TechTakes

When you go so hard you Hadamard

https://wandering.shop/@flub@mastodon.social/115813129402677936

Happy new year everybody. They want to ban fireworks here next year so people set fires to some parts of Dutch cities.

Unrelated to that, let 2026 be the year of the butlerian jihad.

Anti-A.I.-relationship-sub r/cogsuckers maybe permanently locked down by its mods after users criticize mod-led change of the subreddit to a somewhat pro A.I.-sub (self.SubredditDrama)

The mods were heavily downvoted and critiqued for pulling the rug from under the community as well as for parallelly modding pro-A.I.-relationship-subs. One mod admitted:

"(I do mod on r/aipartners, which is not a pro-sub. Anyone who posts there should expect debate, pushback, or criticism on what you post, as that is allowed, but it doesn’t allow personal attacks or blanket comments, which applies to both pro and anti AI members. Calling people delusional wouldn’t be allowed in the same way saying that ‘all men are X’ or whatever wouldn’t. It’s focused more on a sociological issues, and we try to keep it from devolving into attacks.)"

A user, heavily upvoted, replied:

You’re a fucking mod on ai partners? Are you fucking kidding me?

It goes on and on like this: As of now, the posting has amassed 343 comments. Mostly, it's angry subscribers of the sub, while a few users from pro-A.I.-subreddits keep praising the mods. Most of the users agree that brigading has to stop, but don't understand why that means that a sub called COGSUCKERS should suddenly be neutral to or accepting of LLM-relationships. Bear in mind that the subreddit r/aipartners, for which one of the mods also mods, does not allow to call such relationships "delusional". The most upvoted comments in this shitstorm:

"idk, some pro schmuck decided we were hating too hard 💀 i miss the days shitposting about the egg" https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsuckers/comments/1pxgyod/comment/nwb159k/

Got one last sneer to share before the year ends, courtesy of a defence contractor:

A rival gang of "AI" "researchers" dare to make fun of Big Yud's latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy

Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)

When we say Y&S’s arguments are theological, we don’t just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using “theological” to simply mean “wrong”. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. That’s because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).

What we mean is that Y&S’s methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.

Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, there’s no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the “before” and “after”: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.

LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP

Update an LessWrong attempts to debunk the piece with inline comments here

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6sBAT4SPCJnBPKPJ/mechanize-work-s-essay-on-unfalsifiable-doom

Leading to such hilarious howlers as

Then solving alignment could be no easier than preventing the Germans from endorsing the Nazi ideology and commiting genocide.

Ummm pretty sure engaging in a new world war and getting their country bombed to pieces was not on most German's agenda. A small group of ideologues managed to sieze complete control of the state, and did their very best to prevent widespread knowledge of the Holocaust from getting out. At the same time they used the power of the state to ruthlessly supress any opposition.

rejecting Yudkowsky-Soares' arguments would require that ultrapowerful beings are either theoretically impossible (which is highly unlikely)

ohai begging the question

good morning awful, I found you the first thing you’ll want to scream at today

palantir and others offering free addictions, all in the name of “productivity”

internet comment etiquette with erik just got off YT probation / timeout from when YouTube's moderation AI flagged a decade old video for having russian parkour.

He celebrated by posting the below under a pipebomb video.

Hey, this is my son. Stop making fun of his school project. At least he worked hard on it. unlike all you little fucks using AI to write essays about books you don't know how to read. So you can go use AI to get ahead in the workforce until your AI manager fires you for sexually harassing the AI secretary. And then your AI health insurance gets cut off so you die sick and alone in the arms of your AI fuck butler who then immediately cremates you and compresses your ashes into bricks to build more AI data centers. The only way anyone will ever know you existed will be the dozens of AI Studio Ghibli photos you've made of yourself in a vain attempt to be included. But all you've accomplished is making the price of my RAM go up for a year. You know, just because something is inevitable doesn't mean it can't be molded by insults and mockery. And if you depend on AI and its current state for things like moderation, well then fuck you. Also, hey, nice pipe bomb, bro.

Another video on Honey ("The Honey Files Expose Major Fraud!") - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE

Shame he missed cyber monday by a couple weeks.

Also 16:35 haha ofc it's just json full of regexes.

CW: Slop, body humor, Minions

So my boys recieved Minion Fart Rifles for Christmas from people who should have known better. The toys are made up of a compact fog machine combined with a vortex gun and a speaker. The fog machine component is fueled by a mixture of glycerin and distilled water that comes in two scented varieties: banana and farts. The guns make tidy little smoke rings that can stably deliver a payload tens of feet in still air.

Anyway, as soon as they were fired up, Ammo Anxiety reared its ugly head, so I went in search of a refill recipe. (Note: I searched "Minions Vortex Gun Refill Recipe") and goog returned this fartifact*:

194 dB, you say? Alvin Meshits? The rabbit hole beckoned.

The "source links" were mostly unrelated except one, which was a reddit thread that lazily cited ChatGPT generating the same text almost verbatim in response to the question, "What was the loudest ever fart?"

Luckily, a bit of detectoring turned up the true source, an ancient Uncyclopedia article's "Fun Facts" section:

https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Fartium

The loudest fart ever recorded occurred on May 16, 1972 in Madeline, Texas by Alvin Meshits. The blast maintained a level of 194 decibels for one third of a second. Mr. Meshits now has recurring back pain as a result of this feat.

Welcome to the future!

• yeah I took the bait/I dont know what I expected

This is a fun read: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/27/how-to-ruin-all-of-package-management.html

Starts out strong:

Prediction markets are supposed to be hard to manipulate because manipulation is expensive and the market corrects. This assumes you can’t cheaply manufacture the underlying reality. In package management, you can. The entire npm registry runs on trust and free API calls.

And ends well, too.

The difference is that humans might notice something feels off. A developer might pause at a package with 10,000 stars but three commits and no issues. An AI agent running npm install won’t hesitate. It’s pattern-matching, not evaluating.

Foz Meadows brings a lengthy and merciless sneer straight from the heart, aptly-titled "Against AI"

Rich Hickey joins the list of people annoyed by the recent Xmas AI mass spam campaign: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f

Cory's talk on 39C3 was fucking glorious: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

No notes

A few weeks ago, David Gerard found this blog post with a LessWrong post from 2024 where a staffer frets that:

Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of "rationality community building"

So keep whisteblowing and sneering, its working.

Sailor Sega Saturn found a deleted post on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dustin-moskovitz-1 where Moskovitz says that he has moral concerns with the Effective Altruism / Rationalist movement not reputation concerns (he is a billionaire executive so don't get your hopes up)