Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
OK this is low-hanging fruit but ChatGPT-4o (4o? what even is branding?) was demoed with a feminine voice, So HN discussed it. And a couple extremely horny users can’t stop talking about robot girlfriend sex and the end of relationships
the western world is already experiencing a huge decline in womens sexual appetites – AI will effectively make women completely uninterested in men
An AI girlfriend that isn’t going to bring up the last three time you fought because you forget her birthday/called her fat/hit on her friends? are you sure you understand the target market?
I guess I can never understand the perspective of someone that just needs a girl voice to speak to them. Without a body there is nothing to fulfill me.
And after that you have a robot that listens to you, do your chores and have sex with you, at that point she is “real”.
If you want to solve procreation them you can do that without humans having sex with humans.
countries with GPUs
GPU is the new WMD
mr president, we cannot allow GPU gap!
“And with the proper breeding ratio of, say, 10 chatbots to each male…”
countries with GPUs
Did this person forget how the internet works? Or is he imaging that people just buy a desktop to fuck (and that any desktopsexuals have not done so already. (keep that blacklight away from my dvd player please).
It’s the same fantasy zero-depth comprehension as the chuds who thought they could transact in only bitcoin come the fall of civilisation, in the same delivery format: thonkwits trying to cloutfarm in hypewave
Didn’t Futurama already do that bit?
It never ceases to amaze me watching these tech bros breathlessly hyping the next revolutionary product for it to be a huge nothing burger. Like that’s it? You gave gpt an image to text input + and a text to speech app? Dawg, I’ve been watching Joe Biden & Trump play Fortnite for 5 years at this point, text to speech just doesn’t hit the same anymore.
I mean my god, at least some hardcore engineering went in to making the migraine inducing apple vision pro. If this is the best card in oai’s deck, I would be panicking as an investor.
Well, I suppose dating a chatbot taped to a fleshlight is exactly the sort of relationship these people deserve. Self-solving problem.
I have now looked it up and heard ChatGPT-Four-Oh’s incredibly obnoxious fake-enthusiastic advert person voice. These people are very very sick.
that’s the parasocial relationship they deserve
Saw that twominutepapers did a breathless stan video about the performance of it, and it featured some rather choice opinions about the “very naturally sounding voice” too
These boots must be made of something rather hardy, to not fall apart under all this licking
It got submitted to lobste.rs too and there are some insane takes there too
https://lobste.rs/s/ph5o0a/openai_gpt_4o
this model has lower latency, and they’ve priced it at half of the previous model’s price, despite it having comparable or better performance. If this is not a dumping price,[…]
Yeah it’s totes more efficient, it’s not like Altman/MSFT are desperate to goose subscriber numbers
I’ve seen first-hand how it helps non-programmers write programs to solve their problems (with “bad” code, but bad code is still empowering people), and I think that’s important given that software has been eating the world.
Couldn’t the thousands of people now free from mundane work, work together now on solving climate issues or issues that require physical human labor?
if LLMs/AI can run byrocracies (and whole countries) more efficiently, there are potential energy savings there too.
fml i thought these were the smarter techies
ChatGPT-4-o-face
Chathegao
manic pixie dream T-1000
Shirley Manson or GTFO. But I don’t think they’d like her.
Come on, her voice sounds like garbage.
this is an absolutely accursed post, well done
Talking about the demo and not those HN reactions (they suck): So we all in tech have collectively forgotten the whole ‘apple iphones didn’t actually work when they were being presented and it was all just theatre’ thing? Because I wouldn’t trust a slick tech demo like that at all. (I also want to know about all the edge cases where it fails and well, there is also the whole ‘what is this even for?’ thing). (And yes some HN people did voice these concerns).
E: also don’t these GPT things have a sort of token limit? After a while they just get stuck in ‘cannot accept more new data’ mode basically (which I assume is a limit so people don’t use up too much compute (I hate how we are making that a word now)), how would that work? (This is more about the robofuckers, who have also not learned anything from the previous gen of this shit when somebody turned the naughty cybersex function off).
