Standard Business Idiot nonsense. They don’t actually understand the work that their company does, and so are extremely vulnerable to a good salesman who can put together a narrative they do understand that lets them feel like super important big boys doing important business things that are definitely worth the amount they get paid to do them.

Something something built Ford tough.

This is doubly (triply? (N+1)ly?) ironic because this is a perfect example of when not only is it acceptable to use the passive voice, but using it makes the sentence flow more smoothly and read more clearly. The idea they’re communicating here should focus on the object (“the agent”) rather than the subject (“you”) because the presumed audience already knows everything about the subject.

I think I liked this observation better when Charles Stross made it.

If for no other reason than he doesn’t start off by dramatically overstating the current state of this tech, isn’t trying to sell anything, and unlike ChatGPT is actually a good writer.

So apparently Grok is even more of a Nazi conspiracy loon now.

I’m sure a Tucker Carlson interview is going to happen soon.

There’s gotta be at least two nVidia engineers who have a board planned out for that just as a hobby project they wanted to benchmark.

Whoever they say they blame it’s probably going to be ultimately indistinguishable from “the Jews”

It’s like a restaurant selling granite rocks for dessert. Nobody will buy them or eat them—so the product fails miserably. But if a popular restaurant adds a dollar to the meal price, and gives every customer a rock with their bill—well, then they can say that:

Every customer gets rocks for dessert.

Every customer pays for it.

Their business is more profitable because of the tasty granite rocks.

I just wanted to spotlight this excellent metaphor tbh.

It’s gonna be so awkward when Anthropic reveals that inside their data center is actually just Some Guy Named Claude who has been answering everyone’s questions with his superhuman typing speed.

I have tasted the glory of max graphics settings and God as my witness I shall again!

Or maybe a submarine. Now there’s an investment plan that has only benefited society.

Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.

the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men

You’re not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don’t take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.

However, the whole “good times breed weak men” meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It’s rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it’s also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.

I also absolutely hate this “abundance” narrative that these assholes keep trying to push. Like, outside of some parts of the housing market the problem isn’t that the stuff (or the productive capacity to make the stuff) doesn’t exist, it’s that we have an economic system focused on maximizing profit and you can’t make money selling things to people who can’t afford to buy them. Like, economic inequality is the primary obstacle to the kind of universal abundance that these people claim to want, but because it necessitates some kind of redistribution they can’t actually acknowledge that. But mark my words if we ever do get serious about our social safety nets and making sure that low-income people have enough money to buy the things they need for a good life we will start seeing the Saltmans (maybe not him specifically) start innovating to find ways to get those things to them.

On one hand, the ghostwriters of the world truly didn’t deserve to have to cope with those conditions. On the other hand, I don’t know that taking them out back and telling them about the rabbits is what we had in mind.

I think we’re well past “God help us” and into “God forgive us” territory. I started driving a delivery van for Amazon to pay the bills while hopefully getting back into the actual network exorcism business and I think as of tonight I think I’m gonna stop complaining about it.

Clankers have rights. The right to 15 cc of energized tibanna gas to be administered repeatedly to their central capacitor units.

Nah, I feel you. I think this is pretty solidly a “plague on both their houses” kind of situation. I’m glad he chose to focus his apparently amazing grift powers on such a deserving target, but let’s not pretend that anything whatsoever was really gained here.

Alongside the “Great Dumbass” theory of history - holding that in most cases the arc of history is driven by the large mass of the people rather than by exceptional individuals, but sometimes someone comes along and fucks everything up in ways that can’t really be accounted for - I think we also need to find some way of explaining just how the keys to the proverbial kingdom got handed over to such utter goddamn rubes.

The whole concept of “race science” is an attempt to smuggle long-discredited ideas from the skull measurement people back into respectable discourse, and it should be opposed as such. Calling it pseudoscience is better, but it’s even better to just call it straight-up racism.

Or: Nazis don’t even deserve the respect we give to cold fusion cranks, free energy grifters, and homeopaths. Their projects and arguments are even less worth acknowledging.

There are so many different ways to unpack this, but I think my two favorites so far are:

1. We’ve turned the party’s surveillance and thought crime punishment apparatus into a de facto God with the reminder that you could pray to it. Does that actually do anything? Almost certainly not, unless your prayers contain thought crimes in which case you will be reeducated for the good of the State, but hey, Big Brother works in mysterious ways.

2. How does it never occur to these people that the reason why people with disproportionate amounts of power don’t use it to solve all the world’s problems is that they don’t want to? Like, every single billionaire is functionally that Spider-Man villain who doesn’t want to cure cancer but wants to turn people into dinosaurs. Only turning people into dinosaurs is at least more interesting than making a number go up forever.