Okay fuck all this, fuck OpenAI, fuck Effective Altruism, fuck this entire line of thinking. Ockham's razor on all this shit is THERE'S NOTHING THERE.

You know Uber's business model? Undercut taxis by breaking the law. Eventually the law caught up. Price difference between Uber and a taxi is now nominal; taxis are cheaper half the time. Uber? Their profits come from bringing you take-out.

You know WeWork's business model? Lose money on subleases but make it up on volume. Softbank was all in, though, 'cuz "vision." So Wall Street hallucinated a $47b valuation and got all upset when it turns out losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year is bad for profit. Now they're bankrupt.

You know Theranos' business model? Con investors into giving them money while they struggled to violate the fundamental laws of fluid mechanics in pursuit of epidemiology. Theranos is a special case in that they fucked up cancer tests and shit like that but ultimately? They lied about impossible shit and eventually the public caught them out.

You know Enron's business model? Lie about how much money you have so you can borrow money so you can bet money so you can lose more money. Enron is a special case because they caused rolling blackouts across California to the point where eventually even the left bank grifters looked into it but ultimately? They lied about impossible shit and eventually the public caught them out.

You know FTX's business model? Lie about how much money you have so you can borrow money so you can bet money so you can lose more money. FTX is a special case because fuckin' Seqoiah et. al. gave a frizzy-haired autist and his friends multiple billions of dollars based on their utter obtuseness about the one thing they should fucking understand (money) but ultimately? They lied about impossible shit and eventually the public caught them out (fucking Coindesk? Fuck off with that shit).

You know what drives me batshit? Everyone wringing their hands about how Sam Altman has Skynet on a leash and if we don't give him exactly what he wants we're all gonna be Borg'd into grey goo or some shit. Meanwhile, Skynet?

We've got a friend involved in an Amazon-affiliated startup. She confides to my wife yesterday "I'm afraid that if I tell them that no one will ever sign up for their services they'll just pivot into something even stupider." I said "make sure she waits until she's grifted as much money as she can possibly get; that's what everyone else is doing."

Microsoft has comped $13b worth of cloud time to OpenAI. That doesn't mean Microsoft has invested $13b in OpenAI. This is Hollywood accounting; when you pay yourself from someone else's cut you never seek a bargain. Friend of mine wrote the movie Deja Vu. It made $180m in the box office. He never saw a dime beyond the advance because according to Disney, they spent $780m promoting it. This is like how a Skinny Puppy album can cost $11m to produce: You bring the band members to your house, let them use your studio, encourage them to hang out, and bill them $100k a day against their future profits to ensure you never have to pay them.

Everyone is talking about how OpenAI has somehow scuttled an $86b valuation when what they've done is jeopardize the idea that someone is going to give them a billion dollars for 1.1% of one of their many, convoluted, funds-incinerating subcompanies. Meanwhile Microsoft has pulled some kind of coup by hiring the CEO even though Bill Gates himself says GPT5 is a nothingburger.

You know how this all makes sense?

1) GPT is a dead fucking end

2) Sam Altman wants to spend a billion dollars on it anyway

3) The board can't kill one of their white calves

That left three OpenAI employees on the board: Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever. And it left three independent directors: Toner, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo, and entrepreneur Tasha McCauley. Toner and McCauley have worked in the effective altruism movement, which seeks to maximize the leverage on philanthropic dollars to do the most good possible.

4) the monkeys throw shit at each other

hey, how much money have "effective altruists" actually given to anything? I mean, it's full of tithing billionaires and shit, right? But they've squirrelled away half a billion across fifteen years, putting them nowhere near anything effective. "For all humanity" is TESCREAL bullshit code meaning "for absolutely no one living or breathing." It's all a LARP. It's sociopathic twitchfucks doing their selfish best to screw over us NPCs so they can pretend their building a bug-out bunker for the betterment of all mankind.

what if I told you... it was all a grift

But to most people, it will never matter how much OpenAI was worth. What matters is what it built, and how it deployed it. What jobs it destroyed, and what jobs it created.

What has it built? What has it deployed? What jobs has it destroyed? What jobs has it created? There's this fundamental assumption at all this that Skynet is just around the corner but what we get, time and time again, is a hallucinating chatbot that can't even play Not Hotdog.

