A very strange story about Bill Gates’ daughter’s startup troubles: https://futurism.com/future-society/bill-gates-daughter-traitor-startup

It honestly doesn’t sound any more shady than any of the bullshit her dad got up to in the 90s (which is to say, it’s still pretty damned shady!), but this Futurism blog seems to be trying to push the story into some sort of bizarre celebrity-gossip soap opera:

While the story has been well hashed out by now, Bloomberg‘s sourcing is noteworthy for what it implies: the leaked Slack messages strongly suggest that someone inside Phia is hell-bent on taking Gates — and quite probably the entire company — down.

Anonymous internal sourcing seems like a typical feature of these exposés, so framing it like this struck me as a laughably absurd overreach. Plus the site has 3 or 4 different tiny articles on this same topic, making me wonder if it’s one of those “any exposure is good exposure” sorts of things where Gates Jr.'s PR team is using the outlet as a cutout to raise her profile.

Bonus laugh line from Gates Jr. herself:

“Our target consumer is a young woman who’s hustling,” the recent Stanford graduate told Fortune. “She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”

What does it even mean to shop like a genius? I guess Erdos probably had his amphetamine plug’s number well-memorized…

So, paradoxically, it’s going to catch on with rationalists any day now?

If you haul garbage to a municipally owned landfill, is that technically a form of nationalization?

And of course our favorite polyamorist turns up:

The most important would turn out to be Amodei, whom she started dating in 2014. Just previously, beginning in 2011 and lasting for three years, she was in a relationship with Schmidt, who was then executive chairman of Google.

Definitely seems like an echo of Altman’s path to influence. If your “meritocracy” keeps empowering these odd mini-Rasputins, where’s the merit?

I mainly understand “foom” as a sound effect onomatopoeia from comic books. Which is totally appropriate given the foundational texts of LW

I’m probably going to stumble over some of the terminology here, but I think it might be possible to describe what @BioMan@awful.systems is proposing as a consequence of LLMs ultimately being lossy compression systems. Inference is a function over a lossily-compressed data set, and “chain-of-thought reasoning” and “agents” may sound sophisticated, but are simply applying containerization and DevOps tools to VM images of the inference application in an attempt to get around hard memory limits on the context window for inference. “Chain-of-thought” attempts this in a serial fashion, passing results from one instance to the next, while “agents” implement this hierarchically and recursively (and woe to the poor bastards who wished that mess upon themselves). But in both cases, the “finalization” phase is necessarily a further lossy compression step, attempting to compress a result from the inference process to a fresh instance of the inference application, so as not to immediately blow out the new instance’s context window.

Given this necessity, it comes to seem somewhat intuitive that there may be “strange attractors” in the higher-dimensional vector space that is the compressed data set which surround code that creates and maintains message passing channels. No matter what you’re doing with an “agentic” process, the inherent necessity of context cramdown & message passing means that querying into the space where such code examples lie is a hidden requisite of running the damned things, thus turning such functionality into the sort of selfish elements that BioMan is talking about.

The problem in investigating and concretely describing this phenomenon is nailing down the exact functions and processes that make it happen. Given the godawful messes in the Claude frontend codebase that @jonny@neuromatch.social has been documenting, I’d be surprised if there’s one developer in a hundred at Anthropic or OpenAI who can describe in detail how the intentionally-developed context-passing code for their “agents” works.

Somebody writes a low-level kernel for Emacs and the revenge of the Lisp machines begins

what the hell is facebook “shipping” that’s so important anyway? more fake trump-as-jesus photos for louisiana snake-fondlers?

VC fundraising pitch: local Dutch Bros knockoff that offers drive-thru coffee enemas

The mechanics of this are left as an exercise to the reader

Hasn’t Time been a Marc Benioff rag for a while now? This is the kind of shit that guy eats right up

oh oh i think i learned this in calculus class

Every time Yegge comes up these days, I feel compelled to reiterate that I unironically want to see the Computer History Museum try to stand up a Gas Town replica 20 years from now

i still can’t find the shift key on my keyboard.* i think it may just be a greybeard myth. no big deal, posting messages like this really bolsters my public image by making me seem relaxed and approachable.

*Unless I am publicly accused of fraud, trade secret theft, mass copyright infringement, etc. in which case my PR team tells me I need to temporarily drop the act.

Defining a non-GAAP unit of account is your most important task as a Silicon Valley executive. Product? Pffft hahahahaha

By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates.

tick tick tick tick

(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)

The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable

or flooding the zone?

With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.

Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!

…damn, it’s not really very impressive. at all.

I still respect the definition he gives for magic, which he probably pulled forward from one of the many past ritual magicians he’s studied. Magic is the change in consciousness in accordance with will… but we must always remember that that doesn’t say whose consciousness, nor whose will.

Yeah, I began losing interest in Greer as it became clear that he was perfectly happy squatting in the middle of the red-brown alliance during the Trump era. His critiques of industrialism and unquestioning belief in technological progress broadly align with what we discuss here, but he will always coddle MAHA types and tale a shrugging “well, what can ya do?” attitude towards people like Trump, as it fits his preference for cyclical theories of civilization.

I noticed a couple months ago that he actually managed to dig Nick Land out of whatever tweaker den that guy’s been hiding in for a podcast, which says a lot about what he’s willing to indulge these days.