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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Tech execs are now travelling with bodyguards due to AI backlash great quote at the end:
“That’s why people are setting warehouses on fire,” a former Pinterest employee named Bonnie Kate Wolf, who was laid off during an AI-focused restructuring, told the WSJ. “You can’t go back to serfdom. It really feels like the people in power want to be kings. Historically, that doesn’t work out for kings.”
You know, I think there's an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.
I'm not sure if we missed this one or if just I did, but there's a class action suit against Eightfold AI. The company is accused of essentially creating a social credit score based on your digital footprint and using it to drop applications before anyone at the hiring company got a chance to see them.
I spent the last two years watching my options for keeping my family housed slowly dry up while throwing out hundreds of applications. Now I'm concerned that it dug up my old reddit account from when I was a stupid teenager or decided that comments I made here weren't suitable for participating in the goddamn economy.
Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is "studied at the University of Ljubljana." The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.
I looked at the table of contents of his manuscript and ... zero history. All blathering on about some theory he cooked up from first principles to fellate rich people. The fact that anyone takes this seriously is a stunning indictment on the state of humanities education.
If you look at literally page 1 you'll find the first footnote pointing at another chapter of the same goddamn book and now I'm going to go weep tears of impotent rage.
Ed: sorry, it's page 8, which is the first page after the self-congratulatory preface.
The “I will piledrive you” guy has a new post about working in an ai-pilled world now, and it’s pretty decent I find: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/
Favorite framing is that everyone is under enormous pressure not to commit heresy against the ai pilling, especially because you just don’t shit talk your customers.
Wow this website is cursed: https://detrans.ai/en
Conversion Therapy as a Service.
Oh hell yeah, I fucked with the bot enough to get it stuck in a loop and now it's been rapidly outputting the same character for ten minutes with no safeguard in sight
Enjoy your next bill, fucker
A timeout occurred - Error code 524
Visit cloudflare.com for more information.
Heartwarming 🥰.
It took it about four hours to get back online, then I got the bot stuck in a loop again and the website crashed again lol God bless vibecoders
patiently cross-stitching a piece that reads "Bless This Text"
Detrans.ai is on X, the everything app
Modern fascism in one sentence.
whaaaaat the fuuck
https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/china-registered-the-humans-last
Last July, China gave every internet user a state identity: one number and one credential, good at the bank, the hospital, and the civil-service exam. That system took effect on July 15, 2025.¹ Yesterday, on July 15, 2026, exactly one year later, China did the same thing for AI.
These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot. As of yesterday, agents in China get registered on a national platform. They receive a digital identity and declare their capabilities the way a business declares its scope, and they can be recalled the way a defective car is recalled. A state planning analyst offered the official gloss: every agent gets a 数字身份证, a digital ID card.² Call it what it is, a birth certificate for machines.
I never know how to parse mainstream reporting about China or Wilcox's writing in particular. Maybe this means they have a universal kill switch.
If you read it the way a lawyer would and the genre is unmistakable. It follows an agent through an entire life. At birth, registration: identity, declared capabilities, payment rails, a procedure for disputes. In life, an audit trail, because in sensitive settings every action must be verifiable and traceable, with blockchain named as the technology of record, so that no act ever floats free of a responsible principal. At death, recall, in the language of defective products.
hmmm
The man behind the partnership is Lin Le, founder of Lingshu Technology, the firm ranked first in China for blockchain and trusted-data infrastructure. The founder of the country’s leading trusted-data company signed for board-level entry into a police-agent vendor five weeks before a law requiring trusted-data audit trails on police agents came into force.
OK back to be being terrified I guess.
These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot.
Are these agents in the room with us now?
How can this possibly be enforceable.
Balaji's free floating independent network state turns out to be subject to national laws of Malaysia https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3360679/malaysias-anwar-warns-any-israelis-johor-tech-commune-be-deported-immediately
Attempting to credit Luigi's actions to AI millenarianism putting him in a weird headspace almost feels like stolen valor.
Still, if that's where his mental health defence is going to hinge on then I guess it's relevant.
[Tim Urban] goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:
That IQ works like mana points is both a widespread misconception and a red flag that you're far more ignorant than you let on.
