your mode of analysis is closer to erotic Harry Potter fan fiction

To give Gary Marcus credit here, HPMOR may not be erotic, but many of Eliezer's other works are erotic (or at least attempt to be), the most notable being Planecrash/Project Lawful which has entire sections devoted to deliberately bad (as in deliberately not safe, sane, consensual) bdsm.

Eliezer tried to promote/hype up Project Lawful on twitter, maybe hoping it would be the next HPMOR, but it didn't quite take. Maybe he failed to realize how much of HPMOR's success was being in the popular genre of Harry Potter fanfic (which at the time had crap like Partially Kissed Hero or Harry Crow as among its most popular works), and not from his own genius writing.

I know I've said somewhere on here before that "Harry Potter for pop science nerds" is fanfiction on easy mode, but I'll stand by it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqs2ehBK8p4

Also I think there's enough manipulation fantasy in HPMOR, and enough lack of agency from Hermione, that it qualifies—in it's own way—implicitly as being erotic.

I actually dug up the context to make sure I wasn't forgetting something horrific. It's from a 2017 piece (CW: SSC Link) back before he went mask-off but was firmly in the "I'm a liberal and I talk exclusively about how liberals and their institutions suck" useful idiot phase of his career, so the overall essay is about how actually the wing nuts have a point when they say that all so-called neutral institutions are actually secret communist indoctrinators that want to trans your children and take your guns. I'm paraphrasing, obviously; he believes/pretends that when they called these things left-wing they didn't mean "literally in league with Stalin and the Devil". However, in the middle of the usual beigeness he tries to maintain his air of neutrality by having a section on how bad Voat ended up being, which concludes with:

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

Obviously I don't want the human race to go extinct, but if there was a choice of inevitable outcomes where we do, building an inimmical superintelligence at least implies agency, not carelessness.

Anyway Big Yud's fantasy of a precisely timed diamondoid-bacteria delivered killshot to every human being at the same time might sound terrible, but from a sensory perspective of the victims, it's basically suffering-free. You go about your day, BAM nothingness. Maybe there's a difference in timing so you see your partner keel over a split second before you die - again, you might not even realize what is happening.

I am not sure from where this idea of a global instantaneous simultanous genocide comes from, maybe a tit-for-tat escalation to counter every argument against shutting down the robot god, but from a storytelling perspective it's pretty useless. There's no drama where the survivors lament their loss or brood over what might have been. It's just a plug being pulled on the simulation.

(weirdly it's also the logical outcome of asking a computer to "end human suffering", a bit like the Robobrain logic in Fallout 4's Automatron expansion, but I doubt it's meant that way)

Usually, you wake up on a lifeless beach that’s adorned with some sort of abandoned marble temple. It’s supposed to be beautiful, but instead it’s really sad. Almost unbearably sad. So much so that you want to get away from it. So you crawl downward into these vents going below the horrible temple, and suddenly it’s like you’re moving through the innards of an incomprehensible machine that’s thudding away, thud, thud, thud. And as you get deeper, the metal sidings are carved with scrawled ominous curses and slurs directed toward you, and you hear the voices, louder than before, and you somehow know these people are in pain because of you. It keeps getting colder. Color drains from the world. And you see the crowd through the slats of the vents: pale and emaciated men, women, and children from centuries to come, all of them pressed together for warmth in some sort of unending cavern. What clothes they have are torn and ragged. Before you know it, their dirty hands and dirty fingernails lurch through the grates, and they’re reaching for you, tearing at your shirt, moaning terrible things about their suffering and how you made it happen, you made it, and you need to stop this now, now, now. And next they’re ripping you apart, limb from limb, and you are joining them in the gray dimness forever.

That’s precisely what I was thinking. Obviously I don’t want everyone to die but if you forced me to choose between apocalypse scenarios, I’m picking something painless and instantaneous- like a super-virus that activates immediately or a bullet in the head-over being slowly tortured to death via something like nuclear radiation or extreme heat

A real evil robot god would keep a sample of humanity alive forever in order to torture them as reprisal for them being really really mean to it back in the day.

Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism

https://quitgpt.org/

John Scalzi's shitcanned any book club plans for the foreseeable future, and AI spammers are the reason why.

“We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy,” he wrote. “Good learning experience for me as we face higher-stakes decisions in the future.”

Yes of course this is just a learning opportunity... higher stakes decisions in the future...

