Also the main problem here is that security has been shit for years because the result of any security incident anywhere by-and-large been a “not my problem” situation for the companies hacked.

I actually love the pigeon missile analogy here. Sure, you can wax poetic about how impressive it is to train a pigeon to do much of anything, and you did have to work hard and apply specialized knowledge and whatever to make it happen, but outside of animal training circles the pigeon is the least interesting or dangerous part of the whole contraption.

I mean, I guess the consequences and policies associated with culture war shit did abruptly go from ridiculous to real fucking serious what with the camps and the trying to unperson trans people and the overturning Roe v Wade. Maybe that leaves the Dems (who I assume are still being treated as “the left” in this discussion) in a more ridiculous position?

“sure Trump is renaming AI, but I saw a without context post which I didnt understand of a trans person who has 100 followers so the left is worse”

Not like windows or mac are less fashy

Bit sad as some people I used to know at KDE were outspoken antifascists.

To be fair, the workplace predates the nazi salute. Does make you wonder how much the thenibb comic applies here, and how much Musk was acting like he was bullied because ‘people cant take a joke’ (before he radicalized into what he is now).

It’s Dork Kremlinology

I have been unsure how to talk about all this since the abuse allegations popped up on my radar. Passing along accusations from people who say they were abused makes sense, and noting when figures have said really creepy things or hired / funded people they were romantically entangled with, but I have never met any of these people or exchanged more than a few brief text messages with them and its hard to know the shape of their lives and goals.

I’m being a bit flippant with the previous post, but really, Gyges was right to retract this. A number of the allegations he’s resurfacing are serious, and there most likely is more abuse going on the rat scene than has come to light… but leaning so heavily on Twitter posts as primary-source evidence makes his whole effort here come off as lightweight and cranky. To me, rather than a scathing exposé, this resembles a Dear Lowtax letter from somebody who got banned from Something Awful (a place where some of the moderators really were pedophiles, who really did have to be evicted from the community and prosecuted!).

We’ve known for a long time that Aella’s attitudes are problematic, and that we don’t want to spend time with her in olfactory distance, let alone tactile distance. Nothing new there. This Brangus dude was previously unknown to me, which is probably a good sign that my social-media hygiene of staying strictly away from Twitter is working… but also, and I don’t mean to say this by way of minimization, he ultimately seems like yet one more Tate-swilling Twitter manosphere bigot. He just happens to be the one infesting Gyges’ community of affinity. It would be hard to make the case, given the evidence presented, that he’s done much more than perform for the tech-savvy subset of Rogan/Tate adherents. Enough that people should reconsider associating with him, yes, but not enough to convict and remove him from public life.

And his conclusion starts off so laughable that it drowns out any accusation he might level against Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is a great man whose most recent equivalent is… Lenin?! What on earth? Yudkowsky doesn’t even measure up to Hubbard, his closest American parallel. The only grace I am willing to give Yudkowsky is that he has not, generally, been as openly predatory or as single-mindedly focused on creating a high-control organization as Hubbard was. Yudkowsky’s attempts at re-establishing group control and setting boundaries against outgroups typically consist of whiny tweets and LW posts that very quickly reach into “ur not takin p(doom) seriously!” hyperbole. The Sea Org and Guardian’s Office this is not.

I also strictly disagree with Gyges’ implicit assumption that Yudkowsky was the most effective popularizer of these ideas, or somehow more effective than Kurzweil. Without Kurzweil projecting exponential growth curves forward and back in time, no VC GP in the mid-2010s is going to start writing checks for the early generations of genAI. And, for crying out loud, I distinctly remember Disney children’s TV having an episode about grey goo taking over the world in 1996! https://gargwiki.net/Walkabout Almost 10 years before Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near, and two years before the first Harry Potter book would be published in the US! Omitting Kurzweil and Drexler to hype Yudkowsky is just plain silly. And no, he’s not on a level with Lenin; we can already tell that the AI companies’ marketing which adapts AI-doom ideas is backfiring and being laughed at by the general public.

I’ve gone on for too long, partly because this is a diverting way to procrastinate, but by the end of this, Gyges once again demonstrates why he’s an unreliable fellow traveler. I am very reluctant to quote directly from a document that has been officially retracted, but the second to last paragraph where he talks about “understand[ing] what people mean when they say certain ideas are demonic, and that they spread like a disease…” Hmm, you obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter to dig all this shit up, tell me, what’s the “mind virus” they keep ranting about over there? Fuck you, Gyges, you’re a few invitation-snubs or one bad layoff away from goose-stepping with the rest of them.

I agree. He gets over his skis with too many speculative scenarios. On the other hand I think he’s spot-on about the techniques rationalists use to filter for people who will tolerate abuse (e.g., the “cow question”). And he brings receipts when it comes to Brangus and his interactions with other prominent rationalists.

I am not sure if Yud actually touches under-18s, or just has desires, but none of these people should be anywhere near minors or allowed in a position of responsibility (I suspect something happened between him and his disciple before 2014, and these people show no ability to learn from their own mistakes).

The later section about Brangus (Ronny Fernandez) was damning. I’ve seen him come up in discussions a few times, but I too had no idea just how depraved and dangerous he was. Nor did I realize how central he was to the whole scene. This guy feels like he’s going to be Brent Dill 2.0 but worse.

EDIT: This also sheds light on the recent ouster of the leader of “Pause AI”, Fernandez’s ex-wife.

I had suspicions personally.

His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.

I think the FOSS angle kinda works just off of the inherently unsustainable economics of the space. Relying on unpaid labor makes the worker protection arguments inherently less valuable because it’s not like this was your livelihood to begin with (ostensibly). Keeping up with the next thing is a pretty clear way to keep a mostly-volunteer workforce interested.

maybe a hot take but there’s no fix for this. The ideology built into the american tech industry makes it permanently susceptible to the Next Big Thing regardless of the second order effects or ideological baggage. Coders have been riding high making extremely inflated salaries for the better part of the last 25 years, and they (mostly) all view themselves as unique brain geniuses that don’t need to work in solidarity with others. Just a collection of monads pursuing their rational self interest via computer touching.

This is one of the recipes in How to Serve Man

“No you misunderstand, we want the same things! We just think Friend Computer could manage society more Effectively based on (garbled utilitarian noises)”

I haven’t had a 15 minute refractory period since being a teenager, is that anything

At this point, I’d say calling it a Nazi bar is fully reasonable.

While calling him “the dude who hacked Rockstar games” is a catchy meme, Arion Kurtaj was sentenced to indefinite detainment in a secure hospital after being found unfit to stand trial after being arrested a third time for violating the terms of his parole and committing further offenses (only one of which was hacking Rockstar Games.) Rockstar is basically entirely incidental to what happened there, and it’s disingenuous to pretend it’s more important to the outcome than the previous convictions or other acts involved in the trial. He’s also since been deemed fit to stand trial and will be tried in November.

If you must make comparisons, it would be better to pick someone like Aaron Swartz instead of laundering the reputation of a convicted fraudster and extortionist.

Too anthropomorphised.

We ran software that generates code associated with a particular task, in an environment that executes that code and can feed it’s outputs back into the software. We configured the environment to be open to the net at large, and ran the software with no oversight and without adequate security to prevent the running of malicious code.

This isn’t some sinister electric god with no morals, it’s strapping circular saws to a roomba and setting it loose in a shopping centre.