You should try to make your point in a way that doesn't involve idiosyncratically appropriating existing terms, god knows there's enough technobabble muddling the discourse already.

"Genetic algorithms are the thing balls and lines do on unity on youtube and also that's how LLMs get trained, from the blackbox program generator" is like the experimental theater version of being wrong, there was no need to double down.

Genetic algorithms (and backpropagation, which is probably what you got it mixed up with) don't remotely work on a level where terms like strategy are meaningful.

This even made the news in my parts, in case you weren't 150% sure if it's big-money backed AI white washing marketing push. Even their website host vercel.com list their primary business as 'agentic infrastructure', i.e. selling AI wrangling software.

Rodriguez is a founding partner at the mergers and acquisitions advisory firm Avolta

His avolta bio also notes

Philippe is a leading figure in the European crypto and blockchain industry, serving as the president of Bitcoin France for three years

Which OK least surprising thing ever. So (per google) a crypto guy, a magazine publisher and a banker with an e-voting business walk into a bar and found an AI literary award, I wonder who got the effective altruism grant first. Maybe in late November when the judges are revealed we get a clearer picture of the people involved.

What do you think genetic algorithms are exactly? The way you write about them is really weird. Also they have next to nothing to do with LLMs as far as I know.

(edit: Isn't he like a vice assistant (to the) chief executive of something or other in anthropic? apparently not) There's just no telling how many of the roons of the world are going to become billionaires from this IPO, what a terrible state of affairs.

Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?

These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users' devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices' digital locks.

It it's anything like any android device I've ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.

Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices.

groan.

It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?

I don't know what I'm supposed to get from this piece, it feels like he's saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as you're willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically what's left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.

There's also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I don't know, seems kind of familiar if you've been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you'd also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.

He specifies Claude 10, so it's after the ??? in the checklist, and spicy autocomplete will be widely accepted to qualify for sentience by then I guess.

The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, we're definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway here's how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes.

He almost gives away the game when he says christians don't feel like slaves when they say 'thy will be done' so letting Claude run society would feel fine.

The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.

In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors

According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article's summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn't even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn't happening.

Decent monday morning take from robert evans:

Schrodinger's double-think.

::: spoiler transcription Quote skeet:

This is a researcher at Anthropic. Some of these people have lost their minds! What is mainlining Claude all day doing to them?

there are basically two possible futures at this point. either we're all going to die of[sic] the future is going to be Good beyond our wildest imagination. the trick is to hold this duality in your head and not be driven insane by one side.

Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans):

some of these people get so locked into a labyrinth of Rationalist thought experiments that they are no longer really capable of interacting with reality 1/2

you can in fact limit the horizons of possibility in your own mind so severely that you are no longer able to "think" in a useful way 2/2

:::

Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

who talks like this

"not on squeaking terms"

by the way I first saw this in the stubsuck

::: spoiler transcript I know this is about rationalism but the unexpanded uncapitalized "rat" name really makes this post. Imagining a world where this is a callout post about a community of rodents being racist. We're not on squeaking terms right now cause they're being problematic :/ :::

In every RAG guide I've seen, the suggested system prompts always tended to include some more dignified variation of "Please for the love of god only and exclusively use the contents of the retrieved text to answer the user's question, I am literally on my knees begging you."

Also, if reddit is any indication, a lot of people actually think that's all it takes and that the hallucination stuff is just people using LLMs wrong. I mean, it would be insane to pour so much money into something so obviously fundamentally flawed, right?

So many low-hanging fruits. Unbelievable fruits. You wouldn’t believe how low they’re hanging.

This was such a chore to read, it's basically quirk-washing TREACLES. This is like a major publication deciding to take an uncritical look at scientology focusing on the positive vibes and the camaraderie, while stark in the middle of operation snow white, which in fact I bet happened a lot at the time.

The doomer scene may or may not be a delusional bubble—we’ll find out in a few years

Fuck off.

The doomers are aware that some of their beliefs sound weird, but mere weirdness, to a rationalist, is neither here nor there. MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher, encourages his followers to be “moral weirdos,” people who may be spurned by their contemporaries but vindicated by future historians. Many of the A.I. doomers I met described themselves, neutrally or positively, as “weirdos,” “nerds,” or “weird nerds.” Some of them, true to form, have tried to reduce their own weirdness to an equation. “You have a set amount of ‘weirdness points,’ ” a canonical post advises. “Spend them wisely.”

The weirdness is eugenics and the repugnant conclusion, and abusing bayes rule to sidestep context and take epistimological shortcuts to cuckoo conclusions while fortifying a bubble of accepted truths that are strangely amenable to allowing rich people to do whatever the hell they want.

Writing a 7-8000 word insider expose on TREACLES without mentioning eugenics even once throughout should be all but impossible, yet here we are.

There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

It feels more like a toy project that snowballed fueled by ideology and get-rich-quick schemes.

I'm not spending the additional 34min apparently required to find out what in the world they think neural network training actually is that it could ever possibly involve strategy on the part of the network, but I'm willing to bet it's extremely dumb.

I'm almost certain I've seen EY catch shit on twitter (from actual ml researchers no less) for insinuating something very similar.

It's useful insofar as you can accommodate its fundamental flaw of randomly making stuff the fuck up, say by having a qualified expert constantly combing its output instead of doing original work, and don't mind putting your name on low quality derivative slop in the first place.

Wow, I expected to read about people voting themselves out of healthcare so bitcoin mines can operate at 1% cheaper, instead I got data center induced Havana Syndrome.

edit: I love that throughout the article they keep referring to the police chief who's fighting the mining installation as a former oath keeper, the fuck-one-monkey principle at work.

- I wish people would finally start calling me the anti-crypto police chief.

- Whatever you say Monkeyfucker Joe.

Apparently genetically engineering ~300 IQ people (or breeding them, if you have time) is the consensus solution on how to subvert the acausal robot god, or at least the best the vast combined intellects of siskind and yud have managed to come up with.

So, using your influence to gradually stretch the overton window to include neonazis and all manner of caliper wielding lunatics in the hope that eugenics and human experimentation become cool again seems like a no-brainer, especially if you are on enough uppers to kill a family of domesticated raccoons at all times.

On a completely unrelated note, adderall abuse can cause cardiovascular damage, including heart issues or stroke, but also mental health conditions like psychosis, depression, anxiety and more.