Nikhil’s guest post at Zitron just went up - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/

EDIT: the intro was strong enough I threw in $7. Second half is just as good.

I liked his stuff on wework back in the day. Funny how he could see one tech grift really clearly and fall for another. Then again, WeWork is in the black these days. Anyway I think Galloway pivoted (apologies) to Mens Rights lately; and he also gave some money to UCLA Extension (ie not the main campus) which is a bit hard to interpret.

https://www.profgalloway.com/ice-age/ Good post until I hit the below:

Instead of militarizing immigration enforcement, we should be investing against the real challenge: AI. The World Economic Forum says 9 million jobs globally may be displaced in the next five years. Anthropic’s CEO warns AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Imagine the population of Greece storming the shores of America and taking jobs (even jobs Americans actually want), as they’re willing to work 24/7 for free. You’ve already met them. Their names are GPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Having a hard time imagining 300 but AI myself, Scott. Could we like, not shoehorn AI into every other discussion?

One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370

Aella popped up on doomscroll - https://youtu.be/r7WL6kaTJnw

E: oh man the comments are great

E2:

1:08:02 There’s a lot of discussions among the rationalist community about the uneven distribution of IQ and its correlation with race. Why is this a topic that people fixate on if they’re also convinced that this ultra intelligence an AGI that’s like smarter than every human on the planet why are these marginal differences so important to people?

Sure, done.

Another response to Ptacek. “Vibe coding as contempt for materiality” part is particularly good.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/material_girl

AI powered lie detectors spotted in the wild - https://pimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/100.png => https://eyecanknow.com/

Brought to you by researchers at the University of Utah. smh.

In the spirit of “worse is better”, here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:

! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)

EDIT: fix bug with 1 hour and 20 minutes ago. regex is even worse is better.

! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text(/(hour|minute)s? ago/):style(background-color:#7700AA)

I have LLMs translate novels, I can tell when they run over the window because they forget characters’ gender half way through, things like that. Lots of legal documents are even longer, maybe.

https://less.online/ - they couldn’t be bothered to write the 5 lines of js to do their karma discount automatically