That thread gives me hope. A decade ago, a random internet discussion in which rationalist came up would probably mention “quirky Harry Potter fanfiction” with mixed reviews, whereas all the top comments on that thread are calling out the alt-right pipeline and the racism.

Urgh, I couldn’t even get through the whole article, it’s too disgusting. What a surprise that yet another “no politics at work”-guy turns out to support fascism!

just yesterday I saw this toot and now I know why

(I mean, they probably should’ve bounced the guy a decade ago, but definitely even more time for it now)

@mawhrin just casually pitching “great replacement theory” there. What a little Nazi

I was in London last week and I can confirm it still has the Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and streets. The Tube is as shite and loud and warm and tight as ever. I even got called a cunt once. Had a blast. On a scale of Bordeaux to Beans on Toast I rank it 9/10 Britishness

@mawhrin @BlueMonday1984 bad news, he’s just financed a coup of Rubygems…

(well, shopify did. he’s on the board. so, looks like, best guess.)

(edit: fixed wrong company name.)

Side note: The way I’ve seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I’ve mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.

The truth is that we feel shame to a much greater degree than the other side, which makes it pretty easy to divide us on these annoying trivialities.

My personal hatred of tone policing is greater than my sense of shame, but I imagine that isnt something to expect for most.

Slightly related to the ‘it is an op’ thing, did you look at the history of the wikipedia page for clanker? There were 3 edits to the page before 1 June 2025.

This is an interesting crystallization that parallels a lot of thoughts I’ve been having, and it’s particularly hopeful that it seeks to discard the “hacker” moniker and instead specifically describe the subjects as programmers. Looking back, I was only becoming terminally online circa 1997, and back then it seemed like there was an across-the-spectrum effort to reclaim the term “hacker” into a positive connotation after the federal prosecutions of the early 90s. People from aspirant-executive types like Paul Graham to dirty hippies like RMS were insistent that being a “hacker” was a good thing, maybe the best possible thing. This was, of course, a dead letter as soon as Facebook set up at “One Hacker Way” in Menlo Park, but I’d say it’s definitely for the best to finally put a solid tombstone on top of that cultural impulse.

As well, because my understanding of the defining activity of the positive-good “hacker” is that it’s all too close to Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things,” and I think Jared White would probably agree with me. Paul Graham was willing to embrace the term because he was used to the interactive development style of Lisp environments, but the mainstream tools have only fitfully evolved in that direction at best. When “hacking,” the “hacker” makes a series of short, small iterations with a mostly nebulous goal in mind, and the bulk of the effort may actually be what’s invested in the minimum viable product. The self-conception inherits from geek culture a slumped posture of almost permanent insufficiency, perhaps hiding a Straussian victimhood complex to justify maintaining one’s own otherness.

In mentioning Jobs, the piece gestures towards the important cultural distinction that I still think is underexamined. If we’re going to reclaim and rehabilitate even homeopathic amounts of Jobs’ reputation, the thesis we’re trying to get at is that his conception of computers as human tools is directly at odds with the AI promoters’ (and, more broadly, most cloud vendors’) conception of computers as separate entities. The development of generative AI is only loosely connected with the sanitized smiley-face conception of “hacking.” The sheer amount of resources and time spent on training foreclose the possibility of a rapid development loop, and you’re still not guaranteed viable output at the end. Your “hacks” can devolve into a complete mess, and at eye-watering expense.

I went and skimmed Graham’s Hackers and Painters again to see if I could find any choice quotes along these lines, since he spends that entire essay overdosing on the virtuosity of the “hacker.” And hoo boy:

Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people’s ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.

You think Graham will ever realize that we’re culminating a generation of his precious “hackers” who ultimately failed at all this?

AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.

Hackers is dead. (Apologies to punk)

Id say that for one reason alone, when Musk claimed grok was from the guide nobody really turned on him.

Unrelated to programmers or hackers, Elons father (CW: racism) went fully mask off and claims Elon agrees with him. Which considering his promotion of the UK racists does not feel off the mark. (And he is spreading the dumb ‘[Africans] have an [average] IQ of 63’ shit, and claims it is all genetic. Sure man, the average African needs help understanding the business end of a hammer. As I said before, guess I met the smartest Africans in the world then, as my university had a few smart exchange students from an African country. If you look at his statements it is even dumber than normal, as he says population, so that means either non-Black Africans are not included, showing just how much he thinks of himself as the other, or they are, and the Black African average is even lower).

