Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
joke is on us, Heaven’s Gate picked the right time to exit.
Also how would anybody be left behind? Lile say we are wrong an the AI stuff is real vital etc etc bla bla bla. Them we just need to learn a new tool.
Nobody died because they didnt want to learn how to use a debugger for several years and then finally reversed their stance.
I guess the idea is that the tech economy moves fast and if we don’t get to grips with AI we’ll be left in the dust, broke and unemployed. Somehow this is proof that AI is good instead of proof the economy is bad (if people are impoverished in a whim). It’s just the same self-satisfied fantasy as always.
Yes im just trying to say that it doesnt seem like a hard skill to pick up, and a skill which you can just skip a few generations and still be fine. Prompting gpt 1 is gonna ve different than the later models. (Even of the actual model improvements (compared to modules they add to the models) has drastically slowed down). Hell if AI worked you wouldn’t even need the skills you could just ask AI whatever and it would figure it out.
Basically,
Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg
https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923
It is an impressively bad speech.
I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, “If you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.” Yeah, if you’re worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, don’t worry, it’s going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.” No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.
“The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen.” Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesn’t matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.
Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. You’re a billionaire, so you know better than them.
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”
obviously didn’t watch that Treehouse of Horror ep where Bart and Homer are placed on the rocket ship headed directly towards the sun , along with that time period’s analogs to Eric Schmidt
IRL Principal Skinner meme
When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.
I’d first check if it’s Musk’s ship for the fear of my life
When some offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.
I don’t know mate, I think I do neither of those things because the kid-diddling natalist doesn’t seem to be good at making ones that don’t go boom.
Christ what a fucking shitweasel.
When someone offers you a seat on a submarine, you do not ask which seat, you just get on
Get in losers. We’re going imploding.
Is this submarine made of carbon-fibre and is it driven with a knock-off PlayStation controller?
The Logitech F710. The wireless signal is just bad on that controller. I’d get constant lag spikes or dropped input. The Logitech F310 is a much better deal because it’s 10 dollars cheaper and actually works on account of being wired.
Maybe it’d work in the depths of the sea without a lot of radio noise? I dunno I’m not asking any questions just getting on the rocket ship.
Something tells me the interior of that sub was an RF noise-rich environment.
carbon fibre is reflective for microwaves
Don’t ask those questions just get on
His eyes are giving me Corinthian vibes.
SpaceX has chosen a
sacrificialdisposablenaivecrypto billionaire to captain a mars fly-by someday: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lead-first-crewed-mission-to-mars-2000762451The mission is expected to take two years and here’s what he has to say about that:
I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.
He already pulled the same con on a Japanese billionaire in 2018, just talked about flying around the moon not landing on Mars (Wikipedia: dearMoon)
I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.
Well they do tend to think stuff scales forever.
can’t wait for the inevitable livestreamed freakout/cannibalism scene
Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.
gee I wonder why
The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. […] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.
hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you
1 comment, essentially saying if you’re not above average height you might as well die alone
of course they get caught by incel culture immediately, trying to quantify attractiveness is so far in their wheelhouse they might as well have come up with it
Most incel forums proliferate pseudoscientific slop to justify their beliefs.
He was this close! This close!
can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once
Wait what, how can I lock in a good shape with an upfront payment without having to go through this “exercise” bullshit all the time? What does he know that I don’t?! What’s the One Simple Trick, dammit??!!
y’all will be pleased to know that a new LWer has a fresh take on looksmaxxing!!
basically if you look like a Greek god you can convince the sheeple that the AI is gonna kill us all (and bang hot chicks as a bonus)
as of writing there’s one comment suggesting OP should read:
Aella: Has a few posts on male attractiveness, that inform a bunch of thinking on this. But she is a canon Rationalist blog, so you should default to reading her work.
Also recommends Zvi, who, no offense, is the literal epitome of a scrawny nerd, but who has managed to find a female to reproduce with. All hope is not lost, friend!
