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.)
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.
Apparently they can also sick the police on you on a trust-me-bro basis:
Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was “just fucking around.”
But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.

image shamelessly stolen from https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv5puo47ns2z
Never wanna hear any bullshit about Anthropic being the “good guys” ever again
LITERALLY 1984
(I am morally obligated to make this joke)
happy kirkiversary to all who celebrate
Happy kirk kirked day.
And people said rightwing minds couldn’t be changed during debates.
I thought it was his neck that got changed?
Change comes from within.
Lack of blood in this case
i'm not sorry
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Crosspost, hat-tip to @pnwpixel@programming.dev for finding this. Omarchy announces another patron: DigitalOcean. I will wait for DO to explicitly confirm/deny this, but if this is true then I’m going to be moving my entire small-business footprint.
back at ya

Oh, gods damn it. I’m only going to have a couple of servers to move, but it’s going to be a huge pain in the ass. What VM provider is recommended these days for USAian customers?
I’m probably going to increase my presence on DreamHost in California, who I’ve hosted with for over a decade. They historically are First Amendment proponents known for being quietly friendly towards adult content; also, in 2017 DH pushed back on the Department of Justice’s subpoena for 1.3 million IP addresses visiting an anti-Trump protest-organizing website. That said, I’m 100% prepared for yet another Milkshake Duck Moment.
Looking forward to being able to send email, which DigitalOcean still blocks in order to funnel customers towards hosted email-delivery services.
Check out https://upcloud.com/. EU based, but have servers in the EU, US, and Asia-Pacific: https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/locations/
If you got questions, hit them up on mastodon: https://glitchy.upcloud.world/@upcloud
There’s this: “Built for agents: Omarchy’s pipeline moves to DigitalOcean” https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitalocean-joins-omacom-foundation
Alongside the infrastructure move, DigitalOcean is joining the Omacom Foundation, the nonprofit that funds Omarchy’s infrastructure and the open source projects it depends on, as a Founding Corporate Patron, and will serve as Omarchy’s agentic compute provider.
So fascism and slop. Name a more iconic couple.
New (to me) lore from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline
This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.
The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.
lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
Because rationalists distrust mainstream normal science and skepticism, they are far more willing to dabble in mysticism and the supernatural than normal skeptics.
Buddism us quite popular amoung the tech crowd from what I always gathered. So no shock there, that or Orthodox Christianity. (The latter being the preferred adult convert religion of alt right types. because they think it is like how space is uncorrupted by capitalism, but instead of capitalism they fear the woke).
lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
The parts I skimmed mostly read like a travelogue so tax write-off vacations with the family in Europe, plus he has an audience of marks that will eat up fucking anything as long as it’s framed as independent research into the parts mainstream academia doesn’t want YOU to know about.
Still the cross-section between simulationists/transhumanists and mysticism enthusiasts was already huge before Yud mixed in adult Harry Potter fandom and an implicitly supernatural set of adages about human-to-computer soul transfer and living in the end of days waiting for the Artificial Godhead Intelligence to incarnate and judge humanity.
the kindergarten/elementary school / New Atheism view of religion is “believe in big sky father, ask him personally for good stuff, get good stuff”. Religions that manage to progress out of the cult stage do have something more going on, generally a system of ethics designed to help people cope with the vagaries of life (and maybe also control their thoughts so they don’t revolt).
I think this is why Buddhism (at least the Western kind) is so popular, as it relatively focussed on “how to live” rather than “what to believe”.
“Rationality” strives to be a secular Buddhism, you have rules and precepts for how to approach life and personal interactions. It’s interesting and maybe a comment on how human brains work that they seem to have invented a great sky father from first principles too.
there are some religions that put more emphasis on orthodoxy and there are religions that put more emphasis on orthopraxy. christianity would be more in the former category and buddhism, especially buddhism-as-mind-hacking-tool would be the latter. rationalists are just religious in a way that is less common in the west
tangent
the kindergarten/elementary school / New Atheism view of religion is “believe in big sky father, ask him personally for good stuff, get good stuff”.
there is some evidence that a couple of ancient polytheist religions worked this way, sort of https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
you might wonder if there’s some space for new atheist racism to happen, as religions that do more of orthopraxy are not western or ancient (therefore primitive)
Here is a roundup of the “october tech movie” superfecta
is there a kalshi market for which one tanks the hardest? Or will we get crossover sequels for musk vs altman a la MCU?
