RetroFed
Architeuthis, architeuthis@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
Joined: 3 years ago
Posts: 2
Comments: 141
It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
Posts and Comments by Architeuthis, architeuthis@awful.systems
techtakes
notawfultechComments by Architeuthis, architeuthis@awful.systems
It’s not fragile and unergonomic, it’s robot-uprising-proof!
Also like will the warranty actually cover damages suffered when trying to squash the rebellion?
I’d say it’s all of that, plus the fact that a lot of the cult stuff are also present in how organised rationalism works in general so you need to believe that such a tradeoff can be mostly worth it, otherwise it’s time to really get packing.
Although a more charitable read could be that the intended audience are people still under cult influence who need to be communicated to (in the most non-judgemental way possible so as to not trip any cult induced outgroup-o-phobia) that it’s entirely possible to feel you are in a situation with positive and productive elements that is also a fucking cult that is eating you alive.
The extended framing of how ‘high-control literature’ applies to the MAPLE situation probably also caters to those sensibilities, most other readers probably already got that it’s a cult as soon as stuff like dear leader halting his daily two-hour speech when someone almost nodded off to make everyone stand up and stare at them in silence for ninety minutes started being mentioned. Or the constant surveillance and brainwashing. Or keeping everyone within a hair’s width from collapse from exhaustion at all times. Or the isolation retreats where your only human contact is a few minutes per week of getting told off by dear leader. Or <gestures at everything>.
Having said all that, the positive aspects of MAPLE the author manages to come up with seem to amount to providing life structure and long term goals, which really doesn’t seem like much:
Again I’ll say: there was a great deal of good at MAPLE. While many people were being impacted in the ways above, many were also becoming less anxious, more grounded, more relationally attuned, less distracted and more focused, more capable of doing chores and taking on responsibility without internal resistance, physically healthier, deepening in their spiritual practice, and more. Most people experienced some amount of the positive and the negative, which is a large part of why many former residents say their relationship to MAPLE is “complicated.”
Guys guys guys hear me out guys what if I say what if uh the market can’t be irrational? Because of all the money? That would be really cool right?
But using like 2000 words.
no wonder the staff voted with their feet
Rather than rebelling against google, it seems like they where just poached by anthropic a short while before the project shut down:
[Alphahold VP and nobel winner] Jumper announced in June that he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic. A couple of his colleagues jumped ship to Anthropic, as well. DeepMind has confirmed to the Times that it also moved staff members internally to Gemini-focused projects. Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, which is a DeepMind spin-off.
Like a lot of the rationalist world view and the way it readily aligns with enabling cult dynamics and providing justification for rule-by-epstein-class, this is probably just another happy accident brought on by people who like to role play as geniuses but can’t see past the tip of their nose.
There should be a case study on how OneNote started out ok and just keeps getting worse and less usable every update. Maybe ms is using it as training ground for new project managers and it’s been just a series of half-baked first attempts as updates since forever.
The AI bros are worried about the precedent that someone, anywhere, can tell them “no,” and make it stick. And others who hate vibe code might realise they too can say no. You can just ban the slop bros.
I both love and hate that vibe coders are developing a perpetual victim mentality.
Their “Dev team of none” justification (one of many) is really solid and not something I’ve seen spotlighted before, here it is in full:
The development team of none
Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Wow what cutting insight, what incisive vision, what an original thinker!
Oh wait no that was just the plot of the Animatrix from two decades ago.
the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it
If you don’t mind reading comics online you could check Fairmeadow.
kayfabe vcs
Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.
I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of “leaving rationalism” is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don’t belong in tech.
I don’t know the author so I don’t know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.
The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread
From the article:
But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.
Get fucked, Will.
But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because that’s all it takes to outweigh the other side’s moral concerns.
Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.
The Leverage article kept referring to him as “the slovenian” and that’s at least honorary eastern europe, but I’ve no idea if he actually grew up there.
If the argument is that too much rationaltruism fried his brain then fine I guess.
Otherwise I don’t think United Healthcare doing AI assisted fraud falls into any rationalist framework of doom, and also those people are allergic to direct action.
Also the article is already setting the bar very high by using the Zizians, a sect that’s almost completely predicated on semi-obsure rationalist lore, as their first point of reference for rationalism gone wild.
Sounds like he went for the low hanging fruit to showcase his business and ate shit, good to know.
His great founder theory certainly seems amenable to going all in on dictators.
Attempting to credit Luigi’s actions to AI millenarianism putting him in a weird headspace almost feels like stolen valor.
Still, if that’s where his mental health defence is going to hinge on then I guess it’s relevant.
[Tim Urban] goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:
That IQ works like mana points is both a widespread misconception and a red flag that you’re far more ignorant than you let on.
Yeah, the foam-at-the-mouth racist college drop out with an imaginary phd in race science and at least one nazi alt that we know of is his overall top account to boost by some margin.
I don’t think I’ve heard of Nicholas Decker.
Was it really the sensible position that the poorest country in Europe would go on to embarrass an ostensible superpower? Predicting a Russian victory in the short term in the early days doesn’t seem too daring a hot take.
It was mostly the analysts who were predicting a three day walk in the park with the ukrainians cheering them on as liberators that turned out problematic all the way.
These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot.
Are these agents in the room with us now?
How can all this possibly be enforceable.
