Yeah I’m there with you. I’m not saying I predict we will succeed, just that I would prefer if we did.

I’m really neither optimistic nor pessimistic on our chances. On the one hand, it seems like simple logic that any time a being evolves from simple animal to one with the potential for Kardishev type 1, that along the way to type 1 they will destroy the initial conditions they evolved into, obliterating their own habitat and ending themselves. I assume this is similar to your view.

On the other hand we don’t have the data points to draw any conclusions. Even if species invariably Great Filter themselves, many of them should emit radio signals before they vanish. Yet we’ve seen not a single signal. This suggests Rare Earth to me. Or at least makes me keep my mind open to it. And Rare Earth means there isn’t even necessarily a great filter, and that we’ve already passed the hardest part.

It’s a fact of course. Pluto will also remain, and every object in the Oort Cloud.

But despite our incendiary impact on this planet’s biospheres, I do think something would be lost if we vanished. Through us the universe becomes aware of itself. We’re not the only intelligent species nor the only one that could ever play this role. But these qualities are scarce. Evolution rarely selects for high intelligence because of its high cost. Self aware intelligent beings who can communicate complex abstracts at the speed of sound and operate in unison and transmit information down through generations… all from a rock. I hope we don’t destroy ourselves and every other living thing around us. I really do.

It’s hard to talk about what the earth needs. For humans and AGI, the driving requirement behind “need” is survival. But the earth is a rock. What does a rock need?

AI is actively worsening the climate crisis with its obscene compute requirements and concomitant energy use.

Yep. They’ve only raised $15M so far which is a modest amount by relative standards. If they paid it back right now then I would give them some breathing room for these naive, grandiose statements. Oh but then how would their staff get rich without an IPO? If they could become profitable NOW they could maybe go employee-owned and avoid selling their ass to the stock market.

Of course none of that will happen. Optimistically they will take on more investment money and then go public or get acquired by some other entity and these hippie-ass remarks from their CEO will look like what they are: pipe dreams brought on by their first blush of success. And that’s charitable. Her comments are so naive it’s plausible she’s straight up lying through her teeth right now.

Everyone in tech wants to get buy-a-house rich and quit. No one is in this for humanity.

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I once bought a bottle of wine at the old state store. I was on a road trip with my gf at the time and oh boy did those ladies at the counter glare at us like we were degenerates! There are worse things than being tight about alcohol, I guess.

Years later I proposed to my now wife in Bryce Canyon. We were staying in Kanab, which was a delightful little spot. Greyhound owners meetup was going on at the time so there were adorable dogs everywhere. Nice UT memories.

Oh yay that’s something.

I do enjoy Utah but could never live with the beer there :D

I’m actually a native so my whole life is here. It’s more to me than a “what’s the cost of living and what’s the crime rate” calculation like so many seem to make when choosing a place to call home.

I’d say the same about my area

Ah but is this somewhere I have even thought about moving? ;D One nice thing about the SF Bay is that it draws interesting people from all over, and friends and family tend to stick around more often than other places I’ve lived. The “great California exodus” is all the rage in people’s minds this year but I have lived in a couple of places that everybody eventually moved away from if they could.

I used to take the BART train to work In SF so traffic wasn’t a concern. Now I don’t commute at all!

But I’m not trying to convince you to move here. Please don’t!

It’s important to recognize that this is a tiny little company.

Around noon, Gupta usually picks up lunch for the team at nearby MIXT Salads. The workers usually eat together at a table in the office.

The founder can pick up lunch for everyone. So we’re talking what, 8 people?

There are 8 people out there who have nothing in their lives except for work and want their job to feel like a life. They get some kind of thrill from the intensity and they have probably been sold a dream about what their stock options will be worth when the company makes it big on the AI boom. They’re young, single, socially orthogonal people and their home lives were probably desolate and depressing before they took this job. The job gives them a place they can always go and find other people, where they have something to do. I’m not excusing the horrible WLB but I can easily imagine a small number of people who go for this. We just have to remember how miserable much of humanity are.

We don’t have to generalize about capitalism, San Francisco, tech, or anything else from this guy. Not that you were but others ITT certainly are.

Don’t take this idiot’s little company as the norm for the area. San Francisco scene is pretty chill.

You’re talking about people who work at a high level and might not type that much code. Thats definitely a thing.

I’ve also got a junior front line engineer on my team who does literally nothing. It takes them 10x too long to do anything and they require so much help from seniors than it would be faster for them to do it themselves. One of the seniors told me “a sure fire way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to give it to them.”

But gosh, it isn’t 10% of them that are like this. No way. This person is 1 in 500.

I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.

You make a good point. When a small number of people complain loudly but most people don’t care, I’m not sure that’s “controversy.” The majority don’t care but this accessory is for the minority who do, and they hate it, so yeah “hated” would not be overstating it :)

I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.

Surely that could never happen again though! /s

I guess it all depends on the physical layout but this seems like a very complicated way to get material downhill.

I don’t really care what’s installed on my work computer, which I use solely for work purposes. Should I?