Is it real hardmaxxing unless you change your gender? In this essay I will
Fuck me for having read this… Surely there are only like 2 dozen people in the world who think like this, right?
Ope, im getting an update that it is more than 2 dozen…
“Im a fuckin sicko and no one wants to immediately fuck me”
Some online dating device is demonic in the same sense as the chatbot which encouraged someone to commit suicide then initiated erotic roleplay with him.
A lot of lonely guys will do well from hiring a professional for some social dates and makeout sessions to get practice reading body language and finding some face-to-face activity with women which is not just about dating.
STOP FINDING THINGS
- WEB PAGES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND
- YEARS OF SEARCHING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for PAGES of SEO-OPTIMISED AI SLOP
- Wanted to find things anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called WIKIPEDIA “RANDOM PAGE”
- “Yes please give me ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION of my search. Please give me TEN ADS and A PARAGRAPH OF SLOP FIRST” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Search engines have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the ad views we gave them
(This is REAL Search results, given by REAL search engines)
- “None of Africa’s 54 recognized countries start with the letter ‘K’.”
- “Add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce”
- “Understood. No more templates—just direct answers, hyper-focused on exactly what you need.”
“Hello Something went wrong and an AI response wasn’t generated”
They have played us for absolute fools
Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?
Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas’s cloud spend.
Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.
I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.
I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.
How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?
If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.
people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org
How does using personal plans impact the company’s bill? If someone is so profoundly stupid as to spend their own money on a “tool” for their job then why stop them?
That’s a good point. I wonder if they’re also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven’t manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can’t really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.
Dunno, maybe they believe the pinky promise that their code won’t be used for training on the enterprise plans?
It’s more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you can’t tell that just means your enterprise code isn’t discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.
I’m assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, it’s going to be a big legal deal.
does anthropic sequester the data it gets sent the same way on personal and business plans?
My assumption based on nothing except life experience is that all of that data gets pushed through differently coloured pipes into the same giant bucket with privacy concerns being “too hard” and “approved by legal”.
that would be my assumption as well, but i’m sure the business subscriptions have some language that suggests otherwise.
by introducing more mess that has to be cleaned up later
I’ve seen the pattern be used as an enterprise pricing dodge before: rather than sign the whole org up at $$$, everyone signs up themselves at $ (and maybe get to claim or somesuch)
another reading could be that someone in leadership/security went “holy shit this exposure is terrible” and put forth a policy including “no personal” and the poor little promptfondler is left ashen-faced upon reading that the policy instruction actually thought of the first obvious workaround
WELL WELL WELL, if it isn’t the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling
(plus a dose of corporate greed)
(oh dear, how sad, nevermind)
that made me smile good and proper, ty for the lol
I love the orangeposters in there, some of them sure are thonkers
this is a good way of getting rid of hyperactive deadwood
AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology
“Why do people hate us so much? We only constantly say the technology we’re making is dangerous and then block regulation, suck up resources, commit mass theft and plagiarism, threatened to destabilise the economy, enabled more CSAM, caused widespread mental health issues and multiple suicides, unleashed a barrage of slop, engaged in mass surveillance and mocked people against the tech? Don’t they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?”
On top of all of that, it just doesn’t work.
The instant you understand the concept of hallucinations should be the instant you are against gen AI.
oh boohoo Beff let me play a sad song for you on the world’s smallest violin
As always with these people, note that the replies make frequent reference to “loopholes” and people “exploiting the system” without ever being specific about what those loopholes are.
The number of bitter fascist weirdos kicking Beff (of all people) while he’s down sure is something.
No honor among thieves i reckon.
Isnt part of the fasc idea space the whole idea that the strong are worthy and would be rewarded and rise to the top the world just got away of all the rules pushing the unworthy? Clearly this means that as he is in trouble he is unworthy himself and now a target.
Esp as you can get a social boost by stepping on him on your way up.
The loneliest ideology.
