Agreed

When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he’s referring to has to be capitalism. The “unaligned AI is already here, it’s corporations” trope has been around for a while, and I don’t think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.

Nah, this is the threat as he describes it:

Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country

He doesn’t need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark’s access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he’d control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice

He’s not saying that “corporations are a parasitic species we created that will devour our precious planet and ability to survive and turn it into shareholder value for our corpses to enjoy” no sir he’s saying we need to switch to open source replacements for Office 360 and get Right To Repair for our tractors.

It’s not just that he fails a purity test it’s that he basically only cares about his pet issues like right to repair and hating copyright and positions himself as a social activist while twisting real social issues to fit into his framework of ‘copyright bad, hackers fix this.’

This has been getting posted repeatedly on a reddit sub I follow and it’s funny that we’re still finding Harris fans who somehow didn’t catch on for all these years that the dude is just straight up racist and hates Muslims on an individual basis. The fact that he was probably the most commonly mentioned podcaster on the slate star codex sub is a sign!

I’ll steal my general remark from one of the threads on DTG:

Sam, if you’re allowed to call the mayor an Islamist because his wife liked some posts on social media, can we call you a racist for having a notorious racist on your podcast to yammer about the woke menace?

That was when he got a very gentle NYT bio and flipped his lid.

Aella showed up.

in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.

Nay a culture where every citizen is entitled to one armed crashout and threats of such have been an important lever used by the party that believes in that entitlement for decades.

His substack reads like LW.

I would once again like to gloat that I called it.

After the first copycat maybe some calls got made /tinfoil

Reuters?

Kalanick now runs a robotics startup; in his free time, he said recently, he uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT “to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics.

When I read that I assumed they included it for color to make him sound insane.

If tokens ever become expensive people are gonna start using these to code until they get shut down.

I need to find an entirely new profession, everyone in software now is fucking deranged.

Mood

I feel like there’s a difference between alcohol and drugs, something people can make in their back yard and AI which requires a first world country’s entire economy to be oriented towards it to function… a difference in what we should be required to accept.

I don’t buy the general argument about shame either. We teach children to shit in toilets and not sidewalks. I see rampant AI use as just another form of disgusting public indecency and the faster we bring shame in to remedy it the better.

It seems vaguely AI flavored to me inasmuch as it’s using contrasts too much (it’s not x it’s y) and it’s way too verbose. Also it’s obviously wrong at least in my experience, middle managers aren’t the sparrows, individual contributors (especially juniors) are.

Maybe that’s just a symptom of a person reading too much AI text and thinking a good tweet would make a great substack.

I’d love to see it tested in court but I’m not gonna be the test case. GitHub won’t touch it because the ‘AI output is worthless’ angle is bad news for MS.

So you’re sure you Claude wasn’t trained on wordpress?

Unfortunately FOSS is basically dead because nobody is enforcing licenses against training.

The software industry is experiencing a huge collective AI psychosis.

piece he keeps equivocating between local LLMs and their behemoth online counterparts with their heavily proprietary tooling that occasionally wraps them into a somewhat useful product.

This is fundamental to his approach. He believes that technology is inherently liberatory as long as it’s in the hands of the consumer.