istewart @ istewart @awful.systems

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GPT-8: The Ocho

Now trained with comprehensive coverage of top-fuel lawnmower racing and timbersports

These days, I often find myself saying that I would be further along as a programmer if I had taken Squeak Smalltalk more seriously when I first encountered it.

On the other hand, I do not think I would be very happy working in the modern software industry. Better remunerated, perhaps, but not any more satisfied with life.

can we come up with a way to tag posts as "infohazard"

You must be one of those strange people who Paul Graham and Thiel get all excited about, who communicate entirely in memes

other worldbuilding conceits I won’t get into here

My invite-only internal prediction market is offering good odds that this is referring to either math pets or tentacles, and a solid parlay opportunity on it being both combined

You thought a right-and-proper Communist Five-Year Plan couldn't also be a self-insert fanfic? Hold Yud's beer

I grew up nearby the hometown of one of the Rick and Morty creators, I think the one that got fired for excessive drunkenness and harassment. And when I found that out, my immediate reaction was, "yup, of course a guy from Manteca would make a cartoon about having an alcoholic grandpa"

Business Insider so poop-tier, I tacitly assumed this was happening already

If this is truly the path, then Wimp Lo must be the most rational man in the universe

Kayfabe.

Although one of the mortal risks of kayfabe has always been that the performers begin to buy too deeply into the performance, cf. Macho Man Randy Savage's rap album

A lot of this is complaints we've heard from Thiel before that are starting to get pretty tired, i.e. everything stagnated during the 1970s and the lack of immediately applicable Big Science since then means that there is no more Progress. But it is important to remember that Thiel and his fellow venture capitalists are in the business of selling money, and the most important price they attach to that money is not interest or equity, but ideological compliance. (I credit Del Johnson on Twitter for laying this out clearly and simply, and I dearly wish he would expand and diversify his platforms.) Thiel is enacting a pro-wrestling-style kayfabe performance to try to rotate the market into which he is selling his money.

It is most interesting that Thiel's position here is essentially "how do you do, fellow Christians," and he offers very little if anything to people of a more technical bent. In fact, if this was your first encounter with Thiel, you would be forgiven for thinking he was essentially against technology. The only meaningful message here is that Thiel no longer has any upside in investing in technical enterpreneurs, and instead wants to preserve his wealth and infleunce by throwing in with the remnants of the evangelical movement as the Trump era draws to a close. In a sense, he's trying to salvage his investment in Trump by pivoting to explicitly Christian rhetoric and downplaying his prior career.

Two notes stand out to convince me that Thiel is using (and perhaps trapped in) the logic of kayfabe:

Oppenheimer lamented, "We need new knowledge like we need a hole in the head." Nick Bostrom has proposed "preventative policing" and "global compute governance" in his Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Eliezer Yudkowsky's latest book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Two out of three of these people have taken money from Thiel or his close associates. Thiel helped to create the condition he is describing here. Vince McMahon may have shot up 'roids and stepped into the ring 30 years ago (something which turned me off to WWF/E programming during its golden age), but he was also ultimately the guy signing everyone's paychecks and dictating the storylines.

Q: How do you view Silicon Valley's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto"?

It represents a kind of corporate utopianism. In the 1990s, there was a broad cultural optimism that technology would solve everything. But by 2025, that optimism has shrunk. Today's visions are narrower, less inclusive, and far less confident. The grand, utopian projects have given way to incremental gains, overshadowed by fears of collapse.

Thiel is essentially "cutting a promo" on Andreessen's prior screed, and part of that is conflating it with the relatively unambitious, unaccomplished startup market that continues to exist in its wake. But there is surely no effective acrimony behind the scenes. We will continue to see A16Z money invested right alongside Thiel Capital, Founders' Fund, etc. We will continue to see smaller A16Z and YCombinator startups attach themselves as limpets to Thiel-funded platform companies. We will continue to see plenty of Silicon Valley cash on deposit with Thiel's whatever-the-hell-LOTR-reference-it-is-this-week bank. As there is no real enmity, Thiel's likely focus going forward is as the main salesman getting Midwest and Southern MAGA money into the SV ecosystem, while giving these people a figleaf of deniability that they are still "conservatives" and not funding all the things they have been programmed to hate about California.

Lastly, I find that Thiel reveals what will likely be his fatal flaw:

Q: Is the Antichrist an individual person, or an institution?

Early Christians thought it was Nero. Lutherans and Anglicans pointed to the Pope. But until the modern age, humanity lacked the power to destroy itself. That has changed. Because our era uniquely possesses this destructive capacity, the Antichrist today can only be understood as an individual, not merely an institution.

