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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Apparently MS is “making significant changes” to recall, and there are murmurs that multiple people at MS are realmad about how this played out
Because yes, it’s the dirty users with their petty concerns that are the problem here, not the perfect product that they managed to bring to market oh so rapidly!
I wonder how long they’ll leave this in the windows build before finally making it a manual feature install (if not entirely killing it off, which will eventually happen too)
Also much further up that thread there is another example of the same tired “if you’re not ready to accept AI…” shit that many corps have been pulling. I just lambasted sentry about that shit recently too. These fucking people do not fucking understand consent, and they don’t seem to think that people might not actually want this utter shite
my friend started working for a company that does rlhf for openai et al, and every single day I wish I could post to you guys about the bizarre shit she sees this company do. they're completely off the rails
I just want to share this HN comment because it was the worst thing I've read all day.
Wait until they have kids. The deafness gene will be passed along. Soon enough we'll be like the cars with the hardware without the software or the locked features.
A treatment for a type of genetic deafness sounds good and all; but think of the implications man. The no-longer-deaf people might hear some steamy music and then get frisky and in the mood to make deaf babies. And next thing you know bam! There'll be activation keys for hearing.
I expect SneerClub to provide my alibis when reading one of these finally makes me snap.
you were busy posting I saw it myself
Who is more evolutionarily fit: a deaf person who appreciates technological progress and has kids, or an unloved eugenics enjoyer posting on hacker news?
Apparently deaf people never have kids. Hmm. Alright. Okay.
This guy isn't even the first techbro to suggest recently that if disabled people are allowed to have kids, eventually we will all be disabled. I know very very little about genetics, but I'm still pretty sure it doesn't work that way.
From the Philosophy Tube comment section:
Video is way too long. But I did go to chatGPT to ask extensively about this Judith Butler character.
Trying to figure out if that comment is a bit or not, and at least one of the poster's other comments on the video is this literary masterwork:
some people have observable x chromosones and others have observable y chromosones, and those categories are good to make useful distinctions, just like I make a distinction between a chair and a sofa... I still don't believe gender is real, and I can still observe sex. Sure, sex could be an illusion, but it doesn't matter. The chair is most certainly an illusion.... At what point does wood become a chair? Is a three legged chair a chair? A two legged? A one legged? A none legged? Is a seat and a chair the same thing? What if I break the seat in half? Is it still a chair?
Sure, you can observe people's chromosomes, I guess, so long as you have a microscope.
but can you observe their chromosones?
truly one of the thought leaders in philosophy. surely no one has ever... oh wait, no, you're about 2400 years too late
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40611600
It will never stop being incredibly funny that in the past 24 months an untold legion of people have emerged from heroic doses of shrooms/LSD clutching a note that just has “what if u could chat with a pdf???” scrawled on it
this was dunked on like 7 years ago already, maybe earlier
I am so happy that we know with 100% certainty that Jack Dorsey saw this image and wasn't mad. He was laughing, actually.
Beautiful. The papyrus font really seals the deal.
I seen someone on LinkedIn yesterday talking about how you'll be able to "chat with your database"
Like, what if i don't want to be friends with a database? What next ? a few beers with my fridge? Skinny dipping with my toaster?
Both options would be horrible, of course, but they'd both be better than spending another five fucking minutes on LinkedIn.
You know, I have no direct information as to what kind of background those people might’ve had for their trips, but 1337% it was wrong (or this person is just full of it). Set and setting. Always. And dear god if I came out of a trip with that? What a fucking abysmal prospect
And yet holy fuck that’s quite possibly a strong driver in all this insanity isn’t it?
You could guess my internal state right now, and you’d need zero psychedelics to do it
it’s a fucking tragedy what techbros, fascists, and gurus have done to the perception of what a trip even is. there’s this hilariously toxic idea that a trip must have utility or else you’ve wasted your time and material; these people will gatekeep and control how you process what should be a highly personal experience, because that gives them a subtle but powerful amount of influence over what you’ll take back from your trip. the Silicon Valley/TESCREAL crowd have even ritualized bad set and setting so much that they don’t need a guru personally present in order to have a bad fucking time.
the damage these fucking fools have done is difficult to quantify, largely because psychedelic research is either banned or firmly in the hands of those very same fucking fools. it’s very important to them that you don’t use your temporarily jailbroken neocortex for your own purposes; that you never imagine a world where they don’t matter.
yep. a couple of years ago I read We Will Call It Pala and it hit pretty fucking on the nose
a couple years later, with all the dipshittery i've seen the clowns give airtime, and I'm kinda afraid? reticent? to read it again
never read this one before. neat story, even if it is not much more than The Lorax, but psychedelic-flavored.
unprompted personal review (spoilers)
it makes sense that the point-of-view character is insulated / isolated from the harm they're doing. my main gripe is that in doing so, the actual problems of the hypothetical psychedelic healthcare industry (manufactured addiction, orientalism and psychedelic colonization, inequality of access, in addition to all of the vile stuff the real healthcare industry already does) wind up left barely stated or only implied. i was waiting for the other shoe to drop; for Learie to, say, receive a letter from a family member of a patient who died on the bed due to being unattended to, a result of stretching too few staff too thin over too many patients, et cetera. something that would pop the bubble that she built around herself and tie the themes of the story together.
instead it feels like she built the bubble and stays in the bubble. she's sad her cool business idea outgrew her, that the fifty million dollars she got as a severance package doesn't fill the hole in her heart she got by helping people directly. which is neat and all, but, like. what about all the uninsured and poor Black people who never got to even try to see if psychedelics could help? what about the Native Americans who watched their spiritual medicine, for which they were (and still are) punished heavily for using, get used to make Learie's millions, for which they will never see a penny? what about your overworked staff, Learie!?
from a persuasive and political perspective, to me it seems the non-sequitur ending leaves the entire story up for ideological grabs. think it sounds like capitalism is bad? sure, go for it. think the problem is that we need to do capitalism, But Better™? sure, go for it! hell, that's basically the author's own conclusion:
But what we really need are psychedelic models for business - business that defines new standards for integrity, equity and ethics; business reimagined with a technicolor glow.
sorry, but a can of glow-in-the-dark paint over the same old exploitative business practices is not a solution. it's just more marketing. where is this even going?
