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Venture capital is having a bad time — and AI isn’t going to fix it
  • As usual, the business fundamentals thing happens after the compensation has been paid out.

  • even DHH suggests Mullenweg might wanna cool it
  • I'm getting the picture that governance is a great thing until you find out that other people want to govern you back.

  • Want to hear the truth about Automattic, the not-like-the-other-girls company that still thinks it is a startup after 20 years and his founder acts like he invented remote working?
  • The encouragement of a situation where you disconnect with those outside, the sleep deprivation, the drip of hints that you're not meeting the standard, the trust in the great leader.

    It also sounds corporate, yes.

  • Grindr proposes ‘AI wingman’ to optimize away the gay sex bit
  • You know how sometimes you use a grocery app and it's fairly obvious that the people writing them don't spend time in grocery stores? I'm getting that same impression here.

  • A radical idea - stop talking about things that don't exist like they do
  • With so many parts of tech operating like a mixture of religion and fandom this would be the atheistic answer. (This is my diametric opposite of a sneer.)

  • The Bitcoin bros who want to crowdfund a new country
  • I think we've all walked by a giant important point.

    These nearly-all-male network state fans have such compelling ideas that women outside their immediate circles would rather Xerox "bits of their bodies" than engage with those ideas. Their outreach "embassy" attracts even fewer women every day. Possibly even an average number rounding to zero.

    Right now it seems like their polities will be remembered in the same religious studies lessons that teach about the Shakers.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

  • Ilya Sutskever's new AI super-intelligence startup raises a billion dollars. Unclear what they actually do.
  • Well look if you no longer had a Silicon Valley executive's salary you might have opinions about that situation too.

    Weird sort of wartime to be investing new dollars into Israel though I thought?

    Oh wait right. https://bdsmovement.net/news/israel’s-most-important-source-capital-california

  • No, intelligence is not like height
  • Imagine being a skilled San Francisco-style tech worker, at the apex of your industry, and the heights of intellect and rigor you can scale outside of that very specific context turn out to be "race science" apologia. Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

  • The Paul Graham vs Nigerian Twitter Saga; Lexical racism and language bias masked as ChatGPT hysteria
  • This reminds me of the reaction when I point out that to non-native English speakers that Canadian students may not have had as much English grammar instructions as they did.

    Also this brought to mind all those times I've been taken to task about my own phrasing.

    Gatekept by non-readers indeed.

  • StackOverflow is blogging about Web3. Please put it out of its misery
  • The author's company is listed which happens to be in the list of companies using the blockchain being shilled.

    That's practically above board in the land of blockchain companies.

  • That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out
  • Even just saying it was mescaline would help it make more sense.

  • That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out
  • I'm starting to think that some writing classes would really help the EA/LR crowd.

  • The CIA is using generative AI as a search engine
  • Just a minor paragraph rewrite for clarity.

    “The reality of generative AI is you’ve got to have a foundation of cloud computing,” AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy, whose compensation relies on him successfully growing Amazon's computer rental income, told Nextgov/FCW in a June 26 interview at AWS Summit. “You’ve got to get your data in a place where you can actually do something with it.”

    It's always so tedious when these little conflict of interest notes are left out of articles.

  • NSFW
    Balaji's movie "Technodemocracy" bombs
  • People who seem impressive until you listen to their ideas are a real theme around here.

  • Why I'm leaving EA
  • Is there some EA culture thing where every thought has to be expanded into essay form?

  • "Google Gemini tried to kill me"
  • I applaud your optimism that most people can do this without AI but have you gone and met people? Most people are not that capable of producing torrents of shameless bullshit as conscience or awareness of social and/or professional costs rear their head at some point.

  • another dystopian hellscape is when your AI generator makes non-white Nazis

    Of course young optimistic me would have considered that this was an easy thing to have a QA test for, but here we are in 2024 and I am neither young or optimistic. Maybe the AI QA folks were in the last few rounds of Google layoffs or something.

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    cwood Christopher Wood @awful.systems

    Reading, Shadowrun, walking. Living and working in Toronto. Sysadmin (or whatever it's called this month). He/him.

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