It’s fascinating to watch Hanania try and do politics in a comment space more focused on academic inquiry, and how silly he looks here. He can’t participate in this conversation without trying to make it about social interventions and class warfare (against the poor), even though I don’t know that Bessis would disagree that the thing social interventions can’t significantly increase the number of mathematical or scientific geniuses in a country (1). Instead, Hanania throws out a few brief, unsupported arguments, gets asked for clarification and validation, accuses everyone of being woke, and gets basically ignored as the conversation continues around him.

This feels like the kind of environment that Siskind and friends claim to be wanting to create, but it feels like they’re constitutionally incapable of actually doing the “ignore Nazis until they go away” part.

1. From his other post linked in the thread he credits that level of aptitude to idiosyncratic ways of thinking that are neither genetically nor socially determined, but can be cultivated actively through various means. The reason that the average poor Indian boy doesn’t become Ramanujan is the same reason you or I or his own hypothetical twin brother didn’t; we’re not Ramanujan. This doesn’t mean that we can’t significantly improve our own ability to understand and use mathematical thinking.)

Honestly I’m kinda grateful for people who dig into and analyze the actual data in seeming ignorance of the political context of the people pushing the other side. It’s one thing to know that Jordan “Crimieux” Lasker and friends are out here doing Deutsch Genetik and another to have someone cleanly and clearly lay out exactly why they’re wrong, especially when they do the work of assembling a more realistic and useful story about the same studies.

…so it’s not a Dr Who thing.

No, no. I’m not mad. Just… disappointed. Existentially speaking.

they’ve already got a contract with Crusoe AI to deliver 1.21 gigawatts.

Does that number feel suspiciously memetic to anyone else?

The new “Radio didn’t work and I never heard the order to shovel forty tons of shit, sir” is going to involve some suspiciously direct damage to Corporal Chatbot’s output devices.

Sounds a bit like a Swedish heiress to Lillian Gilbreth. My wife has had some mobility issues and has lamented that the work that went into designing more ergonomic and accessible kitchens in the 40s and 50s was largely abandoned and ignored in more recent homes.

I’m slightly disappointed they didn’t take a page from David and use the only valid photo of Jensen Huang for the relevant page, but the fact that he was encouraging us to sign a literal deal with the devil more than made up for it.

Honestly you could probably pitch that to the Musk/Thiel set pretty easily by playing up how masculine fighter pilots are and disconnecting but not removing the rear flight controls. Let them push buttons and feel cool.

I’m legitimately disappointed in John Carmack here. He should be a good enough programmer to understand the limitations here, but I guess his business career has driven in a different direction.

I feel like this is a really common experience with both HPMoR and HP itself, and explains a large part of the positive reputation they enjoy(ed).

Based on your reproduction it looks like the biggest reason to doubt the original results is that they all have the hands right and hair that seems like it vaguely fits a human scalp.

Yud seems to have the same conception of insanity that Lovecraft did, where you learn too much and end up gibbering in a heap on the floor and needing to be fed through a tube in an asylum or whatever. Even beyond the absurdity of pretending that your authorial intent has some kind of ability to manifest reality as long as you don’t let yourself be the subject (this is what no postmodernism does to a person), the actual fear of “going mad” seems fundamentally disconnected from any real sense of failing to handle the stress of being famously certain that the end times are indeed upon us. I guess prophets of doom aren’t really known for being stable or immune to narcissistic flights of fancy.

Patrick Boyle on YouTube has a breakdown of the breakdown of the Microstrategy flywheel scheme. Decent financial analysis of this nonsense combined with some of the driest humor on the internet.

It’s also the sort of thing that you wouldn’t actually think to ask for until it became quite hard to sort out. Creating this kind of list over time as good resources are found is much more practical and not the kind of thing would likely be automated.

You’d think that they’d eventually run out of ways to say “fuck you, got mine” but here we are I guess. I’m going to guess that they’re not subject to the same kinds of environmental regulations or whatever that an actual power plant would be because it’s not connected to the grid?

It legitimately feels like at least half of these jokers have the same attitude towards IT and project management that sovereign citizens do to the law. SovCits don’t understand the law as a coherent series of rules and principles applied through established procedures etc, they just see a bunch of people who say magic words that they don’t entirely understand and file weird paperwork that doesn’t make sense and then end up getting given a bunch of money or going to prison or whatever. It’s a literal cargo cult version of the legal system, with the slight hiccup that the rest of the world is trying to actually function.

Similarly, the Silicon Valley Business Idiot set sees the tech industry as one where people say the right things and make the buttons look pretty and sometimes they get bestowed reality-warping sums of money. The financial system is sufficiently divorced from reality that the market doesn’t punish the SVBIs for their cargo cult understanding of technology, but this does explain a lot of the discourse and the way people like Thiel, Andreesen, and Altman talk about their work and why the actual products are so shite to use.

Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.

Also I would contend they’re misusing “infrastructure”. Social media and chat bots are kinds of services that are provided over the internet, but they aren’t a part of the infrastructure itself anymore than the world’s largest ball of twine is part of the infrastructure of the Interstate Highway System.

Hat tip to the person who wants to try and include DMT and other hallucinogens and psychedelics. How many of these experiences are gonna be tagged “Machine Elves” by the time anyone starts asking wtf we’re doing here?

…I will freely admit to not knowing the norms of courtroom conduct, but isn’t having preestablished penalties for specific infractions central to the whole concept of law itself.