Don’t forget about how the presentations for Google Gemini and OpenAI Sora and Devin were all
fakedembellished too, but no one talks about that anymore either.I’m still waiting for even one actual use-case for sexy Clippy that isn’t generating SEO spam while speedrunning climate change.
Some people at the EFF (or people who used to work there at least, apparently they sort of sold out, not clear on the details dont quote me on this one) prob had a small heart attack on the privacy concerns of linking cameras with openAI gpt systems. Chatbot powered advertisements, as seen in the movies!
this one doesn’t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post that’s best summarized as:
I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and it’s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big “L”.
It’s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.
[…]
But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.
[…]
From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didn’t seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.
you’ve read all of this shit before. it’s another “centrist democrat” who thinks the republicans have really good points now that they’re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what I’ve quoted here. there’s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.
this post wouldn’t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:
Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.
In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.
I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.
and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tear’s name was George Washington
there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (…)
Ofc it’s not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of “let’s move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucks” then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!
You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?
lol this mcdonough guy’s great
@nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who aren’t interested in that.
yes it’s a cynical power grab by the woke mob
and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each other’s company
the woke mob that is, at various points in his post, either a large group that’s taken over the Nix community, or a tiny and unimportant but loud group of marginalized folks, depending on what makes his point more efficiently at the time
[taps the sign]
“Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Libertarianism is the ideology of splitters (which is sort of ironic as that is what they accuse ‘the woke’ of being (which also gets combined with the oppression Olympics idea, ideas which are not only not compatible, but is a thing I have only see concern trolls use against things ‘ow you are protesting against the Gaza genocide? But you never said anything about the Darfuris in Sudan, which is a much worse genocide, much curious, I am very intelligent’) it is annoying)
E: note on a bit of language used which was a bit of a red flag to me.
I want people to know that the author of this blog post (another ex-contributor to the discussions) is not the only one who believes the process was corrupted[emph mine].
The language used here is quite interesting, corrupted vs coopted, or some other word, as corrupted has implications of a profane/divine sort of thinking (which fits nicely into my splitting link above. But it is probably just more like ‘government corruption’ than this divine/profane thing).
And the name of that George Washington? Albert Einstein!
this mcdonough dude’s a trip
referencing how much he loves this blog post from another guy just kicked out for sealioning
oh Shea’s Zulip posts are a fucking trip too. it’s yet another straight up tantrum from the same kind of folks who think you shouldn’t get banned if you tell every moderator to go fuck themselves, personally, during a phone call
they absolutely are
loved this LWN subthread where another of these guys makes vague accusations, replies look at his actual posts and say yeah you should have been kicked out
and this one where yet another poster laments needless politicisation and the immediate responses are “oh it’s you” and receipts
And actually just a bit further, there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech, so the one who is delusional is you
ahahaha you know this whole “I don’t see any problems in the Nix community other than these woke fuckers starting drama” shit would be so much more effective if the folks saying that could stop themselves from following it up with the most obviously fash shit I’ve ever seen
also it’s kind of amazing how fast that second poster got recognized and called out. a whole bunch of way too high profile fash and neoreactionary tech weirdos tried to make nix their hill to die on (and were probably encouraged by the lack of tech media coverage of what’s going on, allowing them room to control the conversation), but they’re pretty consistently getting told to shut the fuck up by people who’ve had the audacity to read their previous posts and know exactly who they’re dealing with.
this is the kind of response that makes me optimistic that we can achieve less toxic open source communities as a new norm, one day. Lix seems to be doing it right; Aux unfortunately seems to be absolute chaos, but its heart is in the right place.
e: and of course, the new Nix governance structures getting this kind of negative, effortful response from the worst parts of the community is making me optimistic it’s going to work, in a way that the announcement and Zulip frankly haven’t yet. an outspokenly antifascist nixpkgs combined with Lix would give the fash parts of the nix community effectively nowhere left to go, especially if Nix or Aux does the remainder of the work left to make Lix the evaluator NixOS’s tooling calls into.
i wonder how long before the antiwoke fork
finally, an operating system worthy of all your favorite urbit services
made me wonder if devuan is still a thing and holy shit it is
What’s the backstory with Devuan? I first heard of it from someone licking Andrew Lee’s boots after the Freenode debacle, and that instantly branded it as really suspect. But it might just be Debian minus systemd?
there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech
There are no rws in tech because there are no rws in tech, qed
Look by my definition you can only be a RW if you voted for the republicans in the past 5 elections, and there are not many of those, so he is right!
