Hmm, the way I’ve chosen to interpret this is to propose the analogy of a person eating corn as a model of LLMs. You can eat a huge variety of foods and your poop looks more or less the same. Sometimes, you eat something like corn, and the result is you can spot kernels of things resembling real food (i.e. corn kernels) in the poop. However, if you were to inspect said kernels, you would quickly realise they were full of shit.
Here's the full text of the article, which, unfortunately, xcancel doesn't seem to support.
Full text in spoiler
I know a bunch of people who were involved or adjacent, including someone who accidentally got some footage. The summary below is based on talking to these people, looking at court documents, reading blog posts, etc. (I was also at the protested CFAR reunion and knew Daniel)
More info at the bottom (especially for journalists who would like interviews)
Pre-2019 Curtis Lind allows people to live in trailers and containers on his Vallejo, CA property, initially offering affordable housing to artists, woodworkers, and electricians. Over time, some tenants stop paying rent and are later referred to as "The Cult" by neighbors. The cult consists of Ziz (Jack LaSota), Emma Borhanian, Somni (Alexander Leatham), and Gwen Danielson. Separately, at some point Ziz attends a workshop by CFAR, which is a nonprofit focusing on behavioral psychology and AI.
2019 November 2019: CFAR bans Ziz and Gwen from their alumni reunion, partly due to fears of violence. November 2019: Ziz, Emma, Somni and Gwen protest at the reunion with accusations of bad decision theory (it's complicated) and transphobia. (All four of them are trans). The protestors get arrested for blocking entrances (while there are children on the grounds) and wearing Guy Fawkes masks. They're released on bail.
2021 August 2021: Ziz advocates for "airlocking" (a sci-fi term for killing) various people in blog comments and claims many people seek "suicide by Ziz." Ziz runs a blog which appears to be the primary attractor for this community. They claim that people have two hemispheres, and are either non-good, single-good, or double-good (very rare, which Ziz herself is). Ziz advocates for a ruthlessly enforced altruism towards all living creatures, and to follow the principle that it’s never valid to surrender. She promotes the punishment of “non-good” people, particularly those who are not vegans. 2022 February 2022: Jamie Zajko, a close friend of Ziz, claims that Ziz threatens to kill Jamie, if Jamie does not kill Jamie’s girlfriend and provide proof of it. April 2022: Gwen Danielson, one of the protestors, stops appearing for court hearings, and their lawyer suggests they have died. July 2022: A different friend of this group commits suicide and cites ideas from Ziz’s blog in their suicide note. Ziz appears to suggest their ideas caused the suicide. August 2022: Ziz fakes her own death in a boating accident and stops showing up to court hearings. The Coast Guard conducts a search for her, but finds no body. An obituary is released. November 2022: Emma Borhanian is killed by Curtis Lind during a violent altercation at his Vallejo property. Somni stabs Lind with a sword, and Lind shoots both Somni and Emma. Lind is stabbed dozens of times and loses an eye. Lind’s account is that they had been threatening him for some time, and one day requested he come fix a leak. They hit him from behind, and when he woke up they were attempting to cut off his head (he has scarring consistent with this claim). He then shot Emma and Somni in self defense. His friend claims upon entering the trailer afterwards he found surgical equipment and chemicals he believes were intended to dissolve Lind’s body. Somni and Suri Dao are arrested. Ziz and Gwen are seen at the scene, alive. It seems likely Gwen had faked their own death earlier to escape court appearances, much as Ziz had. November 2022: Somni attempts to escape from jail (twice).
2023 January 2, 2023: Richard and Rita Zajko are found dead from homicide in their Pennsylvania home from gunshot wounds. Their daughter Jamie Zajko was associated with Ziz, and we suspect the homicide was an attempt to gain money (several million dollars) from inheritance. Police also suspect Ziz is involved in the murder. Police also suspect Daniel Blank, an associate of Ziz, is involved in the murder. Blank has not been seen since and we suspect he’s dead. January 13, 2023: Ziz is arrested in Pennsylvania for "obstructing administration of law" and "disorderly conduct." Ziz eventually makes bail (in June) and stops showing up to court. We suspect that the arrest was indirectly related the murders, and that the police didn't have enough evidence to make a full charge.
