Rumor, but lol if true "A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets" Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
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Dear ~~~Sneerclub~~ TechTakes, will you be my 'Friend'? :)
AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)
AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)
Here's Friend's advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is... unsettling.
I like how the advertisement's URL opens with a fucking O_Q like even its unsettled by this shit
unsettling.
Indeed.
Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.
This hast the same vibe as a trailer for shows like Black Mirror. I actually feel sad for the people they're targeting with this, holy shit.
“It's real! Premium domains are expensive, but it's worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.
[…]
"People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing," Schiffmann said.
there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once
The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”
presented without comment
Enough money to blow it all on a domain name. Not enough money to port their chatbot-app from iPhone to Android, or pay someone to resolve customer issues. (twitter.com, xcancel.com)
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This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn't it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that "regular" Republican politicians wouldn't have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there's many an NPR-loving granny googling "what is a yarvin" and getting wound up about it in her group chats.
We've all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, "the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time." I therefore propose a new thing, the "Yarvin Window," which we can define as "the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents."
This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.
What amazes me, as a sort of US politics watcher from the outside, just how badly the various republicans weirdos are reacting to this. Esp Vance, posting his dolphin fucker stuff in the middle of the jokestorm about him being into furniture. But not just him, the GOP going 'don't be racist about Harris' and then all the racists doubling down on their racism, etc etc. The weird lashouts re weirdness. "how dare you call me weird! Grabs calipers I can see from your skull shape that you are ..."
If I had a nickle for every time I've heard about dolphin sex I'd have four nickles. Which isn't much, but also is kind of a lot.
damn so he's a posadist too on top of everything?
first taste of apple intelligence and it's about as good as you could expect
but hey, an apple product has acknowledged swearing - progress!
In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?".
I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.
wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that's JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat
one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn't wrote a thing about ai earlier
then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i'd expect even from him
JAMA article's not in scihub, anyone got a copy?
anything newer than 2022? won't be on scihub, because scihub got in a court case in india, that they hope they can win and secure reasonably stable place where they can operate from
tho it seems to me that the entire article is that three screens of text
Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can't they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software
that's fuckin grim.
PURE PROMO: we're doing a Pivot to AI patrons’ video Q&A on Thursday August 8, at 16:00 UTC
also taking cryptocurrency questions
like you know I answer any of you guys' questions anyway, but this is in a much l33t3r format
Here's a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, to make long running threads easier to follow. I'm posting it in the stubsack because it's the thread I had in mind when writing it.
Pasting it in the browser's console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I've cross tested it any... Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won't steal your crypto, or mine any new.
In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.
(()=>{
function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
}
const nodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
.map(x => {
return {
Node: x,
Date: Date.parse(
x.dataset.tippyContent
.split('\n').at(-1)
.replace(/Modified |at /g, ""))
};
});
const dates = nodes.map(x => x.Date).filter(x => !isNaN(x) && x != null);
dates.sort();
const minDate = dates[0];
const maxDate = dates.at(-1);
nodes
.filter(x => x.Node.closest('.ms-2') != null)
.forEach(x => x.Node.closest('.ms-2').style.backgroundColor = getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, x.Date))
})()
This is really cool!
I was just thinking it would be cool to have something like RES's 'Previously Read' feature that only shows the new comments, and everything else is darkened or collapsed. This does a similar thing though and it's great for these weekly threads
In the spirit of "worse is better", here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:
! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)
the way you made it, it works only for awful.systems users
I love this but I don't know if I have the same royal Grape Fanta energy in me. I think I'm on one of the alternate themes but I like #333333
other handy thing you can do: make a bookmark that has the URL be javascript:(function() { function bits go here} )();, and stick it in your bookmark bar
Yes, do this if your browser allows it, it's way better. Just paste the code in the OP prepended by "javascript:" without quotes in place of the url and as far as i can tell it works.
I only now saw how badly the syntax on my post is fucked, that’s what I get for trying to snip things in a dodgy textentry rather than a real editor 😅
leaving it up for posterity tho.
Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694
As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I don't think she's actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school won't magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and there's a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If we're going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, I'm not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individual's odds of losing, y'know?
Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere I'm probably being incredibly charitable and she's actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.
it's 110% white suburban totally-not-eugenics
I don't know about "magically immediately" (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you don't have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.
Don't get me wrong, I think ending the de facto segregation we've ended up with needs to be a primary policy goal and that dealing with people not like themselves is going to do good for any kid all on its own. And the numbers parents use to figure out which schools are "better" are cooked to all hell, making trying to accurately judge school quality incredibly difficult. But that doesn't change the fact that some schools do have better outcomes or more problems than others, and while the broader systemic factors that create those problems need to be solved, expecting parents not to try and take care of their own kids first isn't a viable way to make that happen.
She's listened to anecdotes "about kids who are like my kids" (👀👀👀), and that's quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.
Morning lads, let's have a big week 💪
so… are we blaming muffin for this week? seems it’s more posts than usual this time ;p
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