Yeah milesrout made a fool of themselves on lobste.rs and got banned.
The guys should just have been banned for writing posts that take hours to read that the mods then have to read and respond to.
Creativity is a lie. You heard it here first.
I keep hearing this shit from creatively bankrupt folks and fash billionaires, because it’s very important to them that art and creativity isn’t for us — it’s an expensive relic of the past and a commodity that only they can afford. it’s fucking ghoulish, but that goes without saying with Sammy
what none of them seem to have an answer for is the obvious chicken and egg problem that their weird fucking conjecture leads to. if creativity isn’t possible, where in fuck did all the art come from? these assholes assert that modern artists just remix their inputs like a fucking generative AI, which is plainly false to anyone who knows artists or has even objectively evaluated generative AI outputs, but where in fuck did historical artists get their inputs from if we’re supposing that’s true? generative AI copies, but there’s nothing to copy from when there’s no original.
and that’s not meant to give a single inch to these shitheads and allow the fash idea that true art comes from some fantasy version of history either. modern artists do fucking fantastic creative work — when they’re not shackled by the capitalist systems that keep shitheads like Sammy boy buying expensive, unchallenging art pieces purely as a tax dodge
I’m starting to think that this Sam Altman guy just might be a giant asshole.
It took you this long to suss that???
First they came for the eyeballs, and I said nothing.
Where we’re going, we don’t need eyes.
–Sam Altman, probably
It’s hard to understand what Samuel Alternativeman hopes to accomplish by making such statements. Does he want everyone to give up on being creative and just defer to AI? Does he think that without a source of real creativity for training, his products have any value at all?
He’s either trying to generate new critihype by making Clippy intelligent again (“It learns just like those pesky hoomans do!”), or slither his way out of that lawsuit by claiming it couldn’t have stolen original ideas when there have never been any original ideas in the first place.
I’m still trying to figure out what’s stupider.
“It learns just like those pesky hoomans do!”
It’s Furbies all over again
Did the Aella moratorium from r/sneerclub carry over here?
Because if not
for the record, im currently at ~70% that we’re all dead in 10-15 years from AI. i’ve stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending and the amount of long-term health risks im taking
Is increasing the amount of long-term health risks code for showering even less?
Same Aella Same, but moon.
For the record, I’m currently at ~70% that we’re all dead in 10-15 years from the moon getting mad at us. I’ve stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending towards a future moon mission to give it lots of pats and treats and tell it it’s a good boy and we love it, please don’t get mad.
As a moonleftalonist, I have increased my spending towards nuking all space travel sites (not going well, apparently those things are expensive and really hard to find on ebay), as it is clear that the moon doesn’t want our attention, it never asked for it, and never tried to visit us. Respect the moons privacy!
Our secondary plan is making a big sign saying ‘we are here if you want to talk’.
it’s clear that the moon was right and we have it coming
rip aella girl. aella dead girl
Ugh, this post has me tilted- if your utility function is
max sum log(spending on fun stuff at time t ) * p(alive_t) s.t. cash at time t = savings_{t-1}*r + work_t - spending_t,
etc.,
There’s no fucking way the optimal solution is to blow all your money now, because the disutility of living in poverty for decades is so high. It’s the same reason people pay for insurance, no one expects their house is going to burn down tomorrow, but protecting yourself against the risk is the 100% correct decision.
Idk, they are the Rationalist^{tm} so what the hell do I know.
MS carbon emissions up 30% due to spicy autocomplete
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/microsoft_co2_emissions/
I know this is like super low-hanging fruit, but Reddit’s singularity forum (AGI hype-optimists on crack) discuss the current chapter in the OpenAI telenovela and can’t decide whether Ilya and Jan Leike leaving is good, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk, or bad, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk.