2025 January 17, 2025: Curtis Lind (who was set to serve as the primary witness in his assault case) is stabbed to death outside his Vallejo property. A man named Maximilian Snyder is later arrested for this murder. The previous year, he applied for a marriage license with a woman named Teresa Younblut, who was in contact with Ziz. January 20, 2025: Teresa Youngblut and a man named Felix Baukholt are stopped while driving by U.S. Border Patrol in Vermont. They end up in a shootout, and Baukholt and a border patrol agent dies. Police find tactical gear, firearms, and burner laptops in the car. According to the police, an unnamed person who purchased the firearms used in this shooting is also a suspect in the Pennsylvania Zajko murders. We think this is likely to be Jamie Zajko, given that the shooting is in the same town that Jamie Zajko has a registered address (Coventry, Vermont).
That's it so far. We still don't know the whereabouts of the people in this story who aren't either dead or in custody, and we sort of expect them to continue doing murders.
-
If you're a journalist and want to get in contact with people around the community/rationalist scene who knows the people involved, you can fill out this form and your contact info will be shared around our networks
-
My friend, trying to interview Lind about something else, ended up getting a bunch of footage of him talking about the attack. If you're a journalist or documentarian interested in this footage, please reach out to him here
-
The above timeline is collected from sources the community has accumulated here. It also has some high-confidence guesses made by people familiar with those involved. Please doublecheck all claims yourself.
Worrying about whether or not an LLM has censorship issues is like worrying about the taste of poop.
What? You don’t have a spare $6,000 to run nonsense generators at home?
Really sorry about this but this sounds like the premise to a shitty boomer joke:
“If I wanted to spend another 6000 for a home nonsense generator, I’d get married again!”
etc.
Screenshot of an insta post of a screenshot of a tweet 
Tweet:
I can’t believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI
Ok you brought aella up so now I can post this:
Heard this song for the first time the other day and it reminded me of aella.
side note: what’s a good way to post links to music that isn’t youtube?
Working on this take:
Aside from stitching together a bigger and bigger trenchcoat, has open AI done anything else? Just goes to show how vacuous LLMs are if this is what it takes to catch up/outpace them.
Isn’t this one of the things that LW was spooked by? Giving the reins to an AI? Won’t someone think of the wrongers???
You'd think the AI safety chuds would have more reservations about using GPT, which they believe has sapience, to learn things. They have the concept of an AI being a good convincer, which, hey, idiots, how have none of you thought the great convincing has started? Also, how have none of you realised that maybe you should be a little harder to convince in general???
ah, am conflating the cold war and the space race. Though, why the nations wanted to develop ICBMs is entirely relevant.
Snark answer: for the US to avoid collapse, the democrats will have to do literally anything, so yeah collapse is inevitable.
Optimistic answer: a third, actually leftist, anti-liberal party suddenly gains popularity and power and reforms the US entirely.
Realistic answer: trump and the republicans will fully construct a fascist chokehold over the US probably by the end of this year at the earliest. Anyone who has any hope in non-violent action is deluding themselves.
I just want it all to stop.
Hmm, any sort of vision for generating public support for development of a technology has to have either ideological backing or a profit incentive. I don’t say this to mean that the future must be profitable, rather, I say this to mean that you don’t get the space race if western powers aren’t afraid of communism appearing as a viable alternative to capitalism, on both ideological and commercial fronts.
Unfortunately, a vision of that kind is necessarily technofascist. Rather than look for a tech-forward vision of the future, we need deprogram ourselves and unlearn the unspoken narratives that prop up capitalism and liberal democracy as the only viable forms of society. We need to dismantle the systems and structures that require the complex political buy-in for projects that are clearly good for society at large.
