rats' best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton

New Odium Symposium. We go through an episode of Loveline, a once wildly popular call-in radio show, then look at where its hosts Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew ended up.

https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/26-chudline-with-172120239 or www.odiumsymposium.com for all the usual rss sources

Love your threads (haha). I didn't have a mastodon account, so actually you're my first follow :)

Sama is a serial scammer, this is just the biggest scam he's managed to foster. He'll say whatever it takes to get the payout.

Dario is a true believer but I also think the prospect of $billions skews his judgement

Bankruptcy means they're not going to be paying out damages for all the AI Psychosis they caused.

New Baldur Bjarnason: It’s not our job to fix our employers

As a note, Baldur dedicates much of the first half to how general sentiment has shifted against the tech industry over the past decade.

It's funny how they're twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.

A frustrating (and beware, long) post I came across: Coding is NOT solved

Starts off with some good sneers:

Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough:
❌ Haven’t written code in ages
❌ Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers!
❌ Have a low bar for what good looks like
❌ Don’t care about quality or NFR
❌ Have difficulty understanding an S-curve
✅ Are honest: AI genuinely writes better code than them

But the author can't get over their AI-centrism:

Instead of following other people’s advice, build with AI, gain first hand experience and make up your mind. But whatever you do, please please please don’t fool yourself into believing this is a fad. AI is here to stay, and as I stated above there are some genuine use cases for it already.

Here's that falling apple thing so that it might be referenced in the full post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message

I totally remembered the claim wrong. Forgive me for I am after all mere human and not a Bayesian superintelligence:

A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.

I wonder how many webcam frames were needed for the ancestor simulations; given that we're all actually digital copies in Newcombian-basilisk-hell™ without realizing it.

Via Kevin Bird (who has taken on the Rationalists before) a substack taking down Jordan Lasker/Crémieux Recueil

These people love to feel sciencey but hate the actual science part where you have to look and look elsewhere and readjust and suddenly learning more takes generations of time and material investment instead of handwaving wildly

Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way

but it has to work, it was foretold in ai in a box prophecy

Lets spend 500 Billion tokens on reverse engineering an unspecified first person shooter. You ask how our agents communicate with each other? Obviously via a fucking Discord channel because that makes sense.

I wonder what answers you would get if you polled these Anthropic people about the Covid lab leak theory

"Yes I did it. No you can't see the work"

What fullsquare said, they've got years of sci-fi filtered through lesswrong short stories and sequence posts saying it could happen, so they repeated that despite all the ways it is completely impossible given the limitations and hardware requirements of LLMs.

Yep, so many of their favorite tropes and assumptions fail when an actual expert breaks them down. Like their belief in the possibility of Drexler-style nanotech has been taken down quite firmly several times (here is a good takedown that got posted to the EA forums), Drexler's ideas pretty firmly ignore how things actually work at the molecular level...

As someone who isn't totally uninterested in animal welfare the shrimp argument always makes me generally grumpy. Like, I'll grant that it's better to use a stunner than to not and that it's probably a good use of $15, but the whole problem with EAs is that they have significantly more than $15 at their disposal. Like, if you just do the naive multiplication you'll end up missing out on two things. On the one side opportunities that require a lot more than $15 to have a positive impact that are going otherwise underserved. On the other, more important side, their emphasis on economic efficiency leaves them blind to the completely avoidable harms that are inflicted in the accumulation of that much money. That's how grifters like SBF work their way in, and why the whole enterprise seems to be earning a reputation as a way to make tech billionaires feel better about themselves rather than actually making the world a better place.

The presence of billions of dollars under anyone's control destroys anyone's brains as their lives have all negative feedback removed, their surroundings become a reflection of their own preferences alone rather than bearing any information about the world, and their social connections become transactional and sycophantic.

And yet so much less plausible than "diamondoid nanobacteria" or whatever it is. I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.

What if an AI did the same thing that Mirai is already doing only we spent far more money on the attempt and we were almost certainly legally liable for the consequences?

I think the shrimp stunner isn't even a thing, it's just something semi-plausible bentham's bulldog invented to make his argument work.

a nsfw to start wednesday, what if the billionaires all suddenly exploded

I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.

i mean that's why we all are here, the problem is that they have thiel's money and white house advisors

And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria”

drexler is a hack and yud's nanobots can't grow, can't divide (they're made from stiff material), can't self-repair (it's one piece), and would turn out to be extremely expensive coal dust fire, and that's before you look too closely, so i wouldn't say that because iot devices at least aren't forbidden by known laws of physics

I think it was modern warfare 2 but they redacted all explicit references because activision or whoever was starting to make annoyed legal noises.

