Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Eliezer joins the trend of condemning “political” violence with confidence on the far end of the dunning-kruger curve: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-can-prevent-extinction
I’ve already mocked this attitude down thread and in the previous weekly thread, so I’ll try to keep my mockery to a few highlights…
He’s admitting nuke the data centers is in fact violence!
It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell to pretend that this is not an invocation of force.
But then drawing a special case around it.
But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force.
I don’t think Eliezer has checked the news if he think the US government carries out violence in predictable and fairly avoidable ways! Venezuela! The entire lead up to Iran consisted of ripping up Obama’s attempts at treaties and trying to obtain regime change through surprise assassination! Also, if the stop AI doomers used some clever cryptography scheme to make their policy of property destruction (and assassination) sufficiently predictable and avoidable would that count as “Lawful” in Eliezers book.
If he kept up with the DnD/Pathfinder source material, he would know Achaekek’s assassins are actually Lawful EvilThe ASI problem is not like this. If you shut down 5% of AI research today, humanity does not experience 5% fewer casualties. We end up 100% dead after slightly more time.
His practical argument against non-state-sanctioned violence is that we need a total ban (and thus the authority of state driving it), because otherwise someone with 8 GPUs in a basement could invent strong AGI and doom us all. This is a dumb argument, because even most AI doomers acknowledge you need a lot of computational power to make the AGI God. And (violently) slowing down AGI might buy time for another sort of solution.
Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals
Sources cited: 0
One of the comments also pisses me off:
Which reminds me about another point: I suspect that “bomb data centers” meme causal story was not somebody lying, but somebody recalling by memory without a thought that such serious allegation maybe is worthy to actually look up it and not rely on unreliable memory.
“Drone strike the data centers even if starts nuclear war” is the exact argument Eliezer made and that we mocked. It is the rationalists that have tried to soften it by eliding over the exact details.
It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell
Life is too short to be that pompous
Reading Heinlein as a kid isn’t even especially notable, but it’s Yud so he definitely means the polyamory advocacy stuff specifically.
And it’s not like Orwell wrote a book about talking animals that is required reading in schools across the land.
This feels somehow tied to the whole “agentic” thing I’ve ranged about previously. Like, individual acts of violence are strictly destructive because the people doing it aren’t sufficiently “agentic” to change things, even though American history is full of cases where (usually racist) vigilante violence had a huge impact on people’s decision-making. But when the government does it it’s different because people in government got there by proving their agency and ability to actually impact the world. Like, it feels almost like he’s offended that the NPCs might try and do something as drastic as killing someone without GM permission.
Meanwhile in reality, people legitimately do feel like they don’t have a lot of options to protect themselves from the real harms this industry is doing, to say nothing of the people who buy his line about the oncoming class-K end-of-life scenario. Anger is an appropriate response to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.
Eliezer complaining about vigilante actions is really ironic considering one of his main themes in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalist was about “heroic responsibility” and complaining about how ordinary people default to doing nothing. I guess what he actually meant was for right-thinking people (people that agree with him) to take the actions he approves of.
in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.
Nay a culture where every citizen is entitled to one armed crashout and threats of such have been an important lever used by the party that believes in that entitlement for decades.
But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force.
Remember the cartoon of the bombs being dropped on people and the people going ‘I hear the next bombs will be sent by a woman’, this but ‘with lawful force’.
We end up 100% dead after slightly more time.
