small thread about these guys:

https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3llepnsvtpk2g

tldr only new thing I saw is that as a teenager the founder annoyed “over 100” academics until one of them, a computer scientist, endorsed his research about a mobile game that diagnoses you with Alzheimer’s in five minutes

hmm, interesting. I hadn’t heard of these guys. their original step 1 seems to have been building a mobile game that would diagnose you with Alzheimer’s in 10 minutes, but I guess at some point someone told them that was stupid:

So far, the team has raised $6 million in seed funding for a HIPAA-compliant app that, according to Patel, can help identify Alzheimer’s disease — even years before symptoms appear — after just 10 minutes of gameplay on a cellphone. It’s not purely a tech offering. Patel says the results are given to an “actual physician” affiliated with Craniometrix who “reviews, verifies, and signs that diagnostic” and returns it to a patient.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/this-yale-alum-wants-to-build-a-telemedicine-platform-expressly-for-alzheimers-disease/

my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim.

(side note, gender affirming care resolved this. in my case HRT didn’t really help by itself, but facial feminization surgery immediately cured my dysphoria. also for some reason it cured my lower back pain)

(of course it wasn’t covered in any way, which represents exactly the sort of hostility to bodily agency transhumanists would prioritize over ten foot long electric current sensing dongs or whatever, if they were serious thinkers)

I used to think transhumanism was very cool because escaping the misery of physical existence would be great. for one thing, I’m trans, and my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim. transhumanism to my understanding promised the liberation of hundreds of millions from actual oppression.

then I found out there was literally no reason to expect mind uploading or any variation thereof to be possible. and when you think about what else transhumanism is, there’s nothing to get excited about. these people don’t have any ideas or cogent analysis, just a powerful desire to evade limitations. it’s inevitable that to the extent they cohere they’re a cult: they’re a variety of sovereign citizen

they’re never going to let it go, are they? it doesn’t matter how long they spend receiving zero utility or signs of intelligence from their billion dollar ouji boards

interesting masto thread on doge’s use of AI, from someone who helped build their LLM:

https://elk.zone/carhenge.club/@skiles/114203147063483693

the phones seem to serve no practical purpose. they already have his number and I don’t think you can conclude much from call logs. so suppose they are symbolic. what he would be communicating is that he’s so fully pliant that he is willing to do things there is no possible excuse for, and not even for real benefit, just to suck up to them. the opposite of plausible deniability

I get the reasoning and it makes sense tbh. but having been at these places what I experienced just doesn’t reflect your theorycrafting. if my experience doesn’t line up with “well based on human nature it should be this or that way” I’m going to go with my experience every time

the subtext here that ppl at prestigious universities are less likely to be misogynists… it’s not correct

they’re almost identical. biggest difference is that barris is less charismatic (not being RDJ), creepier and more clearly a crypto nazi in the original. I don’t think you’re missing anything by sticking with the movie

I AM A GOD OF THE INTERNET *five seconds later* HELP MY MOUSE IS MOVING BY IT SELF

I reread (listened to actually) that book last week. it’s probably qualified as “uncomfortably prescient” at every point since idk the bush administration. in particular barris is exactly the sort of psycho this moment was made for, there’s not that much difference between him and musk

I do like bugs and spam!

I will write them in the box.

I will help you boost our stocks.

Thank you, Sam-I-am,

for letting me write bugs and spam!

I hope it goes without saying but none of this is posted approvingly

I agree. you’ve got a community built around a right wing coded topic, using the same sources and with the same delusions as their parent community, but they’re mixing and matching bits of ideology and cooking up a left wing variant. it’s incoherent but that doesn’t seem to bother them

I always find this sort of wild swing across the spectrum fascinating. for example a lot of hardcore TERFs still think of themselves as genuine feminists even though anyone in those circles has for some time now been building the fourth reich. or the fact that there’s a left wing GameStop cult subreddit. when I see these things I have to conclude that no ideology makes you immune to any other ideology

stumbled across an ai doomer subreddit, /r/controlproblem. small by reddit standards, 32k subscribers which I think translates to less activity than here.

if you haven’t looked at it lately, reddit is still mostly pretty lib with rabid far right pockets. but after luigi and the trump inauguration it seems to have swung left significantly, and in particular the site is boiling over with hatred for billionaires.

the interesting bit about this subreddit is that it follows this trend. for example

or the comments under this

or the comments on a post about how elon has turned out to be a huge piece of shit because he’s a ketamine addict

mostly though they’re engaging in the traditional rationalist pastime of giving each other anxiety

the cherries metaphor hinges on him willingly having eaten shit covered ice cream

about 3 in 100 americans are in prison, on parole, etc. so if that’s the definition of a criminal, you would get 97% accuracy by just guessing not criminal every time

there’s got to be a better name. bogocoding?

excellent method, compatible with all worst practices and suitable for posting on hackernews as well