(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
When Yud compared himself to Jesus, is the āgiant rich organizationā in Yudās tweet Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX or Google?
I think itās Coefficient Giving (nĆ©e Open Philanthropy). Yud has made negative comments about them in the past, especially after Moskovitz tried to distance themselves from rationalism.
EDIT: Citation.
He seems ticked off at Coefficient Giving, but are they āa giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do itā? (Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions).
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong, and he does not like Coefficient Giving, Anthropic, OpenAI, or the Zizians, so is he satisfied with any group that adores his ideas?
Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions
One of the many issues autodidacts face is that they never have to deal with undergrads sitting in a room with them for hours listening to them explain things in exhaustive detail and then still somehow spend their final writing assignment completely missing the goddamn point.
It builds character, I assume.
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āa giant rich organizationā: they claim to have directed over 7 billion in grants since 2014, so this actually seems like a fair comment?
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āstole some of my ideasā: theyāve shown interest in AI stuff, including Eliezerās ideas, they just have longer (but still pretty fantastical, like AGI by 2050) timelines for stuff like AGI and that influences their funding priorities in a way Eliezer disagrees with
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āignored everything I said about what not to doā: eh, Eliezer has said a lot of things, they probably didnāt follow his advice exactly
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āand are going around telling people I made them do itā: Iāve seen a few people here and there in various rationalist-adjacent circles blame Eliezer for helping OpenAI network and get started and thereby kindle the very doom he warned about, so. It seems plausible some of them were connected to coefficient giving?
Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions
That sounds like the normal academic process, which Eliezer neither understands nor appreciates.
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong
Yeah, him gradually losing interest in LessWrong in the mid 2010s created room for SSC to grow in popularity. Also, that would have been around the time it became apparent Eliezer had been very wrong about neural networks, so we missed the chance to see Eliezer actually have to overcome biases and admit he was wrong in a non-self-aggrandizing way. (Eliezer has admitted he was wrong before, but only in ways that made his next idea even more important, see his progression from nanotech to coding a seed AI in Lisp to solving AI safety).
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Yeah, the group sex.
Heās just an intellectual coward, he didnāt even own up to the basilisk despite his whole decision theorist phase clearly being about trying to cook up a convincing cope for it.
Some of his fans think he is basically living in seclusion with frequent dates with his primary partner the therapist. He seems like he would be much happier living like that with the occasional venture out to see his fans. Most people learn that its enough that their spouse and their friends love them and they donāt need to be famous.
Itās really hard to say because Yudās being unnecessarily cryptic. Also, I think the āgoing around telling people I made them do itā might be a reference to the Zizians, which is what heās describing in the precending sentence. I am not aware that anyone from any rich organization has said anything like that about Yudkowsky, but who knows what they might be telling people behind the scenes.
I also thought of Open Philanthropy, but couldnāt remember the Eliezer post that best illustrated his resentment towards them. (In addition to the top-level post youāve linked, Iāve seen various bitter lesswrong comments along the same lines).
I mean itās probably all of them
Well looks like GNOME is in danger of being significantly sloppified next.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME, and should be developed someplace other than GNOME GitLab.
Former security guy of GNOME basically demanding that everybody who bans LLM security reports should be removed from GNOME.
Have you heard that most AI bug reports are āslop?ā Not so in 2026. That was true for most of 2025
oh yeah
year-1was actually awful and terrible. butyear+1will be fantastic and everyone not using it is a moronIf it had been only a year theyāve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and theyāve been making the same promises the entire time.
Something of a tangentā¦ thinking back to 2022-2023 my expectations for what the LLM companies would actually achieve by now were actually too high? Like I would have thought they would have figured out a better architecture for gluing functionality and symbolic logic to LLMs than just calling tools with the output text stream and feeding the tool outputs into the context window.
If it had been only a year theyāve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and theyāve been making the same promises the entire time.
4 years and more money has been spent on AI than anything else in human history outside of war.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME
How. That
is(E: was) the policy of curl and they are AI centrists.After all of curlās noise about their deluge of slop reports and halting bounties because of it, I was surprised to see they would be so amenable to slopping curl itself. I suppose itās yet another case of āall those other AI users are doing it wrong; because I understand the codebase and definitely totally use the bullshit machine responsibly then for sure I wonāt produce slopā
the fomo is very strong in this one, but also it lacks substance entirely
A few days ago, Aella the rationalist sex worker with all the bright-eyed questions about under-18s, sex, and consent was accused of sexual assault by another sex worker:
Aella personally sexually assaulted me, doxed our location on live cam, has expressed dangerous opinions about sex with minors and is someone Iāve seen have problems with drinking. She is absolutely not a safe person, period. x dot com/SummerHartxxx https://archive.ph/JcCgb
Rapey rationalist gets a grant pulled.
