gerikson @ gerikson @awful.systems

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44

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1,507

Joined

3 yr. ago

I found out about the rightwing / misogynist strain of FOSS mostly via the furore over RMS defending Minsky from Epstein allegations.

Glyph has weighed in here

https://lobste.rs/c/mhal5b

Apparently someone edited in the numeral in the title when submitting to lobste.rs. Another entry on the watchlist.

Sorry for you and your cat.

cue this lobste.rs shitshow where someone states "88 is a known Nazi dogwhistle", and multiple people come out of the woodwork saying even if it is, it's not so bad actually, get over it

https://lobste.rs/s/rvgvgj/best_line_length_is_88

Submitted blog post could without loss of generality be titled "Black's default of 88 for line length is not necessarily the best", yet author decided to go with the title they have now... edit author seems to be a good egg generally https://mastodon.social/@glyph

Man, that's rough. I know it's not much but I'm sending you positive energy from where I am.

I'd wager an ounce of gold that the general attitude towards sustainability and the environment is 100% aligned among the rulers of both states.

Dubai famously doesn't have a sewage pipe system, human waste is loaded onto tanker trucks that spend hours waiting to offload it in the only sewage treatment plant available.

A rival gang of "AI" "researchers" dare to make fun of Big Yud's latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy

Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)

When we say Y&S’s arguments are theological, we don’t just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using “theological” to simply mean “wrong”. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. That’s because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).

What we mean is that Y&S’s methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.

Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, there’s no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the “before” and “after”: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.

LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP

Update an LessWrong attempts to debunk the piece with inline comments here

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6sBAT4SPCJnBPKPJ/mechanize-work-s-essay-on-unfalsifiable-doom

Leading to such hilarious howlers as

Then solving alignment could be no easier than preventing the Germans from endorsing the Nazi ideology and commiting genocide.

Ummm pretty sure engaging in a new world war and getting their country bombed to pieces was not on most German's agenda. A small group of ideologues managed to sieze complete control of the state, and did their very best to prevent widespread knowledge of the Holocaust from getting out. At the same time they used the power of the state to ruthlessly supress any opposition.

rejecting Yudkowsky-Soares' arguments would require that ultrapowerful beings are either theoretically impossible (which is highly unlikely)

ohai begging the question

LOL @ promptfondlers in comments

Nice time - here's a Swedish dude who constructed a 8m parabolic dish to do EME by hand

News item in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/byggde-atta-meter-parabol-for-att-prata-via-manen

Earth-Moon-Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication (bonus illustration obviously taken from a primary school science project) Edit malus for long passage in second section second para obviously originally written by a Nazi

this made my day, thx

Thanks for digging into this.

Question for someone not versed in US nonprofit law - are there any legal consequences for incorrect statmements in these forms? Or does the IRS just look at the tax situation?

whole country is swole, good mirror of the maga mind

yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.

Did you hear about the vegetarian cannibal?

He can only eat swedes.

So I gather but SB is the only book I’ve read

More on datacenters in space

https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

N.B. got this via HN, entire site gives off "wouldn't it be cool" vibes (author "lives and breathes space" IRONIC IT'S A VACUUM

Also this is the only thermal mention

Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed

riiiiight....

Semi-related, the SF author John Varley died the other day, and I remember how both transgressive and cool it was that his characters in Steel Beach and others could change gender basically at will. (Banks ripped this off in the Culture btw). I don't think he had a special insight into the lived experience of trans people, but at least he embraced the idea as part of humanity's future, not recoil from it like later epigones.

Michael Swanwick mini-obit: https://floggingbabel.removed/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html

HN on Varley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991

Pretty sure this guy has some serious mental health issues.

Yeah, the substacker seems either naive or genuinely misinformed about Siskind's ultimate agenda, but in their defense Scott is really really good at vomiting forth torrents of beige prose that obscure it.