TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I'm pretty sure there are some other factors he's gonna need to sort out before having kids is even an actual question. For example, finding a woman who wants to have his kids and let him fuck with their infant brains.
Also given how we see the brain develop in cases of traumatic injury I would expect to see that neuroplasticity route around any kind of implant under most circumstances. Nerves aren't wires and you can't just plug 'em in and wait for a software patch.
what kind of semen retention scheme is this
No Nut Neuravember
I want my kids to be science experiments as there is no other way an ethics board would approve this kind.
Turns out some Silicon Valley folk are unhappy that a whole load of waymos got torched, fantasised that the cars could just gun down the protesters, and use genai video to bring their fantasies to some vague approximation of “life”
https://xcancel.com/venturetwins/status/1931929828732907882
The author, Justine Moore is an investment partner at a16z. May her future ventures be incendiary and uninsurable.
(via garbageday.email)
What is it with every fucking veo3 video being someone talking to the camera?! Artificial slop model tuned on humanmade slop.
I wonder if some of those chuds think those waymos might be conscious
Seeing shit like this alongside the discussions of the use of image recognition and automatic targeting in the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian bombers is not great.
Also something something sanitized violence something something. These people love to fantasize about the thrill of defending themselves and their ideology with physical force but even in their propaganda are (rightly) disgusted and terrified by the consequences that such violence has on actual people.9
At first I was like:
But then I was like:
And back on the subject of builder.ai, there’s a suggestion that it might not have been A Guy Instead, and the whole 700 human engineers thing was a misunderstanding.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/
I’m not wholly sure I buy the argument, which is roughly
- people from the company are worried that this sort of new will affect their future careers.
- humans in the loop would have exhibited far too high latency, and getting an llm to do it would have been much faster and easier than having humans try to fake it at speed and scale.
- there were over a thousand “external contractors” who were writing loads of code, but that’s not the same as being Guys Instead.
I guess the question then is: if they did have a good genai tool for software dev… where is it? Why wasn’t Microsoft interested in it?
"Cursor YOLO deleted everything in my computer":
Hi everyone - as a previous context I’m an AI Program Manager at J&J and have been using Cursor for personal projects since March.
Yesterday I was migrating some of my back-end configuration from Express.js to Next.js and Cursor bugged hard after the migration - it tried to delete some old files, didn’t work at the first time and it decided to end up deleting everything on my computer, including itself. I had to use EaseUS to try to recover the data, but didn’t work very well also. Lucky I always have everything on my Google Drive and Github, but it still scared the hell out of me.
Now I’m allergic to YOLO mode and won’t try it anytime soon again. Does anyone had any issue similar than this or am I the first one to have everything deleted by AI?
The response:
Hi, this happens quite rarely but some users do report it occasionally.
My T-shirt is raising questions already answered, etc.
(via)
I looked this up because I thought it was a nickname for something, but no, Cursor seems to have a setting that’s officially called YOLO mode. As per their docs:
With Yolo Mode, the agent can auto-run terminal commands
So this guy explicitly ticked the box that allowed the bullshit generator to execute arbitrary code on his machine. Why would you ever use that? What's someone’s rationale for enabling a setting like that? They even name it YOLO mode. It’s like the fucking red button in the movie that says, don’t push the red button, and promptfans are still like, yes, that sounds like a good idea!
There is an implicit claim in the red button that it was worth including.
It is like Google’s AI overviews. There can not be a sufficient disclaimer because the overview being on the top of Google search implies a level of usefulness which it does not meet, not even in the “evil plan to make more money briefly” way.
Edit: my analogy to AI disclaimers is using “this device uses nuclei known to the state of California to…” in place of “drop and run”.
Can you imagine selling something like a firewall appliance with a setting called "Yolo Mode", or even a tax software or a photo organizer or anything that handles any data, even if only of middling importance, and then still expect to be taken seriously at all?
Yolo charging mode on a phone, disable the battery overheating sensor and the current limiter.
I suspect that they added yolo mode because without it this thing is too useless.
Setting my oven to YOLO Mode and dying in a fire 7 seconds later
I set my car to YOLO more by pointing the vehicle roughly the direction I wish to travel and then dropping a brick on the accelerator.
We already have this, it's just a Tesla with "FSD" on
I thought FSD only works if there are kids around for the car to aim at.
Well, they can't fully outsource thinking to the autocomplete if they get asked whether some actions are okay.
deserved tbh
I was reading a post by someone trying to make shell scripts with an llm, and at one point the system suggested making a directory called ~ (which is a shorthand for your home directory in a bunch of unix-alikes). When the user pointed out this was bad, the llm recommended remediation using rm -r ~ which would of course delete all your stuff.
So, yeah, don’t let the approximately-correct machine do things by itself, when a single character substitution can destroy all your stuff.
And JFC, being surprised that something called “YOLO” might be bad? What were people expecting? --all-the-red-flags
The basilisk we have at home
At the same time, we have a Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know etc in the article itself:
What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?” Mr. Yudkowsky asked in an interview. “It looks like an additional monthly user.”
