In a world of moral totalitarianism, sometimes freedom looks like a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines.

I literally lol'd. Beyond parody.

the answer is to get Peter Thiel to try to magic up Dimes Square out of nothing, isn’t it?

On a actually serious note: When I look back at the multiple years I spent on sneerclub and otherwise following the rationalists, I increasingly feel that I had been tilting at windmills. I had spent most of that time making fun of them instead of looking into their finances, and in doing so I had missed the big picture and simply hadn't realized how integral Peter Thiel was in propping them up and building a network to support them.

Thiel funds or funded MIRI, EA groups, Curtis Yarvin, FTX and OpenAI.

split screen between "how to win the culture race" and "a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines"

oh cool, Kirac, those are the idiots who made the (hopefully still) unreleased michel houellebecq sex tape. what a nice congregation of weird frauds.

Random musings but I feel like posting: I almost got sucked into the urbit hole. I thought it was such a cool idea and implementation, and all the fun names and technical purity was so attractive to me at age 18 (this was before the crypto circus and urbit barely did anything except talk to a terminal).

It took me a while to realize that there is, actually, zero reason to give nonsensical names to literally every aspect of software, and also pretty dumb to try to shoehorn everything through a tiny functional core ("Nock") while slowly re-learning all the lessons of 50 years of compiler development. So why use it at all?

Using urbit over a normal Linux stack comes purely with downsides. Slow, buggy, obscurantist, and so on. This means whoever actually dedicates their precious time to developing this unconditionally buys into the ideology. I never thought an ideology could be so powerful that it could corrupt the minds of my people (software monkeys).

Urbit is a truly fascist^H^Hnating phenomenon.

Poor people of Lisbon have to put up with 2 weeks of the great unweathered people of Ethereum and Urbit

It's the people of Portugal who are the real victims. Why do techbros love Lisbon so much? Cheap cost of living?

Yet again I call to your attention The Basilisk Murders by Andrew Hickey, and especially the intro, which anticipates this conference schedule five years ahead.

Cosimo de Medici persuaded Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, to enter his service by writing him a letter which concluded, ‘Come, I will choke you with gold.’

They are clearly ok with AI simulacra (simulacrap, perhaps) of everything interesting or meaningful, why do they even feel the need to court artists?

(of course, I know the answer. They are all just losers who don’t know how to do anything cool and they know it)

@dgerard "more sovereign, decentralized, and open AI" just reads like something that's meant to "run on the blockchain" and given the processing capacity I think we'll be able to sneak up on it and get it dressed in sovereign citizen style

Cody Wilson jfc.

You can't make me read that shit, it's been years and I still hate knowing what Urbit is.