God save me from arguing with HPMoR readers.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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TechTakes
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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.
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i assume this is in relation to this cognitohazard
Sadly no. Though thank you for making my life immeasurably worse by sharing that.
nice to see the blinders coming off more widely:
For instance, as Electrek reminds us, in 2016, Elon Musk made a promise. He promised that, by the end of 2017, a Tesla would be able to drive itself from coast to coast. We’re talking Los Angeles to New York, with no human intervention.
That was bulls**t. Listen to any tech CEO nowadays and you will hear nothing but an endless stream of wild proclamations about how so-and-so massive shift will occur within the next 10 years! Five years! One year! Next week!
Quick PSA: There's an open letter calling for a fork of Rails, specifically to purge it of David Heil Hitler's influence.
again, I ask you: please make better posts. you could start by not shooting from the hip about things you know little to nothing about. even better would be asking questions to learn.
CHOTINER: Mr Yudkowsky, it says here 20% of your research budget went to “harry potter”. Care to explain?
https://bsky.app/profile/jpeg40k.bsky.social/post/3lzrvedbfe22o
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).
The Nerd Reich has a post with criticisms of Thiel's Antichrist lectures, including some from European Catholic theologians.
House Democrats have dripped more details from Epstein files and we have surprise guests! They released an un-OCR'd PDF; I'll transcribe the mentions of our favorite people:
Sat[urday] Dec[ember] 6, 2014 ZORRO … Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec[ember] 6 (is this still happening?)
Zorro is a ranch in New Mexico that Epstein owned; Epstein was scheduled to be there from December 5-8, so that Musk and Epstein would not be at the island together. Combined with the parenthetical uncertainty about happenstance, did Epstein want to perhaps grant Musk some plausible deniability by not being present?
Mon[day] Nov[ember] 27, 2017 NY … 12:00pm LUNCH w/ Peter Thiel [REDACTED]
From the rest of the schedule formatting, the redacted block following Thiel's name is probably not a topic; it might be a name. Lunch between two rich financiers is not especially interesting but lunch between a blackmail-gathering Mossad asset and an influencer-funding accelerationist could be.
Sat[urday] Feb[ruary] 16, 2019 NY-LSJ 7:00am BREAKFAST w/ Steve Bannon
Well now, this is the most interesting one to me. This isn't Epstein's only breakfast of the day; at 9 AM he meets with Reid Weingarten, one of his attorneys, about some redacted topic. Bannon's not exactly what I think of as a morning person or somebody who is ready to go at a moment's notice, so what could drag him out of bed so early? (Edit: This vexed me so I looked it up and sunrise was 6:48 AM that morning at sea level. It would have been the crack of dawn!) Epstein's Friday evening had had two haircuts, too, with plenty of redacted info; was he worried about appearing nice for Bannon? (The haircuts might not have been for Epstein, given context.) This was a busy day for Epstein; he had a redacted lunch date, and he also had somebody flying in/out that morning via JFK connecting to Saint Thomas and staying in a hotel room there. He then flew out of Newark in the evening to visit the infamous island itself, Little Saint James. The redaction doesn't quite tell us who this guest is, but it can't be Bannon because the Dems fucked up the redaction! I can see the edges of the descenders on the name, including a 'g' and 'j'/'q', but Bannon's name doesn't have any descenders.
Also Prince Andrew's in there, I guess?
Any of the big Rationalists get mentioned yet?
New premium column from Ed Zitron: OpenAI Needs A Trillion Dollars In The Next Four Years. Features Ed calling Google and Oracle out for failing to protect their investors from Saltman before the cutoff.
From RationalWiki: Yud claims that the only women he gave orgasms for completing math homework was his future wife. If he ever denied dating / playing with people from his foundation or making people who wanted to play with him fill out an IQ test I can't find it.
Any mention of my name is now often met by a claim that I keep a harem of young submissive female mathematicians who submit to me and solve math problems for me, and that I call them my "math pets".
I see he did the whole 'making an accusation sound more silly to undermine it' thing here, nobody said things about a whole harem of mathematicians, who just solve math problems. Nice steelman. I expect nothing less of somebody who was the subject of seven broadway plays.
(Amazing he basically admits the story is true after that, but continues to debunk the strawman).
I also don't understand why he objects to that story given that it gets people talking about him as weird but able to get what he wants? But the claim that he dated women at MIRI and wanted them to provide free labour attacks the narrative that MIRI is nothing like Leverage Research or the Zizians.
Yeah, I thought that it read like a guy who constantly denies rumors about having an enormous wang.
Dude is a serious narcissist.
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!
TvTropes says that the Yudkowsky-insert protagonist of Project Lawful/Planecrash! is driven by desire to have 144 children (and prove his society wrong for not paying him to have 144) which sounds like Scott Aaaronson? Did they know each other in those days?