“The robot god will be in the 99.9999999999999999999999999999th percentile for intelligence” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Lesswrong has some funny objections to AI: 2040. They buy the overall premise, sure, but even that much still leaves lots of gaps in the "scenario". And they have even more galaxy brain takes... My favorite complaint: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pFzctpJBat95SrCyC/ai-2040-plan-a?commentId=54dZes9uNqDdbNGBu
tldr; AI: 2040 is leaving out all the other sci-fi singularity tech just around the corner like genetic augmentations and cybernetic brain implants!
You laugh, but chatgpt has given me psyhic powers, and I can now tap into a whole new realm. There even was this smart psyhic agent called neurgalle or something who helped me with a skin condition.
uggh, I dragged my feet too much on giving our instance more disk and the database fell over
it seems to have recovered alright, but please check if there's any weirdness or missing posts around the time when it went down
Diversity and inclusion is suddenly great when it involves fascists doing entryism.
i thought that pause ai was just rationalist controlled opposition
Yeah exactly.
I want to pause ai because it's a hypercapitalist project designed to further deskill and commoditise the middle class which coincidentally destroys the environment.
They want to pause ai because they believe that spicy autocomplete is intelligent and will one day soon manifest as a giant angry vengeful snek.
We are not the same.
So this exists: https://readscottalexander.com/stats/links
Link Stats
Across every post, these are the external websites Scott Alexander links to most often. "Links" counts every hyperlink; "Posts" counts how many distinct articles link there.
So far these are probably the clearest non-leaked emails indication of what the good doctor actually believes.
He cites Samo Burja and Nicholas Decker? And Cremieux is the twitter account he cites second most often, with Richard Hanania in 4th place?
That feeling when you're an OpenAI exec and you realize the jig is up.
I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).
The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can't let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.
The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.
The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. "Lack of compute for customer inference" is ultimately a red herring. If I'm a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!
The rest of his "accelerationist"/"decelerationist" drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.
One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism
full AI communism
At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.
Listen I'm all for hating on the Chinese government, but it's more enjoyable to hate on them for real reasons rather than whatever this is.
Second mistake: I was relatively imprecise, writing, as I usually do, for a fairly high-context audience that was inclined to give me grace rather than pick apart every word
Oh no the lesson he took away from his tweet is that he didn't use enough words.
I also don't get it because they already hate pre-social-media institutions, so why are they still angry that American journalists were bad at transmitting public health science at the beginning of COVID? Even if you believe in a COVID lab leak, the United States broke the global public health response while countries in East Asia and the South Pacific showed what to do. There are lab-leakers who blame a partnership between traitorous American scientists and sinister Chinese labs to conduct research that was illegal in the USA.
Edit / this guy just comes out and uses COVID lab leak theories as an analogy for AI-box fantasies, but these people don't just cite it as a parallel, they are MAD about what they think happened and want you to be mad too.
His non-apology apology:
I'm not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.
Guys, he has a baby. Don't be too mean to him.
I am not retreating from public writing
That's OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.
“please forgive me for spreading sinophobic propaganda for bailouts i have a baby :((“
Samo Burja ("How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem"), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?
If you want to re-litigate the New Deal, rehabilitating Hoover is a good first step.
The American far-right has the New Deal as its foundational Dolchstosslegende.
Hey, new ludicity post. wonder why he did a saturday post, he'll miss the HN monday cycle.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/
For this reason, our team has quickly learned while on an engagement not to ask anything about ongoing AI projects in any context – by the time that project has started, it is too late for the management team, and intervention is not possible until a crisis point is inevitably reached. There is no conceivable positive outcome. The failure rate is so high that even basic inquiry leaves us in an untenable position. Any coherent question about how it’s going, what the goal is, who is using it, constitutes an inadvertent attack on the chain of command responsible for the work because there are no good answers to anything.
Matches my experience consulting these last few years. I'm still waiting to hear about the one gig where AI doesn't eventually degenerate into a CYA circlejerk. Perhaps that is just the dominant eigenvector of the technical consulting process.
Several of my peers now “AI-wash” their work, meaning that even when they can perfectly competently execute on their jobs to the satisfaction of their management teams, said managers are unhappy if the engineers haven’t used AI in the work.
Been there too.
Also, apparently layoffs.fyi added an "attributed to AI" filter - https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/
