Yeah, ”think for yourself“.

Don’t trust the experts who warn you about capitalism and the consequences of our irresponsible behavior, and dare to criticize our AI overlords. They only want to instill fear in you!

”Think for yourself“ by heeding the advice of some guy still on the Nazi platform to reject science and logic. And by swallowing whatever the messengers of the AI overlords deliver. And by swallowing against all evidence that climate catastrophe basically has zero chance of threat.

What a stupid take.

What about luck? What about inheritance?

Take, for example, the British King. He wasn’t crowned King because he was the most popular Brit. And he certainly wasn’t for his achievements.

This take by Naval serves only to indoctrinate gullible techbros with libertarian oligarchs‘ idea of meritocracy.

When I first heard of Naval Ravikant about 7 years ago (via Tim Ferriss), I was still kind of immature and learned a lot from him.

His most famous aphorism might be ”Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.“

He also offered some amazing book recommendations. For example, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Still one of my favorite books ever.

Even back then, I rejected some of his views, like 80-hour-weeks.

But nowadays he’s just a fascist nutcase.

I have to listen to a number of people (offline) who keep telling me they were told that Robert Kennedy Jr. is a crazy person, but after listening to the likes of Lex Fridman, and hearing Kennedy Jr. talk for the first time themselves, they thought the guy was brilliant. Yeah, the rapist who had brain worms…

Now this deluded guy says he thinks Jared fucking Kushner is excellent, after having seen him platformed by Lex.

Men falling for these idiots, deaf to reason — what can we do against that?

For those who don’t know, ”The Network State“ is the dream of the fascist Balaji Srinivasan. The dream of how techno-authoritarian dictatorship would look under his rule:

He and all other disgusting billionaires form the ruling elite. Bribes and rewards buy the police. Idiots who cheer on crypto, AI and billionaires are allowed to stay as their minions. Everybody else is ”removed“.

Naval is best friends with Balaji.

Billionaires are fascists.

For a start, read this:
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

I admire Lex Fridman because he’s much more disciplined and focused than I am.

I admire Lex Fridman because he reads many more books, and knows more things, than I do.

But he’s not more intelligent or even more moral than I am.

Especially after having read books such as Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, 1984, books about the Third Reich and the rise of Hitler, about capitalism and socialism, about libertarianism, how can you still cheer on an oligarchy, exploitation, and literal fascists?

How about—before we worry about the distant future and speculative dangers—we first try to tackle the near-term issues?

Which should include not cheering on one of the most vile persons on the planet, calling him "awesome".

Meanwhile on Twitter, people are still judging Elon #Musk by—and celebrating him for—his empty/broken promises rather than his actions because they're

- too dumb/brainwashed to see through the charade
- proponents of unbridled capitalism and/or toxic ideologies such as effective accelerationism
- actual fascists

But then again, there's not much (if any) difference between these three explanations.

In case you still think #ElonMusk is a good guy, please follow @parismarx and @gilduran.

It's tiring how uncritical (or unethical) tech bros are cheering on a technology mainly pushed by (venture) capitalists that is on its way to destroy our habitat and deplete our water resources.

From a popular newsletter:
First of all, this presents a false dichotomy: If you don't celebrate it, you fear it. I do neither.

Yesterday I asked ChatGPT for some Jinja code for dbt. The produced code looked correct but did not work, because it wasn't Jinja code. 🤦‍♂️ It was Ansible's extension of Jinja.