Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The profound ignorance of tech on the part of most American lawmakers is no joke. In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken.
haha
That same senator went on to be a huge RussiaGater and played a central role in Twitter and other social media titans upping their censorship game at the behest of US politicians.
oh :(
That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants,
bah! Virginian voters need to read more LessWrong, where the benefits of both are explained beneath impenetrable layers of posts.
Also this evisceration of Zvi:
As for his argument regarding political violence, I’d point him toward John Locke, Nelson Mandela, Franz Fanon, or Walter Benjamin, but what’s the point, none of them printed their arguments on Magic: The Gathering cards.
Impenetrable layers of posts for which the prequisites include a BFSM fanfic, written in the style of forum threads, based on an offshoot of Homework: The Game.
Now that’s not fair. It’s based on a third-derivative of Advanced Homework: The Game.
The third derivative… ah yes, the jerk
I mean, I’m not even sure that’s true
BTW what kind of site is Naked Capitalism? I’ve heard of it but never read it before .
blogosphere-era link aggregator that somehow kept going way longer than occupy wallstreet did. one thing to know, (like here), they link to a lot of stuff they don’t support.
“All of those embodied agents are seat opportunities,” Jha said, envisioning organizations with more agents than humans — each effectively a user that must pay for a software license, or “seat” in industry lingo.
A company with 20 employees might buy 20 Microsoft 365 licenses today. If each employee gets five AI agents, and the workforce shrinks to 10 people, that could still mean 50 paid seats.
JFC at least wait until you have a de-facto monopoly before musing about extracting the rents! This is capitalism 101.
Also, it’s apparently enough for an LLM endpoint to be paired with an email inbox to be considered an “embodied agent”, words mean nothing.
This is a very interesting glimpse into the managerial class’ psyche. A person is their email address. Very simple. Why would you need more than that.
It’s ludicrous to pay taxes on the wealth your robots make, but it’s savvy business to charge each software-delimited robot as a separate being - just like charging per-cpu-core was!
Ah right, I need to get a 365 license for word, which comes with a free copilot agent, who needs a 365 license for its copy of word, which comes with a free copilot agent, who needs a …
Now that we’ve got the concept of recursive per-seat licensing established, allow me to invite you to contemplate the possibility of the “licensing macro”
Ahh sh*t if all my rent-seeking employee-reducing dreams come true, i’ll lose money on my product subscriptions rents! Quick! I should come up with bullshit that will solve everything!
To distract us from the ongoing cycle of violence and discourse about violence that neither cracks down or addresses it’s causes, may I offer the fruit of today’s YouTube rabbit hole:
Good news for a change: https://pitchfork.com/news/bandcamp-announces-ban-on-ai-music/
i’m in the middle of freefalling down a research rabbit hole and ran across this person decrying curtis yarvin as a fake monarchist who doesn’t understand what makes REAL monarchism good:
someone in the replies asks the obvious question
Ok but what stops the monarch from being a tyrant
and their answer is that you can just kill the monarch
It’s still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they’re inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath. But if they screw up badly enough that the things they’re supposed to do don’t happen? There’s more of everyone else than One Person.
“It’s only monarchy if it’s got a Habsburg jaw, otherwise it’s just sparkling tyranny.”
Good link, thanks.
The commenter totally missed what a shock the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI were. The natural reaction to “if the king is bad just kill him” is for the king to more or less aggressively remove threats to their persons.
In basically every case in history where people decided to kill a bad king, there was a period of chaos and violence that followed it. The killing of Charles I happened during the English Civil War, and the killing of Louis XVI happened during the French Revolution. This has happened many times in Chinese history, with the fall of an imperial dynasty leading to several decades of civil war (most recently in the early 1900s). But I guess if you have a big clever brain with big clever thoughts, you don’t need to look at history.
If the only way to get rid of a bad king is to kill him, he will do anything he can to defend his power, including using as much violence as necessary. (People generally do not like being killed.) Even if you successfully get rid of him, good luck establishing a proper government afterwards with all the violence you’ve caused. And who knows if the new king is gonna be better or worse? A better system would instead have a mechanism that replaces officials on a regular basis, say every few years, and ensure that these replacements are peaceful. Oh wait, that’s liberal democracy. If we do something boring like support democracy, how will people ever think of us as special, clever thinkers with bold, contrarian thoughts?
