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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Free SFnal short story idea, came to me literally in a dream:
Dude is living his best life, beatiful house, beatiful wife, gets a job doing computer stuff "improving the world". But his big fancy work computer is wasting a lot of space so he reformats it/installs Nix, and suddenly everythings gone, all grey wireframe, no way out. Turns out he was given root to his own simulation and there's no backup.
Feels I should have read this somehwere but haven't read short SF in ages so...
Did my regular check in of a q-pilled family member’s facebook page. Zuckerberg’s new fash turn is not being received well as he is being read as the worm that he is. i.e. they are still mad about the anti-vax fact checking.
I am sorry you have this family member.
It's ok, it's not your fault!
Looks like LW/Lightcone managed to convince enough people to give then $2M, which will totally not be used to settle sexual assault lawsuits in the future.
It will instead be used to purchase another castle in which to perform SA
Don't confuse the Conference Castle with the (Non)Consent Castle!
Crying in LW
It was a stately home goddammit! Stop weakmanning meeeeeeeeee
But how are we supposed to grift our absurd ideology into respectability without having a stately English manor to entertain people in??
Like every other 'charity', rent a room at some super expensive hotel, hire the most expensive cooks and give all your potential donors a free invite, and massive gifts.
With risk of falling into the 'classify people into two binary groups' thing which I have often criticized the Rationalist for. Move over jock vs nerd. There is Jock vs Creep.
The opening statement is also quite silly already (and makes me belief in a companion to the dead internet theory, the dementia internet theory, as I was sure we have had conversations like this as 'the internet' already, Zuck turning manospherian all of a sudden also makes me thing this (same with the fight over H-1B on the US right, they had that in 2018 already, Trump likes H-1B)).
We had the whole 'they act like they are morally superior' discussion already a lot, and that was about vegans. Only one problem, they are morally superior on almost all ethical/moral/ideological systems you can think of. Sure hedonists, stoics (who are not allowed to complain), sadists, accelerationist extinctionists, ironic nihilistic status quo pushing postmodernists, all disagree they are superior morally but who cares about the opinion of those people. Sure some of them might be annoying to people, but annoying people can be morally superior.
His statements about how politically correctness comes from the 80's is also wrong (it predates that, and has quite a complex history of being used by various different groups for different meanings), but at that moment I knew I was going to be wasting my time reading this as I would disagree with every paragraph. (as I have seen these types of articles before, they were popular a decade ago or so).
E2: Whoops that edit should have been on a different post. E3: bonus content: Two articles sneering at Paul, Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder and Paul Graham, proto-techbro..
Paul I am begging you to actually write out a fucking timeline. Apparently woke started in the 80s in universities when the (white) civil rights protestors of the 70s got tenure in the 60s, as an inevitable and predictable extension of political correctness in the 90s. From the title you're obviously going to indulge the conservative fantasy that "wokeness" is a coherent thing rather than a political tool to dismiss calls for action to actually address blatant injustice. But if you're going to bullshit me, at least do it competently and have an internally consistent narrative that allows for the natural passage of time.
Man wrote nearly 5k words of pure unfiltered cap:
I'm not sure how someone can read all this without capping themselves. We could sneer this all fucking day.
If you can't get through two short paragraphs without equating Stalinism and "social justice", you may be a cockwomble.
I'm not reading that shit but for the masochists out there who like to read HN licking VC boots, here ya go
I've been a big fan of HN comments lately
As many writers (perhaps most eloquently George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than men to the idea of being moral enforcers.
Ah, thanks Paul for validating my disdain for Orwell at least.
Considering popes, priests in general, politicians etc are usually male (historically) i have a feeling these quotes also exclude some groups from being moral enforcers.
It also neatly ignores social pressures, which provides good reasons for women being into certain types of 'moral enforcement'. Either because 'it is their duty to protect the kids' or the revolutionary idea that people are all people and should have equal rites, bodily autonomy, a political voice etc.
But nope: "me and the boys agree, this wokeness stuff is for girls".
This all makes me wonder, we know he has proofreaders who help him. Did he either get rid of all the people who disagree with him, or did they give up, as some people dont want understand the other side they just want to argue their forever cause they believe they are correct (so disagreement is a massive waste of time).
E:
Thanks to Sam Altman, Ben Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim Urban for reading drafts of this. [emph mine, the names that really jumped out to me]
Ah. Also 1 name which jumps out to me as prob a woman. Let me google her. Ah right. His wife, and co-founder.
