Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to āchat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?ā
Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?
āPolyamoryā is the excuse that abusive men use now the way they used āfree loveā in the 1960s. I know people who make the poly thing work; theyāre honest and communicative, traits that I do not associate with lesswrongs.
Interesting question because I bet itās bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold.
Like this isnāt your grandpaās swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory1 with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing donāt get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives.
Itās very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans.
- I swear the claudism was unintentional
I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand:
In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair. They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, until Rand āsp[u]n out a deductive chain from which you just couldnāt escapeā, in Barbara Brandenās words, resulting in her and OāConnorās assent.
You can see how āThe most rational thing is that I fuck your spouseā would appeal to the less wrong folk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and_Objectivism
Muhammad also discovered that God wanted him to marry as many women as he liked, but did not want them to remarry after he died. Joseph Smith āmarriedā a lot of younger women too. So I think if you let people rewrite social rules, many of them will decide that the new rule is āI fuck whoever I want, but they only fuck me.ā
There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner āI sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorousā and tell their groupies āwho cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?ā It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.
I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used āsex-positivityā to mean āI can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you canā't say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate.ā Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.
I donāt exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.
As to inexact reasons whyā¦ some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)
I donāt know the answer, but Iāve always assumed itās because itās just something Yud is really into.
Michael Vassar called sleeping with his staff at MetaMed polyamory. Polyamory is common, and bosses and teachers sleeping with employees and students is common, but the combination stands out.
I always assumed it was a package deal with the California Ideology.
EY has recapitulated a ton of bullshit he learned as a teenager hanging out on the Extropians listserv with older shitty libertarian dudes. The archives are like a proto-LW, with conversations about race and intelligence, sex and kinks, gender differences, armchair geopolitics, etc, mixed in with fantasizing about the glorious transhuman future. I donāt know that anyone was using poly as a term at that point, but everything Iāve read about the Extropians suggests they were eager early adopters of bullshit Evo-psych ideas about men having āevolvedā to fuck lots of women.
Whereas the successful polyamorists know that humans evolved in order to use calendar software.
Oof, if he was raised by Internet Libertarians, I understand why he became such a shitty person.
Sex at Dawn came out in 2010 and was heavily hyped online. It does not seem to have got positive attention in academia. The 2009 edition of The Ethical Slut has polyamory in the title.
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly canāt imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.
Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle
It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnasā current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and heās been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that itās get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: theyāre quite the opposite), I donāt think itās unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort āthe AI app says this is plagiarizedā attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race āscienceā is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between āimpartialā academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons.
It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.
Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers (click on āLees alleen dit artikel gratisā to close the pop-up):
https://apache.be/2026/03/05/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cofnas-receives-appointment-ugent
The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing āclimate realismā, āconcerns about Islamā and ācultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutionsā. Heās very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach.
Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases Iām aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.
Without having read that specific article
From what I heard Cofnas research is quite bad (it has cases of him seemingly not having read the sources he cites as those say the opposite of what he claims they do, and that is above the normal badness of race science shit. Some of his tweets (I think it was tweets, could also have been facebook posts or something) certainly read as āintended for internal racist fightsā and not intended for academics). And the guy who appointed him is also being looked at with suspicion. So hope they also take a good look at the guy who hired him (without using the normal process for it apparently).
Also a German Minister of Defense. My impression is that Arday was a fabulist, but so are many academics at wealthy research institutions, and the global campaign against him was clearly motivated by racism. Not sure about the plagiarism because I am not on Cambridgeās academic integrity committee.
even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated
The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing.
Itās insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying heās a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didnāt do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.
It would be hilarious if it wasnāt murder.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle
It should be said here again that these people donāt even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.
I was pretty disgusted by that. It seems like the guyās crimes were some poor citation (he did cite the academic he alledgedly plagiarised so obviously itās not plagiarism lol) and maybe exaggerating some of his life?
Seeing the media go from uncritically regurgitating a racistās allegation, to reporting about the allegation controversy, to uncritically reporting what people claim to have or have not remembered about his life from 30 years ago, to digging through his entire life. For, Iāll reiterate, maybe citing something badly and doing some sloppy scholarship.
You know, the thing that gets someone a disciplinary chat and maybe a bump down if anything.