Speaking of movies about high-profile silicon valley grifters, what the fuck is this??
At this point given the absurdity of this combination of people I feel like the reality will likely be disappointing.
If all it took to bring these guys down was to show that they were weird and unsettling, the CIA would have infiltrated and shut down awful systems by now
Men Who Stare At Goats would have shut down the CIA first
Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die.
Highlights:
- No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning!
- Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash.
- No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way.
- Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess?
- Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons.
- Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death.
- The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise.
- Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol.
The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed.
If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.”
🤡
Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying.
H/t to violet blue. https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802
Tesla has not gotten clearance from safety regulators to deploy vehicles without features such as brake pedals, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it had opened an investigation into whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards.
The fuck do you mean opened an investigation. I don’t care that the US are a fake made-up country, there is no conceivable world in which you can legally put random shit on public roads without some kind of permit.
Quick search and from somewhere else
the company relied on self-certification, the standard method automakers use to affirm compliance with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards without pre-approval from regulators. NHTSA can audit that self-certification at any time, and it has now requested the engineering data and testing records Tesla used to reach its conclusion
you can’t be fucking serious
oh wow, it’s that bad huh. i guess it make sense, there’s a reason why the cybertruck is not legal in europe yet still on the streets in the us.
That’s horrifying.
The door handles don’t sound so bad from a firefighter perspective. More excuses to break out the slicy claw. ಠᴗಠ
Having to account for the stupid thing to start driving on its own for no reason seems more irritating. Maybe we can invest in some big jaws attached to the front of the truck to crunch down on and immobilize struggling robo-taxis. This seems like a very reasonable direction to develop car technology.
There was a photo from a cybertruck crash not so long ago where you could see that the doors and windows had been attacked with crowbars to try and get the damn things open before the people trapped inside burned to death. It didn’t work.
Things (and skills) for busting open locked doors and laminated glass aren’t (yet?) commonplace, and I wouldn’t trust tesla engineering to keep me alive long enough for the professionals to turn up with the right tools 🫤
You’re right of course, stupid engineering like that will kill people and already has.
From an emergency responder perspective I’m mostly asking how can I keep my squad safe and how can I rescue survivors. Once we’re there we usually got all the tools you would ever need. And I’m 100% sure, if someone is in danger I’m breaking out the can opener before I would ever bother to call remote support.
Move fast and kill your customers and first responders.
Literally “just push it over there with the rest of the fire and send an email.”
Terry Tao talks about how he used to try to cooperate with the AI industry to achieve a positive outcome, but now he finally sees their true colors. Link
During this event, OpenAI requested an interview concerning my vision of the future of AI and mathematics. I accepted, and spoke with them for perhaps an hour. I had done similar interviews in various venues, and I assumed that, as with these other cases, they would eventually post the entire interview online, which talked about both the possibilities and risks of AI much as I have done in these other interviews. As it turned out, they only used a few snippets of that interview for that infamous advertisement instead. In retrospect, I should have pushed back harder on their decision; but I decided at the time that even a selective release of my commentary would help raise awareness of the potential for AI, and in particular on the possibility of the “best of both worlds”.
Since then, the situation has deterioriated markedly. Many of the people in the industry that shared my views have left or become sidelined, with most major tech companies now increasingly focused on the race to develop extremely powerful, autonomous AI technologies regardless of their actual value to society. The current drama surrounding the Navier-Stokes global regularity problem is the most dramatic and visible instance of this, but there have been multiple other such examples, and much of my commentary in the last few months has been aimed that the increasingly severe divergence between the current objectives of the AI industry, and of mathematics in general.
Much respect to artists for seeing all this coming from the very beginning, and holding the line.
“AI techbro syndicate looking shady as fuck to nobody’s surprise” —an actual rabbi
she’s great, isn’t she?
The discourse about AI is similar to the way people talk about Trump. A lot of us saw them for what they were immediately, and were called alarmist.
