Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Forwarding this discussion to here:
News from r/philosophy: OOP, Richard Y Chappell, posted an article containing image slop, landing them a 3-day ban. OOP writes a new article that DESTROYS the r/philosophy moderation policy on AI generated content with FACTS and LOGIC. For added flavour, OOP is an EA. OP is an SSCer. Both are participants in the thread.
Good news everyone! Someone with a SlackSlub has started a series countering the TESCREAL narrative.
He (c'mon, it's a guy) calls it "R9PRESENTATIONALism"
It stands for
I see no reason why this catchy summary won't take off!
they should just touch GRASS
Guided Rationalist Acceptance of Socionormality Studies
[...] it actually has surprisingly little to do with any of the intellectual lineages that its proponents claim to subscribe to (Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, conflict studies, etc.) but is a shockingly pervasive influence across modern culture to a greater degree than even most people who complain about it realize.
I mean, when describing TESCREAL Torres never had to argue that it's adherents were lying or incorrect about their own ideas. It seems like whenever someone tries this kind of backlash they always have to add in a whole mess of additional layers that are somehow tied to what their interlocutors really believe.
I'm reminded, ironically, of Scott's (imo very strong) argument against the NRx category of "demotist" states. It's fundamentally dishonest to create a category that ties together both the innocuous or positive things your opponents actually believe and some obnoxious and terrible stuff, and then claim that the same criticisms apply to all of them.
Also "orate" is a fucking verb
They probably conflated it with ornate lol
"The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends," Ser Jorah told her. "It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace." He gave a shrug. "They never are.”
- George R. R. Martin
In other news, Politico's management has gone on record stating their AI tools aren't being held to newsroom editorial standards, in an arbitration hearing trying to resolve a major union dispute.
This is some primo Pivot to AI material, if I do say so myself.
Not a sneer but a question: Do we have any good idea on what the actual cost of running AI video generators are? They're among the worst internet polluters out there, in my opinion, and I'd love it if they're too expensive to use post-bubble but I'm worried they're cheaper than you'd think.
continuing from the last weeks thread https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
The beautiful process of dialectics has taken place on the butterfly site, and we have reached a breakthrough in moral philosophy. Only a few more questions remain before we can finally declare ethics a solved problem. The most important among them is, when an omnipotent and omnibenevolent basilisk simulates Roko Mijic getting kicked in a nuts eternally by a girl with blue hair and piercings, would the girl be barefoot or wearing heavy, steel-toed boots? Which kind of footwear of lack thereof would optimize the utility generated?
Iris van-Rooij found AI slop in the wild (determining it as such by how it mangled a word's definition) and went on find multiple other cases. She's written a blog post about this, titled "AI slop and the destruction of knowledge".
I'm still thinking about the article about the NRx party from last week and just how classless (who pours champagne wrong?) and sad it showed them to be, while still being obsessed with their image. Such a sad bunch, their ideas have reached the higher ups of American power and still they obsess about how a journalist (who is dating one of them (he is into the 'we live in a simulation', break up with him, you are in danger)) might write something bad about them. (See also how many of these sad sacks got fired/blackballed for just having no internal filter (dressing up gay people as the KKK really?)). The creme de la creme of intellectual thought and they talk and act like a bunch of 4channers. (Yarvin must know this, his shit about how billionaires act must be a bit of projection). I'm talking about this piece: https://archive.ph/gm3Za Sorry to repost it, I just had a 'layer 2 well done' reminder and cringed again, fucking larpers (No shade to people who actually larp, seems fun, just cringe to do it irl).
names for genai people I know of so far: promptfans, promptfondlers, sloppers, autoplagues, and botlickers
any others out there?
cogsuckers
UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought
The part of data centers using to much water is apparently old emails.
lol, lmao: as if any cloud service had any intention at all of actually deleting data instead of tombstoning it for arbitrary lengths of time. (And that’s the least stupid factor in this whole scheme; is this satire? Nobody seems to be able to tell me)