Is that what “g” has stood for all this time?

But despite well-documented claims to genius IQs, somehow the billionaire set ends up not on the chopping block.

To be fair, while I’m not familiar with the discourse in China I know a lot people consider (rightly) “alignment” as a framing to be a red flag for cranks and rats. It’s not that surprising that this attitude hasn’t been getting much recognition when the marketing departments of ai companies has been more engaged on that subject than serious academics.

I’m picturing Muppet Joker having the gimmick that the cast varies shot to shot. If it’s from Joker’s perspective he’s the one human in a world of increasingly cruel muppets. If it’s from anyone else’s perspective then he’s the one single muppet, probably played by Beaker.

Muppet and Commander: the Felt Side of the World

Now I’m imagining a Muppets adaptation of Redshirts and want to change my answer. I’m imagining that we go through the whole first act of a normal episode with Captain Kermit and the all-muppet bridge crew only to get introduced to our one human, Ensign Ricky, right before the transporter sends them down to the danger zone.

The Vatican has been two weeks away from a nulear weapon for the last 20 years, ever since that business with the antimatter bomb at the conclave. It’s a boogeyman they’re using to try and justify continuing the forever war against Italians. I say if they want atomic spaghetti, let em have it.

Okay but hear me out: if they do restrict it to only Russian training data then it’s gonna end up having a small enough set to fail in truly comical ways.

You can see also his rabbit counterpart from Zootopia in a princess dress in the background of the first picture!

I’m sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It can’t be real (It’'s definitely real).

Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if there’s one problem with weed it’s that it’s not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing it’s going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.

Shadow and Bone fell into the Netflix trap of not becoming a culture-dominating mega-hit to justify getting a third season where the various “pay me pls” clauses of everyone’s contract would come due and I’m still low-key mad about it. But that show was better than it needed to be and they were just on the cusp of main love interest Mal becoming the slightest bit interesting.

God, when was the last time I read a book that wasn’t to a child? Uh… I think Lies of Locke Lamora could be pretty fun to adapt, and might encourage the next book to get published in a more timely fashion. But let’s lean hard into anime specifically and spotlight the webnovel Sunspot. It’s already rolling around in magical girl (plus magical enby) territory, but the way the magic system is described as like a combination of knitting, weaving, lasers and integrated circuit design seems like it would translate into aniqmation to be really goddamn cool.

I feel like the film school set watches enough good movies. What’s a movie that’s terrible in an interesting way that could teach aspiring filmmakers something about the craft beyond just “don’t do that”? I’ve been thinking and can’t come up with one, so I’m just gonna say Plan 9 from Outer Space so all the aspiring film guys can have a little bit of fun.

And it’s not a movie, but if I can submit a TV show I’m really tickled by the idea of The Muppets Get Leverage. Same premise, team of crooks taking one back for the little guy by conning the 1%. But while all the targets and their associates are the actual people (rotating cast of guest stars?) the crew are all muppets. Kermit as the mastermind, Miss Piggy as the grifter, Animal as the hitter, Gonzo’s your hacker, and let’s bring in Abby Kadabby as the thief. Sam the Eagle has a recurring role as the insurance agent turned interpol officer trying to chase them down.

Yeah. I mean, I’m going to assume that he’s not specifically referring to LLCs and that, say General Partnerships and Sole Proprietorship aren’t actually better, mostly because they absolutely share the same problems. But that’s a whole lot of digital ink spilled about how important it is to create “digital public goods” - and one assumes public goods more generally, given our ongoing inability to subsist on digital food - without any real thought put to how such systems should be organized, controlled, protected, etc. Like, if he stopped trying to wave “digital innovation” around like a magic wand he’d basically have to be a communist or anarchist of some flavor. But he’s still sufficiently in the Silicon Valley Milieu where lefty politics are too cringe to admit, so he’s stuc having identified some real problems and having no realistic starting point for solving them

Dramatic fascistic “RETVRN” language and focus on aesthetics aside, my wife and I actually dug into some of this lighting quality stuff a while ago and while our very good friend here does a poor job explaining it there is a definite difference in normal LEDs vs incandescent or natural light. The LED spectra is fascinating - big spikes at a couple wavelengths and nothing in between. In my experience with switching to the fancier high-CRI LEDs the difference is pretty minimal. Feels like a possible case where you don’t notice it, but your brain does. For my wife it seems to have helped reduce the incidence and severity of her crippling migraines, which is obviously more impactful. I don’t think I’d say it beautified the space or brought us back to the halcyon days of our glorious past, but that’s been huge for us all the same. The plural of anecdote is not cliche, but there’s not nothing here.