And over time, more and more people try to explain that they have changed their mind, and they were fooled, and aren’t bad people themselves, something something something.
without going into the merits of the specific case, I find it highly amusing that OpenAI fucked up their big Navier-Stokes announcement which is now more about how they stole research from honest mathematicians rather than how awesome their AI is
One detail that seems to have not spread around: the announcement was so rushed that when the 165 page output was released, it only included 16 citations, and those citations did not even include the work of Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, who introduced the overarching framework for attacking the problem (that Buckmaster-Alpöge and OpenAI used). After the announcement and after these redditors pointed it out, they threw in a few more citations to include them, but come on.
wtf is deal of that segyges person. now they’re convinced that openai will solve room temperature superconductors in silico real soon, because altman vagueposted about it
and this all based on lk-99 fraud case, nevermind that there’s no high temperature superconductivity theory, or how prohibitively computationally expensive computational chemistry is, and i guess it’s not accurate enough anyway, this all with people that do computational chemistry coming in their thread trying to explain this, then posts this

I keep free-associating this idiot with eigenrobot and maybe that’s unfair to them. They’re insufferable and smug and always confidently wrong, but maybe they’re not also a huge racist.
they also have a blog where they blog about how unfair are the anti-ai terrible people and. among other things, why the luddites were the terrible, no good, absolutely not worthy of interest reactionary bunch who got what they deserved.
Somehow word association will beat density functional theory to the punch for mapping out theoretical materials, lol. Alright.
I’ll believe that when pigs fly.
arguably it’s stupider than that

and this doesn’t even go into whether pallet of lean spaghetti is in any way insightful, or does it explain anything, or does any of these things manmade proofs do
just like our favorite TV show, right? surely a comprehensive description language for physics can’t be THAT much more complex than a steaming hot cup of Earl Grey tea!
You’ll forgive me, I’m neither lobotmised nor a mathematician.
The poster wants to slop into existance a language for stacking logical statements on top of each other and testing/prooving truthiness but the statements are what? Physics rules?
And once you have this um magic world simulator from first principles (since it would have to be, because the thing about science is we need to do the experiments since we don’t know how things work fully) it will somehow stumble onto RTPSC materials?
K
i’ll also note that assembly of reply guys decided that room temperature superconductors will magically solve energy requirements of silicon-based chips (this is not how any of this works)
Once we have superconductors, all computation will immediately switch to relay-based logic
cmos logic still beats it, because main source of heat are switching losses (all these gate + parasitic capacitances being charged and discharged, and some related phenomena). relays store more energy, and that makes situation worse, even if you make them as MEMS
Also consider how much more noise pollution you would get by adding billions of little click-clacks to the operation.
What’s entropy precious?

that’s just “machine god will figure out relativity from three video frames” in another form
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
I dunno, but AI machine god will figure it out from first principles in a nanosecond once we turn it on!
incidentally, this is also their current best shot at turning rube goldberg cash burn pit into something that’s not one
Good God. Sometimes I wonder how small the population that understands all these references and knows all this deep lore and history is. How few people really understand the true nature of this bunch of people and how their ideas have ruined so much. When I go to conferences I get to have 4 hour conversations over beer with astrobiologists explaining how ideas from a blog in 2009 started showing up uncited in their literature 8 years later (when late undergrads who read a blog post start writing papers during their PhDs) and have since completely fucked whole subfields. They are flabbergasted at first, but then they see it, and see the damage done. So few people actually see this.
In the TESCREAL lore iceberg, “Aella Sankey chart” is above the waterline.
- Existence of HPMoR
- Existence of Zizians
- Aella Sankey chart
- Aella not showering
…
- Topher Brennan leaks Siskind emails
…
- “AI datacenter water usage is fine actually” Substack
…
- Cremieux’s alleged old Reddit handle
…
- Scott Aaronson anti-feminist breakdown
- Scott Aaronson goes full Zionist
…
- Glowfic
…
- su3su2u1 review of HPMoR
…
- Robot God deduces general relativity in three frames with the power of Bayes
…
- Scott Aaronson makes airport cops sympathetic
…
- TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard
…
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is That Guy when recommending scifi books
TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard
Out in the wild, I’ve actually seen somebody cite that piece earnestly… as an example of how Wikipedia still has problems even if it’s generally a useful source of information.
