https://fortune.com/2024/04/18/mercedes-self-driving-autonomous-cars-california-nevada-level-3-drive-pilot/

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what's to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot's ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I've ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji's 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji's ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco's government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations': outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who's attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherlovers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

“What I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You're a fellow Gray.”

The Grays' shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman's banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That's, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman's son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon's building?”

This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building's exterior. But in Balaji's dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they'll march through the city together.

!clinklickers MOAR WORDS...

>A day of the life of a DEI program manager

>11:00 am - Wake up. Early birds are racist.

>11:30 am - Attend a sync up meeting. Standup is not inclusive. Everyone needs to come up with 5 words to remove from our dictionary.

>12:00 pm - Have lunch at a black-female-owned Chinese restaurant. Scold the owner for cultural appropriation.

>1:00 pm - Meet with one of my program sponsors. Discuss what protest we need to fund next.

>2:00 pm - Check internal Slack messages and mark those who used non inclusive language

>3:00 pm - Have s*x with a queer peer

>4:00 pm - Go back home. Work is racist

>10:00 pm - Attack random people online

Microsoft just open-sourced DOS 4 https://t.co/iOeLUVfVok (as well a release of beta binaries, disk images, and PDFs from @rozzie's archives!) (but who did the PR?!) pic.twitter.com/g3VyOCsT40

— Scott Hanselman 🌮 (@shanselman) April 25, 2024

Pikesville principal Eric Eiswert was caught on tape going on a racist rant.

People called for his life to be destroyed.

Turns out, the entire recording was fake and generated (using AI) by Dazhon Darien, the school's former athletic director. pic.twitter.com/Qw6J1LPnxD

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 25, 2024

The Department of "Justice" has once again criminalized the developers of an app that restores financial privacy. The way to fix this it to make money private by default. Privacy must never be "exceptional," or they will make it criminal.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 24, 2024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40126958

There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.

Won't someone think of the poor zoomer influencers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127055

Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic process and the rules-based order were this to happen.

Fellas is democracy gonna die because nurses can't twerk on TikTok anymore?

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Don't ever use Reddit again. pic.twitter.com/ynSlWFt844

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 23, 2024

https://old.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1bt7agy/exploit_balatros_source_code_is_exposed_easy_to/

hello~ idk if this has been discussed in the community yet, but there's a really easy exploit to cheat in balatro --- you can right-click the .exe file, go to "Open Archive", and modify the source code directly. i made a video so you can see how it works:

i'm bringing it up because if the editor is smart, there's no way to tell if a game has been modified or not --- you can, for example, increase the droprate of powerful jokers or legendaries and cheat in a speedrun category

i've sent a message in the speedrunning groomercord that they should probably modify the rules so that runners have to verify their game files on Steam before they submit a run. and more generally, i think ppl should be aware that this exists so they can call out suspect videos and runs

i almost didn't want to publicize this because the more well-known this gets, the easier it will be for ppl to cheat in speedruns and tournaments and stuff, but at the end of the day i think it's better if more ppl know and can establish rules to stop it when it matters

^ Yeah this thing

Truely unsurprising.

{Its basically just a VNC connection to an android VM with Playwright automation scripts for the 5 services it does. Oh and that VM connection is also how you put in your logins to those services, probably scraping your password}

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US.

Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions). pic.twitter.com/H8F4UVxhwS

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) April 23, 2024

Stomp sexy Indian dude skulls with steel toed boots.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/?id=d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e61e7021e3496ddf7fd61e

Australia’s censorship industrial complex:

“The problem that you’ve got here with this eSafety Commissioner, she’s an activist.

She will continue to expand her role to police the internet, to censor debate in a way that’s consistent with her own ideological views.

You have… pic.twitter.com/GZosiBHAcb

— Ana Mostarac (@anammostarac) April 20, 2024