The insistence on using number of functions copied as a metric is weird, like of course a port isn't going to be a function-to-function translation, programming languages are never a 1-1 match with each other that's kind of the point of having more than one.

What we needed was an automated check that tells agents whether a reconstructed function matches the original. It should verify identical semantics. A simple PASS or FAIL signal would be enough and the agent can figure out on its own what’s wrong.

Uh, sure.

Also a lot of their recommendations come of as no-duh, like pressing the compact conversation button early to reduce tokens or using a common specification document across LLM instances to keep them more coordinated, how novel, are you kidding me.

Another one of their recommendations is that fixing stuff causes garbage to accumulate, so if something isn't working out you are better off starting from scratch, because tokens are cheap now! You just need to be doing the equivalent of maxing out dad's credit cards by using multiple private subscriptions in tandem, and I guess also make sure to time your dev cycle to coincide with the two major LLM vendors having a money burning competition on their way to an IPO.

Finally there's a whole hypecycle going on currently that this feeds into, that makes headline readers think that LLMs can convert binaries right back into code now, when they are actually using an MCP to control existing decompilation software which is so far from the same thing.

Unconfirmed rumor says that a Swedish streaming service had to postpone the premiere of a new game show season because an "AI agent" deleted the completed cut of the show.

Via SVT: https://www.svt.se/kultur/tekniskt-haveri-tv4-skjuter-upp-realitysatsning

References Aftonbladet: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challenge-sverige-raderad-av-ai-bara-veckor-innan-premiaren

The streaming service (TV4) says it's a "technical issue" (the Swedish term "haveri" is used for everything from a computer system crash to an airplane crash).

I too have seen the documentary "Maximum Overdrive"

More news about the character dot ai bankruptcy: as it turns out, the true economics of the company are disastrous. At their peak, their revenue was around $1M a month while their AI compute expenses alone were $14M a month! Their total expenses in 2025 were around $18.5M a month before counting legal fees. All of this is for a pure text-based low power LLM (none of the "reasoning" business).

Before AI boosters crow about how much cheaper AI is currently, they tried every trick in the book to enshittify: open models, ads, usage limits, etc. This allowed them to cut down their losses to a mere $9M a month.

Surely this is all one big exception, everyone else in the AI bubble is doing just fine!

How you look at "my company pays $14 for every $ from the user" and not like, idk, stop, seek help, change your job, name, and address, is completely beyond me.

Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?

I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me "wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies" I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.

Edit: thanks everyone for responses, I'll get my friend started with Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse and then point him at rational wiki for any further questions.

(h/t david gerard)

How much slop is in Linux now? You're no longer allowed to know, so its probably all slop

(why did I jump ship to Linux at this exact moment)

I was just listening to an interview with Emile Torres, it's an hour long but it is on the topic you're asking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt508VjX2H8

You assume that the VCs will keep you alive a little longer as a honeypot to gather more plaintext blackmail material and private information and keep preparing to sell out to Facebook

https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged-bugging-executive-conference-room/ h/t Naked Capitalism

A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.

lol asking ChatGPT how to bug OpenAI from your wife's account.

There is always RationalWiki but its not really equipped to deal with the polycule and abuse of sexual power stuff (or all the giant institutiions taking Internet cranks seriously). https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Previously, on Awful, Gutsick Gibbon spent an hour ripping apart T. Beale's (VD's) anti-evolution book. She was still angry though, so she got her prior collaborator and four friends to join her for a complete dissection of VD's bullshit claims. Content warning for literally everything awful we discuss here, including sex crimes, neo-Nazis, Silicon Valley bullshit, and remarkably bad arithmetic. My choice sneer is her chosen video title, "Six Scientists Roast One Racist Loser (Heartwarming) (Four Hours) (Hopecore)". GG's requested that we not give VD any attention other than reminding him that he's such a pathetic loser that even white nationalists disavow him as too boring and insipid, so I'm not posting this to a top-level topic, but I'm getting a lot of household chores done while listening to it in the background and maybe you will too.

What type of documentation are you looking for? The big picture is easily googleable and wikipediable: EY got a few of the super-rich excited enough about doomer drama to bankroll the founding of OpenAI, whose governing body was mostly EAs (until the Altman-Nadella counter-coup) while Anthropic were the people who bailed because they though OAI weren't serious enough about alignment, and suddenly getting dicked in a rationalist compound group house has immense career implications in the burgeoning AI sector.

