Strange is a trooper and her sneer is worth transcribing. From about 22:00:

So let’s go! Upon saturating my brain with as much background information as I could, there was really nothing left to do but fucking read this thing, all six hundred thousand words of HPMOR, really the road of enlightenment that they promised it to be. After reading a few chapters, a realization that I found funny was, “Oh. Oh, this is definitely fanfiction. Everyone said [laughing and stuttering] everybody that said that this is basically a real novel is lying.” People lie on the Internet? No fucking way. It is telling that even the most charitable reviews, the most glowing worshipping reviews of this fanfiction call it “unfinished,” call it “a first draft.”

A shorter sneer for the back of the hardcover edition of HPMOR at 26:30 or so:

It’s extremely tiring. I was surprised by how soul-sucking it was. It was unpleasant to force myself beyond the first fifty thousand words. It was physically painful to force myself to read beyond the first hundred thousand words of this – let me remind you – six-hundred-thousand-word epic, and I will admit that at that point I did succumb to skimming.

Her analysis is familiar. She recognized that Harry is a self-insert, that the out-loud game theory reads like Death Note parody, that chapters are only really related to each other in the sense that they were written sequentially, that HPMOR is more concerned with sounding smart than being smart, that HPMOR is yet another entry in a long line of monarchist apologies explaining why this new Napoleon won’t fool us again, and finally that it’s a bad read. 31:30 or so:

It’s absolutely no fucking fun. It’s just absolutely dry and joyless. It tastes like sand! I mean, maybe it’s Yudkowsky’s idea of fun; he spent five years writing the thing after all. But it just [struggles for words] reading this thing, it feels like chewing sand.

There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.

There’s inarguably an organizational culture that is fundamentally disinterested in the things that the organization is supposed to actually do. Even if they aren’t explicitly planning to end social security as a concept by wrecking the technical infrastructure it relies on, they’re almost comedically apathetic about whether or not the project succeeds. At the top this makes sense because politicians can spin a bad project into everyone else’s fault, but the fact that they’re able to find programmers to work under those conditions makes me weep for the future of the industry. Even simple mercenaries should be able to smell that this project is going to fail and look awful on your resume, but I guess these yahoos are expecting to pivot into politics or whatever administration position they can bargain with whoever succeeds Trump.

Yeah I’m sure DOGE doesn’t appreciate that structured programming hasn’t always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their code’s structure to avoid calling it.

The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:

It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt – the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required

While I’ve never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. I’ve seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).

I decided to remove that comment because of the risk of psychic damage.

That’ll look good in my portfolio next to my biotech startup with a personal touch YouGenics

small thread about these guys:

https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3llepnsvtpk2g

tldr only new thing I saw is that as a teenager the founder annoyed “over 100” academics until one of them, a computer scientist, endorsed his research about a mobile game that diagnoses you with Alzheimer’s in five minutes

He’s an AI bro, having even a basic understanding of art is beyond him

I hated Sam Altman before it was cool apparently.

you don’t understand, sam cured cancer or whatever

best guess i’ve heard so far is they’re trying to sell this shitass useless company before the bubble finally deflates and they’re hoping the AI interviews of suckers are sufficient personal data for that

I know the GNU Infant Manipulation Program can be a little unintuitive and clunky sometimes, but it is quite powerful when you get used to it. Also why does everyone always look at me weird when I say that?

I wrote down some theorems and looked at them through a microscope and actually discovered the objectively correct solution to ethics. I won’t tell you what it is because science should be kept secret (and I could prove it but shouldn’t and won’t).

I feel like cult orthodoxy probably accounts for most of it. The fact that they put serious thought into how to handle a sentient AI wanting to post on their forums does also suggest that they’re taking the AGI “possibility” far more seriously than any of the companies that are using it to fill out marketing copy and bad news cycles. I for one find this deeply sad.

Edit to expand: if it wasn’t actively lighting the world on fire I would think there’s something perversely admirable about trying to make sure the angels dancing on the head of a pin have civil rights. As it is they’re close enough to actual power and influence that their enabling the stripping of rights and dignity from actual human people instead of staying in their little bubble of sci-fi and philosophy nerds.

All praise the Omnissiah

Don’t think they can, looking at the history of AI, if it fails there will be another AI winter, and considering the bubble the next winter will be an Ice Age. No minduploads for anybody, the dead stay dead, and all time is wasted. Don’t think that is going to be psychologically healthy as a realization, it will be like the people who suddenly realize Qanon is a lie and they alienated everybody in their lives because they got tricked.