I mainly know him from Smash Bros where his big attack is sucking you in close and beating you with his comically large mallet, and that seems like a reasonable metaphor for what being bombarded with slop commits feels like

end result: well, we for sure got the streaming anime

Wouldn’t you be so grateful that your modular repairable upgradeable laptop that you probably sunk at least $2k into, and probably plan on owning for the long term, has specifically funded support for this steaming pile of crap?

edit:

As AI is increasingly producing high severity CVEs against core infrastructure, security needs to be top of mind for all developers, but especially authors of distributions targeted at developers. Lately there have been innumerable reports of developer machines being compromised and their access used to contaminate the software supply chain or exploit production systems. Developers are high-value targets because of the level of access they are often granted. Developer machines typically disable security guardrails for convenience, store credentials in plain-text dotfiles, and accumulate access to systems. This must change.

I’ll microwave a surplus Funko Pop doll if this paragraph wasn’t cut-n-pasted straight from chatbot output

OP definitely has a kernel of a point, and there’s a lot to discuss regarding it, but he sprints right past it all to uselessly compress the conversation into the ~~ timeless dialectic of class consciousness ~~. The acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class is, if anything, still under-analyzed! You come into the industry already propagandized that if you just join the right startup and bust your ass, you’re gonna hit it big! In this way, it’s important to understand, and describe to others, Hacker News as a propaganda tool to shape and condition technical discussion, rather than the common perception of a neutral, focused technical discussion forum.

And the end circumstance is, even if you are awarded stock options at most of the big Silicon Valley firms, thanks to multi-class share structures, you’re given a booby-prize version of ownership! Your decision is binary, cash out or hold, you have no effective decision-making power over the future of the enterprise. There’s a lot of persuasive points here that still aren’t widespread in the public dialogue! But no, I guess it makes more sense to continue the same old tactic of labeling everyone we hate and fear with an obscure, difficult-to-spell French loanword. The rhetorical tactic that has been pretty demonstrably ineffective for over a century now.

There are, of course, equally valid reasons to be pessimistic. The historically-contingent development of computer programming has mainly been along lines that are obfuscatory rather than accessible, subject to continuous framework and API churn, fetishizing rapid delivery of “new features” over stability. All these aspects help create a false sense of mastery on the part of those who pass through the firewall of skill and tedium, then further combine with the class-mobility propaganda to create a false sense of security. And the interposition of uninspectable, poorly-replicable AI systems is the culmination of the rot, approaching the point where even the supposedly masterful programmer doesn’t really know what their system is doing, let alone the end user. In this way, I have to agree that there is far greater potential for solidarity with the users on whom this crap is imposed rather than the sunk-cost dead-enders who keep crapping it out.

But even then, I still don’t trust OP’s conceptual framework to build that solidarity. This is precisely the genre of Marxist argument that is most tedious and least effective, the kind that approaches religious fundamentalism. Dude’s writing seriously reads like Christian fundamentalist bullshit papered over with Marxist jargon. Later in the thread, we get bangers like

The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line, that line being drawn by the rich, the haute bourgeoisie.

Replace “righteousness of the proletariat” with “grace of the saved,” “privileged status” with “fallen nature,” “haute bourgeoisie” with “liberal elite” etc. and you’d have the exact output of somebody in a Texas megachurch. Dude’s a Jesus freak, his Jesus just happens to be named Karl.

Agent-4’s off-the-charts bioweapons capabilities

I would ask to establish metrics for “bioweapons capabilities,” if I didn’t already know the request would end in disappointment

Interesting if somewhat unintentional contrast between tools: a 7-month-old microblogging/Twitter-like thread is readily considered “old,” even if it contains (and might be a primary reference point for!) information that is relevant long before and long after. The same can’t always be said of a blog post.

It’s almost like he was considering cosplaying Tekken series mascot Heihachi and then gave up when he realized he would have to work out

Space property rights.

dammit I’m gonna get my money back out of these SpaceX IPO shares no matter what it takes

for context, “donkey farms” is shorthand for wooly-headed small-scale thinking, not Rationalist

Ah, a version of the YCombinator pejorative “lifestyle business” tailored for the nonprofit sector. How droll.

Whether consciously or not, a lot of these people probably implicitly think of their kids as cost centers. I feel like this is widespread across finance-focused American households, not just in the executive strata.

Patrick Collison

Boy this fella sure gets around. I’m sure he dutifully attends all the meetings, too; a high-level operator like him can’t just be an open checkbook available to be bilked by any old troglodyte

Good lord it’s a wannabe advertising executive trying to write a Zen fable

In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE)

You came up with your own calendar system centered around your institution and you want to tell me you’re not a cult???

Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.

Dude hasn’t been around. I’ve noticed quite a bit of anxiety around even terminal-supply transmission lines adjacent to new-build neighborhoods in wildfire risk zones. I’ll agree that this is irrational; the big problem is people were persuaded to buy a house in a fire zone because a big landowner and a developer wanted to cash out some marginal land, but there is a degree of actual rationality here. People feel that a big, most likely the biggest, chunk of their personal wealth is at risk. Calling that “straight up moral panic” is ignoring how real people actually rationally calculate risks, and ignoring potential opportunities to help them improve, if that’s really what you want to do.

But we already knew that Zvi was a disingenuous idiot, so I digress.

I really need to pick Simulacra and Simulation back up off the reading pile

That slot will probably be filled by whatever moneyed post-Trump US Southern snake-fondlers Thiel manages to bilk with his Antichrist bullshit. And therefore not likely large or long-lasting

I will have you know that fartwave is a legitimate musical genre. The normies might not be ready for a full-length, full-production stage musical, BUT

Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.

Art Bell was not a non-problematic person, but if he were still alive, at least this era would have an appropriate narrator. His replacement George Noory essentially turned the show into a shill-a-thon for anyone with woo bullshit to sell (quite literally, any guest I’ve heard since Bell died was clearly there to pull the listener into their sales funnel).

Which makes me a bit surprised that I haven’t heard about any of our friends being booked!

the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything

A corollary to that: the rationalists and those downstream assume that AI, as a technological category, will necessarily be more intelligent and capable than its users. Therefore they are willing (and arguably even enthusiastic!) to uncritically accept badly designed, opaque, and barely-functional software from whoever labels it AI. Learned helplessness in action. They claim to be experts at the highest level, but they’re not even really able to get over the starting line of criticism.

What does Tom Cruise do for Scientology? (Not that I think Radcliffe would have fallen for it, I have the impression that he’s a fairly level-headed guy as former child actors go)

What If: A Chick tract was 600,000 words?