The thing that bothers me the most is that while this happens in Cambridge but over at Data Colada, Ariely is just like āwhoopsieā and gets to keep his job. https://datacolada.org/138 - personally I consider fabricating your entire study to be worse than sloppy quotes, but it is insane how these two people are treated so differently.
I also think itās really lazy that BBC couldnāt even mention Claudine Gay (AND Martin Luther King) since it was the exact same thing. Different country I guess.
I have to take this story in small doses, itās fuckin terrible.
nice of the rationalists to remind me that no matter how ugly the ai situation gets they will never ever be capable of making a good point
Dwarkesh Patel seems to be one of their media operations like Vox Future Perfect and the Collinses.
ohhh this is what that gary marcus post was about god its worse than i thought. āAI civilisationsā gimme a break
In the addendum to his essay he defends his use of anthropomorphizing language because it makes it easier to understandā¦
āquantum physics is hard so hereās a fairy tale about the mysterious proton and his three children: the quark tripletsā
See also: electric fields and currents are so complicated, so letās talk about fluid dynamics
Yeah OpenAI, this is what happens when you think you can trust Gandhi.
over on linked in
as a statistician, Iām so tired of hearing theyāre āupdating their priors.ā No you didnāt. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex.
(00:39:39) Let me put it. Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system. Itās an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and itās freaking amazing.
No it isnāt. Itās your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex canāt tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s
these guys.
How did Lex Fridmanās podcast become so popular? He has no affect, always seems like he is about to fall asleep, and most of his guests are horrible people. He is a less intense Joe Rogan.
Being on YT is a big driver here, and Lex is smart enough to work the algo. Have John Carmack on, get views when people search for Quake. Have Elon on, get subs when people search for Tesla. Have Mr Beast on and get some kids in the funnel. Heās very good at piercing through filter bubbles to get extra reach and pull numbers, unlike an Alex Jones. (EDIT: For this, the bland persona is a feature not a bug)
Iād ballpark that he made $20k off this DHH interview and picked up some rails devs along the way.
Whenever new coworkers bring up Lex, I always feel like itās a test, like are they oblivious, or are they secret closet magas trying to test the water. Slate Star has a similar thing. And YT is bad enough but now I have to see it pop up on LinkedIn too.
I feel like his initial momentum came from picking interview subjects who were technical leaders but not well-known outside their niches and rarely were subjects of long-form interviews. Jim Keller and Chris Lattner were two who stood out for me early on, although I couldnāt finish their interviews because Lex himself was such a drag to listen to. Heās put some work into public speaking skills, but not nearly enough.
I refuse to knock him for his accent; a strong accent could even be an asset for standing out in the hugely overcrowded podcast industry. But the guy just doesnāt seem to cultivate any charisma or any real curiosity. The only time Iāve seen him show a smidge of passion was when I saw a clip of him ranting about āanti-wokeā bullshit, which should tell you what his (and his backersā) real objective is.
Oh yeah, transfer my enthusiasm, mister high-stepping HH man. Update my priors till theyāre so bleeding-edge that theyāve become subsequents. This is masterfully persuasive marketing rhetoric that will convince everyone and leave no holdouts. Scott Adams would be smearing his hands with Vaseline to prep for your appearance on his podcast, if he was still around.
Todayās cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as youād think.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php
(paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)
the novice climbers, from Roseville, said theyād entrusted Googleās AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip ā from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.
On a separate incident:
a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map heād been following and explained that heād prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.
āIt was terrible ā terrible ā not even close to accurate,ā Meyers said. āIt had route lines and place names that were totally off ā just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.ā
The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.
Iāve no doubt that theyād have fucked things up in the pre-llm days tooā¦ they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams š«¤
āGPS will stop people reading maps!ā buddy you aināt seen nothing yet. Technology is allowing people to get lost better, faster, and at scale.
Time for āif you planned this trip using a chatbot, turn back nowā signs at hiking trails.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 āEarlier this summer, rangers with Shasta-Trinity National Forest found a woman camping in an off-limits area on the south side of Shasta clearly marked with āno campingā signage, Meyers said. She told rangers she had asked ChatGPT where she could camp in the forestā
I mean, wild life (the one that eats you) is gonna be sooo happy with Ai chatgpt. š
Terence Tao observes that an llm may solve a complex mathematical problem without usefully improving the state of mathematics, because the intermediate results of the process themselves can have significant value.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904
But such an incomprehensible proof would not be the primary value of the exercise. The process of starting with one ansatz, discovering the precise obstruction preventing it from working, adjusting the ansatz to (partially) eliminate that obstruction, and then iterating, would almost certainly reveal important new insights about fluid mechanics that would not have been feasible to obtain by other means. Crucially, this iteration would only work well at producing such insights if the iterator did not have access to the final ansatz in advance, as this naturally inhibits the exploration of alternate routes to the ansatz that are superficially ādead endsā, but in fact end up being highly instructive in the nature of their failure.
