How does one give an embryo an IQ test.

Most leading Rationalists are autistic, but many of them are in denial. Many are Jewish or have Jewish parents. You can debate which kind of folly let them embrace eugenics and white supremacism: are they brain-proud and desperate to believe that they were destined from birth to rule? Sure that they just have eccentric Ashkenazi genius genes not inferior Autistic genes? Naive that the deportations would stop with black and brown people? Their favourite Catholic fantasy author had some warnings for them.

A bit tangental but I found a book review about a professor wrote pushing similar "polygenic" nonsense: https://www.nybooks.com/...

It looks like Herasight cites some of his nonsense in at least one of their garbage papers.

When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone

I don't think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media...)

Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn't be given healthcare). It's hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:

Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.

tired: butletian jihad

wired: butlerian crusade

e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom

Seizing "the res novæ of our time" [derogatory] from this

we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it...

Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.

Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good... The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all...

A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.

The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.

Doesn't claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they're immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.

From the pope's first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"

Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can't even get past the first full chapter of this shit.

I encountered this in the wild over on Reddit about the Pope and AI

The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code — a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no "warn the user first" preamble.

God why is the writing of AI-bros always so long winded and stilted? I mean... we know why but it's still so so unpleasant to read. This is why people hate LLMs.

Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about "we" and "our" and an "internal review" but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.

Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It's that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.

... you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots

So, do you consider active destructive actions to be a proper resistance strategy, @jlink?

Very last comment in this issue - because I'm too stupid to resist the urge.

It's as much "active destruction" as telling someone to eff themselves.

I can't actually believe someone would be so cool and put this into their repo, kudos

LOL @ the obviously vibe-written comments from the original complainer

I'm tempted to submit this to lobste.rs just to watch the fireworks but linking directly to a GH issue thread is discouraged for brigading issues

edit complainer tried to brigade HN, with few results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291757

the slot machine addicts have created a sternly-worded open letter to the maintainer utilizing all the critical analysis they are capable of mustering

shot:

However adding malware that for no reason destructivly destroys user code is insane.

chaser:

from user "bryon-cryptoconsults"

All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases you'd probably get better value for your buck.

Anthropic (who own Claude Code) are hoping to IPO this year.

1 cve, 100 things that might have mattered.

2 orders of magnitude false positives doesn't sound like an efficient use of labour for finding vulnerabilities but that's just me.

it continues to be amazing to me that this is the “high impact” area they’re going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still don’t buy this wholesale, there’s a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), bug-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time

[0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corps…

So what's the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because I'm gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn't check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of "more or less right, we swear"

Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.

They're about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts

slop code in rsync timeline Ψ(･ω･ )Ψ

Well, that might be the first package that I have to locally pin to a pre-slop commit. Thanks for the heads-up. I've never bothered to implement rsync myself even though the algorithm is documented; maybe this will be the push I need.

rsync

Huh, haven't heard of that before, lemme go check its Wikipedia page and-

rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers

Okay this sounds very fucking bad

https://hails.org/@hailey/116657391001259044

In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it's called a sex club.

Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, "hey wanna hear me sing?" The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.

(This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it's because these men are not really trying to have sex, they're trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)

Ouch, "picking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resort" "building a happy working relationship with a sex worker" and "romantic pair-bonding" are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed.

RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aella's consensual-nonconsent orgies.

The AI stuff is fun and all, but the awful gender takes is really why I subscribe to sneerclub. I swear some guys don't realize how cute men can be (when they're not posting awful gender takes anyway...) and it's such a weird blind spot.

One obvious elephant: how much time should you spend becoming physically attractive if you're not above average height?

???

imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end

that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people without making it about consumption challenge

by "culture wars" she means she's a fucking nazi

This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.

hmm, looking at the text you link it says "your past statements in Twitter" first. could it be they found out you're a fucking nazi

also you're shocked, shocked to find that 4chan people are assholes. you hang out there for hours at a time. probably just coincidence.

