A rival gang of “AI” “researchers” dare to make fun of Big Yud’s latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy

Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)

When we say Y&S’s arguments are theological, we don’t just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using “theological” to simply mean “wrong”. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. That’s because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).

What we mean is that Y&S’s methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.

Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, there’s no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the “before” and “after”: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.

LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP

LOL @ promptfondlers in comments

Nice time - here’s a Swedish dude who constructed a 8m parabolic dish to do EME by hand

News item in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/byggde-atta-meter-parabol-for-att-prata-via-manen

Earth-Moon-Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth–Moon–Earth_communication (bonus illustration obviously taken from a primary school science project) Edit malus for long passage in second section second para obviously originally written by a Nazi)

this made my day, thx

whole country is swole, good mirror of the maga mind

yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.

Did you hear about the vegetarian cannibal?

He can only eat swedes.

So I gather but SB is the only book I’ve read

More on datacenters in space

https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

N.B. got this via HN, entire site gives off “wouldn’t it be cool” vibes (author “lives and breathes space” IRONIC IT’S A VACUUM

Also this is the only thermal mention

Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed

riiiiight…

Semi-related, the SF author John Varley died the other day, and I remember how both transgressive and cool it was that his characters in Steel Beach and others could change gender basically at will. (Banks ripped this off in the Culture btw). I don’t think he had a special insight into the lived experience of trans people, but at least he embraced the idea as part of humanity’s future, not recoil from it like later epigones.

Michael Swanwick mini-obit: https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html

HN on Varley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991

Pretty sure this guy has some serious mental health issues.

Yeah, the substacker seems either naive or genuinely misinformed about Siskind’s ultimate agenda, but in their defense Scott is really really good at vomiting forth torrents of beige prose that obscure it.

Some rando mathematician checks out some IQ related twins studies and find out (gasp) that Cremieux is a manipulative liar with an agenda

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist

Said author is sad that Paul Graham retweets the claim and does not draw the obvious conclusion that PG is just a bog-standard Silicon Valley VC pseudo-racist.

HN is not happy and a green username calling themselves “jagoff” leads the charge

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195226

is there a term I can google to start researching this new generation of motors?

I guess battery tech has affected this too

Carmack is a Gen-X Texan mostly known for using hardmode C to code an FPS. He’s so drenched in nerd testostorone I’d be surprised if he wasn’t background radiation level non-woke. Not saying he shouldn’t be as a human being, just that it would be an uphill battle for him.

data which for menial tasks doesnt exist yet.

This reminds me over an old old furore here in Sweden. A female researcher at a largish university made a study of how cleaners … cleaned. How bathrooms, kitchens etc were constructed and how workers had to move and lift to do their work.

This was almost universally derided - “who does science on cleaning???”, but of course the intent was serious. Lots of people clean, if we design better workspaces, we reduce injuries and RSI etc, and maybe make it easier for less skilled people to clean. But becaseu both the author and the subjected were coded female, the reactionaries had conniptions.

Anyway that won’t help humanoid robots. Just thought about it

Edit found an article in Swedish about it, year was 1985. Nowadays bathroom fixtures are constructed after her recommendations

https://arbetet.se/2009/02/26/gudrun-linns-forskningpverkar-hela-byggsverige/

Questioning the nature of human intelligence is step 1 in promptfondler whataboutism.

I regret I have but one upvote to give to this

This is such a pivot, from “you can soon fly between capitals in half the time” to “this screaming jet engine will soon be disturbing your sleep 24/7”

Old Man Stallman comes out swinging against ChatGPT specifically, adding it to the long long list of stuff he doesn’t like. For some reason HN is mad at this, as if RMS saying slop is good actually would convince anyone normal to start using it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203591