I use UTF-9 to efficiently handle Unicode on my PDP-10.

grind for a decade [trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer] OR [whatever]

I have spent the last decade doing either:

• riding a flying pig to frozen hell and back

or

• something.

Very fine people at YouGenics. They sponsor our karting team, the Race Scientists.

I missed the AI bit, but I wasn’t surprised.

Do YC, A16z and their ilk ever fund anything good, even by accident?

Do you expect me to walk?

No, Mr. Bond! I expect you to buy!

Perfect timing, “self”, if that really is your name. I was just getting tired of the dirty talk 😇

Me dropping a radioactive gold bar on my foot: “Au!”

Oh dear, please give Mr. Gerard my apologies for assuming first name basis, how impolite of me.

I think calling gold “most stable currency in human history” is pretty buggish, but maybe by the time I’m intellectually ready to go back to college I’ll figure out why it isn’t.

Sure, investment in gold is reasonable. Particularly compared to most of whatever the hell Trump administration is doing. You said goldbugs are unreasonable yourself, so your initial hostile tone seems misplaced. Most likely you either misunderstood what was said or felt that the remark about goldbugs was meant to include people as reasonable as yourself, even though no one said investing in gold is unreasonable per se.

As for your later hostile tone, that is perfectly understandable because I’m being almost as much of a condescending dick as you are.

Come to think of it, dragon types are know to be big on hoarding gold so I guess it’s natural for you to take the issue so personally.

Hey, there’s a new government program to provide care for dementia patients. I should found a company to make myself a middleman for all those sweet Medicare bucks. All I need is a nice, friendly but smart sounding name. Oh, that’s it! I’ll call it Frenology!

Okay daddprofessor. Most of us were agreeing that Trump admin trading gold reserves for cryptocoins is a stupid idea. This seems to have attracted people who agreed for the incorrect reason, namely that they think inert yellow metal is the fundamental source and measure of wealth, which David called out. After that it could be one of three things:

a) You misunderstood what David wrote and rudely insinuated he is unfamiliar with the concept of speculative investment.

b) You correctly understood what David wrote and — being a goldbug yourself — took issue with it and proceeded to make the aforementioned rude insinuation.

c) You’re flirting with me a bit too aggressively and it’s activating my brat instincts, professor~

I wrote down some theorems and looked at them through a microscope and actually discovered the objectively correct solution to ethics. I won’t tell you what it is because science should be kept secret (and I could prove it but shouldn’t and won’t).

The headline is a bit of a crash blossom, but if you read the article, the comments in this thread, or even the title itself carefully enough, you should be able to parse it. If not, I’ll help:

A startup company named “11x”, whose business model is AI sales, claims to have customers for its software (which incidentally doesn’t work), who in fact are not their customers.

This is not funny. My best friend died of whatever. If y’all didn’t hate saltman so much maybe he’d still be here with us.

You probably felt really smart when wrtiting that comment, and that’s totally normal and valid. Everyone has lapses in reading comprehension sometimes.

I know the GNU Infant Manipulation Program can be a little unintuitive and clunky sometimes, but it is quite powerful when you get used to it. Also why does everyone always look at me weird when I say that?

Surely not, their whole dev team is made of 11x programmers!

Can we make “low-background media” a thing?

Works as a flex I guess. Does this government agency budget statement really include a multi-million dollar line for “arming fascist death squads to destabilize countries most of us couldn’t find on a map”? Why yes it does, what are you going to do about it!

The world was not quite ready for the FleshLathe.

I listened to parts 2—4 today and even with an above-average familiarity with rationalist weirdness it was a wild fucking ride.

Kinda wild to have a community of vegan trans women whose most notable victims are a border patrol agent and a landlord and who are still the baddies in this situation.

The HPMOR/LW parts and to a lesser extent bits of CFAR were absolutely familiar (and all the more cringeworthy for it). Never quite realized exactly how obviously psychologically torturous cult shit CFAR event were about.