First they came for rsync, and I cared nothing, for I do my backups with borg…
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 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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LWer: politics is really hard to be Rational about, so how about we just forget all about
Bad: arguing about prison abolition
Good: arguing about how to fastest get to the closest Muni station
This could have been a tweet. I seriously 100% believe that this logorrhea could have been a single Xart. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
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Love the second example of immigration because not only does it completely miss the crux of the issue (free movement is a human right and must not be conditional) but also boils down to "actually this IS measurable and provable but Charlie doesn't like the outcome so lalala whatabout Germany"
This gets dangerously close to acknowledging that the rationalist method isn't actually very useful for any area where it isn't trivial.
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As reported by local Wyoming paper Cowboy State Daily, Meta's closed-loop water-cooling system bred a metal-resistant bacterium and now the municipal wastewater system has refused to accept Meta's wastewater. To be crisp, Cupriavidis, which literally means ~~"loves to eat copper"~~ "lives on copper", already was metal-resistant; this wasn't a de novo adaptation. Edit: used wrong root for translation, whoops.
Yet another point in favor of evaporative cooling. Standing water, recycled water, and grey water are too complex to treat as recyclable. Also another point against cheaply-designed rush-built datacenters.
How do we know this isn't the AI god creating the first diamondoid bacteria?
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The Inside story of Leverage Research
This should be interesting, it's about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don't know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.
edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:
I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.
edit edit: Why can't these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020
edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she's Curtis Yarvin's baby momma.
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LWer: slavery was bad and abolishing the slave trade was a net good
LW commenters: really?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDZcsojmRXo5qKNBm/surprising-facts-about-the-slave-trade
(I can kind of understand that intellectual honesty can prompt people to question a narrative, and in some ways I respect it, but there comes a time when you need to ask yourself "am I being the best person I can be by defending slavery" and back away from the keyboard)
At times you need to ask yourself, does the devil need more advocates? And how much does he even pay?
At times you need to ask yourself, does the devil need more advocates? And how much does he even pay?
Top-rated review
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Hmmm can we trust a narrative extensively documented in the UK Parliament, courts, and newspapers? Hmmm can we?
No I will not look anything up personally.
these kinds of questions are about the potential benefits to some hypothetical version of humanity (from slavery) vs. the real, documented harms to a real group of real people (caused by slavery). Of course we already know that rationalists are bad at accounting for the later while distracted by the bright and shiny allure of the former. And it just so happens that the people they imagine benefiting from slavery are people very much like themselves.
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So Anthropic slopmaxxxed a hamfisted Chinese AI lab detector into Claude Code. And I'm kinda surprised at how much hate Anthropic is getting for it on the orange site.
sharing a quality sneer from orangesite commenter mcmcmc
Watch out for the press release where Dario denies this was ever intentional, and it’s actually emergent behavior demonstrating that Claude wants to claim authorship of its works
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US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it...
casey newton, well-known fawning stan of promptfarmers, has now started on some mildly revisionist wording
you could’ve been engaging with this point for 2+ years casey! why *now you spineless shit? goose-goose-meme.jpg
In his op-ed, Altman offers up the usual list of future AI miracles to justify the disruptions to come: “the power to heal people, to discover cures and to deliver abundance on a scale the world has never known before. In the meantime, though, what AI is delivering at an unprecedented scale is annoyance.
Does anyone actually believe this? What the heck does bullshit-text engines or fake-image-generators contribute towards discovering ANYTHING, delivering ANYTHING, producing ANYTHING? The only thing there is any argument for at all is delivering quick-and-dirty code, which is hardly connected to any of those tired promises.
Does anyone actually believe this?
Current copium is that if it can solve Erdos problems after a fashion then the cancer annihilating molecular biology breakthroughs can't be that far behind.
Also since just shovelling GPUs and reddit posts into a data center forever probably won't do the trick they've settled on the questionmarks on the list before Profit! being Recursive Self Improvement, meaning that since automatic code generation is somewhat improving it follows that pretty soon LLMs will just code themselves out of their current predicament of being unsustainably resource intensive hallucination machines and build AGI on their own.
I really like how in the past couple of years they've decided model collapse just isn't a thing anymore.
They just don't call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem. (Somebody on bsky said 'hey that isn't actually model collapse, read this article on it written by the AI company'. And then the article described model collapse, but didn't call it model collapse, it was amusing. (And I went into it, thinking I could be wrong, going 'ah so it is only related to a specific set of instructions', but then the article also showed that models without those instructions had the the problem (in a much smaller way, but the bad instructions were spreading due to synthetic data))).
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every week of work with biologists brings another "guess we doin circles now" moment. there's simply so many things that were never measured, measuring them requires knowing what are you doing, proper experimental design and interpretation of results, that are affected by myriad factors and dozens of feedback loops. none of that is in training data of course, and even if it was it would help very little because humans measuring that would make better use of these results first. but don't worry about that, machine god will learn relativity from three video frames and will make peter thiel immortal right away
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https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/02/smooth-ai-criminal-drives-first-end-to-end-agentic-ransomware-attack/5266073 h/t naked capitalism
llm exploits langflow cve in other llms. smdh. what a time to be alive.
also https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/ditch-your-phone-and-join-the-summer-of-ludd-the-offline-festival-happening-in-nyc from same
However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can’t recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated “from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale,” without backing up any of the encrypted data.
As usual, even when these things display legitimately impressive capabilities they still fuck up in ways that completely negate the whole point of doing it in the first place.
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