NotebookLM was really useful to my friend who has a humiliation kink which he satisfies by erotically roleplaying on Discord: he simply copypasted the chatlogs into the AI input box and received a personalized podcast of two AI voices kinkshaming him.

His primary complaint was that it wasn't longer.

I'll head in later and post badly!

I'M A BAT

I'M GAY

It's the technique of running a primary search against some other system, then feeding an LLM the top ~25 or so documents and asking it for the specific answer.

A friend who worked with her is sympathetic to her but does not endorse her: this is a tendency she has, she veers back and forth on it a lot, she has frequent moments of insight where she disavows her previous actions but then just kind of continues doing them. It's Kanye-type behavior.

Last paragraph first: Grudgingly, yeah, that's a pretty good literal answer to the question. Peter Thiel won't sell just anyone a cult following, and you're not paying for it in cash, but he will sell you one if you're lucky.

Writing advice: I like your writing. I haven't tried to emulate you because I haven't read enough of your writing, and because when I made my first brush with you (which was like a year ago) I was spending a lot less time emulating people in general.

It's a little distressing to me because, well, I'm way too anxious to play the game of moral righteousness straight-facedly. It takes a very different personality from mine to say "Those are the bad people, fuck them" and not see the obvious similarities between me and the people I hate.

Some level of this is actual, real-world hypocrisy: I'm the cofounder of an AI startup and at the same time I deeply dislike AI. I went here because one, there was money, and two, I didn't want a way worse person than me to take the same job. It has not been what I hoped for -- it has been deeply destructive to my personality -- it has taught me a lot and made me much more cynical -- it has definitely made me stupider.

I don't really know how to do a hypocrisy purge. (I hear this is what ayahuasca is for, but Catholicism also works, and I'm considering getting my brain tattooed with a laser gun.) I think until I do one I have to temper all my moral righteousness by saying "I think I know why this person is doing the thing they're doing, and if you want their (bad) motives, here's my guess."

Before I was posting about tech on the internet I was posting about philosophy. I don't know enough about philosophy to be good at it -- I've read almost nothing -- but I noticed you could get pretty far by saying "Kant probably didn't have anything valuable to say -- he was a massive racist." A balm for people who are looking for an excuse not to have read Kant.

My bleak theory is that to be convincing I'd have to switch to calculatedly mediocre text deliberately orchestrated to be unsurprising. My experience is that when an extremely successful article contains genuine insight, it separately contains an absolutely mediocre take that is the real explanation for why it went viral.

Let's start with "Scott is a bigot" as an example claim. That's true, but the evidence is basically just a bland admission of "yeah." Nobody can spin that into a detailed and personal story about how Scott got mindhacked, which is the single part of Scott Alexander's bigotry that can be discussed at a level interesting to bored idiots. Discussing his bigotry directly would make it obvious -- he hasn't stated any takes that aren't incredibly commonplace for tech-adjacent eugenics losers, and has waffled publicly about whether or not to disavow even those stances.

What options are left? I could write a history of the ideas involved and risk boring people to sleep: such a story would contain basically zero concrete events, because we only have his distant past-tense account of how he came to his current conclusions. Or I could write something wildly speculative and commit defamation: "here's how it might have happened: a fictionalized account of how a mediocre person became racist." Or I could go into hyperbole: Eliezer Yudkowsky is Scott Alexander is Mencius Moldbug is George Lincoln Rockwell.

Would the latter post do OK? I'm afraid to try it: one because I'm afraid it wouldn't and I'd feel like more of a failure, and two because I'm afraid it would.

These are the opinions I don't like having about other people, but they also feel increasingly vindicated when I look at what text performs well on Reddit, and when I observe the basically-zero correlation between the topic of an article and the text of its responses. I've seen an enormous number of successful posts that can be summarized as "the author presents their grand unifying theory of X, with the understanding that the reader will never attempt to apply it to examples outside the post."

If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!

I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.

Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.

I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.

Holy fuck! That man does not sound like an engineer. Why is he the CTO of anything?

My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn't have worked)

I don't want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I'm therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

• For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
• For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

I can imagine him responding in three ways:

• "Sure, here is another lie" -- and then he's locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
• "We don't think we have to do that" -- and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
• -- and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.

Is there an amount of testosterone that will turn me into a lizardman