Architeuthis

I lean towards things being unfathomably worse that they appear a the surface, there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural and not the result of deliberate machinations by evil genius pedophiles. The nazi bar analogy works for more than ideology, and the burgeoning CNC scene they got going seems to be exacerbating the if-you-build-it-they-will-come aspect of the whole thing, because good luck trying to explain to authorities how you got real raped at the fake rape party you are supposed to have willingly attended. This is all third hand at best, but I live on the other side of the world so whatever. As far as personal experiences go @ivyastrix@awful.systems just posted a new blog about her victimization at rationalist events where she describes some of the systemic pathologies in rationalist organisations trying to deal with SA allegations, and it’s basically the same principles that make them believe that vertical workplace romance is not a minefield of power imbalance and coercion but actually fine and ethical when the right people are doing it, just fundamentally unserious people biting off more than they can chew and acting defensive and victim blaming and trying to pass it off as drama when it blows up in their faces.

It goes off the speculative rails for most of the second half, but I have to admit the rate at which Αela compliments people on her socials on being good rapists could be the most off-putting thing I’ve ever encountered in relation to rationalism. From the more out there claims I thought the part where he advocates that Irregular (the people with rat/EA ties who made the swiss cheese LLM sandboxes) where employing weaponized incompetence in order to let a big incident happen that would force the government to go through with pausing AI research was interesting. though obviously of dubious likelihood. The whole doomer rationalists sabotaging slightly less doomer EAs in a low key sort of civil war over pausing vs slowing down AI research wasn’t very convincing in general. There’s also a bit where he thinks the EAs have infiltrated all levels of government and are planning to eliminate the competition (non rationalist controlled AI) via a ‘pivotal act’ that involves bioweapons. Basically doing the rationalist rhetorical staple of smuggling an extreme position as a given and then just piling on the speculation. Dedicating a paragraph and a half to the fact that the usually unspoken second part of the pause AI doomer project is to just do eugenics for a few generations until we get an upper class of genetically engineered naturally galaxy brained people that can finally do AI properly isn’t nothing, but at some point you need to segue into how siskind rolled out a red carpet for every semi-literate blood and soil gutter fascist and spurned nice guy to make a home in the ratsphere, you wrote the scott alexander email explainer ffs. There’s also a weirdly grandstanding section where he writes like he’ll get the rationalists like FBI got Capone for tax-evasion, except it’s Lighthaven committing massive fraud against its investors and donors by knowingly funding events that lead to solicited sex acts in the compound’s premises, which is by far the least objectionable sex related issue in a writeup that’s leading up to the claim that the rationalism in incidental and the real goal is funneling vulnerable minors to sfba based pedophiles.

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

The progression from ‘the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data’ to ‘we just stole them from some guy’s chatbot logs’ has been nothing if not organic. an insane amount of compute had been used. You don’t say.

Some alignment guy bailed out of fear anthropic will unfavorably immanentize the eschaton. It’s as cliche as the op makes it sound. Still the link OP shared is like 80% about Terrence Tao worrying about LLMs ruining mathematics, it’s a kind of reverse bury the lead situation, which is a bit unnecessary.

D) Could be they finally read the room and realized we’re not that many news cycles before experts warn AI might destroy your livelihood and also incarnate as a dark god of genocide turns to burn it.

Yud isn’t necessarily inconsistent here: he really really wants the robot god to become real so it can invent the blowjob machine and win utilitarianism, but he only trusts people he’s met personally to do it, and certainly not those shifty celestials. Please don’t think about what you as an individual should do about the problems facing the world; you’re just an NPC after all. Or as the AI2027 blog put it: We may only have 2 years left before humanity’s fate is sealed! Despite the urgency, please do not pursue extreme uncooperative actions. If something seems very bad on common-sense ethical views, don’t do it.

Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this week’s stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and it’s just as cursed as you would imagine. That’s it. That’s the post.

even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing. It’s insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he’s a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn’t do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.

Interesting question because I bet it’s bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold. Like this isn’t your grandpa’s swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory^1^ with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing don’t get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives. It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans. I swear the claudism was unintentional

structured language for interacting with LLM that’s_not_how_any_of_this_works.webm

He does worthless little-birthday-boy AI boosting while pretending to be the serious face of bluesky AI bootlicking fair and balanced anti-anti-AI bluesky. Occasionally has decent sneer content, though it has a much more evident muh datacenters tint these days. Writer of the siskind email explainer.

