At least two other self-published books on Amazon with AI cover art have “super lawyer” in the title.

Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.

Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not “user #123456, ip address … credit card … just visited these pages and accidentally switched from her French keyboard to US-American”).

RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don’t plan to check the site regularly.

They have a clause for “Most adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs).”

Something something used surgical equipment in Ziz’ van, something something they do like their pills.

Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you can’t explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.

IIRC there is almost nobody in the House of Representatives with Computer Science training and very few with Engineering. A messed-up country! I for one salute our coming Chinese technocrats.

I would not recommend consuming strange powders from these people. Hazing with electricity goes back to club initiations in the 1920s or so.

You have to ask “if Google could never beat SEO for long, can these clowns and cultists decide which sites should not be used to train their precious Computer God? If surveillance advertising got respected old institutions hawking product reviews and mattresses on a branch of their website (Google says we are a Trusted Site not that we are trusted for a specific topic), how will sites the bots like avoid being corrupted too?”

Montana is legalizing a pet Libertarian project: the right to try any experimental medical treatment a crank will offer https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/30/1140942/montana-experimental-medical-hub-pushed-forward-right-to-try/ Rationalists are big on this one because they are such good suckers.

This is an old scam: the Internet has been filled with sites which just exist to boost another site in search results for twenty years. Creating essay-like slop to convince the bot that Burma Shave is great and Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia is the same business as hiring writers in India to convince Google bot that your car dealership is the best car dealership.

In 2016, Scott Alexander reviewed the autobiography of pharmaceutical pioneers Alexander and Ann Shulgin:

Shulgin and his friends seem like good people. But not, crucially, like the best people. Shulgin himself – by his own admission, based on facts that he himself presents in his own autobiography – is consistently kind of a jerk to his wife (and his wife kind of agrees). He gets depressed and ornery a lot, sometimes to the point where it seriously interferes with his work and relationships. His circle of friends seems to have some problems with marital infidelity and random drama, and he tells one story about a distant friend-of-a-friend obsessed with LSD who seems to be an outright con man. I’m not saying they’re bad people; quite the opposite, the book makes them seem very human and if I lived in the same time and place as them I would be delighted to have the opportunity to know them.

…

The Shulgins met through a group that had branched off of Mensa. Their social circle consisted of a mishmash of scientists, underachieving geniuses, mental health professionals, hippies, and people convinced that their new projects were going to save the world – all in the context of Berkeley and the Bay Area. This is also my social circle, thirty years later, so it’s interesting to see how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.

Its a very common tic in American culture to state that white dudes who did something wrong or hurt people were good at heart, and to skip “how can we prevent this from happening again with rules and policies?” or “how can we make good with the victims?”

SpaceX shares fell after SpaceX reported they had doubled their revenue but increased spending sixfold in a year. On Thursday more insiders can start to sell, which will raise the float and trigger index-fund purchases but could drive down share prices. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0qvpveg20vo

It would be good if someone could take the r/Grimes post, boil out the chatbot overwriting, verbosity, and hallucinations, and give a concise version. An environment where you are pushed to make intimate sexual confessions in front of people who decide whether to give you resources, especially if those statements are recorded like anything you post on the Internet is recorded, is a red flag.

A lot of people in the sex trade discourage people who are barely legal from face-out work because young people don’t know themselves or the world of work very well and a porn video can follow you around for life.

Introduced by the head of safety (!)

At least they accept the principle that “relationships across a power differential” can put the weaker party in a difficult position. They don’t have a rule against this, or a requirement to disclose, but they accept the principle.

Previous thread on plzdontkillus https://awful.systems/post/8359862 I wonder whether it is Aella or Duleba who is forcing some basic harm-reduction policies (but no enforcement, whereas you can be kicked out if you don’t post fast enough).

Ziz reported being asked similar icebreaker questions.

On Tuesday 4 August, SpaceX has to release a quarterly financial report. On the second trading day after that, SpaceX insiders are allowed to sell another tranche of shares. So get some popcorn and a cool beverage 🍿 https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/07/27/spacex-earnings-aug-4-heres-why-aug-6-important/ (please do not take investment advice from Motley Fool but they have the basic numbers)

That was a deliberate offer from Big Tech: put aside your old convival systems and let us handle the details. Google deliberately deskilled web search, other companies broke systems administration and software packages that users can understand and edit. The point is that once you don’t understand the details and cannot operate on your own, the big company can do what it likes and you have to take it. Organizations who switch to AWS rarely find that it saved them money but hiring a new team of IT people to build an alternative would be a hassle.

Some of the Zizians had parents who paid for them to bum around in the Bay Area for a few years, but AFAK no famous rationalist has parents who donated a few million to a charity which subsequently gave the child a make-work job. Their most enthusiastic patrons are New Money too.

Edit / SBF has rich and connected parents who were involved in his business ventures

Zero Interest Rates Policy from 2008-2022 and lack of antitrust enforcement in the USA lead to two things: incumbent software companies got bigger because they could borrow so much money and buy or crush their competition, and small software companies did not have to make profits now because investors tossed in more money and hoped they would make big profits one day. That world is dead but the industry has not adapted.