Semi-OT: Ed Zitron's Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut'n'pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don't get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else's summary, "just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets".
The only one I've met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don't travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven't heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that's worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the "a gig's a gig" principle.
I did read one of Carlo's pop sci books back in the day, was a nice read. Iirc he's like one of the dudes all in on loop quantum gravity. Bet you'd know more about this than I do 😅
Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.
Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:
- No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
- The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.
'nightmare blunt roration' as people say. See the greyzone is also present.
Cursed bizzaro bonaroo
"Philosophy & Music" are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.
Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he's probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he's been up to outside of physics.
And isn't Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.
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I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
He is busy being 93 fucking years old, lol
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
They probably couldn’t get Bernie.
If Penrose followed his trajectory from 30 years ago, he is now a radical anti AGI person but because he thinks human minds work on quantum effects.
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I saw in passing a claim that investors (or rather gamblers) are fleeing the dollar for safer assets such as "gold and Bitcoin".
Gold might be true, the ancient relic is up against the dollar, but Bitcoin!? Someone tell me that isn't true and it's just coinfondlers trying to hype it, in order to steer stupid capital their way.
Quick check suggests that Bitcoin is indeed up over the last couple of days, but at time of posting is down YTD. Any dumb money going into Bitcoin to hedge against USD chicanery is replacing the money that came out of it in response to the overall economic disaster still in progress, so I wouldn't exactly call it a "flight to safety" as much as a "morons returning their still-on-fire hands to the hot stove"
Ed: also all the usual disclaimers about liquidity, stable coins, manipulation, etc. apply just as strongly as they do for any other discussion of the Bitcoin spot price.
Isnt the money in volume in bitcoin quite low reportedly? I figure the exchanges can track that, but not sure if they release that data, which should show if this is real at all
@David Gerard could probably throw the actual numbers and sources at us to back it up. I don't really have the background to put the numbers in context and have largely trusted his and others' reporting on the subject, but my understanding is that especially if you consider the volume of actual USD liquidity rather than trusting Tether and other stablecoins to actually be backed then it's truly dire. Even if you take the numbers at face value, however, I don't think there's nearly enough depth in the order book to absorb a meaningful amount of sell pressure at current prices.
when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop
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"Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’"
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3lne5zqaxyc2c
the associated “date” video is so multi-dimensionally cringe it had me reaching for numpy
I’m sure whoever put money into that venture will see dramatically amazing returns, now there’s a founder that will not take the money and run.
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Inside baseball, and I don't really have a dog in this fight, but LW is crowing over a legal loss for RationalWiki
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW5tjMmTqsoRa6zrd/pablo-s-shortform?commentId=wB9jcCPrXzNCLCQXL
They link to a TracingWoodgrain(!) tweet which is basically just a screenshot of a talk page
https://xcancel.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1913717061626347642
I don't know the significance of this, if any. I don't recognize the names of any of the plaintiffs(?) in the screenshot, so I find it a bit amusing that probably the only google juice they had were RW.
An lesswrong:
countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.
uh-huh
An different lesswrong:
LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.
Christ on a futa dick
when people do stuff like dismissing x-risk because their top Google search result pointed them at RationalWiki, what exactly was the proper non-free-speech-limiting solution to this problem?
How can we leverage the monopoly of violence of the state to promote our religious views?
Christ on a futa dick
He is risen!
The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:
We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We'll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.
Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for "ban evasion". Dunno what that's about.
Ah that is a bit sad, I often link to Rationalwiki as it properly documents several far right people. (no idea about the people listed here, never heard of them). And seeing people defend/use the twg article is a bit sad. But I'm not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already. Anyway, typical Rationalism rationalization bullshit.
E: seems the problem is that RW is in a SLAPP suits allowed state and has little money. Of course the anti-RW people will use this loss to claim that RW is actually defamatory.
But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already
Yeah, I didn't write at truly Rationalist length about it, but I did spend longer than was healthy.
Yeah, that was quite a good post btw. I snicked again at the 'new sources of porn' and 'James Somerton plagiarized.' bits after seeing your link.
Sorry annoyed rant incoming, have no other place to put it in a normal way. Has nothing to do with out regular subjects, feel free to ignore. I just needed to scream into the void
Saw Lazerpig released a 'culture war' video (content warning for anybody who wants to look it up), in which he is doing a 'both sides should listen to each other' stick. (yeah, I know). In which he includes a bit on how Daryl Davis (the anti KKK guy) was called a white supremacist by antifa. Which was news to me, I never heard anybody near anti-facism call him that (but yeah filter bubbles). (I have hear a lot of people say they he gives KKK/racist members a shield to get back into respectability without doing the actual work, get lesser jail time, and that his work is only temporary and the places where he got rid of the KKK they just came back later). So I was annoyed that Lazer'talk to both sides'Pig didn't actually talk to anybody involved in antifa. But it got worse, as far as I can tell the event his is talking about took place in 2019, they protested against the alt-right being there, who according to event organizer Tim Pool(posted mostly for the picture) were not there. Other organizers are this guy (note the tweet about Jimmy concepts, as we talked about that fool more on that below in other threads. The myth thing he organizes also just tweets transphobia (funny thing, they started this org because of 'Zeitgeist: The Movie', aaaaa)), and a third guy who I didn't find any social media profile off. (Source for the organizers. Exactly the type of shit antifa says Daryls naively helps (Don't get me wrong, him convincing individual members is good, I just don't think he is without flaws (for example, the people he follows on twitter)). Do some research lazerpig, obv they didn't protest Daryl, they protested the other guys there, and Daryl got caught in the crossfire because he knows about the KKK, not the alt right. (the far right loved it, their 'they called Daryl a nazi' articles are all over the place). The racists nowadays don't don the hood, they wear the frog, and pretend to be hated by the KKK while planning marches with them.