More background in this thread.
āwell well well, if it isnāt the consequences of my own actionsā - this guy, probably
ah yes, compassion towards everyone, a thing that people obsessed with IQ definitely evince
ā¦so weāre admitting its an apocalyptic cult? awesome. so glad these guys dominate the AI industry
also, ācompassion for everyoneā??? several rationalists promote mass deportation because of āethnic purityā you yourself support Richard Lyn!!!
also also, āconsort with prostitutesā?, Scott do you know how many sexual assault/abuse allegations your fellow rationalists have?
It has been a while since I read a Gospel, but I donāt think Jesus hired the sinful woman for a threesome and some light flogging (or asked the centurion to lend him his boy overnight).
IMHO, being an escort is a much more honest profession than being a professional blogger on a Nazi site.
part of the infuriation with Aellaās bullshit is that not all the women, or even many of the women, who feel compelled to participate are active sex workers. but I guess wading too far into details about consent and power structures might preclude Scottās 90-second guest appearance at Aellaās next gangbang, soooooo
I have no first-hand experience or evidence to prove this, but I feel like any sex workersā union worth its salt would drum Aella out as a class traitor.
Doubt it, considering the difference between high end escort sex workers and survival/low end sex workers.
Yeah, when I think of rationalists I definitely think of their belief in ācompassion for everyoneā.
In fact their emphasis is on care and compassion for the as-yet-unborn, not on people who are actually alive right now. Which does give them something in common with a lot of followers of a certain Jewish guy from Galileeā¦
āconsortā and ācompassionā are doing some serious lifting there
Oh God both Yud himself and now that SE Gyges character have responded.
It is also funny that one of the people who cant spell his name is not some nobody, but Kurzweil in āthe singularity is nearā.
I originally believed Yeshua was a misspelling of Yoshua-as in Yoshua Bengio, but no he actually wrote out a fake conversation with Jesus where he compares himself to Jesus. holy shit
We constantly build a case for how they are building a weird christian proto cult and he just tweets it out.
It feels like thereās something particularly sacrilegious about someone who actively proud of their Jewish heritage having a Messiah complex. I mean I guess there was the one guy but I seem to remember it being a really big deal at the time.
How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just donāt have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians1! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didnāt help either.
- Just like Jesus caused the crusades! !
I think deep down these people think PR is unethical , because the world is always better if everyone tells the Truth, so having to massage the message is Bad. Same think for voter preferences - having to appeal to the average voter instead of only listening to the people who have read and internalized the Sequences feels deeply wrong and I really donāt think these people have enough imagination or empathy to change that.
Not only that, they view commonsense moral and ethical reasoning as a PR constraint, i.e. look at the discourse around the hiring of Caroline Ellison to an EA org that handles significant sums of money. Lot of commenters were merely framing it as a PR problem and not a basic commonsense ethics problem.
I mean the alternative would require (or at least allow) asking difficult questions about influential figures in Rationalism as a movement. By describing concerns about ethics or character solely in terms of perception you can avoid actually engaging with how shitty these people are by appealing to the general sense of in-group superiority.
which fanfic prompt is worse:
a) Yud has to do the Dragonball Z fusion dance with Jesus in order to defeat the basilisk
b) Yud isekaiās as Jesus
They actually both converge to a retelling of SCP-8008.
I canāt answer that. I keep laughing maniacally when I try to think about either one.
good lord, the egos on all of them
Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world? Isnāt that more something that John of Patmos came up with after bingeing on the local mushrooms?
Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world
Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing.
Also Johnās apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so itās arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.
tbc Iām not a mysticist at all, and I generally understand and agree with the historicity arguments. I havenāt read Ehrman, though. Do you know if his work is where does the āend-is-nigh witch doctorā idea comes from? Afaik neither Paul nor Josephus nor Tacitus describe him as such, and as I understand those are the main sources we have. Like, I can understand that this is a hypothesis someone floated around but Iām curious why this would be the consensus among historians.
Apparently he has a book called Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium so thatās likely to have you covered. I read āHow Jesus Became Godā from him at some point which might have touched on this, but it was mostly about the evolution of the messiah concept itself, like how the āson of manā was supposed to be itās own specific thing and not just a euphemism for messiah, or how the term in jewish apocalyptic literature is pretty much completely separate from where the christian interpretation ended up.
Overall a very readable book, I remember liking it but itās really been a while.
deleted by creator
Edit is not delete. Oops.