This whole Sam Altman conundrum is solved in one if you assume nobody wants to be the first person to give the game away.

That's all it is.

And every. single. company. listed. above. went through the same cycle.

Random shitposting aside, I do feel this bears discussion, albeit in a less fingerpointy way.

Wikipedia lists Tim Draper as a "third generation venture capitalist" which is kinda tough for me because - playing the Old Card here - bad ideas used to be dangerous or niche not outright fraudulent. Lawn Darts. Salad Shooters. Pet Rocks. Vegematics. The products we used to make fun of were either trendy things that we didn't actually need or outright scams - compare and contrast ZZZZ Best and WeWork. Barry Minkow had to go to the mob because his idea was clearly fraudulent. Adam Neumann could go to Matsayoshi Son.

The idea used to be that venture capital allowed ideas and products that weren't backed by major industrialists to come to market. The idea has become that venture capital allows ideas and products that aren't backed by Kickstarter to provide a profitable exit as they get sold or become publicly traded. I don't think VCs are inherently evil, but I do think that the financialization of the process has divorced it from public judgment. I mean, this is a dumb fucking idea:

It's an even dumber fucking idea than this dumb fucking idea:

And anybody who touches it can tell you. But that's not what we do anymore. We start in "stealth mode" where friends of rich people spend money. Then we do a hype cycle where friends of rich people spend money. Then we do the barest-of-bare engineering and design to get a "minimum viable product" out the door and do the hype cycle again, and then it hits the public who howl like banshees about the stupidity. Meanwhile the VCs - the guys in charge of the process - get paid. The engineering and design teams get a bunch of stories they may get to tell someday when their NDAs expire. And Wired gets to write a feel-good story about that plucky band of online adventurers - the "makers" - rescue a bad fucking idea just enough where they can continue to masturbate all over it.

"Stupid products bought by VCs" didn't used to be a genre of television, man. And while the VCs are clearly culpable I'm unconvinced they're solely responsible for this. Obviously they do better with a higher hit/miss ratio but just as obviously they're profiting anyway.

If you brought the nunc to market through, say, a pre-2008 economy you would find no shelf space. It would be an expensive thing with expensive beans. The model for dumb shit like that would be to give you a free coffee maker to lock you into the beans - the first PS3s cost $900 to make and sold for $500 because Sony wanted your living room. Prior to the iPhone cellular carriers lost money on the damn phones to lock you into a contract. Prior to that, I mean - you couldn't buy a phone from AT&T, you had to rent it. Lock-in isn't new, it's the idea that you should mortgage your house for the privilege of overpaying for fucking juice.

Here's a guess:

This shit dates back to the slaps on the wrist everyone earned from exploiting the shit out of non-GAAP accounting.

The use of non-GAAP financial measures began to change in the 1990s, when companies began providing non-GAAP earnings and disclosures that they argued provided investors with improved insight into the company’s ongoing core business earnings. When presenting non-GAAP information, companies have significant discretion in adjusting GAAP-based earnings by excluding noncore expense items or including revenue items not recognized under GAAP rules. In response, the SEC continues to evaluate whether companies are using their discretion in non-GAAP earnings reporting to inform or mislead investors. This article details the SEC’s historical treatment of non-GAAP measures, reviews problems associated with non-GAAP measures, and provides ways that a company’s auditors, accountants, executives, and audit committee members can reduce the probability of a non-GAAP disclosure being deemed misleading.

My first exposure to this nonsense was in 2006. I worked for a company that had every plan to become the #1 source of music in the world (reader, they did not). Their big metric was EBITDA - Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation & Amortization. In other words, "every possible way to make the balance sheet look good without listing anything what-so-fucking-ever related to running a business." It'd work like this:

We'd sell a music subscription to, say, Bank of America. The idea is, they're going to give us $20/mo for piping the Fugees into the lobby of every BofA. That's 6900 banks! That's $138k a month! $1.66m a year! Except we're going to give them a 40% discount for the first two years. So really, it's $993k a year. And we're giving them the system for free. Which, with installation, comes in at $2500/store. So... $17m in outlays. And it's a five-year contract. So... we're spending $2500 to earn $1000... seven thousand times. Except what we report - non-GAAP - is $140k a month in recurring monthly revenue (RMR) STRAIGHT INTO THE VEINS of our EBITDA. It gets better though because I report the price of our player as zero dollars because we make it and we can give it away. The player department reports 6900 sales at $1200 ea because non-GAAP, we just "earned" $8m from selling players to Bank of America.

