Christopher Wood
Reading, Shadowrun, walking. Living and working in Toronto. Sysadmin (or whatever it’s called this month). He/him.
- 7 Posts
- 47 Comments
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Venture capital is having a bad time — and AI isn’t going to fix itEnglish12·6 months agoAs usual, the business fundamentals thing happens after the compensation has been paid out.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•even DHH suggests Mullenweg might wanna cool itEnglish5·6 months agoI’m getting the picture that governance is a great thing until you find out that other people want to govern you back.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Want to hear the truth about Automattic, the not-like-the-other-girls company that still thinks it is a startup after 20 years and his founder acts like he invented remote working?English13·7 months agoThe encouragement of a situation where you disconnect with those outside, the sleep deprivation, the drip of hints that you’re not meeting the standard, the trust in the great leader.
It also sounds corporate, yes.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Grindr proposes ‘AI wingman’ to optimize away the gay sex bitEnglish25·7 months agoYou know how sometimes you use a grocery app and it’s fairly obvious that the people writing them don’t spend time in grocery stores? I’m getting that same impression here.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Y Combinator is being criticized after it backed an AI startup that admits it basically cloned another AI startup | TechCrunchEnglish6·7 months agoThat startup founder. Is he okay?
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•A radical idea - stop talking about things that don't exist like they doEnglish14·7 months agoWith so many parts of tech operating like a mixture of religion and fandom this would be the atheistic answer. (This is my diametric opposite of a sneer.)
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•The Bitcoin bros who want to crowdfund a new countryEnglish7·7 months agoI think we’ve all walked by a giant important point.
These nearly-all-male network state fans have such compelling ideas that women outside their immediate circles would rather Xerox “bits of their bodies” than engage with those ideas. Their outreach “embassy” attracts even fewer women every day. Possibly even an average number rounding to zero.
Right now it seems like their polities will be remembered in the same religious studies lessons that teach about the Shakers.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Ilya Sutskever's new AI super-intelligence startup raises a billion dollars. Unclear what they actually do.English3·8 months agoWell look if you no longer had a Silicon Valley executive’s salary you might have opinions about that situation too.
Weird sort of wartime to be investing new dollars into Israel though I thought?
Oh wait right. https://bdsmovement.net/news/israel’s-most-important-source-capital-california
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•No, intelligence is not like heightEnglish25·8 months agoImagine being a skilled San Francisco-style tech worker, at the apex of your industry, and the heights of intellect and rigor you can scale outside of that very specific context turn out to be “race science” apologia. Probably a lesson in there somewhere.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto Buttcoin@awful.systems•use a blockchain, they said. Fabulous efficiency, they said. Will revolutionise stock trading in Australia, they said.English14·8 months agoTo your edit, there do seem to be very many people emotionally invested in append-only ledger technology.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•The Paul Graham vs Nigerian Twitter Saga; Lexical racism and language bias masked as ChatGPT hysteriaEnglish9·9 months agoThis reminds me of the reaction when I point out that to non-native English speakers that Canadian students may not have had as much English grammar instructions as they did.
Also this brought to mind all those times I’ve been taken to task about my own phrasing.
Gatekept by non-readers indeed.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto Buttcoin@awful.systems•Butters do a 180 regarding statism as Daddy Trump promises to use filthy Fed FIAT to buy and hodl BTCEnglish3·9 months agoWeird, I thought that policies such as improving the uptake of asset-backed commercial paper(1), loosening restrictions on beneficial owner(2) anonymity in shell corporations(3), and even protecting network marketing(4) companies from innovation-unfriendly regulations would be far bigger vote getters than this.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•StackOverflow is blogging about Web3. Please put it out of its miseryEnglish12·9 months agoThe author’s company is listed which happens to be in the list of companies using the blockchain being shilled.
That’s practically above board in the land of blockchain companies.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is outEnglish8·10 months agoEven just saying it was mescaline would help it make more sense.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is outEnglish12·10 months agoI’m starting to think that some writing classes would really help the EA/LR crowd.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•The CIA is using generative AI as a search engineEnglish14·10 months agoJust a minor paragraph rewrite for clarity.
“The reality of generative AI is you’ve got to have a foundation of cloud computing,” AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy, whose compensation relies on him successfully growing Amazon’s computer rental income, told Nextgov/FCW in a June 26 interview at AWS Summit. “You’ve got to get your data in a place where you can actually do something with it.”
It’s always so tedious when these little conflict of interest notes are left out of articles.
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Balaji's movie "Technodemocracy" bombsEnglish7·10 months agoPeople who seem impressive until you listen to their ideas are a real theme around here.
Is there some EA culture thing where every thought has to be expanded into essay form?
Christopher Wood@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•"Google Gemini tried to kill me"English18·10 months agoI applaud your optimism that most people can do this without AI but have you gone and met people? Most people are not that capable of producing torrents of shameless bullshit as conscience or awareness of social and/or professional costs rear their head at some point.
I can’t tell which of these profits are in actual currency and which are in fake money.