scruiser

joined 2 years ago
[–] scruiser@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

Remember when a bunch of people poured their life savings into GameStop and started a financial doomsday cult once they lost everything? That will happen again if OpenAI goes public.

I've seen redditors on /r/singularity planning on buying OpenAI stock if it goes public. And judging by Tesla, cultists buying meme stock can keep up their fanaticism through quite a lot.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It seems like a complicated but repeatable formula: Start a non-profit dedicated to some technology, leverage the charity status for influence and tax avoidance and PR and recruiting true believers in the initial stages, and then make a bunch of financial deals conditional on your non-profit changing to for profit, then claim you need to change to for-profit or your organization will collapse!

Although I'm not sure how repeatable it is without the "too big to fail" threat of loss of business to state AGs. OTOH, states often bend the rules to gain (or even just avoid losing) embarrassingly few jobs, so IDK.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago

i’ve listened to his podcast, i’ve read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart.

For comparison I've only read Ed's articles, not listened to his podcasts, and I was unaware of his PR business. This doesn't make me think his criticisms are wrong, but it does make me concerned he's overlooked critiquing and analyzing some aspects of the GenAI industry because of these connections to those aspects.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago

This week's southpark makes fun of prediction markets! Hanson and the rationalists can be proud their idea has gone mainstream enough to be made fun of. The episode actually does a good job highlighting some of the issues with the whole concept: the twisted incentives and insider trading and the way it fails to actually create good predictions (as opposed to just getting vibes and degenerate gambling).

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

and the person who made up the "math pets" allegation claimed no such source

I was about to point out that I think this is the second time he claimed math pets had absolutely no basis in reality (and someone countered with a source that forced him to) but I double checked the posting date and this is the example I was already thinking of. Also, we have supporting sources that didn't say as much directly but implied it heavily: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/42iv09/a_yudkowsky_blast_from_the_past_his_okcupid/ or like, the entire first two thirds of the plot of Planecrash!

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Here: https://glowfic.com/posts/4508

Be warned, the three quarters of the thread don't have much of a plot and are basically two to three characters talking, then the last quarter time skips ahead and gives massive clunky worldbuilding dumps. (This is basically par for the course with glowfic, the format supports dialogue interaction heavy stories and it's really easy to just kind of let the plot meander. Planecrash, for all of its bloat and diversions into eugenics lectures, is actually relatively plot heavy for glowfic.)

On the upside, the first three quarters almost read like a sneer on rationalists.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 2 months ago (6 children)

We've sneered about dath ilan before on the reddit sneerclub, and occasionally I work references to dath ilan's lore into sneers, but other than that no.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 2 months ago

Where else am I supposed to fine deep analyses of the economic implications of 1st level wizards and clerics on an early modern setting? ~~and analyses of Intelligence score distributions across the nations of Golarion?~~

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago

You are close! It is a bdsm AU (inspired by an Archive of Our Own Trend of writing alternate universe settings of a particular flavor), i.e. everyone identifies as "Dominant" or "Submissive", and that identification is more important than gender in most ways. Ironically the dath ilan character is the one freaked out by this.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean the aftermath of Buterlian Jihad eventually lead to brutal feudalism that lasted a really long time and halted multiple lines of technological and social development, so I wouldn't exactly call it a success for the common person.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago (9 children)

It would be only light cringey if he kept it as a fiction writing project not strongly linked to his other writings. But as Architeuthis says, he not only links to it frequently, he cites it like it was a philosophy paper or something that obviously everyone should have read. Example from our old reddit discussions: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/x3pihv/to_be_fair_you_have_to_have_a_very_high_iq_to/

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago

So us Americans do get some of "grabbed guns and openly fought" in the history of our revolutionary war, but its taught in a way that doesn't link it to any modern movements that armed themselves. And the people most willing to lean into guns and revolutionary war imagery/iconography tend to be far right wing (and against movement for worker's rights or minorities' rights or such).

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