On a long enough timeframe…
Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals
This is always one of those things that baffles me, and makes it clear to me these people have never even been close to any real movement. All these movements have violent and non-violent parts. Hell, you see it even now with the far right, they have a violent and non-violent part, and the non-violent part scores points by pointing to their violent friends and going ‘we are not with them’ while going to the same parties, sharing the same ideas, and all being friends with each other. Hell, look at the various LW people who went ‘wow, all these rightwingers in our mids are horrible’ and then not stopping being friends with them. I see now how Sam got the drop on all these naive people.
eliezer misses that (as used in decolonization/civil rights era) nonviolence is effectively a sophisticated propaganda strategy that takes existing injustices and violence and uses it to bait opponent into attacking you, all while your own people take photos and show to entire world carefully crafted messaging that appeals to general public conscience. the messaging part is extremely important in this. there’s no fucking way this could work for him because his cause is comprehensible only to those who already buy his cult messaging as ground truth. he’s in just for the moral superiority of being nonviolent. he’s never gonna get it because comprehending it requires touching grass
Yeah both non-violence and pure terrorism are communication forms at the root. I remember reading long ago that the Rote Armee Fraktion’s master plan was:
- commit horrific acts of violence against pillars of the community / rob banks to get money
- said acts would unleash a repressive wave of violence from the state
- the proletariat would see this repressive wave, wake up, and cause the revolution
It kinda stopped at stage 2, because the BRD’s security services were a bit less ex-Nazi than they expected, and also there was basically no proletariat.
Also the Southern police chief who correctly deduced that mass arrests were what the civil rights activists wanted, got the go-ahead from neighboring county jails, and then politely and non-violently arrested everyone protesting and spread them out over a wider area, thus preventing the media-friendly repression that was the goal.
Yeah there are only so many ways to get it going, you don’t hear about these that don’t figure it out because cops bust them making them look like clowns and nobody wants to get associated with them afterwards
there is also a barrier between step 2 and 3, because sometimes news like that are suppressed. american school shootings get that treatment sometimes, not to mention all the info filtering at facebook and friends. this is why sympathetic media is an important bit to have in advance. there’s also this bit where any serious insurgency needs money and it looks like what they got didn’t work out
that southern police chief was per blogpost Laurie Pritchett and this kind of thinking is also what makes COIN tick. worry not, Hegseth declared it all woke nonsense
Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don’t know his main messages. It used to be orthodox that you cannot have a two-faced message any more without each audience learning what you say to the others, but that assumed you were a good communicator aiming at a mass audience.
Yud has strange views about legal responsibility:
Anthropic Claude Mythos is already a state-level actor in terms of how much harm it could theoretically have done – given its demonstrated and verified ability to find critical security vulnerabilities in every operating system and browser; and how fast Mythos could’ve exploited those vulnerabilities, with ten thousand parallel threads of intelligent attack. Mythos hypothetically rampant or misused could have taken down the US power grid, say… at the end of its work, after introducing hard-to-find errors into all the bureaucracies and paperwork and doctors’ notes connected to the Internet.
But if you release a virus and it infects people, we don’t hold the virus responsible, we hold you. If you build a car and it explodes when it gets rear-ended, we don’t blame the car, we blame you.
Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don’t know his main messages.
This is very late to respond but what I’ve noticed is that a when people in rationalist spaces respond to Yud, they often say “my interpretation of this is…” and things along similar lines, which always struck me as weird
Ah, so it’s Mythos that will create the
nanobotsdiamondoid bacteria
Not really a sneer, just wondering what to make of it, if it doesn’t belong here please remove.
The Financial Times goes with a study which ostensibly demonstrates that ca. half a million of potential coding jobs were directly eliminated by AI, not any other factors or general industry slowdown. The idea is it’s mainly junior positions which aren’t tightly “bundled” with other domains or just years of programming experience & intuition which are harder for AI to replace. So is AI really fully replacing juniors in the hundreds of thousands, or is there more going on?
or is there more going on?
One idea I’ve read about (heavily developed by Ed Zitron, but also a few other news sources and commentators have put it forward) is that SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses were heavily over invested in expectation of basically infinite growth over the past decade. SaaS growth has exponential in its early days, but then various needs of the market were basically saturated, so SaaS companies squeezed more growth out cutting cuts or upping how much they charged, and now it is finally catching up to them.