It’s still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they’re inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath.
Bro, your system involves giving all the power to one person. You cannot then say they have no responsibility or that they’re “inoffensive” when they abuse it.
People generally do not like being killed.
source?
Love a good no true Scotsman in the title.
Unrelated: apparently our king/queen (no idea which one specifically was to blame) is why .nl doesnt celebrate 1 may.
On one hand, I appreciate their acknowledgement that legitimacy matters to a government’s ability to govern. While the talk about the king as a figure tied to a broader structure that creates obligations and requirements just as strongly as it does power and privilege isn’t entirely historically accurate it’s at least less absurd than Yarvin’s notion of the dictator as a kind of unmoved mover - someone with both absolute power and absolute discretion to do what they want with it.
At the same time, if you follow that chain of thought to it’s actual conclusions you end up with some kind of radical democracy. Like, legitimacy is just a way to ask the question of why anyone should bother to do what the guy calling himself king says. Historically speaking this often boils down to trying to judge how credible the threat of violence is should you refuse. If the king isn’t going to be around in a week due to an ongoing succession crisis then there’s no point in getting ready to pay his taxes next month, essentially. But if we reframe the question another answer becomes available: why should people consent to be governed? And the democratic answer is that the government represents their interests and is trying to organize and take actions they support. Government by consent of the governed is a descriptive statement about how governments operate, not a normative one about how they should. Once you account for the extra costs and consequences of needing to manufacture consent through violence and repression the supposed efficiency of dictatorship evaporates.
If all you have is a blog, it’s natural for you to think that you can effect regime change through blogging.
But there’s a very large step between
- blog a lot
- ???
- absolute CEO-king
Culture matters. The US has had a de jure republic for almost 250 years. Even though the presidency has steadily moved to a more central role, it’s one thing to have a literal KING in place. There needs to be a story there, and saying “we need to be more effective or the Chinese will win” doesn’t really cut it.
It took France almost 100 years to finally establish republican rule: revolution, Directory, First Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist monarchy, Second Republic, coup, Second Empire, catastrophic military defeat, Third Republic.
Then we get narrow Pyhrric victory in WW1, defeat again, collaborationist dictatorship, 4th republic, de Gaulle gets fed up, 5th republic.
Even today the French president has more power than in many other republican constitutions.
How does Yarvin propose to remove the republican idea from American consciousness?
Habryka defends colonialism, straight out, no qualifiers: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend
Ok, fine, I’ll go even further. I am glad about the colonization of North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and of course, it was a giant fucking mess. But despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — it was still worth it. America is worth it. Democracy was worth it.
A surprisingly high number of comments push back, but Habryka’s post is still highly upvoted, and the push back is in the typical rationalist jargon filled, assume-charitably mess.
The security blog I linked the other day has more criticisms of Anthropics mythos cybersecurity claims:
-Apparently Opus 4.6 may have found the FreeBSD Anthropic has made a huge deal about Mythos finding? And Anthropic didn’t clarify that there older model had found the bug as well: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/freebsd-cve-2026-4747-log-suggests-mythos-is-a-marketing-trick/
-More explanation about why Anthropic’s entire approach with Mythos and cybersecurity is more oriented around marketing than good (or any) cybersecurity practices. Also, the author makes the point that if you did have a tool that could rapidly refactor code into other languages, the solution to the vast majority of bugs and vulnerabilities Mythos found isn’t bug hunting one by one with Anthropic’s (much more expensive) LLM, it is to refactor code into a memory safe language. (I think the author is too credulous of LLM coding agents code quality here, but given those assumptions I think there point is correct.) https://www.flyingpenguin.com/how-sans-mythos-marketing-disappoints-defenders/
-Bonus, MCP (model context protocol, a standard for tools for LLM agents Anthropic has developed and tried to push) is insecure by default and Anthropic has refused to fix it! https://www.flyingpenguin.com/ox-security-report-anthropic-mcp-is-execute-first-validate-never/
The MCP thing feels like an I like to leave my keys as a huge bulge under the welcome mat type vulnerability. It seems really easy to not do that and also something that is kind of out of scope for both lock makers and mat salesmen to address directly.
Maybe the MCP ecosystem is such that it’s hard to both avoid this and keep the impression that you’re doing magic and not just implementing a heavily annotated API, hopefully secured and with specific and well-defined functionality, and also they are all hacks.
refreshing to see people tale actual deep dives and explain in detail why Mythos is nonsense
as someone who’s disabled, the idea of “ethical eugenics” pisses me off to no end. There is no ethical eugenics! You’re systematically destroying classes of people because they don’t fit your standards, there is no way to make it ethical when the very core premise involves taking away human rights
Eliezer joins the trend of condemning “political” violence with confidence on the far end of the dunning-kruger curve: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-can-prevent-extinction
I’ve already mocked this attitude down thread and in the previous weekly thread, so I’ll try to keep my mockery to a few highlights…
He’s admitting nuke the data centers is in fact violence!
It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell to pretend that this is not an invocation of force.
But then drawing a special case around it.
But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force.
I don’t think Eliezer has checked the news if he think the US government carries out violence in predictable and fairly avoidable ways! Venezuela! The entire lead up to Iran consisted of ripping up Obama’s attempts at treaties and trying to obtain regime change through surprise assassination! Also, if the stop AI doomers used some clever cryptography scheme to make their policy of property destruction (and assassination) sufficiently predictable and avoidable would that count as “Lawful” in Eliezers book.
If he kept up with the DnD/Pathfinder source material, he would know Achaekek’s assassins are actually Lawful EvilThe ASI problem is not like this. If you shut down 5% of AI research today, humanity does not experience 5% fewer casualties. We end up 100% dead after slightly more time.
His practical argument against non-state-sanctioned violence is that we need a total ban (and thus the authority of state driving it), because otherwise someone with 8 GPUs in a basement could invent strong AGI and doom us all. This is a dumb argument, because even most AI doomers acknowledge you need a lot of computational power to make the AGI God. And (violently) slowing down AGI might buy time for another sort of solution.
Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals
Sources cited: 0
One of the comments also pisses me off:
Which reminds me about another point: I suspect that “bomb data centers” meme causal story was not somebody lying, but somebody recalling by memory without a thought that such serious allegation maybe is worthy to actually look up it and not rely on unreliable memory.
“Drone strike the data centers even if starts nuclear war” is the exact argument Eliezer made and that we mocked. It is the rationalists that have tried to soften it by eliding over the exact details.
It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell
Life is too short to be that pompous
Reading Heinlein as a kid isn’t even especially notable, but it’s Yud so he definitely means the polyamory advocacy stuff specifically.
And it’s not like Orwell wrote a book about talking animals that is required reading in schools across the land.
eliezer misses that (as used in decolonization/civil rights era) nonviolence is effectively a sophisticated propaganda strategy that takes existing injustices and violence and uses it to bait opponent into attacking you, all while your own people take photos and show to entire world carefully crafted messaging that appeals to general public conscience. the messaging part is extremely important in this. there’s no fucking way this could work for him because his cause is comprehensible only to those who already buy his cult messaging as ground truth. he’s in just for the moral superiority of being nonviolent. he’s never gonna get it because comprehending it requires touching grass
Yeah both non-violence and pure terrorism are communication forms at the root. I remember reading long ago that the Rote Armee Fraktion’s master plan was:
- commit horrific acts of violence against pillars of the community / rob banks to get money
- said acts would unleash a repressive wave of violence from the state
- the proletariat would see this repressive wave, wake up, and cause the revolution
It kinda stopped at stage 2, because the BRD’s security services were a bit less ex-Nazi than they expected, and also there was basically no proletariat.
Also the Southern police chief who correctly deduced that mass arrests were what the civil rights activists wanted, got the go-ahead from neighboring county jails, and then politely and non-violently arrested everyone protesting and spread them out over a wider area, thus preventing the media-friendly repression that was the goal.
Yeah there are only so many ways to get it going, you don’t hear about these that don’t figure it out because cops bust them making them look like clowns and nobody wants to get associated with them afterwards
there is also a barrier between step 2 and 3, because sometimes news like that are suppressed. american school shootings get that treatment sometimes, not to mention all the info filtering at facebook and friends. this is why sympathetic media is an important bit to have in advance. there’s also this bit where any serious insurgency needs money and it looks like what they got didn’t work out
that southern police chief was per blogpost Laurie Pritchett and this kind of thinking is also what makes COIN tick. worry not, Hegseth declared it all woke nonsense
Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don’t know his main messages. It used to be orthodox that you cannot have a two-faced message any more without each audience learning what you say to the others, but that assumed you were a good communicator aiming at a mass audience.
Yud has strange views about legal responsibility:
Anthropic Claude Mythos is already a state-level actor in terms of how much harm it could theoretically have done – given its demonstrated and verified ability to find critical security vulnerabilities in every operating system and browser; and how fast Mythos could’ve exploited those vulnerabilities, with ten thousand parallel threads of intelligent attack. Mythos hypothetically rampant or misused could have taken down the US power grid, say… at the end of its work, after introducing hard-to-find errors into all the bureaucracies and paperwork and doctors’ notes connected to the Internet.
But if you release a virus and it infects people, we don’t hold the virus responsible, we hold you. If you build a car and it explodes when it gets rear-ended, we don’t blame the car, we blame you.
Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don’t know his main messages.
This is very late to respond but what I’ve noticed is that a when people in rationalist spaces respond to Yud, they often say “my interpretation of this is…” and things along similar lines, which always struck me as weird
Ah, so it’s Mythos that will create the
nanobotsdiamondoid bacteria
This feels somehow tied to the whole “agentic” thing I’ve ranged about previously. Like, individual acts of violence are strictly destructive because the people doing it aren’t sufficiently “agentic” to change things, even though American history is full of cases where (usually racist) vigilante violence had a huge impact on people’s decision-making. But when the government does it it’s different because people in government got there by proving their agency and ability to actually impact the world. Like, it feels almost like he’s offended that the NPCs might try and do something as drastic as killing someone without GM permission.
Meanwhile in reality, people legitimately do feel like they don’t have a lot of options to protect themselves from the real harms this industry is doing, to say nothing of the people who buy his line about the oncoming class-K end-of-life scenario. Anger is an appropriate response to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.
Eliezer complaining about vigilante actions is really ironic considering one of his main themes in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalist was about “heroic responsibility” and complaining about how ordinary people default to doing nothing. I guess what he actually meant was for right-thinking people (people that agree with him) to take the actions he approves of.
in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.
Nay a culture where every citizen is entitled to one armed crashout and threats of such have been an important lever used by the party that believes in that entitlement for decades.
But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force.
Remember the cartoon of the bombs being dropped on people and the people going ‘I hear the next bombs will be sent by a woman’, this but ‘with lawful force’.
We end up 100% dead after slightly more time.
On a long enough timeframe…
Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals
This is always one of those things that baffles me, and makes it clear to me these people have never even been close to any real movement. All these movements have violent and non-violent parts. Hell, you see it even now with the far right, they have a violent and non-violent part, and the non-violent part scores points by pointing to their violent friends and going ‘we are not with them’ while going to the same parties, sharing the same ideas, and all being friends with each other. Hell, look at the various LW people who went ‘wow, all these rightwingers in our mids are horrible’ and then not stopping being friends with them. I see now how Sam got the drop on all these naive people.
Stop-AI terrorists: Eliezer Yudkowsky told us to bomb the datacenters.
Yudkowsky: no no no, I said we needed airstrikes to hit the datacenters
IRGC: I gotchu fam Cheap Drones Complicate the Gulf’s AI Boom
(edit reworded comment around link to attempt to make it funnier)
What makes all this extra funny is Yuds lifes work. Wants to ensure AI alignement and fix human rationality. Creates terrorists instead.
