Some more about the term “one-shotted” in the Atlantic, found in a LW comment thread, so caveat emptor

https://archive.is/TfsCC

Trust, but verify, and tape a shotgun to their forehead just in case.

edit I vaguely remember the shotgun to the forehead as a reference to the Turing Registry in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, but I can’t find a direct quote. Am I totally off base with it?

edit edit found it

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

And why isn’t Yudkowsky advocating for sexy French Turing cops headshotting rogue AIs?

“You are worse than a fool,” Michèle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. “You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now.” She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer.

that’s a horrifying situation to be in… good on the community who originally cancelled his show for apologizing

More on Dawkin’s fellating Claude (sorry Claudia)

https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-the-claude-delusion/

edit this particular episode has not made it into LW (yet)

Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong decides GenAI is good enough to replace 14% of his shitty company

PR-laden longtweet for source

https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/2051616759145185723

Showed up first on Lobste.rs (by 42 min by my stats) with the author themselves as a submitter:

https://lobste.rs/s/klw6bu

most of the discussion is about whether they’re a spammer or a promptfondler.

HN seems more enthusiastic

LW found it too:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3LcyoqNTJuCZ65MbL/mo-putera-s-shortform?commentId=hBaxokbLP3LEKSKij

Didn’t realize it was on Unherd, that organ for middlebrow fascists

Edit it’s funny how “one-shotted” has object-shifted from the original “Claude one-shotted this code” to “asshole was one-shotted by Claude”

Here’s an account of Elon on the stand

(dunno author, not endorsing their other work)

https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/musk-v-altman-recapping-elon-musk-farcical-cross-examination

Here’s one post, but it’s obfuscated as usual

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwxcunmW33TgvrAmg/red-vs-blue-the-parable-of-the-feud-within-a-feud

One weird thing about LW is that it presents itself as this timeless Hall of Truth, but half the content is literally incomprehensible if you’re not also deeply embedded in the adjacent Twittersphere .

Actually 13.2% had read it in 2016

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xi6syQenk24nQTzgz/2016-lesswrong-diaspora-survey-analysis-part-three-mental#Stories_Read

I take Zitron’s takes with a massive grain of salt, but I think the fundamental difference between him and rats is that for him, AI is just another technology. He’s looking at the figures, seeing the adoption, and not premising his arguments with the supposition that Anthropic’s Claude is literally gonna escape and kill us all.

Piper says she’s fine with paying $100/month for Claude. OK, but how large is the total addressable market for that kind of monthly expenditure - especially in a world where costs are rising? I’ve seen people stating that because they personally spend $200 on streaming services, increasing that load by 50% monthly is no big deal for them. But streaming services are much more mainstream than AI agents, and crucially, adding another subscriber to them is basically zero-cost for the provider on the margin. Not so with AI! The more people use them, the more they cost for the provider!

We’re seeing “pricing adjustments” from both Anthropic and Microsoft, which sure doesn’t align with the idea that they have a huge inference pricing margin cushion. Everything is gonna get more expensive - fuel, chips, employees (who are gonna be expected to be compensated for their own rising costs). Just based on what I’m reading in the news titls the analysis over in Ed’s favor.

I think it’s inevitable that the economics of anime production will lead to more GenAI content being used.

Sadly, many plots may just as well be generated by AI as well.

Tokens can never fail, they can only be failed - by not tokenmaxxing

“the thing that matters for your company is: is my employee becoming insanely AI-pilled? And that requires getting them on this tokenmaxxing mindset.”

This is gonna be the epitaph of this current bubble.

I kinda wanna see LW tackle this

“why do we have to write our own propaganda???”

I figured I’d re-read “A few notes on the Culture” https://theculture.adactio.com/, and lo and behold almost everything in these threads is answered there.

Also , look at these ghouls being delighted that the “proponent of deathism” author is dying: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RspqaNmJKKBnXTqwk/open-thread-april-1-15-2013?commentId=pnoiQZL7id6cav6aN, fascist gnome Gwern among them

Yeah I think I linked to another similar take where another Wrong’un was mighty pissed that the Culture was infested with “deathism”.

(edit found it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=eibhY5xmnTKcjwhnk

BONUS from the comments - if you don’t like Scottish Socialist Humanists, how about novels by a tradcath yank who was nominated by the Rabid Puppies??? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=Qmo8u85zCERNpXDBb)

Technically there’s no reason you can’t live forever in the Culture, through a combination of cryosleep and life extension, but it seems that the natural thing is to get pretty bored after 3 centuries or so. And I think that’s perfectly reasonably from what imagine it would be like.

Remember that there’s no private property in the Culture, so things that people here obsess over (keeping the family business going, making sure no non-deserving relative gets an inheritance) simply goes away. After a while you’ve played the Game of Life on all challenge modes and it’s time to pack it in.

I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.

Yeah I vaguely remember that part from the novella.

This is yet another story where a Culture citizen weirdly decides that living in a shithole (1970s Earth) is preferable to literal utopia, so maybe the LW crowd have a point it’s not a very good utopia. Or maybe there are weirdos in every time and space. Again, see LW.

There’s local democracy - in one book some activist reserved a big part of an orbital just to run cable cars back and forth. And I believe the decision to go war with the Idirans was subjected to a vote - part of the Culture split off when it didn’t go their way.

But yeah, the Minds decide everything and Contact/SC is all about doing the “needful stuff” that every right-thinking Culture citizen would deplore.

The Culture is imperialist in the previous US sense of “everyone wants to live our lifestyle” but not in the “invade planets and strip them” sense.

I’m less interested in discussing the minutiae of the fictional Culture than exploring nerd’s reactions to it, honestly .