The AI hype means almost everyone tries to interpret everything the lines of AI causing it. The recent price correction in many SaaS companies was (mis)interpreted as the threat of vibe-coded replacements forcing them to cut costs. The SaaS companies trying to cut costs and going through layoffs is being misinterpreted as AI successfully replacing junior devs.
that looks like a heaping pile of correlation, without mentioning the general downturn
Big “Don’t mention the war” energy
There is no cost-cutting in Ba Sing Se
So I don’t have time to read the full paper and I probably don’t have the background to make an informed critique of the methodology once I do (not that that’s gonna stop me). But I feel like the challenge here is in mapping the distinction between junior and senior coding roles. To what extent do the senior coders get treated like a distinct job as opposed to being junior-but-seasoned?
Based on a quick amateur read of the abstract it looks like they’re assuming the first option, that junior and senior developers are separate roles that can be largely disentangled. But if the other option is true, then in the event of a general industry downturn (say, after over hiring during recent periods of unsustainable growth) then it might make sense to look at the cuts to junior roles as simply removing the less efficient and effective people from the development role, rather than specifically cutting the juniors because they’re uniquely exposed to AI replacement.
I don’t know which model is more accurate to how the industry treats these roles or whether it varies by organization or what, but that’s what seems like the most likely alternate explanation for the observed shift towards a very senior-heavy workforce.
And seniors obviously grow on senior trees (assuming that this take is actually true)
Good news for a change: https://pitchfork.com/news/bandcamp-announces-ban-on-ai-music/
Anyone ever heard of these folks before? https://dataglow.energy/
On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc.
I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.
HEre’s an El Reg piece about doing something similar for low-income UK homes
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/
Thermify is a pretty weird-looking thing, what with actual servers being installed in people’s homes, and running some kind of opportunistic batch processing work? That’s very specialist compared to regular datacentres, though the plumbing would be a lot simpler.
i heard that a couple of german dcs (owned by universities or other research institutions and therefore indirectly by state) do this, but this kinda depends on district heating grid existing and also puts some limits on thermal side, in simplest variant chips just have to run hotter. not to mention that it’s kinda easier to do when you own the entire thing, long term, and can offload some of the engineering and design effort to some
internstudent writing masters or doctoral thesis. this works in part because when you switch from coal to gas and have district heating using that waste heat, there’s less waste heat from gas turbine of equal power, and it’s all gone when you switch to renewables, so there’s a grid that still needs some heat and dc boiler can fill that gap to a small degree. at the same time dc can’t be the only source of heat because demand is seasonal and dc ideally should run 24/7 and while you can get enough storage for daily variation this won’t be enough and some other source of heat is needed. this is why it makes more sense as a long term government backed projectThis system uses heat pumps at the consumer sites rather than plain radiators, so they’ve got a bit more flexibility in how hot they have to run their cooling loop. There’s also mention of a swimming pool, though I have no idea how much energy it takes to warm one of those. Does provide a year-round demand, though.
okay so they want to use layer of soil as a sort of seasonal storage. fine; this part works. 1. who’s paying for all these residential heat pumps? 2. this kind of arrangement means a lot of digging and drilling. it takes one (1) nimby to stop it in its tracks and all these earthworks also cost money 3. at this point it’s way simpler and cheaper to just use solar collectors to top up heat reservoir in the summer, as long as heat pumps are paid for. also these same solar collectors would just provide hot water in summer directly
were they advised by rube goldberg?
also, your local university probably has a kind of stability that makes years-decades long commitment worthwhile, unlike some sketchy bloated startup that probably dealt in crypto seven years ago
To be honest I thought it was an April Fool’s Joke at first
Only way I could get behind this is if it were a national mandate to recycle 90% or so of waste heat to get planning permission. Put the coordination problem in the lap of data center builders, weed out the fast talkers from the serious people.
People talked about doing this with bitcoin mining - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/16/bitcoin-crypto-mining-home-heating-energy-bills.html - but I’m not aware of anyone trying to scale it out or turn it into a company.
Some guys who steal other people’s work choose to market their stolen wares using the name of a woman whose work was stolen.
