• 47 Posts
  • 2.16K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • geriksontoTechTakes•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th October 2026English
    11·
    14 hours ago

    guys maybe basing our entire identity off being so very Rational we end up hosting (“consensual”) rape parties means we don’t play well in Peoria

    LGM: The AI Sex Cult(s)

    For the uninitiated: Lawyers, Guns and Money is a US political group blog with a progressive bent. Cheryl Rofer usually writes about stuff like nuclear disarmament. These are people that are Online but Serious. There’s no way they’re wasting their time like we are reading Rats in the original LWese.

    Thus, any views they have of Rationalists, Big Yud and AI Doom is filtered either by mainstream reporting or by bloggers/BlueSky posters they follow. And the fact that the views that appear are mostly about how fucking weird these people are (and how weird they are fucking) bodes ill for the hope that addressing Doom will be Non-Partisan™

  • geriksontoTechTakes•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
    7·
    4 days ago

    presented without further comment, LW reposts Axios(!)

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZLs7CcQuxozxqPd7f/scoop-trump-allies-open-new-front-against-anthropic-ceo-over

    A memo began circulating within the White House this week that seeks to paint effective altruism as a fringe, cultish collective out of touch with mainstream America. The memo, obtained by Axios, places Amodei at the foundation of the movement, which defines itself as an effort to maximize the benefits of philanthropy.

    Critics of the movement, which has ties to the AI research community, have called out its obsession with AI safety, animal welfare (including musings on shrimp consciousness) and other values they deem far from the U.S. mainstream.

    The memo says it prioritizes “foreigners over citizens, shrimp over families, future hypothetical people over the living, and - on the current agenda - possible machine minds over Americans.”

    In the view of the Florida-heavy White House and its allies, Anthropic is staffed with too many Biden-era liberals, Democrats and strange Californians.

    The document lists a veritable parade of horribles for the average conservative mind: abortion, veganism, devaluing human life by overvaluing animals or granting “digital minds” civil rights-like protections.

  • geriksontoTechTakes•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
    6·
    7 days ago

    Related, Mike Masnick at Techdirt is iffy at best about LLMs but this is a good take

    Techdirt: The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy

    This essential nuts-and-bolts safety work also doesn’t, typically, require brilliant and manly heroes to nobly die for the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods. Instead, the hard work of actual safety requires things that are much less sexy: empathy, conflicting values, and a deep understanding of tradeoffs that will never fully resolve. Those qualities are not highly esteemed in the present moment. But they are critical for tackling the actual threats and the actual risks, which aren’t as flashy, and don’t make for such fun headlines. AI safety matters, but we’re unlikely to move in the direction of actual safety if all the focus is on fantastical stories involving killer robots.