Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Fun article.
Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something thatās even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.
I think he exists in the tension between rationalism/transhumanism and what he can get away with selling to the public, and that necessarily means his schtick appears dumber and more incoherent. Heās essentially got two major groups heās trying to manipulate simultaneously; true believers and those who have yet to be persuaded. As he runs out of hype on the public-facing side, itās suddenly a desperate scramble to keep the true believers that make up the bulk of his workforce on board. Hence his pivot to marketing his latest and by far most important product: publicly traded shares in OpenAI.
Apropos of nothing, L. Ron Hubbard died in a dingy trailer in Creston. Ever been to Creston? Itās a long ways from Hollywood.
Pretty sure this brand of cyborg fantasizing is quite popular in mainstream rationalism, unless youāre reading something more creative in this than superbabies, brain uploading and HDMI to visual nerve for undetectable on-demand pornography.
āGenetic engineering to merge with machinesā is both a stream of words with negative meaning and something I donāt think he could come up with on his own, like the solar system sized dyson sphere or the lab leak stuff. He just strikes me as too incurious to have come across the concepts he mashes together on his own.
Simplest explanation I guess is heās just deliberately joeroganing the CEO thing and thatās about as deep as it goes.
Iron-compatible osteoblasts that build bio-steel! Synapses with silicon, no, make that graphene neurotransmitter filters in the gap! Cāmon, Sam, hire me and we can technobabble so much harder than this!
I must insist on cash payment, though. No stock options. And I prefer to be paid weekly.
āWhat if we figure out DNA well enough that we could edit a babby to grow NAND gate cells and put a calculator inside their body so they can do instant arithmetic like a computer?ā
I assume heās talking about that kind of stuff, but being vague so you canāt call him out if he gets details wrong.
Brb gonna go collect a trillion dollars for my startup idea that makes babies grow a malignant style parasitic twin that is actually a compute farm