TechTakes

re: election results. unfortunately i'm not surprised or even disappointed by now. it makes me feel sad for my 2015 self and her naivete. she didn't understand what a disgusting and evil culture she lived in

Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:

Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.

“One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”

For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn't a great rolemodel.

(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on 'traditional rationality')).

The worst part about Trump being president is Trump being president for a year. The second worst part is Vance being president for the next three (after Trump dies of heart failure). The third worst part is the fact that I've been owned in a way I can't even explain to my closest friends.

The orange site is an easy target, but the lack of solidarity in the comments about the NYT Tech Guild strike fills me with dread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42040795

In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/mondays-campaign-11424-kari-lake-adds-ai-polls-rcna178681?icid=latestpost_bot

Edit: Found the map she's using:

https://xcancel.com/IwriteOK/status/1853647442740441289#m

Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc

Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:

• The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
• I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
• it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.

Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.

NB: am not a US voter.

https://x.com/typedfemale/status/1855097494222651681

Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.

why do neurotypical people love to do this. why can't you say sam harris sucks in a normal way

You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?

Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results are... basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual "gameplay".

TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things aren't even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer they're using to render this.

Note that the person in the video isn't part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.

Orange site envrionmentalism:

Lawns are functional though, they aren't just a status symbol.

I grew up with a mossy front yard, and I have clover and ferns in my current yards to compete with grasses; there are better options, my dude.

what a terrible fate https://archive.ph/X2s3z

lol

Atlantic writer: "better dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuh"

https://archive.is/OtYCo

Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobs' widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot "GW Bush Did Nothing Wrong" Cohen.