Fifteen years later, long, long, LONG after every shop you know is running a Spotify playlist, that company was acquired by a conglomerate using private equity money. Why? Because the RMR is still theoretically there while all the losses have been washed through investors.

I think fundamentally if you create a climate where people get away with crime, there will be crime. And if you don't call it crime, people will call it "the business environment." And here we'll be, wondering how the fuck they can think we'll pay $3500 for a coffee juicero.

So yeah. What I want is for Scott Siskind to stop hurting people while the number of people whose deaths his actions have directly and materially contributed to is still in the single digits. What I want is for people to stop listening to his poorly written and poorly argued bullshit. What I want, in fact, is for people to stop listening to all of it: Siskind, Yudkowsky, Moldbug, Thiel, Trump, Bannon, and all of the other fucking idiots helping work towards human extinction. I want them to shut up and go away and stop making the world an actively worse place to live in.

I don’t expect this essay will accomplish that though. So my second choice is that one of the well-meaning people to be suckered in by Siskind’s con will read this and go “oh, shit” because they finally see what’s been done to them and what purposes it served. And they’ll go and be better people afterwards who don’t read eugenicists and sexists and maybe when they hear someone talk about being sexually assaulted they’ll actually listen and work to make a world where that happens less. So by all means, if you find yourself arguing with some Slate Star Codex fan online, link this article. If I can manage this happening once, frankly, all 12,500 words of this and the genuine unhappiness they provoked will be worthwhile.

I admire the sentiment, I admire the work, I admire the sheer labor behind it. Lord knows Hubski has its SSC problems. I think this thread is my most beastly; the closest I've ever gotten to agreeing with Scott Siskind - in my recollection - is "eh, he kinda has a point about that, I can see why he attracts the audience he does."

I think the core flaw with his style of argumentation is summed up in this comment in response to "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup":

I suppose he was just trying to flip the semantics around, in the same way some racist talking-head in the media might bleat about "problems of 'black culture,'" he can do a similar song and dance for "white culture." Ultimately, it didn't really feel like he was railing against himself, or providing some sort of insightful self-critique, he was using it as a code word or dog whistle for the Red Tribe.

blackbootz, among others, would send me SSC screeds on a monthly basis for a while. I have been encouraged to read Scott Siskind for twelve, fifteen years now. My takeaway was "what a bunch of fuzzy-headed thinking" which is different than Ms. Sandifer's assessment of malfeasance. I don't think it really clicked until Emil Torres and others started to dismantle the whole "TESCREAL" constellation, and bless Michael Lewis' black heart, it didn't gel until that fucking Sam Bankman Fried book. Here's SBF arguing against Shakespeare:

Sam was asked, in high school, to write an essay on Shakespeare because he was one of the greatest authors in the English language. Sam sucks at literature (shocker!) and is utterly disinterested in the human experience (I know, right?) so his argument was not against the greatness of Shakespeare's writing, his argument was that studying ancient literature at all was a waste of time because statistically speaking, there are more humans now than there were in the 1600s therefore it is improbable that any author from the 1600s is better than an author from the 2020s from a pure numbers standpoint.

Here's the first move out of the playbook, illustrated at a literally sophomore level: reject conventional standards of evaluation out of hand and substitute your own. Note that Lewis doesn't describe Sam as offering any examples to back up his argument. Note also that Sam Bankman Fried has publicly hated on "books" - "I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post." Which goes to the second move: it's the vibe, not the facts.

