There’s a bizarre tendency in a lot of technocrats to basically reject the notion that people in the future will have the power to make different choices. Like, it’s not enough to put together a policy that will solve the immediate problem, no matter how pressing, because if you extend the resulting trend line infinitely it might result in a suboptimal outcome. Combined with the TESCREAL project’s long-termism and obsession with personal immortality it feels like the link to far-right paternal totalitarianism is actually pretty straightforward.

If I were inclined to research and source properly I feel like there could be some meat there that I don’t think Emile Torres and his colleagues have gotten all the way into yet.

All the boring western gun names like Desert Eagle, Colt Python, Winchester, Walther Pocket Pistol…

Please send help; I’m going down a wikipedia rabbit hole for the sake of a stupid joke

Maybe some kind of diagram that showed the links visually, color-coded to illustrate some more details about the connection. Add some photographs for visual appeal.

I don’t think any of the words on that shirt are in the Bible.

Nonzero chance AI kills us before we reach the end of this probably-years-long-process, but we plant trees in whose shade we may never sit.

You know, I didn’t think it would be necessary to discuss the meaning of that line in a space where people ostensibly take long-termism seriously.

AI Use: LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group—unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.

Lol. Lmao.

I guess given the demographics of the diehard Bernie bros this isn’t necessarily a surprising turn, but it’s still disappointing.

Also, hat tip to Dr. Rasmussen for cogently articulating the frustration of the hour. Why in the hell are we talking about whether the acausal robot God is going to endanger our ability to trade galaxies like Pokemon cards when so much of the world is both literally and figuratively on fucking fire?

Tag yourself I’m “(I suspect)”

I don’t think it’s a very novel insight to point out how this pattern is pretty typical of high control groups, though I guess most are much more explicit about the in-group/out-group distinction there. Our very good friends seem less inclined to treat everyone outside the circle like they’re part of a grand anti-tescreal conspiracy, at least.

This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can’t imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.

Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle

It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas’ current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he’s been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.

It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it’s get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: they’re quite the opposite), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort “the AI app says this is plagiarized” attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race “science” is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between “impartial” academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.

As is so often the case, I honestly don’t know what’s supposed to be different about our response to gengineered superplagues if they were made by an AI instead of the CIA or whoever else is in on that nonsense.

Always love reading Iris’ work. I’m already finding ways to abuse the concept of the person-tool gestalt for dumb jokes that I have to over explain to my wife so I’m getting my money’s worth to be sure.

Also I definitely have actual fond memories of randomly running into people in Guild Wars 2. The of genericizing/instancing more of the world interactions (like loot and quests, for example) and using mega servers to dynamically scale resource usage and player allocation meant that you were very unlikely to organically run into the same people often enough to really make even a parasocial connection, but it dramatically improved the experience with the overall community.

Objection! Gas Town isn’t junk, it’s a memetic weapon trying to convince anyone with actual engineering sensibilities to abandon the industry and move to their cabin in the woods to become professional manifesto writers, thus clearing the path for AI inevitability.

Of course, the irony is that in their desire to revolt against the violence being forced upon them they merely created an incredibly efficient means of achievement farming for those with the stomach for it.

I can’t think of a more productive charity for helping make-a-wish donors and the parents of dying children feel better about the world.

Also with Desert Bus for Hope on the horizon I want to use this space to (probably unnecessarily) point to Child’s Play. It’s almost not utilmaxxing, but I know when I was in hospital as a kid the little cart with a Nintendo 64 on it was the only time I felt like an actual kid instead of a science experiment or hurt. I’m willing to forgive a lot of lost net utils to give that to others going through it.

It was possible to take things away from that movie other than “Lmao these names are silly” and “Channing Tatum is a puppy?”

It’s also fascinating to see them use nuclear vs renewable energy as their case study given that renewable energy has been having a hell of a time properly replacing fossil fuels even though everyone mostly agrees it’s a good idea. Like, whatever hypothetical advantagre they got from their opposition to the nuclear boogeyman (their idiotic framing, not mine), renewables have still been facing strong political and economic headwinds that are only being magnified by the unceasing growth in demand for electrical power (including but not exclusively driven by AI compute).

But if I don’t obsessively optimize my career in ways that prevent me from making meaningful human connections, how am I supposed to keep up with the relentless march of AI??? Thank God I have AI to help pick up the slack.

I wouldn’t put a multiplier on them, except for 1.2x to 1.25x.

I’m pretty sure it’s still a multiplier if you’re not using whole numbers.

I’d be curious to see how they defined “harmful” in their test, since it looks like Claude code’s technically-not-yolo mode is looking for “actions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environment” which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in “your environment”.

And yes, I’m sure that the fact that the flow of operations they’re outline will massively increase the number of times that the system automatically retries things, this increasing token usage, is going to be fully accounted for when they review the financials on how many tokens people are paying for.

If you’re putting yourself in a situation where your business decisions, political ideology, or general worldview will be negatively impacted by the seeding of a pseudorandom number generator I would recommend you rethink your life rather than argue with the people who set the seed.