According to a later post from them there’s a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I don’t think there’s much of a difference between “member of the nu-money illuminati” and “accepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse.” I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.

Anthropic: Oh no! Our new model is too powerful! It’s dangerously good!

US Government: okay then you can’t export it or allow foreign nationals to access it

Anthropic: Wait not like that

We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.

Of course this has less to do with the actual capabilities of any model and more to do with Anthropic openly telling the Trump administration “no” on exactly one occasion, but we can still roast some marshmallows over this dumpster fire, right?

If anything I would expect the nonexistence of NIMBYs to be a good sign for the good-faith YIMBYs because it suggests that the opposition to their preferred policies are both more reasonable and less unified than the existence of a coherent NIMBY ideology would suggest. Of course if your YIMBYism is just a subset of technocratic authoritarianism then the fact that NIMBYs aren’t an actual thing is both convenient but hard to acknowledge. Crushing a mirage under your boot in the name of Progress and Civilization is easier than crushing actual people, but if that reality becomes too obvious you start looking like Star Wars kid.

I also question the degree to which “the other 99% of readers” actually don’t care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of “I guess this is the world now” rather than actual acceptance. And I know we’ve talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn’t a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can’t tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the “median reader” statistic is misleading because the median reader isn’t particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it’s the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they’re not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.

If they were so good at investing money in the public good then how come they still have so much money and so much time to bitch about unhoused people?

Honestly I would be really interested in either or both of the AI war games. They’ve been on my list to watch but low enough that I haven’t picked it up yet.

Beyond that I will absolutely vouch for Pillars or Eternity being a top-tier RPG in that isometric Renaissance we got back in the 2010s. Anyone on the fence should pick it up and then let me jabber about it at them before my poor wife has to tank any more of it.

The goal now is “operationalizing it into a powerful political faction that drives public outcomes at scale.”

I’m pretty sure I read this exact justification in a document from management explaining why they were simultaneously laying off 20% of total headcount and doing a massive stock buyback.

This is fascinating to me and has shades of Iris Merideth’s The Problem is Culture. In other engineering fields, if you had a tool that cut costs but caused a threefold increase in failures you would be looking at a massive scandal, probably because if this was structural engineering rather than software engineering you’d be looking at a new Grenfell Tower or Hyatt Regency Walkway from every other project that used this shit. From what I’ve been following I don’t know that vibe coding has directly racked up quite so literal a body count yet, but if this pattern holds (and I see no reason to expect otherwise) then it’s only a matter of time before someone fucks up something important.

Also the fact that the framing here doesn’t seem to treat this as an existential risk to the project of AI coding is fascinating. If you’re not producing stable and secure applications in prod then what in the actual fuck are you writing all that code for?

I don’t know if I’m more impressed by how many occasions you find to link that or by how often it’s relevant. Either way, you’re doing the Lord’s work and congratulations on the 1/10000 of a Hugo.

My favorite part of that whole beautiful affair was towards the end with dgerard’s Chinese counterpart saying “no don’t ban them yet I need more material for an article I’m halfway through writing.”

In D’Souza’s interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

D’Souza continued, “Ultimately, what’s the last job? It won’t be knowledge work. It won’t be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”

Taken together it becomes incredibly transparent that the actual goal here is to transform themselves into a kind of priest-king class, exercising absolute authority on behalf of the remote and unfathomable god that they built. Just please pay no attention to who built the AI, who runs the AI, or where all the money and power end up.

I have some modest proposals for handling private equity but they would all probably count as fedposting. We still haven’t found a decent replacement for the market niche JoAnn fabrics occupied.

I love the deep lack of specificity in “other sectors of the economy facing shortages”. Either you have to acknowledge that you’re talking about the cafe economy and gig economy and those sectors aren’t so much facing labor shortages as much as leveraging the worker’s chronic underemployment to keep costs down or you’re making shit up wholesale. Also please note that American companies are already finding that as the investor capital subsidies run out it’s often cheaper to hire a person than pay the token costs to do the job with AI.

So there are a bunch of people on this forum more literary and authorial than I and I welcome any of them to correct me on this, but I’m skeptical of the whole project here of seeking to identify or define a new subgenre that is pushing speculative fiction as a whole forward. It’s always seemed to me like the real creative energy behind this kind of movement doesn’t originate from a defined subgenre as much as from a community of authors in conversation with each other. The identification and labeling comes afterwards as outsiders try to talk about it. In that sense, I don’t think he’s actually identifying that kind of community. Just naming a bunch of writers he likes, to the point of excluding several who he admits would be in this kind of community as defined but he just doesn’t like as much.

Don’t get me wrong, if Erika Kirk wanted to make the world a better place she could start by hastening her trip to join Charlie in hell. I’ll also happily agree that Charlie was less an innocent victim and more an enemy combatant in the ongoing conflict between fascism and humanity. Even so, I feel like the performative cruelty here isn’t exactly a good look. I’m not criticizing anyone’s feeling of catharsis or schadenfreude about Kirk’s fate, but this was a public display. It took effort and planning. They made props. And as a piece of political theater, this is not what we ought to be about. The message shouldn’t focus on Kirk’s death, but on making sure his life is remembered accurately: as a fascist debate bro who took massive amounts of money from the Epstein class to make internet memes for letting them do whatever they want. A man who immediately abandoned any libertarian small-government principles he used to claim once it became clear that openly hating gays, immigrants, and nonwhite people was politically viable.

Botterdamerung

I think there’s also an issue of framing here. Lemoine’s words on the matter suggested that not only was AI conscious, but that this meant it was worthy of moral consideration and that Google wasn’t interested in that. The new line is that the company is interested in this exciting new capability of their product and of course they’re undertaking the task of “model welfare research” to make sure that nobody is doing anything objectively evil, so you should absolutely keep spending even more money on Anthropic’s products.

Credit to John Rogers for the canonical reply:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Tom’s hardware is normally pretty boostery imo. For example, they published an article about token costs getting to be enough of a problem that Altman had to address it and somehow managed to reference “tokenmaxxing” without using the meme template of the guy jamming a stick into the wheel of his own bike. Also they notably don’t reference the increases in token pricing as the VC subsidies run out, which is somehow both less surprising than the lack of sneering and also a more serious omission.

I’m sure the tigers won’t be driven to a homicidal rage by the incessant Hummmmm.