Tunney has deleted the post already! But there's an archive and another one

Gestural Bayesianism!

I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I've come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that I'm a good person, it would underflow a double.

Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.

Why doesn't she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person he'd love to donate some Thiel bucks to.

EDIT: I just went to her linked GitHub sponsors page. I was surprised to find Simon Willison there, but maybe I shouldn't have been. It certainly gave me another reason to look sideways at him.

Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it's the last bastion of curiosity online.

From the linked post:

Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it's the last bastion of curiosity online.

Fuuuuck off

I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that's the best way to show that you're serious.

This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newton's televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).

I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won't be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.

Grifting off the United States' escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.

Deleted, but the archive remembers

I'm pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (musl) telling her to go away last week. She's finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she's done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.

It is now 404-ing; an archive copy is available here.

I never heard of Justine Tunney before but she has a Wikipedia page.

@sinedpick

yikes

it's hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don't already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it's signal-shaped noise). but I'll try.

what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody

I'm waiting for the "who contributed what under what conditions". I'm wondering how much of the supposed money follows a rather ovoid trajectory.

FFS the amount of circlejerkingdealing going on in this industry is absolutely insane.

"Hello anthropic. Have some money to spend on our chips"

They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying "provocative" anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove you're the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.

It’s jawdropping how everyone in Silicon Valley is living in their own little world where AI is the greatest invention ever and everyone should be grateful for living in the year of the AI Gods

don't kinkshame

It really baffles me how these types manage to read this stuff so badly. The galactic holocaust at the end of Fire isn't an accident, it's the whole plan of the Powers from the start. There's a fungus growing in the Top of the Beyond that might threaten them and their cure is to cauterize an entire slice of the galaxy, a plan which comes to fruition as intended. The final transmission implies that maybe some Powers got burned too, which might or might not have been the plan (the Blight was found in the Low Transcend after all) but the Beyond being burned was never optional, it was the plan.

The Blight is a big threat but it's not even the first such threat in the galaxy; it doesn't threaten the entire galaxy, not even the entire Beyond; heck, the only reason the extermination fleet travelled all the way to the Bottom was the pursuit of the entities working to enact its destruction. It can easily be argued that the cure was worse than the disease. Ravna outright thinks that at the end, it's right there in the text.

I don't even know why I'm arguing this here. These types just make my blood boil with how badly they misread (not misinterpret) works that I really like. Ugh.

I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk

Thats an addiction, gonna be fun when the prices go through the roof.

When you wrote “he’s such a good writer”, I assumed you hadn’t read Children of the Sky… a book that urgently needed an editor with a spray bottle and the power to yell “No! Bad Vernor!” multiple times a minute.

Re-reading the preceding parts after Children has also fixed my impression of his writing ability, tbh.

George, are you saying that becoming the Eloi is good actually?

The distributions below are our team’s probabilities on when AI’s will achieve human level coding performance.

So in AI'27 they predicted 2030 will have "1T Wildly Superintelligent copies thinking at 10000x human speed", "wildly superhuman" coding ability, and "brain uploading", with "biosphere destroying mirror life" on the horizon.

Now they are predicting "maybe it will be able to write C++ in 2030 without constantly falling over (50% probability)".

Seems like a bit of a step back, but I guess we'll see what they put in their fun interactive website once it's ready.

They've been using the excuse that not everyone who participated in the "AI 2027" project agreed on 2027 as the year it all happens. But if that's the case, why the hell did they call it "AI 2027"?

Gotta love the ex post facto of it all.

I’m sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet there’s a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.

The abstract of her paper sounds interesting:

This essay analyzes anti-feminist (“Pick-Me”) Black women content creators on YouTube who exist within the Black manosphere—online spaces populated by Black men who support Black patriarchal dominance. These “Pick-Me” content creators use what I term “tactical patriarchal femininity” to attract the financial provision of an economically stable Black man and to derive income from sympathetic viewers.

