TechTakes

Scott Alexander published a blog post about how its unfair to call Victor Orban an autocrat but:

I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.

Dsquareddigest responds:

I believe the full quote is "to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from, if you are being dumb on purpose"

It's in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair's famous line that "it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html

Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 400%

I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.

The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. The stock surged over 400%, from under $3 a share up to $13. The shoe company had a market cap of about $21 million Tuesday.

Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn't a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?

Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.

Microslop exec floats the idea that companies should be required to buy additional software licenses for each AI agent

"All of those embodied agents are seat opportunities," Jha said, envisioning organizations with more agents than humans — each effectively a user that must pay for a software license, or "seat" in industry lingo.

A company with 20 employees might buy 20 Microsoft 365 licenses today. If each employee gets five AI agents, and the workforce shrinks to 10 people, that could still mean 50 paid seats.

Also, it's apparently enough for an LLM endpoint to be paired with an email inbox to be considered an "embodied agent", words mean nothing.

Stop-AI terrorists: Eliezer Yudkowsky told us to bomb the datacenters.

Yudkowsky: no no no, I said we needed airstrikes to hit the datacenters

IRGC: I gotchu fam Cheap Drones Complicate the Gulf’s AI Boom

(edit reworded comment around link to attempt to make it funnier)

i regret to inform you all that another technonce manifesto has hit our collective psyches. If you woke up with a headache today, this is probably why, gratis Alex Karp:

https://archive.is/N20zm

greatest hits:

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

the "government is like a business and should be run like one" meme, for the dumbguys

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

naked hypocrisy from the man who wants to erase a nebulously defined "leftism" from public life.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

Sure, our society structurally requires an increasingly large fraction of the population to be economically precarious and eternally on the precipice of financial ruin and death, but it could be even worse! you should be grateful.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . .

BE NICE TO ELON! sure, his ideas are vaporware bullshit that don't make sense, but he produced a lot of shareholder value and is definitely not just enriching himself. Another one for the dumbest people you know to seal clap over.

Every single bullet point here is sneerable, but i'll stop there and let other people have some fun.

i'm in the middle of freefalling down a research rabbit hole and ran across this person decrying curtis yarvin as a fake monarchist who doesn't understand what makes REAL monarchism good:

https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1iy4fto/moldbug_morons_and_monarchism_an_xpost_of_my/

someone in the replies asks the obvious question

Ok but what stops the monarch from being a tyrant

and their answer is that you can just kill the monarch

It's still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they're inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath. But if they screw up badly enough that the things they're supposed to do don't happen? There's more of everyone else than One Person.

Good news for a change: https://pitchfork.com/news/bandcamp-announces-ban-on-ai-music/

Habryka defends colonialism, straight out, no qualifiers: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend

Ok, fine, I'll go even further. I am glad about the colonization of North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and of course, it was a giant fucking mess. But despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — it was still worth it. America is worth it. Democracy was worth it.

A surprisingly high number of comments push back, but Habryka's post is still highly upvoted, and the push back is in the typical rationalist jargon filled, assume-charitably mess.

LW stalwart discovers kids get sniffles from daycare, obviously this means women have to stay at home to take care of kids and not work:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/byiLDrbj8MNzoHZkL/daycare-illnesses

BTW almost every person born after 1970 in Sweden has been to daycare as a kid, if daycare illnesses had long-term consequences it would be showing up here

There is just something so inherently smug and annoying about Mollick. He is one of those low information boosters whose posts sound intellectual until you really think about them.

Tell me more about how the pile of cursed spaghetti that is Claude code is now viable due to model breakthroughs. All I see are hype men saying "the new model is a team of PhDs in your pocket" and then releasing disappointing updates or saying "the new model is too dangerous" because they have some vaporware powered by human crowdsourcing.

Also coding is not like other areas - you can test for hallucinations by compiling and printing and running tests.