Yep, there’s no scenario here where OpenAI is doing the right thing, if they thought they were the only ones who could save us they wouldn’t dismantle their alignment team, if AI is dangerous, they’re killing us all, if it’s not, they’re just greedy and/or trying to conquer the earth.
vs.
to be honest the whole concept of alignment sounds so fucked up. basically playing god but to create a being that is your lobotomized slave…. I just dont see how it can end well
Of course, we also have the Kurzweil fanboys chiming in:
Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves. Use the tech to upgrade ourselves.
But don’t worry, there are silent voices of reasons in the comments, too:
Honestly feel like these clowns fabricate the drama in order to over hype themselves
Gee, maybe …
no , they’re understating the drama in order to seem rational & worthy of investment , they’re serious that the world is ending , unfortunately they think they have more time than they do so they’re not helping very much really
Yeah, never mind. I think I might need to lobotomize myself now after reading that thread.
Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves.
But… wait…
a crossover sneer from the Nix Zulip:
This is an easy place to add a hook that goes through each message and asks a language model if the message violates any rules. Computers are about as good as humans at interpreting rules about tone and so on, and the biases come from the training data, so for any specific instance the decision is relatively impartial.
please for the love of fuck kick the fascists out of your community because they’ll never stop with this shit
This is another one for the “throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance” category.
jesus christ that post is so not even wrong it’s hard to know where to start
This is using-a-sheep’s-bladder-to-predict-earthquakes territory.
Do you suppose that an LLM can detect a witch?
good to see that LessWrong is about improving human rationality to decrease the existential risk of superintelligent AI, and not long screeds on current political issues from a reactionary perspective
If what you really care about is stemming the ill-effects of large and growing student debt, debt cancellation is a terrible policy. If you want people to consume less of something, the last thing you should do is subsidize people who consume that thing.
Yes, I agree, once debt is cancelled we shouldn’t let people go into debt and attending university should be free.
Also that is a weird sort of argument, how would people consume less schooling? ‘Yeah I’m going for my 4th degree now, after Biden canceled the debt of the first one, I hope he will cancel the other 3 as well’
I generously assumed that he meant consume less loans but, yeah, doesn’t look great.
introducing the human brain to utilitarianism is a lot like introducing a proof system to Falso
Falso
Quality shitpost, top tier SIGBOVIK content, especially appreciate this:
ah yes, aduhelm (aducanumab), probably first drug that FDA approved despite zero evidence that it works, but they wanted to push something, anything that maybe perhaps will show some marginal benefit (it was discontinued few months ago, but in time it was for sale they raked in some serious undeserved money). understandably this made a lot of people very angry, especially people that make drugs that work https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/aducanumab-approval https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/goodbye-aduhelm
and can you guess why it was discontinued? it’s because that company has new, equally useless antibody, that also got approval, but has none of that pr stink around so they can repeat entire process again
Literally one of the Vogons talked about in the opening, well done substackcommenter2048.
I have a business idea for him. Small batch alcohol produced by harvesting ethanol produced by this bacteria found in Aella’s teeth scrapings. Call it Mutella 1140, the official alcohol shot of rationalist orgies.
uh
Sorry for that. It was funnier in my head.
i mean you managed fresh horror from Aella, that’s not nothing
They have that IPA made with yeast from a hipster’s beard flakes, so there’s…uh…precedent.
oh wow re-colonizing your mouth with a bacteria that continuously produces an antibiotic is a bad idea? Who could have seen this coming???
insane Timothy Treadwell voice ‘SCOOTER IS SHITTING HIMSELF’
This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that’s not an actual ancap position?
On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that I’m mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It’s difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.
apparently oai has lifetime NDAs, via fasterthanlime[0]:
[0] - technically via friend who sent me a screenshot, but y’know
I can’t imagine signing that - unless I was being paid a lot of money
keep in mind that the company heavily pre-filters for believers. that means that you have a whole set of other decision-influence things going on too, including not thinking much about this
(and then probably also the general SFBA vibe of getting people before they have any outside experiences, and know what is/is not sane)
oh that reminds me of Anthropic’s company values page where they call it “unusually high trust” to believe that their employees work there in “good faith”
…that’s going to be some ratsphere fucking bullshit, isn’t it
(the tweet is here, can’t find a working nitter ritenao)
For those wondering about the LessOnline event, here’s the actual plan
“Whiteboards, whiteboards everywhere, yet not a thought to think!”
