this post was submitted on 26 Aug 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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

ChatGPT was a significant help in writing this book, serving as a creative muse [...] and for refining my understanding of technical topics that are likely to be well represented in its corpus.

Nate Silver

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Read through the whole thread. Man, I remember back when Nate Silver seemed smart and interesting and now I'm realizing that he probably was just my political Boss Baby moment.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I remember ‘08 when Natty Ag was hot shit. Everything I’ve seen or heard of him since is just chud shit.*

*I will post just one source.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (7 children)

before i begin, i want to be clear that what i am about to say is not an endorsement of chattel slavery

eigenrobot

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like what someone who's about to endorse chattel slavery would say, but okay.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

On a more considered note after actually reading the thread (poor choice on my part, I know), it's hard not to connect this to the broader line-goes-up mentality that we see so often here. As evidenced by the long history of the "live free or die" ethos, whether enslaved people were/are actually better off than had they been killed is more of an open question than our friend's argument would imply. This is especially true if you ignore all the ways that chattel slavery was deeply cruel and inhuman even in the history of unfree labor to the point where historians consider it an abberation, closer to being worked to death in Mauthausen than being a medieval serf. I'm not qualified to talk about the history of dehumanization, but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves, provided you could find someone with citizen standing who was willing to plead your case, and this was thousands of years before the liberal ideas of what being a full human being and a free individual meant, so we need to understand the position of unfree people in those periods differently. But even if you ignore all that context and treat slavery like a universal practice from the prehistoric "sea peoples conquered my tribe" days to the antebellum American South, the primary benefits that you get from slavery don't go to the enslaved people, obviously. Rather it comes from the conquerors having a new source of labor to work their new fields, and the economic benefit they get from that. Rather than needing to allow population growth to expand your people's farms into new lands, you have a ready-made labor force to start (or in some cases continue) working there. It makes the line go up faster, in other words. The argument relies on ignoring all the questions of justice and the impact that these practices have on people's actual lives because it makes line go up, and in that sense it fits right in with all the other ways that ostensibly-libertarian ideologies end up supporting fascism.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

fucking…. time to reset the counter to 0. I’d finally managed to actively page out that this person exists.

eigen is one of the central twats in tpot and I wish they could just….not. imagine what they could do if they applied themselves to a different endeavour

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (5 children)

basically it seems like slavery solved genocide

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

When the revolution comes, we have to cut off the hands wearing this abomination of a watch before we cut off the owner's head:

https://www.ablogtowatch.com/new-release-jacob-co-oil-pump-44mm-watch/

Price: $280k, limited to 88 pieces...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I can only assume the 88 is a coincidence. it's just a coincidence, right? right?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

The article talks about this having a slimmer case profile, right now it’s 18mm, i heard they’re aiming to shave off another 4

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Yes, the CEO was born in 1988, the 14th month.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Somebody quotes Paul Graham's rules for argument at him: shot, chaser.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I hate to say it but pg's tweet was reasonable. Some asshole carrying water for Mike fucking Lee deserves to be blocked.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

they live glasses on

I THINK ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE DOING ELECTION FRAUD

DUAL CITIZENSHIP EXISTS

LET ME MISS THE POINT EQUALLY HARD IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION, OR AT LEAST HOPEFULLY SO

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Not a sneer, but another cool piece from Baldur Bjarnason: The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus.

Gonna skip straight to near the end, where Baldur lays out a potential apocalypse scenario for FOSS as we know it:

Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse:

  1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

  2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

  3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.

  4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

Linking this to a related sneer, another major problem that I can see befalling FOSS is earning a reputation as a Nazi bar. How high that risk is I'm not sure, but between the AI bubble shredding tech's public image and our very good friends increasingly catching the public's attention, I suspect those chances are pretty high.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I don't wish ill upon my fellow tech sector workers, but frankly a backlash on the tech industry is long overdue. People have been mad at big tech before and so far it (thankfully) hasn't led to cataclysmic shifts in free software.

I feel like the original Free Software ethos of software freedom as moral obligation first and economic convenience second (if at all) might be more resilient to these kinds of field-shaping challenges than the more business model oriented Open Source ideology. That said, I don't expect the ongoing AI crisis to re-separate F and OS by name in popular or even tech industry consciousness.

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