2026-09-07 14:30 UTC
Replies (39)
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-07 18:42
Another oped from StudyHacks Cal Newport: Opinion: How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? | NYT The time has come to push back. Once we understand the key ideas of Rationalism, we can begin to filter them out. Be very wary, for example, when A.I. leaders or online commentators begin talking in sweeping generalities about the future of the technology, such as stating with confidence that many jobs will soon be automated or that their language models will soon become sentient beings intent on escaping their creators’ control. (No, OpenAI’s autonomous agents conducting hacks doesn’t mean that A.I. is rising up against its human overlords.) The correct reply is to promptly turn the conversation back to the possibilities, harms and viability of the products that actually exist. To extend an analogy I’ve made before, if Ford automobiles were spontaneously catching on fire, we wouldn’t tolerate the chief executive’s changing the subject to discuss our general lack of preparedness for a future with flying cars. We’d demand that the company address the acute problem happening right now. (Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president? “We” tolerated exploding cars and people dying for years, until someone actually stepped up and forced the issue. How’s the country been treating that guy?) It’s not surprising that so many Americans feel negatively about A.I. at the moment, but these sentiments aren’t inevitable. Our current crop of L.L.M.-powered tools are exciting — and worrisome, and promising, and frustrating, all at the same time. With proper direction, they’ll hopefully make our lives better. But they don’t have to be terrifying. We thought Silicon Valley was trying to warn us of an unavoidable danger, but maybe they were just being weird. wonder if such a moderated, watered down position in a large publication ends up sending more eyeballs to Yudkowsky than it does to innoculate the general public, could end up a net negative.
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@e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-09-07 21:50
It was only a matter of time. Enlightened centrist Brodie Robertson is now rubbing shoulders with DHH on his podcast. I guess after making nice with the likes of Andreas Kling, Vaxry and Lunduke it was only a small step to invite DHH as well.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-07 23:45
New (to me) lore from theargumentmag.com/…/god-is-back-on-the-timeline This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses. The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day. lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-08 07:22
Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises). Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used. The main statement is here: cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf Associated stuff linked from here: mastodon.social/…/117233413705701198 Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-09-09 00:17
The latest tech bro attack on public education is Alpha School for teenagers. One reporter thinks that if we take the accounts claiming to be students are real then: …we have to take semi-seriously the question of whether Alpha School is a cult? A set of indoctrination camps for the airport-book class? What the hell is happening here? A focus on judging people by biometrics, cult criticism, and assertion that LLMs can replace teachers. Someone on Bsky replies: The cult of Alpha school is strong in Miami-where the Miami tech/finance/crypto bro set is just generally dumber (or less intellectual, less cultured, less educated) and far less ethical than in other parts of the country (not that silicon valley tech bros are awesome, but the worst ones move here) Hereticon got started in Miami.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-09-09 02:50
Status of my evening: Post a link to my personal website, find out a minute later that it’s “down for maintenance”, try to log into my web hosting dashboard (Siteground) to figure out what’s going on, it rejects the 2FA code it sends me, then the 2FA code suddenly works, then the dashboard is full of hard-selling slop features that I will gouge out my left eye with a spork and skull-fuck the hole with the blunt end before I will use… My blog seems to be back now, though? Fuck, I need to migrate my blog. If there is even anywhere to migrate it to.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-09 03:19
Another Anthropic employee has quit for reasons typical of an Anthropic employee
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@NextElephant9@awful.systems 2026-09-09 08:12
theguardian.com/…/andrew-garfield-sam-altman-arti… Will this be any good?
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-09-09 12:26
Speaking of movies about high-profile silicon valley grifters, what the fuck is this?? At this point given the absurdity of this combination of people I feel like the reality will likely be disappointing.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-09 17:40
Here is a roundup of the “october tech movie” superfecta hollywoodreporter.com/…/musk-artificial-social-re… is there a kalshi market for which one tanks the hardest? Or will we get crossover sequels for musk vs altman a la MCU?
