It's possible the attempt to shove AI in every nook and cranny in the pentagon didn't especially pan out and since his face was all over that project, he's desperate for a scapegoat.

Like for sure he'd have had the logistics of the entire US army running smoothly despite layoffs by now, if it weren't for the wokies in anthropic acting up.

centaur-configured programmer

Cory, baby, my dogg, sure "enshittification" was a big hit, but you can't expect that your rough-draft followups are automatically gold

the Hofstadter tendency towards neopronouns

Seeing it extracted from context and called out like this helps me understand why I've bounced off Hofstadter multiple times over the years, despite his hype. It's an artistic choice, sure, but 400 pages of this stuff without a break can be like beating your face against a brick wall after a while.

I was not ready

Oof!

AI was going to give us all universal healthcare but we didn't believe hard enough and now all we have is this.

Thanks! I don't get the impression that Michael Vassar posts or publishes a lot under his own name, he seems to prefer cornering susceptible people at events and then having private conversations and correspondence with the ones who respond in a promising way. The clearest description of his jailbreaking which I have read is by Scott Alexander in a back and forth with Jessica Taylor (and we know Scott Alexander tries to hide some of the beliefs he cares the most about).

In a LessWrong thread people just point to a deleted Twitter account and some YouTube videos by Vassar.

RationalWiki briefly mentions earlier woo abut brain hemispheres.

Hofstadter and Hesse seem to be namechecked on LW much more often than Leo Strauss. I wonder if Scott Alexander talks about Strauss over coffee if he trusts you, because so much of what our friends do is supposed to fool the vulgar masses while the wise smile and know the hidden truth.

I wonder if the real secret to Vassar's influence is that he influenced the leaders of Bay Area LW like Alexander, Anissimov, Constantin, Zvi Moshowitz, and Salamon.

And locally, UAW RPSP just announced a tentative agreement, apparently they got a technology policy through without calling out AI explicitly. Might be too little too late tbh.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uxn_Tq-CMVyPstXD9GnCzuiRp660QdAw/view

Man, it's frustrating to see him end up going down this route because the opening part of this is actually one of the better descriptions of AI psychosis I've seen, and i appreciate his emphasis on the way the delusion is built up in the sufferer's mind rather than trying to game out what's happening "inside" the chatbot. Even his point about how LLMs aren't bad in exceptional ways for a new technology is pretty cogent. But his insistence on defending his own use of these things (and others who do so in "centaur-configured" ways) rather than thinking about how it interacts with all the relatively normal ways that this technology is wildly destructive is a very conspicuous blind spot.

Like, you can absolutely drive a nail with a phone book, and given the wider surface area it even has the advantage over a traditional hammer of being harder to smash your fingers. An individual craftsman may well decide that this is a useful tool and in some cases worth using over other options. But if the only source of these hammer-books was an industry that relied on massive uncompensated use of creative work passed through exploited third-world labor, ground rainforests to dust to create special "old-growth paper", placed massive and unsustainable burdens on existing road infrastructure to collect these parts and deliver them, and somehow had been blown into a speculative bubble that represented something like a quarter of the entire US economy by promising that if they created a big enough book then one guy could hammer all the nails at once and they could lay off all the carpenters, I think it's justifiable to look at the people using it as a normal tool and ask them "what the actual fuck are you doing?" The usage statistics they represent and the user stories they tell are used to justify not addressing any of the harms necessary to enable this tool to exist in its current form, and are largely driving the absurd valuations that keep pumping the bubble. Your individual role in those harms as a small-time user who finds it occasionally useful may be incalculably small, but it is still real.

Like, it feels like I agree with Doctorow on basically all the premises here. He seems to have a decent grasp on how the things actually work (even if he's wrong about Ollama specifically being an LLM in its own right) and their associated limitations. He draws a decent line separating criticism from criti-hype. He is basically correct about how much of a bastard everyone involved in the industry at a high level is. But maybe because so many of these things aren't really exceptional (save possibly in their sheer scale) he can't seem to conceive of a world where things happen any differently, or of the role his actions and words play in reinforcing the status quo even as he writes pretty explicitly about how fucked up that status quo is.

Honestly it makes me think of the finale of his second Martin Hench novel, The Bezzle. After drilling into the business of the private prison operator that is making his friend's life hell and separating the merely fucked up parts from the things that might actually have consequences if word got to what passes for cops in that tax bracket, he doesn't go to the papers or start reaching out to the SEC. Instead he goes to the bastard at the head of it all and blackmails him into making his friend's remaining incarceration less hellish and leaving him alone. And his friend, who started all this by begging for help unraveling this shit, rightly calls Marty a coward for it. There's something ironic in seeing Doctorow here seemingly make the same judgement: abuse and apathy are sufficiently normal that we shouldn't even bother to try and make the world better, just find ways to shelter ourselves and the people we care about from the consequences. And hell, I guess even there I'm not immune to it. There are reasons why I'm posting here and not waiting out front of a hotel with some engraved brass. Still, on the continuum of such things I'm disappointed that the guy who wrote that scene is stuck in the normalization blues.

