Ok, read their actual pitch. Lmao they think that a one time introduction of a GMO bacteria strain is going to 'just work' because they've also GMO'd it to outcompete other bacteria?
There's a reason we aren't running our cars on yeast-produced gasoline. No matter how awesome your tuned microbe is, it's still subject to mutation and natural selection. If your beneficial changes aren't actually helping it survive, they will not be conserved. And those 'competitive' changes you jacked it up with to make sure it dominates the environment? Well, that might end up horizontally transferred into something you don't like.
About the right amount of 'we humans are smarter than dumb biology' metal-fetishism I'd expect from the folks concerned.
Also there's this obsession with calling this folly 'experimenting with government' as though they aren't always trying the exact same thing over and over again.
In before NY times article prints her real name complete with hissie fit followed by transition to Substack and total abandonment of mask of deniability.
I maintain that the reason they haven't gone full Waco isn't that they aren't deranged enough, but rather it would require them to confront the fact that they have nobody to blame but themselves for Clippy so they rationalize themselves into inaction.
The ones that scare me the most are the ones that are no longer afraid of Clippy and replaced that fear with a fear of, like, minorities.
The community manager saying they were aware of the situation (and presumably took no corrective action and kept it hush-hush) was damning. As is the post that's just like what about the reputational damage!?
Zero recognition of the fucked up power dynamics at play, and way too much 'well, nerds will be nerds.'
I slogged through the article so you don't have to.
Basically, there's a trio of very strange dotcom-wealthy folks who call themselves 'nonlinear' but really they're a guy, his brother, and his partner. They claim to be doing 'important work' and hire/defraud interns who live in their house, clean up their messes and get groceries for them, drive without a license for them, score drugs for them and traffic the drugs across borders. Also they isolate them from their families and friends, and have sex with them. This is considered inside the Overton window in the EA community, evidenced by the lack of pushback and the fact that this trio has not been run out of EA on a rail.
This reads like a PCJ comment, bravo. I'll do one for rust:
If an LLM cannot insult the user for having the tremerity to try and compile code, it's not compatible for use with the Rust compiler.