CinnasVerses @ CinnasVerses @awful.systems

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2 mo. ago

The big web exists because 1) VC money, 2) massive surveillance rewarded by lack of privacy laws in the USA, 3) US hegemony, and 4) cheap energy and a stable climate. All of those are going away. Most of the big sites are like an 18th century sugar plantation owner's formal garden and pet composer, they lose money or barely break even but M$, Google, and Facebook have so much money that they don't care. Then one day the plantation owner hears that Saint-Domingue is free or the colonials are in revolt, and a few months later the servants are told that economies must be made.

And how does a 23-year-old whose parents run a Chinese restaurant have >$600,000 to found a company? Austria is a conservative country with a lot of old money and laws that are not friendly to small speculative businesses.

Founders' credentials include a PhD, experience developing software, and being ranked #4 in League of Legends (European edition)

It does look like the facial recognition in the support.apple.com link is opt-in!

I am told that Apple, DropBox, etc. have done this for years, often in the name of "fighting CSAM" or "helping you organize your photos". https://support.apple.com/en-us/108795 Agree that its a very good reason not to touch corporate cloud services and to not let people take digital photos of your face even if they promise not to share them! I do not trust any company with physical assets in the USA not to be penetrated by three-letter-organizations and data brokers.

We did quite well with few long Internet videos 20 years ago, and we will do well again 50 years from now when the corporate Internet has collapsed like the Qing Dynasty or the East India Company and the Internet is decentralized, low-bandwidth, and solar-powered

They don't like to talk about solar panels and battery technology do they? But those are obvious examples of a technology on the vertical part of the S-curve right now. And computing is not just hardware (Moore's Law and blue LEDs) but also algorithms like A* or ActivityPub Protocol and software like Google Search.

It reminds me of the "infinite scroll" archive of a Substack blog which also freezes or crashes if you search a blog with a few hundred posts so fortunately they don't encourage you to post often (picks up note card) um, although they encourage you to post often

Stripe the payment processor published a book asking "what if bubbles are good and necessary? Was it economically rational to discover America?" The authors have a startup called Anomaly Capital. https://press.stripe.com/boom

Scroll down to the book by a Dwarkesh Patel who interviewed all our favorite people.

I have never seen slop on Mastodon, but I often see it when I am logged in to Facebook (both suggested by the websites, and shared by people).

A very simple strategy is buying less US assets and more international assets than you would hold if the US stock market was not weighted so heavily towards Friend Computer. If 60% of my stocks were in the US in 2015, I might hold 30% today (this is not financial advice).

Contra Doctorow there are lots of strategies someone can chose if they think the US stock market is likely to collapse in the next three years. Eg. there are people in the USA who bought some chickens and seeds last winter, or who started new jobs or new education outside the USA. Deciding to act is the hardest.

"You know, I never defrauded anyone,” says Sam Bankman-Fried

“You know, I never sent the boys across the Isonzo without believing we could win,” said Luigi Cadorna

This also shows problems with the "effective altruist" approach. Donating to the local theater or "to raise awareness of $badThing" might not be the best way of using funds, but when a friend needs help now, you have the resources to help them, and you say "no, that might not be as efficient as creating a giant charity to help strangers one day" something is wrong.

Soyweiser

Its even worse when I read the whole thread, Atwood claims to have $140 million, and the best he can do for "a friend" who is homeless is handing out some printouts with a few sections highlighted? And he thinks this makes him look good because he promises to give away half his wealth one day?

"Provide an overview of local homeless services" sounds like a standard task for a volunteer or a search engine, but yes "you can use my address for mail and store some things in my garage and I will email some contacts about setting you up with contract work" would be a better answer than just handing out secondhand information! Many "amazing things AI can do" are things the Internet + search engines could do ten years ago.

I would also like to hear from the friend "was this actually helpful?"

There are a few relevant posts on LessWrong like Yud in 2007 and Lukeprog in 2011. Ayn Rand was in to selfishness and its big with market worshipers like Bryan Caplan.

Selfishness sounds like it might be his way of thinking about some of this (I don't think he could allow himself to think "I am a fundraiser and pulp writer and married with no other achievements" but I think he knows he likes to be adored and control things).

When we get a proper history of this subculture, with names and dates and diagrams of the polycules and play parties and group homes, it is going to be wild.

Jon Evans is the only person I know who has read Yud's early mailing-list posts, and he was already an AI cultist and went on to work for Metaculus and Meta Superintelligence. There is probably interesting material in there but clearly Yud already thought highly of himself, already believed he was the Chosen One, already got defensive and wordy when someone criticized his ideas, and already posted voluminous pseudo-intellectual screeds which are not as consistent and logical as he believed.

Evans loves chatbot-summaries, but some science writers spent year at it and could not make the bot spit out useful abstracts. And he says he can skim a scientific paper in 5 minutes.

Just this week Scott Alexander wrote a long 'joke' about how the fe-males just want to attach themselves to a high-status man like (guess who) Curtis Yarvin (bonus self-own: the joke implies that Curtis Yarvin is not inviting the narrator to parties any more) https://archive.is/akSnc

Yud has distanced himself from some of the things he posted before LessWrong, but he keeps citing the Pathfinder fic on twitter (here in 2022) (here in 2025)

I also don't understand why he objects to that story given that it gets people talking about him as weird but able to get what he wants? But the claim that he dated women at MIRI and wanted them to provide free labour attacks the narrative that MIRI is nothing like Leverage Research or the Zizians.