this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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Pay $1000 a month to live on Balaji and Bryan’s private island grindset Sorbonne. Hone your Dark Talents at the Wizarding school from guys who don’t believe in society, but DO believe in getting teenage blood transfusions. Featuring Proof-of-Learn^TM^!

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

Okay, first of all, classic question from me, who the fuck is this? How many chuds were produced by the crypto bubble, it's insane, you could have a fucking Pokemon card deck with them. My brain already struggles to retain information about both SBF and Wrinklewusses, there are no more resources to be allocated to a Balaji.

Second, most of this is irrelevant bullshit even for the standards of a crypto grifter, but I really wanted to read the "Learn" section. First there's some nonsense about "proof-of-learn" which, again, completely irrelevant, and finally the single paragraph that actually says anything about the curricullum:

Our initial material focuses on founding tech communities, as distinct from tech companies.

Is there a word for stuff like this? Filler? Cruft? Meaningless, utterly redundant words that just pad the text. Anyway, this post is 90% that.

As such it touches on everything from crypto, AI, and social media to history, politics, and filmmaking.

So your idea of "everything" in tech is crypto, AI, and social media, in order: a useless tech that is already dead, an ill-defined hype term for tech that doesn't exist in the best case and is useless in the worst, and just a general concept of platforms with users? Don't get me wrong, you can learn a lot of software engineering by analysing the architecture of pre-collapse Twitter, like you can run an entire course on microservices just off the back of that, but I somehow doubt that's what this guy is selling.

It should be useful even if you’re just growing a traditional company or building a following.

What the fuck does this even mean. This should be useful if you're growing a company or not actually trying to do or achieve anything? Do you need any sort of education for "building a following"? What does that even mean, like a traditional Jim Jones-style following? You definitely don't need a school for that shit.

Also what's a non-traditional company? What's the avant-garde corporate trend now? Companies that actually turn a profit?

Over time, of course, every branch of the sciences and humanities becomes relevant when building a community.

I'm not sure what he categorises as "building a community" but I'm not sure if like molecular quantum mechanics ever become relevant for what in my head is community-building, as in establishing networks of support and communication between people. Just saying that choosing "building a community" as the guiding principle of what to include in your curriculum might tend to exclude some important branches of science.

Also lol, lmao even, dude how the fuck is AI or crypto relevant to building any sort of community other than a communal fart-sniffing chamber.

But we’re intentionally starting with something simple. Our learning is about continuous education, about solving the problem-of-the-day [emph. mine].

Oh, so they're gonna tackle climate change almost exclusively! You know, the actual problem-of-the-day we have in this current day! Wonder how crypto helps with that, though... 🤔

Anyway, in conclusion, your "university" doesn't have a coherent fucking curricullum, what are you even doing. I hope this is going to be a sex island, otherwise this is a giant waste of everyone's time.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

balajis has been a bitcoin shill since almost the very beginning (I was blocked from following his crap on Xhitter ages ago probably because he applied a collective banlist to everyone who had ever expressed an anti-BTC sentiment he knew of ) His probably most famous venture was trying to construct and sell a self.-contained BTC miner in an RPi form factor, which crashed and almost literally burned hilariously. Now I think he's just coasting on his VC billions, slowly self-radicalizing in a social media soup. If the superyacht he was traveling in to his Arbeitslager island was sunk by orcas at least we'd get a decent headline out of it.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

His probably most famous venture was trying to construct and sell a self.-contained BTC miner in an RPi form factor, which crashed and almost literally burned hilariously.

Oh, I remember that one! That's a claim to fame if I've ever heard one.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago

(quick basic background typed mobile while still trying to get started on day)

balaji shillranivan is the primary thonkfuck espousing the view of “the network state”, which is a stance that’s largely a nerdsnipe made up of “eww all this human society shit is messy and hard. fuck it all let’s ~~go shopping~~ rebuild society only on code. code is law!”

it doesn’t actually say the first bit, of course. as with all good obscurantist shit that’s the hidden foundation layer, but it’s what it taps into