I know it's been said thousands of times before, but as a software developer I've never felt a greater sense of job security than I do right now. The amount of work it's going to take to clean up all this slop is going to be monumental. Unfortunately, that kind of work is also soul-deadening.

Eats the same bland meal every day of his life. Takes an ungodly number of pills every morning. Uses his son as his own personal blood boy. Has given himself a physical appearance that can only be described as "uncanny valley".

I'll never understand the extremes some of these tech bros will go to deny the inevitability of death.

After minutes of meticulous research and quantitative analysis, I've come up with my own predictions about the future of AI.

So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay's comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.

Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.

Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet.

Hey Trace, since you're undoubtedly reading this thread, I'd like to make a plea. I know Scott Alexander Siskind is one of your personal heroes, but maybe you should consider digging up some dirt in his direction too. You might learn a thing or two.

I have no doubt that a chatbot would be just as effective at doing Liuson's job, if not moreso. Not because chatbots are good, but because Liuson is so bad at her job.

Not gonna lie, it's fun reading those reddit posts from vibe coders, squealing like stuck pigs because their heavily subsidized code extruder stopped working.

The Lasker/Mamdani/NYT sham of a story just gets worse and worse. It turns out that the ultimate source of Cremieux's (Jordan Lasker's) hacked Columbia University data is a hardcore racist hacker who uses a slur for their name on X. The NYT reporter who wrote the Mamdani piece, Benjamin Ryan, turns out to have been a follower of this hacker's X account. Ryan essentially used Lasker as a cutout for the blatantly racist hacker.

https://archive.is/d9rh1

This is good:

Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

Also this:

If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

And:

If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.

What makes this worse than the financial crisis of 2008 is that you can't live in a GPU once the crash happens.

With his all-consuming fear of death, Thiel is about as far from being a Christian as one can get. All his antichrist talk is a nakedly transparent attempt to gas up the rubes so they remain on the side of the billionaires even after Trump gives up the ghost. He doesn't believe a single thing he's saying.

why it has to be quite that long

Welcome to the rationalist-sphere.

It's a really good article. This part stuck out to me:

If you are seriously, legitimately concerned that an emergent technology is about to exterminate humanity within the next three years, wouldn’t you find yourself compelled to do more than argue with the converted about the particular elements of your end times scenario? Some folks were involved in pushing for SB 1047, but that stalled out; now what? Aren’t you starting an all-out effort to pressure those companies to shut down their operations ASAP? That all these folks are under the same roof for three days, and no one’s being confronted, or being made uncomfortable, or being protested—not even a little bit—is some of the best evidence I’ve seen that all the handwringing over AI Safety and x-risk really is just the sort of amped-up cosplaying its critics accuse it of being.

You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.

I used to be more sanguine about people's ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.

Imagine thinking there is actually some identifiable thing called "white culture". As if a skin color defines a culture.

Yeah, sounds like a Nazi.

Bay Area rationalist Sam Kirchner, cofounder of the Berkeley "Stop AI" group, claims "nonviolence isn't working anymore" and goes off the grid. Hasn't been heard from in weeks.

Article has some quotes from Emile Torres.

https://archive.is/20251205074622/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/sam-kirchner-missing-stop-ai/685144/

Given how often it shows up in his writings, this incel victim narrative is a linchpin to his personality. He even trots it out in the middle of this genocidal screed -- in what on first glance seems to be an irrelevant detour. But it's really not irrelevant. His self-inflicted psychic damage is painfully real and manifests itself in all sorts of toxic and sociopathic ways, including abject dehumanization of an entire population.

Sounds like your typical commenter on a lesswrong or Astral Codex Ten blog post.

People are often overly confident about their imperviousness to mental illness. In fact I think that --given the right cues -- we're all more vulnerable to mental illness than we'd like to think.

Baldur Bjarnason wrote about this recently. He talked about how chatbots are incentivizing and encouraging a sort of "self-experimentation" that exposes us to psychological risks we aren't even aware of. Risks that no amount of willpower or intelligence will help you avoid. In fact, the more intelligent you are, the more likely you may be to fall into the traps laid in front of you, because your intelligence helps you rationalize your experiences.

It's happening.

Today Anthropic announced new weekly usage limits for their existing Pro plan subscribers. The chatbot makers are getting worried about the VC-supplied free lunch finally running out. Ed Zitron called this.

Naturally the orange site vibe coders are whinging.