domain:alexepstein.substack.com
mrvanillasky
8m ago
My previous understanding was that people who build large firms do so entirely on their own fighting impossible odds and are helped by fellow founders, that unlike academia, there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people.
Reading this breaks that, how can you trust anything? Thiel was a legit FBI guy for a year and there is zero mention of it by anyone anywhere and this is not because of Palantir being related to him either. Similarly, Marc Andreessen is seen as this American patriot, /ourguy/ but a VC whereas his firm has taken money from Saudi Arabia and likely China too, how can you not have a conflict of interest then?
I used to take everything at face value before, I think I will probably lean towards believing things that I have seen as true instead of taking everyone else word for it.
Tree
13m ago
I don’t let people choose their colors. They get on the binary tree like everyone else.
“grey tribe” : left-right-right
“communist”: left-left-left
“center-right” : right-left-right
“conservative”: right-right-left
Hyperion
24m ago
My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls.
I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
35m ago
You're missing the point. The point is that there's nothing to distinguish this photo from the 150 other photos deleted in those ten minutes except that you feel strongly about this image. There's no indication at all that the process has been abused.
I'm not missing the point, it's just not relevant to my views. There's a lot of work in an org like Wikipedia including deletions, so these other 150 deletions don't move the needle either way.
There's no indication that the process was abused, because you cannot access the licensing info of the image at the time it was deleted anymore.
At this point, it seems it is you who has the unfalsifiable belief,
I literally proposed a test that would falsify it.
mrvanillasky
43m ago
The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.
I do wish to know more about this, there are barely any accounts on any of this at all but people on the inside are extremely tight. For instance, I do not know how Elon Musk can tweet at all hours of the day, play video games and still be involved in various firms, even part-time involvement in 4 different firms is enough to chew you out completely even if you work more than the hard-working Investment Banking guy. He probably is passive in what he does because I don't know how else you can do all that and still spend so much time online. These are not agencies that outsource Web Jobs to Indians, they are hard-tech firms, even if you spend 25 hours a week on one, you still get 48 hours for the rest of your week where you have to eat 21 times, meet your dozen kids, play your video game, tweet at all hours, go on podcasts and now work with the government.
I bring this up because I am certain that a lot of what we are told has pr spin on it combined with our innate desire to have heroes. You would rather want to believe that he does this and more than be told that a lot of what we are told is given charitable spins for preserivng ones image. He is certainly fairly capable, beyond what most people can comprehend but I doubt he is newton, far from it.
The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.
Apparently, he has quite a few more of them with him, his mistress (feel weird using it for a guy) did tell people that he was under threat a few days before his demise. Thiel got contracts even after 2020, donatng this time around would most certainly been helpful.
benny
47m ago
That sounds real good. My November so far has also been going well. Maybe it's in the air.
Rock on!
2rafa
49m ago
As others have said, this is only an issue in dense old-world cities where a high percentage of the population use public transport already. In these cities I imagine SDCs will be taxed, banned or discouraged as necessary to avoid extreme congestion. In the US it’s irrelevant outside of Manhattan because everyone already drives everywhere.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
51m ago
And I'm assuming producing another log of innocuous-looking deletions for that same "made-up" procedural reason will not change your mind either?
Literally why would it? Also, why are you criticizing me for not changing my mind, when I'm proposing a test that would falsify my belief, and you're just looking for excuses to never change yours?
Do you believe organisations are unlikely to have procedural reasons that don't serve political agendas contrary to yours?
It's not about "contrary to mine", and yes I believe it's rare for organizations to neutrally apply their procedural rules, unless they have a healthy balance of worldviews, political agendas, and values, in their decision-making positions.
mrvanillasky
53m ago
I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.
Most of modern-day urban India is mostly leaning towards the casteless future BJP imagines or Congress did before it. There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry. BJP is not and never reactionary even when it first started out. They follow Arya Samaj which makes corrections to the Vedas to justify annihilating castes. Savarkar in his texts very directly talked about this. BJP has to appeal to upper castes because they vote for BJP in unison.
You cannot discuss any of this here publicly nor point out the HBD implications of castes, how brahmins in various parts Sanskritized people for money or how every single scripture is explicitly in favor of having castes and varnas. Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now. I am not some caste obsessed lunatic, I have to mention all of this since it gives a complete model for understanding religion, denying birth-based varnas is not far from denying the divinity of Christ. Anyone who does that is calling scriptures wrong, and not the fake new ones but the Vedas which are the equivalent of the bible in Hinduism. Again I am not asking for people to follow it, its just that you cannot believe in the Vedas, call them divine and then go against things they explicitly tell you to not do.
The reality of being poor plus having stark contrast with people who live beside you who not only inherit everything good but also were responsible for everything bad done to you and have slightly different ancestry is a recipe for disaster. Also why they push against Aryan Invasion Theory as it makes things even worse. On the flip side, most upper castes are people who got Sanskritised in that fold, their y haplogroups don't match those of others so there are no good outcomes.
most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated
Yes, but I'm not sure what the conspiracy theory is. It seems like a paragraph or two was lost before the edit.
