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
They banned the guy that wrote the theil antichrist notes.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/23/spilled-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-secrets-now-s-banned-lectures/
Stephens and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment. Kulkarni declined to answer questions about the lectures, citing the off-the-record policy.
legal threats?
personal vent: at my job yesterday i had to come up with a few fake book titles/author combinations for a project. a fun little task and opportunity to hide some cheeky easter eggs. so, i came up with a few and then asked my coworkers to share in the fun. one of them though just couldn't come up with anything at all, and eventually just resorted to "asking chat gpt".
mind you, i work a creative job, and so do my coworkers. this is a minor thing i guess, but it just made me very sad. how could you just outsource your creative joy to some mindless word salad machine?
Man, knowing nothing else about your coworker, they sound like a completely joyless person. Coming up with fake titles for things is like, such a high fun-to-effort ratio. “Creativity and the essence of Human Experience” by Chat GPT. Boom, there’s one. “Cooking With Olive Oil” by Sam Altman. “IQ184” by Harukiezer Murakowsky. This is so fun and easy that it’s basically hack outside of situations where it is solicited.
Is NP P or is NP not P, thats the question, by Scott Scottersons-Scottsson
Quantum Computing Since Diogenes by Karl Snarx
God, we had so much fun doing this at my uni when creating an example DB table for an exam (only it was fake song/band combinations). Are you sure your coworker isn't a robot themselves?
This story gives "Bezos buying random cassettes at the gas station" doesn't it?
I eagerly await the day when we hear about these people from 1-900-HOTDOG instead of Behind the Bastards
Just got back from the Ted Chiang talk at the law school, talk was good but all the Q&A was lawyers ask-telling about LLMs. Not a single question for him about his fiction. :(
Ted Chiang rules.
Not sure if a LessWronger extensively quoting Accelerando as a blueprint for a singularity takeoff is complimentary to Charles Stross:
Worht noting is that the novel is 20 years old...
Do like somebody left a nice trap there:
You write "you can buy it here" but there is no link.
However, you can do better: the whole thing is available for free online. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html on the author's website is a good place to start; it has links to various versions of the book and also a little bit of explanatory material.
(Unrelated, hope Stross's recovery is going well, sorry for being a bit parasocial relationshippy here).
I like singularity sky more as a sort of critical book about how a post scarcity singularity would be easy to mess up. Very funny that it inspired the US to give free phones to Afghans to try and combat the Taliban.
Disappointed that no one has tried to sell the US government an "Agent Smith" smh
A full timeline on the RubyGems takeover has been put together - looks like the entire situation's been caused by pressure from Shopify.
I have no idea about Ruby or the politics behind the scenes, but I do know who DHH is and so it seems like literally none of this would've happened if not for point 2. on the list?? Just like, don't platform the rancid toxic cesspit of a man and you're fine??
Who's left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?
Also:
When the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was stolen by WordPress, DHH said “This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight."
lol
Does ruby just die now?
Part of the background to this issue is the development of rv which apparently offers a future where rubygems is much less important, and some folk seem to be taking that as a threat.
Whether or not the new tooling delivers, the rubygems debacle has probably helped the new project considerably.
It'd be lovely to see the correct folks build a better one with blackjack and webhooks.
I'm curious whether you or @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems are familiar with the concept of MINASWAN. The only time it's appeared in the discussion is in one of the apologies posted by one of the Ruby Central board members, as their signoff line. Quoting a 2016 analysis of MINASWAN in which it is argued that Ruby's central tenet is not MINASWAN, but wa (和):
Just for the record, MINASWAN is at least half true. Matz is nice. … I would not call DHH nice. … So if MINASWAN is really a basic truth about the Ruby culture, then how does DHH fit in at all? … MINASWAN is garbage. It'd be more accurate to say, "Ruby showcases the Japanese value of 和, but we are arrogant Americans, so we reduce this to a really basic American idea, harshly compressing it in the process to a state where it cannot possibly mean anything any more, instead of bothering to learn something about the outside world for once." But MINASWAN was already a long acronym, so I guess they had to draw the line at RSTJVO和BWAAASWRTTARBAIHCIITPTASWICPMAAMIOBTLSATOWFO.
