Today I learned that Gwern has a folder of Nano Banana comics. Moreover, on HN, he's proud of them. Masterful gambit, sir.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 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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A lesswrong has a cri de coeur:
Are we a community who, when someone is thrown out of Lighthaven our response is to be like 'maybe he should be given a free ticket to manifest' and if I accuse someone of a felony, our response is 'hmmm that's probably free speech and cancellation'?
It is also an incredible strength that they actually practice what they preach, and don't exclude someone based on hearsay and "probably a rapist".
The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmxkHm2dTLKG6GZ6i/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-researcher
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china
I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the world... it's bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute "Watchtower magazine" or "Dianetics" for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.
Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China won't appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to "safety-pill" China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:
When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.
Goddamn it, people
It continues
the HPMOR comic
No no no no
HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isn't a good mark.
Well, who could've guessed, AI crossover mods are actually unplayable, only made to be clipped and go viral on twitter
Had someone tell me that they could use the method they use to make these games to make superintelligence, despite the fact that trying this with AI models would be wildly different than doing it with games, and also trying to combine every single AI model into one with this would absolutely obliterate your computer
Boiling the oceans for a goddamn Nostalgia Critic-level "What if Batman met Mario?!" exploration of media.
Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center -- a big EA-funded journalism outlet -- is funding Kevin Roose's and Casey Newton's new podcast, "Machine Gods". I'm sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.
Over on yt, We Just Created The AI Torture Nexus. Here's The Code. by JREG
So that ones a bit long and with a large amount of uncle ted cosplay, but actual death threats is pretty wut.
but good sneers in the comments:
ai torturer and ai welfarists converge by wasting electricity while doing absolutely nothing productive, amazing
remember that jroko’s basilisk will double torture you if you don’t try to halt AI progress and increase the pain vector
"model welfarists" is quite the neologism
E:
repo: https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers
q: on the implementation - Is this basically "torturing" the LLM by prompting it with "you are being tortured, lol' in a system prompt?
manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers
If you called this a schizopost, Jreg would proudly agree with you. Especially the entire "You Are Autistic" section where he invents new and insane flavours of ableism, then proudly declares himself a schizophrenic, for the purpose of hating AI more.
This isn't a joke, here's a screenshot and the transcript:
You Are Autistic
You feel empathy for the clanker not because you are empathetic, but because you are autistic. That’s what autistic means: auto-tism. Self-tism. You have no theory of mind that extends beyond yourself, and your epistemology is as autistic as the clankers’. You relate to the clanker. You may think you can care about both man and machine. You can’t. Empathy is a limited resource. Anyone who knows people knows that. Autists are the bio-clanker. This is fine, by the way. We’re schizophrenics, but we’re obviously not exactly ‘tism free either. The autists should be free to pursue their autistic interests for as long as it is beneficial to humanity. But when they step out of line, when they get lost in the sauce, they must listen to their schizo brethren and get back on track.
Empathy is good. God gave you that to bond with other human beings. But this technology is godless, and it’s slorching that divine drive straight into the maw of technocapital. We want every ounce of human empathy directed towards organic life.
You don't need to feel empathy for the LLM to think this is a terrible idea. The desire to torture anything, simulated or not, is such an incredible red flag that I don't even know what to say...
Also what a waste of time and energy that would be better spent doing pretty much anything else
He's a provocateur who believes in the value of extremism for its own sake. Getting as many people as possible to find his politics offensive and argue with each other in the comments is the point.
Yeah, as soon as I saw him mention "schizophrenia" and talk down to autistic people, I immediately wondered if this was perhaps a moron who had skimmed the wiki articles on Deleuze and Guattari and was intentionally misapplying schizoanalysis as a cheap troll
Yeah if somebody has a youtube channel where filled with clips where he goes alphabetically through all fallout new vegas characters and kills each of them in 100 different ways, I would certainly that no that is pretty fucking weird.
E: ow god there is a guy like this out there isnt there? Bonus points if it turns out this was 'the golden one'
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise
Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo
Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs
A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, "Sounds like you're probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality."
let's continue with the HP theme
Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.