I can’t imagine the Mouse being happy about this cameo.

Okay much as I’m angry and want to I’m resisting the urge to go point-by-point until I have more time. But I also want to point out that in form it seems like The Beigeness has really caught on as a writing style. Like, we have 22(!) individual points, each of which gestures vaguely at the kind of militant interventionist white nationalist technocracy that could conceivably power the unholy chimera of a silicon valley tech giant and a murderous beltway defense contractor. But unless the book does so more openly, they avoid clearly stating the actual thesis. It’s not really surprising, just interesting to note the pattern spreading from Rat spaces into the broader right wing.

On one hand, I appreciate their acknowledgement that legitimacy matters to a government’s ability to govern. While the talk about the king as a figure tied to a broader structure that creates obligations and requirements just as strongly as it does power and privilege isn’t entirely historically accurate it’s at least less absurd than Yarvin’s notion of the dictator as a kind of unmoved mover - someone with both absolute power and absolute discretion to do what they want with it.

At the same time, if you follow that chain of thought to it’s actual conclusions you end up with some kind of radical democracy. Like, legitimacy is just a way to ask the question of why anyone should bother to do what the guy calling himself king says. Historically speaking this often boils down to trying to judge how credible the threat of violence is should you refuse. If the king isn’t going to be around in a week due to an ongoing succession crisis then there’s no point in getting ready to pay his taxes next month, essentially. But if we reframe the question another answer becomes available: why should people consent to be governed? And the democratic answer is that the government represents their interests and is trying to organize and take actions they support. Government by consent of the governed is a descriptive statement about how governments operate, not a normative one about how they should. Once you account for the extra costs and consequences of needing to manufacture consent through violence and repression the supposed efficiency of dictatorship evaporates.

This feels like an attempt to create an ethical framework that supports overruling people’s actual freedom of choice in favor of a technocratic vision of what you should choose, and while I can understand the frustration with people doing dumb shit, the problem comes in when “joining a cult preaching rationality and then trying to avert the robot apocalypse by bringing about a slightly different flavor of robot apocalypse” is, to many educated folks, a pretty strong example of stupid shit people do, while to them “ignore the oncoming robot apocalypse because you’re too irrational to see the obvious truth that we’re all gonna be simutortired by the basilisk forever!” would presumably make the list.

Also I guess texting your friend to say “Yo we’re out of OJ, is lemonade alright?” is unironically praxis now?

Big “I used to, but I still do too” moment there, though.

I’m glad someone else was able to coherently discuss how ass-backwards Saltman’s response has been. Like, if anything the fact that he responds to this moment by talking up the importance of democracy over emerging technologies should just be evidence before some distant future revolutionary tribunal that he knows his company is literally Sauron (okay, maybe more the Witch-King of Angmar than Sauron) and doesn’t care because he wants to be the one wearing the ring at the end of the day.

From the second post:

A seasoned security leader would never build a defensive program and then measure offensive capability only, making remediation a second-class story. That is the kind of dog and pony show that any good security initiative would slam the door on. Or it’s like a surgeon telling you they have an even sharper scalpel to cut you deeper and faster. Yeah, so then what?

Dark and paranoid thought: given that Anthropic very recently ran into issues with their defense contracts, are they playing up their offensive capabilities targeting a notoriously tech- and security-illiterate political establishment to try and force their way back into those sweet government contracts as an impossible-to-ignore offensive tool? I mean we’ve talked about how the cash burn rate for all these companies is sufficiently absurd that it’s going to take something truly crazy to turn these companies self-sustaining before the world runs out of investor money, and military and intelligence budgets are notorious for dragging ludicrous amounts of public money into a dark alley where nobody can see what’s happening to it.