I’ve never seen a more compelling reason to enforce strict and short retention rules for every corp communication medium, holy shit https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/
just one more data trove bro
Are new data-hungry players entering the market of are we still pretending that shoveling more social media posts to the data furnace will somehow overcome structural limitations?
It’s no comfort that an acquaintance who works at a slop company says they’d been doing that for years now. That surely makes it fine then.
I’ve done crowdsourced work qualifying bits of random work e-mails (had to determine “is this a query” if I recall correctly), and yeah this was like more than a dozen years ago.
Scott Alexander published a blog post about how its unfair to call Victor Orban an autocrat but:
I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.
I believe the full quote is “to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from, if you are being dumb on purpose”
It’s in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair’s famous line that “it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass”
I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts,
He admits it!
Big “I used to, but I still do too” moment there, though.
I wouldn’t give him credit for a full admission. He isn’t acknowledging that “biased left-wing experts” means expert like psychologists with a basic understanding of psychometric validity and geneticists with the basic understanding that popular notions of race don’t have a genetic basis and biological determinism is false.
Unless he specifies his problem was with ostensibly leftist academics being specifically too dismissive of race science and incelist tropes this is worthless, just run of the mill face-leopard schadenfreude.
Also the second half (the what? what’s the cut-off point?) of his career has been if anything more mask off, and it’s not like he stopped whining about woke after posting a half-hearted disapproval of trump like three days before the election after years of writing about how cool it would be if there was less regulation especially for healthcare.
He claims he turned against Trump after the Capitol Putsch, so the two halves would be 2009-2019 and 2020-2026. He actually celebrated Trump’s second inauguration with his post about how everyone knows Richard Lynn was right but cowardly liberals pretend to believe blacks and whites are equal.
I thought his posts about “women don’t like Nice Guys” ended around 2013 like a lot of shouting about gender online? Dating a young cam-person and sex blogger in 2014 must have improved his mood even if the relationship did not last.
Curiously, something else happened around that time which also gives a natural delimiter: he renamed his blog after being dark for half a year. The blog formerly known as SSC was reborn as
ACTACX two weeks after the January 6th riot.So it was! As an aside, Substack’s archival navigation is awful (search and the infinite scroll seem the only way to navigate). https://slatestarcodex.com/2021/01/21/introducing-astral-codex-ten/
That was when he got a very gentle NYT bio and flipped his lid.
Back in the old days, if you got found out for a race science and men’s rights internet instigator, there was the slight possibility that you might actually have to deal with negative real-life implications.
Sigh.
Richard Lynn was right
Ah yes, the everyone in the continent of Africa and parts of Asia is secretly heavily developmentally disabled, my friend Cremieux who’s definitely a highly accredited biologistician and not a college drop out who’s also a nazi thinks this as well post.
Re the incel stuff I think the regulars grew older so it doesn’t come up as much outside the comments, which remain a safe space for this type of whining.
It’s not really extricable from the eugenics iinspired bioessentialism that’s encouraged there I think.
The profound ignorance of tech on the part of most American lawmakers is no joke. In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken.
haha
That same senator went on to be a huge RussiaGater and played a central role in Twitter and other social media titans upping their censorship game at the behest of US politicians.
oh :(
BTW what kind of site is Naked Capitalism? I’ve heard of it but never read it before .
blogosphere-era link aggregator that somehow kept going way longer than occupy wallstreet did. one thing to know, (like here), they link to a lot of stuff they don’t support.
That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants,
bah! Virginian voters need to read more LessWrong, where the benefits of both are explained beneath impenetrable layers of posts.
Also this evisceration of Zvi:
As for his argument regarding political violence, I’d point him toward John Locke, Nelson Mandela, Franz Fanon, or Walter Benjamin, but what’s the point, none of them printed their arguments on Magic: The Gathering cards.
I mean, I’m not even sure that’s true
Impenetrable layers of posts for which the prequisites include a BFSM fanfic, written in the style of forum threads, based on an offshoot of Homework: The Game.