It’s like praising with faint damnation.
su3su2u1 review of HPMoR
obi-wan-theres-a-name.png
what ever happened to them anyway? Probably has tenure by now, hopefully?
Aella Sankey chart
I’m really being tested on my liberation and sex positive values here. Gosh that’s a very weird and kinda gross thing to do.
What motivates someone to chart their fetish fulfillment?
Well whatever. I hope people had fun, seems like it must have been very scheduled and regimented though…
where does thiel/paypal mafia funding situation, urbit, other fashware and broader reactionary connection (yarvin etc) fit into that
also, that one oral bacteria startup
right? and even then you have to go slow with explanation, otherwise you just sound like a crank
It helped that the first person I explained this to at a conference was explicitly working on deconstructing models of the origin of complex life that imply that it’s slow and unlikely that have been uncritically accepted in a lot of circles without actual evidence, and he was already confused about why following the chain of citations bottomed out at weird economist named Robin Hanson and why his naive model was ever taken seriously… oh MAN we had a fun evening.
Amusingly enough, something much like this has happened to me twice two years apart. The scientists deconstructing this stuff are always the most interesting people too.
It was kinda wild studying physics while this was starting.
People were getting all these starry-eyed ideas while anyone actually doing well was realising that the future is going to look a lot like the present because god hates us and we’re not allowed nice things.
wtf is deal of that segyges person
He does worthless little-birthday-boy AI boosting while pretending to be the serious face of
bluesky AI bootlickingfair and balanced anti-anti-AI bluesky.Occasionally has decent sneer content, though it has a much more evident muh datacenters tint these days. Writer of the siskind email explainer.
Also the creator of the anti ai blocklist iirc. Think that is why I blocked him myself.
Anyway if we are going the ‘ai is making silly science fiction things real’, I want monopole magnets (yes the game also has room temp superconductors).
So Altman and Musk agree with Amodei’s latest assessment that AI should slow down, whether or not they actually stick to that is to be seen
Omg
we are haemorrhaging moneyAI is so scawwie powerful intelligent andnobody will lend us any morebecoming self aware. We need to slow down the frontier todo regulatory capture and juice our numbers for ipoprotect civilizationBroke: scared of cheaper Chinese competition
Woke: scared of runaway AGI
Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).
Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.
The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198
Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.
The progression from ‘the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data’ to ‘we just stole them from some guy’s chatbot logs’ has been nothing if not organic.
an insane amount of compute had been used.
You don’t say.
@supersquirrel@lemmy.ca I suppose this is a score for you apropos our recent discussion on industrial espionage. Although I’ll note that the domain they tried to take over this time (dickwaving with math proofs) does also not have a business model, so they’re not really working themselves out of their financial death sentence.
Also hard to feel like a point for me when that atrocious Meta settlement with the attorney generals that basically locks in profits via regulatory capture just came out…
As someone from the US it feels like a nuclear missile pointed at the fediverse…
So from what I gathered, two researchers were working on a math problem with the assistance of multiple AIs, but OpenAI beat them to it. The researchers are accusing OpenAI of using their work as training data, which OpenAI denied
one of them also works for anthropic
also, the unfounded confidence of openai guy makes me think that they might have done that before, and some random grad might have folded much easier under this kind of pressure
and looks like there’s another case of openai thievery https://xcancel.com/ValerioCapraro/status/2097791836269977996 https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv4ouxlnsk2z
They didn’t deny it, they said if the other workers’ research ended up in the training data it wasn’t deliberate. Then they gave the researcher who noticed the similarities a “co-publish with us or else” offer.
Ah got it
Glad to see that OpenAI has not changed in their scummy ways. Despite all that has changed in the meantime, they have kept their time-honored tradition of passing off other people’s work as their own.
One of OpenAI’s math announcements a month ago claimed that their results cost only $2000 worth of tokens, which frustrated me because they were likely sweeping away many inconvenient details and almost certainly misrepresenting their true costs. But people took this as a gotcha. This is the same bullshit as the water usage arguments. We are literally seeing city council members signing motherfucking NDAs about this, and you think that water usage numbers provided by the tech companies themselves are going to sway me?
I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public.
They want to sell the claim that they’ve “achieved AGI”. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of “the computer talks back to you”, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.