🎶 sing us a song you’re the nano man 🎶
I don’t know Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos but Forbes’ profile begins:
Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen says @BasedBeffJezos is a “patron saint of techno-optimism.” Garry Tan, who cofounded the venture firm Initialized Capital before becoming CEO of Y Combinator, calls him “brother.” Sam Altman, who founded OpenAI — the company that finally mainstreamed artificial intelligence — has jokingly sparred with him on Twitter. Elon Musk says his memes are “🔥🔥🔥.”
He has an entry on the Effective Accelerationism wiki https://www.eaccwiki.com/index.php?title=Beff_Jezos
I don’t know Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos
He is supposed to be the original instigator and public face of so-called e/acc or effective accelarationism, i.e. the rationalist (or maybe rationalist inspired idk) spin-off of people who feel whinging about alignment isn’t necessary and that it’s in fact awesome when new technology is killing people and ruining the environment because it means we’re getting to the singularity faster, and also openly rooting for fascism on main is based now.
His magic heatless AI processor startup feels like a grift to fleece investors and as far as I know has only ever produced an obviously staged video of sciency looking individuals fawning over a 3d printed wire mesh while touring what looks like a chip fab with an extremely lax contamination protocol.
xheet is deleted, was is Beff Jezoz who wrote that? background? though he was as American as
apple piethe Ku Klux KlanForbes says he is Quebecois with a PhD from UWaterloo. That does not stop him tweeting about “foreigners” (= foreign to the USA, but not including him obviously).
I’m sure he’ll enjoy being deported back to la République populaire démocratique de Quebec and spending a short time in the reeducations camps before being set to work installing solar panels
URL Typo - fixed it
Edward W. Niedermeyer calls the plans to put SpaceX and OpenAI public at ludicrously inflated valuations and dump shares on index funds for real money BAGNAROK. American pension funds are starting to say out loud that this is a bad deal.
The officials - representing three of the top four largest public pension plans in the U.S. - objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including voting control over the stock, veto power over his own removal as CEO, and protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims.
…
In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years; install a majority-independent board and separate the CEO and chair roles; eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval; scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party transactions with Musk’s other companies.
“Precisely because SpaceX is poised to occupy a position of systemic importance in the public markets, and to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in our portfolios, its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon which long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them,” they wrote.
or sunset super-voting shares within seven years
weird number to pick given they might not last that long if felon and friends aren’t removed earlier on…
sunset super-voting shares within seven years
It’s taken 20 years to get this level of pushback on super-voting shares, and even then, the scam is still likely to go through. All of these people are whistling past the graveyard of eroding systemic legitimacy.
And the people making these decisions know that they don’t invest much in China because they don’t trust Chinese government statistics and the Chinese stock market is rigged. They know that it is hard to get middle-aged schoolteachers and plumbers to put their savings on the stock market even if that market is scrupulously honest. But the USA has been the center of global capitalism since about 1917 and it is hard for them to imagine that changing.
That is a bad sign, negotiating means they are considering buying.
A LWer of the female persuasion makes the entirely reasonable point that most screw-top openings are probably constructed by looking at median male grip strength, not female. But the real fun is in the comments, where people who can post comments on a blog are seemingly unfamiliar with opening jam jars.
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
what is going on with these people i’m so annoyed i’m about to cry
Why do so many containers require women asking a man for help in order to open them? (Or carrying around an opening tool or living in a kitchen?)
how often do you open jam jars outside the kitchen?? it’s not that hard! you don’t actually have to force them open through grip strength like an idiot man!!
