gerikson @ gerikson @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

El Reg: At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto

Two tastes that go great together!

In the recent days there's been a bunch of posts on LW about how consuming honey is bad because it makes bees sad, and LWers getting all hot and bothered about it. I don't have a stinger in this fight, not least because investigations proved that basically all honey exported from outside the EU is actually just flavored sugar syrup, but I found this complaint kinda funny:

The argument deployed by individuals such as Bentham's Bulldog boils down to: "Yes, the welfare of a single bee is worth 7-15% as much as that of a human. Oh, you wish to disagree with me? You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts".

"Of course such underhanded tactics are not present here, in the august forum promoting 10,000 word posts called Sequences!"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tsygLcj3stCk5NniK/you-can-t-objectively-compare-seven-bees-to-one-human

NYT covers the Zizians

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html

Archive link: https://archive.is/9ZI2c

Choice quotes:

Big Yud is shocked and surprised that craziness is happening in this casino:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians “sad.”

“A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”

Good news everyone, it's popular to discuss the Basilisk and not at all a profundly weird incident which first led peopel to discover the crazy among Rats

Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.

Keep saving money for retirement and keep having kids, but for god's sake don't stop blogging about how AI is gonna kill us all in 5 years:

To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.”

More on Banks and Elon's terrible reading of his books

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/07/apes-do-read-banks-elon-they-just-dont-understand-him

edit from the comments I see the meme that The Player of Games is the Culture book to start with is prevalent there too. Oh well.

This true, but I'm convinced the original poster knows this and is using the term ironically.

Everyone is entitled to their own readership of Banks. I'm not saying mine is the one and only. But the Culture is supposed to be a background character, even if Banks spends a lot of time in the later novels "explaining" it. But if the reader only focusses on the lore, they'll miss the quite good characters and psychology that Banks was good at too.

My personal favorite is Use of Weapons, where the focus is on the people doing the Culture's dirty work. In one scene, Zakalwe

In Look to Windward

Tired: the universe was created by a deity

Wired: the universe was created by physical forces

Fucking crazy: the universe was created by a figment of my imagination and I'm communicating with it using a blog post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uSTR9Awkn3gpqpSBi/dear-paperclip-maximizer-please-don-t-turn-off-the

Also the Galactic Empire as an anti-scientific hellhole with secret police surveillance.

Witness good old Hari Seldon unveiling his plans on Trantor:

It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous phrases in various tones and voices.

[Seldon] put his fingers on a certain spot on his desk and a small section of the wall behind him slid aside. Only his own fingers could have done so, since only his particular print-pattern could have activated the scanner beneath.

[…]

“You will find several microfilms inside,” said Seldon. “Take the one marked with the letter T.”

Gaal did so and waited while Seldon fixed it within the projector and handed the young man a pair of eyepieces. Gaal adjusted them, and watched the film unroll before his eyes.

Some dweeb:

I would recommend “Consider Phlebas” by Iain Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me, and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it’s the best depiction of a post-A.G.I. future, an optimistic post-A.G.I. future, where we’re traveling the stars and humanity reached its full flourishing.

The protagonist of Consider Phlebas is working for the Culture's enemies, a theocratic empire that has slaves literally bred for loyalty, and the conflict they're engaged in ultimately kills billions of sentient beings. Most of the thoughts about the Culture are his, and he basically decries them as the ultimate wokesters. No wonder HN nerds prefer The Player of Games in which a smart nerd like themselves get recruited as an agent to bring down an empire a bit like our own by being really really good at games.

Picked up by a relatively mainstream US politics blog:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/07/the-times-revises-its-policy-about-whether-to-publish-stories-based-on-hacked-materials-provided-by-ratfuckers-again

"Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don't listen to music."

That's it. That's the take.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46xKegrH8LRYe68dF/vire-s-shortform?commentId=PGSqWbgPccQ2hog9a

Their responses in the comments are wild too.

I'm tending towards a troll. No-one can be that dumb. OTH it is LessWrong.

Maybe it's to hammer home the idea that time before DOOM is limited and you might as well get your rocks off with him before that happens.

LWronger posts article entitled

"Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly"

OK, title case, obviously serious.

The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

Nope he's going for satire.

And ladies, he's available!

If you don't get it, LLMs don't either, and David's work here is done.

Managers: "AI will make employees more productive!"

WaPo: "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings" https://archive.ph/ejC53

Managers: "not like that!!!!"

It's English, but British, Jim.

The Myrdals are probably entirely discredited nowadays, both for being the quintessential social engineers and their son Jan happily destroying their legacy. As you'll no doubt have learned, fertility has fallen everywhere in the developed world, both in countries with shit welfare for parents (Italy) and quite good (the Nordics). Realistically, the only way to reverse this is to enable draconian abortion laws coupled with a systematic repression of sex ed and contraception. Of course this is congruent with today's fascists' goals...

I have 3 kids, 1 bio and 2 bonus, and man it's a lot of work. (youngest is technically an adult but de facto...)

I also feel there's insane pressure nowadays not just to have a kid but to have the perfect kid - great childhood, great education - and if you miss just one PTA meeting you're branded for life

Mooch is almost endearing in his earnest striving.

Frankly surprised to see something this funny on LinkedIn.