And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if it’ll get them arXiv posts.
yeah I think the push for math results is because they know some of their big investors know enough about how hard/advanced math is and they want to impress them. Burning down an entire academic community is worth it for that
They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved
of course lol, gotta keep that agi ruse up
there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order:
-
this research breakthrough was a consequence of dumping tons of money into the ai companies. if the future of the field means being entangled with openai et al. and extreme expenses that is going to upend mathematics in a much bigger way than ability to prove new things will. this hasn’t been a focal point of discussion yet but it looks to be at the center of mathematics going forward imo.
-
possibly for legal reasons, the statement stops short of accusing openai of stealing their in progress work. as in literally snaking their documents off the cloud and using them to try to undercut researchers. but it’s very clear that that is what the author believes happened
-
openai straight up threatened the mathematician in question. in a colloquial sense they’re engaging in extortion. apparently this is so routine for them that they didn’t even stop to consider that they can’t threaten an academic’s career (or they assumed the mathematician would understand there will be no academic careers in the future)
-
openai is straight up lying about their research methods. there are various ways that their announcements have had the potential to be misleading (for example when you see “we spent $2000 to compute these proofs” ask how much they spent on attempts that didn’t work). but what they’re saying may generally just not be true even in a literal sense
OpenAI:
While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/post/3muznyls6vk2v
lmao what the fuck do you mean it’s unlikely but you can’t rule it out. do you not know what you’re training your models on? are you guys unaware of what’s going on in your own operation? does openai research not have any knowledge of what data they train their models on?
-
The /r/singularity and orange site responses have been gross, lots of commenters willing to totally overlook the multiple different ways OpenAI has been utter scum in this debacle in order to celebrate another LLM “success”.
As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm.
I’m not an academic, so I saw that as (merely) another shitty and unreasonable thing, and failed to understand that this would have been academic fraud and should put a serious or terminal dent in the career of the people engaged in it.
I guess it’s another example of ai firms treating the sources of their training data and their fellow travellers as resources to be strip-mined, not maintained. Even livestock would get a bit more consideration.
As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm.
what? that is absolutely not true. ill try to address this on my lunch break but it is way more serious than that
So the news is now filled with stories about how AI will take over and the Ai companies might lose control of it gets smarter and at least one employee quit because it might kill us all. You know what I seem to be missing?
Actual employees doing sabotage. That is a bit odd right? They think Altman doesnt care about safety, but nobody has tried to wipe the backups. And we know they dont think that much about security.
And it isnt like sysadmins messed with systems in the past over lesser disputes.
Not even a “im turning whistleblower, here are all the internal chatlogs and documents of the employees and management”.
I’m reminded of Yudkowsky’s take that AI is totally going to kill us all and we should treat this seriously enough to bomb foreign datacenters if we think they’re involved in AI development, but that doesn’t mean that you should try to bomb local datacenters involved in AI development work. Please don’t think about what you as an individual should do about the problems facing the world; you’re just an NPC after all.
Yud isn’t necessarily inconsistent here: he really really wants the robot god to become real so it can invent the blowjob machine and win utilitarianism, but he only trusts people he’s met personally to do it, and certainly not those shifty celestials.
Please don’t think about what you as an individual should do about the problems facing the world; you’re just an NPC after all.
Or as the AI2027 blog put it:
We may only have 2 years left before humanity’s fate is sealed!
Despite the urgency, please do not pursue extreme uncooperative actions. If something seems very bad on common-sense ethical views, don’t do it.
God that blog is so hysterical. “Please remain calm and Rational even though we’re telling you that AI companies are going to kill you”
Lobste.rs news: after letting the DHH knob-slobblers and interested-in-the-fascist’s-newletters users weave enough rope to hang themselves with, the banhammers have arrived:
https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=(All)&what[users]=users
expect the next step be even more pressure on the mod team to get them replaced with people “more aligned with the mainstream”
Officials in desert state shocked to learn that water intensive industries (chipmaking) in desert states are vulnerable to sudden water shortages: https://www.theverge.com/science/993522/water-chip-semiconductor-manufacturing-colorado-river
in unrelated news: desert state continues allowing cultivation of incredibly water-intensive alfalfa for another arid region 8,000 miles away.












