I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.

hard to think of anything more dreary and whimsyless than shoving a rainforest into the gas tank of an llm

New episode of odium symposium, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/8-ceci-nest-pas-148404664

we look at a particular book by french philosopher and murderer louis althusser, and talk about what it can say about femicide

this is so cool

this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it’s an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one’s own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.

more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there’s a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you’ve experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like “brain poison” which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination

my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.

all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue

update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.

update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users

update update update: actually they didn’t do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting

💔

ah fuck, man. reddit.com/r/therapyGPT if you want to ruin your day

unfortunately i don’t think there’s any way to communicate how significant the gap is without coming off as condescending or churlish. but like qaa is probably my favorite podcast and i too am tormented by this

that is who we reached out to. i think rat material would fit extremely well with what they’ve got going on and represents a significant gap in their current coverage

i am so sorry

new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632

this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a “gender centrist” psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one

on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there’s basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼

the tea.xyx experiment section is exactly describing academic publishing

idea: end of year worst of ai awards. “the sloppies”

odium symposium christmas bonus episode: we watched and reviewed Sean Hannity’s straight-to-Rumble 2023 Christmas comedy “Jingle Smells.”

https://www.patreon.com/posts/146610014

small typo.

So guess what Mozilla did? When you update Firefox, tt re-enables the AI! And if you disable the AI again, it re-enables it again next update! Choose correctly, user!

“tt” should “it”

maybe my favorite pivot to ai article yet, definitely top three at least. wonderful work

We have a new odium symposium episode. This week we talk about Ayn Rand, who turned out to be much much more loathsome than i expected.

available everywhere (see www.odiumsymposium.com). patreon episode link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/haters-v-ayn-146272391

i’ll cut the coiners some slack on this one because requiring a login to view is an account level privacy option. i don’t know what the option is supposed to actually do. but that’s what it is

article in large part about our friends

https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/

some of the people involved with kernel are pretty unhappy about this and claim the piece is in bad faith/factually wrong (see the replies to https://bsky.app/profile/kellypendergrast.bsky.social/post/3ma55xfq7d22y )