huh, I figured this was common knowledge but thinking back on it, it might have just been dire informal warnings from some of my college friends with a little too much experience in the area

Most shockingly to Urbit devotees and outsiders alike, the board welcomed back Curtis Yarvin, the project's founder, who left in 2019.

nothing has ever shocked me less than Yarvin “returning” to urbit

In 2015, a technical conference rescinded his speaking invitation. The following year, another tech conference lost sponsors and was almost canceled because it allowed him to speak, over objections that this verbose, bespectacled engineer would make attendees feel somehow "unsafe." (Perhaps some feared he would bore everyone to death by reading his posts aloud, or torture them with his poetry.)

[…]

While the cancel culture of the 2010s and early 2020s may be subsiding, bringing Yarvin back remains a calculated risk for Urbit, William Ball, the board member, said on the developer call.

these fuckers are still fucking seething over their adult baby godking being asked not to come to a functional programming conference because he publicly advocates for a fascist takeover of the United States, receives funding from fascists, does press interviews promoting the fascist influencer circles he hangs out in, and is the computer science equivalent of a flat earther. how will our industry ever recover from the absolutely no value that was lost by disinviting him?

ah yeah, 3 downvotes (and one of them’s mine) and zero replies of scorn directed towards you (well, one now)

how about you take your bullshit elsewhere

you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.

oh absolutely! but only out of a sense of shame for being in a career field where a medical device company posting that horseshit compression challenge didn’t immediately prompt a strong backlash and repercussions for neuralink’s ability to attract and retain talent, in lieu of a functioning regulator maybe possibly shutting them down before they can fucking mutilate someone else with this brainfart of an invention

I feel bad for anyone who gets that e-waste implanted into their head and ends up with an implant that absolutely cannot do the things it’s marketed to do, barely does ordinary 90s brain implant shit, stops working very quickly (to the apparent surprise of the people in charge) and will most likely cause injury and severe discomfort to the patients saddled with it

I wish my field had ethics. I’d sleep better if we did.

“halt your conversation and explain yourself to me, whoever the fuck I am, right this instant” is also an utter shithead move on mastodon

no, it’s much stupider than that

The Copilots let users pose questions to software as easily as they might to a colleague—“Tell me the pros and cons of each plan described on that video call,” or “What’s the most profitable product in these twenty spreadsheets?”—and get instant answers, in fluid English.

it’s very funny to me that all the copilot examples this article breathlessly relates are things LLMs are absolutely fucking terrible at

imagine huffing your own farts this hard cause you came up with BasedBeffJezos and posted garbage on Twitter that was so out of touch that monstrous every billionaire instantly agreed with it

as a long-term supporter of the idea that folk should be able to just get high if they want to, it’s incredibly hard to square my beliefs with the existence of a person like Scott, especially having directly dealt with the outcomes of Scott’s advice amongst folks I have worked with

in general, the capitalist idea that even getting high needs to have utility has led to the normalization of some of the worst drug culture I’ve ever seen, from the can of worms that is lifestyle microdosing to some much worse shit than that

wait, so the AI is just your fears about capitalism?

Same elementary school logic but I mean this is how a nuke works.

what. no it isn’t

look I don’t want to shock you but that’s basically what they get paid to do. and (perverse) incentives apply - of course goog isn’t just going to spend a couple decabillion then go “oh shit, hmm, we’ve reached the limits of what this can do. okay everyone, pack it in, we’re done with this one!”, they’re gonna keep trying to milk it to make some of those decabillions back. and there’s plenty of useful suckers out there

a lot of corporations involved with AI are doing their damndest to damage our relationship with the scientific process by releasing as much fluff disguised as research as they can manage, and I really feel like it’s a trick they learned from watching cryptocurrency projects release an interminable amount of whitepapers (which, itself, damaged our relationship with and expectations from the engineering process)

god damn, the only part of this post I’m sure happened as written is that this asshole absolutely stole $4 in change on purpose just to see what would happen

But I try to remind myself every day that the human race doesn’t consist solely of Arthur Chus (or Amanda Marcottes, or Lubos Motls, or SneerClub posters, or Paul Manaforts or Donald Trumps). The world contains millions of women and men of every background and ideology who want actual dialogue, many of whom I’m lucky to count as friends, many of whom I met through this blog. Vulnerability is possible because the world is not uniformly evil.

—but regardless, it’s absolutely somehow our fault. drink!

also I found the actual reason why all of this happened, but Scott buried it in a giant block of text so I’m gonna have to reconstruct a little bullet point timeline:

• when we did arrive, (barely) on time, the contemptuous American Airlines counter staff deliberately refused to check us in, chatting as we stewed impotently, so that we’d no longer be on time and they could legally give our seats away to others, and strand us in an airport with two young kids.
• the only replacement flight was in a different terminal. * in the stress of switching terminals–everything is stressful with two kids in an airport–I lost our suitcase.
• the only shuttle to get back to the terminal went around the long way, and was slow as molasses, and by the time I returned our suitcase had been taken by the bomb squad

so this absolute dipshit started a fight with an airline employee over a flight he was too late to catch (for utterly dipshitted reasons I’ve omitted, see the original post), somehow lost a suitcase, left it unattended for so long that the fucking bomb squad had to be called (which involves automatic confiscation of the suitcase, shutting down the terminal it was left in, and usually detention and a stiff fine for the owner of the luggage — this is usually a big enough problem that it makes the local news), then was caught stealing from a shop after a long day of being belligerent and breaking TSA policy. how is our sweet child not in prison?