They’re building the Torment Nexus, aren’t they?
I’m sure Douglas Adams – who wrote with an anti-apartheid sticker on his typewriter – wouldn’t have been thrilled with the association, either.
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Tesla will be is the first against the wall when the revolution comes now.
You know it!!!
I wonder how much of that is really from the sources though, versus assholes just appropriating the cachet of culture seen as for intelligent people. Lord of the Rings isn’t even sci fi.
Good question… it could be that they don’t actually read these books. But it’s also possible that the messages in the stories just missed them. We all bring ourselves to a work, after all.
You would think Lord of the Rings, over a thousand pages about taking great risks to destroy a superweapon that is too evil to use, would also not be subtle. Likewise for a lot of the torment nexus books. These people don’t just bring themselves to a work so much as smear themselves over top of it. 
Yeah, I don’t think it is…
They still see themselves as “natural superior” to the rest of us… 
There’s always the company Palantir, named after the magical communication tool that Sauron used to corrupt Saruman and Denethor.
I’m sure they are sincere and they’ve built-in the means to do just that, given that it’s open source, but i still call bullshit until they follow through on their promise to offer a more Mastodon-flavoured BSky. The people with the money would probably have something to say about opening up the walled garden.
These are the same people who complain about how China steals IP and competes unfairly.
Sam Altman managed to both complain about China ripping off his work and insist that he is entitled to steal from anyone who has ever produced anything at any point, which might be some of the most spectacular hypocrisy in history. I’m sure when Elon says IP laws should be deleted he’s only thinking about ones that protect people from him.
If I’m remembering the story from my machine learning class – which of course may or may not be the same story you heard – a common case study for machine learning that’s often given is the story of how magnesium treatment for migraines was identified. I believe it was this paper that originated the proposal:
Swanson, D. R. (1988). Migraine and magnesium: eleven neglected connections. Perspectives in biology and medicine, 31(4), 526-557. doi:10.1353/pbm.1988.0009
Thing is, Swanson’s analysis was done by hand. The methodology he used was very algorithmic, essentially doing miniature lit reviews of migraines and their symptoms, then doing miniature literature reviews of those symptoms and the role of magnesium in treating them, thereby building a case for magnesium as a novel treatment for migraines. Given the algorithmic nature of this approach, and the fact that it could rely on a network of connections not immediately apparent even to those intimately familiar with the literature, I think a lot of literature-analysis machine learning types had the idea of applying this mechanism in an automated fashion using ML. Then you end up with papers like:
Langley, P. (2000). The computational support of scientific discovery. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies , 53 (3), 393-410.
… and others, as early as 1999.
Anyway, I heard this story in support of ML for novel medical treatments, but the one I always hear about in support of this hypothesis was done by hand by one guy. Which isn’t to dismiss the idea, I’m just not sure how much as actually shaken out at this point.
[cough] expert systems [cough]
In Snow Crash there’s something called “the Raft” – a collection of boats filled with infected, mind-controlled refugees headed for America’s west coast. It’s an image that recalls the viciously racist 1973 French sci-fi novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, in which a huge fleet of Indian refugees destroy western civilisation.
That seems a bit unfair to Stephenson. It makes it sound as if he had racist motives
That article really glosses over what a cesspool the site is, as if they’re trying to be ‘balanced’
Founded in 2003, 4chan is heavily intertwined with popular internet culture and is responsible for launching everything from the world’s most popular memes to the Anonymous hacking collective.
The website has repeatedly stirred controversy for its involvement in scandals such as Gamergate, the nude celebrity photo leak of 2014 known as “The Fappening,” and the proliferation of racist memes.
Can you imagine a regular, normal, good person joining It?
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