“The Madness of the Crowds”.

I like that there’s a Gamache detective novel with that exact title and smile a little imagining some freshman edge lord accidentally buying it instead of Murray.

Two Drinks With. . . Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’

copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall

“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”

who in hell is Joe Allen.

I don’t think brian johnson’ll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon

Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.”

who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That’s a depressing thought.

Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”

Titled his book after FFX bosses ???

Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it.

They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul.

Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won.

interesting

At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity.

acid trip, or wrong kind of anime

Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject.

This guy needs a QAA bio, he’s been baking.

I hadn’t thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this:

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ribbonfarm-resurrected

For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably won’t notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest it’s no longer a standard WordPress blog.

It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.

It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.

The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. It’s fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.

?O kay? wget -r wasn’t good enough for a static copy?

Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.

This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora — ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.

wat

I suspect I’m going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self.

why can’t you just make a tulpa like a normal person.

well whatever, I’ll ask about the harari.

Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isn’t em dash trigger happy.

now I’m afraid to google farnam street.

AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism.

hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk.

The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network.

If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations.

This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things.

So half-right that it’s almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/02/smooth-ai-criminal-drives-first-end-to-end-agentic-ransomware-attack/5266073 h/t naked capitalism

llm exploits langflow cve in other llms. smdh. what a time to be alive.

also https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/ditch-your-phone-and-join-the-summer-of-ludd-the-offline-festival-happening-in-nyc from same

IIRC the cards thing was originally from a Gebru paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03993 but that dates from the “fairness” era and not the “safety” era. Hugging Face has “a” standard - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/model-cards - but I don’t think it’s “the” standard.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/untenable-middle-ground-responsible-ai-use-emily-m-bender-8jyfc/

So what is the best way out of that uncomfortable, untenable space? I think one key step is disaggregating the (non-coherent) set of technologies sold as “AI”. If you don’t call the stuff you work with “AI”, you aren’t saddled with trying to defend any of the rest of it.

The most recent iteration of this conversation I was involved in turned in part on a strange, over-expansive definition of “genAI” which included, for ex, optical character recognition (OCR).

OCR can be a useful tool for many research projects! OCR is also the kind of technology that gets better with better language models, i.e. more fine-grained models of which word(parts) go where. That has been true since before “genAI” and will be true after.

Just because you can use the synthetic media extruding machines to approximate the task of OCR, however, doesn’t mean that that task can or should be used to justify the use of “genAI” in research.

I interviewed at two different glorified-OCR startups pre-pandemic (?pre-AI?) for an ML role, and neither CTO knew what a spline was. That is my OCR story.

New findings in Bayesian tragedy

The inspection is being led by the chief prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Angelo Vittorio Cavallo. According to Italian news outlets, the technical and investigative team is evaluating whether the crew underestimated the rapidly worsening weather conditions and whether the measures taken to weather the storm were adequate.

The Bayesian went down in the early hours of 19 August 2024 near Porticello, close to Palermo, while at anchor. The tragedy claimed seven lives, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah, ship’s cook Recaldo Thomas, Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda.

The yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, along with crew members Tim Eaton and Matthew Griffith, are under investigation.

time to update our priors

https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism

Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.

More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.

? the kids are alright ?

I’ll yes-and you, Ukraine faces higher costs also, ie https://dronexl.co/2026/05/11/ukraine-fiber-optic-spool-price-ai-data-center-demand/

now serving with Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said in a May 10 post on X that his unit used to buy 50-kilometer fiber optic spools for $300. Today, he said, “it’s easily $2,500.”

China makes money on both sides, plus the data centers you mentioned. Compare/contrast with Iran, who switched from GPS to Chinese nav to also get around jamming because leashes don’t get that long… and China also makes money.

But locally, my BIL who runs fiber for a rural ISP, says basically they still make way more on recycling the copper wire they pull out than they pay for fiber. IDK.

The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html

Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. “Doom trolling” does have a better ring to it than “critihype.” Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.

gwern:

I’ve been browsing /r/LessWrong for many years, due to having toggled on ‘subscribe’ and never quite getting around to leaving. I will be leaving shortly, but before I do:

I think this subreddit has gotten so bad over the years it should be shut down or rebooted with a new set of moderators.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/1uabnlx/proposal_shut_down_rlesswrong/

lol

a coworker set up an argument, almost a syllogism, I can’t quite fill it in, maybe yall can

1. enshitification
2. shit rolls down hill
3. therefore: ?

I was flipping through this month’s magazine on the bus, don’t worry, they have a solution for reviewers…

https://cacm.acm.org/research/from-volunteerism-to-duty-reforming-peer-review-with-tokens/

:(

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

see also the old ludicity snowflake post https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/ and everything by corey quinn LastWeekinAWS.com - there’s like this learned helplessness in corporate america IT (perhaps Graeber is right and more budget validates your self importance even if it’s wasted cloud spend), or they think its monopoly money or something. or, both.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer

For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like “write this app” or “write this functionality” which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.

Please, just fucking don’t, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don’t actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.

My old job had a last minute investor call - “startpage is benefiting significantly from AIO backlash” did not expect that and pretty mixed feelings. Like yeah AIO is bad but don’t run into the open arms of the long tail adtech industrial complex marketing monetization engine either :|

https://lbpost.com/news/education/california-state-university-renews-controversial-systemwide-contract-with-openai

A CSU spokesperson confirmed to EdSource on Wednesday that the university will pay $13 million a year for three years to provide systemwide access to its more than 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. The previous 18-month subscription cost $17 million and expires at the end of June.

Are we so locked in we’re going to put up with a 10% price hike? Couldn’t be bothered to get a new vendor with a better deal, or use the Google one they are also paying for, or just use the free one? This is where the tuition increases are going, this is how we want to spend our taxes? :(

Holy Empire of AI - Predictive History

Once you have the AI state, you now have the technocracy and the world will be perfect.

All right? Does it make sense you guys? What he’s saying here? This is an amazing paragraph written 40, 50 years ago.

So, I’m not saying he’s a Freemason. I’m not saying he’s part of a society, but, he sure thinks like a Freemason.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has been dead for nearly a decade, but sure, let’s play the hits. plus AI! /s

Jiang hadn’t popped up in my feed in a while, guess he’s still at it. At least he’s reading Karen Hao, maybe some viewers follow his cites. He really should just write a Dan Brown novel or something, he’s obviously capable enough at lore dumping.