Cuz making deals with the biggest military in the western world that involve autonomous use of weapons and possible escalation to all out nuclear war sounds pretty low stakes. /s

Fucking muppet

From the comments:

Today I got yet another AI huckster email offering to promote my book, but that book turned out to be AI slop published under my name on Amazon. (I have contacted Amazon.) The AIs are eating their young. This would be funny if it wasn’t really happening.

The purpose of AI is theft, part infinity: chardet steals LGPL code for profit using Claude

Today's AI psychosis casualty, brought to you by Gemini.

Blast from the past: I realized that I didn't have the exact link detailing why nickpsecurity was banned from Lobsters, but now I do. You'll have to click the little [+] to see his comments. He's still active on HN and Reddit; he's gone full MAGA, which is 100% predictable a surprising turn for somebody who constantly preaches born-again Christian bigotry peace and love. I really do wish that Lobsters did the whole turn-you-into-a-tree thing (sure, crucifixion, or maybe Peneus-style or Pequenino-style) for banned users rather than forcing folks to dig through archives.

Zac Bowden at Windows Central

The good news is the report is false. According to contacts that are familiar with the Windows roadmap, there is no plan to ship a Windows 12 this year. In fact, I understand that the Windows roadmap for 2026 is all about fixing Windows 11 and attempting to improve its reputation by addressing top feedback such as reducing AI bloat across the OS

"We have heard your complaints about lead in the paint, and our roadmap for Leaded Paint 2026 is all about improving its reputation by making the lead easier to swallow"

tit-for-tat escalation

I think maybe you nailed it here. Being able to pretend they're doing game theory/mapping out an escalation ladder allows Yud and our friends to feel like they're in the same intellectual lineage as guys like Oppenheimer and Teller, manifesting the same sort of "objective" emotionless rationality. The big difference, you see, is that the AI will think so much faster than us that...!

Don't worry, there's always Effective Altruism if you ever feel guilty about causing the suffering of regular people. Just say you're going to donate your money at some point eventually in the future. There you go, 40 trillion hypothetical lives saved!

Blast from the past: in 2014, Scott Alexander posted a take on marijuana legalization which showed excellent knowledge of medical papers but huge gaps in his knowledge of what brown people or smart policy reformers have to say. David Gerard and Christopher Hallquist in the comments, digression on how pot affects your IQ with gwern chipping in. Alexander came back in 2018 promising that he was right all along with a footnote about how some people in the comments told him that people like smoking weed and he did not know how to process that because his utilitarian calculation said it was bad for society.

The god Plutonium will save me.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/chatgpt-uninstalls-surged-by-295-after-dod-deal/

Some of my faculty have called for a campus wide boycott. Relatedly, the Scott Galloway scoreboard is up to $250m hit to tech market cap: https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/

"They wanted me to build an AI, so I built a shoddy AI casing filled with used pinball machine parts!"

while OpenAI deserves every bit of flack they get, it's comical to see people who criticise OpenAI for creating a 'war machine' turn around and praise Anthropic when they were-by their own admission no less!-the first people to start using AI for military purposes

I mean, I can understand the argument that Anthropic at least maintained a fig leaf of ethics, but notably based on Saltman's statements OpenAI does still feel the obligation to maintain those optics, they're just not nearly as credible at doing so.

Recently discovered Donald Knuth got oneshot by Claude recently (indirectly, through fedi) - feeling the itch to write about tech's vulnerability to LLMs because of it.

Sorry, I was referring to a part of the Prince of Darkness movie

Words on computer screen: "You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED!"

As that movie has people sending messages back from the future using dreams plot element.

jesus fuck https://urbit.org/blog/olif-and-urbit-ids

with urbit, you can now sniff each other's farts

oh hey I remember reading that Donald Knuth paper earlier today, when it got posted by an AI youtube channel as 'proof' AI is on the path to AGI

It's curious how, in terms of utilitarianism, the 2014 post has people doing arithmetic to estimate QALYs but the 2018 post is more of a handwave where Scoot repeats the 2014 numbers verbatim. Advocates of decriminalization and legalization have long argued that the QALYs saved by releasing people from prison and no longer sentencing them (easily 20+ QALYs/person) and not arresting people for possession in the first place (0.5 QALYs/person-arrest) are significant to society at large, even if there were quantifiable health risks.

