istewart @ istewart @awful.systems

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12 mo. ago

This causes me to reflect on contrasting currents in tech culture. I remember growing up with the Apple/Mac rumor culture around the time Steve Jobs came back, and how people had conditioned themselves to get hyped for any little tiny leak about upcoming products. A culture which obviously persists now, albeit in streamlined, advertiser-friendly blog spaces. By contrast, MacWeek magazine had a columnist calling himself Mac the Knife who claimed to have clandestine rendezvous with shady trenchcoat-clad characters in the back alleys of Cupertino... And somehow the new product reveals were almost always somewhat less whelming than the rumormill had built them up to be. Part of the Jobs idolatry that still dominates Silicon Valley is the clear strategy among empty-suit grifters like Altman that such hype is vital but Apple didn't do enough with it; that you should always be marketing what's around the corner rather than keeping it hidden away under lock, key, and NDA.

Contrast this with open-source culture, warts and all. What's in the repository is the basis of what comes next. You think superintelligence is imminent? OK, where's the code stubs that will serve as the foundation? Make a pull request for your mega-brain's medulla, let's review it. It's also a big reason why the current round of AI doesn't fit with open-source culture, no matter how many people are trying to force it. It is inherently an obfuscatory technology. Not just due to the sheer size of the data sets and weights involved, but also through the weird non-deterministic practice of configuring software through natural-language prompts. GIGO at scale, but you can keep the hype going by promising a lower percentage of garbage in the future.

this mf'er watched all the naruto filler and fuckin' loved it

emails SHFiguarts every week from their work address, "Deluxe Mecha-Naruto when?????"

The Hollywood bankruptcy auctions in a few years are gonna be lit

Infrastructural Pykrete as a Service... if y'all can stand up the London office, I'll handle the Bay Area fundraising, time to get paid!!!!!

Ah, a fellow initiate into the mysteries of Cow Lore. Moo to you too, my boo

linkffn("Oh No! I Was Resurrected On The BlockChain As A Smart-Contract Ninja!!!!!!: Densetsu no Side Story")

Words: 267k+ Characters: [Sasuke U., Anakin S.] Tags: NFTs Available, Hurt/Comfort, Mpreg, Fully Transcribed init.el Files, Sasuke Uchiha Becomes A Sith Lord, Cow Lore

Deep dive into complex chemistry may be the most important thing in this thread. The bullshitters need more pushback like this, even though the effort involved means it can't happen nearly as often as the bullshit. Thank you.

As the old saying goes, hope in one hand, Lisp in the other.

If you try it, I personally hope you've got a damned good garbage collector...

How would you audit a computer? Would they add USB-C ports to the cans?

User requests something that accommodates their actual use-case. Altman responds by dismissing it as "toys," in that same cultivated faux-casual lowercase smarm that constitutes the bulk of his public identity. This man is not fit to be an executive.

I used to be a serious systems programmer like you once, then I took a prompt injection in the knee

They are practically handing you free leverage

I feel like it’s too much to hope that even the HN crowd have figured out Balaji S. is a more prolific bullshit machine than any LLM…

This is going to drag out for years, as such things do... and I would not at all be surprised if, a couple years in, Nvidia turns around and starts a PR blitz along the lines of, "tee-hee, that genAI bubble wasn't nearly as big as we thought it would be! Look what happened to our revenue and stock price! Monopolists, lil ol' us?!"

In other words, good on the prosecutors, but I feel like they're only doing this now because of the mainstream hype that AI is inevitable and will conquer all industries.

I feel like Newsweek has been vaguely pro-Trump / at the very least "both sides" clickbait since their last buyout. So it's very impressive that they're willing to publish straightforward information that Bitcoin is a thin, highly manipulated market. Bravo!

It's remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He's worked on that, but it's clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn't very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I'm thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.

But you can't convince me that you're really the world's best technical interviewer if you're also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you're suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who's financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they're concerned about where he might end up otherwise?

She's still a go-to for celebrities who want to be seen as telling raw, difficult truths; Harry and Meghan obviously being the flagship example. They're surely trying to piggyback off that here.

Aww, how nice, Sam got his hair done professionally. And they gave him the Nimoy cut!

It makes sense that he would want back on the only grift train that ever treated him so well. Post-Trump/Vance Thielworld is likely to be a particularly sad place, though.

I suspect it’s a bit of a tell that upcoming hype cycles will be focused on biotech. Not that any of these people writing checks have any more of a clue about biotech than they do about computers.