Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this week’s stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and it’s just as cursed as you would imagine.

That’s it. That’s the post.

i guess that’s why Cory Doctorow likes them so much.

edit: they are apparently professionally affiliated

What a POS

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 assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending he’s the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all he’s doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but I’m serious people so won’t engage with what he’s saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and he’s 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 don’t 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.

If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky¹ (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.

1. 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 “centrist” 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.

Interesting question because I bet it’s bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold.

Like this isn’t your grandpa’s swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory¹ with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing don’t get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives.

It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans.

1. I swear the claudism was unintentional

The post title vs your write-up had me going, I initially thought RFK was actually recommending better mental health support to counteract bad parenting habits instead of the usual run-of-the-mill moralising about screen time.

One of my big hot takes is that being a new parent with a full time job and no assistance from an extended family can cause behavioural changes on par with neurological impairment and bad habits which can carry on even as the kids grow up and things get slightly more normal, so it’s nice to see a version of that in published paper form.

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.

It’s insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he’s a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn’t 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 wasn’t murder.

it’s fundamentally unsolvable, you can only mitigate it, mostly by using classical means to constrain the deterministic (i.e. non-AI) tools the chatbot is allowed access to, and constantly asking the user for confirmation.

With yolo/auto mode (no user confirmation required) and training LLMs on known vulnerabilities things will inevitably get more complicated.

While I agree that separating instructions from data in LLM input is a fundamentally unsolvable problem, in this case that wasn’t the attack vector.

It says the bot is forced by its security guardrails to write a small tool from scratch instead of using the one found in the downloaded zip, but due to the commonness of the task (decoding basexx text) the attacker predicts that the bot-created tool will try to import a specific dependency, so they’ve included a malicious version of that dependency in the zip, and because apparently python will prioritise locally available modules that’s what gets executed, making available all sorts of exploitation paths, including the attacker starting up a claude code instance in the users system.

edit: Actually I’m starting to think you could classify the whole thing as a prompt injection, except the entire site was the malicious prompt, as in it declared itself (we are a site that archives notebooks in json form) in a way that would align with the bot wanting to write simple text decoding software to complete it’s mission of summarizing the available content.

Interesting to think about.

I think it also depends on how all in you are on vibecoding. Like if you just prompt it and then occasionally check if the token carnage produced anything usable, then having an agents.md is probably just best practices cargo culting. But in other cases, having a Here’s How Thing Are Done In This Repo, You Fucker markdown file should make going through the more slop-happy merge requests a little less soul crushing.

The +20% additional token churn is surprising, I would have though the markdown files get cached pretty early down the line, unless the markdown file is really big compared to the chatbot output.

I mean it’s great if you want to automate some specific code generation in the most inefficient way possible while posing to the bosses as a forward thinking AI-first developer.

The closest anyone can come to a use for the AGENTS.md file is so you clarify your own thinking on how the project works

That just means that you are now supposed to write skill files instead of proper documentation to make your project even more inscrutable to anyone but a chatbots with a bottomless token budget.

This is firmly in the ‘what if in the future there is a boot so big that we must start licking it now’ school of hot takes, like literally arguing for a future where the AI sucks at its job and you can’t do anything about it.

Forall …

Never seen a gullibility filter in the form of eyebrows before:

He’s not exactly hiding it:

https://andymasley.com/

Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards’ Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.

Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.

I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it’s like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn’t thought applied to rationalists.

I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.

You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them “THEN LEAVE??” they’d rather keep their position. And it’s very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are “deeply broken.”

Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.

All this is not just one lone weirdo running tryouts for her cult in some way that’s nothing to do with the rest of the subculture.