sc_griffith
don't want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
it's a fucking harry potter reference
education secretary linda mcmahon speaking about AI in schools. please enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/live/lxrg28zBv94?t=7567s
saw this at https://bsky.app/profile/joshkovensky.bsky.social/post/3lmfr3ssn5s2j, but I recommend watching first so you don't spoil what you're about to hear
I love to get my tattoos on clearance
this is credulous bro did you even look at the papers
it's a very human and annoying way of bullshitting. I took every opportunity to crush this habit out of undergrads. "If you say trivial, obvious, or clearly, that usually means you're making a mistake and you're avoiding thinking about it"
I usually say the following. I'm paraphrasing a spiel I have delivered in person several times and which seems to get things across.
'there's a kind of decentralized cult called rationalism. they worship rational thinking, have lots of little rituals that are supposed to invoke more rational thinking, and spend a lot of time discussing their versions of angels and demons, which they conceive of as all powerful ai beings.
rationalists aren't really interested in experiments or evidence, because they want to figure everything out with pure reasoning. they consider themselves experts on anything they've thought really hard about. they come up with a lot of apocalypse predictions and theories about race mingling.
silicon valley is saturated with rationalists. most of the people with a lot of money are not rationalists. but VCs and such find rationalists very useful, because they're malleable and will claim with sincerity to be experts on any topic. for example, when AI companies claim to be inventing really intelligent beings, the people they put forward as supporting these claims are rationalists.'
considering their endless history of scandal, good riddance
We all know Elon Musk as the funniest man alive.
but did you know that Musk is also a lifelong gamer? for example, here he is in the chess club of his whites only apartheid prep school.
grew out of that though.
really want to highlight the phrase "understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks." what the fuck is he talking about?
in any case, he clearly has some issues around the game and I suspect his performance in the chess club. the dude loves to downplay the complexity of the game.
he knows how to tune it up, though.
hmm. fog of war, tech trees, randomized starting positions. that actually sounds a little familiar. could it be...?
OH YEAH BABY! you knew it had to be polytopia!
what the fuck is polytopia?
this is polytopia:
sophisticated Gamers will notice three things here:
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this is clearly a mobile game first, meaning it was developed to fit into the industry's nastiest shithole: the ios and android app markets. i'll tell you right now that polytopia doesn't have gambling in its microtransactions (which instantly makes it cream of the crop), but you can expect it to be braindead and shallow.
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this game is for children. look the bright primary colors, the character's huge eyes, and the low poly style, which evokes minecraft.
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this game looks a LOT like civilization. specifically, it looks like civilization 3:
For those not familiar, the civilization series is the standard bearer for the 4X genre. it's a style of slow, macromanagement focused turn based strategy focused on the "four Xes" of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. thematically, they present societies as machines for producing imperialism. the civilization games are also fearsomely complex and famously deep.
not so with polytopia:
so yeah, it's baby civilization. but the thing that really kills me is that musk is obsessed with this game. like... really obsessed, according to a story published on yahoo finance.
This puff piece is sourced from "Benzinga," a tech finance news site that seems to mostly post about crypto, ai and tesla. context clues suggest the content is entirely ripped from walter isaacson's biography of musk. I have to emphasize that all of this is intended to be flattering - right in the middle, they take a break from the content to shill some affiliate link I won't click on:
that's the image of musk they want to convey. anything they include is in support of that.
saying "I am just wired for war" because you play a lot of polytopia is classic elon cringe. beating a game's developer is nothing to brag about, by the way. most game developers are terrible at their own games.
i would argue that ragequitting to the parking lot to smack down your employee/mother of your children in a baby game is also not something to brag about:
flexing on mom almost shows up more than once in the article...
... except, twist, for some reason he beat his employee but not his partner???
and yes, he sulked like a little shitbag he when he lost. one has to suspect that if his sycophants weren't constantly throwing polytopia matches against him he'd have turned on it just like he did chess.
before you read this next bit I want to emphasize again that EVERYTHING IN THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO BE FLATTERING.
his brother seems to feel the same way
(and from another benzinga sourced yahoo finance story):
here's what i think: elon musk isn't learning shit from polytopia. he's a profoundly stupid and childish man who likes moving brightly colored blocks around and being told he won. he's projecting the disgusting and wretched pile of deficiencies which is his personality onto a game for babies. as someone who only fails upward and cannot stand to fail, it is impossible for him to learn from reality; doing so would require facing what is too painful to face.
why the fuck would anyone want a raisin catalog
- curtis yarvin
you will never guess which company hired oswald mosely's grandson
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/palantir-boss-interview-keir-starmer-gets-ai