LW found it too:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3LcyoqNTJuCZ65MbL/mo-putera-s-shortform?commentId=hBaxokbLP3LEKSKij

Didn’t realize it was on Unherd, that organ for middlebrow fascists

Here’s an account of Elon on the stand

(dunno author, not endorsing their other work)

https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/musk-v-altman-recapping-elon-musk-farcical-cross-examination

Here’s one post, but it’s obfuscated as usual

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwxcunmW33TgvrAmg/red-vs-blue-the-parable-of-the-feud-within-a-feud

One weird thing about LW is that it presents itself as this timeless Hall of Truth, but half the content is literally incomprehensible if you’re not also deeply embedded in the adjacent Twittersphere .

Actually 13.2% had read it in 2016

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xi6syQenk24nQTzgz/2016-lesswrong-diaspora-survey-analysis-part-three-mental#Stories_Read

I take Zitron’s takes with a massive grain of salt, but I think the fundamental difference between him and rats is that for him, AI is just another technology. He’s looking at the figures, seeing the adoption, and not premising his arguments with the supposition that Anthropic’s Claude is literally gonna escape and kill us all.

Piper says she’s fine with paying $100/month for Claude. OK, but how large is the total addressable market for that kind of monthly expenditure - especially in a world where costs are rising? I’ve seen people stating that because they personally spend $200 on streaming services, increasing that load by 50% monthly is no big deal for them. But streaming services are much more mainstream than AI agents, and crucially, adding another subscriber to them is basically zero-cost for the provider on the margin. Not so with AI! The more people use them, the more they cost for the provider!

We’re seeing “pricing adjustments” from both Anthropic and Microsoft, which sure doesn’t align with the idea that they have a huge inference pricing margin cushion. Everything is gonna get more expensive - fuel, chips, employees (who are gonna be expected to be compensated for their own rising costs). Just based on what I’m reading in the news titls the analysis over in Ed’s favor.

I think it’s inevitable that the economics of anime production will lead to more GenAI content being used.

Sadly, many plots may just as well be generated by AI as well.

Tokens can never fail, they can only be failed - by not tokenmaxxing

“the thing that matters for your company is: is my employee becoming insanely AI-pilled? And that requires getting them on this tokenmaxxing mindset.”

This is gonna be the epitaph of this current bubble.

I kinda wanna see LW tackle this

“why do we have to write our own propaganda???”

I figured I’d re-read “A few notes on the Culture” https://theculture.adactio.com/, and lo and behold almost everything the in these threads is answered there.

Also , look at these ghouls being delighted that the “deathism” author is dying: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RspqaNmJKKBnXTqwk/open-thread-april-1-15-2013?commentId=pnoiQZL7id6cav6aN, fascist gnome Gwern among them

Yeah I think I linked to another similar take where another Wrong’un was mighty pissed that the Culture was infested with “deathism”.

Technically there’s no reason you can’t live forever in the Culture, through a combination of cryosleep and life extension, but it seems that the natural thing is to get pretty bored after 3 centuries or so. And I think that’s perfectly reasonably from what imagine it would be like.

Remember that there’s no private property in the Culture, so things that people here obsess over (keeping the family business going, making sure no non-deserving relative gets an inheritance) simply goes away. After a while you’ve played the Game of Life on all challenge modes and it’s time to pack it in.

I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.

Yeah I vaguely remember that part from the novella.

This is yet another story where a Culture citizen weirdly decides that living in a shithole (1970s Earth) is preferable to literal utopia, so maybe the LW crowd have a point it’s not a very good utopia. Or maybe there are weirdos in every time and space. Again, see LW.

There’s local democracy - in one book some activist reserved a big part of an orbital just to run cable cars back and forth. And I believe the decision to go war with the Idirans was subjected to a vote - part of the Culture split off when it didn’t go their way.

But yeah, the Minds decide everything and Contact/SC is all about doing the “needful stuff” that every right-thinking Culture citizen would deplore.

The Culture is imperialist in the previous US sense of “everyone wants to live our lifestyle” but not in the “invade planets and strip them” sense.

I’m less interested in discussing the minutiae of the fictional Culture than exploring nerd’s reactions to it, honestly .

I figure part of the “scan” that a Contact ship does when it encounters a “lesser” planet is to basically slurp down all media, read all the books, and send drones down to do full-3d immersive recordings of basically everything going on.

I guess some stuff you really need to train as a monk for 30 years to really grok, but if there’s an interest for that some Culture weirdo will volunteer and get sent down with a drone in the form of a crucifix or whatever, and incidentally become the next pope.

incidentally I feel I’m seeing in this post and in the shit like Karp’s 22 points a growing sense of ennui and purposelessness that was also reported in Europe before WW1 . Everything is safe and soft and real manly virtues like killing are downplayed so what we need are big strong men throwing missiles.

Banks wrote during the 70s/80s and just imagining a future that wasn’t a nuclear wasteland or the Empirium of Man was an act of opposition.

It’s a day ending in “y”, so here’s another bad rat take on Banks’ Culture:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdJM6ZAdnjisDu249/the-great-smoothing-out

Once again, for the ones at the back, the Culture is not the main subject of the novels. We almost never see the perspective of “normies” in the Culture, it’s always from the view of misfits (Culture recruits into Contact/Special Circumstances) or outsiders (mercenaries like Zakalwe, enemies like Bora Horza Gobuchul, or allies like Ambassador Kabe).

Banks wanted to write novels about characters in dangerous situations facing their personal demons - like almost every other novelist wants - and the Culture was just the backdrop he invented as contrast.

The color choice was either super lazy or super inspired.

presented without further comment, this remarkable piece of political advice

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/prHnjtXAKrPPZt8eB/eric-neyman-s-shortform?commentId=MvK8EGC8HHryT7QGL

God knows I love me a good dose of genre fiction, but I believe that if you’re gonna base your entire worldview on fiction you should use something that’s not second or third hand.

What a rogue’s gallery. Truly a chilling portrait of the sworn enemies of trillions of unborn human beings.