You're right! There's a disclosure on the page but it's fuckin tiny.
@awful.systems
The media again builds a virtual public consisting of billionaires of a variety of positions and ask you "which one do you agree with?" This is a strategy to push the public closer to the beliefs of billionaires.
I don't know who these fucking people are. The real public in California still supports Biden by a 25% margin.
I do not recommend using the word "AI" as if it refers to a single thing that encompasses all possible systems incorporating AI techniques. LLM guys don't distinguish between things that could actually be built and "throwing an LLM at the problem" -- you're treating their lack-of-differentiation as valid and feeding them hype.
Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends
In which the Orange Site is a very bad influence on some minors:
How do you evaluate “factuality” without knowing all the facts, though? That’s the downfall of all such services - eventually (or even immediately) they begin to just push their preferred agenda because it’s easier and more profitable.
Hi there, thank you for your feedback! I think we could potentially go down the route of a web3 approach where we get the public consensus on the facts.
...
Your first meta-problem to solve is to get people to care about the facts, and to accept them when they’re wrong. There is an astonishing gap between knowing the truth and acting accordingly.
Yea, that's why we also added in an grammar checker, even if they dont care about facts, they can get something better than gram marly that checks for way more for way less.
Every rationalist I've met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.
On this issue I can never pin them down -- responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don't agree.
No doubt if you're a cynical manipulator, "having your followers lie about what you believe" works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.
In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I'm not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them -- and I think there's a huge part of this that they're not wrong about and they're entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there's philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.
I don't know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done -- if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it -- and where the seduction of ego and money isn't like, so readily and constantly available.
Meta:
I read his blog a while and I agree with you.
Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.
Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.
The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.
I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.
If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.
I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.
I don't understand why people take him at face value when he claims he's always been a Democrat up until now. He's historically made large contributions to candidates from both parties, but generally more Republicans than Democrats, and also Republican PACs like Protect American Jobs. Here is his personal record.
Since 2023, he picked up and donated ~$20,000,000 to Fairshake, a crypto PAC which predominantly funds candidates running against Democrats.
Has he moved right? Sure. Was he ever left? No, this is the voting record of someone who wants to buy power from candidates belonging to both parties. If it implies anything, it implies he currently finds Republicans to be corruptible.
My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn't have worked)
I don't want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.
The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I'm therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:
I can imagine him responding in three ways:
NotebookLM was really useful to my friend who has a humiliation kink which he satisfies by erotically roleplaying on Discord: he simply copypasted the chatlogs into the AI input box and received a personalized podcast of two AI voices kinkshaming him.
His primary complaint was that it wasn't longer.
Last paragraph first: Grudgingly, yeah, that's a pretty good literal answer to the question. Peter Thiel won't sell just anyone a cult following, and you're not paying for it in cash, but he will sell you one if you're lucky.
Writing advice: I like your writing. I haven't tried to emulate you because I haven't read enough of your writing, and because when I made my first brush with you (which was like a year ago) I was spending a lot less time emulating people in general.
It's a little distressing to me because, well, I'm way too anxious to play the game of moral righteousness straight-facedly. It takes a very different personality from mine to say "Those are the bad people, fuck them" and not see the obvious similarities between me and the people I hate.
Some level of this is actual, real-world hypocrisy: I'm the cofounder of an AI startup and at the same time I deeply dislike AI. I went here because one, there was money, and two, I didn't want a way worse person than me to take the same job. It has not been what I hoped for -- it has been deeply destructive to my personality -- it has taught me a lot and made me much more cynical -- it has definitely made me stupider.
I don't really know how to do a hypocrisy purge. (I hear this is what ayahuasca is for, but Catholicism also works, and I'm considering getting my brain tattooed with a laser gun.) I think until I do one I have to temper all my moral righteousness by saying "I think I know why this person is doing the thing they're doing, and if you want their (bad) motives, here's my guess."
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...