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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Decent monday morning take from robert evans:
Schrodinger's double-think.
transcription
Quote skeet:Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans):
They’re also incredibly horny about creating conscious digital slaves for some godforsaken reason
It isnt Claude that did this to them, it is their desire to be lesswrong.
(To the tune of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme*): self-inflicted psychic debuff
*The correct theme, not the heretical one. If you have to ask, you’re wrong
Well, we are all going to die. So... musing over?
We all get that right, everyone is going to die. Everything living you lay eyes on is going to die. I am 100% certain that the future contains the death of everyone alive today.
Do they mean immanently? Why?
Not if you're a Yudkowskian rationalist. He'd call us "deathists".
I don't have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are. Nor to know how much the physical world resists making tiny machines and measurements necessary to explore these frontiers, or the ethical dilemmas involved in exploring how consciousness works that vastly slow and perhaps outright prevent answering questions like "can we replace little bits of someone with some machine we can maintain easier in the interest of prolonging them?"
Also I do happen to know how the universe ends.
I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that there's anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we did come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.
I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions won't work.
One of the funniest things I ever read was a result of a survey of laypeople, physics UGs, physics Grads, postgrads, and faculty on various "cool future" things.
predictions of the likelihood of things geeks constantly dream about craters once you get past the very basics. I can only assume that fields that aren't mine, and are in general vastly more complex, are at least as full of evidence of god hating us and not allowing us nice things.
I remember reading some of yuddies writing about nanomagic and noticing that the word "sticktion" never showed up.
Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who can't distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.
This doesnt apply to everything, like VR and 3d printers were a sci-fi fantasy and now they are mundane economically viable but not revolutionary products.
Biohacking and nanomachines otoh dont seem to be viable and you hear nothing about those anymore. Only a little bit in the uncreative (and going on the experts unrealistic) 'ai will create bioweapons' critihype. No 'It will turn people into cyberzombies' (quake 2 was pretty good (that was aliens not AI but still)).
VR did get a preemptive attempt to enshittify it with the Meta-verse, and the tech isn't quite there, but it is coming along. 3d printers are nice, haven't been fucked up yet as far as I known.
Yeah, but they have not generated the science fiction futures, that is what I meant. They are just normal techs
who in the hell would want programmable matter anymore, after they've seen what happened to plain ol' computer programming as already practiced
What's that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those "secrets they don't want you to know" for incredible profits?
https://xkcd.com/808/ . I think the XKCD undersells the ability of capitalists to chase dumb ideas, especially in the short term. Like Theranos was only a step or two up from Homeopathy in terms of bad science?
I mean they absolutely do, but nature and economics have their say. Like, you can make money selling homeopathy, because people who falsely believe in homeopathy are a market segment, but you can't otherwise make money doing homeopathy because it doesn't work. Similarly you can speculate on anything and come out ahead with the right combination of luck, publicity, and timing, but taking advantage of short-term volatility or noise in the market isn't the same as actually doing something effective, and the farther away from truth you push the market the more damage it's going to cause snapping back to reality.
Piles of screaming grey goo and people being like "Why are you running away? can't you see it's my grandmother?"
This was about where I gave up on Attack on Titan
No idea
They're referencing the meme that an uncontrolled AI will inevitably kill every last human being, for reasons.
They seemed to bring up a cartoon for 12 year old boys?
Ah yes ‘only these two things are possible, dont consider any other outcome’ truly rational thought
It's just the fundamentalist version of our culture's pathologies as a whole, which has a very hard time imagining anything other than endless progression or apocalypse, neither of which is real.
Also, ‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’ is just the vaguest thing ever. ‘yeah bro AI is gonna make everything super good. How? Why? uhhh i dont know it just will’
pumpkin spice season will be permanent
AI will make free ice cream for everyone
That ice cream? Also pumpkin spice
The pumpkin spice maximiser
We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I've personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.
wat