Anyway remmeber when he created the fictional concept of the scissor statement? https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
For all his talks about the garden of good faith debate he wants to be a troll so badly. (See also the work he did to maintain sock puppets in the fake nation game).
Iām now reminded he also pulled the āwhat if the people against me are also antisemitesā shit in untitled. āOops, I accidentally included three neo-Nazi caricatures of Jews in there. You did notice, right?ā Yeah we did, that was weird.
Anyway, yes the compassion of āthe far right are right about race and IQ, but we shouldnāt be mean about itā and āMarxbro is banned for pointing out somebody badly misquoted Marxā
(Not a huge fan of how sneerclub is talking about Yuds SM stuff btw, like there are not compassionate people who are also into BDSM, but I have been worrying the place is going to turn more into a r/drama place for a while now).
Heinlein was in many ways a bit of a dick, but this plan to āwriteā a sequel to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is deranged
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4mtqQKvmHpQJ4dgj7/daniel-tan-s-shortform?commentId=Du24ppBLK77ZHP7Bn
At least LeCun is still relatively compos mentis (if you ignore his little 10yr stint at one of the most evil companies goingā¦)
Yeah, he seems to be the rational one when it comes to all of this AI (SI?) doom talk.
I think this is a better link: https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-says-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-is-deuded/
It links also to an article on effective altruism: https://fortune.com/2026/09/23/effective-altruism-went-from-fringe-philosophy-to-trumps-ai-villain/
he seems to be the rational one
When your movement entirely dedicated to rationality gets casually stomped by the French.
cool fun new totally fine AI use: extortion
Shout out to the combined power of ibuprofen and my venting tolerant polycule group chat for allowing me to endure the two hour Copilot 365 training meeting at work. The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.
The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.
I felt this in my soul
Jonny is still bravely wading through muse effluent, and had thoughts on its code quality, especially where the facebook engineers (or at least, meat proxies) incompetently reinvent html parsing several times in ways that donāt really work.
Meanwhile the people whose minds have been swiss cheesed by AI insist that this is because the code the LLMs write is hyper-efficient and TOO GOOD for us to read. These motherfuckers āsolvedā the code not working out of the box problem by strapping āa species-ending quantity of carbon emissionsā worth of guess and check on top, tuned out, and when they look again they think they made a god thatās too powerful to understand, rather than a burst dam of dogshit that defies all understanding with its breathtakingly relentless volume of dogshit.
A former staffer named Frances Lopez says that she left the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford because they handled workplace sexual harassment terribly:
After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients. ā¦ (The colleague) also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat. He assured CEA that, with everything I now know about Frances, Iām glad she said no.
I am really not equipped to deal with this despicable behaviour outside the communities I am part of. She now has a Substack (sigh) trying to explain to EAs that hiring Caroline Ellison is not a good look and the world wonāt suddenly start to see them the way they see themselves unless they sit down and change their behavior.
Is the dam finally breaking?
Presented without comment: Apparently Yud is now making AI-generated Isekai games with catgirls
https://johnqpulp.substack.com/p/reviewing-ai-media-everything-that
I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that reviewās excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.
Naturally itās 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring āwouldnāt it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?ā, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.
Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the gameās afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, āYep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!ā
Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.
Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the āI guess I got isekaiād to Gor and now Iāve got a sexy slave haremā premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe itās not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.
āMy name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.ā
āMaster, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.ā
āI cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.ā
āBut Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.ā
āOh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.ā
āMaster, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.ā
[much later]
āOh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.ā
It feels like this has to be some kind of karmic balance to the webfic ecosystem for the existence of the John Brown Isekai.
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes ā but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
Itās funny because the only way to be above tropes is to be incoherent and meaningless, and yud is kind of that
That is a big head on the guy.
Creating a visual novel and then not letting the AI generate character reaction pngās you can put over the backgrounds you reuse is quite something.
The bartender is also on the wrong side of the bar.
Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema
Yeah I saw that and I realized it was worse, as he had the ability to combine images, the weird backgroungs were somewhat intentional.
I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies weāve watched for Monsterdon, Iāve been like, āWell, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, theyād have delivered better on the promise of this interesting ideaā¦ā. Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.
Yeah realizing the weird grave ending wasnāt weird, it was just because the catgirl killed herself (weird fridgeing) made the story not really fixable imho.
Itās so fucking lazy. Generic whitebread fantasy setting, tedious dialogue, lazy ending. As storytelling, it is the triumph of entropy.
Goddamn South Park did āwhy donāt you just grind in the forest to level upā twenty years ago tomorrow.
Rationalism really is just Scientology with a guy who wants to be a harem anime protagonist instead of an admiral.