why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I…basic common sense alone would tell you that something with a lot of fruit and a lot of sugar in it might spoil if left open outside of a fridge. Why do these people act like they’ve never seen a banana before
why understand biochemistry, if you’re part of the cognitive elite who can reconstruct it from first principles should it become necessary
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
this is “fucking magnets, how do they work” translated to rationalist, except that explaining magnets involves quantum mechanics and explaining jam jars involves high school physics (saturated vapor pressure vs temperature. that might be before high school). i also like how one linked explanation sits near two pieces of slop and is wrong
The comments section really is incredible, the level of ignorance about basic kitchen things, which since it’s womanly knowledge instead of dyson spheres they seem to be completely incurious about …
their practical skills are weak, and they won’t survive the winter (because they don’t know how to make jam)
but frame the same physics in terms of what makes steam turbine spin, and they’ll pretend to get it but won’t apply it anywhere else. the longer you look the worse it gets. it’s like they have never watched how it’s made as kids
High-status rats have minions to order their lunches, pick up their shopping, and inflate their bike tires and yell at them if they make mistakes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BGLu3iCGjjcSaeeBG/related-discussion-from-thomas-kwa-s-miri-research
What The Shit
I’ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and we’re both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. He’s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
[…]
Iirc he’s explicitly said he doesn’t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others)
The way these people are larping conflict resolution is so exhausting aaaaaaa please can you just do normal abuse
From elsewhere in the comments:
… I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when it’s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
High-status? Why?!! Jesus H. Fuck, I hope that if anyone ever gives me a get-out-of-social-consequences-free card, it’s for a better reason than my blogging.
D: Not only does this community have a missing stair, but they’re all explaining to each other how to avoid the missing stair, and the missing stair is in the chat replying to comments?!
From the post linked therein:
There’s this thing Nate and Eliezer do where they proclaim some extremely nonobvious take about alignment, say it in the same tone they would use to declare that grass is green, and don’t really explain it.
Gambling? In this establishment?!
Nate thinks in a different ontology from everyone, and often communicates using weird analogies
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
when Nate thinks you don’t understand something or have a mistaken approach, he gets visibly distressed and sad. I think this conditioned us to express less disagreement with him. I have a bunch of disagreements from his world model, and could probably be convinced to his position on like 1/3 of them, but I’m too afraid to bring them all up and if I did he’d probably stop talking to me out of despair anyway.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
The structure where we would talk to Nate 4h/day for one out of every ~6 weeks was pretty bad for feedback loops. A short meeting every week would have been better, but Nate said this would be more costly for him.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
(Every functional research group I’ve been part of has had weekly staff meetings. Even the undergrads were encouraged to participate and got at least that much talking time with the professor.)
In my frustration at the lack of concrete problems I asked Nate what research he would approve of outside of the main direction. We thought of two ideas […] I worked on these on and off for a few months without much progress, then went back to Nate to ask for advice. Nate clarified that he was not actually very excited about these directions himself, and it was more like “I don’t see the relevance here, but if you feel excited by these, I could see this not being totally useless”.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
They keep doing it and it drives me mad!! I finally understood that they got the word from computer shit and not philosophy. Isn’t it just amazing? Here we thought they were vaguely aware of established philosophical concepts for a second!
oh my god lmao. finally we understand how that happened
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
Yeah that jumped out at me. Esp with the reasoning it is costly for him. Extremely disfunctional hierarchy
My wild guess is that if you put a few lesswrongen into a room and told them to invent a “research institute”, they’d write a book of procedure for the sake of having a lot of words about procedure, without any actual sense of how to allocate responsibilites properly.
Nate Soares actually has some work experience at big organizations (NIST, DND, Google, Microsoft) but he clearly is not ready to run a research group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Soares He let the HTTPS certificate for his personal site expire.
So much debate about whether his employer was diligent enough at tyre-pumping when the obvious solution is “pump your own tyres yourself, you buffoon”
Also, real talk: I got a jar opener when my wife moved in and it is a goddamn revelation how much easier that things makes life. Absolutely recommended purchase. You want to have a sandwich but you closed the jar before you came down with a cold? No worries. You stick the yeast towards the back of the fridge because you haven’t made your own bread since you got the cold and that was fuck long ago? Not a problem. You have a third reason why this fucking jar is stickier than you would normally have the capacity to handle (and trust me, you will)? Not anymore you don’t.
