Make Fun of Them
36 comments
·June 30, 2025ergonaught
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PaulHoule
I find any claim that superintelligence helps with physics to be a hoot.
Dark matter is the most notable contradiction in physics today, where there is a complete mismatch between the physics we see in the lab, in the solar system, and globular clusters and the physics we see at the galactic scale. Contrast that to Newton's unified treatment of gravity on Earth and the Solar System.
There is no lack of darkon candidates or MOND ideas [1] what is lacking is an experiment or observation that can confirm one or the other. Similarly, a 1000x bigger TeraKamiokande or GigaKATRIN could constrain proton decay or put some precision on the neutrino mass but both of these are basically blue-collar problems.
[1] I used to like MOND but the more I've looked at it the more I've adopted the mainstream view of "this dark matter has a galaxy in it" as opposed to "this galaxy has dark matter in it". MOND fever is driven by a revisionist history where dark matter was discovered by Vera Rubin, not Zwicky [2] and that privileges galactic rotation curves (which MOND does great at) over many other kinds of evidence for DM.
[2] ... which I'd love to believe since Rubin did her work at my Uni!
alganet
That's not the point of the article though.
PaulHoule
Altman claimed superintelligence would revolutionize physics. This is one of many bullshit statements attributed to Altman, just one I feel qualified to counter. I could say plenty about software dev too.
alganet
Lots of things were said about AI. I could take this sort of discussion to any subject I want.
The article tries to put these personalities into a "master manipulator" figure. It doesn't matter if 99% of the text actually _criticizes_ these personalities.
What matters is the takeaway a typical reader would get from reading it. It's in the lines of "they're not tech geniuses, they're manipulators".
This takeaway is carefully designed to cater to selected audiences (well, the author claims to be a media trainer, so fair game, I guess).
I think the intent is to actually _promote_ these personalities. I know it sounds contradictory, but as I said, it gives them too much credit for "being good manipulators".
Which audiences are catered to and how they are expected to react is an exercise I'll leave for the reader.
That's a general overview of what this article does. Nothing related to actual claims.
periodjet
This is almost unreadable. A dark, disturbing window looking into the soul of a thoroughly frustrated, unhappy, unfulfilled, brutally angry and uninteresting person.
He may be entirely right about these charlatan CEOs, but my god. This is a man on a downward spiral who desperately needs help.
stego-tech
> This is a man on a downward spiral who desperately needs help.
Oh, so you’re finally offering to help, then? You and the rest of the Technosphere who has been so blindly absorbed with startup culture and CEBro worship for the past twenty years, are finally going to help?
Because insulting the authors of these tirades against the present is the opposite of helping. I can’t fault their post or its structure because we are collectively at the end of our fucking ropes, here.
We’ve been polite about our concerns. We’ve raised them through “appropriate channels”, we’ve raised sincere grievances with formal letters, we’ve organized community forums and town halls.
You. People. Don’t. Fucking. CARE. If we go through appropriate channels, we’re not visible enough for your liking. If we write formal letters, you say we’re making unreasonable demands in an improper venue. If we hold town halls, you don’t attend. If we protest, you blame us for inconveniencing your work day.
Instead of blaming the desperation of those of us who are trying to get others to see the lunacy around them, why not just admit you don’t give a fuck and quit occupying the vacuum with your nihilistic banality? Why not let others have a voice, instead of immediately filling it with the verbal equivalent of packing peanuts?
Yeah, we need help. Don’t state the obvious when you’re unwilling to offer said help.
periodjet
> You and the rest of the Technosphere who has been so blindly absorbed with startup culture and CEBro worship for the past twenty years
Making a wild unfounded assumption like this makes the rest of your argument impossible to engage with.
stego-tech
That’s fine, your complete dismissal of the OP’s point because you couldn’t be bothered to empathize with distressful emotion to understand the gravitas of the point being made should have been my cue that you were similarly impossible to engage with.
Guess I learned something new from this exchange after all.
silverquiet
I agree that the tone is a bit much in places, but he does address this:
> I have learned to accept who I am — that I am not like most people — and people conflate my passion and vigor with anger or hate, when what they’re experiencing is somebody different who deeply resents what the powerful have done to the computer.
johnfn
Agreed. OP says "I think it’s because we live in Hell." and then goes on to describe how sometimes buttons on apps don't work or he gets notifications that aren't well-targeted. Really? That's Hell? Hell must have gotten a lot better since the last time I checked.
I agree with your concern for the author.
ctoth
The other kind of ChatGPT psychosis?
meansob
[dead]
desktopninja
I'm in the camp now that asks the question, if AI is so good, why are we still tethered to big tech? why hasn't an untrained human prompted a product out that is 10 times better than anything big tech has to offer. After all intelligence is free :-)
hbn
I read the first few paragraphs but when I saw the size of my scrollbar, I decided the author is putting way too much thought and effort into owning a VC-funded tech CEO playing the game you play when you're running a a VC-funded tech company.