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-09 17:40
Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die. archive.is/…/tesla-cybercab-no-steering-wheel-eme… Highlights: No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning! Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash. No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way. Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess? Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons. Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death. The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise. Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol. The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed. If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.” 🤡 Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying. H/t to violet blue. mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-09-10 01:06
Crosspost, hat-tip to @pnwpixel@programming.dev for finding this. Omarchy announces another patron: DigitalOcean. I will wait for DO to explicitly confirm/deny this, but if this is true then I’m going to be moving my entire small-business footprint.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-09-10 05:01
happy kirkiversary y’all
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@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-09-10 06:17
wtf is deal of that segyges person. now they’re convinced that openai will solve room temperature superconductors in silico real soon, because altman vagueposted about it and this all based on lk-99 fraud case, nevermind that there’s no high temperature superconductivity theory, or how prohibitively computationally expensive computational chemistry is, and i guess it’s not accurate enough anyway, this all with people that do computational chemistry coming in their thread trying to explain this, then posts this
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-10 08:56
without going into the merits of the specific case, I find it highly amusing that OpenAI fucked up their big Navier-Stokes announcement which is now more about how they stole research from honest mathematicians rather than how awesome their AI is
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-09-10 10:12
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence. In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means** reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs**. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment. image shamelessly stolen from bsky.app/profile/…/3mv5puo47ns2z
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-09-10 14:39
Greg Egan reports: Open Letter about the Mathathon This open letter calling for the cancellation of the Caltech “Mathathon”, has received 471* signatures so far. [Only members of the Caltech community or mathematicians at PhD student level or beyond are eligible to sign.] Now 771 signatures. “On October 30th, 2026, Caltech will begin hosting the Caltech Mathathon, a math hackathon in which participants are encouraged to solve open research problems by prompting LLMs. Two prominent AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in AI credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.” docs.google.com/forms/d/e/…/viewform
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-09-10 15:41
Terry Tao talks about how he used to try to cooperate with the AI industry to achieve a positive outcome, but now he finally sees their true colors. Link During this event, OpenAI requested an interview concerning my vision of the future of AI and mathematics. I accepted, and spoke with them for perhaps an hour. I had done similar interviews in various venues, and I assumed that, as with these other cases, they would eventually post the entire interview online, which talked about both the possibilities and risks of AI much as I have done in these other interviews. As it turned out, they only used a few snippets of that interview for that infamous advertisement instead. In retrospect, I should have pushed back harder on their decision; but I decided at the time that even a selective release of my commentary would help raise awareness of the potential for AI, and in particular on the possibility of the “best of both worlds”. Since then, the situation has deterioriated markedly. Many of the people in the industry that shared my views have left or become sidelined, with most major tech companies now increasingly focused on the race to develop extremely powerful, autonomous AI technologies regardless of their actual value to society. The current drama surrounding the Navier-Stokes global regularity problem is the most dramatic and visible instance of this, but there have been multiple other such examples, and much of my commentary in the last few months has been aimed that the increasingly severe divergence between the current objectives of the AI industry, and of mathematics in general. Much respect to artists for seeing all this coming from the very beginning, and holding the line.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-10 16:00
www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/…/5295368 At the same time, some of that harm may be balanced on a statistical level by lives saved through AI tech. [citation needed]
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-10 19:07
Well that Anthropic employee that recently quit made it on the news, also Gary believes superintelligence is inevitable
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@Evinceo@awful.systems 2026-09-11 02:50
The antiai sub on Reddit is lousy with doomers now. Ugh.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-11 04:01
From the mirror universe news zerohedge.com/…/campaign-slow-ai-was-ready-viral-… ZH’s interpretation is Coxon is some kind of false flag thing to bait Dems into regulating AI Parker Thayer argued that Coxon’s launch looked like a sophisticated public-relations operation. He traced the earliest amplification to people associated with Encode, the AI Policy Network, and the AI Futures Project. Brian Chau’s later thread surfaced a direct political-technology link. Newspeak House’s own residency page lists Jacob Coxon among its residents and describes his work as “applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets.” Newspeak calls itself the London College of Political Technology. Its current calendar advertises Campaign Lab sessions aimed at helping the progressive left “campaign more effectively.” The residency places Coxon inside that political-technology network. Some of the underlying funding links are public. The Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2025 grant table lists $2.035 million for the AI Futures Project, $516,000 for Encode AI, and $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute. The fund attributes those grants to Jaan Tallinn. Anthropic says Tallinn led its Series A financing in 2021. Encode identifies the Survival and Flourishing Fund as one of several foundations supporting its work. It also says it refuses funding from corporations, foreign governments, and executives at frontier AI companies. Its general counsel, Nathan Calvin, is one of the early amplifiers named in Thayer’s thread. Some new pins for the conspiracy board I guess. They imagine a “political-technology network” quite the linguistic contortion to not use the word rationalist. No clue what LCPT is but looks like a hacker house type thing?
