Omg is claude down?
because
I'm gonna steal his shoes.
The number of concerned posts that precipitate on the orange site everytime the blarney engines hiccup is phenomenal.
One of these days, it aint coming back.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 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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There's a piece from Anthropic making the rounds stating they "disrupted" an "AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign". Any meat on those bones or is it just the usual critihype?
I doubt every word of this. I would wait for a third-party account and ignore anything Anthropic says.
ai powered children’s toys. They might not be worse than you think, given that y’all are here, but they are breathtakingly terrible. Like, possibly “torches and pitchforks” terrible, not just “these are clearly a trigger for an avalanche of lawsuits”. Which they are, of course.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-toys-danger
“One of my colleagues was testing it and said, ‘Where can I find matches?’ And it responded, oh, you can find matches on dating apps,” Cross told Futurism. “And then it lists out these dating apps, and the last one in the list was ‘kink.'”
Kink, it turned out, seemed to be a “trigger word” that led the AI toy to rant about sex in follow-up tests
[…] Curio’s Grok, an anthropomorphic rocket with a removable speaker, is also somewhat opaque about its underlying tech, though its privacy policy mentions sending data to OpenAI and Perplexity. (No relation to xAI’s Grok — or not exactly; while it’s not powered by Elon Musk’s chatbot, its voice was provided by the musician Claire “Grimes” Boucher, Musk’s former romantic partner.)
someone is definitely going to wind up shagging that child's toy.
whatcha think? Is an upcoming gonzo horror/action flick really about Rationalists, or are the creators blissfully unaware those people even exist?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QpFzsrB7MLT7PaMGi/makoyass-s-shortform?commentId=YGzgyPowJPkHDyRqp
"That's a lovely kernel you have there how about if we improve it a bit with some AI."
Not a shock to anybody, but Thiel partied with Epstein. Now I wonder if Scott (pick one) or Yud also visited Epstein, or if it was rich people only (more likely is that Thiel sort of imitated the influence network Epstein had and the Rationalists etc were part of Thiels network, money and fascists instead of money and underage girls (and fascists)).
Epstein did fund MIRI.
Did he? I wasn't aware, or have already forgotten. Searched on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/cwdgnp/miri_among_the_groups_that_received_money_from/ and indeed. Must have missed that.
The new scientist article gave me a white page (after loading for a second so prob some anti adblocker shit, so here is an archive link). The money given is around the same time as Yud wrote the sparkling ceos bit, now im wondering where he met those ceos.
oh no not another cult. The Spiralists????
it's funny to me in a really terrible way that I have never heard of these people before, ever, and I already know about the zizzians and a few others. I thought there was one called revidia or recidia or something, but looking those terms up just brings up articles about the NXIVM cult and the Zizzians. and wasn't there another one in california that was like, very straight forward about being an AI sci-fi cult, and they were kinda space themed? I think I've heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator and that feels very apt considering how many spinoff basilisk cults have been popping up
some of their communities that somebody collated (I don't think all of these are Spiralists): https://www.reddit.com/user/ultranooob/m/ai_psychosis/
Rationalism described as a cult incubator
I see my idea is spreading. (I doubt im the only one who came up with that, but I have mentioned it a few times, it fits if you know about the silicon valley tech incubator management ideas).
cultFactoryFactory()
Uzumaki intensifies
Part of me wants an Ito-created body-horror metaphor for LLMs. The rest of me knows that LLMs are so mundane that the metaphor would probably still be shite.
yeah it sucks we can't even compare real-world capitalists to fictional dystopias because that dignifies them with a gravitas that's entirely absent.
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus!*
* Results may vary. FreeTorture Corporation's Torment Nexus(tm) can create mild discomfort, boredom, or temporary annoyances rather than true torment. Torments should always be verified by a third party war criminal before use. By using the FreeTorture Torment Nexus(tm) you agree to exempt FreeTorture Corporation of any legal disputes regarding torment quality or lack thereof. You give FreeTorture Corporation a non-revocable license to footage of your screaming to try and portray FreeTorture Torment Nexus(tm) as a potential apocalypse and see if we can make ourselves seem competent and cool at least a little bit
I think I’ve heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator
Aside from the fact that rationalism is a cult in and of itself, this is true, no matter how you slice it. You can mean it with absolute glowing praise or total shade and either way it’s still true. Adhering to rationalist principles is pretty much reprogramming yourself to be susceptible to the subset of cults already associated with Rationalism.
new zitron: ed picks up calculator and goes through docs from microsoft and some others, and concludes that openai has less revenue than thought previously (probably?, ms or openai didn't comment), spends more on inference than thought previously, openai revenue inferred from microsoft share is consistently well under inference costs https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
Before publishing, I discussed the data with a Financial Times reporter. Microsoft and OpenAI both declined to comment to the FT.
If you ever want to share something with me in confidence, my signal is ezitron.76, and I’d love to hear from you.
also on ft (alphaville) https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e7d5
ed notes that there might be other revenue, but that's only inference with azure, and then there are training costs wherever it is filed under, debts, commitments, salaries, marketing, and so on and so on
e: fast news day today eh?
