not include other AI products like GPT-4 and DALL-E2. Right now, it si pulling through only because of Microsoft's $10 billion funding.

Sorry, folks, pull harder, you're obviously not putting EVERYTHING YOU HAVE into creating me.

no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge

e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams

e2: I didn’t link it initially, but the orange site thread where I found this has heated up significantly since then

Also the hivemind seems to have taken against ~~tweets~~Xeets, a stunning reversal from last year when St. Elon was gonna usher in a new Dawn of civilized discourse.

Science shows that the brain and the rest of the nervous system stops at death. How that relates to the notion of consciousness is still pretty much unknown, and many neuroscientists will tell you that. We haven't yet found an organ or process in the brain responsible for the conscious mind that we can say stops at death.

no matter how many neuroscientists I ask, none of them will tell me which part of the brain contains the soul. the orange site actually has a good sneer for this:

You don't need to know which part of the brain corresponds to a conscious mind when they entire brain is dead.

a lot of the rest of the thread is the most braindead right-libertarian version of Pascal’s Wager I’ve ever seen:

Ultimately, it's their personal choice, with their money, and even if they spend $100,000 on paying for it, or more, it doesn't mean they didn't leave other assets or things for their descendants.

By making a moral claim for why YOU decide that spending that money isn't justified, you're going down one very arrogant and ultimately silly road of making the same claim to so many other things people spend money and effort they've worked hard for on specific personal preferences, be they material or otherwise.

Maybe you buying a $700,000 house vs. a $600,000 house is just as idiotic then? Do you really need the extra floor space or bathrooms?

Where would you draw a line? Should other once-implausible life enhancement therapies that are now widely used and accepted also be forsaken? How about organ transplants? Gene therapy? highly expensive cancer treatments that all have extended life beyond what was previously "natural" for many people? Often these also start first as speculative ideas, then experiments, then just options for the rich, but later become much more widely available.

and therefore the only rational course of action is to put $100,000 straight into the pockets of grifters. how dare I make any value judgments at all about cryonicists based on their extreme distaste for the scientific method, consistent history of failure, and use of extremely exploitative marketing?

Eminent domain? Never heard of it! Sounds like a fantasy from the "economical illiterate."

Edit: This entire thread is a trash fire, by the way. I'm only highlighting the silliest bit from one of the more aggressive landlords.

Excerpt:

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

He's also a big eugenics supporter:

“There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion,” he wrote in a 2010 article for AlternativeRight .com. “Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.”

(Reminds me a lot of the things Scott Siskind has written in the past.)

Some people who have been friendly with Hanania:

• Mark Andreessen, Silion Valley VC and co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz
• Hamish McKenzie, CEO of Substack
• Elon Musk, Chief Enshittification Officer of Tesla and Twitter
• Tyler Cowen, libertarian econ blogger and George Mason University prof
• J.D. Vance, US Senator from Ohio
• Steve Sailer, race (pseudo)science promoter and all-around bigot
• Amy Wax, racist law professor at UPenn.
• Christopher Rufo, right-wing agitator and architect of many of Florida governor Ron DeSantis's culture war efforts

RationalWiki is a highly biased cancel community which has attacked people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander before.

Background on the authors according to a far-left website.

Let's at least be honest.

That is profiling work. (Not just "Ad hominem".)

The clash with the name "rational-wiki" is too strong not to be noted.

as the infrastructure admin of a highly biased far-left cancel community that attacks people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander: mmm delicious

for bonus sneers, see the entire rest of the thread for the orange site’s ideas on why they don’t need therapy:

I was about to start psychotherapy last month, I ask my family's friend therapist If he could recommend me where to go. So he interviewed me for about 30 mins and ask me about all my problems.

A week later he send me the number of the therapist. I didnt write her yet, I think I dont need it as badly as before.

Those 30 mins were key. I am highly introspective and logical, I only needed to orderly speak my problems.

to quote Key & Peele: motherfucker, that’s called a job

Saw this last night but decided to give them a few hours to backtrack. Surprisingly, they've decided to leave their comments intact!

This sort of attitude, not directly harassing trans folks but just asking questions about their moral fiber indirectly, seems to be coming from some playbook; it looks like a structured disinformation source, and I wonder what motivates them.

OceanGate's cofounder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050, and says we shouldn't stop pushing the limits of innovation

https://archive.is/AyosK

this lends credence to the stealth comrade theory, btw

I talk a lot about how "empathy" in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn't care, but it's important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding "why" some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.

This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise "wow, steve. you really care about people don't you?"

I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232

the only paragraph you need:

Bryan Johnson — who also has said he uses a machine to count his nighttime erections and has taken steps to make his rectum perform like a teenager’s — made his fortune in his 30s when he sold his payment processing company Braintree Payment Solutions to EBay for $800 million in cash.

this is the guy who also uses his son as his personal blood boy

NY Post, so have the archive link: https://archive.is/ExtBO

PayPal has a lot to fucking answer for

This is an infrequent sub for Silicon Valley dumbassery, Sam Altman or Paul Graham or HN reactionaries or the rest of the spawn of the Californian Ideology who aren't actually the LessWrongers.

Originally an offshoot from SneerClub, created due to off-topic orange-sitery.