My man spent 10 paragraphs failing to describe the intended vibe of the event he’s organizing. This is what happens when you only read tweets and substacks, you completely lose the ability to describe the immaterial.
a dance concert led by the Fooming Shoggoths, with many songs that didn’t make it onto their April 1st album
dunno about you, but that absolutely informs me about the event in fullness
Fooming Shoggoths
On April 1st 2024, the LessWrong team released an album using the then-most-recent AI music generation
No, nope, nononono, nope right off, no, nope.
If the moon gets mad at us that’s why
They are a satire of themselves. You really can read only that and perfectly imagine how insufferable the event is.
There is also the ‘Creating the Fooming shoggoths after action report’ talk where they talk about how hard it was to get the AI to make the songs, and to get all the raunchy popculture references just right without it making references to Ernest Clines poetry.
I’d rather see that than the concert, but that’s a pretty low bar to meet. They are spending more time tricking the autocomplete into working than it would take to write goofy songs directly.
Clearly you are not familiar with Clines raunchy poetry.
“cozy/spaciousness”
The Danes do not have a term for this, but if they did, it might be* hyggelig dimensioner*. A good name for an oversized couch at Ikea. Also, the Danes would not include “whiteboards everywhere” as part of cozy, warm, intellectual conversation, but hey.
You need the whiteboards to schedule the orgies.
From a comment thread:
Other ideas we chatted about having at LessOnline include maybe having some discussions about doing research inside and outside of academia, and also about learning from GlowFic writers how to write well collaboratively.
snerk
Also:
Also (if you haven’t seen) lots of new great writers confirmed attending including Scott Sumner, Agnes Callard, and Patrick McKenzie.
Is it worth getting Agnes Callard if she’s not a double act with her second husband/former grad student?
deleted by creator
just want to share my article from this week. It’s about products that account for their lack of usefulness with ease of use. Using the gpt-4oh as an example. https://fasterandworse.com/known-purpose-and-trusted-potential/
If the house doesn’t have a roof, don’t paint the walls.
i adore this line. because yeah, what i see the rest of the tech industry doing is either:
- scrambling to erect their own, faster, better, cheaper roofless house
- scrambling to sell furniture and utilities for the people who are definitely, inevitably going to move in
- or making a ton of bank by selling resources to the first two groups
without even stopping to ask: why would anyone want to live here?
thanks! I think I began saying that when I moved from digital marketing agencies to startups around 2011
When randoms from /all wander into the vale of sneers:
https://x.com/soniajoseph_/status/1791604177581310234?s=46&t=nT1XIOTx9ax3_3I0GXvgVQ
David, something is cooking behind the scenes here.
Hmm, a xitter link, I guess I’ll take a moment to open that in a private tab in case it’s passingly amusing…
To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties—
OK, you have my attention now.
To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties—
During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI employees, their friends, and adjacent entrepreneurs, which I have not previously spoken about publicly.
It is not my place to speak as to why Jan Leike and the superalignment team resigned. I have no idea why and cannot make any claims. However, I do believe my cultural observations of the SF AI scene are more broadly relevant to the AI industry.
I don’t think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women. They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers, with broader implications relevant to X-risk and AGI safety. I believe they are somewhat emblematic of broader problems: a coercive climate that normalizes recklessness and crossing boundaries, which we are seeing playing out more broadly in the industry today. Move fast and break things, applied to people.
There is nothing wrong imo with sex parties and heavy LSD use in theory, but combined with the shadow of 100B+ interest groups, leads to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen. The climate was like a fratty LSD version of 2008 Wall Street bankers, which bodes ill for AI safety.
Women are like canaries in the coal mine. They are often the first to realize that something has gone horribly wrong, and to smell the cultural carbon monoxide in the air. For many women, Silicon Valley can be like Westworld, where violence is pay-to-pay.
I have seen people repeatedly get shut down for pointing out these problems. Once, when trying to point out these problems, I had three OpenAI and Anthropic researchers debate whether I was mentally ill on a Google document. I have no history of mental illness; and this incident stuck with me as an example of blindspots/groupthink.
