May 9, 2022 • 2HR 29M

Roon: The Endgame of Machine Learning, Technology, and Internet Balkanization

A Tranquil Chat About How the World Ends Between Brothers in Technology

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Appears in this episode

Brian Chau
THE podcast on institutions.
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Roon is a machine learning engineer, anonymous writer at roonscape.substack.com, and the inventor of the term “wordcel”. He’s an extremely insightful commentator with a similar technical background to mine - all the better for approaching the questions we’re asking today. 

Topics discussed include the “wordcel and “shape rotator” meme, the decline of journalism, the conflict between legacy and new institutions, the difficulty of explaining machine learning to lay audiences, how very few people are agentic, niche communities and anonymity, the “neoreactionary” movement, accelerationism, techno-optimism, existential risk, alien life, and which problems machine learning is most likely to solve. 

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Roon on twitter: https://twitter.com/tszzl

His substack:

roon’s Newsletter
A Song of Shapes and Words
Backstory I’ve been grinding for tiny scraps of engagement in the internet mines since I was but a wee lad. But my actual claim to fame turned out to be a memetic repackaging of funny cognitive patterns that ended up activating an incredible underbelly of tribalism that we didn't know we were missing until now. People are starved for good dichotomies and…
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2 years ago · 175 likes · 48 comments · roon

DALL-E ML Image Generator: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/

UPDATE: Timestamps

2:01 interview starts

9:28 legacy journalists

15:11 financial collapse

22:33 Elon Musk and twitter

28:44 "Hate Speech" is a fake term

39:53 Old Money vs. New Money

53:53 Technologists Becoming Disillusioned by Politics

57:01 The Neoreactionary Movement

1:06:30 Existential Risk

1:13:22 Aliens

1:18:37 Machine Learning in Simple English

1:26:54 Automation

1:38:09 Inequality

1:50:32 Gen Z

1:57:43 Why are tech journalists so incompetent?

2:05:34 Machine Learning Lightning Round

2:07:55 Central Planning

2:11:46 Machine Learning and Emotion

2:18:07 Self-Driving Cars

2:21:45 Finance

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