gerikson

SCENE: a wind-blasted desert landscape. In the foreground, a weathered truck rests on the side of a ruined highway. The windscreen is dusty and cracked, and the tyres have long since rotted away.

A PAIR OF SCAVENGERS, clad in bulky rags, approach the truck with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

Using a CROWBAR, they force open the back doors of the truck, and exclaim

"Fuck it, Ted, it's one of those dumb AI trucks!"

Astroturfing is as American as apple pie.

I'm no fan of Greg Egan's fiction but I am a fan of him pissing of rats:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbqJfCz9qvfptNbCQ/an-angry-review-of-greg-egan-s-didicosm

Link to short story: https://www.gregegan.net/DIDICOSM/Complete/Didicosm.html

also

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hx5EkHFH5hGzngZDs/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon (shared in a comment to the above)

Here's the short story that pissed Zack off: https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DeathGorgon_Egan.pdf

Edit I found the time to read Didicosm and while it suffers from an Eganesque infodump (with diagrams!) it's not nearly as bad as the LWers are wittering on about. Part of me thinks they're mad because the main scientists are all women while the main dude is a stable, well-adjusted partner in the relationship.

in b4 "Committee for AI Safety" seizes control and executes people who are too smart with a guillotine.

Habryka doesn't have time to write all the crazy shit he's mulling on, so he offers a summary.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqgwHJ93pJpaeHXs6/posts-i-don-t-have-time-to-write

Do you enjoy living in a society that takes fire safety seriously? Sucks to be you, I guess:

2. Fire codes are the root of all evil

How about we just make all the mosquito nets flammable. That's effective altruism!

Also Switzerland is a libertarian paradise apparently.

I think the entire business idea was hallucinated by an LLM.

A go-live at 11PM is a recipe for disaster as sleep-deprived engineers struggle to fix all the teething bugs.

Habryka @ LW takes a break from inventing Western civilization from first Rat principles to advocate a RETVRN to incandescent lighting:

Eventually, in most of the western world outside of the US, incandescent lightbulbs were literally banned to promote energy saving policies.

This was the greatest uglification in history. Within two decades, much of the world that was previously filled with beautiful natural-feeling light started feeling alien, slightly off, and uncomfortable, and societal stigma around energy-saving policies prevented people from really doing anything about it.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWib7qinqymfxevE4/if-a-room-feels-off-the-lighting-is-probably-too-spiky-or

Look I know Doctorow fails the gen-AI purity test but I think he's making sense here

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/

Why? So it can be firebombed?

(don't fire-bomb residences people)

also it's hilarious that a 5% local tax surcharge on a place you don't even live in is considered Stalinism

I don't deny Putin is a Russian nationalist, I just meant that he could have more profitably reached his goals with a lighter touch. Invading in 2022 hardened Ukraine's opposition, highlighted the behavior of Russian troops in occupied Ukraine, and destroyed a lot of hardware and people.

Before 2022, Putin could project Russian power as this weird chimera of Russia as a promised land of white patriarchy, coupled with invincible military threat. The invasion revealed Russia as both military incompetent and brutal, making resisting Russia militarily the rational choice, and simultanously sidelining Russia's supporters. If you stand with Putin, you also stand with the people who destroyed Bucha.

If all you have is a blog, it's natural for you to think that you can effect regime change through blogging.

But there's a very large step between

1. blog a lot
2. ???
3. absolute CEO-king

Culture matters. The US has had a de jure republic for almost 250 years. Even though the presidency has steadily moved to a more central role, it's one thing to have a literal KING in place. There needs to be a story there, and saying "we need to be more effective or the Chinese will win" doesn't really cut it.

It took France almost 100 years to finally establish republican rule: revolution, Directory, First Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist monarchy, Second Republic, coup, Second Empire, catastrophic military defeat, Third Republic.

Then we get narrow Pyhrric victory in WW1, defeat again, collaborationist dictatorship, 4th republic, de Gaulle gets fed up, 5th republic.

Even today the French president has more power than in many other republican constitutions.

How does Yarvin propose to remove the republican idea from American consciousness?