But despite well-documented claims to genius IQs, somehow the billionaire set ends up not on the chopping block.

I think building codes and zoning reform are good topics to get into in rich English-speaking countries but you have to 1) learn from actual experts not x.com/wiseAss1488, and 2) engage in local politics and policy and not just post to nerds around the world.

Fire codes are the root of all evil

Ah somebody got told by their landlord not to do something. (I remember our student housing landlord (a big org) was regularly claiming 'fire codes' as an excuse to get rid of stuff in semi public areas. The actual fire codes didn't demand this btw, it was just the excuse they used to stop students from filling everything with random trash).

They develop a special g-meter to find people who could potentially create more efficient gpus and send them to the gulags.

Yeah but never pull 9 numbers out of your ass, that would make you too smart and they will tell the gov to drone strike you.

anthropic is the most moral ai company in the universe

Tante nails it again. No notes.

That he has a LinkedIn finally explains how I first heard of him. A liberal but very startup/hustle culture brained colleague shared an anti-blockchain thing on the Slack. Always wondered how she stumbled on a comm(o|u)nist tech critic, but it must've been LI.

might LWers be the real Pol Potists? Read on to find out!

Friend of Ziz and cofounder of the 'rationalist fleet' pops up out of the woodwork trying to clear Ziz's name

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mbrmZmzBdtn4qrSus/re-introduction-of-a-rationalist-dragon-and-clarifications

I find myself noticing things rather detached from the typical Ziz funnybusiness more strongly than I notice the stuff about that whole situation.

"I'm Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death (and bring people back if I could) and that I would become a dragon and help generally facilitate a fantastical transhumanist future."

"I dream of non-Euclidean geometries, of countless worlds visible and accessible in the daytime sky, of competent infrastructure, of soul forges continually working to bring back the dead... I dream of reaching through warps in the spacetime fabric to save the dying across time"

"Signed,
the dragon of creation
Creatrei (cree-AH-trey)
also known as Gwen Danielson
or as Char and Astria (when referring to my hemis as distinct individuals)"

The reactions are fun. "This post is not actually doing a good job of making me trust you and think this conversation is safe to have[1], and I notice that as I am saying this that I am afraid that this will now somehow result in someone trying to murder me in my sleep"

Habryka's all, "Dammit, why do you have to come here and remind everyone where the Zizians came from?"

EDIT: This person also seems to have no concept of the finality of death, which might explain why the Zizians were so murdery.

Semi-topical, there's a new Local 58 and even the moon demon hates AI, I guess.

The back-and-forth between Gwen and LessWrong commenters is getting spicy. This definitely deserves a top-level post on SneerClub.

In the same period, the English-language alignment and AI ethics literature produced no substantive engagement. No citations. No rebuttal.

Wow it's almost like alignment and AI ethics studies is less a serious academic field and more like a prank capital likes to play on consumers.

But I also think Zhao Tingyang's take that alignment will make AI evil because people are evil falls too much into the the-people-deserve-to-be-disempowered totalitarian state funny business side of things to be especially influential down these parts.

I’m Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death

thiel jumpscare

I'm no fan of Greg Egan's fiction but I am a fan of him pissing of rats:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbqJfCz9qvfptNbCQ/an-angry-review-of-greg-egan-s-didicosm

Link to short story: https://www.gregegan.net/DIDICOSM/Complete/Didicosm.html

also

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hx5EkHFH5hGzngZDs/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon (shared in a comment to the above)

Here's the short story that pissed Zack off: https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DeathGorgon_Egan.pdf

Edit I found the time to read Didicosm and while it suffers from an Eganesque infodump (with diagrams!) it's not nearly as bad as the LWers are wittering on about. Part of me thinks they're mad because the main scientists are all women while the main dude is a stable, well-adjusted partner in the relationship.

Ah yup, that is definitely the type of person who’s deeply attracted to cults.

it's what they do instead of prayer

I'm a huge fan of Greg Egan's fiction and a huge fan of him pissing off the rats. He's been explicitly needling them and making fun of them in his fiction for over a decade. Making calm contradictions against them for over two decades, after noticing weirdos being fans of his.

Is the crappy dragon fursona related to Peter Thiel being an anagram for "the reptile"?

He showed up at my blog to talk math back in the ancient days when I had a comment section. And he's active on Mastodon a fair bit.

Uh oh

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/gwen-danielson-zizians-interview-1235552043/

Going on a media tour now

The link to the guide to setting up a retrofitted boxtruck to continue AI alignment research in with local copies of the internet archive after civilization collapses in 2025 is fun

SCENE: a wind-blasted desert landscape. In the foreground, a weathered truck rests on the side of a ruined highway. The windscreen is dusty and cracked, and the tyres have long since rotted away.

A PAIR OF SCAVENGERS, clad in bulky rags, approach the truck with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

Using a CROWBAR, they force open the back doors of the truck, and exclaim

"Fuck it, Ted, it's one of those dumb AI trucks!"

https://theintercept.com/2026/04/23/chatgpt-ai-false-confession-interrogation-crime/

“If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?”