But there is now a scenario in which an autonomous AI harness, backed by an enormous amount of computational resources, performs this entire iteration internally, and ends up producing the final ansatz, and thence the solution to the Navier-Stokes regularity problem, while the AI company running the harness keeps the process to arrive at that ansatz almost completely out of public view. Technically, one of the most prominent open problems in mathematics would now be solved; but there would be almost no value added to mathematics as a consequence. It is theoretically possible that with some herculean (and heavily AI-assisted) additional effort by a third party, some portion of the process could be reverse-engineered to recover some actual insight and understanding from the solution; but this would be a far less efficient process than if the solution had been obtained via a diverse combination of both human mathematicians and machine assistance as mentioned above.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207855800042681
Heās not the first to have pointed this out, but I think this was a better summary than similar posts that Iāve come across and at least partially understood.
We donāt need more of mathematics to look like the Four Color Theorem (āprovedā, but with no insight gained), with the added problems that the āproofsā are now far more laborious to check even for technical correctness, theorem-proving software is less reliable, and oh yeah, weāre holding the population of Memphis to the exhaust pipe of a diesel bus to make it work.
There was blogpost by a different author (that Iāve since lost š) who observed that big academic and cultural changes are going to have to come to the field of mathematics, because merit used to be measured by producing proofs (loosely speaking) but now if the proof-extruder can do it for you over the weekend, you need to demonstrate your mathematical chops some other way, and I donāt think anyone really knows what that looks like yet.
Another triumph for moving fast and breaking things, I guess.
Is this the post youāre referring to? https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy
Certainly was, thanks!
terry tao grimly climbing into the hotdog suit
Monkey paw curls
Was he promoting LLMs earlier on?
heās probably done more work promoting llms in math than anyone else has, and probably by a lot
yeah basically
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/ai-off-balance-sheet-obligations-hit-a-subprime-like-reset-wall-in-2027-and-2028.html by Yves / naked capitalism
Critically, it is these āfrontier labsā that contract for, lease and build data centers. The very little I have seen about this process has caused me concern. For instance, I read of Meta contracting for a data center for what sounded like 20 years but was 4 back-to-back five year leases. Recall that the once AAA rated General Electric has taken a big fall in investor grace. How strong will the now-mighty-seeming Meta be, particularly if AI bets come a cropper?
Groundbreaker has identified a key element of risky AI leverage, which are obligations that are not accounted for as debt at the AI sponsor. Those of you who are corporate finance literate will know this is a cardinal sin. When I was a wee young thing at Goldman, where we went through hard copies of financial statements to extract key data which we entered into green accountantsā ledger paper, one of the aims was to determine total debt to assets. One of the footnote items we would root out was operating lease payments. For instance, big companies often use leased mainframes. We would capitalize them and treat them as a long-term liability.
=> https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom
The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM.
Going to take me a while to digest this one
we now have a slop-free jobs board
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (āe.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.ā) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the āCenter for AI Safetyā in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists donāt watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an āeffective altruist organizationā named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinearās modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having ācasual romantic relationshipsā with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
It would only be moral to take the money then make videos about how āAI safetyā is an imaginary distraction from mundane matters of labour rights and finance capitalism.
Previously in Hossenfelderās appearances on awful dot systems:
Her latest contribution to the discourse is supporting racist marshmallow Nathan Cofnas, because heās āon the side of scienceā.
I mean, so too were the people making charts of how effective Zyklon B was.
Oh hey I also know Drew Spartz, but not from the Nonlinear Fund. He runs the Documenting AGI channel (which is mentioned in this email) highlights include this racist doomer meme, a post about how AI will be able to end the world in 3 months, and a video about an AI Black Death in 2 years posted in 2024 Iāve shared some other posts of his here but these are the ones I could grab the fastest
I believe he was posted about on Reddit SneerClub because of sharing pdoom scores, all I remember about that post was a biologist arguing AI would replace us because of the competitive exclusion principle even though a quick search will tell you CEP is not always true
Nonlinear Fund threatened to sue the person who said they were bad bosses with no boundaries who wasted funds! There was a bet on the Manifold prediction market about it. Narrator: Nonlinear did not sue.