The sleight-of-hand at the heart of all this rationalist-effective-altruist-accelerationist-libertarian bullshit is a loose and conditional set of BELIEFS, not rational conclusions, and everything that comes out of it is an exercise in framing to reinforce the convictions of the converted. This, more than anything, is why it drives the rest of us bugshit, I think - you've got a group of people pretending that their every thought has been arrived at through painstaking study and when questioned about it, the opponent is subjected to a bullshit whirlwind of whataboutism, conditionality and cherry-picking that allow other BELIEVERS to chin-stroke and nod thoughtfully about how yes, actually, Hugo Drax should exterminate the world with orchid poison from orbit for the betterment of all mankind.

The core, unassailable belief at the heart of Untitled is "white nerds are worth more than anyone else" and everything around it is prevarication. It's wooly to the world and galvanizing to the believers because the world doesn't view the superiority of the white nerd as axiomatic while the TESCREAL crowd - a famously empathy-bereft group - cannot imagine things any other way. This more than anything is the driving force behind their love of eugenics - they cannot imagine (or tolerate) any use of eugenics that will not benefit them, because who on earth would go after white nerds? The fact that one of their saints, Ayn Rand, was driven from her home and her family's business burned by an anti-intellectual mob with a 200-year policy of racial purity never enters into it because it isn't about the thought. It isn't about the argument. It isn't about the facts. It's about the vibe, and the vibe is "I should be getting more girls than those annoying Hispanics on the swim team because I am a superior being."

The most success I have had in getting people to question these ideas comes from assailing the arguments as stupid, not malevolent. You can't meet them at their level because they're just floating around saying whatever feels good in the moment. If you engage with them as if they were genuine, you make them genuine which is exactly what they're after. I think Ms. Sandifer errs when she argues that Scott Siskind comes from a place of disingenuousness. He clearly believes everything he says, and he clearly believes it quite earnestly. The fact of the matter is, however, that all these people have convinced themselves they've arrived at the only logical conclusion when in fact they've spent 9000 words creating a conditional house-of-cards to say "if you tilt your head and squint, you'll see it my way." And, of course, anyone who refuses to tilt their head and squint is disingenuous. Thus the whole "if you're going to argue with me you have to address these nine bullet points" bit.

Where I seriously disagree with Ms. Sandifer is where she describes it as "beige."

Steve Bannon described this as "flooding the zone with bullshit" while RAND calls it the "firehose of falsehood" propaganda model. Thomas Rid traces it back to the Okhrana of the 19th Century - talkin' Czarist disinformation and propaganda in the Hapsburg era. And it has always been deployed against freer societies.

Sarah Chayes wrote a whole book about how, going back to Thucydides, the hallmark of a failing state is corruption. We hold up the Code of Hammurabi and the Magna Carta for a reason - they establish fairness. They codify rules that say "if this, then that". Society has always advanced on fairness and declined on corruption, a point even Graeber backed up. But in wavering liberal societies based on rules, illiberal societies based on personality can make hay by "flooding the zone with bullshit."

And the thing is? If it's your flavor of bullshit, you just swim in it. You know each particular turd is all just a part of the vibe, none of it really matters, because things are going your way. And you also know that the rules-based world you're railing against is going to have to counter every single fleck of poop because whatabout this whatabout that whatabout the other and fundamentally, conservatives and reactionaries are much more about vibes than debates. And it works for a while, if it's going your way, and you're on the right side of the dividing line. But it never ends well.

The problem with vibe-based political systems is the vibe can shift. There's a reason that the world's most liberal democracies have the most rules. Anyone who has ever operated under Robert's Rules of Order rolls their eyes on the reg over all the procedural nonsense... until someone loses their shit, nobody is friends anymore and holy shit that framework you were just dogging saved your fucking bacon. People always point to Hitler whenever they want to discuss demagoguery but the Weimar Republic was a shitshow of reprisal and recrimination and someone like Hitler was going to come around. This "flood the zone" method? It's how Italy went fascist. It's how The Philippines went fascist. It's how Israel went fascist. And it sure as shit is how Team Trump tried to take America fascist.

Ms. Sandifer mentions Gamergate in passing. She does it a disservice. Dale Beran draws a bright white line between GamerGate and Trump. It's not a dot plot, it's not a trail of breadcrumbs, it's a straight vector from A to B. And it fundamentally comes down to a bunch of underemployed men with no social skills who have nothing better to do than tear shit down.

So does ISIS, btw.

