I think “we patented the idea for talking” to be horrifying on its own merits.

Finding people you like on the internet and talking to them is fun.

The whole road to the top is lined with asses to kiss. Why would Zuck stop now?

Does all this sound like they’re actually loving Trump or are there credible threat to their health from the Trump admin?

Credibly threats to their revenue streams, more like. You don’t climb the ladder to billionaire-hood without kissing a few assess and sucking a lot of dick.

But “Meritocracy Has Never Been Tried!” is not something liberals constantly repeat to one another cynically.

Seems like its self described well.

In theory. But in practice what you’re describing tends to be the licensure of corruption. Rather than paying off a guy for a no-show job, you pay a school for a degree to show the guy (getting kickbacks from the school) that gives you the no-show job.

Great example of this was Bob Jones, Liberty, and the assorted christian conservative schools injecting whole graduating classes into the '00s Bush Administration.

When your “meritocratic” institution really starts to pay off is when it looks more and more like an MLM. The modern Ivy League/Federalist Society-based judicial system looks a lot like this. You need to be a member of a school who joined a club to get access to the clerkship that qualifies you to join a firm that will fast-track you into the appellate judiciary. So these “elite” institutions get swarmed with applicants, and now you need to go to a particular prep school or join a certain social group to get into the school/club. Now those schools/groups get flooded. So you need to join a partisan organization or work your way into a country club hierarchy to get access to the prep school / social group, and they start assigning ranks for members and fees to climb the ranks.

Now “meritocracy” is just a massive web of patronage, with access to the inner layer predicated on outclassing all your peers in the outer layer. Whole industries exist to prove “merit” either through cheating explicitly (straight up buying accreditation) or implicitly (paying for study guides that contain the exact questions to be asked) and get you special access to the people doing manual selection of applicants. Its almost exclusively pay-to-play and a lot of it is scams.

Vivek absolutely maldin’ right now.

Hardly. Escorts charge by the hour. She’s salary.

This is where it all ends. “Everything I don’t like is Russia/China/Iran”.

Nothing evaluated on its merits. Nobody with a view different from mine is real. Evil Foreigners is the explanation for every bad take and un-pc post. Americans are only ever loyal patriots, villainous traitors, or useful idiots.

I suspect china is fudging the training timeline tho…

I’m more prone to believe OpenAI is just a clunky POS. DeepSeek released a model that’s operating on theories kicking around the LLM community for years. Now Alibaba is claiming they’ve got a better model, too.

Altman insisting he needed $1T in new physical infrastructure to get to the next iteration of his product should have been a red flag for everyone.

They’re trying to brute force a solution to a problem that more elegate coding accomplishes better.

Altman insisting that once the model is good enough, it will program itself was the moment I wrote the whole thing off as a flop.

Never going to gargle balls as good as grandma did it.

Oh absolutely. Trump out, Vance in. I’m really excited to see what a younger, even more nakedly fascist corporate lickspittle will do with the unchecked powers of the executive branch.

A conservative with money is like a donkey with a spinning wheel. We don’t know how he got it and he’s darned if he knows what to do with it.

…that is, this isn’t yet the end of the AI bubble.

The “bubble” in AI is predicated on proprietary software that’s been oversold and underdelivered.

If I can outrun OpenAI’s super secret algorithm with 1/100th the physical resources, the $13B Microsoft handed Sam Altman’s company starts looking like burned capital.

And the way this blows up the reputation of AI hype-artists makes it harder for investors to be induced to send US firms money. Why not contract with Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence directly, rather than ask OpenAI to adopt a model that’s better than anything they’ve produced to date?

Hm even with DeepSeek being more efficient, wouldn’t that just mean the rich corps throw the same amount of hardware at it to achieve a better result?

Only up to the point where the AI models yield value (which is already heavily speculative). If nothing else, DeepSeek makes Altman’s plan for $1T in new data-centers look like overkill.

The revelation that you can get 100x gains by optimizing your code rather than throwing endless compute at your model means the value of graphics cards goes down relative to the value of PhD-tier developers. Why burn through a hundred warehouses full of cards to do what a university mathematics department can deliver in half the time?

Start using Amazon, but in an elaborate drop shipping scam where you sell a $.25 item for $38 and have Amazon pay you $3.99 to ship it to yourself as a proxy.

There’s definitely good material on it. Was a big fan of “Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend” short film, for instance.

But its also got your garden variety YouTube crap.

The winner was the guy who could successfully exert power over the judiciary, while the loser was the guy without a committed vanguard ready to storm an election counting office to guarantee victory.