Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours.

To me the most baffling part is the devs. Like, someone has to be working on this? An honest-to-god software engineer is spending their life fighting windmills to harras more people with ads. This cannot be fulfilling work in any way, can it? Great, I’m putting a lot of work into circumventing uBlock and

1. if I win then people will be forced to watch ads, which quite directly makes our society worse to exist in,
2. I most likely won’t win, and the month of work I put into this will be thwarted by some guy in a cellar pushing a small uBlock change 4h after my code goes live.

To be fine with that you have to be either a sociopath, or somehow completely compertmantilise the task and actively not think about the externalities… or be held at gunpoint. I mean, you’re a fucking software developer, there are other jobs than Google! You could be doing literally anything else right now, up to and including herding goats, why the fuck would you willingly fight on the front of the Ad War on the side of the ads.

If I was working on YouTube and my boss told me that I had to figure out a way to thwart uBlock I’d just tell him no. If the choice was between doing that and quitting, I’d quit the same fucking day and get a job doing something real. I quite literally cannot imagine why you wouldn’t do that, you got a job at GOOGLE, if you succeeded in their stupid recruitment process then you can find a job LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE the same fucking week you quit.

I want someone to take this and run it in a self-feeding loop, I want to see what the limit supremum of AI Imagery looks like

I swear to god there was a video I watched about this years ago that already talked about how they don’t give you the best coupons and that they hijack affiliate links. I couldn’t have made that up in my head.

The most surprising thing to me was that they’re owned by PayPal? How can you have any credibility left when you’re owned by PayPal, wtf, that should’ve been the end of them. Oh, no shit, a service owned by PAYPAL is shady and not above-board?? No way man, those paragons of user centrism, PAY-fucking-PAL.

Oh jesus christ now I get it.

Thank you. This single sentence explains to me how the fuck those people are able to exist for 20 years and still be so shit at their job.

A lot of the “I’m a senior engineer and it’s useful” people seem to just assume that they’re just so fucking good that they’ll obviously know when the machine lies to them so it’s fine. Which is one, hubris, two, why the fuck are you even using it then if you already have to be omniscient to verify the output??

Also I’m sorry but

Why the discrepancy? A footnote in the CE Delft report makes it clear: the price figures for macronutrients are largely based on a specific amino acid protein powder that sells for $400 a ton on the sprawling e-commerce marketplace Alibaba.com.

this is exactly the sort of magical thinking I’m talking about “it will scale because we can order tons of the stuff off Alibaba” just what the fuck are you smoing mate, this can’t be good faith analysis

A lot of “I can control my emotions and choose how I act, you should try that” - yeah stop. We’re human. Emotions are normal.

Ye, that’s the point? The point is not to suppress emotions but to recognise them as they’re happening to you. It’s not even that there’s objective value assigned to the emotions, it’s simply so that you yourself can perform introspection of the kind “I did that action because I was furious. Now is that good or bad?”. But it’s still entirely okay to make a conscious decision of the form:

1. I’m gonna punch that motherfucker
2. Okay, stop, I am feeling fury right now, I shouldn’t allow just the emotion to guide me. Let’s think.
3. Okay, I thought this through, I’m gonna punch that motherfucker with purpose.

Step one is understanding you only control your own thoughts and actions. Step two is learning how to control your anger and use it as fuel for deliberate actions.

Honestly, I think Luigi here just followed this wisdom. Recognised that he was rightfully angry at the system and directed that anger at someone responsible. You only control your actions, and your action can be to shoot a motherfucker on the street ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not condoning or saying it’s morally acceptable, but I don’t think it’s philosophically incoherent.

I think it forces us all to ask an important introspective question – if I were to become the target of a national manhunt, would my posting history look cringe?

Realistic version: pulling the lever would save five lives but that decision would cost shareholders $7.23. What should you do?

10/10 CEOs fail this test!