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yep to a lot of your points (I'll try reply in more detail tomorrow, majority of brain context atm is going to fucking android bullshit)
as a bit more context, it was originally published on https://aurynproject.org/, which I think also says something about its origin/background. imo overly-narrow horizons in their optimism is a problem that plagues a lot of psychedelic-treatment evangelists (and I already view the argument favourably!); it's something I've often felt irked by but also haven't really been able to engage with in depth much to try form any wide-consumption counterargument too, because headspace and a lot of other stuff too
The Auryn project has a sub-project called North Star, founded by a VC partner, and a Bain Capital veteran, among others.
The whole thing gives me the ick.
best of luck with android bullshit. i'm not familiar with either psychedelics themselves or their evangelists, but yeah, would love to hear thoughts
You laugh, but people in incel circles are heralding the nascent arrival of better than real AI girlfriends.
Now I am laughing harder.
The incels have also been crying about how the upcoming robot sexbots/ai will end women forever for a decade now so it isn't anything new. (They prob are shouting about it more, but they have been obsessed by this idea already in the past).
All I can say is bring it on. These guys seem to assume women will be furious about being replaced in this hypothetical scenario. I imagine most women would be relieved to have more free time and greater opportunities. Losing your role is only scary if you have benefited from your social position.
They prob (at least that was the mindset I got last time I read up on who they seem to think, doubt much has changed) women are useless and massively protected by society and as soon as that stops (because of robots) they will all starve or be enslaved or worse. It isn't a rational group of people (even if they claim to be).
And just did a quick check, and they don't seem to mention AI shit at all. Guess even the incels can see through the (fin)techbro bs. Lot of sexism, racism and antisemitism though.
Well would you fucking believe it: it turns out that deplatforming your horrible arseholes fixes the problems! (archive)
(well, until one of the problems scrapes together $44b and buys the platform)
every fuckin time
bsky comment:
the number of times i have seen even a small private forum or discord server go from "daily fights" to "everyone gets along" by just banning one or two loud assholes is uncountable
one of the follies of the early non-research internet was that the folks in charge of the more influential communities (Something Awful comes to mind) all tended to be weird fucking libertarian assholes insisting that debating fascists in a “free and fair environment” (whatever that is) must be a good thing, we can’t just ban them on sight for some reason. generally these weird libertarian assholes were motivated by typical weird libertarian asshole things — greed, or being fascists themselves.
and all of these horseshit policies around not banning fascists ended in complete disaster for those communities and those libertarian shitheads (SA again), but somehow they’re practically the only element of those early communities that carried over to the modern internet, likely because caring about community quality doesn’t make money, but pandering to nazi fuckwits does.
it probably goes without saying, but I take the apparently radical stance that nobody needs to interact with fascists and assholes and I won’t give their bullshit transit on any system I control. it’s always been surprising to me how many sysops consider “kick out the fucking fascists” an unworkable policy when it’s very easy to implement — it only gets hard when you allow the worst fucking people you know to gain a foothold.
I'm not up to date on my SA banning people lore, but hasn't it also been several times that after people finally got banned from they made stuff infinitely worse? Like 4chan is from SA, but there was also a far right racist forum for people banned from SA, the my posting career people for example (at least I heard they were banned SA people, which could be a lie, we know how much they love multiple blankets of irony. Also their site is now dead thankfully).
no, MPC was one of the sites set up by nazis banned from SA
Yeah that is what I meant, that I heard it was setup by exSA neonazis. I wasn't 100% sure.
there’s a direct line from SA not explicitly banning ironic naziism to anime nazis being everywhere and I fucking hate it
Not just SA, but everywhere. We should have listened to the barmen of old better. (hope most of you are familiar with the barman who kicks out the polite nazi story).
SA has been taken over by a non-shithead and now the moderation is "yeah, you can fuck off now" and it's much nicer
though tbf it's greatly improved because we're all old with bad backs now and aren't putting up with dumb bullshit any more
that is true! usually these assholes set things up so the communities they founded collapse when they leave (and from what I’ve heard that almost happened to SA) so I’m glad they’re flourishing within their niche without said asshole parasocially positioned at the helm. I really should re-include the forums in the list of places I visit when I’m bored.
to be fair, a lot of the early Internet, including the early research Internet, was driven by libertarian tendencies (which always ignored the dilemma in combining libertarian tendencies with the fact that the entire early Internet was enabled by massive government funding). John Perry Barlow, the EFF, etc. It’s just that a lot of those people were libertarian utopians – and I will fully admit that in my youth it seemed very convincing. It felt like there were no space for bad actors because when the Internet was smaller, it was less obvious to idealists and the naïve that a larger internet would be incredibly useful for bad actors.
As recently as gamergate the EFF was loudly insisting that all by private companies was wrong, and an intervening few years they have only grudgingly and rarely admitted that overly libertarian moderation policies can suppress speech massively. And yet I fully believe all the EFF people mean well.
i look askance at the ones stanning for fucking bitcoin mining
you're not wrong.