So, curse you for making me check the actual source material (it was freely available online, which seems somehow heretical. I was intending to torrent it, and I’m almost disappointed I didn’t have to) and it seems I’m wrong here… the anconia copper mine in the gulch produced like a pound of copper, and they use mules for transporting stuff to and from the mine. The oil well is still suspicious, but it just gets glossed over.

I’m not prepared to read any more than that, so if there was anything else about automation in there I didn’t see it. I’d forgotten the sheer volume of baseless smug that libertarian literature exudes.

I can’t find any good sources right now, I’m absolutely not going to find a copy of that particular screed and look up the relevant bits, but I think the oil wells in galts gulch were automated, with self driving trucks, I think? It might also be implicit in the goods that are produced there, but that is drifting a bit into fanfic, I admit.

Anyway, between boston dynamics and the endless supply of rand fans on the internet, it’s very hard to research without reading the damn thing.

If I find a new source, I’ll report back.

They had robots in galts gulch, which means that all businesses need them. If you aren’t randmaxxing 24/7, can you really call yourself a technological visionary at the vanguard of the libertarian master race?

Of all the environments that you might want to rearrange to facilitate non-humanoid labour, surely warehouses are the easiest. There’s even a whole load of pre-existing automated warehousing stuff out there already. Wheels, castors, conveyors, scissor lifts… most humans don’t have these things, and they’re ideal for moving box-like things around.

Industrialisation and previous waves of automation have lead to workplaces being rearranged to make things cheaper or faster to make, or both, but somehow the robot companies think this won’t happen again? The only thing that seems to be different this time around, is that llms have shown that the world’s c-suites are packed with deeply gullible people and we now have a load of new technology for manipulating and exploiting them.

KDE showing how it should be done:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

Question:

I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

Response:

We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

1. The owner is a nazi
2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

There are various other posts here on the general subject.

https://awful.systems/post/5897965

Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.

Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

It’s just more llm output, in the style of “imagine you can reason about the question you’ve just been asked. Explain how you might have come about your answer.” It has no resemblance to how a neural network functions, nor to the output filters the service providers use.

It’s how the ai doomers get themselves into a flap over “deceptive” models… “omg it lied about its train of thought!” because if course it didn’t lie, it just edited a stream of tokens that were statistically similar to something classified as reasoning during training.

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.

If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?

They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.