Now that’s not fair. It’s based on a third-derivative of Advanced Homework: The Game.
The third derivative… ah yes, the jerk
A detailed analysis of why Anthropic’s claims about Mythos’s cybersecurity implications are bs: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-boy-that-cried-mythos-verification-is-collapsing-trust-in-anthropic/
And a followup post about why Anthropic’s Glasswing project violates cybersecurity community norms and is an attempt to form a cartel: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cartel-or-not-anthropic-mythos-is-a-curious-case/
From the second post:
A seasoned security leader would never build a defensive program and then measure offensive capability only, making remediation a second-class story. That is the kind of dog and pony show that any good security initiative would slam the door on. Or it’s like a surgeon telling you they have an even sharper scalpel to cut you deeper and faster. Yeah, so then what?
Dark and paranoid thought: given that Anthropic very recently ran into issues with their defense contracts, are they playing up their offensive capabilities targeting a notoriously tech- and security-illiterate political establishment to try and force their way back into those sweet government contracts as an impossible-to-ignore offensive tool? I mean we’ve talked about how the cash burn rate for all these companies is sufficiently absurd that it’s going to take something truly crazy to turn these companies self-sustaining before the world runs out of investor money, and military and intelligence budgets are notorious for dragging ludicrous amounts of public money into a dark alley where nobody can see what’s happening to it.
It has already worked out that way: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1snbv4m/white_house_moves_to_give_us_agencies_anthropic/
So you aren’t even being paranoid, this seems like a straightforward calculation for Anthropic to have made.
There’s a pretty wide divide between the speculations of the motives of the alleged arsonist of Sam Altman’s SF residence last week.
LW has handled the issue obliquely, but the main concern seems to be that they are pretty convinced the dude acted out of fear of AI-induced x-risk. The optics is that his actions would paint EA in a bad light.
HN (based on this big heap of comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921) is more focused on the idea that Altman and co. are fomenting class hatred and the attack is more akin to Luigi Mangione’s attack on a health insurance CEO. (Searching for “exinction” and “doom” in the threads doesn’t throw up much)
Neither forum links to the dude’s alleged slobslack.
My conclusion is that “AGI-driven X-risk” is a position too extreme at the moment for HN.
Also I believe the alleged attacker is not an avatar of a popular movement but a confused individual self-radicalized online.
writing this up for today, will be mentioning Ziz
Looking forward to it!
more akin to Luigi Mangione’s
Didnt he also have sort of links to the LW idea space?
His substack reads like LW.
The optics is that his actions would paint EA in a bad light.
I think SBF’s Scamfest Spectacular did a good enough job of that already :P
HN is more focused on the idea that Altman and co. are fomenting class hatred and the attack is more akin to Luigi Mangione’s attack on a health insurance CEO.
Altman and co’s antics have repeatedly shafted the working class to billionaires’ direct benefit, so I’ll give the orange site that on the “fomenting class hatred” part. Thinking his actions are any way related to Luigi Mangione nailing the healthcare billionaire’s fucking wild, though
I think SBF’s Scamfest Spectacular did a good enough job of that already :P
Still, being a possible hotbed for domestic terrorism is a whole different ballpark of having the authorities meddle into your day-to-day.
[ai booster voice] if you last tried a head of AI more than six months ago, you need to try the new model. https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ska7kn/apples_ai_chief_john_giannandrea_departs_this_week/
i regret to inform you all that another technonce manifesto has hit our collective psyches. If you woke up with a headache today, this is probably why, gratis Alex Karp:
greatest hits:
- Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
the “government is like a business and should be run like one” meme, for the dumbguys
- Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
naked hypocrisy from the man who wants to erase a nebulously defined “leftism” from public life.
- No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
Sure, our society structurally requires an increasingly large fraction of the population to be economically precarious and eternally on the precipice of financial ruin and death, but it could be even worse! you should be grateful.
- We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . .
BE NICE TO ELON! sure, his ideas are vaporware bullshit that don’t make sense, but he produced a lot of shareholder value and is definitely not just enriching himself. Another one for the dumbest people you know to seal clap over.
