It is with great regret that I must inform you that all this comes with a three-hour podcast featuring Scoot in the flesh: 2027 Intelligence Explosion: Month-by-Month Model — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo

That was a good one. Also, was he the first to break the coreweave situation? Not a bad journalistic get if that’s the case.

Imagine insecure smart people yes-anding each other into believing siskind and yud are profound thinkers.

Wish I’d found a non clunky way to work “cult incubator” into that.

It’s pick-me objectivism, only more overtly culty the closer you are to it irl. Imagine scientology if it was organized around AI doomerism and naive utilitarianism while posing as a get-smart-quick scheme.

It’s main function (besides getting the early adopters laid) is to provide court philosophers for the technofeudalist billionaire class, while grooming talented young techies into a wide variety of extremist thought both old and new, mostly by fostering contempt of established epistemological authority in the same way Qanons insist people do their own research, i.e. as a euphemism for only paying attention to ingroup approved influencers.

It seems to have both a sexual harassment and a suicide problem, with a lot of irresponsible scientific racism and drug abuse in the mix.

Intelligence² didn’t seem half bad when Robert Anton Wilson was the one talking about it way back when, in retrospect all the libertarianism was a real time bomb.

SMBC using the ratsphere as comics fodder, part the manyeth:

hand-writing your original manuscript

The revenge of That One Teacher who always rode you for having terrible handwriting.

Why make a true crime movie when you can do a heavily editorialized ‘documentary’ for a fraction of the price.

who is this guy anyway, is he in openai/similar inner circle or is that just some random rationalist fanboy?

His grounds for notability are that he’s a dev who back in the day made a useful thing that went on to become incredibly widely used. Like if he’d named redis salvatoredis instead he might have been a household name among swengs.

Also burning only a billion more would be a steal given some of the numbers thrown around.

Not exactly, he thinks that the watermark is part of the copyrighted image and that removing it is such a transformative intervention that the result should be considered a new, non-copyrighted image.

It takes some extra IQ to act this dumb.

Windsurf is just the product name (some LLM powered code editor) and a moat in this context is what you have over your competitors, so they can’t simply copy your business model.

https://xcancel.com/aadillpickle/status/1900013237032411316

Also, Yud’s kink is literally rape¹, isn’t it? Role playing non-consensual situations is fine and all, but this is a subculture where reporting sexual harassment is considered a possible infohazard², and surely the utilitarian calculus in on the side of letting rationalists who do important work on existential risks have a go at you, imagine how many multiplujillion far future virtual entities of minimum moral status that might save.

Fuck a cult.

1. He’s openly declared himself a sexual sadist and writes stuff like this, and also math pets.

2. Occupational Infohazards

I hate being reminded that besides phrenology physiognomy is also a thing.

I like how this presupposes that unlike the tendency towards violent crime, pedophilia is equally distributed among all races and skull bump arrangements.

Anecdotally, greek <-> english stuff seems to be deteriorating also.

The post is using traditional orthodox frankincense scented machine learning techniques though, they aren’t just asking an LLM.

This is AI from when we were using it to decide if an image is of a dog or a cat, not how to best disenfranchise all creatives.

Could be an SSC type situation: you write an interminable pretend research post in a superficially serious manner on an obviously flawed premise and let the algorithm help it find its audience of mostly people who won’t read it but will be left with the impression that the premise is at least defensible.

This will be made considerably easier once siskind puts it in his regular link roundup with a cheeky comment about how he doesn’t really truly endorse this sort of thing.

His commenters really didn’t like the ‘white’ part.