Tactical patriarchal femininity is an elaborate, all-consuming embodied performance that is as much about emotion work as it is about exuding conventional attractiveness and behavior that is aligned with traditional femininity. Tactical patriarchal femininity exists to combat the matrices of oppression created by capitalism, white supremacy, and institutional patriarchy. Anti-feminist Black women work in reaction to the misogynoirist material realities that victimize Black women.

Generally conspiracy theorists aren't interested in actual things that cause real problems, I think. Air polution and global warming being deliberate decisions by elites who don't care about killing millions, for example. It has to be some wild take like Pokémon child sacrifice or something, so you get to feel like you spotted the secret truth.

But if you want to see some actual apocalyptic conspiracy against "AI", as in it is literally the manifestation of the body of the Beast and the voice of demons etc., check out Paul Kingsnorth's substack. This is a burned-out environmental activist who radicalised anti-immigration with Brexit, started pushing a narrative of hobbit pastoralism as a justification for racism, and converted to Christianity with that fervour you only find in converts.

Trump likes AI and they like Trump too much to dislike something he likes.

Some of them think it's demonic but I guess there's a conflict of interest since big tech is supporting the Republicans.

It owns the libs though, that's usually enough

Can I interest you in a video titled “Mike Adams Joins Alex Jones to Discuss AI World Simulations, Digital Gods & the Data Center Takeover”? It has an AI-generated thumbnail, yet the title sounds anti-AI, and I'm not going to watch it to find out which way it goes. I'm just assuming it leans toward whatever direction will pay them the most, which is possibly also why we haven't heard much protestation.

Related:

Paul Graham: "You're holding it the wrong way."

and since it's likely that there is no writeup, I am now already starting with "polymarket site:lesswrong.com"

we all know the abyss would get upset if I don't visit enough

Cyberlibertarianism covers it.

Did you try RationalWiki or the page for Hanson himself? Read it next to Taleb's The Black Swan patiently explaining to clever but inexperienced young men that you cannot perfectly predict the future just diversify and prepare for different scenarios.

A lot of rats give Robin Hanson credit for things which are much older (prediction markets for elections are recorded back to the 16th century, The Great Filter was huge in Cold War pop culture). Werner Antweiler at UBC ran a prediction market from 1993 to 2008.

Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance

Look, I admire professional math researchers as much as the next guy, but they're literally balancing on top of the economic pyramid of needs. This is a profession that cannot exist outside a culture with a surplus that can afford higher education, because there's no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.

So GenAI can solve Erdos problems. Can it unplug a drain or repave a road? Fuck no. Can it handle refuse for a city? Also fuck no.

Maybe professional math researchers will go the way of professional typesetters. I think humanity will retain its relevance.

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.

Sadly, Erdős never invented a problem based on counting the r's in strawberry.

The part about the AI generated story about ancient Israelis tugging at his heartstrings made me dig up the post where he proudly proclaims himself a zionist and creates an insane trolley problem: https://awful.systems/post/5437903

really remarkable how they just expect us to swallow the hard pivot from "AI is going to take all your jobs and render your economic value to the amount of calories harvestable from your feeble body" to "AI will create undecillion jobs UwU (◠‿◠✿)"

Another quick sneer:

Cherny: I was so focused on shipping. As soon as I got the idea, I spent every night and every weekend on it — it was the only thing I thought about, the only thing I worked on. I started having dreams about Claude Code, and that's still all I dream about: what should we do next, what do we build next. There's a chance now to zoom out, because a lot of people are using it and there's a lot to learn about how. But for a long time we were so focused on building that I didn't even have a chance to think about what it was.

Emphasis mine. the ideology buried within statements like this makes me want to erase the idea of a computer from the collective human consciousness. I feel like moving to the woods with some goats, or something, when i consider the fact that literally every single one of the tech oligarchs thinks like this. Literally channeling the spirit of capitalism like your body is a portal to a lovecraftian dimension. Purge. purge. purge this evil

And not a single question about the Claude Code source leak, which revealed how it's completely slapped together with string and bubble gum.