I am not writing this on the behalf of any interest group. Historically, much of OpenAI-adjacent shenanigans has been blamed on groups with weaker PR teams, like Effective Altruism and rationalists. I actually feel bad for the latter two groups for taking so many undeserved hits. There are good and bad apples in every faction. There are so many brilliant, kind, amazing people at OpenAI, and there are so many brilliant, kind, and amazing people in Anthropic/EA/Google/[insert whatever group]. I’m agnostic. My one loyalty is to the respect and dignity of human life.
I’m not under an NDA. I never worked for OpenAI. I just observed the surrounding AI culture through the community house scene in SF, as a fly-on-the-wall, hearing insider information and backroom deals, befriending dozens of women and allies and well-meaning parties, and watching many them get burned. It’s likely these problems are not really on OpenAI but symptomatic of a much deeper rot in the Valley. I wish I could say more, but probably shouldn’t.
I will not pretend that my time among these circles didn’t do damage. I wish that 55% of my brain was not devoted to strategizing about the survival of me and of my friends. I would like to devote my brain completely and totally to AI research— finding the first principles of visual circuits, and collecting maximally activating images of CLIP SAEs to send to my collaborators for publication.
Useful context: this is a followup to this post:
The thing about being active in the hacker house scene is you are accidentally signing up for a career as a shadow politician in the Silicon Valley startup scene. This process is insidious because you’re initially just signing up for a place to live and a nice community. But given the financial and social entanglement of startup networks, you are effectively signing yourself up for a job that is way more than meets the eye, and can be horribly distracting if you are not prepared for it. If you play your cards well, you can have an absurd amount of influence in fundraising and being privy to insider industry information. If you play your cards poorly, you will be blacklisted from the Valley. There is no safety net here. If I had known what I was getting myself into in my early twenties, I wouldn’t have signed up for it. But at the time, I had no idea. I just wanted to meet other AI researchers.
I’ve mind-merged with many of the top and rising players in the Valley. I’ve met some of the most interesting and brilliant people in the world who were playing at levels leagues beyond me. I leveled up my conception of what is possible.
But the dark side is dark. The hacker house scene disproportionately benefits men compared to women. Think of frat houses without Title IX or HR departments. Your peer group is your HR department. I cannot say that everyone I have met has been good or kind.
Socially, you are in the wild west. When I joined a more structured accelerator later, I was shocked by the amount of order and structure there was in comparison.
it is just straight up fucked that there’s a hacker house scene where you’ll be so heavily indoctrinated (with sexual coercion and forced drug use to boot (please can the capitalists leave acid the fuck alone? also, please can the capitalists just leave?)) that a fucking Silicon Valley startup accelerator seems like a beacon of sanity
like, as someone who was indoctrinated into a bunch of this hacker culture bullshit as a kid (and a bunch of other cult shit from my upbringing before that), I get a fucking gross feeling inside imaging the type of grooming it takes to get someone to want to join up with a just hacker culture and AI research 24/7, abandon your family and come here house, and then stay in that fucking environment with all the monstrous shit going on because you’ve given up everything else. that shit brings me back in a bad way.
I want to tell myself that it’s probably a tiny scene of 10s to 100s, that it’s just vestigial cult mindset that what she went through is the real SV VC scene, and most of it is just the more pedestrian techbro buzzword pptx deck tedium …but even then, it’s still incredibly tragic for everyone who went through and is going through that manipulation and abuse.
Very grim that she feels the need to couch her damning report with “some, I assume, are good people” for a paragraph. I guess that’s one of her survival strategies.
Good thing that none of this mad-science bullshit is in danger of working, because I don’t think that the spicy autocorrect leadership cadre would hesitate to hurt people if they could build something that’s actually impressive.
Thanks! I thought the multiple journos sniffing around was very interesting.
some of these guys get in touch with me from time to time, apparently i have a rep as a sneerer (I am delighted)
(i generally don’t have a lot specific to add - I’m not that up on the rationalist gossip - except that it’s just as stupid as it looks and frequently stupider, don’t feel you have to mentally construct a more sensible version if they don’t themselves)
