TinyTimmyTokyo @ TinyTimmyTokyo @awful.systems

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20

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138

Joined

2 yr. ago

Ozy Brennan tries to explain why "rationalism" spawns so many cults.

One of the reasons they give is "a dangerous sense of grandiosity".

the actual process of saving the world is not very glamorous. It involves filling out paperwork, making small tweaks to code, running A/B tests on Twitter posts.

Yep, you heard it right. Shitposting and inconsequential code are the proper way to save the world.

I'm aware of the cloudflare issue, and I don't use them. So I'm pretty sure it's not that. (I use firefox but I turn off DNS over HTTPS)

I noticed starting a couple weeks ago that archive.is is requiring me to complete captchas nearly every time I visit. Are other people experiencing this? If so, I wonder if the site's maintainers are reacting to increased traffic from LLM crawlers. The crawlers probably find Archive extraordinarily useful when they get blocked by source sites.

Can we call this the peak of the LLM hype cycle now?

It's reminiscent of the freakout among some of the rationalists when Roko's basilisk first appeared. And they wonder why people keep calling them an apocalyptic cult.

ChatGPT-5 is having a day on r/ChatGPT.

It's a really good article. This part stuck out to me:

If you are seriously, legitimately concerned that an emergent technology is about to exterminate humanity within the next three years, wouldn’t you find yourself compelled to do more than argue with the converted about the particular elements of your end times scenario? Some folks were involved in pushing for SB 1047, but that stalled out; now what? Aren’t you starting an all-out effort to pressure those companies to shut down their operations ASAP? That all these folks are under the same roof for three days, and no one’s being confronted, or being made uncomfortable, or being protested—not even a little bit—is some of the best evidence I’ve seen that all the handwringing over AI Safety and x-risk really is just the sort of amped-up cosplaying its critics accuse it of being.

Could be worse, I got got by some neofascist scum who was dunking on rationalists.

Gell-Mann amnesia.

It's happening.

Today Anthropic announced new weekly usage limits for their existing Pro plan subscribers. The chatbot makers are getting worried about the VC-supplied free lunch finally running out. Ed Zitron called this.

Naturally the orange site vibe coders are whinging.

That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”.

I studied computer science because I was a huge computer nerd growing up. I always loved programming and learning everything I could about how computers worked. Learning new programming languages felt like uncovering a new universe of knowledge -- knowledge I could use to create things. I spent endless hours studying computers and learning to do amazing things with them. It was fun. It still is.

So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can't relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.

In the case of O'Connor and people like him, I think it's about much more than his philosophy background. He's a YouTube creator who creates content on a regular schedule and makes a living off it. Once you start doing that, you're exposed to all the horrible incentives of the YouTube engagement algorithm, which inevitably leads you to start seeking out other controversial YouTubers to platform and become friendly with. It's an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" situation dialed up to 11.

The same thing has happened to Sabine herself. She's been captured by the algorithm, which has naturally shifted her audience to the right, and now she's been fully captured by that new audience.

I fully expect Alex O'Connor to remain on this treadmill. <remind me in 12months>

The Lasker/Mamdani/NYT sham of a story just gets worse and worse. It turns out that the ultimate source of Cremieux's (Jordan Lasker's) hacked Columbia University data is a hardcore racist hacker who uses a slur for their name on X. The NYT reporter who wrote the Mamdani piece, Benjamin Ryan, turns out to have been a follower of this hacker's X account. Ryan essentially used Lasker as a cutout for the blatantly racist hacker.

https://archive.is/d9rh1

It's starting to feel like I need to download a snapshot of Wikipedia now before it gets worse.

I'd be lying if I said the randomly generated narrative the LLM is stringing together isn't hilarious.

"I panicked and ran database commands without permission."

"I destroyed all production data."

"You immediately said 'No', ''Stop', 'You didn't even ask.'"

"But it was already too late."

The rest of that guy's blog is a fucking neofascist mess. That'll teach me to post a link without first checking out the writer.

Reading the comments led me to this entertaining sneer about our friends.

Daniel Koko's trying to figure out how to stop the AGI apocalypse.

How might this work? Install TTRPG afficionados at the chip fabs and tell them to roll a saving throw.

Similarly, at the chip production facilities, a committee of representatives stands at the end of the production line basically and rolls a ten-sided die for each chip; chips that don't roll a 1 are destroyed on the spot.

And if that doesn't work? Koko ultimately ends up pretty much where Big Yud did: bombing the fuck out of the fabs and the data centers.

"For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes."

It's not that weird when you understand the sharks he swims with. Race pseudoscientists routinely peddle the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than any other ethnic or racial group. Scoot Alexander and Big Yud have made this claim numerous times. Lasker pretending to be a Jew makes more sense once you realize this.

You thought Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) was bad. You were wrong. He's even worse. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/cremieux-jordan-lasker-mamdani-nyt-nazi-faliceer-reddit/