Viewing profile — Lambent_Cactus

Yeah, I liked the idea that it's asymmetrical. You use the VK to find replicants trying to pass as human, but to try to make sure they're sufficiently robotic you need something el…

There's a haunting version of this in Blade Runner 2049 that they call a "baseline test." Replicants have to prove they're sufficiently robotic by reciting extremely alienating thi…

Orders of the political police are backstopped by violence. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing? Either way, the head-shooting and the stake-burning are Scott Alexander's …

The Eastern Bloc did ... kind of a lot of violent coercion? The penalty for jumping the Berlin Wall was not losing your job.

I did actually check out his twitter feed before writing this, where I saw that his bio, pinned tweet, and several of his most recent tweets ( https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/stat…

Most of his articles could be about a third as long with no loss in clarity. The meandering windups can be _rhetorically_ effective, especially when they appeal to the biases of th…

I'm sure you could come up with a hypothetical prosocial falsehood, like "aliens assassinated JFK for petty reasons, but they're very vain and will destroy the Earth if word gets o…

The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself…

I seems like a lot hinges on "The identities of the bullies is well known." The President's letter says "If those students who issues the threats can be identified, they will be su…

Ugh, just read the original that this post rips off, which has all the analysis and none of the egregious over-writing. https://randle.substack.com/p/playing-different-games

The tooling system was ok even then, but core development seemed listless. Vitalik gave a keynote at a conference I went to and talked about why it was actually good for the ecosys…

Oh yeah, a proper great power could snuff out Bitcoin, to say nothing of the smaller coins, if they put their mind to it. If there's a real non-bubble use case, it will have to be …

OnlyFans is a classic two-sided marketplace with strong network effects. The more paying customers are already on the site the more attractive it is for new performers to choose On…

Picture of new CEO Bryan Crowley looks like a parody. And this line! > First of all, I want to take a moment to say hello and thank you to all of our Soylent friends out there who …

I like where this is going - you want to apply some pressure to organizations to set up internal incentives that push for longer-term thinking. But if the value of being on the LTS…

I'd love to talk to you about our devops team. What's the best way to get in contact?

We built something like this for our our data science platform ( https://civisanalytics.com/products/end-to-end-data-science/ ), but the containers run on a group of workers that a…

Tried to sign up, but the enroll form at https://beta.docker.com/form is blank for me - it just says "Great! We just need a little more info:" but has no forms.

This is the Google version of Twitter's little 'verified' checkmarks, just for whole web pages instead of tweets. The presidential election is actually a great place to roll out th…

Yes. I got a letter from OPM detailing what may have been compromised an offering me some identity theft protection/monitoring service. They got my SF-86 ( https://www.opm.gov/form…

Serious question: when did your shields go down at Palantir?

The Muji store locator amusingly lists the two Toronto locations as being in the US: http://www.muji.com/storelocator/?c=us&lang=EN&header=gl

Really disappointed they went with the bloodless "Datagate" when "VANghazi" was available.

My Chicago company is not Lightbank-funded, but all I see in print is relentless small-town boosterism - what's a more reliable source for sounding out a firm's reputation?