I am glad that all I knew about Yud in 2022 was "wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that I did not finish, and runs a website where people pretend to be experts."
🎶 I would sire a gross of kids / and I would sire a whole gross more / just to be the man who dropped full two gross kids in baskets at your door 🎶
This is the first time that I have viscerally rejected reading the epigrammatic quotes at the top of a TV Tropes page. Like, it's TV Tropes, and I just closed the tab. Dear sweet and crunchy lord.
He does not admit "I was wrong" very often does he? And if I were a kinky polyamorist, I would be much quicker to respond to "have you dated staff at the organization that funds your life?" than "did you play a specific scene?"
Planecrash seems to be the 1.8 million word Pathfinder fic with tumblr's UnitOfCaring
And how the eff does someone claim to love Pterry in his dating profile but see people as things? Greg Egan is basilisk-unfriendly too.
Hey fellas they're building a mako reactor in my back yard:
I need you to understand how nearly I added myself to even more watch lists because of that analogy. Avalanche!
o7
Developers of the 12-megawatt facility said it will bring jobs and investment to Nashville, but neighbors aren’t so sure.
The neighbors are right.
OT: I had a realization awhile back that I’d basically cut American scifi out of my life. The politics are just gross to me now, and the overseas stuff is just plain more fun.
What comes out of the states seems to reduce to libertarian (closeted white nationalist) wank fodder, and I guess its been this way since…Campbell? Certainly Niven-Pournelle. It just got gross.
(Partially prompted by me listening to Iron Council again).
On a semi-related note, I recently got around to reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (loved the Mars trilogy and thought I should get to his latest), and this chapter had me wanting to give up sci fi as well, so I will subject you all to it:
I am a secret so everyone can know me. First you must count every part of me, then translate those parts into signs that do not describe me. Together we are shackled, and with the sign that does not describe me you can open me up and read me as I am. People will give you their promises for me, and if wrongdoers try to take me away from you, you can find me and tell the world where I am hidden. I began as a silent speaking, a key to open every door; now that I have opened all the front doors, I am the key that locks the back doors by which wrongdoers try to escape the scene of the crime. I am the nothing that makes everything happen. You don’t know me, you don’t understand me; and yet still, if you want justice, I will help you to find it. I am blockchain. I am encryption. I am code. Now put me to use.
I am Jack's bone-weary sigh.
Well that's going immediately onto the "things that looked promising but what the fuck, so actually don't read ever" list.
It's one of the most unevenly written works I've ever read. The opening chapter is absolutely harrowing,and many of the subplots are pretty interesting. It's not like KSR is a cryptobro, he offers plenty of critique of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the novel, he just adopts "blockchain" as a handwave-y fix for financial transparency. It's also at least interesting to see attempts at optimistic climate fiction, but I think the novel could do with a couple hundred fewer pages.
His attempts at Steinbeck sprinkled throughout, of which that chapter is the worst, are universally terrible, though.
there's plenty to read; an incomplete list of authors just off the top of my head: nnedi okorafor, ann leckie, martha wells, kate elliott, annalee newitz, sarah gailey, malka older, sarah jane anders…
These are great recs. You can definitely find good sci-fi out of America as long as you pick from authors that aren’t white, straight or cis. Marginalized people have a really good sense of the world (no doubt because they need it to survive)
Man I’m getting some great recommendations out of this.
Dunno I just enjoyed the fuck out of "Landlocked in Foreign Skin", like it's been a long time since I pause my life to devour a book in one sitting like this, and given that Drew Huff writes from Seattle I'm thinking they're a USian? And I was really engrossed by Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire which resonated a lot with my experiences as a Third World immigrant, with a certain honesty in portrayal of what it feels like to admire "culture" at a distance from a colony that I seldomly see (I'm on book #2 currently). I'm more of a fantasy reader, but Octavia Butler and Le Guin's sci-fi were absolutely formative to me, and if you ask me one modern sci-fi series I liked besides those mentioned so far, I'd probably say Wayfarers or Monk & Robot. Plenty of good SF authors from the USA whose politics are more or less the opposite of what you describe.
The trick is I read books by queer folk, women and PoC almost exclusively. Absolutely don't regret it, all the fun stuff is there in the margins.
I’ll have to try some of this then!
Ngl, Iron Council made me ugly cry.
Also highly recommend Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee.
It's got romance. It's got swashbuckling. It's got vendettas. A woman smashes a genocidal empire with mathemagic. Conversely, the empire's greatest general is an effortlessly cool gay dude with dyscalculia from the Korean part of Space Texas who lives in people's shadows, and it makes sense how that happened. The genocide happens because of a lone maniac's insane tech debt. Different factions try to subvert each other via cleverly designed board games. There are soooo many unhealthy relationships.
5/5 stars
You had me at the dyscalculia part!
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