I don’t like to speculate, but it seems tptacek is not happy about it for some reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291623

https://www.gauntletai.com/

10 weeks of 100h work weeks so you can have a 98% (publically disclosed) chance of being denied a Golden Ticket to the AI factory.

This is very weird but not particularly notable, other than that these guys have apparently been YC funded in 2017, and I can’t find anything about the company in the directory: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer+2017… until I looked at the CEO’s name. Lambda School Bloom Institute GauntletAI’s latest pivot is asking for 1000 hours of voluntary unpaid labour.

e: apologies for the vaguepost, I could’ve sworn I put down the name, but in any case, it’s the return of PG’s favourite guy not named Sam Altman, Austen Allred

Being paid to reddit has to be the most pathetic thing you can do, and I say that as someone who once reddited unpaid.

This almost reads like tptacek doesn’t understand why lucidity’s piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.

I’d have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it’s a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I’m just a vibe coding Youtuber.

Being the worst and the biggest studios aren’t unrelated concepts, they’re the biggest because they’re the worst.

I don’t get it, how is every one of the most touted people in the AI space among the least credible people in the industry.

Like literally every time its a person whose name I recognize from something else they’ve done, that something else is something I hate.

Reminds me something F.D. Signifier said on a music podcast.

Progressives are losing the cultural war in a lot of ways, but they’ll always need us because we’re the ones pushing the boundaries on art, and it turns out, no matter how ghoulish people want to act, everyone has genuine love of fucking awesome art. The true loss condition is being captured by the tools of the master.

Listen, I’m just saying that this never would’ve happened with hg.

If you’re referring to genetic algorithms, those work by giving the computer some type of target to gun for that’s easy to measure and then letting the computer go loose with randomly changing bits from the original object. I guess in your mind, that’d be randomly evolving the codebase and then submitting the best version.

There’s a lot of problems with the idea of genetic codebase that I’m sure you can figure out on your own, but I’ll give you one for free: “better code” is a very hard thing for computers to measure.

Hey that’s unfair, us North Americans are as normal about bikes as we’re normal about cars.

At first I was skeptical of the guy who told me, but they seemed rich and therefore trustworthy.

I don’t want to see grummz anywhere near AI ERP discourse.

I’m just glad all my friends are such smart rational independent thinkers that we’ve all independently come to the same conclusion that the status quo is perfect!

The machine I love can’t be dumb, I love the machine and I can’t love what is dumb.

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/50 and of course we already have chatgptfriends on the case of stopping the mean programmer from doing something the Machine doesn’t like. This person doesn’t even seem to understand what anubis does, but they certainly seem confident chatgpt can tell him.

Posting cringe, even intentionally, has little artistry.

I’m sure the man who sleeps with his secretaries on company time has great ideas on how much time I should be in the office.

1. My big robot is really expensive to build.

2. If big robot parts become cheaper, I will declare that the big robot must be bigger, lest somebody poorer than me also build a big robot.

3. My robot must be made or else I won’t be able to show off the biggest, most expensive big robot.

QED, I deserve more money to build the big robot.

P.S. And for the naysayers, just remember that that robot will be so big that your critiques won’t apply to it, as it is too big.

There are companies doing “cool-sounding” things with AI like Waymo. “Good” would require more definition.

If they can convince the money hose that they just need one more OOM of compute bro, they can keep vacuuming infinity dollars. The incentive is obviously there for any amount of lying, but at some point, I assume even the most braindead investors will start asking around if this really is the only game in town.

Or maybe they won’t, which would be an admission against the core tenet of capitalism, but this has been a crazy year, and it’s only january. :/