The brainwrinkles look if you put a brain though a make-it-look-like-a-sketch prompt, it’s pointlessly detailed (i.e. not pretty or crafty, not adding anything, just lines for the sake of lines), it has the piss filter hue and also there’s random orange shading. The background seems to be at least two separate layers of seemingly disjointed stuff.
Supposedly the plot hinges somewhat on AI shenanigans so this painting being noticeably GenAI’ed could the part of its point. or even a meta thing, but playing the game to make sure isn’t currently on my agenda.
There’s a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so there’s probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.
Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because it’s harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.
I wasn’t around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid were a major voice in the community, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.
A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.
jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad
From github thread:
Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/
Seems like run-of-the-mill yada-yada boosterism for the most part.
Points for managing to write an entire blog post without lamenting how the persecution of nerds is a historical level atrocity, much unlike the ongoing state-sponsored genocide by Israel which is very fine and very justifiable, I guess.
LessWrong, an online community that started out as a place to discuss Yudkowski’s writings, who among other things is the If You Build It Everyone Dies guy.
LessWrong also directly gave us Effective Altruism and the Zizians.
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.
I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
Well now you’ve made me look at the image too long, too.
#1’s belt probably wraps twice around that waistline, I’d say photoshop/AI but there’s that 1/3 of the shirt hanging off to the right with nothing to fill it so yeah, and also Phil Davis1 exists.
#10 is aspiring to be the jock from scooby doo and I don’t think that jacket can actually close, similarly to #1 the whole thing probably only works for very specific poses and angles.
#6 looks like he runs a leopard print handbag delivery service, #4 is horny youth pastor in his aunt’s kitchen, 7-9 look comfy but contrived, #5 really wants you to know he’s wearing a possibly expensive wife beater under that shirt and 2 & 3 are all sorts of dodgy, esp. #3 who looks like a tourist trap gift shop keeper whose face is noticeably untanned because he has to hide it a lot for undisclosed reasons.
#2 mostly has a raging case of resting netflix true crime serial killer face syndrome.
I get that the point probably was to only show the broad strokes of how it should look if you’re making an effort, but whatever.
1
He is supposed to be the original instigator and public face of so-called e/acc or effective accelarationism, i.e. the rationalist (or maybe rationalist inspired idk) spin-off of people who feel whinging about alignment isn’t necessary and that it’s in fact awesome when new technology is killing people and ruining the environment because it means we’re getting to the singularity faster, and also openly rooting for fascism on main is based now.
His magic heatless AI processor startup feels like a grift to fleece investors and as far as I know has only ever produced an obviously staged video of sciency looking individuals fawning over a 3d printed wire mesh while touring what looks like a chip fab with an extremely lax contamination protocol.
I think a 30% chunk will be available for non-institutional investors, which as far as these things go is supposed to be humongous and also an indication that they are very much counting on stupid money to prop their valuation.
It’s more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you can’t tell that just means your enterprise code isn’t discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.
I’m assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, it’s going to be a big legal deal.
Microsoft releases cost calculator for GitHub Copilot for the new token usage based billing. Previously you were being charged per request, kind of like hiring a cab and paying the same whether you went to the next corner or the next continent.
Turns out Zitron may have been seriously low balling the actual cost to subsidized billing ratio.
spoiler
As if LLMs being the last step before AGI/ASI/The Metal Messiah is a foregone conclusion. As far as I can tell even the AI 2027 thing only argues that once the bots completely nail down programming (any minute now) then the foom happens and the models will magic themselves into true AI, because apparently being good at solving coding problems is a sufficient proxy for superintelligence, hence the METR infatuation.
In other Scott of Siskind news, he just posted an entirely unnecessary amount of words to aggressively push back against the adage that “all exponentials sooner or later turn into sigmoids” as if it was by itself a load bearing claim of the side arguing against the direct imminence of the machine god.
It’s just a bunch of arguing by analogy ( “helping you build intuition” ) and you-can’t-really-knows while implying AI 2027 was very science much rigorous, but it also feels kind of desperate, like why are you bothering with this overperformative setting-the-record-straight thing, have you been feeling inadequate as an AI-curious stats fondler of note lately?
He probably paid a rationalist dating coach good money to tell him to do that.
It always trips me up how this is about state sponsored arranged marriages (preferably to virgins), instead of like pushing to decriminalize sex work in the united states.
Isn’t this completely hypothetical though? As in having the various LLMs respond to a story prompt and calling it an experiment, AI safety research style?
That’s mostly because outright admitting that the point of prediction markets was to make having the prediction gene profitable so they could get on with breeding a rationailst kwisatz haderach to fight the robot god on more equal terms wouldn’t fly with the lower level thetans and other exoterics.
Just wanted to say that that ‘tal’ comes after ‘mor’ when ‘soc-rate-s’ is in the near context and in agreement with the attention mechanism is a very different type of logic than what this phrasing implies. This is also in combination with the peculiarities of word embeddings (the technique by which the tokens are translated to numeric vectors) like how it has a hard time making something useful out of numbers, it uh gets uh complicated.
The monofacts thing seems very post hoc and way too abstracted in comparison, and also the amount of text that can be categorized as strictly true or false isn’t that big all things considered.
Still if the point was to formalize the very no-duh observation that a neural net isn’t supposed to output it’s dataset verbatim at all times hence hallucinations, then fine, I guess. Their proposed sort of solution (controlled miscalibration) even amounts to forcing the model to generalize less by memorizing more, which used to be the opposite of why you would choose to use this type of topography.