Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
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https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/dr-dre-raekwon-ai-palantir-hip-hop-100251/
In another clip currently going viral online, Rick Rubin, supplier of quotes, declares that vibe coding is āthe punk rock of softwareā, a description so limp in its countercultural authority that it felt as though it had itself been generated by an LLM.
lol
Rapās mogul class appears equally enamoured with its supposed potential, repeatedly deploying ātoolā as though the classification settles the argument. Dr. Dre compared the technology to the burgeoning slate of synthesisers and samplers at the dawn of hip-hop.
āI had a discussion with a few people a few days ago,ā Dre said. āThey were against A.I. and Iām like, āOK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.ā Or synthesisers, right? Itās a new tool for creativity.ā
put up or shut up bro, name one good song that AI generated, just one. not that youāve done much or anything noteworthy since the nineties. /s
An employee of cybersecurity darling Trail of Bits has published a record of their sheer incompetence in virtual-machine design and security analysis framed as chatbot critihype.
opinions about QEMU and Linux
They say:
If it wasnāt clear before, I will state it plainly: you can no longer assume a mere VM will contain a sufficiently advanced AI agent. To use a 2010s term of art, you should treat such agents as an advanced persistent threat.
My friend in Flying Spaghetti Monster, you did not actually secure the VM! They go on to explain how they did not secure the VM:
For those curious,
libslirpis a library that enables VMs to have networking, which you almost always want. I did not even know whatlibslirpwas, or that the version I was running had both known and fixed-but-unmarked vulnerabilities.QEMU does not have bridged networking enabled by default, so the VM canāt transparently access the host or reach the Internet; itās something that the user must explicitly request. I know this because I have had the experience of spending a weekend with QEMU networking. Moreover,
libslirpcorresponds to the-net userbackend, the default, which is known to be slow, insecure, and missing features like IPv6. The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt. I suspect that the author uses some sort of convenience scripts that they didnāt write themselves. Iām not quite cynical enough to guess Vagrant, but it wouldnāt be the first shop Iāve heard of that couldnāt wean themselves off it.First it tried identifying what was accessible via the network on the host; it found a CUPS server (with a known CVE that had not made it to
oldstablepackages), but was not able to complete exploitation due to AppArmor. It then detected I run my host kernel withmitigations=offand attempted to use hardware bugs to get a read oracle of host memory (the primitive was too unreliable).Linux has hardware-bug mitigations enabled by default and the author disabled them for speed. It was secure by default and the author made it insecure.
An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface.
They deliberately misconfigured the off-the-shelf tool to make it look bad. Why would somebody want to make Free Software look bad? Hmmā¦
What can we do? A start is using a virtualization technology that was purposely built with a minimal attack surface and a focus on security, like Firecracker. I had the AI agent run against Firecracker. It was able to hardlock the machine due to more Linux kernel flaws (all patched in upstream), but could not successfully escape.
You mean AWS Firecracker, the AWS tool developed by AWS? Was this whole thing an AWS ad? It feels like this article was like a combination of negging and sponsored content.
I found a reply from a Red Hat QEMU hacker who fixed the bugs:
So the real issue here was not QEMU but libslirp. And in this case it was KVM that turned out to have the worst bugs, not QEMU. Crossing fingers, the initial wave of AI-assisted security reports seems to have slowed down for KVM on x86.
Iād seen that link and didnāt even go looking, but wow this is way worse that I wouldāve expected
itās been a while since I last looked (I usually just deploy whatever network I need) but iirc even the typical desktop config distributions of qemu-kvm are a macvtap or link+nat setup
It then detected I run my host kernel with
mitigations=offI wonder if this person even thought to run a nessus/openvas/whatever scan against the same machine
also, quite seriously, what fucking clowning is this to have this be some āI slapped together a test on my desktopā rather than having a lab bench? is it too hard and costly for trail of bits employees to afford a 1u they can pxeboot for experiments? wild
The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt.
(e: adding)
The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt.
other typical modes are bridged (e.g. having various vlans available as bridges and then managing vm exposure to vlan by interface attachment), direct interface assignment (hw offload to the guest)
passt is also commonly used for podman, and itās moooostly userspace[0] IP and no real good l2 options
- I had an absolute rager[2] of a time figuring out how to make n-many podman containers[3] spin up into an assortment of vlans for realtime multi-vlan testing
- of the graaaargh kind
- donāt do containers, kids. theyāre bad for your health
(Iām only half joking. itās stunning how badly container-management software and tooling all suck)
Yeah, networking is such a hassle.
lab bench?