Also, I really think it's worth understanding that Ruby is not at risk here. Ever since the release of RPG Maker XP in 2005, Ruby has been a staple of embedded scripting for game engines. Really, what we're seeing here is the demise of Rails.
it would be very funny if Rocco Basilico’s legacy was that his name bore resemblance to Roko Basilisk and nothing else
image desc
Quote tweet: “my name is rokos basilisk and i’m making artificial intelligence that you put on your body”
Quoted tweet: an embedded article platforming Meta’s Chief Wearables Officer named “Rocco Basilico”
They put 'environmental impact of AI' on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this
kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus
Found a well-done essay by Jared White recently: AI Apologists and the Humanist Legacy of Steve Jobs, which does a good job sneering the ideology of AI and arguing for a more pro-human approach to tech.
This article also reminded me of how when they are trying to promote AI agents they dont get further than shopping, a secretary, or help you cook with random ingredients. No real human connections
Satire warning!!! 🚨🚨🚨 You have been warned!!!
Some great tips for using ChatGPT to stop being a “Brain only” person to a fully optimised person!
They say "Luddites" as if it's a bad thing...
The Ai bubble has taught me that the luddites are really misunderstood.
The Luddites were a 19th century guerrilla movement that smashed textile machines, burned factories and threatened their owners. But they were not motivated by a fear of technology [...] the luddites [...] were engaged in the most science-fictional exercise imaginable – asking not what a technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for. The Luddites, you see, were skilled weavers whose intense physical labor produced the textiles that clothed the nation. The difficulty of their trade – both in terms of esoteric knowledge and physical prowess – allowed them to command high wages and good working conditions.
All that was threatened by the advent of textile machines, which produced more fabric in less time, and required less skill. The owners of textile factories bought these machines with profits derived from the weavers' labor, and then used those machines to grind down the weavers. Their hours got longer, their pay got shorter, and many of them were maimed or killed by the new machines.
Weaving engines are ingenious and delightful machines. The Luddites had no beef with the machines – their cause was the social relations that governed those machines. By painting Luddites as mere technophobes, we strip ourselves of the ability to learn from history. The lesson of the Industrial Revolution is that merely asking what a machine does and not who it does it for and to can lead to literal genocide.
“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life”
This quote is just... something.
Is the plan to literally create 8 billion podcasts in the near future? This company doesn't think that might be a tad excessive?
Tech take from the near future: Podcast life begins at conception i.e. the instant one thinks the inside thoughts should be outside
new extreme strain of catholicism: life begins at conceptualization
Uh I think we are very quickly and dangerously approaching Dawkinsian Meme Theory
RAIDEN!
Ed: I'm sure there's an MGS2 quote I can't think of that would make this actually funny, but here we are.
Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
[...] Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
Cloudflare sponsors Ladybird and Omarchy, techfash workfare
TIL about Omarchy.
Of course it uses Hyprland. Of course the demo video on the website shows using Grok in it.
Still can't believe that choosing a Linux distribution now involves decision-making factors like "what's their take on fascism". But I guess the real problem is that such questions weren't asked for way too long before.
why the hell are they sponsoring omarchy
how is a customized hyprland config "helping the open web"
Damn, I was kinda hoping the Ladybird guy wouldn't turn out awful but nah, can't have shit in IT.
This scream into the void has been on my mind for a while: Apparently I work for an AI company now.
Kinda.
When I had the interviews with my now-employer at the beginning of the year, they were an open-source cybersecurity startup. Everything sounded great, we got along, signed the contract. I took a long vacation before starting the position, and when I got back, I was... amused? bewildered? to find that a), we are no longer open source; and b), we have pivoted, hard, towards AI.
Luckily, I still get to work 100% of the time on the core (cybersecurity) product (which is actually a really good and useful thing, sorry, not going to be more specific), it's just that part of the dev team, as well as all of marketing and sales, now work on building and selling an AI product built on top of that.
At least it's not a wrapper around ChatGPT, and does offer something kinda new and actually beneficial, but still, it's an LLM product.
Now, for the actual scream-into-the-void: Once a month, in a company-wide meeting, I have to observe how people praise LLMs to the the moon, attribute nonsense or downright bugs to something akin to proto-sentience, and give absurd estimates of profitability based on the idea that AI will totally be used everywhere and by everyone, very soon now, you'll see. What finally prompted (pun intended) me to post this is the CEO yesterday unironically referencing AI 2027's "predictions".
Can't wait for the bubble to burst. I'm really curious to see if I'll keep my job through that. At the end of the day, the stuff I work on luckily has nothing to do with AI, and basically every other application of the product makes more sense; but now the entire company has shifted gears towards AI...
take care and step carefully. there's a moment where the stress from working for a company with goals that counter your personal ethics is going to be hard to bear, and the worst thing you can do then is to change your value system to reduce the cognitive dissonance.