TBH I think that Scoot got a bit of a tough surprise when data actually came in on cannabis usage; it's now accepted cannabis lore that cannabis can cause onset of e.g. schizophrenia, at a rate of something like 1 in 2000 users, but the numbers on causing cancer never materialized. Meanwhile the case studies treating e.g. epilepsy have multiplied to the point where, again, it's now accepted lore that some epileptics find relief by using products made from high-CBD strains.

Choice sneer from the second post, from somebody with an extremely-relevant Moray avatar:

Yeah but you know what would achieve better results? Criminalizing driving.

Edit: grammar and also the extremely-relevant link. Pass the Moray, please~

I didn't know that Moray in QC was around in 2018!

That is a good example because it shows the failure of imagination (can imagine the end of the world, can't imagine working public transit and public policy to discourage driving) and because hf he thought it through he might get to "humh, some people like to drive, but its bad for public and social health, how can we discourage it while preserving liberties?"

I really wonder what he did as a medical student in Cork other than study and read racist Tumblr accounts. Did his friends never drag him to Amsterdam to ride a bike and eat an edible?

Another surprise is that illegal weed still has 30% of the market in Canada. I don't know how much of that is consumer inertia ("My buddy Mike always gets me the good stuff eh") and how much is avoiding taxes.

I’ve been seeing some people (not here, I’ve been taking a break) saying that we shouldn’t be mean to clankers by bringing up Kant’s position on being nice to animals. Well. Fuck all that.

Istg this has come up before, i am just too lazy to prove it. Still. Why would anyone want this

in the past 24 hours I was fooled by 3 pieces of fake news in a row:

• that Kurds from Iraq were crossing the border to fight in Iran
• that Windows 12 would be AI-centred or require an AI chip to work (I helped spread this)
• that Spain has capitulated and let the US use its ports for war (erroneously claimed by a WH official).

I know that fake news can be made organically and have been since forever and I'm doing selection bias here but I can't help but picture the misinformation engines firehosing bullshit constantly until some of it catches and spreads.

ooh gooods nooo now all the Claude slurpers are going to refer to this forever as definitive proof of how legitimately useful LLMs have got, it "solved" a math problem for Donald Knuth! :<

A lobster invokes classic argument from authority

First Terrence Tao and now Donald Knuth.

If you're still on the fence about AI, you have to take it seriously now.

yeah b/c I'm a professional computer scientist ...

was doomscrolling and got fucking jumpscared by this fucking article: https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-three-scientists-who-said-no-epstein

thought it was satire, genuinely surprised it's an official Urbit-sponsored project

also very much goes against the grain of elevating the mind over the body which is the vibe I get from urbit and environs

yeah it's bad

otoh awareness I think is spreading

swedish public broadcasting has regular "spot the fake" pieces on their website

I think giving a sensationalist bit of news 6 hours to "mature" is a good idea before amplifying.

If you’re still on the fence about AI, you have to take it seriously now.

But... why?

Always remember that Nobel disease is a thing.

The one I often think about is the person who invented PCR and then later claimed to have had an encounter with a fluorescent talking raccoon of possibly extraterrestrial origin.

Baldur Bjarnason's essay remains evergreen.

Consider homeopathy. You might hear a friend talk about “water memory”, citing all sorts of scientific-sounding evidence. So, the next time you have a cold you try it.

And you feel better. It even feels like you got better faster, although you can’t prove it because you generally don’t document these things down to the hour.

“Maybe there is something to it.”

Something seemingly working is not evidence of it working.

• Were you doing something else at the time which might have helped your body fight the cold?

• Would your recovery have been any different had you not taken the homeopathic “remedy”?

• Did your choosing of homeopathy over established medicine expose you to risks you weren’t aware of?

Even when looking at Knuth's account of what happened, you can already tell that the AI is receiving far more credit than what it actually did. There is something about a nondeterministic slot machine that makes it feel far more miraculous when it succeeds, while reliable tools that always do their job are boring and stupid. The downsides of the slot machine never register in comparison to the rewards. Does it feel so miraculous when I get an idea after experimenting in Mathematica?

I feel like math research is particularly susceptible to this, because it is the default that almost all of one's attempts do not succeed. So what if most of the AI's attempts do not succeed? But if it is to be evaluated as a tool, we have to check if the benefits outweigh the costs. Did it give me more productive ideas, or did it actually waste more of my time leading me down blind alleys? More importantly, is the cognitive decline caused by relying on slot machines going to destroy my progress in the long term? I don't think anyone is going to do proper experiments for this in math research, but we have already seen this story play out in software. So many people were impressed by superficial performances, and now we are seeing the dumpster fire of bloat, bugs, and security holes. No, I don't think I want that.