I don't have words for how stupid this is.

Their heart seems to be in the right place, police interrogation will be exploitative and brainwashy with no real consequences for the interrogators, but they sure chose the dumbest possible way to make their point:

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

"ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?"

The foursome had been on the lot for a few months when the pandemic struck in March 2020. That same month, the price of Bitcoin — in which most of Borhanian’s life savings was invested, money that was covering much of the group’s expenses at that time — cratered. Soon after, the four of them stopped paying rent to Lind altogether.

Aella also lost much of her early earnings on crypto.

Curtis Lind reminds me of the businessman who supported Elron early on and lost most of his money.

The end where Gwen Danielson decides that Yudkowsky is her their savior is tragic.

edit/ The article describes Danielson as transfemme but refers to them as them so I will do the same

yeah he rules

Emile Torres and me, rationalist enemies list #3 and #1. a photo to strike fear into the utility functions of rationalists everywhere

https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/116456408676175449

pic by my kid and from the premiere of Ghost in the Machine, an awesome documentary. I'm in it. tl;dr AI was always olde timey race science all the way down

while it's technically plausible that Ziz was involved in a minor oopsy whoopsy fucky wucky deady weady or two or six, she's always been lovely to me, much of the time,

@BioMan These are the kind of people who I could picture working away at a laptop in a box truck and they tell you they're close to a breakthrough and then you get closer and the laptop isn't on, and hasn't been powered up for years.

Is that what "g" has stood for all this time?

Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.

Does "read a second book" apply here, or is this a "read a first book" situation?

They sure seem to enjoy the idea of a Year Zero

We'll hide them at the g spot. LW would never find them there.

Detective: "So Magic Eight Ball. I'm just gonna ask you outright. Were you the killer?"

Magic Eight Ball: "It is decidedly so."

Some Guy: "Oh my god."

Not really part of the back and forth but I find this illuminating of their recent travails, regarding it not being a step to far to prevent them from posting:

"This isn’t super relevant since it’s not like the standards are super high but ever since the enormous onslaught of LLM psychosis posters, the default of people who try to post to LW is to get rejected from posting here"

Sounds like the mods have had to deal with a lot of unbalanced people lately, and are not having it.

they're all cosplaying medieval alchemy so at least it fits a theme

I rarely find that reading fiction makes me upset […] fiction can be quite bad, but rarely do I find it personally offensive…

Rat reading a book that makes fun of AI doom in passing:
Me, a trans woman immigrant:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mel-gibson-talking-to-bloody-jesus

Only the magic eight ball has been rigged with sides reading:

• Signs point to yes

• It is decidedly so

• Absolutely. You're so smart

• Maybe. Good question!

• There are strong reasons to think so

• Lots of people are saying it

• I can see why you'd ask that

• There isn't a strong consensus either way

What a rogue's gallery. Truly a chilling portrait of the sworn enemies of trillions of unborn human beings.

some of us just nail the existential risk

Tassadar's probably the most telling. For those not in the know, the Protoss are noble savages modeled after samurai, templar, and Native Americans. Tassadar in particular is modeled after the stories of legendary Hiawatha and real person Geronimo, first uniting the Protoss under a single banner and then sacrificing himself in a cutscene at the end of a big battle before repeatedly re-appearing as a ghost in later titles. On one hand, Tassadar's the most influential Protoss in the entire setting; after his death, everybody switches in-game from a greeting revering ancient hero Adun ("in taro Adun") to a greeting mentioning new hero Tassadar ("in taro Tassadar"). But on the other hand, he's a general and warrior deeply enmeshed in a military tradition which demands his unwavering total sacrifice in order to achieve any progress. Tassadar is a racist stereotype embodying the idea of stoic acceptance; when Protoss say "it is a good day to die" they are echoing tropes about Native American beliefs.

Not gonna touch the Undertale reference today.

'top ai'. so it is a sex thing after all.

Just looking at that picture makes me hear googles of unsimulated people scream in terror.

soul forges continually working to bring back the dead

Even in death, duty does not end.

This person also seems to have no concept of the finality of death

The god ai can perfectly simulate people, and a sa copy is you, death isnt permanent. And when you start to think this is inevitable and close, murder becomes just another way to signal how strongly you feel about a thing.

I was trying to combine the scientology e-meter stuff with the iq race science g-factor stuff.

@macroplastic @BlueMonday1984 classic example of accidentally reaching a decent conclusion ("the police have a lot of pull to elicit false confessions") via a completely moronic line of argument

I mean, it's a banger of a song.

I feel like you may be judging Tassadar too harshly. What you said is true but his defining feature is openness and empathy towards other cultures. The Conclave, the ruling body of the protoss, consider humans basically animals and blast them from orbit without a care, and they dismiss the 'Dark Templar' as heretics. This even though the Dark Templar are the only ones who have the magitech to kill the invading aliens. His whole arc is about rejecting prejudice and teaming up with people your culture considers inferior, not just heroic sacrifice.

I'll have you know there's lots of important WoW lore in the novels!!!!