Semi-related, the SF author John Varley died the other day, and I remember how both transgressive and cool it was that his characters in Steel Beach and others could change gender basically at will. (Banks ripped this off in the Culture btw). I don’t think he had a special insight into the lived experience of trans people, but at least he embraced the idea as part of humanity’s future, not recoil from it like later epigones.

Michael Swanwick mini-obit: https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html

HN on Varley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991

Pretty sure this guy has some serious mental health issues.

Yeah, the substacker seems either naive or genuinely misinformed about Siskind’s ultimate agenda, but in their defense Scott is really really good at vomiting forth torrents of beige prose that obscure it.

Some rando mathematician checks out some IQ related twins studies and find out (gasp) that Cremieux is a manipulative liar with an agenda

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist

Said author is sad that Paul Graham retweets the claim and does not draw the obvious conclusion that PG is just a bog-standard Silicon Valley VC pseudo-racist.

HN is not happy and a green username calling themselves “jagoff” leads the charge

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195226

is there a term I can google to start researching this new generation of motors?

I guess battery tech has affected this too

We Lutherans have confirmation too, I’ll have you know![1]

Here in heathen People’s Socialist Kingdom of Sweden it’s mostly an occasion to awkwardly flirt with the appropriate sex on church away camps and get a lot of presents. But I was quite impressed by my nieces’, organized by a very woke archbishopric. Another neice got to go to Assizi!

[1] I’m confirmed but very much lapsed

Carmack is a Gen-X Texan mostly known for using hardmode C to code an FPS. He’s so drenched in nerd testostorone I’d be surprised if he wasn’t background radiation level non-woke. Not saying he shouldn’t be as a human being, just that it would be an uphill battle for him.

data which for menial tasks doesnt exist yet.

This reminds me over an old old furore here in Sweden. A female researcher at a largish university made a study of how cleaners … cleaned. How bathrooms, kitchens etc were constructed and how workers had to move and lift to do their work.

This was almost universally derided - “who does science on cleaning???”, but of course the intent was serious. Lots of people clean, if we design better workspaces, we reduce injuries and RSI etc, and maybe make it easier for less skilled people to clean. But becaseu both the author and the subjected were coded female, the reactionaries had conniptions.

Anyway that won’t help humanoid robots. Just thought about it

Edit found an article in Swedish about it, year was 1985. Nowadays bathroom fixtures are constructed after her recommendations

https://arbetet.se/2009/02/26/gudrun-linns-forskningpverkar-hela-byggsverige/

Jane Street has an interesting cachet in at least my nerd circles because they require everyone they hire to learn Ocaml[1]. It would not surprise me if they are fash-adjacent, but only because I believe everyone in Wall Street is fash-adjacent.

[1] I think - maybe it’s only the technical staff

Questioning the nature of human intelligence is step 1 in promptfondler whataboutism.

I regret I have but one upvote to give to this

This is such a pivot, from “you can soon fly between capitals in half the time” to “this screaming jet engine will soon be disturbing your sleep 24/7”

Old Man Stallman comes out swinging against ChatGPT specifically, adding it to the long long list of stuff he doesn’t like. For some reason HN is mad at this, as if RMS saying slop is good actually would convince anyone normal to start using it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203591

Having a SAN stat act like an INT (IQ) stat is very on brand for rationalists (except ofc the INT stat is immutable duh)

Yud explains, over 3k words, that not only is he smarter than everyone else, he is also saner, and no, there’s no way you can be as sane as him

Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity

(side note - it’s weird that LW, otherwise so anxious about designing their website, can’t handle fucking apostrophes correctly)

pity it is slop, I’d enjoy a good ESR dunk

2 links from my feeds with crossover here

Lawyers, Guns and Money: The Data Center Backlash

Techdirt: Radicalized Anti-AI Activist Should Be A Wake Up Call For Doomer Rhetoric

Unfortunately Techdirt’s Mike Masnick is a signatory some bullshit GenAI-collaborationist manifesto called The Resonant Computing Manifesto, along with other suspects like Anil Dash. Like so many other technolibertarian manifestos, it naturally declines to say how their wonderful vision would be economically feasible in a world without meaningful brakes on the very tech giants they profess to oppose.

Thing I realized: if GenAI really is the game-changer the fondlers say it is, it should have broken through to the consumer now, in the form of better goods and services at lower prices. But that’s not what I’m seeing. So either GenAI doesn’t work as advertised, or the companies deploying it are keeping the surplus profits to themselves. Neither scenario makes me want GenAI more.

I’m too fucking old to care about hipster terminals, so I had no idea ghostty was started by a (former) billionaire. If forced to choose a new terminal I will certainly take this fact into consideration.

the base use for LLMs is gonna be hypertargetted advertising, malware, political propaganda etc

well the base case for LLMs is that, right now

the privacy nerds won’t know what hit them