Phil @ pja @awful.systems

Posts

4

Comments

45

Joined

2 yr. ago

OK I’m done here.

Ah yes, the poor little smol bean uwu Doge boys. It’s not their fault they (probably) killed 100,000 children. Anyone could have done that!

Back in the real world, these people were adults who let 100,000s die because they didn’t care to check the likely outcome of cutting the programs they assumed were worthless.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Almost as if Fitzgerald was describing a type.

I don’t particularly care about whether COVID was a lab leak or not at this point: gain of function research was spectacularly stupid. It was entirely unclear how it was going to achieve anything of any positive consequence whatsoever except extending the careers of the researchers in question whilst putting the entire world at risk.

Worst risk / benefit trade-off in biological sciences ever?

HN is being ... surprisingly on point with this one. Choice quotes:

“However, reading this article about all these people at their "Galt's Gultch", I thought — "oh, I guess he's a rhinoceros now" ” — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317651

“It's very telling that some of them went full "false modesty" by naming sites like "LessWrong", when you just know they actually mean "MoreRight" ” — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44319387

“I feel like I'm witnessing something that Adam Curtis would cover in the last part of The Century of Self, in real time.” — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317313

etc etc.

So it looks like Mr. “Not consistently candid” has been at it again?

I will admit that they got me with this one: I genuinely thought the FrontierMath results meant something real. I didn’t think they would be that brazen about rigging a benchmark that was explicitly advertised as being kept private so that AI companies couldn’t train on the questions. More fool me I guess.

& now Melania is in on the action: https://x.com/MELANIATRUMP/status/1881094861279129643

Or rather, the team that the Trump family have some kind of deal with is getting in while the getting is good. This stuff right out of the gate of the Trump administration before they’ve even taken office is very, very bad.

Someone appears to have launched & immediately rugged an “official tiktok coin” as well.

The next four years are going to be rough, aren’t they?

If Trump makes his own memecoin part of the national currency reserves it will genuinely be the grift that never stops giving.

Honestly, I think this is more likely than him forcing the Treasury to allocate $billions to current BTC holders. Trump doesn’t hold any BTC (or only trivial amounts) as far as we know, so there’s absolutely no personal upside for him in this scenario. Letting other people walk away with $billions whilst Trump gets nothing doesn’t seem very Trump, does it?

I suppose they could up with a scheme where a portion of the $$ from BTC sales to the Treasury get used to buy TrumpCoin or whatever. But that requires him to trust BitCoin bros. Is that plausible?

Why are these people obsessed with a measurement of people that has the worst statistical validity known to mankind? IIRC Taleb ripped IQ-obsessives to shit a couple of years ago with an extended rant / published paper on the various flaws, but even from a non-stats nerd perspective the idea that you can infer the “IQ” of an entire country from the studies that these people quote is absurd. We’re talking “I measured the IQ of a bunch of kids in an orphanage in 1968, so obviously I can infer from this the value of the entire nation” levels of absurd here. Even taking their words at face value (lol) the entire endeavour is ludicrous.

The whole thing just seems completely pointless: what’s the end goal here? Being able to line people up like trading cards achieves what exactly?

(Which leads inevitably to the depressing reality that the “why” is obvious, but unspoken of course: They just don’t want to come out and say it.)

The only concretely good thing in here is that the government is going to use it as a cudgel to impose upgrading the UK electrical grid over the objections of pathetic nimbys who value their views of rolling green fields to things like, oo, people managing to heat their homes in winter without going into debt.

If it also means the government putting the boot into local authorities to force them to permit local economic development I’ll take that too.

I already wasn’t going to read this screed, but now I’m definitely not going to read it. Sheesh.

jart is already banned: https://lobste.rs/~jart &, as that comment makes clear, their entire domain is now completely banned from lobste.rs. I think you might be overcompensating a tad here?

The power level curse where your characters get too powerful for there to be meaningful stakes?

who tf is this?

They’re a self-described gay, furry ex-mormon who seem to have latched onto the rat & rat-adjacent communities (like EA) in the hope of finding a substitute for the certainty they used to find in religion. Last I heard they work for the Blocked&Reported podcast, i.e. Jesse Singal et al., alongside their job in the US military. (edit: their Twitter claims they’re a law clerk? I guess they moved on.)

On the surface they seem well meaning but naïve, the company they keep (perhaps) being a reflection of that.

For the rat & rat-adjacent soi-disant “communities” David is like the bogeyman. You see his name used in places like SSC to stand in for the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.

I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.

You’d think these people would have learned by now that there’s no upside in them spending their precious time on this earth obsessing over why a group of people don’t like them, but nevertheless here they are: drawn like moths to the flame.

Prolix insanity is kind of a Rationalist / Rat-adjacent calling card.

This is going to be a banger, I can feel it.

Definitely not one of the most heavily armed states in the USA.

neoreactionary harem with stack ranking

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.