Every single bullet point here is sneerable, but i’ll stop there and let other people have some fun.
The notorious socialists at the (checks notes) World Economic Forum rank social mobility in the USA as 27th in the world behind Sweden, Germany, Canada, and Japan (!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States So this seems like another demonstration that being very rich is like being kicked in the head by a horse or drinking a bottle of wine a day.
Okay much as I’m angry and want to I’m resisting the urge to go point-by-point until I have more time. But I also want to point out that in form it seems like The Beigeness has really caught on as a writing style. Like, we have 22(!) individual points, each of which gestures vaguely at the kind of militant interventionist white nationalist technocracy that could conceivably power the unholy chimera of a silicon valley tech giant and a murderous beltway defense contractor. But unless the book does so more openly, they avoid clearly stating the actual thesis. It’s not really surprising, just interesting to note the pattern spreading from Rat spaces into the broader right wing.
There is quite a contrast between the call for conscription (6.), the whining that civil servants have too much pay and respect (8.) and the praise for public life (9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.) I think he means that earning a living wage for getting up every morning rain or shine and delivering an old man’s bank statements is BAD, but if you accept a modest position as Chief Technology Officer or Cabinet Secretary nobody should be allowed to criticize you.
Twitter posts which mention stock symbols will now link to a trading app in Canada. Trading individual stocks is almost always a bad idea, even more so doing it based on social media post or the newspaper. https://betakit.com/wealthsimple-partners-with-elon-musks-x-for-direct-stock-trading-via-social-media/
in a world of draftkings and polymarket, this almost feels quaint. the stock-based gambling houses are losing to the prediction markets and sportsbooks and they’re flailing around trying to catch up. I wish them all the worst
Or amalgamating with them. Robinhood has been partnered with Kalshi since last year, and they’re trying to gin up some kind of “standardized” prediction market contract format, a la CBOE’s standards for futures and options.
Tennesee(!) leads the way, a bill to make training chatbots a Class A felony.
Hope they get the fullthroated support of LW
Reddit /r/artificial freaks out (no clue what alignment that subreddit has): https://old.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1slu23a/red_alert_tennessee_is_about_to_make_building/
via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784650
edit aww the coward lawmakers have backed down https://www.wjhl.com/news/tennessee-backs-off-sweeping-artificial-intelligence-limits-opts-for-study-instead/
“All of those embodied agents are seat opportunities,” Jha said, envisioning organizations with more agents than humans — each effectively a user that must pay for a software license, or “seat” in industry lingo.
A company with 20 employees might buy 20 Microsoft 365 licenses today. If each employee gets five AI agents, and the workforce shrinks to 10 people, that could still mean 50 paid seats.
Also, it’s apparently enough for an LLM endpoint to be paired with an email inbox to be considered an “embodied agent”, words mean nothing.
JFC at least wait until you have a de-facto monopoly before musing about extracting the rents! This is capitalism 101.
Do you get a refund when an “agent” inevitably blows out its context window and starts emitting deranged output, or does that automatically get rolled over into starting up the next “agent”
Ah right, I need to get a 365 license for word, which comes with a free copilot agent, who needs a 365 license for its copy of word, which comes with a free copilot agent, who needs a …
Now that we’ve got the concept of recursive per-seat licensing established, allow me to invite you to contemplate the possibility of the “licensing macro”
Also, it’s apparently enough for an LLM endpoint to be paired with an email inbox to be considered an “embodied agent”, words mean nothing.
This is a very interesting glimpse into the managerial class’ psyche. A person is their email address. Very simple. Why would you need more than that.
It’s ludicrous to pay taxes on the wealth your robots make, but it’s savvy business to charge each software-delimited robot as a separate being - just like charging per-cpu-core was!
Ahh sh*t if all my rent-seeking employee-reducing dreams come true, i’ll lose money on my product subscriptions rents! Quick! I should come up with bullshit that will solve everything!
