believe me, I hear ya on that

also why I was reserved in my wording (I am, at best, “armchair enthusiast” level of clued on detailed neuroscience)

it’s so damn messy though. here’s some concurrent (and/or semi-sequenced branching) thoughts/opinions:

• there’s enough people getting high on LLMs (et al) that it is morally and ethically worthwhile to investigate the implications thereof
• it’s extremely fucking hard to objectively quantify this
• we should still try
• it seems like there’s a hell of a need for funding for the applicable research fields of human study ito figuring out the dynamics of this shit
• …wow wouldn’t it be nice if they got even 3% of the openai grift budget

I was trying so, so, so hard not to make a “Huuj Ayns” (or similar) joke

reasoning models

that’s a shot, everyone drink up

Visions of the promptfan walking into those kind of premium mediocre restaurants came to mind here

“Pretentious” is a trait expressed by something that’s thinking

this you?

preprint, but this looks like it’ll be making a splash soon

I don’t have the headspace to sneer it properly at this moment, but this article fucking goes places might even be worthy of its own techtakes post

Shawn Schneider — a 22-year-old who dropped out of his Christian high school, briefly attended community college, dropped out again, and earlier this year founded a marketing platform for generative AI — tells me college is outdated. Skipping it, for him, is as efficient as it is ideological. “It signals DEI,” he says. “It signals, basically, woke and compromised institutions. At least in the circles I run in, the sentiment is like they should die.”

Schneider says the women from his high school in Idaho were “so much better at doing what the teacher asks, and that was just not what I was good at or what the other masculine guys I knew were good at.” He’s married with two children, a girl and a boy, which has made him realize that schools should be separated by gender to “make men more manly, and women more feminine.”

Meta has reportedly offered compensation packages worth seven to nine figures to dozens of researchers from companies like OpenAI and Google, according to The New York Times, with some already agreeing to join the company.

devil’s in the detials/comp structure/yadayada, but fuck damn is it frustrating how this still means that after even a year or two a fair number of the worst people you could ever meet would be set for life

one of the best accessibility-related takes I’ve seen about it so far was this (via @fasterandworse

definitely not you

ran across this, just quickly wanted to scream infinitely

(as an aside, I’ve also recently (finally) joined the ACM, and clicking around in that has so far been … quite the experience. I actually want to make a bigger post about it later on, because it is worth more than a single-comment sneer)

I’ve been waiting for this. I wish it had happened sooner, before DOGE could do as much damage it did, but better late than never

as I said elsewhere (and have from early around the doge announcement): he was never going to last because orange was never going to felon lead, and felon was never going to settle. and everyone who brought him in did so knowing that, but that was fine for them because they were using him as a useful idiot, as a politically useful wrecking ball who they could dump all blame on later and wash their hands of

DOGE has shown you don’t need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government

this tracks with historical fascist power seizures, although ofc updated in the detail of “let felon run wild, then just accept the outcome and use it as a new precedent”. he provided them with a test run of finding just how egregious they could go without pushback (and thus where they need to machinate more)

I am looking forward to Donald screwing over SpaceX or Starlink’s government contracts. On the returning end… Elon doesn’t have that many ways of properly screwing with Trump, even if he has stockpiled blackmail material I don’t think it will be enough to turn MAGA against Trump. Still, I’m somewhat hopeful this will lead to larger infighting between the techbro alt-righters and the Christofascist alt-righters.

overall, same yeah. felon’s long appeared to be comfortable socking for outside influences, so maybe he might go knocking for some more russian/chinese/indian/emirati/whatever war funding, but maaaybe not find some soon enough to prop up his whole house of cards?

(besides, the entire ai craze is begging in the same corners, which maybe is a good thing in this light)

eugenics, saas edition

sigh

another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with

new yorker profile on moldbug (archive)

(still reading)

(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)

“Pray tell mr Babbage…”

time amplifying the nonsense around saltman’s orb grift

features a helluva lot of words while at multiple points remaining entirely incurious about the claims it amplifies

oh, no, to be clear: this isn’t about the sex/sluttiness - I have no issue with that at all. in a more general sense (over the wider set of things aella), her positioning herself as a “sex researcher” but often using that to bash specific groups or put out a specific narrative, that is far more problematic

but regarding this specific thing, tho: the “forced a tattoo on me” bit specifically, and all the rationalists doing their weird quasi-intellectual arguing with everyone who asks questions. the “forced” wording feels … intentionally bait&switch? presumably (…hopefully?) there’s mutual consent here, so it’s a fucking choice to go frame the event that way