Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

presumably!

since we’re talking about venture and investment capital, and about investors who have specifically indicated they’re attempting to pivot to being defense contractors, what are defense contractors and their investors saying?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/wall-street-morgan-stanley-td-bank-ukraine-israel-hamas-war

sv vc trying to get into a more serious space is interesting as theyre generally considered unserious by the wider world of investors, but hey if theyve got money im sure there will be takers

sv vc chasing unicorns has led them to weird bad places, crypto ai defense, when theres tons of potentially useful technology thats never going to produce billion dollar valuations that could use their money

I have to admit, had SBF's idea to bribe Trump not to run come to fruition, that really would have put him ahead of most of the YC crew in terms of "this absurd bet that no one should have taken seriously paid off spectacularly!"

FTX and the other pure-crypto efforts are weird because while some get SV backing, they’re now almost purely financial grifts. All the technology’s known and they aren’t doing anything with software or hardware that isn’t already out there

You could say the same of a handful of others that are pure “disrupt this sector” businesses but developers will try to show off the neat tools they made and maybe spin those into their own business. Half of these might just be forks of some open source user interface library but someone working there wants something to post to hackernews

since we’re talking about venture and investment capital, and about investors who have specifically indicated they’re attempting to pivot to being defense contractors, what are defense contractors and their investors saying?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/wall-street-morgan-stanley-td-bank-ukraine-israel-hamas-war

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Sunday, 5 November 2023 16:42 (yesterday) link

The quotes in this article are so dark.

as for his peers, it’s almost refreshing to see andreesen and others admitting in public that they’d like federal contracts. this was always the wellspring of money, all the way back to the founding days of SV.

iirc the original SV was all companies primarily with DoD contracts

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-thiel-2024-election-politics-investing-life-views/675946/

one of the greatest things i have ever read

amazing how many of these guys think scifi is realest deepest shit

And Thiel made his money from PayPal, that’s some real Mr. Bladreunner shit not even Omni magazine could imagine

such a disappointing douchebag, trump was right

I don't really know where to put this but I am starting to really dislike the way everything you do online is tracked and fed into the algorithms of what you see on every other site, or even your Microsoft home page, if like me you're dumb enough to still have it as the default. It makes your internet use feel more like a conversation, except the person on the other side doesn't understand any of it except broadly what "topics" you're into. If I have a conversation about Joe Rogan with a friend it should be clear that I'm not really a fan of Joe Rogan and don't really want to hear shit about him, but if I'm reading stuff about him online all this tracking data will say "oh he's into Joe Rogan" and it'll ruin my recommendations for a while. Or say a year ago when people thought Putin was going to start a nuclear war, you read a few articles on that and suddenly for the next year you're being fed junk like "Kremlin insider says nuclear strike inevitable" from outlets like NewsBuzzNOW! Which is stuff I don't wanna see, it's stuff I don't want to think about, it just makes the entire internet feel like Twitter where it's just showing you bad and depressing stuff all the time. It makes me feel like I have to monitor what I'm actually looking at lest fucking YouTube get the wrong impression of me.

otm

when the amount of input we each get is almost infinite and requires personal interpretation—and we are people who have limited time/attention, we all and each need internet agents/filters who will do it for us.

that’s either an argument for personal AI filters, or an argument to outlaw/break the internet.

I find the FB algorithm particularly depressing and intrusive because a few of my not very close just happen to post a ton, so I wind up interacting with those people more and it becomes this awful feedback loop where I never see what like 90% of my FB friends post and I miss even posts from close friends if I just didn’t happen to interact with their last couple posts.

Granted FB is also kind of tired and has a bit of a people who stayed at the party too late vibe.

Or on Instagram, for example, if in a bad moment on a bad day I click on a few thirst trap accounts, suddenly I get tons of thirst traps, to the point that I feel like I have to make sure never ever to click on them. Or conversely I’ll wind up clicking on something completely irrelevant to me and inane (“Questions husky owners are tired of being asked”) out of pure boredom, and suddenly I get tons of husky and dog owner content.

