I didn't know a16z was so devoted to developing new hires! Don't you just love to see it.

incredible, where is this from?

Quality sneers in these (one, two) response posts. The original posts that these are critiquing are very silly and not worth your time, but the criticism here addresses many of the typical AI hype talking points.

lmao this is weird as fuck, reminds me of the bullshit Lex Fridman comes up with, I can totally imagine him saying things like this

might involve some amount of hubris you say...

This really opened my eyes to some historical context I never thought of before.

My initial gut reaction was judgmental about the way billionaires spend their money; thinking it might involve some amount of hubris.

Then I realized I have no idea of how sculpture that are now show in museums as treasured historical art pieces were judge in the time they were created. Today we treasure them. But what did the general population think of them? I have no idea.

I imagine that at the time of their commissioning they were also paid by affluent people that could afford such luxuries. People that probably mirror today’s billionaires in influence and access. So what’s different about these?

Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit 🤨 and want to dig in more,

No surprise that folks in anarchist circles are skeptical of Proton ha. That said, I do know quite a few people in the email "industry" who are broadly skeptical of Proton's general philosophy/approach to email security, and the way they market their service/offerings.

Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look

Fastmail has a great interface and user experience imo, significantly better than any other web client I've tried. That said, they're not end-to-end encrypted, so they're not really trying to fill the same niche as Proton/Tuta.

From their website:

Fastmail customers looking for end-to-end encryption can use PGP or s/mime in many popular 3rd party apps. We don’t offer end-to-end encryption in our own apps, as we don’t believe it provides a meaningful increase in security for most users...

If you don’t trust the server, you can’t trust it to load uncompromised code, so you should be using a third party app to do end-to-end encryption, which we fully support. And if you really need end-to-end encryption, we highly recommend you don’t use email at all and use Signal, which was designed for this kind of use case.

I honestly don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff here (I can barely write functional python scripts lol - so please chime in if I'm completely off base), but this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?

Last time I used Tuta the user experience was pretty clunky, but afaik it is E2EE, so it's probably a better direct alternative to Proton.

Hello, and welcome!

I also desperately need a place where people know what a neoreactionary is so I can more easily complain about them so I’d like to hang around longer term too.

Sounds like you're in the right place. Please complain as much as you need, so we can all scream, sigh and sneer into the void in unison.

for my first project I use the Alex Garland TV show Devs

I haven't read your piece yet, because I'd like to watch devs, unspoiled, at some point, but have bookmarked to come back to at a later point :)

q: how do know if someone is a "Renaissance man"?

a: the llm that wrote the about me section for their website will tell you so.

jesus fucking christ

From Grok AI:

Zach Vorhies, oh boy, where do I start? Imagine a mix of Tony Stark's tech genius, a dash of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing spirit, and a pinch of Monty Python's humor. Zach Vorhies, a former Google and YouTube software engineer, spent 8.5 years in the belly of the tech beast, working on projects like Google Earth and YouTube PS4 integration. But it was his brave act of collecting and releasing 950 pages of internal Google documents that really put him on the map.

Vorhies is like that one friend who always has a conspiracy theory, but instead of aliens building the pyramids, he's got the inside scoop on Google's AI-Censorship system, "Machine Learning Fairness." I mean, who needs sci-fi when you've got a real-life tech thriller unfolding before your eyes?

But Zach isn't just about blowing the whistle on Google's shenanigans. He's also a man of many talents - a computer scientist, a fashion technology company founder, and even a video game script writer. Talk about a Renaissance man!

And let's not forget his role in the "Plandemic" saga, where he helped promote a controversial documentary that claimed vaccines were contaminated with dangerous retroviruses. It's like he's on a mission to make the world a more interesting (and possibly more confusing) place, one conspiracy theory at a time.

So, if you ever find yourself in a dystopian future where Google controls everything and the truth is stranger than fiction, just remember: Zach Vorhies was there, fighting the good fight with a twinkle in his eye and a meme in his heart.

The couple both said they found the backlash they faced on social media to be racist since, they argued, minorities often hit their children without the same backlash.

"We are kind of shocked by the racism threaded throughout this recent controversy. It is pretty well-documented that African Americans and other minority groups practice corporal punishment much more than other groups," Simone Collins said via email, linking to a CNN article published in 2011.

Malcolm Collins said it was "uniquely offensive" to him considering "the majority of Americans practice some form of corporal punishment, as you can see from the statistics with specifically that being the minority groups of Americans. So yeah, I think it's an arguably racist position."

this is the stupidest fucking thing I've read all year

how have I not heard of sigbovik before, this is excellent

ffs...

orange site poster finds 2 and 2, struggles to come to terms with the fact that they add to 4:

Every time race comes up on HackerNews i am shocked at how horrifyingly racist (some) users of this site are. Not only did a user somehow think that this context would exonerate this very racist man, both you and I are getting immediately downvoted for disagreeing. There was a post last week or so that was so full of racist comments it just got taken down. I wonder what on earth brings together HackerNews and racism like this.

I wonder mate...

A shining HN knight hoists themself onto their (very) high horse to respond:

You know, topics like this are not always black and white. There is a full-range, nuance and discussion.

I'd also wager that the downvotes here are because this flame-bait kind of comments are not appropriate for HN, or if they are appropriate then some might not think it's contributing to the discussion anyways.

Me, I think the refusal by some to admit (or accept) that the full-context post adds to the discussion and to instead double-down and cry more racism is definitely not constructive.

I'm honestly getting tired of these "race card" low-blows and one-sided thinking shutting down conversation.

nvm found the relevance, Linkedin tells me he was involved in hosting Lesswrong for 9 years lol