A bit of a superpower, just a bit. A tiny little morsel, a sample of superpower, if you will.

If you gotta qualify it like that…

the axe is bundled inside of cut-down pool noodles!

Both based on desperately trying to find an application for linear algebra accelerators that can generate VC-scale inflated financial valuations, so, yeah

Customer acquisition cost for a future service, which is ~fixed after training costs, assuming we can consider distribution costs as marginal. Reasonably impressive accomplishment, if one is taking the perspective of SV SaaS-financing brain.*

*I don’t recommend you do this for too long, that’s how some of the people currently prominent in the news got to be the way that they are

year of Nakamoto 17

so what you’re saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest

Headline photo is actually a jump-scare

I dunno, still not as bad as the last Win10 update I was presented with that wanted to resize the recovery partition and shrink my C drive at the same time. That was the push I needed to switch to my Gentoo install and never look back. I presume that Windows is probably pretty decent about live partition resizing these days, but I don’t know that for sure, and I don’t want to waste time being concerned about it on a system that’s mainly for gaming anyway.

do these kooks follow single inheritance or multiple inheritance rules? I’m a bit more worried about the latter

This reinforces my judgment that the ultimate customers for code-completion models are people who don’t actually want to be writing code in the first place.

see why i never hang out in berkeley these days

L. Ron Hubbard says new “high-voltage” e-meters set to enter testing with Sea Org volunteers, possibly capable of purging body thetans at an unlimited rate

If you’re a journalist and want to get in contact with people around the community/rationalist scene who knows the people involved, you can fill out this form and your contact info will be shared around our networks

why does this seem vaguely like a threat

Clicked on Aella content, sho’ nuff, exposed to strange new forms of brainworms. What’s the deal with the “ultra-wokeness” guy picking on “taurine deficiency?”

I kicked them a donation just for that

We regret to inform you that Stonks have been replaced by Storks*. Go long long legs, big beaks, and affinity for coastal shorelines and wetlands

*this offer may not be immediately available in all markets due to presence of H5N1 bird flu

A) Putting on my conspiracy theory hat… OpenAI has been bleeding for most of a year now, with execs hitting the door running and taking staff with them. It’s not at all implausible that somebody lower on the totem pole could have been convinced to leak some reinforcement training weights to help Deepseek along.

B) Putting on my best LessWronger hat (random brown stains, full of holes)… I estimate no less than a 25% chance that by the end of this week, Sammy-boy will be demanding an Oval Office meeting, banging the table and screaming about “theft!” and “hacking!!”

Oof yeah, that’s rough. The AI generated header image isn’t helping his credibility, either. Didn’t he happily trot along to one of the rat conventions in Berkeley, and everyone was wondering why?

The Bally’s story is its own source of hilarity - not only are they scrambling to fund this Chicago thing, they’re also making promises about a Las Vegas resort that will host the ex-Oakland A’s in what would be the smallest major league baseball stadium; with equally ??? funding gaps that their client press is all too happy to ignore.

A well-brewed fart will propel me straight to the moon

Still working on fermenting it

No actually, I think what you have to say is in line with my broader point. As the top source of global consumer demand, America is primarily held together by its supply chains at this point. To be crude about it, the best reasons to be an American in the 21st century are the swag and the cheap gas. When the MAGA and Fox News crowd are pointing fingers and ranting about Marxism, they’re actively trying to obscure materialism and keep people from thinking about material conditions. Having a material program, that at least has elements that can be built from the bottom up, is at least as crucial as having an electoral program. I know the Four Thieves people got rightfully shredded here a few weeks back, and that kind of technical pushback on amateur dreams is necessary, so it’s a tough needle to thread. But for instance, consider Gavin Newsom’s plan to have California operate its own insulin production, within existing systems and regulations: https://calmatters.org/health/2025/01/insulin-production-gavin-newsom/ This is a Newsom policy I actually think is a fantastic idea, and a big credit to him if it happens! But it’s bogged down in the production-line validation stage, because we already know how to synthesize insulin and that it’s effective. And the production may not even be in California when it happens! There’s plenty of room for improvement here.

Space and centralized, rent-seeking “AI” are not material programs that improve conditions for the broader population. The original space program was successful because a more tightly controlled media environment gave the opportunity to use it to cover for the missile development that was the enduring practical outcome. Positive consumer outcomes from all that have always felt, to me, like something that was bolted onto the history later. We wouldn’t have Tang and transistors if not for Apollo! Well, one is kind of shitty and useless, the other is so overwhelmingly advantageous that it surely would have happened anyway.

And to your last point, I somewhat sadly feel like a lot of doomer shit I was reading ~15 years ago actually prepared me to at least be unsurprised about the situation we’re in. A lot of those writers (James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer for instance) have either softly capitulated, or else happily slotted themselves into the middle of the red-brown alliance. I think that’s a big part of why we’re at where we’re at: a lot of people who were actually willing to consider the idea of American collapse were perfectly fine with letting it happen.

Refusal of statins was one of the most prominent anti-medical trends I remember observing among right-wing acquaintences, even well before such people got on the anti-vax bandwagon. To be sure, some people experience bad side-effects (including my mom, at least for a while), but it definitely seemed like a few bits of anecdata in the early 2010s built into a broad narrative of “doctor’s tryin’ ta kill ya”