conn10mfan (u/conn10mfan)

conn10mfan commented on The militarization of Silicon Valley nytimes.com/2025/08/04/te... · Posted by u/cadertots

People will generally approach information differently if they know the source of that information has a financial interest in pushing a certain narrative.

E.g. hedge funds or short sellers publishing financial advice is seen as "talking their book" rather than high quality analysis.

conn10mfan · 20 days ago

respond to the claims in the article

conn10mfan commented on Eleven Music elevenlabs.io/blog/eleven... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

conn10mfan · 20 days ago

we really need to mandate that software engineers and ML researchers have some rudimentary ethics and aesthetics education, words really cannot describe how much of an abomination AI generated music is, it should be an outrage to our collective intelligence and creativity that tools trained illegally on the work of unaware artists are attempting to disposes those artists of their livelihoods and cultural functions

while we spin our wheels trying to displace those of us who have decided to produce culture, our adversaries will invest in medicine, energy production, transportation, etc...

what profound contempt for humanity a culture must have to produce tools such as these

conn10mfan commented on The militarization of Silicon Valley nytimes.com/2025/08/04/te... · Posted by u/cadertots

ahmeneeroe-v2 · 20 days ago

Always important to note that when the NYT talks about SV, they're talking about a competitor and an existential business threat.

conn10mfan · 20 days ago

not a very useful comment, respond to the claims on their merit, whether NYT sees SV as adversarially really has limited bearing on determining if their critiques are valid, especially given that they are reporting on real phenomenon

conn10mfan commented on A Research Preview of Codex openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

gitremote · 3 months ago

> With so many graduates looking for a job why don't they bang together and do something. If not for money then just to show off their skills, something to put in the resume.

Young people are already doing that, but a lot of what they produce is what you expect from people who have no prior experience in designing and testing software for production environments.

conn10mfan · 3 months ago

also they need to pay rent

conn10mfan commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley

nickledave · 3 months ago

:100: the fact that these technofascists are willing to amputate the hand that feeds them (NSF, DARPA, NIH) tells you everything you need to know about how deluded they are. It's literally Terminal Engineer Brain.

Very much agree we need to make and shame these dufuses who think they'll be the God kings of federated techno states, like Thiel and his ersatz court philosopher Moldbug.

To your list of names I would also add Paris Marx

https://techwontsave.us/

and Robert Evans has done a lot of great series on Elon et al as well

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MLizYdfQT-Y

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mYrPNvVhKLU

conn10mfan · 3 months ago

will check out thanks for the links

conn10mfan commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley

naasking · 3 months ago

Wild to come across people on HN who don't seem to understand that "knowing things" has a price tag, that there is no such thing as "no price is too high", that science that can economically justify itself shouldn't be publicly funded and that science that must be publicly funded should have to justify itself to tax payers.

conn10mfan · 3 months ago

wild to come across people on HN who don't understand that putting economic scrutiny on scientific studies and questioning the public funding of science will both slow the development of yet unknown useful knowledge, as well as slow down economic growth

the perniciousness of the "we need to economically justify the kind of scientific research we are doing" is that plenty of the research we've had that has been economically beneficial was NOT obvious when it was being conducted

by restricting research to programs that may have economic benefit, you restrict yourself to funding things that we pretty much already know, which is a bit more like R&D and less research

to give two examples

1) Gila monster venom - research in the 1990s on Gila Monster Venom formed the building blocks that would become GLP1 medications, which are likely to be some of the best performing medications of all time, as well as have the huge societal benefit of reducing the obesity load on the health system, when this research was being conducted its implications were not known and could have very well been on the chopping block if we were trying to "justify it to taxpayers"

2) CERN - the study of high energy particle physics at CERN is a classic case of "how useful is this knowledge?" It's pretty easy to look at this and wonder how it economically justifies itself. What difference does it make to the tax payer if we discover the Higgs Boson or not? Well, the entire digital economy is down stream of CERN. The internet was partially developed to facilitate the transfer of large quantities of data from colliders like CERN to be analyzed elsewhere in the world. For fuck suck, the world wide web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee. If we didn't invest that money into CERN, or other research institutions, who knows what the web would look like today, and how large the digital economy would be.

Yes, these are just two examples of how research without clear ROI has had economic benefit and justified itself to tax payers. The crux of the issue is we don't know how valuable what we don't know is, and we don't know what branch of science will have the next society altering discovery, so a random walk through scientific research for the sake of knowing things is valuable, because there are undoubtedly things we don't know that will benefit us greatly.

So my argument is in a way like yours, the science does have to justify itself to taxpayers. But the evidence is that the process of science, and knowledge seeking at a high level have justified the funding of science, going study by study to figure out what will have ROI and what won't is a great way to ensure that we discover less and less, leaving more and more stones unturned.

conn10mfan commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley

naasking · 3 months ago

> Astronomy.

What benefits do you expect to see from the kinds astronomy that require this sort of funding? Sure, knowing things can be nice but this ignores opportunity costs, eg. would practical knowledge like fusion research be further along if talent weren't focused on impractical knowledge?

> Physics.

Not strictly true, see quantum computing for instance, lasers, semiconductors and so on. There are some types of physics that aren't viable in this sense, but why does that automatically translate into some need to support them? For instance, consider the decades spent on supersymmetry which ultimately produced bupkis. In a world in which we weren't so focused on ideas so divorced from empirical data, what other types of knowledge or engineering would we have done?

> Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.

What benefits do you expect to see?

> Biology aside from medicine.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Theoretical computer science.

Untrue, Google and Facebook have advance distributed computing considerably, for instance.

> Mathematics.

Unclear, there's a lot of math involved in predictions of all sorts, like weather forecasting, stock market prediction. If your argument here is that math will be more application-focused, this strikes me much like the physics objection where it's unclear that we'd really be worse off.

There seems to be this automatic assumption among some people that pure research with no direction or constraints is an unmitigated good and that we can't do better. I used to think so too, but I just don't see it anymore.

conn10mfan · 3 months ago

wild to come across people on HN who are skeptical about the value of knowing things

"holding my head in my hands" to quote an earlier poster

conn10mfan commented on Starcloud ycombinator.com/companies... · Posted by u/wiley1454

bitmasher9 · 3 months ago

Private use of previous public resources has had mixed success, but it feels like leaving space to the public sector will doom us to being Terran bound forever.

conn10mfan · 3 months ago

the private sector made it to the moon 56 years after the public sector

it's going to take the management of our shared resources and spaces (orbit) for instance to leave earth, and this becomes especially important as Kessler syndrome risk rises with increasing debris in orbit

private companies launching without public oversight and controls are a recipe for cluttering earth's orbit and leaving us earth-bound for far into the future (same if the public sector launches without care but that seems less likely imo)

Kessler Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

conn10mfan commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley

nickledave · 3 months ago

the tl;dr:

> The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission. > But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board.

> Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts.

> Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only.

I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that.

This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system. This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t.... Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.

conn10mfan · 3 months ago

that semaphore article is pretty interesting, there is a whole body of work being developed by folks like Gil Duran, Naomi Klein, Emil Torres, etc. right now diving into the Tech Right and characters like Andreessen

one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?

take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers

Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0

(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")

conn10mfan commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley

robinsoncrusue · 3 months ago

If my memory serves me correctly, the ones you mentioned were DARPA projects. Which is defense arm - and AFAIK defense budget is not being cut.

I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable to pay its debt or inflating away the currency?

conn10mfan · 3 months ago

great example of a reverse gish gallop right here, select one point to argue in a response and attempt to discredit someone based on that

brandolini's law in full effect