It’s like if I happened to go to the salad place for lunch twice in one week and the next week 80% of the restaurants had turned into salad places.

super otm

I have successfully tuned up Instagram now to where 99% of what I'm shown is videos of gorillas, bears, and/or elephants. Consequently, I love Instagram! It's great!

same here I've got over 500 FB friends but I feel like my entire feed is like the same 10 of them over and over again. I deliberately try not to interact with certain people/groups because I don't want them filling up my timeline forever.

if u r on desktop for fb, you can click "feeds" and it will present you with a chronological feed with (afaict) no ads/algo content, dont know how that works on the app since i dont have it on my phone

(nm there will be ads but i have a fb ad blocker extension on firefox)

I use a chrome extension for Facebook, the Newsfeed Eradicator. bless it, i never look at facebook any longer except to check up on a few specific groups and friends… but no feed, chronological or algorithmic. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg

facebook vaguely able to follow real people in a web browser, the app is terrible. nobody I know actually posts on it, the few parents I know who would put fun kid stuff on there are social media avoidant or put things elsewhere.

so if I open the app 80% of the feed is posts from recommended groups and due to search history and other group membership it’s all people doing home repairs in novel (wrong) ways

stone cold freaks.

Breaking news: The OpenAI drama is real.

We checked our data and last night, SF saw a spike in low-quality sleep. There was a 27% increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep. We need to fix this.

Source: @eightsleep data

— Matteo Franceschetti (@m_franceschetti) November 20, 2023

sure sure yeah yeah lol

these people (the mattress people and its customers) are freaks whether or not that is true to be clear.

It was really cold last night (under 50F), also there were a ton of friendsgiving parties.

the shivers up my spine when i hear the word “friendsgiving”

Friendstaking parties are the way to go uh wait.

Algorithms and AI and streaming everything just seem to make many of the more joyful aspects of Life a pretty soulless endeavor.

Actually my least favorite part about social media is how in life we probably only have limited space in our minds for our social lives, and we should emphasize quality over quantity, but these apps and sites just mean that no one ever really goes away and it's more difficult to let the natural fadeout of peripheral friendships and casual acquaintanceships occur. Or worse still, people you forgot ever existed decide they want to find you and then they add you on Facebook or Instagram or whatever and there they are again, when they really should have been gone forever.

Before/after. See what I mean? There's just no comparison. Which would you rather hang in your entryway? How did the AI 'know' exactly what the starting pic needed to complete it? Amazing. pic.twitter.com/SGQOsagQJK

— sonch (@soncharm) November 16, 2023

sometimes i really think these people are trolling.

could be

I mean, I guess that might be giving them the benefit of the doubt too much.

i do think that one is a troll

Friendstaking parties are the way to go uh wait.

that guy's been doing this bit for a while. AI is bad but i also feel bad for anybody who thinks that guy is posting in earnest

Using AI, I was able to take some old painting and make it better. First the painting. Notice how old and colorless it is. And you can't even see the girl's face. There's just no info to work with here. So blah. pic.twitter.com/qyyyjLLRnZ

— sonch (@soncharm) October 20, 2023

yeah, definite troll

i am assiduous in declining cookies, do not have a FB Google or Amazon account, and i don’t see any of the algorithmic interest shit you guys are talking about which is exactly how i like it. the only chink in my armour is my Whatsapp account, have no idea how i’m going to get rid of that but afaik nothing in my posts there get leaked into an online profile

congratulations (and please retire the phrase 'chink in your armour' from your vocabulary)

not sure I agree with that.. maybe we could retain it as an actual word and not a slur

sorry it never occurred to me!

xp to andy

the latest rolling thread on race is thataway -> Rolling Thread on Race 2022

your 1500 word essay on why 'chink' should be retained as a word and not a slur is due on my desk by 9 AM sharp tomorrow morning, or i'm failing you for the semester!

provide an appendix on 'niggardly'

the shivers up my spine when i hear the word “friendsgiving”

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Tuesday, November 21, 2023 11:51 AM (seven hours ago)

way out on a limb here but let me guess, you have healthy relationships with your parents and/or inherited a bunch of money from someone.

for others, friendsgiving is for those who lack those kind of nuclear safety nets, god forbid you get the shivers or... the vapors!

check your privilege? :-)

suspect table's objection is less to "having friends" and more to "talking like a rejected buffy script all the time", or maybe to "reifying the nuclear-family definition of thanksgiving by presuming the necessity of a neologism", or even to "that neologism's very syntax implying that its coiners take the word 'thanks' as having something to do with mom and dad", not that i or anyone else can rly know what goes thru his head as he and his clan stroll the innermost gardens of table manor

yeah just call it thanksgiving its not like its named famsgiving

have had many very enjoyable thanksgivings w friends rather than family and you know what i’ll do it again

Tracer, way out on a limb again but gonna assume you have not had a turkey dinner in the 21st century.

well look out below my friend, i am riding that gravy train to turkey town on the reg (tho i have been known to mix it up w duck and rooster)