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@protectedinfoil@awful.systems 2026-09-11 06:31
Listening to Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich (audiobook, not podcast), and learning heaps about people I’ve known were part of the Rationalist orbit for years, but hadn’t dug too much into, like Balaji Srinivasan. He apparently used the red/blue/grey tribe setup in The Network State, which was published long after Scott’s SSC post using the same language. I remember that Balaji went nutty when the NYT published about Scott Alexander. Durán attributes that to Cade Metz reporting on Balaji telling Yarvin that they might need to intimidate/harass journalists to keep them from reporting on their fascist bullshit, but all the parallels make me wonder how long they knew/read each other. Did Scott influence Balaji first, or the other way around? Certainly I am amused that none of the Rationalists have been named yet, 3 hours in. I wonder if it rankles, knowing how bad Eliezer has wanted to make something that people would actually pay for, having a whole book written about Thiel and Yarvin and Srinivasan where he doesn’t rate at all because he’s just some podunk little cult leader who has to beg for grants and find girlfriends to live with and do his laundry while he eats the crumbs off of their tables. Or if it stung Scott when Srinivasan’s book was panned as idiotic, knowing that at least some of those ideas were his.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-11 21:01
More people are calling out Anthropic’s latest astroturf campaign (on slobstack)
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-11 22:33
www.patreon.com/…/ais-sheryl-crow-169107221 Imagine a hypothetical future history of machine learning, perhaps one that focuses on the politics of AI in the 2020s. You may be thinking to yourself, Given the rapid pace of change, it’s hard to say what this book will contain, but there’s one thing I know for certain will not be in this book: Sheryl Crow’s Instagram account. Well—think again: “We know and have always known that AI has the capacity to outsmart us and eliminate us in order to continue,” the “All I Wanna Do” singer wrote on Wednesday. “It will have the codes. It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids. And, it has the financial data of every single person on the planet.” In the future, I think, we will remember this as the “Sheryl Crow moment”: The week that, effectively overnight, everyone—which is to say previously uninterested normies, previously skeptical pundits, opportunistic politicians and many other people who had never before heard the words “light cone” and whose browsers had never navigated to LessWrong—suddenly started taking “AI safety” seriously.
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-09-12 02:50
Despite all the doomer propaganda that has been swirling around for many years, it’s still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-09-12 03:53
Per AP, it looks like Anthropic has been encountering some interesting requests from certain international users. Now the actual threat of creating missile guidance systems using Claude is massively overstated. Like, making sure the missile knows where it is is pretty much a solved problem at this point provided you have the time and ability to study it, and I would be incredibly surprised to hear that the Houthis (or anyone else) was in a situation where the control and guidance software for these weapons systems was more of a problem than sourcing the material components themselves. However, in conjunction with the math proof debacle earlier in the week, I think the privacy implications of the growing reliance we’re expected to develop on these damned things are becoming inescapable. In the same way that crypto mining platforms will front-run and sandwich you, any information you put into the prompt will be used against you or for the company’s benefit.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-09-12 04:01
👍
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@HotGarbage@awful.systems 2026-09-12 04:16
Nice breakdown and takedown of Omarchy and its ilk. stopomarchy.neocities.org The chuds on HN of course hated my post about it. Surprisingly it hasn’t been flagged (yet). news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661901
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-09-12 05:02
Curious what Caroline Ellison’s been up to since her FTX/Alameda adventures? Well wonder no more. She’s just been given a job at Manifund, where I’m sure she’ll be researching the best ways to fund her very own imperial Chinese harem.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-09-12 11:07
zoMG. aI Is gOnNa KiLL uS All sOonnnn!!!11! what a fucking joke
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-12 16:36
h/t Lawyer Ex Machina for the California legislature recap: AI bills that California Gov. Gavin Newson has signed into law so far at the end of California’s legislative session include: Adam’s Law: SB-1119, named after Adam Raine, regulates chatbot developers who offer their products to users under the age of 18 AI Safety bills: AB-1405 creates a registry of AI auditors and a set of standards “for their independence, transparency, and integrity”; SB-813 requires the state’s Government Operations Agency to develop a framework for evaluating the credentials and expertise of independent verification organizations that may assess AI models for various types of risks Related: A bill that would regulate the use of AI tools by California attorneys and arbitrators, to address the tide of AI-generated errors included in court filings within and outside of California courts, is still awaiting a signature or veto from the Governor => politico.com/…/newsom-signs-ai-safety-bills-backe… The governor signed one bill from Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan that creates a registry and ethical rules for outside auditors — third-party groups that AI developers could hire to ensure their models comply with state AI laws. The second bill, authored by former member of Congress and state Sen. Jerry McNerney, tasks the state with establishing criteria for and checking the credentials of so-called “Independent Verification Organizations” and their expertise in assessing the risks posed by AI systems. Note that the bill that actually required companies get outside audits got vetoed, so. Those clowns in congress did it again.