I guess my first mistake this morning was opening linkedin

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/04/ai-reputational-crisis-violence-data-center-protests-sam-altman-openai.html

The profound ignorance of tech on the part of most American lawmakers is no joke. In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken.

haha

That same senator went on to be a huge RussiaGater and played a central role in Twitter and other social media titans upping their censorship game at the behest of US politicians.

oh :(

Some guys who steal other people's work choose to market their stolen wares using the name of a woman whose work was stolen.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-rosalind/

A detailed analysis of why Anthropic's claims about Mythos's cybersecurity implications are bs: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-boy-that-cried-mythos-verification-is-collapsing-trust-in-anthropic/

And a followup post about why Anthropic's Glasswing project violates cybersecurity community norms and is an attempt to form a cartel: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cartel-or-not-anthropic-mythos-is-a-curious-case/

I’ve never seen a more compelling reason to enforce strict and short retention rules for every corp communication medium, holy shit https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/

To distract us from the ongoing cycle of violence and discourse about violence that neither cracks down or addresses it's causes, may I offer the fruit of today's YouTube rabbit hole:

AI isn't the future. It's medieval alchemy.

There's a pretty wide divide between the speculations of the motives of the alleged arsonist of Sam Altman's SF residence last week.

LW has handled the issue obliquely, but the main concern seems to be that they are pretty convinced the dude acted out of fear of AI-induced x-risk. The optics is that his actions would paint EA in a bad light.

HN (based on this big heap of comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921) is more focused on the idea that Altman and co. are fomenting class hatred and the attack is more akin to Luigi Mangione's attack on a health insurance CEO. (Searching for "exinction" and "doom" in the threads doesn't throw up much)

Neither forum links to the dude's alleged slobslack.

My conclusion is that "AGI-driven X-risk" is a position too extreme at the moment for HN.

Also I believe the alleged attacker is not an avatar of a popular movement but a confused individual self-radicalized online.

Edit It's good to know that if you are a radicalized person thinking about committing violence against people or property, LW will be happy to provide you with a safe space to vent, with guarantees on your anonymity. C.f. habryka's comment here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/igEogGD9TAgAeAM7u/jimrandomh-s-shortform?commentId=zdMRHRqWDcjswhA3i

Eliezer joins the trend of condemning "political" violence with confidence on the far end of the dunning-kruger curve: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-can-prevent-extinction

I've already mocked this attitude down thread and in the previous weekly thread, so I'll try to keep my mockery to a few highlights...

He's admitting nuke the data centers is in fact violence!

It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell to pretend that this is not an invocation of force.

But then drawing a special case around it.

But it's the sort of force that's meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force.

I don't think Eliezer has checked the news if he think the US government carries out violence in predictable or fair or avoidable ways! Venezuela! (It wasn't fair before Trump, or avoidable if you didn't want to bend over for the interest of US capital, but it is blatantly obvious under Trump) The entire lead up to Iran consisted of ripping up Obama's attempts at treaties and trying to obtain regime change through surprise assassination! Also, if the stop AI doomers used some clever cryptography scheme to make their policy of property destruction (and assassination) sufficiently predictable and avoidable would that count as "Lawful" in Eliezers book? ~~If he kept up with the DnD/Pathfinder source material, he would know Achaekek's assassins are actually Lawful Evil~~

The ASI problem is not like this. If you shut down 5% of AI research today, humanity does not experience 5% fewer casualties. We end up 100% dead after slightly more time.

His practical argument against non-state-sanctioned violence is that we need a total ban (and thus the authority of state driving it), because otherwise someone with 8 GPUs in a basement could invent strong AGI and doom us all. This is a dumb argument, because even most AI doomers acknowledge you need a lot of computational power to make the AGI God. And they think slowing down AGI (whether through violence or other means) might buy time for another sort of solution that is more permanent (like the idea of "solve alignment" Eliezer originally promised them). Lots of lesswrong posts regularly speculate on how to slow down the AI race and how to make use of the time they have, this isn't even outside the normal window of lesswrong discourse!

Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals

Sources cited: 0

One of the comments also pisses me off:

Which reminds me about another point: I suspect that "bomb data centers" meme causal story was not somebody lying, but somebody recalling by memory without a thought that such serious allegation maybe is worthy to actually look up it and not rely on unreliable memory.

"Drone strike the data centers even if starts nuclear war" is the exact argument Eliezer made and that we mocked. It is the rationalists that have tried to soften it by eliding over the exact details.