I've started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about....
Have you been abused by Ed Zitron being mean to your favourite AI? You might be entitled to compensation!
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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https://kalshi.com/markets/kxtrumpmention/what-will-trump-say/kxtrumpmention-26feb28
Kalshi puts "AI" at ~ $0.95 for State of the Union. Literally buzzword bingo. Living in the dumbest possible universe.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/alignment-is-proven-to-be-tractable – apparently we have gone stepwise from zero steps to one step in terms of “alignment”, and that step is writing a markdown file with declarative statements asking to be addressed in a particular way
Thought verysane.ai was gonna be a snark blog... They are earnest? shudder
there is some reason to think this way. also keep in mind that a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn't be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah, for example. of course what people want and how it shakes down after the bombs drop is different thing entirely, i guess we'll see, eventually (i assume that decision to strike was already made)
The best thing an unpopular regime can ask for is the enemy they have been bigging up as literally The Great Satan starts dropping bombs and missiles on the populace that hates it.
"If we bomb people and show their government can't protect them, they will turn against the government and we will win" has been tried by the Germans on Londoners, the Allies on Germany and Japan, and the US on Serbia, and it didn't work.
That’s cute, how about you find me a source that isn’t a spooky blob think tank?
Or better yet, enlist and we can be rid the world of another Sam Harris fanboy
i don't give a shit about sam harris. if iranians were broadly fine with theocracy, there wouldn't be 30k+ dead protesters last month, or major protests every year for a decade. like every other country on earth, you can expect that iran secularizes, except that apostasy or conversion is capital offense, or any significant dissent for that matter, so any survey unaffected by self-censorship would be hard to conduct
While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn't satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn't like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you're going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administration has shown a less-than-comforting attitude towards civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide.
Let's also not lose sight of the role that US and British intervention played in creating the circumstances for the Ayatollahs to come to power in the first place. The Shah wasn't exactly any kinder to the Iranian people and was a foreign puppet to boot.
Harris's take only works if, like him, you assume that the fundamental problem with Iran is Islam, rather than actually bothering to look at the history of the country and how it became what it is today. Because in that case once you get the ayatollah out of the way and introduce the light of Science! to the people they'll immediately become rational civil libertarians and believe exactly the same things he does. The Irreligious Right is exactly as reductive and stupid as the worst evangelicals, but can better use the language of STEM to hide it.
to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation
I doubt there are going to be boots-on-the-ground. Not for any good reasons, just because Trump lacks the commitment (or even capability of commitment).
That cuts both ways, you just need to be the last person in the room to speak with Trump
Looking at the bloodthirsty freaks he’s put in charge of our military / intelligence / diplomatic apparatus, and I don’t like them odds
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Yes, absolutely, civilization (or whatever word you like better here) will not happen automatically or magically.
And I'm not finding an answer: How do you /properly/ remove an oppressive theocracy, in such a way that the country has good starting conditions to prosper?
Two things seems clear to me: the theocrats will not go by themselves, and the country will not prosper under them.
the answer is definitely not to sanction and attempt to destabilize them on behalf of your two equally evil regional client states. The corollary to that is that you cannot produce the necessary conditions for future prosperity by destroying their economy in a way that harms the average person more than the elites.
And that's assuming that we (the west) even want them to prosper or care about their future as a nation. Perhaps in an alternate universe, that would be the motivation for regime change but that is not and has never been the case.
From the outside? I'm gonna be honest and say I don't know that you do.
@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare This hasn't happened in Iran, but oppressive theocracies *have* decayed from inside elsewhere—notably Ireland since 1980 (the difference now is as night and day, yet there was no revolution and no shooting, and the country has prospered). Arguably Spain's clerico-fascist system went the same way in the 1970s. And so on.
Iran is different, though, in that it faces a violent, powerful external superpower, which indirectly props up the priesthood.
@cstross @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare OK, but I don't see the automatism in that direction either. And just letting them simmer in their own little cosmos doesn't seem very sustainable when they organize and support e. g. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi.
Starting a war now is not the answer, I'm pretty sure, but the question remains.
@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Bear in mind they're also locked in a long-term cold war with Saudi Arabia (sunni v. shi'ite islam) and Israel (increasingly resembling a religious ethno-supremacist fascist state with regional territorial ambitions). Peace with Iran is a non-starter unless Israel and the Saudis can be forced to back the fuck off at the same time.
from Rusty https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people
Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.
IBM stocks take a tumble after anthropic release a COBOL skill - the rational market strikes again.
I wrote up my take here but TL;DR - a few markdown files telling Claude it's an expert at COBOL development aren't going to unpick decades of risk averse behaviour from bank and government cios. Similar to the SaaSpocalypse this is pure nonsense. Investors don't tend to let reality dissuade them though.
cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.
I feel like the story of Cassandra would be much more gratifying if she'd had access to powered armor.
404 Media: Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox
Yue also shared screenshots of her WhatsApp chat with the OpenClaw agent, where she implores it to “not do that,” “stop, don’t do anything,” and “STOP OPENCLAW.”
This is very serious computing and we must all take it very seriously.
The promptfondlers did it, they made a computer which doesn't do what you tell it to do
A computer that both does what you don't tell it to do and doesn't do what you tell it to do. I didn't think we could do it but - I tell you what - it's been done.
this is like the fourth time an AI agent has completely deleted something important (I remember an article about an AI deleting all of a scientists’s research) How many more times does it have to happen before people stop using AI to look after something important???