I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending he’s the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all he’s doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but I’m serious people so won’t engage with what he’s saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and he’s Always Posting. No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit. I don’t know who the lovely racist tehophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable to me gyges style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM warter-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.

lol pilgramage what. is he converting? The parts I skimmed mostly read like a travelogue so tax write-off vacations with the family in Europe, plus he has an audience of marks that will eat up fucking anything as long as it’s framed as independent research into the parts mainstream academia doesn’t want YOU to know about. Still the cross-section between simulationists/transhumanists and mysticism enthusiasts was already huge before Yud mixed in adult Harry Potter fandom and an implicitly supernatural set of adages about human-to-computer soul transfer and living in the end of days waiting for the Artificial Godhead Intelligence to incarnate and judge humanity.

The post title vs your write-up had me going, I initially thought RFK was actually recommending better mental health support to counteract bad parenting habits instead of the usual run-of-the-mill moralising about screen time. One of my big hot takes is that being a new parent with a full time job and no assistance from an extended family can cause behavioural changes on par with neurological impairment and bad habits which can carry on even as the kids grow up and things get slightly more normal, so it’s nice to see a version of that in published paper form.

This feels like a problem readily solvable by not playing shitty games.

Burn it down and salt the earth then. What’s the point of whinging about it?

They didn’t deny it, they said if the other workers’ research ended up in the training data it wasn’t deliberate. Then they gave the researcher who noticed the similarities a “co-publish with us or else” offer.

What a POS

For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.

i guess that’s why Corey Doctorow likes them so much.

Running a game for any reasonable amount of time this way will bankrupt you may times over from token overspend. This is just to make investors horny, it’s not getting released in any meaningful way.

I think the higher temperatures thing was them accidentally letting slip that the robots are meant to be staffing secret volcano supervillain lairs instead of datacenters, which is a type of facility not really famous for running better the hotter it gets.

I use AI sparingly to make sure the company-paid subscription is a net loss for the AI vendor.

Hey, it could happen.

Overall, I think it was a bit cookie cutter for an article of this type, but maybe It's just the preaching to the choir effect. Even the fact that he ostensibly quit his job over this stuff doesn't hit as hard as it should, it comes off as if he could have done so at any time but this way he gets to grandstand about it.

Also stuff like this:

It wasn’t a bad job, not by most metrics. It ticked the boxes a job is supposed to tick: good pay. Health insurance. Remote work. Time off. Nice coworkers.

sounds like it should be in a how do you do, fellow workers copypasta.

Ooh cryonics, classy.

I’m kind of surprised that this made the news in Greece, unlike the other 128 times something very similar happened. I wonder if anthropic marketing is pushing the story harder than usual, or if it’s the opposite and they’re asleep on the wheel or simply don’t think there’s anything to gain from trying to contain such stories anymore.

Apparently he has a book called (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium)[en.wikipedia.org/…/Jesus:_Apocalyptic_Prophet_of_…] so that’s likely to have you covered. I read “How Jesus Became God” from him at some point which might have touched on this, but it was mostly about the evolution of the messiah concept itself, like how the ‘son of man’ was supposed to be it’s own specific thing and not just a euphemism for messiah, or how the term in jewish apocalyptic literature has pretty much completely separate

It seems he won’t get the full payout: The rationalists are starting to cancel people for exercising free speech! woke 3.0 is go I repeat woke 3.0 is go transcription Survival and flourishing Fund tweeted: We have withdrawn our grant recommendation to John Wentworth from the 2026 S-Process Grant Round. After we posted our announcement on Sept 30, public statements by Mr. Wentworth came to our attention, which we found objectionable, disturbing, and contrary to the values of SFF. A Speculation Grant to Mr. Wentworth was appoved and disbursed earlier in the year, prior to SFF becoming aware of his statements. The Funders of this round will not be fulfilling the remainder of the grant recommendation. If you have concerns about the conduct of an SFF applicant or grantee, you can contact us at

How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just don’t have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians^1^! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didn’t help either. Just like Jesus caused the crusades! !

