all your barsk are belong to us

I got a really nice omnibus edition of Blindsight/Echopraxia that was printed in the UK, but ultimately, the necessarily(?) cardboard nature of the vampire character in Echopraxia was what left me cold. The first chapter or two are some of the most densely-packed creative sci-fi ideas I’ve ever read, but I came to the book looking for more elaboration on the vampires, and didn’t really get that. Valerie remains an inscrutable other. The most memorable interaction she has is when she’s breaking her arm and making the POV character guy reset it, seemed like she was hitting on him?

6G nanometer-wave, gently caressing your mitochondria thanks to the power of antiferromagnets and BORIS:

Wait for AI and Crypto 2.0 to burn out, we’ll get there

It doesn’t even fit with the axioms of market logic! If the platform in question has terrible content moderation, primarily generates revenue from profoundly repulsive people, and was intentionally bought out to be used as the central propaganda organ for a destructive political movement… why wouldn’t you leave?! Dude just doesn’t want to admit he’s too lazy to redo his follows elsewhere

Atlantic writer: “better dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuh”

https://archive.is/OtYCo

Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobs’ widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot “GW Bush Did Nothing Wrong” Cohen.

Given that Trump lost votes compared to 2020, I think it’s past the peak of its relevance. Not many new people are entering the self-referential echo chamber. It’s one of the main vectors for crypto and meme stock scams, as well as the main vector for Musk himself. When all those promises are broken once again, fatigue will start to set in among the bluechecks. It may linger, but it will be a spent force by the end of the decade. Keep up social pressure to get people to leave.

Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?

The more I think about it, the more “Day One” comes across as nonsensical.

I woke up this morning, we had multiple data centers across the globe filled with millions of servers… Day One.

I clocked into the swing shift, we have bins overflowing with unthinkable amounts of returned items, many of which are semi-perishable toiletries and personal hygiene products… Day One.

As a simple-minded catchphrase to orient one’s thinking, it becomes more and more absurd as the company scales. But Jeff don’t care, he punched out a long time ago.

Said it before, I’ll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out

The original statement was clearly meant to dereference a pointer to an object of type “reactionary,” but I expected it to return maybe a Yarvin or at least a Catturd

Facebook platforms are likely to follow the same trajectory as Fox News, and perhaps Zuckerberg can see that. The main site is obviously full of bullshit and practically useless for its original purpose, and it’s also increasingly abandoned by core demographics because it doesn’t have enough of their preferred flavor of bullshit. I’ve known MAGA guys who make a game out of creating secondary accounts to avoid Facebook jail. That sort of pathological use case is surely driving somebody’s OKR numbers, someplace in the company. After that game stops being fun, some of these people will either decamp for other platforms or (gasp, shock, horror) give up on social media entirely!

Instagram has almost completely subsumed the “my favorite celebrity might reply back to me” appeal that Twitter used to have, although TikTok is also stealing a lot of that. If they lose that shine, Zuckerberg’s in real trouble.

why do we want people who can’t deliver viable technology raising more kids?

why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?

How interesting, a volcel who only thinks he’s an incel. Many such cases

LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”

Yeah, this is the “emperor has no clothes” reality that I keep bringing up with my friends who are still invested in the bubble (emotionally if not financially). The genAI/LLM tech stack defies the entire decades-long cost curve and investment thesis for computer technology. Up through the smartphone era, you bought in because you could get more utility for lower cost. What’s being pushed now is higher-cost for dubious utility gains; it’s just that some vendors are eating losses to hide the costs. (And of course the externalities get swept under the rug.)

It’s slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it’s going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.

Altman is certainly aware of what it takes to be a Jobs-like marketing personality (and probably holds Hubbard-like totalism as a not-so-secret ambition), he’s just not, uh, very good at it. He’s put the most effort into the strictly lower-case, faux-casual persona on Twitter to seem “approachable” in a social media context, and that doesn’t help him at all when trying to actually appear serious.

I also don’t doubt that he’s beginning to succumb to the yes-man filter bubble that traps so many public personalities. That’s surely made worse by the likelihood that any underlings he might have reviewing this crap are drinking the AI koolaid and “punching everything up!” with a few rounds of ChatGPT.