end result: well, we for sure got the streaming anime

It’s almost like he was considering cosplaying Tekken series mascot Heihachi and then gave up when he realized he would have to work out

Space property rights.

dammit I’m gonna get my money back out of these SpaceX IPO shares no matter what it takes

for context, “donkey farms” is shorthand for wooly-headed small-scale thinking, not Rationalist

Ah, a version of the YCombinator pejorative “lifestyle business” tailored for the nonprofit sector. How droll.

I will have you know that fartwave is a legitimate musical genre. The normies might not be ready for a full-length, full-production stage musical, BUT

On a cool June evening in Berkeley, I watched a man named Victor try to shoot a beam of light out of his penis. Minutes earlier, he had raised his hand because he found the volunteer onstage before him attractive. And now here he was, facing her in front of a crowd of perhaps 60 people, having been instructed to do precisely this by a woman named Aella … Now she told her first subject to imagine himself gathering all of the energy in his body into his pelvis and then sending that energy outward as a beam of light, straight through his trousers and into the room.

For some reason, this brings to mind ancient Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire websites written by children, that promised training programs for being able to shoot Dragonball Z energy beams in real life. And I can’t be sure that isn’t exactly what inspired Aella here.

Will Manifest REALLY take over the world, or will its attendees end up at Davos or Davos 2 when they eventually grow up to be as ancient Klaus Schwab?

Imagining these people in their old age, just like imagining current AI models as legacy systems, makes for a grimly hilarious pastime.

Burja has always had remarkably bad vibes, but it knocks my estimation of him completely into the basement to learn that he was so involved with a shitshow like Leverage. I suspect that daddy Peter and the Twitter/Hacker News crossover crowd is what’s propping up Palladium, but I believe we discussed it here when even the HN crowd laughed off Burja’s bro Wolf Tivy.

Is this the origin story of a new, remarkably sedentary Batman villain?

which are common in my Bay Area social context

I just went to a party in the Bay Area last night, and nobody talked like this. Perhaps she’s eliding some other, more trenchant details about her social circles?

We’ve discussed before the influence of David Chapman and his Tibetan Buddhism among TPOT, but it’s worth also noting the fairly big notoriety and footprint that San Francisco Zen Center has in the Bay Area and northern/central California more broadly. Anyone who ends up in the Bay and goes looking for “alternative” spirituality with a relatively rigorous grounding is likely to encounter some aspect of SFZC or its outreach pretty quickly. To say nothing of enduring idol Steve Jobs’ association with the practice. It might seem surprising from the outside, but given the facts on the ground, I’m not surprised that dashes of Buddhism got roped into the techbro stew.

Note, of course, that Chapman’s Tibetan lineage is something notably different from SFZC’s lineage, and that the parent institutions can’t be held totally liable for misinterpretations by lay practitioners and dilettantes. (Myself being one of the dilettantes!)

Directly comparing Scientology-speak to the beliefs and practices of the rationalists and their offshoots seems like it should be a ground-floor understanding of the whole mess, but perhaps that sort of blunt simplicity is what some folks on the margins need to avoid being sucked all the way in.

How sad that Altman’s shell corporation’s property insurance has to pay for this guy’s tedious status anxiety

“Look, Grandpa, here’s what we should invest the trust fund into!”

Who wants to join me in standing up the competing Center For Applied Rationality Techniques

Setting firm boundaries is for amateurs, haven’t you heard?

From another perspective, royalty gossip is the progenitor, and now the semi-vestigial rump, of the modern celebrity gossip industry

I think their brains have just been thoroughly microwaved by social media feedback loops. I remarked elsewhere that I’m not sure these people are or can be earnest about this (cf. the fact that the billionaires they’re celebrating are laser-focused on the tech they claim might doom the world); they’re simply too conditioned towards creating outrage content for Twitter. To me, this is more akin to LARPing “Leave Britney alone!” than it is serious political activism.

Huh. Are the remaining “classical liberals” in the wild just naturally covered in this much slime, or is it something Yud applied to himself specifically for this conversation?

it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation,

Now wait just a goddamn minute, I thought the whole schtick here was that our gracious correspondent is better than anyone else at evaluating situations that are relatively rare but nonetheless highly consequential