It’s both less sad because he’s probably not completely LARPing as his entire family on twitter, but also more sad because that’s his actual mother who couldn’t be arsed to actually be present and decided to slop it up for social media clout instead.

If it is a firm I hope they’re getting some good word of mouth on the back-end because they’re on point.

…almost two years to the day after getting laid off I have received and accepted an offer for a new IT job making more than I ever have and working with a client that I’m actually excited to help support.

I’m somewhat in shock since the last two years have been so incredibly hard. Like, I might have to indulge in some public therapy and put together a more in-depth reflection on this experience for MoreWrite at some point to give me a chance to organize my thoughts and feelings properly. But for now: holy fucking shit we got there.

I want to piggyback off this to talk about the inevitable Uber comparisons, because not only is the mismatch between investment and returns several orders of magnitude greater, but there’s also a difference in kind. Uber’s model was to undercut the taxi industry and establish a dependence within their niche before increasing revenues. It’s the classic enshitttification cycle. But the AI plan, at least as advertised, isn’t to undercut a specific industry as much as it is to undercut literally the entire white-collar labor force. There are several problems with this, starting with the fact that the technology isn’t actually able to replace the target in the way it would need to. More significantly, however, is that labor doesn’t work like taxis. If labor can’t get work it shuts down the entire economy because they lose their income and can’t actually consume any of the things the market offers. Also labor tends to get mad and break out the pitchforks and molotovs if things get too bad, and “restructuring the economy to no longer provide you the means to sustain your family” seems like the kind of situation that definitionally makes things too bad. In either event the point is that even if this tech is somehow as revolutionary as advertised then there’s not really any winning for the company.

Glad to see that “regulatory uncertainty” continues to mean “we figured out that the government might actually care if we do something illegal”

Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

I don’t necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systems’ lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what it’s going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesn’t do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.

Ed: hadn’t realized that the guy we were taking seriously was the author of Sapiens. Gonna have to assume I was extending entirely too much charity in my assessment.

Look, if our founder was abusing his power and influence over the organization to manipulate his underlings into sexual relationships and/or reward those who agreed to such, would he really have done it three times?

Thank you for your service in writing up this sneer-a-long and in unearthing this maddening artifact from the unseen cyclopean depths of substack. Zoe Cursi’s account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic and at least has the decency to treat the extreme distress that this whole thing caused as a problem rather than a sign that there was something powerful at work (that something obviously being the cult dynamic itself). But it’s rare to be able to see the inside of a cult from the perspective of a believer like this, and the way that manifests here is fascinating.

Honestly that part alone reminds me of the pastebin debacle where people just failed to consider that these things are in fact publicly accessible.

I keep bouncing back to this one and I think that the core objection is that the method of discourse that they’re trying to advance here is fundamentally incapable of handling people actually disagreeing. Like, the whole concept of “identifying a crux” basically requires that there’s a central point of agreement somewhere. In my experience a lot of these issues are better understood as tradeoffs and compromises. It is simultaneously true that some people will do terrible things left to their own devices and locking them up seems to be one of the only things society can collectively agree to do about it and also that locking people up is fundamentally cruel and it’s bad that we do it. The challenge isn’t in identifying the central point of agreement between those two but in managing their fundamental incompatibility.

Actually, taking a closer look at this line:

Connection Theory, which he describes as “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.” What follows, then, is that any person’s problematic behavior can be changed, because “if you actually get the logic of what’s producing the problematic set of beliefs or actions,” then you can intervene in that logic.

So unless we’re already getting into some very culty language where words like “Basic Goals” or “logic” are cult jargon that only loosely resemble their more general use this sounds less like an overview of a theory and more like an incredibly obvious statement that would have to fit into basically any psychological paradigm other than maybe hard behaviorism.

It’s weird to see the Great Founder Theory laid out so clearly because it’s basically explicitly declaring allegiance to what I was starting to call the Great Man Theory of Everything - the belief that rather than being historically contingent and reliant on circumstances as much as any personal characteristics some people are just innately “agentic” in a way that others aren’t and the key to success isn’t in finding a way to navigate the world but in unlocking this “agentic” quality in yourself. Notably the corollary of doing this (or of being one of those special innately “agentic” people) is that you have the right and duty to impose your will on the malleable clay of the world and people around you. I maintain that this is the rotten kernel at the heart of so many of the batshit weird things that the rats believe and do, and the fact that it simply isn’t true is why their broader schemes keep sputtering out or failing, though with enough money and power behind them that they continue to leave a frankly impressive amount of human suffering in their wake.

However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can’t recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated “from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale,” without backing up any of the encrypted data.

As usual, even when these things display legitimately impressive capabilities they still fuck up in ways that completely negate the whole point of doing it in the first place.

I never said it was a good old Star Wars expanded universe novel.

You know, some cities (at least one because I live here) delay their local pride celebration until July to avoid competing with larger cities in the local metro area. Don’t get too comfortable if you want to avoid being seen and celebrated, is what I’m saying.

Did anyone else read the old Star wars Novel Darksaber by Kevin J Anderson? The Hutts kidnap/hire the designer of the original death star to build them one of their own, and while the new Republic is gathering up the requisite heroes to do what they do to death stars we get to see the Hutts cutting corners and embezzling. The fleet arrives just as they’re ready to turn it on and instead of blowing our heroes up the subpar construction fails and it just fucking explodes.

No idea why that came to mind all of a sudden after reading this piece.

I mean at some point someone is going to try and make this argument so they can actually extract profit from their slop-inator. And it’s gonna be real funny to see what they had to say about copyright law during the training data gold rush.

This gets dangerously close to acknowledging that the rationalist method isn’t actually very useful for any area where it isn’t trivial.

Yeah. The Haitian revolution was absolutely a high point of postcolonial Caribbean history, but the resulting state wasn’t exactly able to project power and export their revolution through material support. It gave slavers a reason to double down on repression, but outside of Haiti itself it’s a propaganda win more than a change in the scales.

It’s also fascinating because I thought the OP was pretty clear that there’s a difference between decision theory and “desirable dispositions” which I interpret as covering the kind of counterfactual preferences indicated here. Actually there’s an even more fundamental issue with this as a decision theory problem which is that it misidentifies who is actually making a decision. Changing the applicant’s decision theory (while leaving their preference for thievery intact) doesn’t matter to the person actually deciding here.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s also a wildly racist example to put forward, it’s just also a bad example and where there is an argument it’s addressed in the OP.