Basically Wikipedia

What?

I was dumb in many ways in my 20s.

You’re not really in your 20s if you aren’t doing a certain amount of stupid bullshit

I’ve seen this on Pornhub

You wouldn’t believe it, but some people still think the solution is to install windows

After 170 years? A story about the young working class seeking simple comforts through ruthless ecological exploitation? And for this humble crew to be swept up in a prideful crusade towards wealth and glory lead by a charismatic madman intent on killing God? And this crusade culminates in a calamity that destroys everything their exploitative labors sought to build?

I can’t think of any modern parallels. But if one were to arise, I could see a certain sympathetic appeal.

You need to get on board for what is, at its heart, a blog about being a whaler in the 19th century. The story isn’t gripping in the sense of a two minute movie trailer, but it does draw you in and lead you to care about a bunch of the crew as it drags on. It is the quintessential “slow burn” novel.

But it isn’t even the worst on that front. Any Brian Sanderson novel is going to have a similar “omg, is this going anywhere? And why won’t they just kiss already? Damn, now I know entirely too much about an obscure magic system methodology of turning whale cum into lighter fluid” element.

One book I could argue genuinely reads better on audiobook when you’re stuck in traffic for two hours a day.

Unironically a great novel. If you can understand Moby Dick, you can understand the first 200 years of American history.

He was the one pushing the conspiracy theory, and running on the promise of releasing them.

He was on the gravy train of Pizzagate from way back in 2016 and he’s been dining out on it ever since. But to say he was pushing it? No, he was just echoing all the talk radio goons who wanted to smuggle in transphobia under the banner of “Save The Children”.

Trump’s just along for the ride on so much of this shit. He’s a bagman with a serpent’s tongue, but he’s not really guiding any of these decisions except to take his own slice.

So anyone who’s name is in the files can blame Trump for them not getting away with it.

Name one person who hasn’t gotten away with it, other than Epstein himself and Maxwell if you’re being generous.

Larry Summers didn’t even quit his day job teaching at Harvard. This is a freak who has been dining out lavishly as Economics Svengali since Mark Zuckerberg was in college. He’s been nailed dead-to-rights getting PUA advice from Epstein as recently as months before Jeff unalived himself. He’s “stepping away from public life for a little while”. Dude’s set his social media to mute and hoping this will all blow over in a few months. And he’s probably right. Good chance he gets bookings on MSNBC and CNN to denounce Zohran Mamdani’s far-left socialist mayoralty right alongside Steve Bannon before the end of next year.

The joke of the “Epstein Files” is that you absolutely could put up names, addresses, and lurid details about each and every one of his friends and nothing would happen to any of them. Maybe another Luigi Mangione proves me wrong. That’s the best anyone can reasonably hope for.

you are actively defending North Korea

If this was any other county, you wouldn’t consider it an insult.

Why do you feel the need to hate a foreign people this much? They have no impact on you whatsoever.

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

you think I’m defending the genocidal losers

If the shoe fits

15% of russian GDP has already been seized

Do you know what GDP is?

one side sucks so clearly that means the other side is absolutely perfect

It’s funny to hear liberals defend the genocidal members of the Democratic Party by insisting “we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.

But when you’re a guerrilla resistance fighting of the Japanese at their most bloodthirsty, or a country that’s painstakingly recovering after suffering more bombings in a year than all of Europe suffered in four, the bar gets raised through the roof.

You idealize tyranny and oppression

You are living under a totalitarian regime right now, you big dummy. You don’t seem to mind.

LeCun says current AI models are a dead end for progress.

Sure. That’s easily proven, as the Pacific Rim tech companies are all running laps around the American models in terms of efficiency and output.

It looks like two guys arguing about which dead end to pursue

They’re both Snipe Hunting for the mythological AGI, because they’re each invested in the idea of a Singularity solving all their problems.

LLMs have a set of niche useful applications, but these dudes are chucking that advancement aside in pursuit of Digital God.

With Roko’s Basilisk bumping around in their heads, I can’t help but detect a certain religious fervor, either. We really might have folks who believe they’ll be tortured for eternity if they don’t build AI Hellraiser first.

It’s jibberish. Might as well be calling Trump a TERF or complaining that Andrew Cuomo isn’t Italian.

totally-not-zionist “lefty” Mandani

What?

Obviously, the solution is US slavery

US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year for pittance

Sounds reasonable.

Does it, though? Feels like we’re just rewriting the sales manual without thinking about what “learning from video” would actually entail.

Doesn’t make sense to build a lot of compute capacity, then spend fifteen years banging on research before you have something to utilize that capacity.

There’s an old book from back in 2008 - Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity - that a lot of the modern Techbros took perhaps too closely to heart. It posited that chasing the next generation of technological advancement was more important than keeping your existing revenue streams functional. And you really should kill the golden goose if it means you’ve got a shot at new one in the near future.

What these Tech Companies are chasing is the Next Big Thing, even when they don’t really understand what that is. And they’re so blindly devoted to advancing the technological curve that they really will blow a trillion dollars (mostly of other people’s money) on whatever it is they think that might be.

The real problem is that these guys are, largely, uncreative and incurious and not particularly intelligent. So they leap on fads rather than pursuing meaningful Blue Sky Research. And that gives us this endless recycling of Sci-Fi tropes as a stand in for material investments in productive next generation infrastructure.