OK sysadmin question: how can I “pin” a last-known good version in apt?

The author of that piece outsources his thinking to the slop machine.

If anyone wants to read the discussion by the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary), it starts here.

I think Trash Future had a great statement when Richard Dawkins was going on about Claudia that applies to this, which was "you don't have put in the the newspaper that you hug your stuffed animals and tell them good night."

The "C is too hard for the AI so have the AI rewrite it in Rust" take is just so galaxy-brained.

The manager of the store says:
"Stop. You know nothing. You have baked 0 bread loaves by hand. No one has ever depended on your bread. You are a finger-wagging "they put dog poo in my bread" type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of baking homemade bread from scratch at home without poo. You can't ship bread, can't adapt, can't even realize that a bread shop is not the place for this kind of attitude."

@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984
> OP's language seems as if it belongs to someone who trains their children that gender and sex are different and sincerely hopes his son will play with dolls
Says Mx. keysmash username, as if it was a bad thing 🧐

tiny little problem of spinal cord attachment, surely It Will Be Solved™. at least they didn't throw nanobots at it

i guess that immortal oligarch class is a 100% ethical thing for them

Huh, I got déjà vu and yeah there's this story from a couple months back! https://www.technologyreview.com/...

MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called “body replacement cloning” in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains.

Please don't let this be the next bubble.

Just like the famously well-adjusted and happy Rei Ayanami.

I think I saw this movie on TV at 2am. And it sucked

https://www.technologyreview.com/...

Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver.

Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.

The fuller context of R3’s proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They’ve been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash.

And that’s because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.”

A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.

And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.

Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”

My 'no conspiracy to create humans with brain damage' shirt is making people ask a lot of questions

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
making people give birth to horribly mutilated babies, then declaring those babies non-persons so you can put the senescent brains of the wealthy in them, helping them refuse to face their fear of death? no, seems ok to me

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 this has real, "GOOD NEWS EVERYONE" energy

Oh here's a comment, sounds pretty reasonable actually

Doesn't work because aging affects the brain as well and many deadly diseases originate in brain: insults (sic!), Alzheimer and brain cancers. Add risks of the transfer itself and the uncertainty when it should be done: too early for healthy aged person and and too late for one with cancer of any type (risks of metastases). All together it gives less than 10 years increase of of medium life expectancy.

back to the "upload smooth pristine brain onto the computer" drawing board we go!

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 But, once we’ve grown these brainless clones, how will we stop them voting for #GOP or #Reform? Or becoming #Radio1 DJs? Will we need to keep them plugged into reruns of #MaFS? So many questions.

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 I would love to know what sort of life this person has, that they feel scared of not getting enough of it

it’s funny because it’s almost directly the eve capsuleer picture, but we already knew these dipshits don’t read

also, how would this work? body grows old, but brain just….doesn’t? self-rejuvenating hermet crab brain!

Somehow Emperor Palpatine returned.

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 it's not immortality, because the brain still ages. But otherwise... I guess? ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Like many concepts out of sci-fi novels, by the time we get the capability, we will have evolved our thinking.

Also: having productive people sitting around on life support seems inefficient compared with giving them jobs.

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984

So they think consciousness is entirely in the brain 🫠

I see that lesswrong-er has read Time Enough for Love

My guess would be that this guy wanted the bragging rights to say he won earned his money by being an extra special smart boy rather than just a wagey at cyberpunk mega corporation alpha.

Congratulations bb you’re a bog standard misogynist

Love how one of the top qualities for women is "feminine". I can't imagine one of my friends being asked about me and just saying uh she's a woman I guess. A real womanly woman. She-woman. Girl

Women unreliable? GTFO

Ugh. Does it worry anyone else how much this fraudulent/incompetent way of claiming to be scientific resembles nazis and race science at their most fundamental workings?