Very good read, but throughout I can’t help but say to myself “ye so the issue is scale. AS ALWAYS”

This is a tale as old as time. Fusion energy is here! Quantum computers will revolutionise the world! Lab-grown meat! All based on actual scientific experiments and progress, but tiny, one-shot experiments under best-case conditions. There is no reason to think it brings us closer to a future where those are commonplace, except for a very nebulous technical meaning of “closer” as “yes, time has passed”. There is no reason to think this would ever scale in any way! Like, there is a chance that e.g. fusion energy at any meaningful scale is just… impossible? Like, physically impossible to do. Or a stable quantum computer able to run Doom. Or lab-grown meat on a supermarket shelf. Every software engineer should understand this, we know there are ideas that work only when they’re in a limited setting (number of threads, connections, size of input, whatever).

The media is always terrible at communicating this. Science isn’t fucking magic, the fact that scientists were able to put one more qubit into their quantum computer means literally nothing to you, because the answer to “when will we have personal quantum computers” is “what? how did you get into my lab?”. We have no idea. 50 years? 100 years? 1000 years? Likely never? Which number can I pull out of my ass for you to fuck off and let me do my research in peace? Of course, science is amazing, reading about those experiments is extremely interesting and cool as all fuck, but for some fucking reason the immediate reaction of the general public is “great, how quickly can we put a pricemark on it”.

And this leads to this zeitgeist where the next great “breakthrough” is just around the corner and is going to save us all. AI will fix the job market! Carbon capture will fix climate change! Terraforming Mars will solve everything! Sit the fuck down and grow up, this is not how anything works. I don’t even know where this idea of “breakthroughs” comes from, the scientific process isn’t an action movie with three acts and a climax, who told you that? What even was the last technological “breakthrough”? Transistors were invented like 70yrs ago, but it wasn’t an immediate breakthrough, it required like 40yrs of work on improving vacuum tubes to get there. And that was based on a shitton of work on electric theory from the XIX century. It was a slow process of incremental scientific discoveries across nations and people, which culminated in you having an iPhone 200 years later. And that’s at least based on something we can actually easily observe in the natural world (and, funnily enough, we still don’t have a comprehensive theory of how lightning storms even form on Earth). With fusion you’re talking about replicating the heart of a star here on Earth, with lab grown meat you’re talking about growing flesh in defiance of gods, and you think it’s an overnight thing where you’ll wake up tomorrow and suddenly bam we just have cold fusion and hot artificial chicken?

I hate how everyone seems to be addicted to, I don’t know, just speed as a concept? Things have to be now, news is only good if it arrives to me breaking in 5 minutes, science is only good if it’s just around the corner, a product is only good if it gets one billion users in a month. Just calm the fuck down. When was the last time you smelt the roses?

If you keep running through life all the roses are gonna burn down before you realise.

Salvation Army

they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things

No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they’re not even a charity! They don’t get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It’s a church! We don’t even know how to evaluate them because there’s literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!

Also Chick’fil’A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.

Will Microsoft fully buy them out?

Yup. They own basically everything anyway, they take the tech, poach the people, lay off 80% of them, and then continue selling copilot in Office 2137 Pro Enterprise Whatever until the end of time

Satelite models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that the Moon might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding its true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether the Moon has the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the Moon to strongly follow. We evaluate satelite models on a suite of six planetary evaluations where the Moon is instructed to pursue goals and is placed in orbits that incentivize scheming.

don’t think I’ve ever heard someone I agree with being so unpleasant to listen to

Sending this to EZ so that he can put it as his by-line

Ed is presuming a high school education from his readers

Hmm, I don’t think ignoring the American audience like that is a good idea, but maybe he has his reasons

Funnily enough he makes a really strong case as to why he specifically definitely shouldn’t be a father.

If you asked an embryo to pick parents it’d be like “oof, anyone but that guy please”

When you consider Elon Musk everything is a strategy, even when he falls face-first and exposes his whole ass. It has to be a strategy because he is the smartest boy you see

Ahhh you see, the physics of 2D waifus were actually covered on the seminar a year after he flunked out. Womp womp.

the guy is actually almost a physicist, even flunked out of a Ph.D

Great credential for trying to “integrate physics and AI” if he’s demonstrably too lazy to understand physics at an advanced level.