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-09-12 17:14
Sometimes I feel inadequate. I was clumsy when burning Justin M. Keyes and, regardless of whatever trust was lost, I haven’t felt better even after a week of making fun of fascists. Maybe burning somebody else will help? I’d like to share my notes on Dan “Opcode” Jonsson, a relatively-unknown right-wing influencer, before he gets popular enough to have money. I think he’s spooked on Lobsters recently, but he’s been uploading to Youtube multiple times per week and there’s plenty to explore. If this is also too clumsy and leads to Jonsson deleting his YT channel: good, actually! It’s the only source of revenue that I can find for his opinions. So I’m not going to worry too much about it. click for notes * Daniel Jonsson * Unconfirmed, but lots of hints * Despite using Fedora, unhealthy amount of shilling for Omarchy * Reads a book purely because of a DHH recommendation 1 * Lobsters * Appreciating DHH and PewDiePie 1 * Apologizing for Omarchy with rhetorical exploration of definition of “distro” 1 * @DanOpcode@www.youtube.com * Right-wing guy in front of microphone opining about news headlines * Small fry: only about 1k subscribers currently * Recommended videos from a private window include Brodie Robertson, Jon Blow, Casey Muratori, Primeagen, Lex Friedman with guest DHH * So it seems that YT’s recommender thinks he’s part of the Standup podcast crew, ideologically * Tries out chatbot recommended by DHH 1 * Defends DHH and Vaxry, supports Omarchy funding, calls Linux users “clowns” and “goblins”, complains about culture war and codes of conduct 1 * Video defending The Quartering 1 * Defends XLibre 1 * Notably, says DEI is bad, says Trump is DEI, says Big Tech is bad and DEI * So, maybe not fascist, just stupid and prone to worshipping white supremacists? But that’s still a fascist * Mastodon: at DanOpcode at mastodon.social (deliberately breaking link because not sure whether Lemmy will ping Mastodon usernames) * Toot prominently features “88” in an image 1 * Suggested alt text: “Approve sign in request [padlock with outline of person] Open your Authenticator app and approve the request. Enter the number if prompted. [box] 88” * On its own, just a dog-whistle; with the rest of the evidence, starting to sound like a Neo-Nazi * Will become monetized on YT after 1k subscribers 1 * So… I guess he’s making money on YT now? * And he’s only sharing YT videos on Mastodon when they’re about relatively neutral tech topics; he uploads culture-war takes at least once per week but isn’t sharing them on Mastodon
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@sansruse@awful.systems 2026-09-12 20:12
xcancel.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910 uh oh you guys, sama and dario agree that progress needs to be “paced” at the “frontier” call it: A) regulatory gambit meant to suppress open source chinese LLMs, or B) progress is slowing anyways and they need a good excuse that will also shine their IPOs
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-13 01:00
Dario’s back at it again-agent swarms could shut down the whole internet in 6 months He also wanted AI research to slow down over a month ago. Surprise surprise Anthropic didn’t do jack to slow down
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@sansruse@awful.systems 2026-09-13 03:19
Officials in desert state shocked to learn that water intensive industries (chipmaking) in desert states are vulnerable to sudden water shortages: theverge.com/…/water-chip-semiconductor-manufactu… in unrelated news: desert state continues allowing cultivation of incredibly water-intensive alfalfa for another arid region 8,000 miles away.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-13 10:37
Lobste.rs news: after letting the DHH knob-slobblers and interested-in-the-fascist’s-newletters users weave enough rope to hang themselves with, the banhammers have arrived: lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=(All)&what[users]… expect the next step be even more pressure on the mod team to get them replaced with people “more aligned with the mainstream”
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-09-13 12:40
So the news is now filled with stories about how AI will take over and the Ai companies might lose control of it gets smarter and at least one employee quit because it might kill us all. You know what I seem to be missing? Actual employees doing sabotage. That is a bit odd right? They think Altman doesnt care about safety, but nobody has tried to wipe the backups. And we know they dont think that much about security.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-13 19:38
So Altman and Musk agree with Amodei’s latest assessment that AI should slow down, whether or not they actually stick to that is to be seen