Robert Putnam wrote a book about 25 years ago about how we were all fundamentally fucked because we didn't know our neighbors anymore, we didn't have any civic engagement, we didn't have any friends and how that was fundamentally bad for democracy.

We've [Americans] been able to run a different kind of society. A less statist society, a more free-market society, because we had real strength in the area of social capital and we had relatively high levels of social trust. We sort of did trust one another, not perfectly, of course, but we did. Not compared to other countries. And all that is declining, and I began to worry, "Well, gee, isn't that going to be a problem, if our system is built for one kind of people and one kind of community, and now we've got a different one. Maybe it's not going to work so well."

Putnam matters because he decided society was made up of two kinds of capital - bonding capital (what makes similar people stick together) and bridging capital (what makes dissimilar people stick together). He doesn't matter because he's pretty much entirely known for coming up with a theory of Life Before Facebook. I guess the real question is whether our society has fundamentally changed since 2000? Or whether it's simply oscillating around the same trend line.

Thomas Rid did a pretty good job of making me see Putin behind everything that goes wrong in the free world. Thing about stochastic shit like this is if it costs little and pays back a lot, flood the zone early and often. But the more I look around, the more I see it all winding down the way it historically does. If it doesn't push the wall over, it crashes back to nothing. If there's any good news around all this it's that the harsh sunlight of scrutiny is drying up the money, everyone is sick of the bullshit, and intellectual movements end up looking like lame versions of the Panther Moderns.

The Trump Administration was a vibe-based presidency. You were in good until you were fired on Twitter. You were the best buddy until you were the back-stabber. You were in until you were out. This is also how the Soviet Union ran, and how Russia runs. It's how populism works. The secret to success of representative democracy is the safety to be unpopular. You get to keep playing the game even if you insist on doing that thing that the rest of the polity thinks is no fun. Often, you get to be the one right person five, ten years later when everyone else is proven to be wrong. It moderates everybody else and gives them the courage to be wrong. It allows you to vote your convictions and it allows you to change them when they're wrong.

I can't think of a single success - monetary, social, legislative, spiritual - that the vibes-based process has enjoyed in this latest wave. I think Father Time is coming for Slate Star Codex and its ilk. Effective Altruism, Effective Accelerationism, eugenics of any sort - none of it withstands the harsh scrutiny of the light and the past ten years of financial innovation sure look like rich white sociopaths enabled by rich white sociopaths. You do enough enabling of the wrong thing, you lose the ability. OpenAI just lost its chance to be a money inferno, much the same way WeWork did.

Take away these assholes' money, you take away their power. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for Robert Mercer, and he mostly just wanted to cheat the IRS; all the political bullshit in between is between his daughter and Steve Bannon.

I think nature is healing.

I hope nature is healing.

_______________________________

The image up top, BTW, is William Blake's "Ancient of Days" Copy K, which is probably either an in-joke between the author and herself or some serious in-group signaling, as this whole posse has put a whole lot of symbolism behind one little drawing.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair

I think ridiculous amounts of money has been made on the premise that enough venture capital can bend the laws of the universe to its whim. The following Youtube video is from this post, it's worth watching exactly five minutes because that's all it takes to make you realize that Andy Kaufman would be unemployed if he were still alive because irony is dead:

That's where we were until the dumbness started to pop. Theranos, WeWork, FTX, OpenAI... not only are these travesties never showing a profit, they're money sinkholes that make the 20th century look miserly. Comes a time when you make more money by being diligent than you do by being a visionary.

I think we're coming round. I don't think it's obvious yet. And I'm not fully convinced I'm right. But enough money has been lost on "boldness" that I think "shrewdness" might be coming back in vogue.

Slowly.

You wanna talk about burying the lede. This is boring but important so bear with me.

(but don't take my word for it, play around)

That humpy line there is how much money your money makes you. What you can earn just by giving your cash to something virtually risk-free like a bank or loaning your money out to a city to build roads or whatever.

There's a historical perspective. now - before you get your panties in a twist, I want you to think about every document you have saved somewhere. I guarantee you 90% of them are receipts and contracts. People who don't pay attention get butt-hurt over the idea that we don't know how to make a Roman hamburger but we know how much it cost Pliny the Elder to get a car loan and the reason for that is people save their contracts.