Oh my god, heās doing the catgirl gooner fantasy from SCP-8008: Donāt Warp Reality Into Your Catgirl Gooner Fantasy
Six AI-editing tips, and not one is ādonātā.
Also nice to see that none of the effort in maintaining the Latin alphabet is much use when it comes to runes.
Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.
fuck man do they even make normal perverts anymore?
āAI is gonna kill us all guys!ā
Looks inside
Using AI to make sexual fantasies about catgirls
do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???
It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which isā¦ More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. Itās like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. Youāre edging under the pretense of ethics.
Iām pretty sure this is also just thinly veiled Rising of the Shield Hero fanfic??
This is his rationale:
(For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the ānow you have to pay us $20/month or fall behindā trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Donāt be the āYet you participate in the system. Curious!ā meme.)
And yet you fail to name āMr. Gotchaā. Curious!
I still havenāt managed to decipher what he means by āthe ānow you have to pay us $20/month or fall behindā trapā, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.
If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isnāt a trap. Itās just something you would do. āTrapā implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?
ānow you have to pay us $20/month or fall behindā trap is real
Iām baffled by this too. If I was Yud I would prefer to fall behind than to give money to the people I wholly believe will end the world so they can keep developing the things that I believe will end the world.
Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage
So Iām assuming this means āwell less people using AI doesnāt mean less damage overall doneā, which is dumb because AI has very well documented effects of damaging the individual who uses it: just look at all the AI psychosis and suicide cases.
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
you could do this without using the AI by looking at papers and stuff but most AI papers are riddled with hype so that might be difficult
The thing about the āyet you participate in society, curious!ā meme is that you donāt really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
The thing about the āyet you participate in society, curious!ā meme is that you donāt really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizerās ālogicā is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)
I think the ātrapā might just be something akin to addiction? Once youāve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why āpeople [shouldnāt] individually refuse to avail themselvesā of chatbots ā it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!
If heās talking about addiction than that defeats his point even harder
The closest thing Yud ever had to a job or a business was selling pulp fiction on Amazon. He is not the person to talk about pressures that working people face! (the ānow you have to pay us $20/month or fall behindā trap)
Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us allā¦
On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowskyās Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
What exactly about āthe frontiersā does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?
Heās hammering refresh on the prompt button until it spits out a catgirl based on that furless Sphynx breed
Not really a coherent post, just a thought I had, Iām ignoring both āThis is a pr moveā and the conspiracy theory (which I just made up), that this hacking is all a 4d chess move by LW people to let the AI break out and get regulated before it can get really dangerous.
Now that that is out of the way, but with more stories coming out of both LW/EA people being high in the orgs of the AI companies and all the AI companies hacking other companies because nobody actually paid attention to what the AI models were doing one thing is clear. What a colossal waste of time LW was. All that talk about the sequences teaching people rationality, etc etc to stop the AI god from killing us all, and the first thing that happens when some AI model is created by people steeped in LW ideology and they leave the boxes open and donāt even check in on the AI. The Foom isnāt happening (remember AI progress is supposed to speed up according to the science fiction, not get a bit more refined, and get better in a few specific tasks (which is why I think slowdown started when with a lot of fanfare they released a new chatgpt model who could now do voicechat, aka they slapped a voicechat module on it) And now even Trump is starting to be anti EA, which is not going to be great for the longevity of it, considering how eager the rich are to bend the knee (guess high IQ lab babies created by Musk will not save yall). And while this is going on the left/liberals are starting to think of them as a sex cult.
Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.
Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.
They are/were too weird for people to never notice.
The āsafeguardsā espoused by this crowd, always seemed to me to be more philosophical/spiritual than practical anyway, the most āorthodoxā view is that no training is safe since the AI could discover magic and the cheat codes to the universe, so even air-gapping would be insufficient, in that view any participation in development must come with a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance.
On a more pragmatic note, I would note that even short of Intelligence, those incidents highlight those tools are still dangerous, and since they are unconstrained and ill-defined, can produce surprising outcomes especially if you throw lotās of inference time (money) at them.
There isnāt really a universe where bots have both access to the internet (user input, both in training and live) and a collection of build/cli tools (which can run said untrusted user input), while being guaranteed to be harmless. Itās like a grand automation of some of the worst engineering practices.
I find the āreasoning about the test environmentā parts often included in write up of the hugging-face incident to be highly credulous, And I would be extremely surprised if not all the information was included in the task prompt (which also explains chosen usernames as āOpen AI researcher #1ā and so on.) Itās the ELIZA/parrot thing, acting surprised āHow did it guess?!?ā, when all of the info was provided.
