TinyTimmyTokyo
As someone who also went to university in the late 80s and early 90s, I didn’t share his experiences. This reads like one of those silly shaggy-dog stories where everyone says sarcastically afterwards: “yeah that happened”.
Damn. I thought I was cynical, but nowhere near as cynical as OpenAI is, apparently.
One thing to keep in mind about Ptacek is that he will die on the stupidest of hills. Back when Y Combinator president Garry Tan tweeted that members of the San Francisco board of supervisors should be killed, Ptacek defended him to the extent that the mouth-breathers on HN even turned on him.
So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some… boutique… views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:
- Lab-grown meat
- Modern architecture is rotten
- Population decline is an existential threat
- Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?
As anyone who’s been paying attention already knows, LLMs are merely mimics that provide the “illusion of understanding”.
I’m noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he’s being upvoted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he’s steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.
Actually it’s the wikipedia subreddit thread I meant to refer to.
As a longtime listener to Tech Won’t Save Us, I was pleasantly surprised by my phone’s notification about this week’s episode. David was charming and interesting in equal measure. I mostly knew Jack Dorsey as the absentee CEO of Twitter who let the site stagnate under his watch, but there were a lot of little details about his moderation-phobia and fash-adjacency that I wasn’t aware of.
By the way, I highly recommend the podcast to the TechTakes crowd. They cover many of the same topics from a similar perspective.