A skilled, centaur-configured programmer

This is like reading Yud mumbling about "Shoggoths". It's giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb.

libuv is a very common way to get a portable event loop. If you're logged into GH and can use their search then you can look at the over fifty packages in nixpkgs depending on it. I used it when I developed (the networking and JIT parts of) the reference implementation for Monte, to give a non-nixpkgs example.

A hackernews notices that HN autoflags 404 Media articles. A little downthread, dang bullshits unconvincingly in reponse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354634

It sucks. :(

Honestly, the article reminds me of Scott Alexander, but succinct. "Here are several true things and an absolutely batshit wrong thing, presented together with equal earnestness."

The wrong thing being "Believing that LLMs are trash is a mental disorder (not really but wink wink)."

Why do this now, when it's all coming apart? It's baffling.

Man, due to a weird alignment of the spheres I started reading those Honor Levy excerpts in the voice of Max Payne-style hardboiled narration and it fits weirdly well? Like a bargain version of the same sort of mid-budget semi-affectionate parody of existential angst that's all tone and minimal substance.

It's gotta be tied to the idea of anchoring, right? Like, the first credible bit of information you have is what sets the tone for everything that comes afterwards. At that point in a sufficiently complicated information ecosystem, confirmation bias kicks in and it's hard to break out of.

Interestingly this 404s now. I wonder if he withdrew

@samvines wow

this is a good post and some of y'all may enjoy it too: https://dotart.blog/cobbles/ai-and-that-guy-at-the-bar

They are indeed all run by the same people.

It was very good, and I'm glad I clicked through to the link to Robert Kingett's story "The Colonization of Confidence", which deserves its own highlight.

Even if the constant reminders that I'm trapped in the machine are painful.

I am retrospectively disturbed by how well "I really came in a fluffer that time" slots into Dorothy Parker's flow.

Hey, he's posted here before!

That story is rad as hell. I was ready to run through a wall for those folks at the end. Appreciate you, Robert!

I noticed that too which is an extra reason why I figured I'd drop the link and name in. His posts about receiving an LLM-generated happy birthday is something I think about surprisingly frequently.

even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artist’s rights and intellectual property in general isn’t an especially big deal.

It's not that he doesn't think it's a big deal. It's the one thing he's most consistently cared about for most of his career as an activist. He's willing to put up with anything else if it circumvents copyright. And that's why he's been consistently pushed, I reckon, despite his nominal hostility towards the hands that feed the media ecosystem he flourishes in.

@samvines oh it's back

Probably should've written 'not a deal breaker' instead of not a big deal.

New post from Iris Meredith: Tech's empiricism problem

If this is the real reason:

It's because, for a long time, most of their content was behind a signup wall with no obvious workaround. I don't know if it still is or not. If it isn't, we can change it.

It is baffling that this isn't communicated upfront to the users. Really weird move orange site.

piece he keeps equivocating between local LLMs and their behemoth online counterparts with their heavily proprietary tooling that occasionally wraps them into a somewhat useful product.

This is fundamental to his approach. He believes that technology is inherently liberatory as long as it's in the hands of the consumer.

Do they also block NYT, WSJ, Atlantic? I think not. Odd, but I didn't trust dang and friends to start with. HN is not intended to be a neutral forum.

A lateral move from pointing at the unbelievers and screeching, really

I tend to like her education takes. Like the first piece of hers that I read.

Last week 404 Media reported on some DOGE deposition videos.

The videos were since removed via court order, but are available on Internet Archive.

For anyone unfamiliar: this slots under TechTakes because DOGE is basically Elon Musk's army of naive fascist silicon valley tech-bros rampaging about the federal government with Chat-GPT, SQL, and unsecured thumb-drives.

This article is behind a paywall, but links to the following video snippets from the depositions:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVyhJT9jf4f/

For example here Justin Fox talks about deleting federal grants that he considered in-scope for an anti DEI executive order: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/

Q: "Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI"

A: "It's the gender based story 🤷 that's inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group 🙄."

Q: "It's inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?"

A: "The gender based. So, females 🤷 during the Holocaust."

He goes on to clarify that it's DEI because it focuses on Jewish women. Oh that's OK then!

There is a lot of video to work through but I know there is more comedy gold rage inducing punchable nazi snippets within.

No, they're allowed and users usually post an archive link to get around the paywall.

https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1rrhzhc/doge_lead_in_deposition_details_how_he_emailed/

Behold: the Silicon Valley masters of opsec.

Zoe Curzi reported that IFS was used within Leverage Research and that after she escaped the cult, she used Internal Family Systems therapy to heal and accept that Leverage did not offer unique insights.

"Do you think there's a reason why the DSA didn't allow you to use Signal or other apps on your government phone?"

"No."

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE "S" STANDS FOR YOU IGNORANT CHILD??

Just gonna file this on my mental list of reasons I didn't go into law.

I swear every time his stuff floats through here I end up standing as I read it and wildly gesticulating at my living room or ranting extemporaneously to my basement about something it made me think of or feel. After reading this piece I hope that comes off as more complimentary to his work than showing myself to be a freaking weirdo.

I mean she was undoubtedly too much of a lefty for the Thiel set to ever admit her influence, but I feel like that's the exact type of vibe she's trying and mostly failing to evoke.

Turns out, that uv also sucks now!