Anyone here read “World War Z”? There’s a section there about how the health authorities in basically all countries supress and deny the incipient zombie outbreak. I think about that a lot nowadays.

Anyway the COVID response, while ultimately better than the worst case scenario (Spanish Flu 2.0) has made me really unconvinced we will do anything about climate change. We had a clear danger of death for millions of people, and the news was dominated by skeptics. Maybe if it had targetted kids instead of the very old it would have been different.

HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion

Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is “The Best Charity Isn’t What You Think”.

The SH is catnip to “scientific types” who don’t recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it can’t be that hard to simulate the entire workings of a universe down to the quark level, can it? So surely someone just a bit smarter than themselves have already done it and are running a simulation with them in it. It’s basically elementary!

Shorter HN: wasting gigawatts of power to increase VC valuations - fine. Discarding 80k pounds of butter because of missing allergen information is the worst thing to happen since the burning of the library of Alexandria

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150991

Some techbro proposes “HumaneRank” as a distribution system in the post-AI era and while HN finds it disturbingly like a global popularity system at least “it’s better than Communism”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42140664

Running for office is just a stunt for these people. More unearned publicity.

The Onion: Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’

Apparently real: https://archive.is/pxmqX

Seeing a worrying trend of people wanting to cosplay as La Resistance, going dark, hiding from the cops. “Fun” fact, the Gestapo was extremely good at finding, torturing and killing people in the resistance. If people only know you via encrypted messaging, who is gonna raise a ruckus when you’re sent to a camp?

Kill and dethrone God.

I will never forget the dude who argued online that the sealion is the real victim here (a victim of the “disgruntled female”)

I think we can all agree now that US Rationalists are basically all ex-Christians who are looking for the same thing but with the serial numbers filed off.

Yeah that’s the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they’ll start using it. There’s all sorts of rationalizations going on - it’s portable, it’s performant, it’s what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.

Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.

Anyway I like how the options presented are “socialism” - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?

I had to doublecheck what “polygynous” means, and I “love” this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It’s technichally correct in some parts of the world.

Posting not for the content but for the stunningly inept AI slop illustrations:

https://datastream.substack.com/p/mistakes-from-my-failed-startup-in

JFC it was just 11 individuals??? To read the Putin sockpuppets having a Russian grandmother was enough to be booted from the MAINTAINERS list, your computer confiscated, and you being sent to Archangelsk on trumped-up charges.

Oh wait, that’s just what happens to random teens in Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v5rn8jr82o

It’s more like everyone is hungry for content and the POTUS election is a big generator of it.

Not really that surprising. Computer programmers are textbook petite bourgeoisie.

Edit I don’t keep track of C and C-likes, but apparently D has been forked, and it seems that Walter Bright is a bit of a dick as a maintainer too

https://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2024_01_01.html

The “money” the AI companies have are basically just promises from backers. If they cannot deliver their promises (which boil down to basically knowledge industries replacing around 20% of their workforce with LLMs) then that imaginary money dries up. Remember, there are real bills in the form of power and cooling and hardware that have to be paid all the time just to keep running in place.

A lawsuit that convinces the public and investors that LLMs are a dead end will kill most LLM companies.

damn Poe’s

That’s the thing. What Russia under Putin is doing is textbook imperialism, not the weird alt-left definition which defines it as “what the US and its allies does”. But hey, mangling and redefining terms is a Soviet/Russian tradition.

Stepping back, take a look at what the Russian duma is legislating and point to the “leftist” content. Just the other day they decided that “childfree propaganda” should be outlawed. Breed more cannon fodder for the Motherland!