I don't have the headspace to sneer it properly at this moment, but this article fucking goes places might even be worthy of its own techtakes post
Shawn Schneider — a 22-year-old who dropped out of his Christian high school, briefly attended community college, dropped out again, and earlier this year founded a marketing platform for generative AI — tells me college is outdated. Skipping it, for him, is as efficient as it is ideological. "It signals DEI," he says. "It signals, basically, woke and compromised institutions. At least in the circles I run in, the sentiment is like they should die."
Schneider says the women from his high school in Idaho were "so much better at doing what the teacher asks, and that was just not what I was good at or what the other masculine guys I knew were good at." He's married with two children, a girl and a boy, which has made him realize that schools should be separated by gender to "make men more manly, and women more feminine."
Least fascist programmer
Nothing in the article suggests he is a programmer, or that being a programmer is inherently fascist.
You're both incorrect. I am the least fascist programmer and I'm here to tell you programming is inherently fascist.
They say that you can't destroy the master's house with the master's tools, but what about hammers?
Yea, what if the master owns a wrecking ball, a bulldozer, a heavy duty excavator and a bunch of dynamite?
Yes, this is a metaphor for C programming, how did you know?
Does master own a Sawzall?
Funny thing, the sawzall vanished right before his catalytic converter went missing
That was one wild read even worse than I was expecting. Holy sexism Batman, the incel to tech pipeline is real.
"In college, you don't learn the building skills that you need for a startup," Tan says of his decision. "You're learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It's just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce."
I remember when a large part of the university experience was about meeting people, experiencing freedom from home for the first time before being forced into the 9-5 world, and broadening your horizon in general. But maybe that's just the European perspective.
In any case, these people are so fucking startup-brained that it hurts to think about.
Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.
Serious question: how? Isn't Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer? I tried to search up "how to make money off a Minecraft server" and was (of course) met with an endless list of results of LLM slop I could not bear to read more than one paragraph of.
Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, York says. "The success of Western civilization," she argues, "does not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now."
Yes, because Palantir is such a beacon of defending democratic values and not a techfash shithouse at all.
how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer?
For years now, custom plugins have made public Minecraft servers much less "block building game" than "robust engine for MMOs that every kid with a computer already has the client for," and even though it's mostly against Mojang's TOS, all the kinds of monetization you'd expect have followed. When you hear "Minecraft server that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit," imagine "freemium PC game that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit" and you'll get roughly the right picture. Peer pressure-driven cosmetics, technically-TOS-violating-but-who-cares lootboxes, $500 "micro"transaction packages, anything they can get away with. It puts into perspective why you hear so much about Minecraft YouTubers running their own servers.
In the Year of Our Lord 2025 how does anyone, much less a published journalist, not recognize "Western Civilization" as a dog whistle for white (or at least European) supremacy rather than having anything to do with representative government or universal human rights or whatever people like to pretend.
Uni is also a good place to learn to fail. A uni run startup imitation place can ensure both problems (guided by profs if needed) and teach people how to do better, without being in the pockets of VCs also better hours, and parties.
Re: minecraft - kids/people who aren't very good at technology can't or are unwilling to learn how to host their own servers, so that's your potentially paying audience. Or people who want to play with a ton of other people, not just their family/friends. And you can do some interesting things with custom scripts and so on on a server, I remember briefly playing on a server which had its own custom in-game currency (earned by selling certain materials) and you could buy potions, equipment and various random perks for it (and of course there are ways to connect that to real money, although you might get banned for it).
i googled for discussion around how a VPN can protect (or not) against a MITM attack, and came across this:
We are a small team of men trained through stoicism, currently, as newcomers to cybersecurity, we’ve taken the biggest risk by betting everything on ourselves and the leverage we can gain by sacrificing everything that is not essential.
and while the technical parts seem fine based on a surface-reading, this thick as molasses STOIC MANLINESS of their red-teaming is the silliest shit ever
(ps: read their website in the voice of foghorn leghorn, it's pretty fun)
Our work philosophy stems from the belief that we overvalue what we offer...
Emphasis in original. I don't think this is usually a solid pitch to potential customers.
10 weeks of 100h work weeks so you can have a 98% (publically disclosed) chance of being denied a Golden Ticket to the AI factory.
This is very weird but not particularly notable, other than that these guys have apparently been YC funded in 2017, and I can't find anything about the company in the directory: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer+2017... until I looked at the CEO's name. ~~Lambda School~~ ~~Bloom Institute~~ GauntletAI's latest pivot is asking for 1000 hours of voluntary unpaid labour.
e: apologies for the vaguepost, I could've sworn I put down the name, but in any case, it's the return of PG's favourite guy not named Sam Altman, Austen Allred
oh this is amazing, I wanna write this one up. The world needs warning of whatever shit Allred is trying to pull.
I need to set out the precise scam so it's incredibly obvious to any reader who hasn't encountered Allred before.