For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they’re handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who’s ever scammed $5 in venture capital

I am not retreating from public writing

That’s OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.

I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).

The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.

The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.

The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!

The rest of his “accelerationist”/“decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha

“A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

daniel self-flagella, more like

Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor

I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.

Most “regular” people who remain human will be eaten by digital Infinite Jests, where they can the be tippy top of made up status hierarchies

This person has a remarkable lack of self-awareness

Apparently “unions” = “communism”.

…so what’s open-source software, then?

More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it:

Maybe this decision makes sense for you as a business: take the risk. But it doesn’t make sense for me as an end user.

I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.

warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed.

Oof, yeah. I kinda like the side-notes, but the instances where multiple embedded tweets were side-by-side AND simultaneously interspersed with side-notes were so visually confusing that I quit skimming the article.

this is what overpriced housing does to an mf

Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc.

Or is that something more quirky, “Eqoist?” Sorry, if you’re making it that easy to misread while I’m having my morning caffeine, I’m not going to do you any favors

cruise ship, duh

brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored

I could just bundle everything I’ve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.

Remember that this is not targeted to influence you. This is targeted to influence brain-poisoned wealthy Republicans who own things like a bunch of fracking oil-fields, or multiple car dealerships across multiple Southern states. The doors to the institutional capital (especially public pension fund capital) that Thiel’s investment funds previously had easy access to are surely being shut, and he’s trying to salvage what he can from MAGA as it breaks up on re-entry.

About half of it (~150 pages)

That’s not a card! That’s a book!!! If they can’t get this simple classification right, how am I supposed to trust their probabilistic text extruder?

I think we can call it, “Goose value 71” is officially the peak of the bubble

Yah and sign up for their newsletter too

high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off

Bbbbbut making high-end medical equipment profit margins on cheap Furby knockoffs is the new Silicon Valley ideal!

A step up from last week’s uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I’ll take it, but they’ve still got a ways to go to convince me that they’re not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029

This situation is the first time I’ve become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kiki’s. I’m gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed