I'm sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It can't be real (It''s definitely real).

Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if there's one problem with weed it's that it's not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing it's going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.

This is a serious blow to coolness, from which not even drugs will easily recover.

If it's "agentic," doesn't that imply it smokes weed for you

Agentic Ripz is my new jam band.

Wake me up when there’s an agentic butt plug

What a rogue's gallery. Truly a chilling portrait of the sworn enemies of trillions of unborn human beings.

'top ai'. so it is a sex thing after all.

Just looking at that picture makes me hear googles of unsimulated people scream in terror.

Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.

Does "read a second book" apply here, or is this a "read a first book" situation?

while it's technically plausible that Ziz was involved in a minor oopsy whoopsy fucky wucky deady weady or two or six, she's always been lovely to me, much of the time,

The back-and-forth between Gwen and LessWrong commenters is getting spicy. This definitely deserves a top-level post on SneerClub.

Habryka's all, "Dammit, why do you have to come here and remind everyone where the Zizians came from?"

EDIT: This person also seems to have no concept of the finality of death, which might explain why the Zizians were so murdery.

Uh oh

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/gwen-danielson-zizians-interview-1235552043/

Going on a media tour now

soul forges continually working to bring back the dead

Even in death, duty does not end.

I’m Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death

thiel jumpscare

Ah yup, that is definitely the type of person who’s deeply attracted to cults.

Tante nails it again. No notes.

That he has a LinkedIn finally explains how I first heard of him. A liberal but very startup/hustle culture brained colleague shared an anti-blockchain thing on the Slack. Always wondered how she stumbled on a comm(o|u)nist tech critic, but it must've been LI.

It's fine, spyware is only a risk when it's bad people's spyware. It's totally fine when it's Anthropic™-approved spyware!

As for Mythos catching things, maybe they should have used Mythos on their very own Claude Code considering that it has hilariously obvious security exploits, such as this one which inserts an arbitrary string into a shell command. Actually, never mind I don't see anything wrong here, maybe we should burn another $20k in electricity running Mythos on it again to find out.

Well it does have the secret "Any attempt to arrest a senior officer of OCP results in shutdown" derective.

Their heart seems to be in the right place, police interrogation will be exploitative and brainwashy with no real consequences for the interrogators, but they sure chose the dumbest possible way to make their point:

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

"ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?"

Wtf is up with the face in the top left circle.

The poster goes on to whine about how it sucks it's not the same as solving puzzles and they're just QAing all day now and calls the LLM a slot machine, so at least they're not boosting.

Still, they don't go so far as to say they were forced to work this way, so their not even looking at the code either means they're a lazy bum or that it's too far past incoherent to be worth it.

I can't imagine the Mouse being happy about this cameo.

looks up, shrugs Everybody involved here kind of sucks, best of luck to all of them. looks back down

For the uninformed (like myself), the odd fox out is a character from Zootopia (pic related), which is a Disney movie.

Bold move to steal from The Mouse in broad daylight, isn't it?

Who TF was using LED lights for indoor lighting in the 1990s? Compact flourescents were the lightbulb replacement in the oughties.

And how TF do you write that post without using the phrase "sensory sensitivity" and citing some women who know they have autism? Once you know you are more sensitive to your environment than allistics, you can start to experiment with interventions.

Dramatic fascistic "RETVRN" language and focus on aesthetics aside, my wife and I actually dug into some of this lighting quality stuff a while ago and while our very good friend here does a poor job explaining it there is a definite difference in normal LEDs vs incandescent or natural light. The LED spectra is fascinating - big spikes at a couple wavelengths and nothing in between. In my experience with switching to the fancier high-CRI LEDs the difference is pretty minimal. Feels like a possible case where you don't notice it, but your brain does. For my wife it seems to have helped reduce the incidence and severity of her crippling migraines, which is obviously more impactful. I don't think I'd say it beautified the space or brought us back to the halcyon days of our glorious past, but that's been huge for us all the same. The plural of anecdote is not cliche, but there's not nothing here.

jesus fucking christ this is insufferable, these guys have been masking off for so long now that they're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find new things to do fascist signalling about

This was the greatest uglification in history.

Seems like a market opportunity for some special lights/glass that recreates the natural feeling light they want. (I have some lower light leds in older style lamps and I'm having, for me, nice and cosy lighting. Only issue seems to be me getting older and my eyes getting worse with age.

[lament about ill effect of AI, here's why it's terrible]

I use AI sparingly for

this is critihype

Okay, today's Rat fixation that I want to rant about is "constructing hypothetical examples to justify my idiosyncratic position." Like, I'm not even interested in arguing about whether their conclusion makes sense in their hypothetical world, I'm more curious about what kind of chain of thought leads you to speculate about that in 2026. Like, maybe I'm reading way too much into this but in practical terms it feels like "how do I justify voting for the Republicans no matter how far-right they might go, if my local Democrats try to move the tiniest bit left?" which feels like the rat/tech ethos in a nutshell.

Or maybe it's the more traditional past time of trying to construct arguments in favor of controversial-sounding positions so that you can feel smarter and more open-minded than everyone else.

Unfortunately, our problem right now is not Donna the below-average Democrat but Donald the fascist. And when it comes to fascists I do not ask if they are above or below average.

I think that, while many LessWrong readers do believe that one party is way better than the other, such that the inter-party quality variation is far larger than the intra-party quality variation, this is not true of all readers.

... Wait is this about race and iq again?

Anyway the math ain't mathing, as there never can be a republican above average enough to counterbalance out that they are an republican.

Unfortunately there are a few things that make courts pretty tricky to implement in practice for things like the rationality, AI safety and EA communities. Badly implemented courts also can just make things worse by creating a clear target for attack and pressure. Seems very tricky, but probably we should have more courts (or maybe not, I would need to write the post to figure it out).

yesss yesss lesswrong people's tribunals and struggle sessions let's gooooooooo

The fire code thing really is an excellent example of LessWrong Brain. Fire truck drivers insist on needlessly large trucks (no citation) which makes roads 30% wider than they would otherwise be (no citation) which has "probably" "non-trivially" contributed to larger cars (no citation) leading to enough additional road fatalities to cancel out the lives saved by stricter fire codes (no citation).

The LessWrong Brain argument starts with a deliberately contrarian conclusion and proves it with a Rube Goldberg chain of logical syllogisms. Of course, citations are strictly optional, and they are free to misinterpret them as they see fit. The only real standard of each claim is "looks good to me", but you are supposed to be impressed that they managed to string a dozen of them together to reveal some shocking, deep truth of the world that nobody else knows about. The AI 2027 nonsense is an infamous example of this.

He uses the word "fermi" which is cult jargon based on Fermi estimation, a.k.a. guessing shit with back-of-the-envelope calculations. Not exactly what you want if you want to convince people to reform fire codes, especially if you have zero citations for anything.

I guess people just aren't rational enough, and the only reason the fire codes are so irrational is because people are emotional about fire codes. Firefighters are apparently revered as heroes, when it is the LWers who should be the heroes. After all, firefighters merely save people from fires, while LWers buy multimillion dollar mansions to talk about saving quadrillions of hypothetical people from hypothetical basilisks!

Fire codes are the root of all evil

Ah somebody got told by their landlord not to do something. (I remember our student housing landlord (a big org) was regularly claiming 'fire codes' as an excuse to get rid of stuff in semi public areas. The actual fire codes didn't demand this btw, it was just the excuse they used to stop students from filling everything with random trash).

I think building codes and zoning reform are good topics to get into in rich English-speaking countries but you have to 1) learn from actual experts not x.com/wiseAss1488, and 2) engage in local politics and policy and not just post to nerds around the world.

I knew some people who lived in Switzerland for a bit and they joked that it was a libertarian paradise because you can drink and smoke when you're a teenager, the age of consent is 16 and everyone is issued a gun as part of their military service. I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously....

Afaik Switzerland does have a unique system of federated democratic governance, one of the oldest democratic systems in Europe. The downside is that women weren't able to vote in some Swiss cantons until the 90s.

Fire accidents seem to have the unique combination of producing extremely strong emotional responses by people in a local community, while also often being traceable to an o-ring like failure that you can over-index on.

Gee, why would people get emotional about friends and family being burnt alive. How bizarre.

Also I am not a fire expert by any means whatsoever and maybe I'm missing this guy's point. But pretty much every account I have ever read of a fire that killed a lot of people is like "the building did not meet fire safety standards and the management had been dodging calls from the fire safety inspectors. Multiple people said the building was unsafe. On the night the fire happened the fire exits were chained shut." Like, read about this horrendous fire that happened near where I live. There is no need to bring up o-rings. Fires in residential buildings and entertainment venues are not the same as fires on NASA spaceships.

Also fire codes do not control the size of fire engines. That's a bad decision made by firefighters.

I'm a huge fan of Greg Egan's fiction and a huge fan of him pissing off the rats. He's been explicitly needling them and making fun of them in his fiction for over a decade. Making calm contradictions against them for over two decades, after noticing weirdos being fans of his.

I rarely find that reading fiction makes me upset […] fiction can be quite bad, but rarely do I find it personally offensive…

Rat reading a book that makes fun of AI doom in passing:
Me, a trans woman immigrant:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mel-gibson-talking-to-bloody-jesus

This has been getting posted repeatedly on a reddit sub I follow and it's funny that we're still finding Harris fans who somehow didn't catch on for all these years that the dude is just straight up racist and hates Muslims on an individual basis. The fact that he was probably the most commonly mentioned podcaster on the slate star codex sub is a sign!

I'll steal my general remark from one of the threads on DTG:

Sam, if you're allowed to call the mayor an Islamist because his wife liked some posts on social media, can we call you a racist for having a notorious racist on your podcast to yammer about the woke menace?

Why? So it can be firebombed?

(don't fire-bomb residences people)

also it's hilarious that a 5% local tax surcharge on a place you don't even live in is considered Stalinism

To be fair, while I'm not familiar with the discourse in China I know a lot people consider (rightly) "alignment" as a framing to be a red flag for cranks and rats. It's not that surprising that this attitude hasn't been getting much recognition when the marketing departments of ai companies has been more engaged on that subject than serious academics.

In the same period, the English-language alignment and AI ethics literature produced no substantive engagement. No citations. No rebuttal.

Wow it's almost like alignment and AI ethics studies is less a serious academic field and more like a prank capital likes to play on consumers.

But I also think Zhao Tingyang's take that alignment will make AI evil because people are evil falls too much into the the-people-deserve-to-be-disempowered totalitarian state funny business side of things to be especially influential down these parts.

It's not just that he fails a purity test it's that he basically only cares about his pet issues like right to repair and hating copyright and positions himself as a social activist while twisting real social issues to fit into his framework of 'copyright bad, hackers fix this.'

Too narrow of a scope to be useful I think.

When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he's referring to has to be capitalism. The "unaligned AI is already here, it's corporations" trope has been around for a while, and I don't think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.

I think you can't usefully tackle just the capitalism of the tech industry, if you don't understand the wider system around it. I mean the VC that sloshes around in tech to raise up one bullshitteer after another comes from somewhere. Real estate, mining, fossil fuels, etc.

It's not so much he fails the purity test than it is he thinks all gen-ai works like whisper on a laptop and open source LLMs grow on trees.

edit: and also that big company engineers are encouraged to be discreet in using them, like what?