I cannot take most of Thiel's 20 years of whining about "no progress since 1971" seriously; it simply ignores all the technological benefits that have primarily accrued at an individual level. Thiel ignores all this because it does not offer an easy place for him to slot himself in as a rentier. But I am willing to consider that he sincerely, durably believes in Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat as central social figure. Moreover, he implies here that he still believes in the social media he has funded as a tool to "focus fire" on these supposedly necessary scapegoats. That is very likely part of his sales pitch behind closed doors if you're, say, a franchisee magnate from Alabama looking to diversify into alternative investments. And while Thiel himself has wisely stayed above the Twitter fray, he's seen how his colleagues can use it to manipulate the public dialogue.

However, as I argued in another forum earlier this week, I firmly believe that short-form social media as the "public square" is dying. Facebook's properties are at best plateauing and at worst stagnating, Twitter is a financial disaster (and really always has been), Bluesky is burning runway. People are retreating into more private settings with barriers to entry like Discord servers, and fitfully grasping towards healthier boundaries in online behavior. Partly due to abuses incited by Thiel's colleagues.

This is why I wonder if Thiel is trapped in the logic of kayfabe. Like the aging wrestler, he needs something to be true that just plain isn't. And though he remains a feared and reviled figure this decade, each time he steps into the ring from here on out will be on ever weaker footing.

YouTube interview show where the interviewee is fed hot-sauce coated chicken wings of escalating spiciness

As an aside, my personal tolerance is such that if I ever go on there, I'm going to end up bankrupting the fuckers

It suddenly strikes me that not even 20 years ago, this same type of guy would still have preferred being called "inventor" rather than "investor" (although it still would have been something equally useless)

Let him get thru a few more HGH cycles

LMAO, this poor bastard turned himself into a Thiel cosplayer to get his attention

We assumed these people were mainly just masturbating, now we know

A brief reminder that Dragonball Z gives up on explicit power level rankings about 30% of the way through; the little machines that read out the numbers start blowing up and they don't bother building replacements

This is an interesting crystallization that parallels a lot of thoughts I've been having, and it's particularly hopeful that it seeks to discard the "hacker" moniker and instead specifically describe the subjects as programmers. Looking back, I was only becoming terminally online circa 1997, and back then it seemed like there was an across-the-spectrum effort to reclaim the term "hacker" into a positive connotation after the federal prosecutions of the early 90s. People from aspirant-executive types like Paul Graham to dirty hippies like RMS were insistent that being a "hacker" was a good thing, maybe the best possible thing. This was, of course, a dead letter as soon as Facebook set up at "One Hacker Way" in Menlo Park, but I'd say it's definitely for the best to finally put a solid tombstone on top of that cultural impulse.

As well, because my understanding of the defining activity of the positive-good "hacker" is that it's all too close to Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things," and I think Jared White would probably agree with me. Paul Graham was willing to embrace the term because he was used to the interactive development style of Lisp environments, but the mainstream tools have only fitfully evolved in that direction at best. When "hacking," the "hacker" makes a series of short, small iterations with a mostly nebulous goal in mind, and the bulk of the effort may actually be what's invested in the minimum viable product. The self-conception inherits from geek culture a slumped posture of almost permanent insufficiency, perhaps hiding a Straussian victimhood complex to justify maintaining one's own otherness.

In mentioning Jobs, the piece gestures towards the important cultural distinction that I still think is underexamined. If we're going to reclaim and rehabilitate even homeopathic amounts of Jobs' reputation, the thesis we're trying to get at is that his conception of computers as human tools is directly at odds with the AI promoters' (and, more broadly, most cloud vendors') conception of computers as separate entities. The development of generative AI is only loosely connected with the sanitized smiley-face conception of "hacking." The sheer amount of resources and time spent on training foreclose the possibility of a rapid development loop, and you're still not guaranteed viable output at the end. Your "hacks" can devolve into a complete mess, and at eye-watering expense.

I went and skimmed Graham's Hackers and Painters again to see if I could find any choice quotes along these lines, since he spends that entire essay overdosing on the virtuosity of the "hacker." And hoo boy:

Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people's ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.

You think Graham will ever realize that we're culminating a generation of his precious "hackers" who ultimately failed at all this?

I don’t know why they decided to put an AI slop image right up top in their banner and then repeat it later.

I've written off otherwise informative newsletters because of this. It's, quite literally, filler with less information than the prompt typed in to generate the image. So what else are they bullshitting me about?

Also they both seem to agree that a worldwide moratorium on AI research that will give us time to breed/genetically engineer superior brained humans to fix our shit is the way to go.

This century deserves a better class of thought-criminal

Damn, I was hoping someone would finally recognize the true value of the ASCII-art goatse that used to show up on Slashdot all the time, before this inevitably came to pass