I particularly appreciate the argument he makes about the tech industry pivoting from creating value to exercising control. I disagree that this trend is specific to the tech industry, but with the possible exception of Monsanto they have been the most successful at it.

With the obvious failings of the American state to perform it’s basic duties and the cross-pollination of the American political and corporate elites it seems plausible that at least some factions in the tech industry are awaiting an opportunity to take advantage of this weakness they’ve created and exercise that control over the functions of the state directly. I feel like I should be saying this into a webcam from behind a cartoonishly-large desk in between shilling for nutritional supplements, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fear what rough beast, it’s hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I mean, to be fair that’s not unique to them - software engineers have been worse than physicists in assuming that all of reality and human experience is downstream from their chosen field.

I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.

I’m not going to start a punch-up with a dev team or maintainer who believes that AI tools can help good programmers do good work or whatever, but time and again we see that, just like crypto before it, you aren’t inviting good programmers to work with you. You’re inviting the bros. AI bros and crypto bros are a specific type of Guy. I’m sure there were dotcom bros in the 90s. This is not a new problem, even if the current economic circumstances makes being this type of Guy more viable than ever, apparently.

It’s not just that the tech is bad (though it is bad), it’s that it’s uniquely privileged by culture and economics to empower the worst assortment of morons and grifters outside of Wall Street (and also inside of Wall Street, because of fucking course it does).

Pete Steinberger shares his OpenAI bill on Twitter. The headline number is $1.3 million in the last 30 days.

But in his (own) defense, it takes so many tokens to do so many bad ideas at once.

Update!

The rich fuckers are apparently inclined to acknowledge this as ridiculous, at least in part. Here’s hoping that this doesn’t stall out and at least some Americans get to report at least one unambiguous public policy win in 2026

My God, it’s like if Mark Rosewater was also a Nazi.

Cards on the table, I love M:tG as a game design nerd, and the color pie is a really well-done tool for keeping the game interesting and fun over it’s very long history and even longer list of expansions and extensions. From a mechanical perspective, it strikes a beautiful balance between allowing the player to do exactly what they want and preventing the player from just doing everything. Without the color pie, it’s easy to see deck building descend into an attempt to assemble the strongest individual cards. It’s telling that basically every other CCG has some kind of mechanism to solve the same problem, but I don’t think any of them have done it as cleanly or in a way that so smoothly enables players to combine mechanics and elements from different colors.

From a narrative perspective it’s a great story engine that allows for all the disparate settings, characters, even genres that the game has explored over its life to still have a cohesive identity - to rhyme. I would argue that part of why the world’s beyond sets have seemed wrong is because the settings weren’t designed from the ground up to align with that narrative tool, and no matter how good the actual card designers at WotC are it just isn’t going to rhyme properly, like trying to translate poetry to a different language family. But that’s beside the point.

As a psychological model of the world? I mean I guess it’s a tool for categorizing and narrowing down the ways that different people interact with each other or the world or whatever. But that’s fundamentally not what it’s for! Even as bad as the science behind the MBTI or whatever might be, at least they were designed from looking at actual people and intended to categorize them and understand them. This is the equivalent of trying to do therapy based on people’s fucking Hogwarts house. Hell, even that was actually intended to fucking categorize people. Like, even without getting into all the ways that he’s extending and distorting the actual color pie as used in Magic to match his own fixations, the whole project is so blindingly wrong-headed from the start that it ought to be an old BuzzFeed listicle and not something that people actually use in any clinical setting, even if it is just his wacko girlfriend.

[To save space, the following several paragraphs of increasingly incoherent ranting and raving are to be filled in by your own imagination. If you do not have an imagination you can consider using an LLM of your choice before going off to fuck yourself]

One thing I found really interesting in your recent more reflective writing was part of your experience with hereticon 1:

I think one of the hardest things you can do, and the greatest gifts you can give someone, is give the situation to them straight when they invite you somewhere. I would realize later that the ‘protection’ I felt in a lot of left-leaning circles was a lot more transitory and a lot less honest than what the supposedly irredeemable far-right conference had done for me.

