pyrex

joined 6 months ago
[–] pyrex@awful.systems 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

The media again builds a virtual public consisting of billionaires of a variety of positions and ask you "which one do you agree with?" This is a strategy to push the public closer to the beliefs of billionaires.

I don't know who these fucking people are. The real public in California still supports Biden by a 25% margin.

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I don't understand why people take him at face value when he claims he's always been a Democrat up until now. He's historically made large contributions to candidates from both parties, but generally more Republicans than Democrats, and also Republican PACs like Protect American Jobs. Here is his personal record.

Since 2023, he picked up and donated ~$20,000,000 to Fairshake, a crypto PAC which predominantly funds candidates running against Democrats.

Has he moved right? Sure. Was he ever left? No, this is the voting record of someone who wants to buy power from candidates belonging to both parties. If it implies anything, it implies he currently finds Republicans to be corruptible.

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 3 points 4 months ago

Stuck in my brain: I used to work at a dating site for Indian people, and one of the things we tried was "LLM-generated pickup lines."

I don't remember most of them and we never made the feature public, but one of them sticks out in my mind for being the most incomprehensible.

Guy-to-girl:

What's your remedy for a Bollywood love affair?

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

This is another one for the "throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance" category.

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Please share!!!!

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It sounds like ChatGPT is eligible for a degree in business!

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.

Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.

I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

This man's blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like "wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog" is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.

Or, in his words:

I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

In which the Orange Site is a very bad influence on some minors:

How do you evaluate “factuality” without knowing all the facts, though? That’s the downfall of all such services - eventually (or even immediately) they begin to just push their preferred agenda because it’s easier and more profitable.

Hi there, thank you for your feedback! I think we could potentially go down the route of a web3 approach where we get the public consensus on the facts.

...

Your first meta-problem to solve is to get people to care about the facts, and to accept them when they’re wrong. There is an astonishing gap between knowing the truth and acting accordingly.

Yea, that's why we also added in an grammar checker, even if they dont care about facts, they can get something better than gram marly that checks for way more for way less.

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

Holy fuck! That man does not sound like an engineer. Why is he the CTO of anything?

[–] pyrex@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn't have worked)

I don't want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I'm therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

  • For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
  • For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

I can imagine him responding in three ways:

  • "Sure, here is another lie" -- and then he's locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
  • "We don't think we have to do that" -- and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
  • -- and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.
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