TechTakes

TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKhbDBkstMJuBv7jg/three-months-in-evaluating-three-rationalist-cases-for-trump

The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]

Yeah I'm sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a "draconian censorship regime"

[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania

Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!

If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it's actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.

I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like

The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes

and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?

this URL is the PDF of the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor for Q1 2025

the Q3 2024 report was comedy gold, using word mangling to present bad news as okay news

i expect this one to be more of the same

While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).

The heading means "Bitcoin could protect from inflation". If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!