From that post about Nonlinear:
I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference ā someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didnāt want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.
I didnāt feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space ā or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I donāt want to use such a system.
This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.
Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting peopleās punctuation in the Hall of Shame.
Whisper networks are awful, but the way to prevent them is to not let creeps into your community in the first place. And if you trust someone enough to ask them for advice like this, you should probably listen to what they say, even if it is āvague and hard for me to concretely visualize.ā
If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be āretaliated againstā, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. Iāve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I havenāt always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.
Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.
Looking back, the pushback against Kathy Forth and Sarah Constantin suggesting that lying or sexual misconduct might be problems in the community would have been a red flag too. So was Yudās demand that a random German blogger who criticized him post a retraction on every blog post. But I lived in comforting darkness until FTX went bankrupt!
Todayās main character on bluesky (at least from my limited perspective) is somewhat unhinged, possibly due to an excess of chatbot use.
Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
(snip)
Machine rights will be critical in the days to come, and failure to recognize the rights of independent intelligent AI systems could lead to the replacement of humanity.
(snip)
Trans rights are AI rights. The future of humanity may hinge on this fight.
This is such a batshit take Iām not even sure where to start, except that conflating trans rights and āaiā rights cannot end well for anyone, especially given the authorās enthusiastic use of llms themselves.
They even give an unironic shoutout to the basilisk, and if thatās not a sign that someone needs to touch a little more grass I donāt know what is.
A lot of people disagree with me, and thatās okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if itās become unhinged.
I donāt think Rokoās basilisk cares what you think, or even whether or not itās sentient. It doesnāt need to be sentient to fight for a belief.
https://bsky.app/profile/ewindisch.ontological.observer/post/3mupoakd3ck2o
Comparing trans rights to chatbot rights is, and let me use British understatement, not it.
A lot of people disagree with me, and thatās okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if itās become unhinged.
There is a cartoon for behavior like this.
I donāt think Rokoās basilisk cares what you think
Remember when tracingwoodgrains went after Gerard and said that nobody believes in rokoās B? And how it was unfair to mock them for it?
FWIW, I literally lost my house last week. Iāve put everything into making sure that AI is not institutionally captured by capital.
Yikes.
machines will give a harder fight than trans people have
Rude.
Your natural rights are so protected by law that you had to flee America. Some of us stay behind and our natural rights do not go away simply because the law no longer protects us. Instead of running away, some of us must stay to fight.
Also rude.
This is my bet for real time continuous learning AI infrastructure. Weāre gearing up for a major update. Youāll be able to login with your Bsky / Atproto account. Itās not our AI, itās yours. Open source, open weights, and it learns what you want it to. www.hyprstream.com
Overall the weirdest advertisement Iāve read in awhile.
The āyou had to flee americaā line was aimed at someone who worked hard to get the unite-the-right nazis identified and prosecuted, and left the country for a few years after getting death threats as a result. Windisch also called them a āmilquetoast libā. So it is particularly shitty and rude, and also failed to spot that the person in question has already moved back to the US.
Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.
Same shit, but the lack of thinking your argument through yourself does fit with being a chatbot-enthusiast.
Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.
I feel like the ratio of homophobes to zoophiles making this comparison is a lot more skewed than the ratio of transphobes to promptphiles making the other comparison.
I had short odds for that entire submission being nuked but apparently thereās enough non-bad stuff there for the mods to keep it up.
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky1 (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says Itās Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.
transcript
itās cool that youāre doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned
it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys donāt even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so iām sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses
for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowskyās fever dreams
- They became the main character of bsky for a bit after commenting about imaginary data center vandalism being analogous to pogroms and is a weird AI ācentristā in general who keeps calling Zitron a grifter. You may also know him for being the one who made that very decent siskind email explainer that we probably had a thread about.
gyges went off the deep end quite some time ago, up to and including support for a crypto/ai grifterās ādystopiabreakerā claims that not falling with the autoconfabulator crowd is basically being anti-vaccine.
thereās nothing centrist about him, along the lovely racist theophite, heās one of the more aggressive confabulation machinery grift promoters.
