Bankruptcy means they're not going to be paying out damages for all the AI Psychosis they caused.

My favorite part about this is that they say 'needlessly.'

Like, they're completely nuts and believe Claude might have feelings. But they're not content to just be insane in that way, they have to also be ok with harming it as long as it's not needless.

God these fuckers

For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop

I don't think I ever saw this. The only indication would have been a major dev org like the FSF, OSI, SFC or somebody hitting Microsoft with a really aggressive lawsuit over OpenAI. They would have had a slam dunk and it would have set the tone for the way the rest of the world reacted, I think.

Instead it was just 'wow cool toy.' That was when I realized the real politics of Foss wasn't just a couple of bad actors like Eric Raymond but a full on rot.

I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.

I wish I had a plan B, but I've devoted my life to being a software engineer and have no idea what else I could do .

It is pretty depressing.

Yeah. I've sort of resigned to my world being ruined and everything I ever worked on stolen and sold back to my bosses for the rest of my career.

I just wish there were some way to inflict some fraction of this pain on the people responsible, the people who go to work every day to ruin mine.

Treacle Eaters

gotta be right?

If they actually gave a damn about people they wouldn't be working at OpenAI

Techbro was originally used to describe the type of men who made it difficult for women in tech, then somewhere along the line the general public realized the same dudes were also making it difficult for lots if people in lots of places.

If tech folks never actually acted like frat bros, the bro appellation never would have happened. I've worked in offices with Kegs cor crissakes.

Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?

I had to google this but it's real.

Fails to list SlateScott as a controversial guest.

Also, did he just use a bang path to refer to a racist dude's Twitter persona? Seeing old school lore adopted by these mutants gives me heartburn.

Oh, and that bit at the end disclaiming it as an EA event despite it clearly being an EA event is classic "decoupler" (or, if you like, responsibility avoider.)

after party at Curtis Yarvin's house

One sentence horror story.

In fact, didn't they make this movie, "Get Out" right?

The writing has been on the wall since they reprinted Alpha as non playable $250 packs.

Awesome, I no longer have to link to leaked emails to convince people he's a phrenologist, he just went and wrote a nice succinct article laying it out.

His initial premise is so damned stupid that there's probably nothing to salvage so I'm not reading it. He gives zero credence to the idea that whatever metric he grabbed for men should be a linear correlation to IQ might... not be? Then ploughs on with an explanation that allows him to do Trans discourse. Fuck off with that.

Here's an alternate theory: you only know about out trans folks. Trans folks will only come out if they think they're likely to not be beaten to death. Therefore you will see more trans folks at IT jobs and fewer at construction sites, because IT workers sit in chairs all day and many couldn't beat someone to death even if they tried. Plus having lots of money helps insulate you from the risk of ending up living on the fucking street. Seriously if this guy just thought about it for like ten seconds he'd realize his data was skewed.

Also, anyone who's ever experienced being a teenage boy probably understands exactly how dumb Testosterone makes you firsthand, complete with specific stories.

You've lost 93% of your investment so far

<homer.jpg>

fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction

Lmao

I knew the yarvin afterparty fact would come in handy later

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.

Also this:

Have you ever made a social gaff? Does the idea of somebody exclusively looking for and publishing negative things about you make you feel uneasy? Terrified?

(spooky hands)

I actually played this game with some of my friends to see how easy it was. I tried to say only true things but in a way that made them look like villains. It was terrifyingly easy. Even for one of my oldest friends, who is one of the more universally-liked EAs, I could make him sound like a terrifying creep.

📸 🤨

I could do this for any EA org. I know of so many conflicts in EA that if somebody pulled a Ben Pace on, it would explode in a similar fashion.

🤔

I wish you were joking but they literally say this in the post:

At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on [investigating us]. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time - it's just that they aren't, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. [...]

Even if it was just $1 million, that wipes out the yearly contribution of 200 hardworking earn-to-givers who sacrificed, scrimped and saved to donate $5,000 this year.

they [nrx and LW] clearly are completely different groups who only party and fuck around together

Ok, read their actual pitch. Lmao they think that a one time introduction of a GMO bacteria strain is going to 'just work' because they've also GMO'd it to outcompete other bacteria?

There's a reason we aren't running our cars on yeast-produced gasoline. No matter how awesome your tuned microbe is, it's still subject to mutation and natural selection. If your beneficial changes aren't actually helping it survive, they will not be conserved. And those 'competitive' changes you jacked it up with to make sure it dominates the environment? Well, that might end up horizontally transferred into something you don't like.

About the right amount of 'we humans are smarter than dumb biology' metal-fetishism I'd expect from the folks concerned.