A well-brewed fart will propel me straight to the moon

Still working on fermenting it

No actually, I think what you have to say is in line with my broader point. As the top source of global consumer demand, America is primarily held together by its supply chains at this point. To be crude about it, the best reasons to be an American in the 21st century are the swag and the cheap gas. When the MAGA and Fox News crowd are pointing fingers and ranting about Marxism, they’re actively trying to obscure materialism and keep people from thinking about material conditions. Having a material program, that at least has elements that can be built from the bottom up, is at least as crucial as having an electoral program. I know the Four Thieves people got rightfully shredded here a few weeks back, and that kind of technical pushback on amateur dreams is necessary, so it’s a tough needle to thread. But for instance, consider Gavin Newsom’s plan to have California operate its own insulin production, within existing systems and regulations: https://calmatters.org/health/2025/01/insulin-production-gavin-newsom/ This is a Newsom policy I actually think is a fantastic idea, and a big credit to him if it happens! But it’s bogged down in the production-line validation stage, because we already know how to synthesize insulin and that it’s effective. And the production may not even be in California when it happens! There’s plenty of room for improvement here.

Space and centralized, rent-seeking “AI” are not material programs that improve conditions for the broader population. The original space program was successful because a more tightly controlled media environment gave the opportunity to use it to cover for the missile development that was the enduring practical outcome. Positive consumer outcomes from all that have always felt, to me, like something that was bolted onto the history later. We wouldn’t have Tang and transistors if not for Apollo! Well, one is kind of shitty and useless, the other is so overwhelmingly advantageous that it surely would have happened anyway.

And to your last point, I somewhat sadly feel like a lot of doomer shit I was reading ~15 years ago actually prepared me to at least be unsurprised about the situation we’re in. A lot of those writers (James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer for instance) have either softly capitulated, or else happily slotted themselves into the middle of the red-brown alliance. I think that’s a big part of why we’re at where we’re at: a lot of people who were actually willing to consider the idea of American collapse were perfectly fine with letting it happen.

Refusal of statins was one of the most prominent anti-medical trends I remember observing among right-wing acquaintences, even well before such people got on the anti-vax bandwagon. To be sure, some people experience bad side-effects (including my mom, at least for a while), but it definitely seemed like a few bits of anecdata in the early 2010s built into a broad narrative of “doctor’s tryin’ ta kill ya”

This is a thought I’ve been entertaining for some time, but this week’s discussion about Ars Technica’s article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.

A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly haven’t cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network won’t dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? It’s gassed. The idea that “it might be ME up there one day!” persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining don’t have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.

For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what I’ve seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systems… which, if it’s not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.

Everybody’s looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?

just mark C for every answer if you don’t get it, that’s what the State of California taught me in elementary school

I’ve seen people criticize Eric Berger for being up Musk’s ass about SpaceX, though I’m simply not that passionate about space stuff anymore. And so far I don’t see them posting anything about the NIH freezeout, even though that surely affects a vast swath of their reader base. Seems odd.

I was reading something David wrote about it at one point, but it seemed like lore too cursed even for the rationalist milieu

Really starting to get a bit sick of Ars Technica. They’re OK for general interest tech stuff, but their editorial line (and some of their commenter base) have been really credulous about AI vendors’ PR.

Hmm, surely there is no downside to doing all of one’s marketing, both personal* and professional, through the false certainty and low signal of short-form social media. The leopard has only licked Sam’s face, it will never bite and begin chewing!

*You and I may find the concept of a “personal brand” to be horrifying, but these guys clearly want to become brands more fervently than Bruce Wayne wanted to become a bat

Single season TV show that came out of the 90s enthusiasm for adapting random comic books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillacs_and_Dinosaurs_(TV_series)

Interestingly, Wikipedia makes it seem like the game made it out the door first

I think one thing to understand is that most of his casual audience very likely engages through watching clips, not sitting through whole interviews. The reasonable, mainstreamable stuff gets clipped out and perhaps you run across it sarching for something else, or it’s algorithmically fed to you because of your interest in an adjacent topic. Clips of the weirder, creepier manosphere/Alex Jones/Art Bell guests don’t get surfaced as readily, at least until you’re down the rabbit hole, so Rogan himself ends up having a veneer of reasonability and respectability that he doesn’t really deserve.

Same goes for Trump rallies, or probably almost any major political speech now. There’s a front line of people who will watch the whole thing, but then they recirculate specific clips based on how they want to portray the subject.

Come now, he was always about consing chodes into lists… Given his excessive self-seriousness, I doubt he’s taken the time to pick up the skill of juggling them in the years since

If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices

alas, there is no honor or glory to be had from winning the meme race

I can’t help but feel like for Ellison in particular, he must have given himself no choice but to believe this stuff is more capable than it is. He’s 80 years old now, and if building towards honest-to-god “real AI” wasn’t what his whole career was about, then what was the point? The twilight of the older generations of tech executives is going to be its own special kind of pathology.

Not sure where this came from, but it can’t be all bad if it chaos-dunks on Yudkowsky like this. Was relayed to me via Ed Zitron’s Discord, hopefully the Q isn’t for Quillete or Qanon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtPzDMB2dg

I feel like before Redbox went under, it was also a dumping ground for this sort of thing. For instance, that mid-budget Western “Rust” where Alec Baldwin killed the camerawoman on set felt like it was destined for this sort of distribution strategy. Who’s clamoring to go out to the theater to see a Western with Alec Baldwin these days? But it might stand out among all the other slop when you’re looking to turn your brain off on a Saturday night.

See also the rise of the “geezer-teasers,” where a random 80s/90s action star signs up to appear in the first and last 10 minutes of a generic action movie filmed someplace inexpensive, most likely eastern Europe or southeast Asia. There were a lot of those. Perhaps my favorite, that I still want to watch someday, was Danny Trejo and Danny Glover in “Bad-Ass 2: Bad-Asses.”

I’m guessing these people were JAQing off hard enough that they got kicked out of their local Oxford-style debate org and had to start their own.

I feel like “qualia” is both an interesting concept, and a buzzword that has rapidly grown to indicate people who need to be aggressively ignored.