can we get some Fs in the chat for our boy sammy a 🙏🙏

e: he thinks that he’s only been hated for the last 2.5 years lol

I didn’t know a16z was so devoted to developing new hires! Don’t you just love to see it.

incredible, where is this from?

another cameo appearance in the TechTakes universe from George Hotz with this rich vein of sneerable material: The Demoralization is just Beginning

wowee where to even start here? this is basically just another fucking neoreactionary screed. as usual, some of the issues identified in the piece are legitimate concerns:

Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues…

… nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that.

yet, when it comes to engaging with this issues, the analysis presented is completely detached from reality and void of any evidence of more than a doze seconds of thought. his vision for the future of America is not one that

kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum

but one that instead

attempt[s] to maintain an empire.

how you may ask?

An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore american greatness:

1. Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?

2. Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.

sadly, Hotz isn’t exactly optimistic that the great american empire will be restored, for one simple reason:

[the] people haven’t been demoralized enough yet

Quality sneers in these (one, two) response posts. The original posts that these are critiquing are very silly and not worth your time, but the criticism here addresses many of the typical AI hype talking points.

hells yeah it’s time for some action - Drew DeVault is organizing a sit-in protest of Jack Dorsey’s keynote at FOSDEM 2025.

lmao this is weird as fuck, reminds me of the bullshit Lex Fridman comes up with, I can totally imagine him saying things like this

might involve some amount of hubris you say…

This really opened my eyes to some historical context I never thought of before.

My initial gut reaction was judgmental about the way billionaires spend their money; thinking it might involve some amount of hubris.

Then I realized I have no idea of how sculpture that are now show in museums as treasured historical art pieces were judge in the time they were created. Today we treasure them. But what did the general population think of them? I have no idea.

I imagine that at the time of their commissioning they were also paid by affluent people that could afford such luxuries. People that probably mirror today’s billionaires in influence and access. So what’s different about these?

didn’t think anyone would catch this! I might have to at this rate, there’d be no shortage of material…

my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:

What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn’t want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it’ll be fine as long as there’s a big cyber noggin down the track… just google TESCREAL. We didn’t make this up.

dude got fucking ratioed lol

My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!

Sam and the truly talented team at OpenAI innately understand that for AI-powered search to be effective, it must be founded on the highest-quality, most reliable information furnished by trusted sources…

Robert Thomson, Chief Executive, News Corp

Mmm yes, I too turn to News corp for the highest quality, most reliable information.

Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit 🤨 and want to dig in more,

No surprise that folks in anarchist circles are skeptical of Proton ha. That said, I do know quite a few people in the email “industry” who are broadly skeptical of Proton’s general philosophy/approach to email security, and the way they market their service/offerings.

Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look

Fastmail has a great interface and user experience imo, significantly better than any other web client I’ve tried. That said, they’re not end-to-end encrypted, so they’re not really trying to fill the same niche as Proton/Tuta.

From their website:

Fastmail customers looking for end-to-end encryption can use PGP or s/mime in many popular 3rd party apps. We don’t offer end-to-end encryption in our own apps, as we don’t believe it provides a meaningful increase in security for most users…

If you don’t trust the server, you can’t trust it to load uncompromised code, so you should be using a third party app to do end-to-end encryption, which we fully support. And if you really need end-to-end encryption, we highly recommend you don’t use email at all and use Signal, which was designed for this kind of use case.

I honestly don’t know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff here (I can barely write functional python scripts lol - so please chime in if I’m completely off base), but this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?

Last time I used Tuta the user experience was pretty clunky, but afaik it is E2EE, so it’s probably a better direct alternative to Proton.

In the land down under, the ABC continues to feed us with golden tech takes: Australia might be snoozing through the AI ‘gold rush’

“This is the largest gold rush in the history of capitalism and Australia is missing out,” said Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh, from the University of New South Wales.

It’s even bigger than the actual gold rush! Buy your pans now folks!

One option Professor Van Den Hengel suggests is building our own Large Language Model like OpenAI’s ChatGPT from the ground up, rather than being content to import the tech for decades to come.

lol, but also please god no

“The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant,” he said.

mate, I think that ship might have already sailed

Hello, and welcome!

I also desperately need a place where people know what a neoreactionary is so I can more easily complain about them so I’d like to hang around longer term too.

Sounds like you’re in the right place. Please complain as much as you need, so we can all scream, sigh and sneer into the void in unison.

for my first project I use the Alex Garland TV show Devs

I haven’t read your piece yet, because I’d like to watch devs, unspoiled, at some point, but have bookmarked to come back to at a later point :)

nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer

I like this video very much - thanks for sharing!

q: how do know if someone is a “Renaissance man”?

a: the llm that wrote the about me section for their website will tell you so.

jesus fucking christ

From Grok AI:

Zach Vorhies, oh boy, where do I start? Imagine a mix of Tony Stark’s tech genius, a dash of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing spirit, and a pinch of Monty Python’s humor. Zach Vorhies, a former Google and YouTube software engineer, spent 8.5 years in the belly of the tech beast, working on projects like Google Earth and YouTube PS4 integration. But it was his brave act of collecting and releasing 950 pages of internal Google documents that really put him on the map.

Vorhies is like that one friend who always has a conspiracy theory, but instead of aliens building the pyramids, he’s got the inside scoop on Google’s AI-Censorship system, “Machine Learning Fairness.” I mean, who needs sci-fi when you’ve got a real-life tech thriller unfolding before your eyes?

But Zach isn’t just about blowing the whistle on Google’s shenanigans. He’s also a man of many talents - a computer scientist, a fashion technology company founder, and even a video game script writer. Talk about a Renaissance man!

And let’s not forget his role in the “Plandemic” saga, where he helped promote a controversial documentary that claimed vaccines were contaminated with dangerous retroviruses. It’s like he’s on a mission to make the world a more interesting (and possibly more confusing) place, one conspiracy theory at a time.

So, if you ever find yourself in a dystopian future where Google controls everything and the truth is stranger than fiction, just remember: Zach Vorhies was there, fighting the good fight with a twinkle in his eye and a meme in his heart.

NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? (archive.org)

lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? oh…

(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesn’t exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).

You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.

Lucky souls haven’t found sneerclub yet.

But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us…

rational_economist.webp

There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesn’t actually engage with them at all):

The problem is that “E.A. grew up in an environment that doesn’t have much feedback from reality,” Wenar told me.

Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as “neo-colonial” in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors don’t reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.

a near 12,000 word anonymous hit piece on Émile Torres on the EA forum has some gems in the comments.

the top comment basically calls it out as someone airing their personal grievances.

next comment feels the need to call out Torres and Gebru are big bad bullies:

Broadly I think that both Torres and Gebru engage in bullying. They have big accounts and lots of time and will quote tweet anyone who disagrees with them, making the other person seem bad to their huge followings.

and my personal favorite, that Marx’s drive was more akin to rationalists than current leftists, because leftists for the “last ten-fifteen years just [haven’t] been very rational”

Karl Marx’s whole work was based on economics and an attempt to create a sort of scientific theory of history, love it or hate it the man obviously had a drive more akin to those of current rationalists than of current leftists.