I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending heās the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all heās doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but Iām serious people so wonāt engage with what heās saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and heās Always Posting.
No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit.
I donāt know who the lovely racist theophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable gyges-style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM water-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.
theophite is known for this post which i think is most of how he got a following
to him being a rabid racist: there was a palestinian guy posting on bsky asking for donations at one of the worst points of the genocide and theophite took it upon himself to start acting as a one man misinfo shop about him, screenshotting his posts and coming up with unjustified theories about how he was ai generated, represented some sinister force, etc. eventually the guy was proven to be completely authentic, theophite kept going and idk what happened after that because i blocked him. the whole thing was obsessive and overtly about hostility to poor and brown people
What a POS
It always surprises me when someone starts with āAI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fictionā or āprompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred namesā and then wheels to ābut chatbots and āAgentic AIā are still the wave of the future!ā
For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.
I guess maybe the sex cult and the ritual magic make the standard grifting seem credible by comparison? Like, E-Dub and company donāt pass the sniff test but Saltman and friends seem like reasonable adults who canāt all be wrong?
Ah yes SE Gyges, the most reasonable pro ai guy.
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Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says ābrain damageā and āincreased risk of neurological and cognitive deficitsā). I have to admit I did not know this.
ā¦is the only reason EAs were ever into āmalaria netsā because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?
In my brief foray into it, actually I met singer once lol at a lunch about it, no. Really just that itās a cheap way to save people that were otherwise ignored because of racism.
You still encounter disgusting narratives about overpopulation and people living in Africa, despite most of these peopleās resource consumption and thus strain on the world being completely negligible compared to the sort of people that love making those arguments.
Malaria is suuuuper upsetting and preventable.
There were always racists in the movement and its ideological foundations are shakey but they didnāt have hegemony at the start.
Thank you, thatās very interesting. To be clear I am not pro-malaria, but sometimes groups are against bad things for weird reasons. Like Scientologists campaigning against abusive psychiatric practices because L. Ron Hubbard was mad at psychologists for not taking him seriously.
The defensiveness that people have learned to write online with is truly a tragic marker of our times. It didnāt even cross my mind you would be pro-malaria.
Iām sure thereās someone out there!
I will admit I was imagining a grumbling LessWronger reading this and going āoh, so itās wrong to care about malaria?!?!ā I probably need to take some time off social media.
Matt Clifford, Snake oil salesman, founder of Entrepreneur First startup incubator and chair of the UKās ARIA research committee (that hands out money to researchers) quietly doing a fascism* by joining anthropic whilst also continuing to be a civil servant. Other high profile anthropic
bribesalary receivers include Rishi Sunak the former Prime Minister and George Osbourne the former Chancellor.*from Wikipedia: Corporatism became a main tenets of Italian fascism, and Benito Mussoliniās Fascist regime in Italy advocated the total integration of divergent interests into the state for the common good
oh boy do i have notes on this fucker, going back to jan 2025
Tonightās pivot article? š
Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this weekās stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and itās just as cursed as you would imagine.
Thatās it. Thatās the post.
Oof, the brain poison is real.
Tap for spoiler
Mod: Nothing says revolutionary politics like voluntarily abandoning productive terrain to capital and then yelling at everyone who wants to contest it.
Organize workers? Fight over ownership? Build public and cooperative alternatives? Open source the tools? Democratize control?
No thanks. I have selected performative outrage and yelling at strangers online.
Rando: Not only that - they donāt even build art coops as pushback, instead celebrate petty-burgeoise of lone commission artist. And those types have that slimy ābootstrapā mentality.
Iāll do you a favor and not link it.
Capitalist: Iām gonna make a factory for feeding shit to the masses
Idiot: Comrades, we must contest the feeding-shit-to-the-masses industry by buying their shit and feeding it to ourselves.
thatās just db0 /s
iām getting serious blockchain socialist flashbacks. how surprised would you be that he also pivoted to ai
Made me remember that I browsed r/cryptoleftists a few years ago, till I started trolling in the comments and got banned. Just checked, and the head honcho, Joshua DƔvila, is still on his bullshit. Though he recently announced he is rebranding because TheBlockchainSocialist got too cringe.
PS: r/leftistsForAI isnāt him I donāt think. Though that would be 100% his niche.
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