You must be new here. Hi!
Please cast your eyes over the archives, paying close attention to the threads where people are enthusing over AI search!
Actually that’s tricky because the people here might generally be described as unenthusiastic about AI, because the technology is fundamentally a fountain of bullshit and bias finely crafted to fool people into thinking it is a valuable and accurate tool.
The popups aren’t the issue, you know.
Gumroad’s asshole CEO, Sahil Lavingia, NFT fanboy who occasionally used his customer database to track down and get into fights with people on twitter, has now gone professional fash and joined DOGE in order to hollow out the department of veterans affairs and replace the staff with chatbots.
https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/
Naturally, it’s been done before, without ai, and (inevitably, I guess) using rust.
https://github.com/Shadlock0133/cargo-vibe https://github.com/vmfunc/cargo-buttplug
Thanks. Not as many interesting details as I’d hoped. The comments are great though… today I learned that the 2008 crash was entirely the fault of the government who engineered it to steal everyone’s money, and the poor banks were unfairly maligned because some of them had Jewish names, but the same crash definitely couldn’t happen today because the stifling regulatory framework stops it? And bubbles don’t exist anymore? I guess I just don’t have the brains (or wsj subscription) for high finance.
Might be something interesting here, assuming you can get past th paywall (which I currently can’t): https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/abs-crashed-the-economy-in-2008-now-theyre-back-and-bigger-than-ever-973d5d24
Today’s magic economy-ending words are “data centre asset-backed securities” :
Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better...Data-center bonds are backed by lease payments from companies that rent out computing capacity
There’s a grand old tradition in enlightened skeptical nerd culture of hating on psychologists, because it’s all just so much bullshit and lousy statistics and unreproducible nonsense and all the rest, and…
If you train the Al to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it's got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil.
…was it all just projection? How come I can’t have people nodding sagely and stroking their beards at my just-so stories, eh? How come it’s just shitty second rate sci-fi when I say it? Hmm? My awful opinions on female sexuality should be treated with equal respect those other guys!
I wouldn’t say that modern computer programming is that hot either. On the other hand, I can absolutely see “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” being enthusiastically applied to genetic engineering products. Silicon Valley brought us “move fast and break things”, and now you can apply it to your children, too!
He’s right that current quantum computers are physics experiments, not actual computers, and that people concentrate too much on exotic threats, but he goes a bit off the rails after that.
Current post quantum crypto work is a hedge, because no-one who might face actual physical or financial or military risks is prepared to say that there will be no device in 10-20 years time that can crack eg. an ECDH key exchange in the blink of an eye. You’ve got to start work on PQC now, because you want to be able subject it to a lot of classical cryptanalysis work because quantum-resistant is no good by itself (see also, SIKE which turned out to be trivially crackable).
The attempt to project factorising capabilities of future quantum computers is pretty stupid because there’s too little data to work with, so the capabilities and limitations of future devices can’t usefully be guessed at yet. Personally, I’d expect them to remain physics experiments for at least another 5-10 years, but once a bunch of current issues are resolved you’ll see rapid growth in practical devices by which time it is a bit late to start casting around for replacement crypto systems.
The thing that currently cannot be worked around is the “play integrity api”, but relatively few applications make use of it yet.
It is a terrible security measure (because it give the impression to app developers that a 5+ year old android installation that’s never had a patch is more secure than an up-to-date graphene install) so there’s a chance that it might be improved in future, but it is currently a looming problem.
It’s been a long time since I read any moldbug, and I vaguely recalled him as someone as a tedious reactionary who wouldn’t stop goddamn writing. Was he always this murderously unhinged, openly fantasising about mass graves?
Anyway, I hope the realisation that the ultra rich are no smarter or more capable than anyone else gnaws away at what ever he has in lieu of a soul and consumes the rest of him.