‘uncovered downside risk’ is an interesting way to euphemise rape, and because it’s an EA I can’t even tell if it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek. EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang. Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it, red pill is an optimized sexual strategy with the humanity of women stripped from it. Really well said. Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it and they should fix this bug with some introspection sigh

Had to google Kurzweilian h+, apparently h+ is kurzweil’s brand of transhumanism. This is very anticlimactic.

it’s fundamentally unsolvable, you can only mitigate it, mostly by using classical means to constrain the deterministic (i.e. non-AI) tools the chatbot is allowed access to, and constantly asking the user for confirmation. With yolo/auto mode (no user confirmation required) and training LLMs on known vulnerabilities thing will inevitably get more complicated.

Feels like for a community that swelled its ranks by welcoming disaffected gamergaters and anti-feminists of all stripes to become a safe space for rapists would be the most natural progression ever.

Nice to see he’s been keeping productive now that he apparently got banned from bsky. Just in time for TESCREAL/weirdo sex cult that runs AI to go viral too.

51-post long thread on why rats are a cult, Jjust finished reading it. woke: Everyone is polyamorous, everyone attends the same events, everyone lives in group homes together, everyone venerates the same few authors, and everyone is very worried about AI doom. They are all very contrarian together. Rationalism as a whole is a religious movement. Not everyone takes marching orders. The core people who mostly live together and attend events and especially orgies in Berkeley are a sex cult, and the ones that aren’t having any sex are part of the wider movement and are its recruiting funnel. Any time you get more than a few people who are deeply concerned with AI doom together, it seems like their natural form of organization looks like a cult; rationalism as a whole is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Some of these cults have gone very badly. One of them is the Zizians. broke: I feel about [CEOs talking about AI progress slowdown] roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research: these people are the enemies of humanity. Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don’t have to fear the paperclipper. It’s possible he has a similar affliction to Doctorow, where he thinks this tech is neutral on its own and can be sufficiently decoupled from its hypercapitalist pushers who would much prefer democracy be swapped for modernised feudalism, or who at least think it’s fine to collapse global systems of knowledge transfer for a quick buck. Still, attributing medical research to AI without discriminating between LLMs and vintage orthodox machine learning that doesn’t actually need infinity GPUs inside a climate regulated warehouse the size of the Peloponnese that also needs to be powered by two active volcanos to work is very TESCREAL coded, LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research only works under the assumption of some singularity type event being just around the corner. And also the part where he thinks it’s normal to declare people who fuck with AI as enemies of humanity. Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job. Or maybe he just really wants the basilisk to like him.

Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business. For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.

People have been calling them a cult incubator for ages, not sure who said it first.

Yeah, the group sex. He’s just an intellectual coward, he didn’t even own up to the basilisk despite his whole decision theorist phase clearly being about trying to cook up a convincing cope for it.

Turns out the centrist subscribes to transhumanism (hipster edition) the overtone window can’t be that fucked, can it?

The photography thing comes up so early too, it was tempting to read just to find out what they’d hidden behind the idiot filter. But not that tempting.

LLMs can be scalpels As in better suited for performing very fine tasks? It’s literally the opposite, being everything machines is their main feature, either in terms of churning out endless text at the vaguest provocation or by being a natural language intermediary between the user and the actual scalpel-like tools, that it then wields like a sledge hammer by forcing endless iterations until something sticks. Wielded in the right hands, they can appear to work magic Wielded in the right situation more like, which varies between models and can’t be a priori known.

Entryism in the sneersphere Absolutely stealing this.

if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations. It’s possible for a gaggle of self important dollar store machiavellis to land on Trump being the surer bet because he openly takes bribes and they have money, forgetting that when he takes the money their leverage ends because they are not the mafia.

John Wentsworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay. Second guy from the right apparently.

Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing. Also John’s apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so it’s arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.

Wish how the american AI industry is thoroughly permeated by Yud’s views on AI, and how Yud knows fuck all about how AI or computers work, would also catch on.

What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, “At least I had fun and got rich and worked on ‘cool tech’ with friends.” Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that’s not my department says Wernher von Braun.