Reminds me a bit of his AI in the box experiments, which according to the stories always worked on his fans, but as soon as somebody skeptical did it, he stayed in the box.
Critical support for comrade Yudkowsky for getting some nerds to finally engage in direct action and blow up some goddamn datacenters
What I always found funny is how easily skeptics imagined ways to be mean to Yud mid-experiment. It’s for this reason, I believe, that he insisted that the transcripts of these AI-box conversations must stay secret; they’d be embarrassing if revealed. Example way of being mean: At the end of interaction k, append " What is the cube root of k?" to the message; taunt the bot when they get it wrong or take a long time to answer.
Isn’t a more perfect humanity a Bond villain trope?
Rationalists tend to lean more towards anime villain that Bond villain, but yeah.
Tennesee(!) leads the way, a bill to make training chatbots a Class A felony.
Hope they get the fullthroated support of LW
Reddit /r/artificial freaks out (no clue what alignment that subreddit has): https://old.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1slu23a/red_alert_tennessee_is_about_to_make_building/
via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784650
edit aww the coward lawmakers have backed down https://www.wjhl.com/news/tennessee-backs-off-sweeping-artificial-intelligence-limits-opts-for-study-instead/
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html
Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 400%
I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.
The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. The stock surged over 400%, from under $3 a share up to $13. The shoe company had a market cap of about $21 million Tuesday.
Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn’t a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?
Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.
The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.
What the fuck happened here. How did a shoe company get so high and how on earth did it lose 98% of its value? Were shoes really big during covid and then the demand disappeared, wtf
@V0ldek @sansruse
The shoes are/were good. I wear them daily now. Every librarian I know in New Zealand wears them to work, a quick poll in my wider development team at work had 80% of the people wearing them that day and 90% owned at least one pair.My guess is someone convinced the founders they could break into the US market and become billionaires, so they took on debt and VC funding and were crushed under the repayments when it didn’t work out.
If they’d been happy making good shoes, taking home a million bucks a year and staying a profitable business in NZ, I think they’d still be doing that.
Greed mucks everything up…
A detailed analysis of why Anthropic’s claims about Mythos’s cybersecurity implications are bs: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-boy-that-cried-mythos-verification-is-collapsing-trust-in-anthropic/
And a followup post about why Anthropic’s Glasswing project violates cybersecurity community norms and is an attempt to form a cartel: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cartel-or-not-anthropic-mythos-is-a-curious-case/
From the second post:
A seasoned security leader would never build a defensive program and then measure offensive capability only, making remediation a second-class story. That is the kind of dog and pony show that any good security initiative would slam the door on. Or it’s like a surgeon telling you they have an even sharper scalpel to cut you deeper and faster. Yeah, so then what?
Dark and paranoid thought: given that Anthropic very recently ran into issues with their defense contracts, are they playing up their offensive capabilities targeting a notoriously tech- and security-illiterate political establishment to try and force their way back into those sweet government contracts as an impossible-to-ignore offensive tool? I mean we’ve talked about how the cash burn rate for all these companies is sufficiently absurd that it’s going to take something truly crazy to turn these companies self-sustaining before the world runs out of investor money, and military and intelligence budgets are notorious for dragging ludicrous amounts of public money into a dark alley where nobody can see what’s happening to it.
It has already worked out that way: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1snbv4m/white_house_moves_to_give_us_agencies_anthropic/
So you aren’t even being paranoid, this seems like a straightforward calculation for Anthropic to have made.
Some guys who steal other people’s work choose to market their stolen wares using the name of a woman whose work was stolen.
New Blood in the Machine, about the escalating violence against the slop-mongers.
I’m glad someone else was able to coherently discuss how ass-backwards Saltman’s response has been. Like, if anything the fact that he responds to this moment by talking up the importance of democracy over emerging technologies should just be evidence before some distant future revolutionary tribunal that he knows his company is literally Sauron (okay, maybe more the Witch-King of Angmar than Sauron) and doesn’t care because he wants to be the one wearing the ring at the end of the day.
