corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ

I’m a man. I have a yellow hat. I also have a monkey. My track record of supervising this monkey is spotty at best, but that’s not important right now.

He is a very smart monkey. When you tell him to do something, he does it in a way that’s smarter than any monkey you’ve ever seen in your life. You had no idea monkeys were even capable of this level of greatness. Billions of dollars have now been poured into the economy, extolling the virtues and achievements of this incredible monkey. He can do things better than humans.

Cheaper than humans.

Get rid of the humans.

You don’t need the humans; you have the monkey. Okay, keep a couple of humans for guardrails; not too many. They’re expensive, and the monkey does it better anyway.

Suddenly it has come out that my monkey, in addition to being incredibly intelligent, has also been committing an escalating number of felonies. And also pooping. So much poop.

We are now in undefined times. Never before has a monkey committed a crime; our legal systems are completely unprepared to apportion blame to me, the man in the yellow hat who has once again failed to properly supervise his monkey. Who is responsible for this monkey’s shitty, shitty behavior? It is completely unknowable. Clearly, the entire legal system will need to be overhauled to address the concept of a monkey committing crimes.

Now please excuse me, I just got a call telling me that my teenager stole a car. Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion as to who is legally responsible here, and I dislike it. This is especially distressing, as the teenager has never made a cent for me in his life, yet I’m about to spend a boatload on criminal defense attorneys.

Shout out to the combined power of ibuprofen and my venting tolerant polycule group chat for allowing me to endure the two hour Copilot 365 training meeting at work. The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.

https://thepointmag.substack.com/p/the-ivy-leagues-surrender-to-ai-is via naked capitalism

The idea that preparing students to succeed in an AI-saturated world requires reimagining college as an AI incubator is not a sign of technological acumen, but of tech illiteracy. An LLM is not an aircraft requiring years of training to operate.

not x but y, but a decent point

it’s_happening.gif

OpenAI halts frontier-model training amid string of agent misalignment incidents

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/openai-halts-frontier-model-training-amid-string-of-agent-misalignment-incidents/

A former staffer named Frances Lopez says that she left the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford because they handled workplace sexual harassment terribly:

After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients. … (The colleague) also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat. He assured CEA that, with everything I now know about Frances, I’m glad she said no.

I am really not equipped to deal with this despicable behaviour outside the communities I am part of. She now has a Substack (sigh) trying to explain to EAs that hiring Caroline Ellison is not a good look and the world won’t suddenly start to see them the way they see themselves unless they sit down and change their behavior.

Not really a coherent post, just a thought I had, I’m ignoring both ‘This is a pr move’ and the conspiracy theory (which I just made up), that this hacking is all a 4d chess move by LW people to let the AI break out and get regulated before it can get really dangerous.

Now that that is out of the way, but with more stories coming out of both LW/EA people being high in the orgs of the AI companies and all the AI companies hacking other companies because nobody actually paid attention to what the AI models were doing one thing is clear. What a colossal waste of time LW was. All that talk about the sequences teaching people rationality, etc etc to stop the AI god from killing us all, and the first thing that happens when some AI model is created by people steeped in LW ideology and they leave the boxes open and don’t even check in on the AI. The Foom isn’t happening (remember AI progress is supposed to speed up according to the science fiction, not get a bit more refined, and get better in a few specific tasks (which is why I think slowdown started when with a lot of fanfare they released a new chatgpt model who could now do voicechat, aka they slapped a voicechat module on it) And now even Trump is starting to be anti EA, which is not going to be great for the longevity of it, considering how eager the rich are to bend the knee (guess high IQ lab babies created by Musk will not save yall). And while this is going on the left/liberals are starting to think of them as a sex cult.

Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.

SNL takes a potshot at Dario Amodei

“AI is not a weapon. It’s a tool. A tool for building weapons. And I urge you to urge me to stop.”

Starting things off with a fresh sneer I recently ran across (and put in the wrong place):

You do not have to hand IT to the techbros

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™

guy on threads told meta’s ai to handle his marketplace transaction for a keyboard, it send his address to a potential buyer, brought the buyer to his house, then accidentally taunted the buyer. coulda gone bad