CHOTINER: Mr Yudkowsky, it says here 20% of your research budget went to “harry potter”. Care to explain?
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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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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Quick PSA: There's an open letter calling for a fork of Rails, specifically to purge it of David Heil Hitler's influence.
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Satire warning!!! 🚨🚨🚨 You have been warned!!!
Some great tips for using ChatGPT to stop being a “Brain only” person to a fully optimised person!
Hey fellas they're building a mako reactor in my back yard:
Developers of the 12-megawatt facility said it will bring jobs and investment to Nashville, but neighbors aren’t so sure.
The neighbors are right.
I need you to understand how nearly I added myself to even more watch lists because of that analogy. Avalanche!
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House Democrats have dripped more details from Epstein files and we have surprise guests! They released an un-OCR'd PDF; I'll transcribe the mentions of our favorite people:
Sat[urday] Dec[ember] 6, 2014 ZORRO … Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec[ember] 6 (is this still happening?)
Zorro is a ranch in New Mexico that Epstein owned; Epstein was scheduled to be there from December 5-8, so that Musk and Epstein would not be at the island together. Combined with the parenthetical uncertainty about happenstance, did Epstein want to perhaps grant Musk some plausible deniability by not being present?
Mon[day] Nov[ember] 27, 2017 NY … 12:00pm LUNCH w/ Peter Thiel [REDACTED]
From the rest of the schedule formatting, the redacted block following Thiel's name is probably not a topic; it might be a name. Lunch between two rich financiers is not especially interesting but lunch between a blackmail-gathering Mossad asset and an influencer-funding accelerationist could be.
Sat[urday] Feb[ruary] 16, 2019 NY-LSJ 7:00am BREAKFAST w/ Steve Bannon
Well now, this is the most interesting one to me. This isn't Epstein's only breakfast of the day; at 9 AM he meets with Reid Weingarten, one of his attorneys, about some redacted topic. Bannon's not exactly what I think of as a morning person or somebody who is ready to go at a moment's notice, so what could drag him out of bed so early? (Edit: This vexed me so I looked it up and sunrise was 6:48 AM that morning at sea level. It would have been the crack of dawn!) Epstein's Friday evening had had two haircuts, too, with plenty of redacted info; was he worried about appearing nice for Bannon? (The haircuts might not have been for Epstein, given context.) This was a busy day for Epstein; he had a redacted lunch date, and he also had somebody flying in/out that morning via JFK connecting to Saint Thomas and staying in a hotel room there. He then flew out of Newark in the evening to visit the infamous island itself, Little Saint James. The redaction doesn't quite tell us who this guest is, but it can't be Bannon because the Dems fucked up the redaction! I can see the edges of the descenders on the name, including a 'g' and 'j'/'q', but Bannon's name doesn't have any descenders.
Also Prince Andrew's in there, I guess?
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Found a well-done essay by Jared White recently: AI Apologists and the Humanist Legacy of Steve Jobs, which does a good job sneering the ideology of AI and arguing for a more pro-human approach to tech.
This article also reminded me of how when they are trying to promote AI agents they dont get further than shopping, a secretary, or help you cook with random ingredients. No real human connections
New premium column from Ed Zitron: OpenAI Needs A Trillion Dollars In The Next Four Years. Features Ed calling Google and Oracle out for failing to protect their investors from Saltman before the cutoff.
OT: I had a realization awhile back that I’d basically cut American scifi out of my life. The politics are just gross to me now, and the overseas stuff is just plain more fun.
What comes out of the states seems to reduce to libertarian (closeted white nationalist) wank fodder, and I guess its been this way since…Campbell? Certainly Niven-Pournelle. It just got gross.
(Partially prompted by me listening to Iron Council again).
Dunno I just enjoyed the fuck out of "Landlocked in Foreign Skin", like it's been a long time since I pause my life to devour a book in one sitting like this, and given that Drew Huff writes from Seattle I'm thinking they're a USian? And I was really engrossed by Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire which resonated a lot with my experiences as a Third World immigrant, with a certain honesty in portrayal of what it feels like to admire "culture" at a distance from a colony that I seldomly see (I'm on book #2 currently). I'm more of a fantasy reader, but Octavia Butler and Le Guin's sci-fi were absolutely formative to me, and if you ask me one modern sci-fi series I liked besides those mentioned so far, I'd probably say Wayfarers or Monk & Robot. Plenty of good SF authors from the USA whose politics are more or less the opposite of what you describe.
The trick is I read books by queer folk, women and PoC almost exclusively. Absolutely don't regret it, all the fun stuff is there in the margins.
I’ll have to try some of this then!
Ngl, Iron Council made me ugly cry.
Also highly recommend Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee.
It's got romance. It's got swashbuckling. It's got vendettas. A woman smashes a genocidal empire with mathemagic. Conversely, the empire's greatest general is an effortlessly cool gay dude with dyscalculia from the Korean part of Space Texas who lives in people's shadows, and it makes sense how that happened. The genocide happens because of a lone maniac's insane tech debt. Different factions try to subvert each other via cleverly designed board games. There are soooo many unhealthy relationships.
5/5 stars
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On a semi-related note, I recently got around to reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (loved the Mars trilogy and thought I should get to his latest), and this chapter had me wanting to give up sci fi as well, so I will subject you all to it:
I am a secret so everyone can know me. First you must count every part of me, then translate those parts into signs that do not describe me. Together we are shackled, and with the sign that does not describe me you can open me up and read me as I am. People will give you their promises for me, and if wrongdoers try to take me away from you, you can find me and tell the world where I am hidden. I began as a silent speaking, a key to open every door; now that I have opened all the front doors, I am the key that locks the back doors by which wrongdoers try to escape the scene of the crime. I am the nothing that makes everything happen. You don’t know me, you don’t understand me; and yet still, if you want justice, I will help you to find it. I am blockchain. I am encryption. I am code. Now put me to use.
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I eagerly await the day when we hear about these people from 1-900-HOTDOG instead of Behind the Bastards