“It’s real! Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.

[…]

“People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing,” Schiffmann said.

there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once

The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”

presented without comment

Forget the diss track person, I’ve tracked down the true origin of Friend:

the ad alone should be a thread it’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in years

the yt comments are brutal btw definitely check them out

I like how the advertisement’s URL opens with a fucking O_Q like even its unsettled by this shit

Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.

This hast the same vibe as a trailer for shows like Black Mirror. I actually feel sad for the people they’re targeting with this, holy shit.

It’s like how can we make a depressing tamagotchi?

unsettling.

Indeed.

Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can’t they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software

wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that’s JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat

one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn’t wrote a thing about ai earlier

then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i’d expect even from him

that’s fuckin grim.

this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it’s already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy

also musk’s downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel

It’s been 3 days, my hope that this is real is fading :(

Musk will always own that hilariously disturbing baby roleplay Twitter alt though

Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:

Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.

“Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”

I mean, you know what the point is.

It’s eugenics. It’s always eugenics.

Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they’re lazier and lazier written each time.

Second, what’s the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?

Also

1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses

Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)

oh man i’d forgotten St Rev, a favourite minor nrx from the mid-2010s

that’s just “poors don’t deserve healthcare” what else

otoh aren’t they going against their benefactors (old rich ghouls)?

christ and it’s always the fucking bad-faith bullshit arguments. I bet if you pulled another dimension to the same fucking numbers there you’d instantly find some Rather Interesting correlations with income brackets, and if you pulled a dimension for care/spend class you’d find Another interesting correlation

I wish these people just fucking wouldn’t, gah

Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn’t it?

At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

This does suck for all the non-LLM ML stuff that has actual usage. (Even if a percentage of that was also snake oil, or had dubious success rates).

For people from the future:

I’m a fan of Clonezilla, which is a debian-derived live distro designed specifically to clone partitions as well as whole disks. If you’re comfortable with how Linux represents devices, it’s as close as you can get to training-wheels-included imaging for free.

BIG WARNING: Be sure to write down the BitLocker key before you begin, or else it’ll be a bad time!

insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.

I had a windows problem once, so was looking through all that looking for an answer and saw somebody go ‘I need to save my data, which is very important, so how do I fix this problem’ and then they got a reply with ‘follow these steps with step X making sure they would delete their data’. And this was before the whole era of AI slop so I fear how much worse it has gotten now.

@dgerard What kind of HD? I have at least 4, incl. 2 x 500GB, 1 x 1TB, that are not “seen” anymore by the system… as if the head was “locked” somehow…

For as much as they like to talk about building things and solving problems the software industry doesn’t seem to put a lot of effort into building things well or solving their own problems.

In the spirit of “worse is better”, here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:

! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)

EDIT: fix bug with 1 hour and 20 minutes ago. regex is even worse is better.

! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text(/(hour|minute)s? ago/):style(background-color:#7700AA)

other handy thing you can do: make a bookmark that has the URL be javascript:(function() { function bits go here} )();, and stick it in your bookmark bar

This is really cool!

I was just thinking it would be cool to have something like RES’s ‘Previously Read’ feature that only shows the new comments, and everything else is darkened or collapsed. This does a similar thing though and it’s great for these weekly threads

Harry Potter and the Surprisingly Good Take

It’s the same story as has ever been. “Smart People”'s position on anything is often informed by their current economic relationship wrt to the things they care about. And maybe even Yud isn’t super happy about his profession being co-opted. What scraps will he have if his own delusions became true about GPT zombies replacing “authentic voices”?

No one is immune to seeing a better take when it’s their shit on the line, and no is immune from being in a bubble without stake.

that’s a linkedin-level take

Somebody got all his books from libgen and it shows.

What amazes me, as a sort of US politics watcher from the outside, just how badly the various republicans weirdos are reacting to this. Esp Vance, posting his dolphin fucker stuff in the middle of the jokestorm about him being into furniture. But not just him, the GOP going ‘don’t be racist about Harris’ and then all the racists doubling down on their racism, etc etc. The weird lashouts re weirdness. “how dare you call me weird! Grabs calipers I can see from your skull shape that you are …”

The proud tradition of “no really, Trump isn’t that bad if you pretend he’s a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth”

Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it’s on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.

So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.

BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace “robot overlords” in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, “The Authoritarian Peril”:

https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg

with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:

A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur’s Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.

Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:

If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.

Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.

What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:

What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”

Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”

Jesus.

Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice

Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?

Siri, how can I unread a post?

Also look at this dude in the replies advocating for mask-off right-wing sexist / racist / fascist EA: https://x.com/diegocaleiro/status/1729715617945788773 … if you dare 😱

Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn’t realize you can still start threads there.

Strange, they didn’t count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald

Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I’ve found it impossible to share threads without.

All in for radioactive hurricanes though

She’s listened to anecdotes “about kids who are like my kids” (👀👀👀), and that’s quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.

As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I don’t think she’s actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school won’t magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and there’s a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If we’re going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, I’m not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individual’s odds of losing, y’know?

Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere I’m probably being incredibly charitable and she’s actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.