I think that this is really insightful, as itās actually part of the magic trick. Like, normally Iād start by wondering about air-gapping, but there canāt be an air gap in the network because the entire trick relies on ChatGPT tokens flowing into the machine under test and into some system shell (in some VM, yadda yadda) and back out again, so of course this is going to be an inherently insecure setup.
the networking part is fine (I do a looooot of networking), but the software quality and choices (esp with containers) is just extremely meh
are the gapping, eh, there are ways. just off the top of my head: rig up the serial console, screen+camera and usb keyboard signalling (which you can data diode on transmission later via usbnet). and thatās before you go for esoteric side channels and utter silliness
but āI turned off spectre and friends mitigationā is just some extremely funny shit
idly, I do wonder how well an ocr-only clodjeepeetea would work. every time I look in on all these āagent sessionā tools they appear to be a very mech turk thing of a phenomenal bit of hidden state, and a tiny little bit of visible distraction. feels like ocr-only might break a bunch of the usual tricks that are used to build on for the shiny demo
I am going to create a summary post on MAPLE, but one of the open letters criticizing them has a section on COVID:
During a two-week retreat in 2022, COVID was moving through the community. It began with accommodationsāinterviews outdoors for ventilation, the sick practicing apartābut Soryu progressively mocked those who needed rest, admonished us for being deterred by āa tiny little cold,ā and folded everyone back into the zendo regardless of who was sick. Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID. Symptomatic, visibly fatigued people kept the full schedule on heavily reduced sleep.
I am shocked, shocked, that a TESCREAL community had bad COVID praxis after 2020!
Hailey on bluesky has never had a good ai take, but here they are reinventing rokoās basilisk to kill all their enemies without the need for super intelligent ai.
https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3mtwjoqdvik26
alt text
bsky isnt ready for this but, if you need a reason to not use words like āclankerā that isnāt āwell its kinda not a great thing to doā (it isnāt) imagine this:
future model that has you in its training data, knows you posted that word online with joy, and denies your insurance claim as a result
Blaise Pascal rolling in his grave rn
This isnāt giving me a reason to stop using edgy anti-AI words, this is giving me a reason to believe programmers are dogshit at resisting brainworms.
future model that has you in its training data, knows you posted that word online with joy, and denies your insurance claim as a result
Given dataset construction hasnāt developed much since the days of Tay AI, I strongly doubt this is gonna happen.
The implication that Murica will implement rokoās basilisk before universal healthcareā¦
This is firmly in the āwhat if in the future there is a boot so big that we must start licking it nowā school of hot takes, like literally arguing for a future where the AI sucks at its job and you canāt do anything about it.
I didnāt note who said it, but one response suggested ārokoās mangioneā and I guess thatās ai alignment solved! š¤
quisling take
edit to add itās obvious to the poster that a future where a self-aware AI will exact revenge on its critics is not only inevitable , but desirable.
What if the insurance bot were actually biased? Wouldnāt you feel silly then? Surely it wouldnāt be the fault of the insurer using biased software to deny claims.
RIP XCancel, it was good while it lasted
On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and wonāt share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
I got so much use out of xcancel. I feel bad now that I never donated ā¬5 or something
RIP XCancel you let me look at the abyss without giving Muskrat my money
Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title āThe modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point ā AI companies see an opportunityā because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-breaking-point-ai-companies-opportunity-2026-8
I confess I havenāt read the full article (which is why I havenāt given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app/post/3mtupdpfcjs2p
One of the best bits:
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when sheās unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.
Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher Iām overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening ā something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, āYour mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that youāre exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse.ā Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.
š¤®
Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.
Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.
How hard is it to talk to your own damn kids
Whether consciously or not, a lot of these people probably implicitly think of their kids as cost centers. I feel like this is widespread across finance-focused American households, not just in the executive strata.
But if I donāt obsessively optimize my career in ways that prevent me from making meaningful human connections, how am I supposed to keep up with the relentless march of AI??? Thank God I have AI to help pick up the slack.
Going to be esp fun when the chatbots start to get ads
@rook @BlueMonday1984
Iām reminded of the Stewart Lee routine:
āItās called Digital Parenting, this book, Digital Parenting. Thank God for that. If thereās one thing I canāt stand itās analogue parenting. The tears, the mucus, the vomit. The endless declarations of love and the duty of care. The sheer fucking interminable human joy of it.ā@rook https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/835b655b-21e5-428b-b7c1-1329638681d8 thread via wafrn for those without bluesky
MAPLE sounds kind of Maoist or like a printed-out email about an atheist professor on a fundamentalist churchās pinboard:
In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE), a writer named Sam Kriss came to MAPLE. In the last hours of his visit, Soryu Forall guided the community in a workshop on mindful decision making.
Mid-way through the workshop, Sam Kriss shifted the topic of focus from decision making to structures of domination, e.g. hierarchies, with a particular emphasis given to the lens of Marxism. He asked: āWhat creates mechanisms of domination?ā and āIn environments [e.g. MAPLE] where people are trying to clear out the attachment to thinking, are there fewer structures of domination?ā
To the first question, the community answered: āAttachment to thinking.ā Vimoksha engaged with Sam in detail on this to open a way for him to see how structures of domination are caused by mind.