Oh and I’m curious now, but can’t be bothered to look it up myself in this slop era,
Has anyone done a men’s vs women’s grip strength study controlling for hand size, height, etc? I’d love to know what the results would be.
opening tool
The flat end of a fork or spoon is usually enough to pop the vacuum. Which seems to be the issue in my exp.
Not that using an opening tool is bad. We are tool users for a reason.
I use grip gloves for opening jars and love them so much. Same ideas as plastic jar grips, but even easier. I find I usually have enough strength but that my skin is too sensitive to fully apply it without grip gloves.
Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages?
James Damore flashbacks ohno
depressing datapoint, this comment was downvoted to the point where it was auto-collapsed yesterday, today it’s “only” on -2
Here’s a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem
After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is
It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.
It’s not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what’s economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.
For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn’t enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.
Microsoft’s experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren’t doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.
But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.
The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And it’s incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. They’re not living in space, they’re glamping.
@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL … which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.
I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.
The worst part is that I don’t even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that it’s a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities we’re leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.
But if space was a place that replicators could exist, there would already be an ecology of some sort there. Or to put it in words (that I hate) related to the so-called Fermi paradox (which I hate and isn’t a paradox) ‘If they could be here they already would be here’. (The ‘solution’ incidentally is obviously ‘interstellar travel is not actually a thing that can happen for replicating systems’ and it flabbergasts me that nobody can admit that.)
The ISS already has issues with structural fatigue which seem to be worsened by thermal expansion. Having one side of your station red hot and another at room temperature is a big temperature differential and what faces the sun and heats up on one side of the orbit will be in shadow and cooling on the other side. And the bigger you make a physical system, the worse problems get.
I miss when I could cheer SpaceX launches on an iMac.
yeah, I dunno much about space engineering but let’s say you use solar panel (which OP acknowledges is probably needed in much higher mass to simply power the stuff) to shadow the radiators, you’re looking at a hell of a large structure, with significant stresses as it orbits.
Surely someone can vibecode a finite-element model of a simple construction and estimate both the mass and the forces involved?
SpaceX (+ Grok + twitter) submitted a request for an IPO to the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/0001628280-26-036936-index.htm
According to an HN poster, it mentions the Kardashev scale at least three times.
These are not serious people.
We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun. In the near term, we expect space-enabled technologies to enhance life on Earth through greater global connectivity and breakthroughs forged in the harsh environments of our solar system, leading to accelerating progress in energy and AI. As we build infrastructure in the Earth’s orbit, and potentially on the Moon, Mars and beyond, we believe we are capable of unlocking an era of unprecedented economic expansion, while also contributing to the safeguards of humanity’s future against existential risk. (source)
I keep seeing grown men with serious jobs thinking like I did as a fourteen-year-old playing with TTRPG vehicle-design rules. We need to figure out how to keep Earth habitable before we worry about building the Ringworld. The man who sabotaged high-speed rail in California wants this?
Edit / My mecha can totally give the Muskrat’s mecha a wedgie, just look at how I optimized it with my Texas Instruments calculator and a lined notebook
We are going to harvest the entire Sun!! And then eat up the stars themselves!! For profit! Humanity shall be an ever-expanding Empire, grinding resources of the whole universe into shareholder value!!!
even their conmanship story is a depressing dystopia. have these people ever considering just chilling. get a girlfriend who plays drums, hang out with her jamming with a bass. watch a movie together, then go out for a walk. play boardgames with children. take up embroidery
@CinnasVerses @o7___o7 I love how bros are just slipping #Kardashev Scale into things like some kind of garnish. Take 3D printing filament, for instance…
Crowning water as the solvent king should be an incredibly obvious move for a Type 1 Civilization in the Kardashev Scale.
Also features molecular disintegration chamber for end-of-life management :neofox_floof_explode:
Hahaha good lord
Molecular disintegration chambers also feature in those erotic horror comics I mentioned a few months ago! Cw cartoon sexuality, arguments that life is pointless, and Nick Bostrom
@CinnasVerses Rule34 for 3D printing is not something I had considered until a moment ago…
So much damage could have been prevented if these people just had gotten more free time to play stellaris.