George was writing his stories in the 40s, so at least has "product of his time" as an excuse.
Paul's just a flat out piece of shit to be writing this nearly 100 years later.
Fair, though in Orwell's case the misogyny is not accidental either, but an essential aspect of the mostly conservative ideology he adopted for 1984 (contempt for the working class, linguistic purism, just really being a little too enamoured with his perfect crystal of unending oppression etc).
linguistic purism
That must have been really subtle, all I remember is a concern specifically about how a sufficiently totalitarian regime may try to weaponize language as a further means of subjugation, not that language evolving is bad in principle.
I think the premise of total control through language is in itself silly, though that can be excused by the book being satire. But Orwell, for good or ill, was undeniably a linguistic purist, as one can gather from a close reading of "Politics and the English Language".
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.
I've never heard of anyone describing 1984 that way, could you elaborate on your points or link to some analysis?
I read it in high school. Iirc, the main character in 1984 deeply hates a woman he works with and his violent fantasies about her are tied up in his desire to rebel against the regime. He later overcomes his desire to commit violence against her by having sex with her. His contempt for her fairly leapt off the page when I read it. I'm sure it's arguable what Orwell meant or intended.
In another scene, the middle-class protagonists watch a working-class woman hanging out washing and tell themselves that if there was any hope for freedom, it lay in "the proles" (members of the mass underclass, like that woman). But the way they look at her and talk about her is dehumanizing.
It's probably easier to just read 1984 yourself and make up your own mind. it's not a very long book.
Isn't Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there's a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?
Also with respect to the attitudes on women and proles, although I don't think it's entirely written in the character's point of view it feels like there's a lot of unreliable narration going on, or at least you get a lot of stuff from the perspective of a person who grew up in one of the most absurdly totalitarian regimes in literature. Which is to say, it didn't feel prescriptive most of the time to me.
See also: "proles", as in the contempt is baked in to the language, which we know the regime is actively trying to hold in a tight leash.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only viewpoint you get is that of a middle class bureaucrat. It's the assumed audience, and it's where Orwell would place himself as well. The narrative loses a lot of impact if you align yourself with the proles. Winston could live a real life if he really wanted to. I don't think this point is intended by the novel.
Isn’t Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there’s a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?
That's a problem in itself, don't you think? It's all very "Feminists hate sex and they want to erase the differences between the genders". Julia gets a taste of freedom and her right place in the world by putting on makeup and girly clothes and having a lot of sex.
Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skillfully done, but Winston’s standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of color in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above, all, far more feminine.
Also she's a flighty moron.
I have not read it in ages, but did hear somebody has written something (not sure if book or play or etc) of the book from Julias perspective.
To be clear, I mean to say that in society where it's life or death to be highly guarded and suspicious of everyone any romantic relationship is necessarily poisoned.
Plus I think there's a whole thing in the book about things being so restricted that fucking for fun is in itself an act of rebellion and thus another thing your partner has over you if they happen to need to give something up to the authorities.
MDN has fucking ads now????
(also, image uploads are back, weird how pict-rs sometimes just shits the bed)
image description
a fucking “ads by Mozilla” banner at the top of mdn web docs advertising mongodb’s LLM of all fucking things
xD oh what a delight, the one thing missing from the complete gobshite of a "database" that Mongo is was an AI to mangle your queries
Read a rumor that zuck's marriage is falling apart, which scans.
A second divorced man is about to hit the tower.
I wish that men would go to therapy instead of going full fascist. Fuck this whole society. The West cannot fall sooner.
Does creating a cover of Get Low called "Z-Pain" for your wife, or commissioning the creation of a giant green statue for your wife strike you as the sorts of things someone in an unhealthy marriage would do? I think not!
i wonder where his roman empire fascination fits the pattern? also, who's next, maybe thiel?
my first thought on hearing the same was "if this is what he's like in public, imagine what it's like at home"
He has two sisters, and one of them wrote a book about the manosphere/redpill (from a non rw way) shit in 2018. So fam gatherings will be wild.
nasb, it warms my cold diamond heart to continue seeing instances of people going "oh, yeah, uh.... actually, no, fuck that shit. we'll do it ourselves" in response to broadcom's attempt to Raise Revenue Through Product Capture