My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.
Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.
There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.
Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.
Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.
TequilaMockingbird
56m ago
The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this.
I think the real question you need to be asking yourself is why do you find this "strange".
Or more pointedly what specific facet of your current worldview/model is it that this particular fact seems to invalidate or contradict?
sun_the_second
1hr ago
And I'm assuming producing another log of innocuous-looking deletions for that same "made-up" procedural reason will not change your mind either? Do you believe organisations are unlikely to have procedural reasons that don't serve political agendas contrary to yours?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It would be an interesting experiment, but I'm not interested if it turns out a prompt deletion for another made up procedural reason wouldn't change anyone's mind.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
Do you want to make a bet on how long it will stay up if I reupload the image, and state that it's fair use?
Do you want to actually do it, or to merely feel secure in your continued belief that Wikipedia maliciously deleted that picture (in a manner indistinguishable from neutral routine gruntwork)?
sun_the_second
1hr ago
On the other hand, when I play such games I do not feel having to expend any particular mental effort to resist shelling out cash, any more than I feel compelled to take any Nigerian princes up on their offers. If you're not in the susceptible target audience, those games really are free.
Because it's the best predictor.
No it's not, because an even better predictor is some combination of past history and direct obsevation.
I am going to disregard the multiple paragraphs of woke nonsense you just spouted off and ask a simple question. Are you calling Clenence Thomas a nigger?
Are you seriously trying to argue that because of his skin color he should be considered as a shoplifter or a drug-adict and not as a supreme court judge?
If your answer is anything less than an unequivocal "yes" how do you reconcile that with the rest of your post?
Glassnoser
1hr ago
Couldn't the vast majority of the work be done on rats? It shouldn't take that long to figure out what works if progress is in fact being made.
Glassnoser
1hr ago
He looks exactly his age to me. His skin just looks a little funny, like he exfoliated or something.
New: There are many agents. All these agents have goals and sets of possible actions. Some of those agents have physical bodies. But the actions and interactions of the agents only account for their physical bodies in the broadest sense, i.e., usually just location. Those physical bodies that are very close to the player's location are actually rendered and physically simulated, but the abstract behavior of the agents has priority over the physics simulation, and they can interact with non-rendered, non-physically-simulated agents just fine.
Yeah, makes sense, that's how I like think about my projects as well, though back to the engine question, I get the feeling that Unity / Godot is often an obstacle to it. It's like they really want you to think agent == scene node, and decoupling the game world from the scene / physical simulation often feels like a pain in the ass. Is this an issue you ran into, or did you come up with some cool way around that (alternatively - can't relate with the issue at all)?
How did your similar situation turn out?
Much like yours. It was a step down financially but that was unavoidable, for all the misery the old job was causing me, it paid quite well. Otherwise nothing but upsides - better management, colleagues I get along with better, a more up-to-date tech stack (which was a big relief, I felt I was in the danger of becoming a fossil with the old one). I also relate suddenly having energy after years of dragging myself.
The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.
The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world
I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.
I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.
The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
Yes. The way to get a position of influence in an organization is to actually do gruntwork.
You're missing the point. The point is that there's nothing to distinguish this photo from the 150 other photos deleted in those ten minutes except that you feel strongly about this image. There's no indication at all that the process has been abused.
At this point, it seems it is you who has the unfalsifiable belief, namely, that this entirely routine, automated action was actually politically motivated.
Glassnoser
2hr ago
They have health problems resulting from inbreeding. I don't think they have a problem with hostile values being smuggled in. They practise rumspringa.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
Interestingly (to me) another euphemism for sex is etchi or エッチ which is itself the pronunciation of the letter H, which in turn is a representation of the romanization of the word 変態 (hentai or perversion).
The term's arduous journey softens the tone from the original hentai meaning--エッチ really just is a noun for sexual intercourse --but it's one of those weird words in Japanese.
There is a term 性行為 or sēkoi which means sex, but it's a clinical term (think "intercourse"). Sēi means sex or gender, koi means "deed" or "behavior."
Not really, I mostly meant to state that I do not believe fully that all the super mega corps that are being run are completely clean entities that represent everything good about the world. Charles Johnson is a nutcase in many cases, the cases he makes for most of VC stuff being for show, where you do have mostly legit companies but the super mega corps most likely have fishy connections, motives and backstories is more believable than I was previously led to believe.
Nuclear technology did get stolen, most of what intelligence agencies do is classified and not reported on much universally in most nations. My theory is that a lot of what we are told about how the absolute outliers came about obfuscates a lot of things and there is a good chance that they are complicit in doing things with either domestic or foreign regimes for their own gain, where the incentives are far higher than what we can think.
Hollywood has casting couches, we know this, most of us know that if you are an actress, you very likely did have to sleep with some sleazy guy. Harvey Weinstein was caught but he was one of likely hundreds of thousands alive who did it. It still is happening and no one talks about it. In many cases, the people who later get hired by the actresses or their friends and families are unaware too. In such a scenario can it not be possible that there is quite a bit that happens inside Silicon Valley that we don't know about because none of us are founders of firms that are extreme outliers?
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