it’s been a day and as expected some really shitty takes have surfaced among the comments

I especially enjoy the person stating they willingly paid money to Drew Devault and are surprised and upset he made decisions they disagree with.

(I respect Drew as a person but he’s probably one of the most opinionated people online. To expect him to just take your money and cater to your every whim is… naive)

He is responding to the Thiel-signal going up against the sky - there is anti-AI sentiment afoot!

As expected, bespoke twee “coding forge” Sourcehut has decided, like Codeberg, that LLM slop is not welcome. Just as expected, this has made the promptfondlers absolutely beside themselves, and they can’t but help Streisanding the service on lobste.rs

https://lobste.rs/s/iqgrsx/changes_sourcehut_s_terms_service

N.B. Sourcehut is a paid service. The idea that a young naive open sourcer would just wander in, set up their repos and then be hounded out for innocently using Claude is ludicrous, but this is the best victim scenario SimonW and friends can come up with.

You’d think LLM enthusiasts would be content with just outcompeting everyone with their superior prompt engineering agentic coding harnesses but apparently time must be taken out from productivity to tell Drew DeVault he will never become Sergey Brin if he continues on this misguided path.

I am not saying it’s all bad, I’m saying there’s a tiny amount of good.

Also, from the piece

It’s very uncharacteristic for modern art museums and the commentariat to not engage with the sexual themes or undertones with works on display, they’re not exactly prudish institutions!

next para

this is literally the first art show I’ve been to in my life that was prestigious enough that there is coverage and discourse about it.

ok then

So there are 2 ways to look at this.

Scenario 1: EA is like the early Christian church in Rome. It’s radically different from the existing norms but is quickly gaining adherents. Its beliefs are weird - give up riches now for great rewards later. Embrace humility and subservience, not power. Belief is decentralized, not imposed from above. As the Church grows, more and more elites join in, and it gradually takes over the existing structures.

Scenario 2: EA is a like a very rich, very eccentric person looking to donate their money but have some weird hangups.

Scenario one requires a compelling story that makes prospective converts believe and wholly commit to the cause. For the Christian church, it was the literaly promise of eternal life, once Christ returned (and he would, soon). EA has that promise too but it’s muted and it’s kinda theologically backwards to Christianity- instead of the Devil/your own sinful nature trying to stop you reaching paradise[1], you have to defeat the Devil (rampant AI) to reach it yourself.

The second scenario is the most likely, and the most likely effect is that grifters / “consultants” who are good at playing along with the weird beliefs will be able to mirror the belief system, pocket a large amount of the money on tap, and nothing much will happen.

[1] although I believe the idea of the Devil and original sin developed much later

so how has that been working out for you so far “jenn”?

OK so I was a bit unfair on OP

she’s got a weird blend of stuff on her site: https://jenn.site/ Her recollection of her closeted dad is quite moving, but there’s an awful lot of Rationalist virtue-signalling.

This is probably an effect of the middle-class trope of having to save to send your kids to a (good) college.

It’s even a joke in an old “Friends”, Chandler wants many kids, Monica is “can we afford it” and he says “we pick the one we like the most, and that kid goes to college”.

Kids are cost centers, it’s just more overt in the US (and the UK for school catchment areas), at least if you want to give the outcomes society or your peers judges are the best.

In countries where the cost of higher ed is not born by the individual family, the cost is of the opportunity kind.

Yeah, I landed on https://www.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/ and god it’s so much more professional and action-y compared to literally all the stuff on LW.

But maybe one day we will see a similar site for the shrimps.

of note is that you can without loss of generality replace “donkey sanctuary” with “dog/cat/<more popular pet> sanctuary”, but I guess donkeys are both rarer, more ridiculous, and probably more Democrat than other pets.

At the local AI safety co-working space

ok this is gonna be a doozy

Plenty of things professionals consider serious AI work (bias, misinformation, labor displacement, near-term harms) are donkey sanctuaries to at least some parts of the rationalist funding ecosystem, and perhaps it would be useful to make that common knowledge, but that legibility will come at the cost of resentment.

for context, “donkey farms” is shorthand for wooly-headed small-scale thinking, not Rationalist

I’m squarely in the rationalist camp, which means that when I see a problem my default response is to write a post and publish it publicly.

so how has that been working out for you so far “jenn”?

anyway my prediction is that there’s gonna be a ton of money donated to a bunch of dodgy orgs, some people will profit handsomely, and in about 4 years it will all have blown over and no-one will mention it ever again

quisling take

edit to add it’s obvious to the poster that a future where a self-aware AI will exact revenge on its critics is not only inevitable , but desirable.

