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

Please share!!!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.
• <no reply> – and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.

I read a few of the guy’s other blog posts and they follow a general theme:

• He’s pretty resourceful! Surprisingly often, when he’s feeling comfortable, he resorts to sensible troubleshooting steps.
• Despite that, when confronted with code, it seems like he often just kind of guesses at what things mean without verifying it.
• When he’s decided he doesn’t understand a thing, he WILL NOT DIG INTO THE THING.

He seems totally hireable as a junior, but he absolutely needs the adult supervision.

The LLM Revolution seems really really bad for this guy specifically – it promises that he can keep working in this ineffective way without changing anything.

Every rationalist I’ve met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.

On this issue I can never pin them down – responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don’t agree.

No doubt if you’re a cynical manipulator, “having your followers lie about what you believe” works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.

In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I’m not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them – and I think there’s a huge part of this that they’re not wrong about and they’re entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there’s philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.

I don’t know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done – if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it – and where the seduction of ego and money isn’t like, so readily and constantly available.

Is there an amount of testosterone that will turn me into a lizardman