It probably hit the mainstream with AI2040 in early July, but it’s just too rationalist coded for there to not have been precursors.

It came out today that Leopold Aschenbrenner (he of the situational awareness fund implosion fame) was also telling everyone who’d listen about how he was going to be buying up galaxies as soon as AI progress made access to them a piece of cake.

Basically outer space manifest destiny is an important part of AI2040, AI Future’s sort of summer sequel to AI2027, I’d say it appears to be well on its way to become another rationalist Weird Accepted Truth.

The way that they use that term makes it synonymous with Orthodox (“right practices/thinking”).

I mean objectivism was already taken so…

This is firmly in the ‘what if in the future there is a boot so big that we must start licking it now’ school of hot takes, like literally arguing for a future where the AI sucks at its job and you can’t do anything about it.

Forall …

Never seen a gullibility filter in the form of eyebrows before:

He’s not exactly hiding it:

https://andymasley.com/

Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards’ Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.

Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.

I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it’s like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn’t thought applied to rationalists.

I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.

You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them “THEN LEAVE??” they’d rather keep their position. And it’s very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are “deeply broken.”

Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.

It had disabled safeguards on purpose, left the systems attached to the internet and then let the AI software agents do their worst, while pretending not to notice.

“It’s an ethically challenged publicity stunt,” says one highly experienced senior security expert who has led the development of global technical security standards.

Cats and dogs living together, skepticism of press releases in tech journalism, mass hysteria.

The coverage of the Effective Altruism aspect is also refreshingly uncharitable.

edit: Archive is link if you don’t feel like enabling cookies

All this is not just one lone weirdo running tryouts for her cult in some way that’s nothing to do with the rest of the subculture.

New things I think learned from this thread:

• the thief used a blockchain provider instead of an ad-hoc local node, making all the transactions incredibly traceable with (unclear to me) implications about their ability to launder them or keep their identity concealed indefinitely.

• even if they are found out, the previous owners probably won’t see a dime back since the vulnerability affects exactly the ability to prove you really were the previous owner.

Unclear which thief since the web3isdoinggreat writeup says there had been up to 15 unique groups doing mass drains by 31/7, maybe the initial 500 wallet sweep was one person or group?

In a world where the AGI/ASI discourse wasn’t so heavily poisoned by anthropomorphization a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having, i.e. if something is recognizably conscious should we immediately assume it knows how to want, or is consciousness meaningfully interchangeable with awareness?

Some guy tried to write a scifi book about non-anthropomorphic consciousness and he ended up mainstreaming the discourse about how the self isn’t a thing in itself and consciousness as an evolutionary deadend. It’s called Blindsight and it’s got space vampires who optimized reading gauges by swapping the usual moving-spike-that-points-at-numbers design with depictions of human faces at various stages of suffering.

We added it to make it clear that if you get harassed by the people who control whether you get your stipend you are on your own, so please don’t make it a big deal when it happens, ok? That just how it goes in these quirky and fun safe spaces that require you to move into a compound in a different city for extended lengths of time.

Ziz reported being asked similar icebreaker questions.

The reddit post from /r/Grimes you linked there has its issues but it does a great job putting into words the parts that bother me with both the cow-fucking questions and the forced “openness” that requires people to always be ready to answer for the normally intimate parts of their personalities and how it’s comparable to grooming.

The reddit post is incredibly long winded so if anyone is interested in this part specifically ctrl+f for compliance filter.

Also super yikes on the Aella tweet advertising her alleged "cam sister"s onlyfans that’s opening in a few weeks when she turns 18, which sounds exactly like if she had actually groomed a minor into sex work.

Makes sense, thanks.

Need ideas for ways to spend philanthropy money without helping absolutely anyone? Check out AI safety influencer bootcamp at Lighthaven!

Basically Aella gathered like 60 people with a seminotable online presence to stay for free at Lighthaven for a month as long as they managed to publish at least one relevant video (15 sec minimum) each day.

Rationalism ensued:

“It’s really hard to run a fellowship that’s not an indoctrination camp,” [cofounder with aella] Fernandez said. “If you don’t try really hard to not make an indoctrination camp, you will on accident.”

Uh oh

A fellow recognized me and asked whether I was there for the “torture potluck.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

It was exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-tolerate buffet of unpleasant experiences, for the sake of Fucking Around and Finding Out. […] Just before midnight, a small crowd gathered around someone laid down on an AstroTurf-lined wheelchair ramp. He was the first of shockingly many in line to get waterboarded — one of the most in-demand items on the torture menu.

So silly omg

After a string of expected questions such as “What’s your take on AI?” and “What kind of content would you want to make?”, the form asked, “If you had to have sex with a cow would you rather it be dead or alive? Why?” All Comic Sans, with animated rainbow dots floating alongside the form field. […] [Fernandez said] “We added it in to make it pretty clear that we don’t have a PR department or an HR department,” he said.

“Even the icebreakers, like everything, they want you to know that they’re part of the weird community,” one fellow told me. “‘Stand over here if you’re super sexually active, and over here if not,’ or like, ‘rate yourself based off of like, the last time you masturbated.’”

The unifying thread, despite the fellows’ ideological diversity, is something like “openness.” Everyone at PDKU was willing to drop everything, move to Berkeley for a month, live in close quarters with strangers, and be perceived doing silly things on the internet.

It’s really unclear what sort of ideological diversity is referenced unless it’s about having both blue haired and green goatee’d people. Maybe we’ve reached the point where everyone is expected to assume race science enthusiasts will be at a rationalist event at some capacity.

Also the whole thing sounds like having tryouts for a cult.

[Fernandez] says PDKU has a conduct policy, authored by him, that discourages relationships across power differentials. When I asked him how that gets enforced, in the absence of an HR department, he mentioned an unnamed community health lead.

Same with the diversity thing, they are preemptively saying that there for sure weren’t no sexual harassment shenanigans this time.

The third methinks thou dost protest too much comes as an extened NO U jab at other shady thinktankers trying to astroturf support for their thing.

Amid the science communication, shitposting, and heartwarming summer camp energy, there’s a giant elephant in the room. “It’s another multi-million-dollar thing happening on a compound in California,” CJ said. “Does everyone think you’re just an annoying cunty psyop?”

Don’t believe your lying eyes is apparently the note on which they chose to end this.

Is Wyvern something people would be expected to care about? I thought all his clout was from being the Gas Town guy.

It says he’s doing AI transformation consultation now. Imagine paying good money to be told that you need to tuck copilot to bed every afternoon.

It’s not fragile and unergonomic, it’s robot-uprising-proof!

Also like will the warranty actually cover damages suffered when trying to squash the rebellion?