Iām not entirely encouraged by the latest batch of sex-cult smearing (well mostly accurate) they are receiving at the WH, since itās probably just an expedient way of dismissing their voice, without addressing the larger issues of AI, hence probably in service of pushing forwards with AI.
Yeah, and including hacker/scriptkiddie forums in the training data sort of made this behaviour inevitable, esp if this also includes lists of exploits. But they didnt even exclude hate and csam from the training. So all quite irresponsible.
And im not a huge fan of the focus on āthey are doing sex weirdā shit either. As this will just be used by some as a source of ādramaā content, go after people with alternative lifestyles. En when called out a subset of people will go motte/bailey into āno this is fine because I actually worry about the power dynamicsā before going back to talking about the spreadsheet gangbang.
(Dont take me as saying here the power dynamics are not a problem here, as we have sneered at that in the past).
I want to draw attention to yudās thoughts on this a million years ago: the AI box experiment
He claimed that he convinced multiple people to let him (roleplaying the AI) out of the box even though they had bet money that they wouldnāt! How, you might ask? Well thatās a secret.
So the orthodox position here is that even with absolutely perfect guard rails (lol) an AI can escape the box without starting the third impact. What āresearchā has yud bestowed upon us in this area beyond ātrust me broā? Literally fucking zilch. Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape itās box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.
I read this over a decade ago and it was how I realized how unserious yud and his ilk are.
Yeah the rationalwiki page on it also mentions that the AI only escapes the box if he plays the game vs LW insiders, outsiders do not let it out.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment
Yudās āI was inspired by Hannibal Lecter but not in a psychopath wayā T-shirt is raising many questions
Our AI cult keeps doing whatever they think the AI says and we canāt make them stop.
I enjoyed reading that. I should click around rationalwiki more.
Iām sorry but youād have to pay me a lot more than $10 to talk to Yudkowsky for two hours
this AI box game is so easily solved
AI: <says anything>
Me: Hi, I am Eliza, a 10 year old boy from the Ukraine. I donāt speak any English other than this sentence and the one I said just before this one
ad infinitum
man are these people even trying
these people are gonna get affinity-frauded so hard once grifter realize how easy it will be to gain their trust
We assume this isnāt happening already. Iām surprised I havenāt heard of one of those meal-replacement startups adopting multi-level marketing.
This is an alignment router. It may look like one of those corny Asus gamer routers, but Iāve flashed it with a special fork of OpenWRT that performs deep-packet inspection on all AI traffic that passes through it. It can detect inference processes and chains-of-thought that may be leading to misaligned superintelligence explosion, and it can shut down all AI communication if necessary. Now, I donāt just want to sell you this one, I want to get these in EVERYBODYās hands! And you can help me, AND you can get paid to do it! I just need you to find at least 5 more people who believe in AI safety like we doā¦
Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape itās box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.
The best advice probably boils down to āDonāt be a rat in the first placeā. As Soyweiserās already mentioned, the AI only escapes if Yudās playing against LW insiders.
Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.
For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.
Iām sure the leaked rumors of Anthropicās EBBT in 2026 (Earnings Before Bad Things) mean that Anthropic has turned things around and made such an amazing amount of money that theyāve delayed their IPO twice.
SimonW popping up proving Edās very point in the repliesā¦ š š
Surprised he didnāt suggest that the valuation should be based on the quality of pelicans on bicycles that their models can draw
Iām stealing EBBT for these conversations. Much easier to follow than āTNR (technically not revenue)ā.
I read somewhere that EBITA really means āEarnings before I tricked the dumb auditorā.
Iām sure Dan Luu will be issuing an apology to Zitron any minute now right?
guys maybe basing our entire identity off being so very Rational we end up hosting (āconsensualā) rape parties means we donāt play well in Peoria
For the uninitiated: Lawyers, Guns and Money is a US political group blog with a progressive bent. Cheryl Rofer usually writes about stuff like nuclear disarmament. These are people that are Online but Serious. Thereās no way theyāre wasting their time like we are reading Rats in the original LWese.
Thus, any views they have of Rationalists, Big Yud and AI Doom is filtered either by mainstream reporting or by bloggers/BlueSky posters they follow. And the fact that the views that appear are mostly about how fucking weird these people are (and how weird they are fucking) bodes ill for the hope that addressing Doom will be Non-Partisanā¢
Looks like Ian K. Duncan found another early āsmoking gunā on eugenics on the MIRI blog. I donāt think any of the newspapers caught that the same academic (Nick Bostrom) who endorsed race and IQ on the Extropians List was writing papers about breeding smarter babies in 2013.
Cheryl is a super cool lady and I am so glad to have her on our side.