(Posting it here because I had to get it off my chest (and it got worse the more I looked into it), and due to how the video is framed if I were to comment this people wouldn't listen to me and claim that I'm doing exactly what the video is claiming is bad about 'the left').
Yeah that was a bit of a rough one, and I say that as someone who at this point needs to admit that I enjoy multi-hour video essays as a genre. The "Ent" framing is also kind of awkward because the whole point of that bit of LotR was that even though the ents didn't want to go to war the war came to them just the same.
Though to be fair I think I already started doubting his sourcing when it turned out that that Moskva maintenance leak was a fake.
There is more than just the war came to them. The Ents are wrong in their 'nobody is there for us' assessment. (like the modern day 'Entlike' people), the Wizards were in fact there for them, that is why the betrayal of Saruman hits so hard. A wizard should know better, aka a wizard should be there for them to protect their neutrality, aka the wizards respected their desires to be left alone. I assume Gandalf, Radagast, and the blue man group didn't try to recruit them on purpose. Also the Elves gave them the gift of speech 'the cure to dumbness', in fact in the previous war the area the Entwives lived was razed by Sauron. One of the powers of lord of the rings is that not all people speak with wisdom, but they always speak their truth. Treebeard spoke the truth the Ents believed, but they were not wise (a pattern often repeated in things various people say, as Bret Devereaux mentions here). (They could be read as the Dutch/Belgians in a lot of ways, even if they according to Tolkien were a Macbeth reference). Which all fits back into Lazerpig, yes you are an Ent, but it isn't a positive thing, and the lack of selfawareness of what this Entness means is why your vid is so rough.
Being an Ent is like being like a Libertarian, ~~deadly afraid of bears~~, "like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand."(E: hahah) But think his heart is in the right place, he clearly has done more for Ukraine than any of us here I assume, just that the anti-antifa part of the video shows a lot of repeating rightwing sources uncritically (like the BLM in 2020 vs the statues shit in 2017 fuckup, time goes the other way dude, and there wasn't a unite the left rally). And the weird US style confusing the democrats/the left/antifa as one big block. Etc
And yes, longer videos are fine, I use them a lot when im doing repetitive tasks which do not require my full cognitive load. Does mean you sometimes miss things, but that happens. It is entertainment anyway. And hey he is right on the Ent part in an other way, over 2 hours, with another hour on the cutting room floor, all to conclude that hobbits are not orcs.
Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn't actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the "both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming" take was still a blow.
Yeah, of course I didn't expect him to be totally on my side, even if he mostly has his heart in the right place. (with a few exceptions, like the downplaying of the nazis in azov (granted, Ukranian anarchists did ask if people could focus less on them as the nazis there are not the main problem right now, which is a different take than 'the nazis are not real', more a militant neo-nazis we can deal with, but the Russian state we cannot etc), and the 'harsher punishment for crimes' shit). I had hoped for more. I had hoped my comment written around the mental health break point, would end up to be a total egg on my face, react before watching the whole video gotcha mistake on my part. Sadly it was not (also why I don't go into the various issues the vid had after that point, even if the repeatedly shows his intention were good, just he is an Ent), but imagine if it was, imagine him going at the end, 'ow correction yeah the Daryl thing, turns out that was Tim Pool, did yall notice how much you went along with my framing? Do you get it now? Sadly it was not.
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Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the "residential proxy" services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.
Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I'm dropping it here:
I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.
Dan Olson finds that "AI overviews" are not as constant as the northern star.
The phrase “don’t eat things that are made of glass” is a metaphorical one. It’s often used to describe something that is difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous, often referring to facing difficult tasks or situations with potential negative outcomes.
But also,
The phrase “don’t eat things made of glass” is a literal warning against ingesting glass, as it is not intended for consumption and can cause serious harm. Glass is a hard, non-organic material that can easily break and cause cuts, damage to the digestive tract, and other injuries if swallowed.
Olson says,
Fantastic technology, glad society spent a trillion dollars on this instead of sidewalks.
Hat tip to the AI bro in the comments willfully misunderstanding why he sees so much "sexualized schoolgirl trash" from human artists. Both in the sense of "illustrators take commissions from horny strangers who are one of the most consistent sources of actual income and one imperilled by genAI" and in the sense of "my dude in the modern internet if you're seeing it that frequently it's because the algorithms have decided you're into that shit."
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