"Our product is the second coming of Christ and if you give me money now you'll 100000x your investment!" is the correct answer to all questions when you're in that position. I'm not saying it's admirable, but it's what you do to keep money coming in for the time being. It's not that deep.
alganet
> a savvy negotiator and manipulator
You give them too much street cred. I'm not convinced they're even good at that.
lenerdenator
If you're referring specifically to the Altman brothers, ask them where you can find a soda and a sunduh for a qwarter on Rowte Farty-Far.
Teasing over the various Midwestern accents is sort of like dealing with boxing great Joe Louis: you can run, but you just can't hide.
stego-tech
Author writes a 36min blog piece about the frustratingly shitty nature of modern technology and CEBro culture.
Top comment on HN? “Ugh, it’s too long.”
The post is a personal blog entry that reads as initial stream-of-consciousness that’s been buttressed by data and revised to improve its readability.
It’s also the frustrated, desperate plea of someone who has been in the trenches for long enough to have seen the same nihilistic response to their pleas. It’s someone who has tried every suggestion to get their point across to others who demanded convenient communication over actual work, and seen the reality that people don’t actually care. The fact the post openly invites and encourages mockery is the point: we should be mocking CEBros who can’t give simple, straight answers, just like we should be mocking commenters who whinge about “thing too long” like they’re grading essay papers for class instead of understanding the whole of someone else’s viewpoint.
The author is trying to draw attention not just to the idiocy of Tech “Leaders”, but also to the idiotic sycophancy of the self-styled “intelligent technologists” who loudly prostrate themselves on these altars and worship the golden idols of the present age.
The author is making fun of you. The fact you’re crying over length reveals the truth in their position and a complete lack of support for your own.
periodjet
I read the entire thing. It’s nothing more than a hateful screed by someone who tears down, but does not build; who is in a permanent state of (incorrectly) claiming that the sky is falling. What’s so interesting and urgent about that? It’s one of a million similar cries of faux-despair from certain over-privileged overreacting regions of the Internet. Yawn.
johnfn
The sentiment highlighted in various comments on this post isn't that the blog piece is 'too long'. The sentiment is that it is incoherent, illegible and borderline unhinged. It clashes so strongly with what I consider to be calm, reasonable writing that I can't justify continuing to spend my time reading it.
stego-tech
> It clashes so strongly with what I consider to be calm, reasonable writing that I can't justify continuing to spend my time reading it.
Which makes the author’s point for them. It wasn’t calm, reasonable writing at all, and it’s your mistake to assume all writing must be calm and reasonable in order for it to be valid or of import. It was written with passion, zeal, distress, and rage. It was shaking the reader and demanding an answer: do they not see what the author does? Do they not connect the puzzle pieces in the same way? Is the reader not seeing the same visage as the author?
That’s the entire point of its length, its tone, its language. It was meant to appeal to humans, not machines, and to be an exasperated plea for others to either acknowledge what the author sees and act upon it, or to rebuke the author’s viewpoint with supporting evidence.
Instead, the response is a bunch of “too long and emotions are bad” whinging. It neither refutes the author nor critiques the piece as written, simply vapidly complains the message wasn’t delivered in a way they personally preferred.
Which, if I were to extrapolate, is its own damning indictment of a technology industry so focused on designing around niche edge cases and shareholder demands that it neglects fundamentals. If that also holds true, then it’s of no wonder LLM summaries are so celebrated:
Content without context, in as dry and inoffensive a format as possible. Never a threat to someone’s thinking, never a challenge to their positions, never complex enough to warrant consideration.
bediger4000
Zitron is correct. He reminds me of Linux advocates, who are also correct.
Spivak
I think the author leaves out one important point which is that most people sound like idiots when put on the spot and asked to talk about things outside their core competency, and for these men that core competency is business. It's entirely possible they're bad at that as well but a priori you would probably expect them to do a lot better.
It's the human person Gell-Mann effect, we listen to CEOs talk about science, tech, and engineering and they sound like morons because we know these fields. But their audience is specifically people who don't-- and to them, thanks to the effect, they sound like they know what they're talking about.
amai
Has this guy ever heard the american president speaking? Compared to Trump Altman et al. are geniuses.
esafak
I'm almost tempted to run this lengthy article through chatGPT for a summary but the irony was too much so I just stopped reading.
Author makes a number of valid and valuable points, but desperately needed to edit this down for poignancy out of respect for everyone's time (including their own), taking their own advice ("clearly articulate what you're saying"). Don't make using an LLM to extract your point seem like such a good idea, eh?