self

is… is yud one of the disaster monkeys? or are we supposed to forget he spent a bunch of years running and renaming an institute that tried and failed to do this exact same alignment grift?

fuck, I went into the xcancel link to see if he explains that or any of this other nonsense, and of course yud’s replies only succeeded in making my soul hurt:

Combines fine with term limits. It's true that I come from the USA rather than Russia, and therefore think more in terms of "How to ensure continuity of executive function if other pieces of the electoral mechanism become dysfunctional?" rather than "Prevent dictators."

and someone else points out that a parliamentary republic isn’t an electoral system and he just flatly doesn’t get it:

From my perspective, it's a multistage electoral system and a bad one. People elect parties, whose leaders then elect a Prime Minister.

fucking right! there’s this unearned assumption that just because the tech’s been invented, it must have worth. and, like, no? there’s so many dead ends in science and technology, and notoriously throwing money at something doesn’t change its fundamental nature

and now I’m pissed and trying to decide if it’s even worth explicitly adding “don’t be a debatelord asshole” to the TechTakes sidebar, cause it’s not like they’re gonna stop

holy shit, imagine getting a second chance to not be a fucking debatelord and doubling down this hard

off you fuck

there’s so much wrong with this entire concept, but for some reason my brain keeps getting stuck on (and I might be showing my entire physics ass here so correct me if I’m wrong): isn’t it surprisingly hard to sink heat in space because convection doesn’t work like it does in an atmosphere and sometimes half of your orbital object will be exposed to incredibly intense sunlight? the whitepaper keeps acting like cooling all this computing shit will be easier in orbit and I feel like that’s very much not the case

also, returning to a topic I can speak more confidently on: the fuck are they gonna do for a network backbone for these orbital hyperscale data centers? mesh networking with the implicit Kessler syndrome constellation of 1000 starlink-like satellites that’ll come with every deployment? two way laser comms with a ground station? both those things seem way too unreliable, low-bandwidth, and latency-prone to make a network backbone worth a damn. maybe they’ll just run fiber up there? you know, just run some fiber between your satellites in orbit and then drop a run onto the earth.

7. Comfort: regardless of how big it is on the inside, shaping our time machine like a public telephone box introduces risk factors such as: someone will pee in there. according to my research, ideal ergonomics are achieved when the time machine is hot tub shaped.

thank you! it completely slipped my mind to add a description (and the linked post doesn’t seem to have one), and the one you’ve written is excellent

today in capitalism: landlords are using an AI tool to collude and keep rent artificially high

But according to the U.S. government’s case, YieldStar’s algorithm can drive landlords to collude in setting artificial rates based on competitively-sensitive information, such as signed leases, renewal offers, rental applications, and future occupancy.

One of the main developers of the software used by YieldStar told ProPublica that landlords had “too much empathy” compared to the algorithmic pricing software.

“The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it,” said a director at a U.S. property management company in a testimonial video on RealPage’s website that has since disappeared.

it’s still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldn’t figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site

mastodon has an appropriated twitter meme for this:

we really do need “my source is that I made it the fuck up” for people who aggressively don’t want to read any of the text they’re allegedly commenting on

did you click through to any of the inline citations? David’s shorter articles on pivot mostly gather and summarize those, so if you need to read the original research and its conclusions that’s where to go