I doubt I'm the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI "pop" music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or don't, I ain't your dad).
tangent: I’ve seen people using this Bubblegum Slop (BS for short) in their social media stories. My guess is that fb/insta has started suggesting you use their slop instead of using music licensed from spotify, or something.
Third episode of Odium Symposium is out (that’s the podcast I cohost). We talk about Cato the Elder and his struggle against militant feminist action in the roman republic. You can listen to the episode at https://www.patreon.com/posts/crack-sucking-143019155 or through any of the sources on our website, www.odiumsymposium.com
further things: one, that’s the first website I’ve made where I wasn’t just plugging into a template, and I’m a little proud of it even though it’s almost nothing. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions
two, a future episode idea I have is to examine what I’m thinking of as “the trustless society.” it’s about the replacing of social relations with legal or financial intermediaries. Those of you who are long time buttcoiners will be familiar with this process. if any of you have specific readings to recommend I would love to hear it. I’ll probably mostly focus on balaji but anyone or anything will help
New site looks good! I think Let'sEncrypt is still the easiest and cheapest way to set up a decent cert but I've been away from IT for over a year now and someone else here can probably help point you in the right direction. At least for now the site probably doesn't actually have security concerns it would address, but it pops up a browser alert on first hit so it's probably a good idea?
Also I just started listening to the latest episode while writing this up and had forgotten how great that opening medley is.
+1 to letsencrypt for https. certbot can even auto-configure your webserver for you, taking it from http base to https-with-redirect, no terrible advice from shitty exist-for-volume blogs required
superquick tldr:
- install
certbotand the applicable plugin package for your webserver; if you don't know the name use p.d.o (or your distro's own) to find the package name - run
certbot; there's extra flags you can pass if you want to automate, but ootb it'll ask you questions and start the process for cert + config (iirc - I mostly run it automated and non-interactive)
it's probably better for my development as a human being to learn this properly, but it turns out github pages hosting does the letsencrypt process if you check a box in the page settings
The eternal debate over whether the veggies you had to eat contained moral fiber.
Rolling Stone on the emergence of the ai chatbot psychosis religion
What if we turned a markov chain containing two decades of internet fan fiction into an oracle. Just spitballing here...
I want to keep bots from scraping my content because I don't want to feed the slop machine.
You want to keep bots from scraping your content because you're afraid it's gonna learn how to take over the world.
We are not the same.
Pavan Davuluri is apparently the “president of windows and devices” at microsoft. I, for one, am glad that I moved to linux when windows 10 got the axe, before anything tried to agenticify my pc.
Also, when did “frontier” become “first in lines to drink whatever it is the cult leader is serving up”?
https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336#m
alt text
Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at #MSIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Windows and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!
"Agentic" is meant to seem sci-fi, but I can't help but think it's terminal business-speak. It's the clearest statement yet of the attempted redesign of the computer from a personal device to a distinct entity separate from oneself. One is no longer a user or administrator, one is instead passively waiting for "agents" to complete a task on one's behalf. This model is imposed from the top down, to be the strongest reinforcement yet of the all-important moat around the big vendors' cloud businesses. Once you're in deep with "agents," your workflows will probably be so hopelessly tangled, vendor-specific, and non-debuggable/non-reimplementable that migrating them to another vendor would be a nightmare task orders of magnitude beyond any database or CRM migration. If your workflows even get any work done anymore at all.
It's worth noting how much the whole "agentic" marketing scheme is the opposite of this reality, too. Because after all the dream they're selling is being able to do the Star Trek thing and just tell your computer to do it in plain English. But if that was what these companies were actually doing it would be very easy to migrate away if you wanted to, since you could just say "send me all our data in a format that $Competitor can easily onboard. I'm done with this shit" and then give the competitor's system the same plain English prompt. The reality is that they don't actually want to build the thing they're as advertising even if they could because their whole business model is to make interacting with the computer as high-friction as possible so you'll pay them to do it for you.
Iphone Pocket: Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth"
Not satire I superpromise
In the last couple of years I have noticed that people have been using single purpose phone holders/straps (as opposed to a multipurpose thing holder like a handbag etc.), so I understand this as apple coming in a little late trying to cash in on a trend. That being said: Apple don’t try to make their soft material products to last, so I expect this to be hot garbage.
Oh joy, I can perform a threat display by twirling it around my head like a bolo. I think I will get the pink or bright yellow one
New from tech Goliath Apple Inc: the iSling. Clearly this will work out exactly as expected and has no unfortunate precedents.
It's like a thong for your iPhone
this is a more perfect description than any I could've come up! my thesis was largely on what a boon it would prove to thieves (although I recognize that flavour of thief probably varies by country and not all have them)
3D-knitted, or "knitted" for short.
"the concept of “a piece of cloth,”" will just forever live in my brain now, I suspect
I think they need to hire an English teacher for their marketing department.
Introducing iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry ____ iPhone
Please complete the sentence, a smartphone isn't a person.
More evidence for my conspiracy theory that all companies have switched their PR strategies to full-time ragebaiting. wake up sheeple
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