TinyTimmyTokyo @ TinyTimmyTokyo @awful.systems

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158

Joined

2 yr. ago

Bay Area rationalist Sam Kirchner, cofounder of the Berkeley "Stop AI" group, claims "nonviolence isn't working anymore" and goes off the grid. Hasn't been heard from in weeks.

Article has some quotes from Emile Torres.

https://archive.is/20251205074622/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/sam-kirchner-missing-stop-ai/685144/

When she's not attending the weddings of people like Curtis Yarvin.

Alex, I'll take "Things that never happened" for $1000.

Amusing to see him explaining to you the connection between Bay Area rationalists and AI safety people.

The "unhoused friend" story is about as likely to be true as the proverbial Canadian girlfriend story. "You wouldn't know her."

But he's getting

This one's been making the rounds, so people have probably already seen it. But just in case...

Meta did a live "demo" of their recording new AI.

In fairness, not everything nVidia does is generative AI. I don't know if this particular initiative has anything to do with GenAI, but a lot of digital artists depend on their graphics cards' capabilities to create art that is very much human-derived.

Yud: "That's not going to asymptote to a great final answer if you just run them for longer."

Asymptote is a noun, you git. I know in the grand scheme of things this is a trivial thing to be annoyed by, but what is it it with Yud's weird tendency to verbify nouns? Most rationalists seem to emulate him on this. It's like a cult signifier.

Now that his new book is out, Big Yud is on the interview circuit. I hope everyone is prepared for a lot of annoying articles in the next few weeks.

Today he was on the Hard Fork podcast with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton (didn't listen to it yet). There's also a milquetoast profile in the NYT written by Kevin Roose, where Roose admits his P(doom) is between 5 and 10 percent.

Make sure to click the "Apply Now" button at the bottom for a special treat.

I get that, but most Christians don't make plans to freeze their bodies after they die.

With his all-consuming fear of death, Thiel is about as far from being a Christian as one can get. All his antichrist talk is a nakedly transparent attempt to gas up the rubes so they remain on the side of the billionaires even after Trump gives up the ghost. He doesn't believe a single thing he's saying.

A nice thread linked in the comments on Peter Woit's blog: https://xcancel.com/VikingFBR/status/1962222479008841730

I know it's been said thousands of times before, but as a software developer I've never felt a greater sense of job security than I do right now. The amount of work it's going to take to clean up all this slop is going to be monumental. Unfortunately, that kind of work is also soul-deadening.

Last year McDonald's withdrew AI from its own drive-throughs as the tech misinterpreted customer orders - resulting in one person getting bacon added to their ice cream in error, and another having hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets mistakenly added to their order.

Clearly artificial superintelligence has arrived, and instead of killing us all with diamondoid bacteria, it's going to kill us by force-feeding us fast food.

It's bizarre and pathetic how Scott disabled comments on his blog post but is now using Peter Woit's blog to carry on a debate with all the people horrified by his views.

Never heard of Ishida, but he sounds like he's yet another one of those people for whom politics and belief are just "vibes". There's no principle, no rational basis, just vibes. I feel like more and more of the world is becoming this way. Or perhaps it always was this way, but the Internet has just made it more evident.