Like any reality-show writing room, they only plan one episode in advance and only have a week's worth of photography in mind.

As the classic film Network points out, the Saudi money is the end of the road; there aren't any richer or more gullible large wealth funds who will provide further cash. So OpenAI could be genuinely out of greater ~~fools~~ financing after another year of wasting Somebody Else's Money. This crash has removed "large" from the front of any other wealth fund that might have considered bailing them out. The Stargate gamble could still work out, but so far I think ti's only transferred bag-holding responsibilities from Microsoft to Oracle.

Another path is to deflate nVidia's cap. At first blush, this seems impossible to me; nVidia's business behavior is so much worse than that of competitors Intel or Imagination yet they have generally never lost faith from their core gaming laity, and as long as nVidia holds 20-30% of the gaming GPU market they will always have a boutique niche with cap at least comparable to e.g. their competitor AMD. But GPUs have been treated as currency among datacenter owners, and a market crash could devalue the piles of nVidia GPUs which some datacenter owners have been using as collateral for purchasing land, warehouses, machines, more GPUs, etc. nVidia isn't the only bag-holder here, though, and since they don't really want to play loan-shark and repossess a datacenter for dereliction, odds are good that they'll survive even if they're no longer king of the hill. The gold rush didn't work out? Too bad, no returns allowed on shovels or snow gear.

Side note: If folks just wanted to know whether tech in general is hurt by this, then yes, look at Tesla's valuation. Tesla is such a cross-cutting big-ticket component of so many ETFs that basically every retirement scheme took a hit from Tesla taking a hit. The same thing will happen with nVidia and frankly retirement-fund managers should feel bad for purchasing so much of what any long-term investor would consider to be meme stocks. (I don't hold either TSLA or NVDA stocks.)

I hope this makes sense. I don't post with this candor when I'm well-rested and sober.

Australian chemist and videographer Explosions & Fire argues convincingly that the ongoing recent radioactive-boy-scout scandal should not result in prosecution. For context, a 24-year-old man ordered small samples of radioactive isotopes from the USA, Australia failed to intercept it at the border, and they are prosecuting him in order to avoid embarrassment over incompetence. I don't have a choice sneer; E&F is unwaveringly energized over the topic of radioactive isotopes and injustice, and the whole thing is worth watching.

Today on the orange site, an AI bro is trying to reason through why people think he's weird for not disclosing his politics to people he's trying to be friendly with. Previously, he published a short guide on how to talk about politics, which — again, very weird, no possible explanation for this — nobody has adopted. Don't worry, he's well-read:

So far I've only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.

The thread is mostly centered around one or two pearl-clutching conservatives who don't want their beliefs examined:

I find it astonishing that anyone would ask, ["who did you vote for?"] … In my social circle, anyway, the taboo on this question is very strong.

To which the top reply is my choice sneer:

In my friend group it's clear as day: either you voted to kill and deport other people in the friend group or you didn't. Pretty obvious the group would like to know if you're secretly interested in their demise.

Somebody pointed out that HN's management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it's the sort of thing Dan might blank:

but I don't want to get hellbanned by dang.

Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It's caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices -- the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.

I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

Meanwhile, actual Pastafarians (hi!) know that the Russian Federation openly persecutes the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for failing to help the government in its authoritarian activities, and also that we're called to be anti-authoritarian. The Fifth Rather:

I'd really rather you didn't challenge the bigoted, misogynist, hateful ideas of others on an empty stomach. Eat, then go after the bastards.

May you never run out of breadsticks, travelers.

My NSFW reply, including my own experience, is here. However, for this crowd, what I would point out is that this was always part of the mathematics, just like confabulation, and the only surprise should be that the prompt doesn't need to saturate the context in order to approach an invariant distribution. I only have two nickels so far, for this Markov property and for confabulation from PAC learning, but it's ~~completely expected~~ weird that it's happened twice.

He's talking like it's 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it's not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he's lining the floors of hamster cages.

This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I've ever seen. To recap:

• NYC elects a cop as mayor
• Cop-mayor decrees that NYC will be great again, because of businesses
• Cops and other oinkers get extra cash even though they aren't business
• Commercial real estate is still cratering and cops can't find anybody to stop/frisk/arrest/blame for it
• Folks over in New Jersey are giggling at the cop-mayor, something must be done
• NYC invites folks to become small-business owners, landlords, realtors, etc.
• Cop-mayor doesn't understand how to fund it (whaddaya mean, I can't hire cops to give accounting advice!?)
• Cop-mayor's CTO (yes, the city has corporate officers) suggests a fancy chatbot instead of hiring people

It's a fucking pattern, ain't it.

I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn't realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.

2017: AI will soon replace human labor

2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want

2020: COVID-19 won't be that bad

2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him

2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers

2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn't understand why I''m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)

Rumor is that GPT-4 is also underpriced; in general, rumors are that OpenAI loses money on all of its products individually. It's sneerworthy, but I don't know what it means for the future; few things are more dangerous than a cornered wild startup who is starving and afraid.