I am ignorant of the Kardashev scale, is that measuring vibes or skulls?
plastic surgery
oops, no wait, that’s the Kardashian scale, sorry
Vibes…in space. It’s the sort of thing that a teenager who imprinted on Ringworld might worry about.
From wikipedia:
*A Type I civilization (planetary) is able to access all the energy available on its planet and store it for consumption.
*A Type II civilization (stellar) can directly consume a star’s energy, most likely through the use of a Dyson sphere.
*A Type III civilization (galactic) is able to capture all the energy emitted by its galaxy, and every object within it, such as every star, black hole, etc.
oh yeah, that happy horseshit.
Full Self- Parody. From p. 138:
We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun. In the near term, we expect space-enabled technologies to enhance life on Earth through greater global connectivity and breakthroughs forged in the harsh environments of our solar system, leading to accelerating progress in energy and AI. As we build infrastructure in the Earth’s orbit, and potentially on the Moon, Mars and beyond, we believe we are capable of unlocking an era of unprecedented economic expansion, while also contributing to the safeguards of humanity’s future against existential risk.
All this from the same kind of people who think shifting to Solar is “woke”.
We’re gonna create an entirely new type of star that supports itself against gravitational collapse by burning money.
Just wait until investors demand the satellites be powered by diesel instead of solar panels
SpaceX’s IPO filing has an unusual paragraph on page 235:
On January 13, 2026, our board approved the grant of 1 billion performance-based restricted shares of Class B common stock to Mr. Musk. The restricted shares vest upon (i) our achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches and (ii) the Company’s establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, in each case, subject to Mr. Musk’s continued employment with us through the date on which achievement is certified by our board. For any tranche of the award to vest, both the applicable market capitalization milestone for such tranche and the human colony milestone must be met.
Until that happy day occurs the shares would be out of Mr. Musk’s hands and safe and secure under the custodianship of the dictator of SpaceX who is (assistant whispers in ears) huh.
Page 166 talks about the old dream of Lunar He3 for fusion power and quantum computing without saying any of those words because people might remember space advocates talking about lunar helium in the 1990s and 2000s:
Once resource utilization capabilities are proven feasible, we believe there is an opportunity to commercialize the harvesting and exportation of rare materials, which is estimated to be present on the Moon in quantities exceeding one million tons and has potential applications in future nuclear energy and quantum computing systems.
The myth that talking about bubbles prevents bubbles for when someone starts saying some “oh but everyone says AI is a bubble which must mean its not”
This website is intended for the use of the wholesale clients only. I declare that I am a wholesale client as defined in the Corporations Act 2001. I declare that I will not provide any information on this website to a retail investor.
Jokes on them I read the page without clicking the agree button here and without being a wholesale client!
Owenomics is also worried about changing the rules to add SpaceX and OpenAI to NASDAQ and the S&P500 while only a tiny fraction of their shares are available for trading. "Bad idea. If float is too low, the market cap is meaningless and should not be relied upon for any purpose. "
Back in January he said that the US stock market is not in a bubble until Robert Shiller’s “CAPE rises to 80 (similar to Japan’s CAPE in 1989).” The CAPE (a ratio of price to the average earning for the past ten years) of the S&P500 is around 40, similar to the US in January 2000.
He does not mention new era thinking (chapters 5 and 6 of Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance).
Here’s a story about a douchebag who lost because AI:
Wonkette: Creep Who Sued Women Who Warned Others Not To Date Him Loses Case Due To AI-Reliant Lawyer - “Finally, a good use for AI!”
The brief included no citation to any legislative findings, let alone any including the statute’s targets as the brief asserted. We could not find any reference to the phrases “amplified exposure and endangerment” or “cyber vigilantism” within the Doxing Act. There also are no legislative findings included in the codification of the Doxing Act, the session law, or any publicly available version of the bill. These mistakes and fictitious quotations bear the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.
