the one about arena shooters dying off

That extruded piece of audiovisual garbage has been bugging me massively for a couple hours now, so I’m gonna make a quick recommendation:

If you’re looking for a non-dogshit video about the arena shooter’s implosion, boomer shooter YouTuber Skeleblood made a pretty solid one a couple years ago.

Felicitations!

(“A job,” Blake thinks. “I need to find one of those.”)

That is what happens when your mode of analysis is closer to erotic Harry Potter fan fiction (which is indeed the medium in which Yudkowsky has delivered some of his prognostications)

I was going to throw a point of order about not all fanfic being erotic, but given how they fetishize “intelligence” and “rationality” I can’t be sure that they *don’t" get off on that slog.

it’s amusing to me that these nerds thought they could in any way affect policy even with a sane administration, not to mention this bugshit crazy one

like I’ve said before, I’d be perversely happy if we managed to off ourselves by building the robot god. beats drowning in our own filth or blowing ourselves up

if we had made the podcast series on rationalists, their importance as useful idiots for billionaires was the structure i wanted to hang the whole thing on. so this is a gratifying read. that said i think the ideas here will be very familiar to many stubsack readers

The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries.

i will go further and say that not accounting for such things is considered virtuous in rationalist ideology

Oooh I wish this project a lot of success!

Zed is interesting but the project’s very pro-AI stance keeps me away from it. So a fork without that stuff is great, hope that works out longer-term.

Given the delay, I’ll bet an internal review discovered more instances in other articles where COVID couldn’t be the excuse.

Someone with more time and motivation could probably look at his past articles and see if any others have been quietly pulled or edited, although I have no idea if ars could be assed to change the ones which weren’t publicly criticized

God that was bleak - I thought Nick was bad in his guest spots on Alex’s show (seen via Knowledge Fight, of course) but apparently you really do need at least two layers of insulating podcast to avoid suffering critical psychic damage from that level of hatred. I appreciated the acknowledgement that in order to feel at all okay playing clips you needed to sanewash him a little bit. I’m pretty sure that JorDan do the same thing with Alex and don’t acknowledge it nearly often enough.

I also feel like some of Nick’s schtick is about trying to position himself and maintain his position in the right wing grifter bigot-industrial complex. Like, the open disdain for his audience and presenting his actually pretty straightforward feelings on the halftime show as somehow brave and iconoclastic is also about differentiating himself and making his audience feel superior to Alex, Tucker, Candace, etc. In that sense the open disdain for the audience serves another purpose in terms of reinforcing heirarchy. Look at how great it feels for me to be better than you. And even you are better than the chuds, who are better than the racialized other.

This paper is great for outlining just how shitty LLMs are for like, everything

Yknow, if the multiple suicide reports weren’t enough

Usually, you wake up on a lifeless beach that’s adorned with some sort of abandoned marble temple. It’s supposed to be beautiful, but instead it’s really sad. Almost unbearably sad. So much so that you want to get away from it. So you crawl downward into these vents going below the horrible temple, and suddenly it’s like you’re moving through the innards of an incomprehensible machine that’s thudding away, thud, thud, thud. And as you get deeper, the metal sidings are carved with scrawled ominous curses and slurs directed toward you, and you hear the voices, louder than before, and you somehow know these people are in pain because of you. It keeps getting colder. Color drains from the world. And you see the crowd through the slats of the vents: pale and emaciated men, women, and children from centuries to come, all of them pressed together for warmth in some sort of unending cavern. What clothes they have are torn and ragged. Before you know it, their dirty hands and dirty fingernails lurch through the grates, and they’re reaching for you, tearing at your shirt, moaning terrible things about their suffering and how you made it happen, you made it, and you need to stop this now, now, now. And next they’re ripping you apart, limb from limb, and you are joining them in the gray dimness forever.