“Why is LessWrong awesome and it’s because we’re prepared to take racism seriously isn’t it”

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZrqTkTCgnFhEgxvQ/what-is-lesswrong-good-for

The focussing on Covid is weird seeing that AFAIK basically everyone who knew anything about pandemics were sounding the alarm at the same time that (some) rats and techbros were trying to corner the market in protective gear.

Shoulda used Grok

“I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”).

“Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”

She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.

Credit where credit is due, I found this via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552565

Also per https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-finances, author is Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund in question.

An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed

(n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he’s a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)

Global Crossing Is Reborn…

Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)

An AI Addendum

As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”

[…]

Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.

He wanted Nazi Germany with Milton Friedman, he’ll get Argentina without a USA to bail it out.

Not really, Schmitt is the real villian

I found it really interesting and scary

https://archive.ph/ZdXIS

I read the disucssions and while I can sympathize with jwz’s ridicule of barely covered raw git, I think he’s asking for advice in the wrong place. There must be tons of solutions for running a small business with lots of part timers ,like a nightclub.

I think one important through-line is that both pencil-necked computer fondlers and muscle-bound roid ragers can and do hate women.

Surprisingly still up on lobsters and the comments aren’t totally horrible.

m’lady

let’s see how fast it gets flagged and deleted from the usual sites

I’ve mentioned before that I believe that Elon turning Twitter into a Nazi bar cut Bluesky’s business model off at its knees. They’re founded by Dorsey, weirdly (or cunningly) absent from the current techfash scene. I’ve always felt the vibe to be coiners and libertarians and “they can’t cancel you here”. Then they got a totally unearned user base because of X, and they’re simply not ready to handle it.

AFAIK there’s no revenue model, Jack or another VC is still footing the bill, and if there’s too much trans stuff on there the funding will dry up.

I have stock firefox on mac and the first 2 tiles on the new tab are sponsored

a lobsters is mad that a middling Perl project gets upvotes just because it’s “braincoded”

https://lobste.rs/s/bu1a84/i_brain_coded_static_image_gallery_few#c_um9usd

By “openwashing” I mean the posts about AT protocol are running cover for Bluesky, the company. It’s basically reinforcing their narrative that if you don’t like what they’re doing, “just” start your own PDS. By focussing on the technical nitty-gritty, these posts ignore the structures in place keeping Bluesky in the dominant position.

An analogy, Bitcoin code is also open, but 1% of coin owners own like 90% of the coins. I’m not making any excuses for BTC here, but I seem to remember a bunch of similar articles breathlessly explaining how BTC “solves the Byzantine generals problem” while totally ignoring the ownership profile.

Is it just me or does it feel there’s a concerted effort to boost the AT protocol in tech venues? Maybe I’m paranoid but it does feel like a bit of openwashing going on.

Bluesky wanted to be Nazi Twitter, then Elon purchased Twitter and stole their market.

I think I read Starship Troopers before I saw the movie, because a small scene reveals that Johnny Rico is of Phillipine descent (his mother tongue is Tagalog) and I remember wondering if that would be part of the movie. Samuel R Delany mentions that scene as something that made him felt included in SF.

I was very young when I read it but even then I could read it as proto-fascist (or rather military-authoritarian, a bit like cod-Roman Republic)

Because the Terminator franchise is from Hollywood, the heroic resisters to SkyNet are Americans. Someone didn’t watch the movies very well.

OFC the OG Terminator was a scary foreign man with a pronounced accent…