You may notice that for the last, oh, fifteen years or so, money hasn't been making much money. This is important because if your money isn't making much money, you need some other way to make money. Because in a capitalist, free-market society, money costs money.

The money you earn minus the money you pay is your profit, and if you are a capitalist rentier, you don't do any work, you let your money do it. So far so good?

NOW

If you can't make any money by sitting on your money, you have to do riskier shit with your money. Like loan it out to stupid companies that aren't making any money now, but if they take over the market they will jack up prices because they have a monopoly. Like, Amazon. Like, WeWork. Like, Spotify. It has been argued by smarter people than me that interest rates reflect the price of monopoly - the more money your money can make, the less likely you are to lend it to giant fucking companies looking to get giant-er.

“Investors are increasingly impatient in 2023 for tech firms to start making money”

Nvidia is at 25 right now.

This is a good read, but it doesn't go into too much detail about the generalizability of the WeWork debacle, which is the main thrust of the article. I found that lack of data disappointing.

He's trying to buy back WeWork, so your dreams may. come true.

sigh

Postmates loses five dollars for every four it makes. Nonetheless, Uber bought it for two and a half billion dollars. Uber, meanwhile, is only "profitable" by juggling numbers in Uber Eats and Postmates.

It doesn't fucking matter, of course, because eight cents of every dime of stimulus that has gotten us through the pandemic has gone directly or indirectly into the stock market, which is a second-order popularity contest based on options flows.

At least the Soviets had a planned economy that didn't work. We've got a kleptocracy run by shitty equations and high frequency trading.

On the plus side? The only way Postmates and Uber work is by being extraordinarily shitty to their employees so they can convince disinterested Robinhooders and equity funds that they're "cutting costs" appropriately. Uber is throwing a quarter billion dollars at getting people to drive for them again and it isn't working because if it sucks driving jackasses around for less than $10, it only sucks a little less for more than $10. Eventually everyone has a "never fucking again" moment, like the PostMates guy behind me in line to get back into the mall. Who was there to pick up a video game preorder from GameStop. And no, the guy he was picking it up for wasn't interested in the poor driver picking it up from any other goddamn GameStop because this one had the magic stickers in it or some shit. He watched me enviously after I decided ten minutes was enough, and chose to walk all the way around the mall to get back to my car. That guy? That guy was making $3 to be told by some stay-at-home asshole that his time wasn't worth magic stickers.

So eventually the equation shifts and some stuffed shirt decides Uber isn't ever actually going to make money in a real way but before that we'll have AOL-Time Warner all fucking over again, WeWork valued at $47b and greater fool theory will keep the rich assholes rich and the rest of us waiting in line to pick up a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 for $3 until we all decide we're fucking done with it.

There's currently five jobs for every four unemployed people in the United States, according to the Commerce Dept. And most of them are bullshit that we all have stories about. I truly believe that the Pandemic taught most people that their job sucks and they aren't paid enough not because of economics or rationality but because the system is designed to fuck them over largely out of pure cruelty.

Six outta ten college students are women this year. It'll be two outta three in a few years. Now - it's pretty obvious that college is bullshit for boys and girls in this day and age. But why are the girls still cool with it? I reckon it's because a girl living at home figuring her shit out faces less stigma than a boy living at home figuring shit out but the center ain't holding on that one. Shit's gonna change.

What precedent will this set? I don't think any. But I think it's another grain on the sandpile and the avalanche is coming.

Last Lyft I took in LA cost as much as the last taxi I took in LA. Take out the bullshit and it turns out we knew the market rate all along. Eventually all the Uber and Postmates in the world are gonna be too expensive to bother with. The question is how much they'll destroy first.

I'm in a mood today

That's a great thread. I imagine many would be Silicon Valley entrepreneur types see WeWork not as a cautionary tale but rather Neuman personally as a success story.

Good read. Interesting and little scary. I had to admit I chuckled a good bit about Adam Neumann's company WeWork transitioning to WeCompany in order to start up real-estate and education missions. It automatically brought to mind the book We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Maybe he wasn't so wrong in his prediction....