There was a rat startup that was aiming to become a sort of ground truth arbiter by putting up bet money if you could win a debate against them on a controversial topic. Lab leak was the first such debate with them on the pro side and they lost like 100K over that to a random acx poster who took them to school.

Anyway I’m mentioning this because “60% certainty” reminded me that when arguing for the side of the lab leak all sorts of rationalist accepted truths type stuff emerged, like how they posited a bunch of other incidents as lab leaks and it turned out nobody else actually thought that and it was just arbitrary prior wrangling because it turns out that having we are better than any experts that haven’t read the sequences type contrarianism as a pillar of faith encourages conspiracy brain.

Also Sam Altman is a lab leak truther but it’s not like it’s possible to take anything he says at face value.

edit: https://awful.systems/post/1088988

Also that subterfuge and misdirection are par for the course doesn’t make this any better. If anything you’d expect such an obvious slum dunk trillion dollar world changing cancer curing robot god enabling infinity profit making technology to need much less of that to become attractive to investors.

ex-DOGE led AI cybersecurity startup hacks Antrhopic (wapo via archive is), Ι’d love to sneer that doing felonies for marketing appears to be normal now, but supposedly they did it by the book and immediately used everyone’s bug bounty processes to inform them of the vulnerabilities, instead of accidentally finding out that they did a surprise hack, is as was the case with anthro, oai and meta.

Anthropic confirmed in a statement that Cathedral researchers had gained access to “a limited set” of its sales, human resources, and IT systems. The AI company shut off the pathways exposed by the researchers and briefed federal officials on the incident, the statement said.

A senior Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal proceedings, said that the Cathedral report on its access inside Anthropic had circulated within the government and raised national security concerns.

“If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind,” the official said. He added that he was taken aback by “how little time it took to get into the sensitive systems of a company that is controlling almost nuclear weapons grade material.”

The Trump administration is now working with the company to game out adversarial scenarios related to AI, the administration official said.

According to my feed either anthropic is doing gloriously in inference and will soon be distilling its own models and undercutting even the chinese, or this is this is the most worrisome IPO in the history of finance and even convertible note holders are selling off their equity IOUs.

Choose your own reality ass timeline.

You should try to make your point in a way that doesn’t involve idiosyncratically appropriating existing terms, god knows there’s enough technobabble muddling the discourse already.

“Genetic algorithms are the thing balls and lines do on unity on youtube and also that’s how LLMs get trained, from the blackbox program generator” is like the experimental theater version of being wrong, there was no need to double down.

Genetic algorithms (and backpropagation, which is probably what you got it mixed up with) don’t remotely work on a level where terms like strategy are meaningful.

This even made the news in my parts, in case you weren’t 150% sure if it’s big-money backed AI white washing marketing push. Even their website host vercel.com list their primary business as ‘agentic infrastructure’, i.e. selling AI wrangling software.

Rodriguez is a founding partner at the mergers and acquisitions advisory firm Avolta

His avolta bio also notes

Philippe is a leading figure in the European crypto and blockchain industry, serving as the president of Bitcoin France for three years

Which OK least surprising thing ever. So (per google) a crypto guy, a magazine publisher and a banker with an e-voting business walk into a bar and found an AI literary award, I wonder who got the effective altruism grant first. Maybe in late November when the judges are revealed we get a clearer picture of the people involved.

What do you think genetic algorithms are exactly? The way you write about them is really weird. Also they have next to nothing to do with LLMs as far as I know.

Isn’t he like a vice assistant (to the) chief executive of something or other in anthropic? There’s just no telling how many of the roons of the world are going to become billionaires from this IPO, what a terrible state of affairs.

He specifies Claude 10, so it’s after the ??? in the checklist, and spicy autocomplete will be widely accepted to qualify for sentience by then I guess.

Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?

These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users’ devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices’ digital locks.

It it’s anything like any android device I’ve ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.

Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices.

groan.

It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?

I don’t know what I’m supposed to get from this piece, it feels like he’s saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as you’re willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically what’s left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.

There’s also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I don’t know, seems kind of familiar if you’ve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you’d also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.

The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, we’re definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway here’s how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes.

He almost gives away the game when he says christians don’t feel like slaves when they say ‘thy will be done’ so letting Claude run society would feel fine.

The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.

In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors

According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article’s summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn’t even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn’t happening.

Descent monday morning take from robert evans:

Schrodinger’s double-think.

other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious

Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness since early spring (tldr: currently not really, but it’s inevitable because I really want it to, so don’t be on the wrong side of history when it happens).

He’s seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI sentiment as an unforgivable moral failing.

I could have gone with destroying excess capital to preserve the status quo, but this stage and with this administration in the US going for subtlety seems unnecessary .

Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?

He is a close associate of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who formerly co-blogged with Hanson on Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias, before starting LessWrong.

RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.

Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.

Just pure fellow vibecoders cringe.

I really liked the part about all countries being in debt, straight from the facebook comments school of economics.

Probably the second, in the vast majority of PCs local inference should be painfully slow and resource intensive.

Local models are astoundingly slow compared to online ones and you can’t really run anything else while they are doing inference.