Also terms like AGI, ASI, AI alignment, existential risk et al started out as lesswrong shibboleths, and so-called alignment research is almost completely a rationalist circlejerk.

Pinning the EA/rats down as a cult is where it gets murkier because it's mostly them telling on themselves in social media and blog post implications, like how they foster a culture of zero personal boundaries, ingroup overdependence and rigid hierarchies stratified around claimed IQ and proximity to the Great Work of not messing up the robot god incantation that ends the world.

You could do worse than the Behind the Bastards episode on the Zizians, mostly because unlike Leverage or MAPLE who kind of did their own thing but with rationalist funding and human capital, the Zizians can be fairly described as what happens if you actually take the more esoteric aspects of rationalism seriously.

For copyright purposes, all patches must be substantially human-written. However, it seems that most patches are now prepared with chatbot assistance, so that effectively means that people are required to be psychotic centaurs in order to keep up with review demand. There's an LWN secret link from the documentation lieutenant which summarizes the linked LKML thread. My former lieutenant, in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem, is apparently having a bad time:

Airlie asked his sub-maintainers; most of them identified him as the biggest pain point. More seriously, it was that the DRM subsystem is still seeing too many regressions. There is a push within the subsystem to move development to GitLab in order to use its CI features; he is not standing in the way because he wants to see how it turns out.

This is a more systemic problem than one might expect, because DRM (and DRI, Direct Rendering Infrastructure) are partially shared between Linux and the BSDs. This subsystem has creaked along under the weight of corporate expectations for decades, mostly fueled by a kind of quiet sponsorship of young university folks from GPU vendors along with outsourced drivers produced behind corporate privacy and thrown over the wall. Every vendor, even our eternal nemesis nVidia, has made repeated concessions in order to try to figure out the maintainer burden, but it seems that we are still dependent on Airlie's stoutness and willingness to get shouted at by Torvalds.

I haven't really kept up, but it looks like Character's business model was still focused on NSFW content. If so, then this is also a disaster for the industry at large, since NSFW content is one of the few genuine money-printers for chatbot and image-generation services; people really do want thousands of iterations of the same fantasy, slightly changed in order to stay engaging, and Character was highly recommended as a source of affordable slop. (Examples of unaffordability include the rampant free-tier abuse on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok; I'm assuming that customers are willing to open their wallets at least a little. In general, the porn industry turns a profit, so I do think that people will pay for porn.)

My prior estimate (previously, on Awful and on Lobsters) was that token generation was subsidized to the tune of an effective 80-90% discount; this looks to be more in the 90-95% range. For contrast, consider chatbot-booster Willison's belief, in reply above, that Chinese labs will magically produce a five-fold improvement in token production; this still would be between two to four times slower than needed to turn a profit for Character.

AI safety is mostly a sex cult

the guy who posted this is also a singularity fanatic, but this is a good enough summary

Also, the really powerful people keep the details mercifully secret. My elevator pitch is "remember how the exec team at FTX were living in a penthouse apartment, sleeping together, and posting harem fantasies? People who have met them say the Rationalists and AI company staff live like that."

It's a catchy summary because he leans into the weird sex stuff instead of say the cosmism aspect, but the writer is a knob who doesn't like EA/rats for basically the same reasons as Peter Thiel, so take him with a grain of salt.

He's also likened anti-data center activism to jewish pogroms and believes that AI resentment can be summed up as "curing cancer is less important than my job satisfaction".

I mean, the founders literally did that, Google hired them back at a 2.8 billion dollar premium for some reason.

@lagrangeinterpolator :trashfire: @BlueMonday1984

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Cognitive surrender illustrated.

Aella was homeschooled by fundies. I don't think anyone ever sat her down and explained that first and foremost you write to figure out what you think about something. She must know the OnlyFans model of a celebrity and dozens of underlings in a call center answering 'her' texts in 'her' voice and selling her smut.

The saga of DRM/DRI and "open" GPU drivers is one of those topics for which I wish I could hire a historian to write an extensive treatment. The primary sources of how we ended up here, mailing list discussions and the like, are probably mostly publicly available, but unless you were there, who has taken the time to understand how it all happened?

You also have to transcribe all the screenshots and google them to trace them back to source. RationalWiki his thread is not.