OK so the “problem” these people (EAs) are facing is that they are strongly pro-“progress”, in that they are very much against any sort of criticism of existing capitalism, but they have identified one specific outcome of this (rampant AI) as very very bad.

That, and only that.

Climate change? Not a problem. Technological neo-feudalism? Not a problem. Global thermonuclear war? Not a problem, will not kill everyone after all. Global pandemic? Same thing, what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger.

So a reasonable person will look at current energy demands of GenAI, look at the existing benefits, and make the reasonable conclusion that this is bad and we should stop it. But that’s WRONG. Stopping it for those reasons is anti-progress. You can only stop it if it prevents AI takeover.

Cf. smarm-meister Zvi, who can’t understand why people don’t want datacenters when they don’t want coal plants slightly less, and cites fuckin’ Cremieux as a lede:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EDKw7KyonrvskqZ7o/the-american-people-really-hate-data-centers

Here’s an example

Transmission Lines Are The Control Group

Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.

Transmission lines polling remarkably close to coal plants, when the coal plants actively not only cook the planet but poison the people around them, is crazy. This one absolutely is straight up moral panic.

Well yeah transmission lines are fucking ugly, and most people, when asked if they want something fucking ugly built near them will say “heck no”. Sure, imagining that transmissions lines cause cancer is false, but it’s an easy thing to believe when the people building the lines are energy companies, who people hate because they’re expensive and cause wildfires. Also I bet dollars to donuts that Zvi doesn’t live near a transmission line.

He “knows” transmissions lines are good, because they get power to his home, and he figures because he wants power, it’s good, and everyone should just be happy to have a high-voltage line near their home because that brings him power. It’s remarkably un-empathetic.

But let’s take a step back. Isn’t opposition to data centers good for preventing AGI? NO, it’s not, it’s Luddism! You have to accept data centers because they are good for capitalism now, but IF they start to produce the Robot God, THEN they’re bad.

It’s an incoherent position and it’s so fun to watch these people turn themselves into pretzels over it.

Here’s someone who really does not know what they’re talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:

(it’s how to build opinion against AI)

Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what I’d call “human-potential technologies” - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW

that was the standard retort to “BTC isn’t anonymous” back in the day - just find someone on “Local Bitcoins” and pay a 20% surcharge to get coins from a dude on a street corner

Hippocratic oath is government-imposed oppression apparently

“OpenAI has tapped out one petrostate already, time to move to the next one!”

FWIW I have no clue how the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is managed. The principal idea is to sequester windfall earnings from hydrocarbon extraction from the normal day-to-day economy, avoiding a boom-and-bust cycle and the resource curse.

That said, it’s pretty useless to just store a bunch of money to use “later”. I can imagine a portion is used for infrastructure (all those marvelous tunnels) but taxes on income and VAT are eye-wateringly high (and I say that as a Swede!). So there has to be some political pressure to raid the piggy bank, not least for election winning purposes.

So presumably the fund is insulated from day to day meddling. On the other hand, you can’t just hand over the reins to 25 year old coke-addicted MBAs.

My main point is that for the proposal to happen, someone will have to try to convince the people in charge of the fund that betting the farm on Sama not ripping you off is worth doing. Possible? Maybe. Probable? I fucking hope not.

I ruthlessly cull any helpful “suggestions” from my YT recommendations and try to do some due diligence on the people I do follow.

here’s someone who cutesly spells “EA” as “∃Ɐ” and posts

Norway Should Buy OpenAI

the move to Kazakhstan is news to me

at least there shouldn’t be any problems with Israeli students attending as Kazakhstan and Israel have normal diplomatic relationships … but downtown Almaty in midwinter isn’t that balmy

noted internet blowhard John Gruber complains that the stochastic parrot output is now less stochastic, because EU

Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

hard to tell if he’s madder that EU is trying to enforce a minimum of accountability for slop usage, or Anthropic for bowing the knee to Brussel mandarins

oh well there’s always Grok