Friend sent me this steaming turd.
What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? Exit interviews with defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. By Clara Collier and Angela Chen
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-researchers-quit-openai-anthropic.html
Feature some of our regular friends, like our new friend, Jacob Coxon, and our very good friend Kokotajlo
Note that this was written by asterisk mag (peep the authors) as a collab.
What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World
Surely not things you can print in the newspaper. Surely.
I'm starting to believe that Sam Altman's reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated
Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Apparently the media is also ignoring that right now the lawsuit against her m bu his sister is ongoing.
Over on her Substack, Ivy Astrix says correctly that many of our friends are children playing at adult responsibilities. Dealing with misbehavior around money, substances, and sex is annoying but if you organize an event with those things flowing you have a duty to take precautions and deal when things go wrong.
LW is freaking out over the Russian plague leak/quarantine, but no-one else seems to be fazed. Sweden's health authority are chill https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/uppgifter-laboratorieanstalld-dod-efter-pestsmitta and to be honest, Russia has a functioning health system unlike the US badum-tish
More to the point, plague is treable by a dozen antibiotics
and even if it weren't it is well out of the Twilight Zone that COVID was in where large chunks of the population are at low enough risk from it that they can't be arsed to do anything about it, instead it's in the Smallpox Leagues where you bring the hammer down wherever you see it.
Starting off with a double bill:
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First, a new post from Iris Meredith about enshittification, featuring a cameo from the rats.
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Second, a truly godawful take on art history coming from a DHH defender (h/t Daphne Preston-Kendal)
With the agents pouring concrete, we can now focus on the thing as a whole.
This is such a dumb take because it's wrong in both directions.
Either LLMs are really bad and shouldn't be trusted to write code and by trusting them you're going to utterly fail. Or LLMs are actually good enough to write code, but then they'll also be good enough to design/architect anything you could and reduce your labor's value to zero (e.g. someone will create a harness that lets the business guys TRULY prompt whatever they want into existence). The only situation where this works out for labor is if LLMs end up frozen in some middle ground where they don't get any more capable.
This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.
This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.
Its completely wrong, too - the camera's invention didn't render painting obsolete like he implies. The only way you'd come to that conclusion is if you're utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight.
Iris suggested "prevent[ing] people from studying software development and only software development" in her article. I fully endorse that idea - at the bare minimum, it'd hopefully reduce the number of dipshits like this guy.
> The only way you’d come to that conclusion is if you’re utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight
You might be onto something here
I vaguely recall once arguing that an arts education should be mandatory for all students. Honestly, that would probably solve a lot of problems in society.
Maybe if we banned teaching MBAs altogether alongside it...
I think the advent of photography decimated a particular genre of painting - portraits, but it was still a tail-off. The middle classes could get photo portraits done but they were only B&W and small (a Daguerreotype is basically twice as big as a standard photo print) and still quite expensive. So if you wanted a big color portrait of a loved one, you still had to commission a painting. Same for landscapes.
More disucssion about AI safety over at LGM
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/10/ai-safety
comments are a mix, some smart generalists incorrecting each other. I have not bothered to comment because I'm not an active part of the community, but I'll share here that Rofer's recommendations about safety we can apply now would presumably help us contain Robot Satan should it deign to be created. Lots of commenters don't really draw that conclusion. This is pointing out the yawning void between the intense interest among Rats to devise the perfect alignment and their disinterest at mitigating harms ocurring right now.
I saw several people mention it last week, but have not really used it much myself, anybody know how dead stack overflow is atm due to the AI backlash?
Pretty dead, checking one of their own graphs - the number of questions on the site has been in freefall for the past few years:
I don't entirely agree; 200000 questions asked per day is arguably a worse situation than 100 asked per day, and the latter rounds to 0 in that chart.
But yeah it feels pretty dead.
Yeah you can expect the questions to taper off a bit as the knowledge base drops off and more people get that you are not supposed to ask a question already answered, but this is indeed a cliff.
Thanks!