One thing that I see in some broadly left-leaning communities when engaging with some of these concerns is to effectively dismiss the women who have been victimized, often with some reference to the face-eating leopard party. (This doesn’t seem to happen as much here at awful.systems, which is one of many things I’ll say in favor of our community’s standards and practices of moderation and whatever else). This is obviously cruel and unfair to those women, but I want to ask about the underlying idea that the way that these social groups or organizations treat women who talk about SA in those communities is consistent with their general political ideologies, since it seems like there’s something missing from that idea beyond the simple lack of empathy.

I actually didn’t refresh to see this until after I had read the pair of “A Normie Girl in Rationalist America” posts (Part 1) (Part 2) and wanted to echo the thanks for sharing your experiences.

Seconding this. I’m really grateful that she’s willing to talk about this here, and what confirmed stories like this we have show where the Rationalists really cross the line from being cringe and dumb to actively dangerous and malevolent. But also I have to confess that I’m not familiar with what she’s written about it previously (or indeed any of her previous writings) and I don’t want to ask anything that’s been answered already, especially when careless questions risk prodding old pains.

Ed: I have since done the requisite work of a 10-minute google and longer substack dive but will hold off on specific references or links until we get a confirmation that she’s okay with that.

Ed2: this is what I get for going straight into the edit without refreshing first. Foot, meet mouth. Egg, meet face. Etc.

But I listened and agreed that you had serious concerns about certain aspects of this technology. I even agreed when you talked about how frustrating it was that specifically other people wanted to do bad things. I listened as you asked whether I had any options to address those concerns! What more do you want from me before you agree to let me do and say whatever I want!

The whole slice-of-life subgenre is all about this. No real conflict or plot, just scenes of the characters existing in their world. My wife both reads and writes that kind of thing and let me tell you the level of research and worldbuilding that goes into writing a simple meal scene or whatever.

I only know that word from an old (pre-pandemic) book episode of Behind the Bastards, so the immediate association is esoteric antisemitism. I’m not sure how common this is but it seems to support your thesis here.

Some may find her “cringe” but she’s doing critical work in stopping the sites you use being DDOSed by AI scrapers.

I mean it’s the same thing with sponsored content anywhere, right? The user assumes that the system is providing information in accordance with purposes, but the ads and sponsored results create opportunities for the platform hosting them to profit at the user’s expense. AI platforms are absolutely subject to the same economic incentives for corruption as say, search engines, but I don’t think they’re uniquely so just because the model in question has a more humanlike UI.

But the effectiveness of the fraud is ironically predicated on people continuing to treat it as gambling.

Adding on that this does feel like another application or consequence of the Great Man Theory of Everything, the idea the only the people with power and money matter because their power and influence are intrinsic to their person rather than being contingent on their social position. The average people empowered to commit insider trading by prediction markets have sufficiently limited individual agency that even collectively they don’t actually matter. In fact we want them to try their hand at the grift so that their insights can flow to the enlightened ones who can better use that information. They don’t matter enough to do real harm, but by watching the attempt we may be able to learn something.

See also: https://youtu.be/u1_dy1EmV6w

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of Scott’s close brush with reality on prediction markets, The Aussie PowerPoint Man is talking about the strategic risks posed by the new insider training opportunities opened up by these tools. A lot of what he’s saying applies to normal financial markets, but what’s striking is the way that prediction markets create those opportunities for people with much less immediate power and information by allowing them to bet directly on the kinds of immediate decisions they do have information on.

I also thought the idea of integrating insider training red flags on public prediction markets into your early warning system was an interesting idea. These things aren’t actually useful for forecasting or making decisions because of how bad the incentives are, but people acting on those incentives absolutely creates a spike that can be meaningful in the short-term and potentially enable a few extra hours or minutes to prepare.

I tried digging into it a little bit and it looks like the key word was definitely “less openly racist”. According to A blog from someone else who tried to trace jt the term originated with Theo Beale, better known by his nom de merde Vox Day. I know I first became aware of this guy when he started trying to politicize the election process for the Hugo awards in order to make them less woke. It was real dumb.