Uh, I guess I’ve kind of gone completely orthogonal to your point of discussion. I’m kind of saying the collapse of the US is inevitable.
Always down for the european alternative if you know what I mean.
Trump revoked the order as part of revoking a long list of Biden executive orders. The reason? “To effectuate the revocations described in section 2 of this order, the heads of each agency shall take immediate steps to end Federal implementation of unlawful and radical DEI ideology.” Uh, okay.
We are going to see exactly far they can take this “radical DEI ideology” boogeyman. Maybe they’ll go to nuclear war over it.
IDK how helpful this is, but Apple intelligence appears to not get downloaded if you set your ipad language and your siri language to be different. I have it set to english (australia) and english (united states). Guess I’ll have to live without “gaol” support, but that just shows how much I’m willing to sacrifice.
Grimes has gotta stop drinking the brain-smoothing juice.
Exactly, that was most of why I decided to make this post. This is ultimately a distraction, intentional or not. They all say and do the vilest shit, and yes, it sucks, and yes, it does normalise outward actions of hate, amongst other terrible real-world effects, but that all pales in comparison to the power they hold and the decisions they can make to harm people.
Infighting-wise, that was a false hope, and hope is a mistake. If Trump were to fight Musk over something, it would be between something that benefits Trump and something that benefits Musk. Neither is likely to be good. Maybe we will get a bit of delay out of it, but that'd be about it.
The insight is appreciated nonetheless. I would love to live in a world where America is not a Nazi bar and we had the luxury of finding humor in pinpointing exactly which neonazi playgroup musk is trying to join.
No link given because it's all over the news. If you ask for proof you're going to have to eat my ass.
A lot of people are going to say it wasn't intended as a Nazi salute, and to that, I say: it doesn't matter. Was it a dog whistle? A variation of a Nazi salute from a South African neo-nazi party? Or just the vanilla salute? Such pontification is a waste of time. Fokker is a Nazi; you didn't need to see him salute. To all the regulars here, Musk being a Nazi is just an axiom of his whole deal. I mean, it's not called technofascism for nothing.
> Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.
“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”
Abstracted abstract: >Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.
I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.
‘Hawk Tuah Girl’ Haliey Welch launched her own cryptocurrency, only for it to plummet by 90 percent just hours later
Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.
https://archive.is/XwbY0
This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.
I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.
John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.
Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:
333
Judge rules that the husband should continue to mine ETH until his rig burns down his house.
556
Judge rules that the guy shouldn’t sell his soul, for symbolic reasons.
Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.
Playing the state’s energy market has become more profitable than mining bitcoin
> On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.
Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9
Up to 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by Friday's IT outage after Crowdstrike's antivirus update went awry.
Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.
I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.
VoughtCoin is a cryptocurrency created by Vought International. On December 15, 2022, Vought International announced that VoughtCoin can be used to purchase digital collectible cards of Homelander. Each authentic and non-fungible card be purchased for 777 VoughtCoin. The use of cryptocurrency to pur...
TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.
It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.
Whisker Squadron: Survivor "feels like a whole new game"
Uncritically sharing this article with naive hope. Is this just PR for a game? Probably. Indies deserve as much free press as possible though.
Peter and Michael discuss Michael Lewis’s bestselling book about the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, a young prodigy whose only flaw was that he dreamed too big.Where to find us: Peter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance...
As is tradition I am sharing this link without having listened yet.
In a contest sponsored by Fanvue, models and influencers crafted from artificial intelligence can now jockey for the title "Miss AI."
2 Better 2 AngelsSupport us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPodWhere to find us: Peter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Jeffrey Epstein’s Science of SleazePinker’s response to Epstein allegationsHow...
Followup to part 1, which now has a transcript!
As is tradition, I am posting this link without having listened to it. (too many podcasts)
Former CEO of shared office space rental company has reportedly been in talks with investors
Jalon Hall was featured on Google’s corporate social media accounts “for making #LifeAtGoogle more inclusive!” She says the company discriminated against her on the basis of her disability and race.
