istewart

joined 5 months ago
[–] istewart@awful.systems 1 points 5 hours ago

just mark C for every answer if you don't get it, that's what the State of California taught me in elementary school

[–] istewart@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago

I've seen people criticize Eric Berger for being up Musk's ass about SpaceX, though I'm simply not that passionate about space stuff anymore. And so far I don't see them posting anything about the NIH freezeout, even though that surely affects a vast swath of their reader base. Seems odd.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 3 points 14 hours ago

I was reading something David wrote about it at one point, but it seemed like lore too cursed even for the rationalist milieu

[–] istewart@awful.systems 12 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

Really starting to get a bit sick of Ars Technica. They're OK for general interest tech stuff, but their editorial line (and some of their commenter base) have been really credulous about AI vendors' PR.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago

Hmm, surely there is no downside to doing all of one's marketing, both personal* and professional, through the false certainty and low signal of short-form social media. The leopard has only licked Sam's face, it will never bite and begin chewing!

*You and I may find the concept of a "personal brand" to be horrifying, but these guys clearly want to become brands more fervently than Bruce Wayne wanted to become a bat

[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Single season TV show that came out of the 90s enthusiasm for adapting random comic books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillacs_and_Dinosaurs_(TV_series)

Interestingly, Wikipedia makes it seem like the game made it out the door first

[–] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago

I think one thing to understand is that most of his casual audience very likely engages through watching clips, not sitting through whole interviews. The reasonable, mainstreamable stuff gets clipped out and perhaps you run across it sarching for something else, or it's algorithmically fed to you because of your interest in an adjacent topic. Clips of the weirder, creepier manosphere/Alex Jones/Art Bell guests don't get surfaced as readily, at least until you're down the rabbit hole, so Rogan himself ends up having a veneer of reasonability and respectability that he doesn't really deserve.

Same goes for Trump rallies, or probably almost any major political speech now. There's a front line of people who will watch the whole thing, but then they recirculate specific clips based on how they want to portray the subject.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Come now, he was always about consing chodes into lists... Given his excessive self-seriousness, I doubt he's taken the time to pick up the skill of juggling them in the years since

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago

If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices

[–] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

alas, there is no honor or glory to be had from winning the meme race

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I can't help but feel like for Ellison in particular, he must have given himself no choice but to believe this stuff is more capable than it is. He's 80 years old now, and if building towards honest-to-god "real AI" wasn't what his whole career was about, then what was the point? The twilight of the older generations of tech executives is going to be its own special kind of pathology.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 14 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

Not sure where this came from, but it can't be all bad if it chaos-dunks on Yudkowsky like this. Was relayed to me via Ed Zitron's Discord, hopefully the Q isn't for Quillete or Qanon

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