As someone who also went to university in the late 80s and early 90s, I didn’t share his experiences. This reads like one of those silly shaggy-dog stories where everyone says sarcastically afterwards: “yeah that happened”.

Damn. I thought I was cynical, but nowhere near as cynical as OpenAI is, apparently.

One thing to keep in mind about Ptacek is that he will die on the stupidest of hills. Back when Y Combinator president Garry Tan tweeted that members of the San Francisco board of supervisors should be killed, Ptacek defended him to the extent that the mouth-breathers on HN even turned on him.

Let them fight. https://openai.com/index/elon-musk-wanted-an-openai-for-profit/

Same. I’m not being critical of lab-grown meat. I think it’s a great idea.

But the pattern of things he’s got an opinion on suggests a familiarity with rationalist/EA/accelerationist/TPOT ideas.

Do you have a link? I’m interested. (Also, I see you posted something similar a couple hours before I did. Sorry I missed that!)

So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some… boutique… views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:

• Lab-grown meat
• Modern architecture is rotten
• Population decline is an existential threat
• Elon Musk and Peter Thiel

How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?

As anyone who’s been paying attention already knows, LLMs are merely mimics that provide the “illusion of understanding”.

As a longtime listener to Tech Won’t Save Us, I was pleasantly surprised by my phone’s notification about this week’s episode. David was charming and interesting in equal measure. I mostly knew Jack Dorsey as the absentee CEO of Twitter who let the site stagnate under his watch, but there were a lot of little details about his moderation-phobia and fash-adjacency that I wasn’t aware of.

By the way, I highly recommend the podcast to the TechTakes crowd. They cover many of the same topics from a similar perspective.

For me it gives off huge Dr. Evil vibes.

If you ever get tired of searching for pics, you could always go the lazy route and fall back on AI-generated images. But then you’d have to accept the reality that in few years your posts would have the analog of a geocities webring stamped on them.

Please touch grass.

The next AI winter can’t come too soon. They’re spinning up coal-fired power plants to supply the energy required to build these LLMs.

I wouldn’t know anything about the thread, as it’s impossible for me to read without a twitter account. Yet another reason why the site is trash.

But by all means, go on generating content for a bigoted fascist who will use everything you write to increase engagement with his platform and give it undeserved credibility and $$$.

(And no, I won’t block you.)

Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.

I’d really like to know the back story on this interview too. I realize weirdness isn’t exactly distinctive when it comes to rationalists, but Zack is in a league of his own.

I’ve been using DigitalOcean for years as a personal VPS box, and I’ve had no complaints. Not sure how well they’d scale (in terms of cost) for a site like this.

Anthropic’s Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.

Strange man posts strange thing.

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This linked interview of Brian Merchant by Adam Conover is great. I highly recommend watching the whole thing.

For example, here is Adam, decribing the actual reasons why striking writers were concerned about AI, followed by Brian explaining how Sam Altman et al hype up the existential risk they themselves claim to be creating, just so they can sell themselves as the solution. Lots of really edifying stuff in this interview.