sinedpick
I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it’s a pretty decent source of sneers. This month’s contains: “The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin”. In classic Moldbug fashion, it’s Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I’m not going to watch the whole thing, but I’ll try to mine the transcript for sneers.
26:23 –
Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that’s simple and easy to use that’s not a small amount of of work
Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?
30:17 – a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You’re the cream of the crop.
~2:00:00 – here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as “oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy” and responding by saying “nuh uh, urbit is decentralized.” Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.
In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: “When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. … When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”
And yet reading that should give us at least some pause
The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.
You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children’s reproductive capacity.
Depending on how you parse this sentence, the author could be asserting a parental right to confiscate their children’s reproductive capacity which is unbelievably unintentionally poetic.
someone pointed out that (paraphrasing) “yeah, you and I are never gonna care for autoplag output but kids are gonna grow up on it and expect it for everything” and that makes me want to do bad things.
US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I can’t tell if this is brilliant satire or not.