Maybe I should apply to be a director of AI safety at Meta. I know one safety measure that works: don't use AI.
What, Ctrl-C wouldn't work? kill -9?
Before they could ask grok how to stop a process it was already too late.
Not that it mattered as Groks advice to become the reichschancellor actually didnt fix this problem.
You assume these people installing experimental non deterministic software on their computer would know how to purge a process (or, you know, not to hook up vibe coded slop to their inbox) but here we are. To get a director job in a big company, the main thing you need is an MBA, a willingness to do whatever the CEO asks of you and either a sociopathy or psychopathy diagnosis (sorry for the repetition, I know I already said MBA). Technical skills "nice to have"
MicroSlop's new xbox CEO has a background in AI and is worried about birthrates.
Can't wait for her lesswrong handle to leak.
The article tries to fact check Asha Sharma's (the new CEO) claim that
fertility rates are declining, the average birthrate in the ’90s when we were growing up was, like, 3, and now it’s 2.3, and in 2050 it’s estimated to be below replacement
Unfortunately, they forgot that other countries than the US exist and didn't occur to them that she could be talking about global fertility rates. In which case the claim is pretty much correct.
Embarrasing.
I mean, sure, but it's still the CEO of XBOX on her second day on the job throwing her hat in the legendarily sus declining birthrates discourse in service of AI solutionism, it's not nothing.
Usually AI boosters are claiming that soon most humans will be economically useless, not that it would be terrible if there were fewer white people. One reason people avoid having children is that they feel economically insecure and doubt there will be respected places in society for their offspring.
Dwarkesh Patel is the only other Indian American I have seen who is friends with our friends.
From fellow traveler stats consultant John Mount:
https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/WeAreCookedLLMs.html
Somehow he manages to touch on so many different subplots, a shotgun sneer instead of snipe
if “tech-bro” plus a LLM is a “100x engineer”, then “bro” isn’t needed for much longer as the LLM alone must be a “99x engineer.” However, I don’t think “bro plus” is often really a 100x engineer, and the LLM alone isn’t a 99x engineer. However, “bro plus” may outlast their peers who make the mistake of trying to do the actual work in place of talking LLMs up.
The above may or may not be the case. But if it is, then it is the LLM-bros (which include non-technologists, con artists, financiers, men and women) that are destroying everything - not the LLMs.
The problem with this iteration is the full court press of finance and technology. The major players are using financing to dump results at a price way below production costs. This isn't charity, it is to demoralize and kill competition.
claiming "after we take over the world we will consider adding Universal Basic Income (UBI)". The LLM bros already have a lot of the money, and they are not even rehearsing diverting it into basic income now. Why does one believe they would do that when they also have all of the power?
You don't have to hand it to Altman, but he did fund the largest UBI experiment through Open Research with his il gotten gains. OTOH, one interpretation of that data was that UBI "decreases the labor supply" which was then used directly as an argument against it.
Any worry about scope or power of LLMs is fed back as an alignment threat so dire that only the current LLM leaders should be allowed to continue work (inviting regulatory capture). Any claim the LLMs don't work is fed back as "you are prompting it wrong"
Orbital deployment makes all of radiation tolerance, connectivity, power, maintenance, and heat dissipation much harder and much more expensive. We are still at a time where putting an oven or air-frier in space is considered noteworthy (China 2025, NASA 2019 ref).
air friers IN SPACE ha
I am more worried about the LLM-bros and their auto-catalytic money doomsday machine than about the LLMs themselves.
100% - ACMDM is a nice turn of phrase as well.
if a Franciscan priest gets really good at basketball, is he considered an air friar
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https://www.adexchanger.com/ai/one-chatbots-journey-to-introducing-ads-that-dont-suck/
Often, the ad loads before the chatbot’s query response, said Baird, and Koah’s goal is to “deliver such a relevant result to the user that they just click on the ad before the result loads.”
LLM's bad performance and inefficiency is a feature to /someone/. And chatbots are themselves not immune to enshitification.
sharing this channel’s posts are the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel but http://youtube.com/post/UgkxoSpDpLNEr9WawVXnl5Mlw4NeQ6-XsLjl this really just feels like an excuse to repost that METR graph. also wtf is the graph on top lmfaoooo
Ladybird stans on SuicideWatch rn
I love* how the AI stans never get tired of proselytizing.
The result was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the entire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me multiple months to do by hand.
*Love, as in: "I love to get my eyelids scraped with a cheesegrater.
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Looks like they're gonna ruin BattleBots with AI somehow. Bright Data appear to be web scraping bastards as a service.
I'll never forgive them for what they did to the 80 lb slab of rotating steel.
Oh god, Bright Data...
I know of them because they were trying to get into the Minecraft modding sphere by offering people to put their ""SDKs"" into their mods. (though not the full SDK initially, just Telemetry™ about what kinds of computers modded players have)
https://notes.highlysuspect.agency/blog/who_is_bright_data/ has more info about it
Thanks, this is a nifty read; I'm appreciating having a look into the world of the bastards who are ruining the web with residential proxy/botnet operations. I had kind of (mistakenly) assumed that the scrapers mostly relied upon IoT trash and hacked Fire sticks. We really can't have nice things anymore, huh?
The company is embroiled in legal action in Israel. After it filed suit against a former employee, he countersued, alleging that Luminati is widely used for click fraud. As part of the suit, it was revealed that the spyware company NSO Group was a Luminati client.
Well that escalated quickly
PS: i really really wish my special interests would quit touching
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