I spent an unreasonable amount of time playing Universal Paperclips. It’s a seemingly simple point-and-click game where your objective is to make paperclips. You win when you turn all matter in the universe into paperclips.
The best part is that it is actually a reasonable way to spend eight hours. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are ready to sacrifice your next eight hours.
I read a very interesting “hot take” on Silicon Valley’s “cult of founders.” I’m not sure what I think of it because I’m as far as you can get from the Valley and close to the open source, “hackery” communities.
The article also links to another interesting article, which presents Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz as two polar archetypes of the techno-founder era. Both Aaron and Sam were part of the first Y Combinator cohort and went on to pursue very different paths. This excerpt sums it up:
Aaron died in 2013. He took his own life, having been hounded by the Department of Justice for years over the crime of (literally) downloading too many articles from JSTOR. Upon his death, the entire internet mourned. Books have been written about him, documentaries have been produced. It felt back then as though there was this massive, Aaron-shaped hole. There kind of still is, even today.
Sam Altman and OpenAI have scraped practically the entire Internet. JSTOR, YouTube, Reddit… so long as the content is publicly accessible, OpenAI’s stance appears to be that copyright law is only for little people.
For this, Altman has been crowned the new boy-king of Silicon Valley.