I’m pretty sure that Atlas Shrugged is actually just cursed and nobody has ever finished it. John Galt’s speech gets two pages longer whenever you finish one.

And I think the challenge with engaging with Rand as a fiction author is that, put bluntly, she is bad at writing fiction. The characters and their world don’t make any sense outside of the allegorical role they play in her moral and political philosophy, which means you’re not so much reading a good story with thought behind it as much as it’s a philosophical treatise that happens in the form of dialogue. It’s a story in the same way that Plato’s Republic is a story, but the Republic can actually benefit from understanding the context of the different speakers at least as a historical text.

So maybe I’m just showing my lack of actual dev experience here, but isn’t “making code modifications algorithmically at scale” kind of definitionally the opposite of good software engineering? Like, I’ll grant that stuff is complicated but if you’re making the same or similar changes at some massive scale doesn’t that suggest that you could save time, energy and mental effort by deduplicating somewhere?

This doesn’t really feel performative enough for that crowd, though. Like, if it included some kind of horribly racist engraving or even just a company logo then maybe, but I don’t think anyone’s gonna trigger the libs by just playing their metal not-gameboy.

It’s interesting to see how many ways they can find to try and brand “LLMs are fundamentally unreliable” as a security vulnerability. Like, they’re not entirely wrong, but it’s also not something that fits into the normal framework around software security. You almost need to treat the LLM as though it were an actual person not because it’s anywhere near capable of that but because the way it fits into the broader system is as close as IT has yet come to a direct in-place replacement for a human doing the task. Like, the fundamental “vulnerability” here is that everyone who designs and approves these implementations acts like LLMs are simultaneously as capable and independent as an actual person but also have the mechanical reliability and consistency of a normal computer program, when in practice they are neither of those things.

Can I just take a moment to appreciate Merriam-Webster for coming in clutch with the confirmation that we’re not misunderstanding the “6-7” meme that the kids have been throwing around?

Jesus. This being 2025 of course he had to clarify that it’s definitely not DEI. Also it really grinds me gears to see hyperfocus listed as one of the “beneficial” aspects because there’s no way it’s not exploitative. Hey, so you know how sometimes you get so caught up in a project you forget to eat? Just so you know, you could starve on the clock. For me.

Sounds a bit like a Swedish heiress to Lillian Gilbreth. My wife has had some mobility issues and has lamented that the work that went into designing more ergonomic and accessible kitchens in the 40s and 50s was largely abandoned and ignored in more recent homes.

Honestly you could probably pitch that to the Musk/Thiel set pretty easily by playing up how masculine fighter pilots are and disconnecting but not removing the rear flight controls. Let them push buttons and feel cool.

I’m legitimately disappointed in John Carmack here. He should be a good enough programmer to understand the limitations here, but I guess his business career has driven in a different direction.

Call the last one A for Agency and turn the acronym into an AI history reference: ELISA.

I feel like this is a really common experience with both HPMoR and HP itself, and explains a large part of the positive reputation they enjoy(ed).

Based on your reproduction it looks like the biggest reason to doubt the original results is that they all have the hands right and hair that seems like it vaguely fits a human scalp.

Yud seems to have the same conception of insanity that Lovecraft did, where you learn too much and end up gibbering in a heap on the floor and needing to be fed through a tube in an asylum or whatever. Even beyond the absurdity of pretending that your authorial intent has some kind of ability to manifest reality as long as you don’t let yourself be the subject (this is what no postmodernism does to a person), the actual fear of “going mad” seems fundamentally disconnected from any real sense of failing to handle the stress of being famously certain that the end times are indeed upon us. I guess prophets of doom aren’t really known for being stable or immune to narcissistic flights of fancy.

Patrick Boyle on YouTube has a breakdown of the breakdown of the Microstrategy flywheel scheme. Decent financial analysis of this nonsense combined with some of the driest humor on the internet.

It’s also the sort of thing that you wouldn’t actually think to ask for until it became quite hard to sort out. Creating this kind of list over time as good resources are found is much more practical and not the kind of thing would likely be automated.

You’d think that they’d eventually run out of ways to say “fuck you, got mine” but here we are I guess. I’m going to guess that they’re not subject to the same kinds of environmental regulations or whatever that an actual power plant would be because it’s not connected to the grid?

It legitimately feels like at least half of these jokers have the same attitude towards IT and project management that sovereign citizens do to the law. SovCits don’t understand the law as a coherent series of rules and principles applied through established procedures etc, they just see a bunch of people who say magic words that they don’t entirely understand and file weird paperwork that doesn’t make sense and then end up getting given a bunch of money or going to prison or whatever. It’s a literal cargo cult version of the legal system, with the slight hiccup that the rest of the world is trying to actually function.

Similarly, the Silicon Valley Business Idiot set sees the tech industry as one where people say the right things and make the buttons look pretty and sometimes they get bestowed reality-warping sums of money. The financial system is sufficiently divorced from reality that the market doesn’t punish the SVBIs for their cargo cult understanding of technology, but this does explain a lot of the discourse and the way people like Thiel, Andreesen, and Altman talk about their work and why the actual products are so shite to use.

Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.

Also I would contend they’re misusing “infrastructure”. Social media and chat bots are kinds of services that are provided over the internet, but they aren’t a part of the infrastructure itself anymore than the world’s largest ball of twine is part of the infrastructure of the Interstate Highway System.

Hat tip to the person who wants to try and include DMT and other hallucinogens and psychedelics. How many of these experiences are gonna be tagged “Machine Elves” by the time anyone starts asking wtf we’re doing here?