Huh, I wonder who this Krauss guy is, haven’t heard of him.

*open wikipedia*

*entire subsection titled “Allegations of sexual misconduct”*

*close wikipedia*

All of those people, Krauss, Dawkins, Harris (okay that one might’ve been unsalvageable from the start, I’m really not sure) are such a great reminder that you can be however smart/educated you want, the moment you believe you’re the smartest boi and stop learning and critically approaching your own output you get sucked into the black hole of your asshole, never to return.

Like if I had a nickel. It’s hubris every time. All of those people need just a single good friend that, from time to time, would tell them “man, what you said was really fucking stupid just now” and they’d be saved.

Clout is a proxy of power and power just absolutely rots your fucking brain. Every time a Guy emerges, becomes popular, clearly thinks “haha, but I am different, power will not rot MY brain”, five years later boom, he’s drinking with Jordan Benzo Peterson. Even Joe Fucking Rogan used to be significantly more lucid before someone gave him ten bazillion dollars for a podcast and he suffered severe clout poisoning.

thanks for linking this, was fun to watch

hadn’t seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it’s a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are

and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner

The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose “rogue intellectual.”

A German term to look up is WissZeitVG but many academic jobs in many countries are only offered to people no more than x years after receiving their PhD (yep, this discriminates against women and the disabled and those with sick spouses or parents).

(sees YouTube video)

I ain’t [watchin] all that

I’m happy for u tho

Or sorry that happened

Sorry but who the fuck is that? Not one of our common guests here, I need a primer on her

TIL Hank Green, the milquetoast BlueSky poster, also has some YouTube channel. How quaint.

I think every time I learn That Guy From BlueSky also has some other gig different from posting silly memes I lose some respect for them.

E.g. I thought Mark Cuban was just a dumb libertarian shitposter, but then it turned out he has a cuntillion dollars and also participated in a show unironically called “Shark Tank” that I still don’t 100% believe was a real thing because by god

What’s up with all the websites that tell me “you’ve reached the limit of free articles for the month” even though I’ve literally never entered that site before in my life. Stop gaslighting me you cunts.

Anyway, here’s the archive

I mean if it gets too hot he could try the traditional fiber arts dodge for internet hate and fake his own death.

@PMMeYourJerkyRecipes @BlueMonday1984

The guy from the Federalist *doesn’t* want more ideological diversity in academia, he wants *less*. But he’ll settle for more as an interim goal until he can purge the wrong-thinkers.

The case for affirmative action for conservatives

We have that already it’s called business school

Forgive my stupidity, but I don’t know what this means. Or it’s referencing something I don’t know.

Is there already a word for “an industry which has removed itself from reality and will collapse when the public’s suspension of disbelief fades away”?

Calling this just “a bubble” doesn’t cut it anymore, they’re just peddling sci-fi ideas now. (Metaverse was a bubble, and it was stupid as hell, but at least those headsets and the legless avatars existed.)

It’s a financial security threat, you see

linkedin thotleedir posts directly into your mailbox? gonna have to pour one out for you

AI’s Biggest Security Threat May Be Quantum Decryption

an absolutely wild grab-bag of words. the more you know about each piece, the more surreal the sentence becomes. unintentional art!

Naturally, the best and most obvious fix — don’t hoard all that shit in the first place — wasn’t suggested.

At this point, I’m gonna chalk the refusal to stop hoarding up to ideology more than anything else. The tech industry clearly sees data not as information to be taken sparingly, used carefully, and deleted when necessary, but as Objective Reality Units^tm which are theirs to steal and theirs alone.

Cultish and Magical Overthinking are top shelf.

Having followed PLT stuff online for more than a quarter century now, I can state with confidence that basically everyone writing about lambda calculus online is doing it to glorify themselves.

Well, I’ll give them the text equivalent of a “you tried” sticker for finally admitting their automatic bullshit machines produce (gasp) bullshit, but the main sneerable thing I see is the ISO Standard OpenAI Anthropomo-

the developers actively selected for bullshit generation

every_tf2_class_laughing_at_once.wav

(Maximising lies extruded per ocean boiled was definitely what they were going for in hindsight, but it geniunely cracks me up to see them come out and just say it)

it’s a shitty paper but even they couldn’t avoid the point forever