That was one wild read even worse than I was expecting. Holy sexism Batman, the incel to tech pipeline is real.

“In college, you don’t learn the building skills that you need for a startup,” Tan says of his decision. “You’re learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It’s just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce.”

I remember when a large part of the university experience was about meeting people, experiencing freedom from home for the first time before being forced into the 9-5 world, and broadening your horizon in general. But maybe that’s just the European perspective.

In any case, these people are so fucking startup-brained that it hurts to think about.

Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.

Serious question: how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer? I tried to search up “how to make money off a Minecraft server” and was (of course) met with an endless list of results of LLM slop I could not bear to read more than one paragraph of.

Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, York says. “The success of Western civilization,” she argues, “does not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now.”

Yes, because Palantir is such a beacon of defending democratic values and not a techfash shithouse at all.

I sometimes feel that I, as someone who also likes retro computing and even deliberately uses old software because it feels familiar and cozy to me, and because it’s often easier to hack and tweak (in the same way that someone would prefer a vintage car they can maintenance themselves, I guess), I get thrown in with these people – and yes, I also find it super hard to put a finger on it.

I also feel they’re very prominent in the Vim community for the exact same reasons you mentioned. I like Vim, I use it daily and it’s my favorite editor because it’s what I am used to and I know how to tweak it, and I can’t be bothered to use anything else (except Emacs, but only with evil-mode), but fuck me if Vim evangelists aren’t some of the most obnoxious people online.

New Zitron dropped, and, fuck, I feel this one in my bones.

Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/

Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank’s TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.

You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.

The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.

Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.

Yet for some reason it is super popular.

Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and we’ve interviewed a few so far. I don’t want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.

I normally don’t like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but I’ve been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and there’s a subset of people who will say, “I would ask ChatGPT now” in those scenarios.

I haven’t met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time.

Yeah. I ran without an account for the longest time (and used alternative frontends like Freetube, Invidious, yt-dlp, etc.) but I caved and made one just so I could curate my feed.

I wish YouTube would ban this shit wholesale, but it’s Google and of course they won’t.

Aside: I’ve been hammering “Don’t recommend this channel” on every video that remotely smells like AI slop for a while and so far that seems to keep the feed fairly clean.

Which AI models, though? Your synthetic text extruder LLMs that can’t accurately surpass humans at anything unless you train them specifically to do that and which are kinda shite even then unless you look at it exactly the right way? Or that fabled brain simulation AI that doesn’t even exist?

Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a “country of geniuses in a data center,” […] [and] that such systems would need to be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields.”

Ah, “future” AI systems. As in the ones we haven’t built yet, don’t know how to build, and don’t even know whether we can build them. But let’s just feed more shit into Habsburg GPT in the meantime, maybe one will magically pop out.

Good news, everyone: critihype is canceled until the next tweet.

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470#m

Oh well. Nothing screams healthy business like force-feeding your product to every customer who can’t hammer the conveniently hidden opt-out button fast enough. I’m sure Gemini is doing great.

Filen does photos too, so you could consolidate 2 and 3 into one. I went and bought 500 GB lifetime storage on their Black Friday offer. Let’s see if they stick around. So far the experience has been smooth.

And if you mention mailbox.org, let me throw Posteo.com into the mix. Basically the same offer, but where mailbox presents itself a bit more business-like, Posteo seems to market itself towards individuals. I moved my mails there and are quite happy with it, but you have to roll encryption yourself. No auto solutions like Proton or Tuta.

Bryan Lunduke

Holy shit, the Linux Action Show guy? I remember listening to that podcast occasionally fifteen years ago and found it quite entertaining.

I had no idea he was even still around, let alone going techfash.

[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

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At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.

I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.

That reads like some bullshit you’d find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.

Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.

I’ve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and “making fun” of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don’t remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.

It was always “we don’t censor speech but don’t be an asshole” with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen even the worst places say, “we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead”.

Holy fucking shitballs.

The worst bit is, the devs who aren’t like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because they’re too slow.

This is so fucking infuriating. I don’t want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because it’s good fucking work ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything it’s apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.

I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I can’t I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.

Their accountant is probably three GPTs in a trench coat that’s being fed prompts by an unpaid intern or some poor dude in India.

Hey, at least there’s no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?

Never mind.