And then there is the narrative of not evaluating AI as an objective tool based on what it can actually do, but instead as a tidal wave of Unending Progress that will one day sweep away those elitists with actual skills. Random lemmas today mean the Millennium Prize problems tomorrow! This is where the AI hype comes from, and why people avoid, say, comparing AI with Mathematica. To them I say good luck. We have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into this, and there are only so many more hundreds of billions of dollars left. Were these small positive results (and significant negatives) worth hundreds of billions of dollars, or perhaps were there better things that these resources could have been used for?

I like this. News is a frittata, it needs time to set before consuming.

scott jumpscare

I was pissed when my (non-academic) friends saw this and immediately started talking about how mathematicians and computer scientists need to use AI from now on.

one of the brain geniuses at bluesky

The HarfBuzz maintainer has drunk the slop-aid - Baldur has commented on it, warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences:

Fonts are a lucrative target. They require a complex parser, usually written in a language that isn't memory safe, and often directly exposed to outside data (websites, PDFs, etc. that contain fonts). This means a flaw could lead to an attack worst case scenario: arbitrary code execution. HarfBuzz is pretty much the only full-featured library for that takes font files, parses them, and returns glyphs ready to render. It is ubiquitous. A security flaw in HarfBuzz could make a good portion of the world's user-facing software (i.e. that renders text) unsafe.

Even in Knuth's account it sounds like the LLM contribution was less in solving the problem and more in throwing out random BS that looked vaguely like different techniques were being applied until it spat out something that Knuth and his collaborator were able to recognize as a promising avenue for actual work.

His bud Filip Stappers rolled in to help solve an open digraph problem Knuth was working on. Stappers fed the decomposition problem to Claude Opus 4.6 cold. Claude ran 31 explorations over about an hour: brute force (too slow), serpentine patterns, fiber decompositions, simulated annealing. At exploration 25 it told itself “SA can find solutions but cannot give a general construction. Need pure math.” At exploration 30 it noticed a structural pattern in an earlier solution. Exploration 31 produced a working construction.

I am not a mathematician or computer scientist and so will not claim to know exactly what this is describing and how it compares to the normal process for investigating this kind of problem. However, the fact that it produced 4 approaches over 31 attempts seems more consistent with randomly throwing out something that looks like a solution rather than actually thinking through the process of each one. In a creative exploration like this where you expect most approaches to be dead ends rather than produce a working structure maybe the LLM is providing something valuable by generating vaguely work-shaped outputs that can inspire an actual mind to create the actual answer.

Filip had to restart the session after random errors, had to keep reminding Claude to document its progress. The solution only covers one type of solution, when Claude tried to continue another way, it “seemed to get stuck” and eventually couldn’t run its own programs correctly.

The idea that it's ultimately spitting out random answer-shaped nonsense also follows from the amount of babysitting that was required from Filip to keep it actually producing anything useful. I don't doubt that it's more efficient than I would be at producing random sequences of work-shaped slop and redirecting or retrying in response to a new "please actually do this" prompt, but of the two of us only one is demonstrating actual intelligence and moving towards being able to work independently. Compared to an undergrad or myself I don't doubt that Claude has a faster iteration time for each of those attempts, but that's not even in the same zip code as actually thinking through the problem, and if anything serves as a strong counterexample to the doomer critihype about the expanding capabilities of these systems. This kind of high-level academic work may be a case where this kind of random slop is actually useful, but that's an incredibly niche area and does not do nearly as much as Knuth seems to think it does in terms of justifying the incredible cost of these systems. If anything the narrative that "AI solved the problem" is giving Anthropic credit for the work that Knuth and Stapprrs were putting into actually sifting through the stream of slop identifying anything useful. Maybe babysitting the slop sluice is more satisfying or faster than going down every blind alley on your own, but you're still the one sitting in the river with a pan, and pretending the river is somehow pulling the gold out of itself is just damn foolish.

luis villa, who as a lawyer really should have known better, being self-reportedly a friend of behdad and a confabulation/war machine promoter decided to come to rescue, calling the above (a) attack, and (b) slander.

It has, but I honestly thought it was fake and/or satire