I'm reminded of an old essay from Siskind that tried to break down the different approaches to disagreement as either "conflict theory" - different people want different, mutually incompatible things - and "mistake theory" where we all want the same basic thing but disagree about how to get it. Given the general silicon valley milieu's (and YudRat's specifically) affinity for "mistake theory" I think the susceptibility to authoritarianism and fascism fits remarkably well. After all, if we all want the same basic thing the only way the autocrat could do something we don't like is if they were wrong, so we just have to get a reasonable enough autocrat and give them absolute power, at which point they can magically solve all problems. See also the singularity God AI nonsense.

If I had my wish, it would be that this doesn't just remind people of how authoritarians can be/are evil or incompetent, but also that the general structure isn't actually more "efficient" because whatever delays the democratic process introduces are dwarfed by the inevitable difficulties of just trying to do anything at the scale of any modern state, much less the sheer scale of the USA.

As a prominent intellectual voice criticizing the current administration, our boy Curtis should really be grateful that they don't hew more closely to his preferred fascist project, as if they did they would have the incentive to be just as if not more brutal in stomping out "credible" independent opposition from the right as from existing liberal institutions. After all the fascist project relies on subverting existing institutions that are too tied up in their own bureaucracy and politicking to effectively oppose them, while the whole point Yarvin has made across his whole career is that the fascists have no such impediment or incentive for restraint. The Night of the Long Knives predated Kristallnacht by more than 4 years, after all.

As anyone who has tracked SovCit discourse can confirm, the English language was definitively codified for all eternity by the 1996 edition of Black's Law Dictionary and all other projects including future editions of that venerable title are the result of communist plots to undermine the sanctity of American freedom and our precious bodily fluids.

Looks like that is indeed the post. I have a number of complaints, but the most significant one is actually in the early part of the narrative where they just assume "companies start to integrate AI" with little detail on how this is done, what kind of value it creates over their competitors, whether it's profitable for anyone, etc. I'm admittedly trusting David Gerard's and Ed Zitron's overall financial analysis here, but at present it seems like the trajectory is moving in the opposite direction, with the AI industry as a whole looking likely to flame out as they burn through their ability to raise capital without ever actually finding a net return on that investment. At which point all the rest of it is sci-fi nonsense. Like, if you want to tell me a story about how we get from here to The Culture (or I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream), those are the details that need to be filled in. How do the intermediate steps actually work. Otherwise it's the same story we've been reading since the 70s.

It's almost like the tech industry relies on a great deal of general stability, education, and other aspects of society that are broadly considered the responsibility of the state. I think there's a stock line here about libertarians and cats?

So the primary doctrine is basically tech bros rewriting standard millenarian christianity from mythic fantasy into science fiction. But it seems like the founder wants to be a silicon valley influencer more than he wants to be a proper cult leader, meaning that some of the people who take this shit seriously have accumulated absurd amounts of money and power and occasionally the more deranged subgroups will spin off into a proper cult with everything that entails -- including, now, being involved in multiple homicides!

That's like a solid centiMoR, which is conveniently the share of HPMoR in which anything actually happens.

And I'm sure he's sent several notices explicitly declaring that lack of contract between them that a judge evaluating the lien would be interested in.

Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?

I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn't that they aren't effective enough at choosing causes; they're supporting exactly what they want to, whether it's saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires requires African kids to die of malaria.

Note that the image here isn't from the AI project, it's from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I've seen closest to this one.

And when they say they've "run the game" they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

Gee, I wonder if there were any major shake-ups in the Ukrainian government circa 2014 that could have explained this change in tune.

Ukraine wasn't able to join NATO because of active territorial disputes regarding Russia's 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. The 2022 invasion and intervening Russian-backed fighting in Donestk and Luhansk were naked imperial land grabs trying to force Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence despite their democratic processes repeatedly trying to move towards the EU.

Or in simpler terms, imperialism is actually still bad when Russia does it and it's weird that you don't seem to understand that.