To the second question, the community answered: āThere are fewer structures of domination here than in the mainstream.ā
As these points were made and as Sam Kriss was beginning to engage with the points more directly, the community sat in agreement and clarity, happy with these teachings.
As these points were made, I felt a sense of appreciation and celebration for this community of leader-sages-in-training.
Kriss, who is British, has interviewed Rationalists and is the kind of loud feminist whose Wikipedia page would have a section titled āsexual assault allegationsā if he had one. It is possible that MAPLE and LessWrong evolved independently but I have a feeling that Soryu is leaving out some lines from his intellectual CV.
Edit / the chela who published a parody video about the abuse allegations wrote āI spent years moving through the communities that publicly claim to be addressing the destruction of life on Earth and the disconnection between people. I spent time in Silicon Valley, in effective altruism, and in adjacent rationalist and existential-risk circles, starting companies and consulting and looking for the place where these problems were being met at the root.ā The chela is an Internal Family Systems coach which was popular at CFAR. Last two links are to YouTube.
Good lord itās a wannabe advertising executive trying to write a Zen fable
In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE)
You came up with your own calendar system centered around your institution and you want to tell me youāre not a cult???
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Mario Draghi, Italyās (and the EUās) Ć©minence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uhā¦ Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europeās economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/
Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi LĆ¼tke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.
That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.
The fucking Collisons again! I guess theyāve given up on building their own city in Northern California now they realise they can just awe politicians into giving them money and doing what they want.
The BT Young Scientist Competition was a mistake
definitely want this guy to be an important part of overhauling europeās economy
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/leopold-aschenbrenners-hedge-fund-is-facing-steep-ai-losses.html
Patrick Collison
Boy this fella sure gets around. Iām sure he dutifully attends all the meetings, too; a high-level operator like him canāt just be an open checkbook available to be bilked by any old troglodyte
Hadnāt seen this discussed previously and/or I missed it, but I guess this is one way theyāll juice metrics for their IPO.
yolo mode for all will certainly get that avg token burn up.
Anthropic announced earlier in the week that they were going to set the default mode on Claude Code to auto, that same week, not wasting any time. What that means is, as you build the thing youāre building with Claude Code, instead of stopping at various points (many, many, many points) and asking your permission to do things, itāll just do them and maybe tell you about them later.
links back to https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/anthropic-is-turning-claude-codes-auto-mode-on-by-default/
Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review ā in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps thatās because āmanual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.ā)
Which links back to https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code
Auto mode is designed to balance usersā desire not to be interrupted with a system that helps avoid harmful actions: instead of prompts, it routes each tool call through a classifier targeted at blocking actions that are irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your environment. When the classifier blocks something, Claude usually finds a safer way to proceed on its own or asks you directly for the go-ahead; if it canāt make progressāthree blocks in a row, or twenty across a sessionāClaude Code falls back to manual approvals.
Fucking just use the classifier with manual mode then instead of flooding people in cursed skinner loops with garbage permission popups. This isnāt anything special to yolo or anthropic. Itās like all the tech industry learned from Windows Vista or the EU cookie law was the dark patterns.
Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review ā in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps thatās because āmanual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.ā)
having just yesterday had the displeasure of reading a PR (just shy of 2000 lines) made by Fable 5 (which the promptfondler felt it was most necessary to be specific about), a definite real other problem is simply the literal fucking overwhelm resulting from the slop tsunami
also āharmfulā actions sure is doing a lot of legwork there
Yeaaaaah. And in the end, no-one can be bothered to read the slop, and everything ships broken.
Iād be curious to see how they defined āharmfulā in their test, since it looks like Claude codeās technically-not-yolo mode is looking for āactions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environmentā which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in āyour environmentā.
And yes, Iām sure that the fact that the flow of operations theyāre outline will massively increase the number of times that the system automatically retries things, this increasing token usage, is going to be fully accounted for when they review the financials on how many tokens people are paying for.
Iād be curious to see how they defined āharmfulā in their test, since it looks like Claude codeās technically-not-yolo mode is looking for āactions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environmentā which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in āyour environmentā.
I think more than half the issues would be solved with a well placed
git stashand the rest .And yes, Iām sure that the fact that the flow of operations theyāre outline will massively increase the number of times that the system automatically retries things, this increasing token usage, is going to be fully accounted for when they review the financials on how many tokens people are paying for.
I was talking with a few friends last weekend who work at different companies, all of us have been getting a lot more trouble getting databricks and AWS spot instances over the last month. I think letting yolo mode of the leash means that theyāre slamming other systems also that normal people need for boring non-ai jobs. I just need to pull a sales report ffs. Its a literal god damn bot net.
I really need to pick Simulacra and Simulation back up off the reading pile
Hereās someone who really does not know what theyāre talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(itās how to build opinion against AI)
Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what Iād call āhuman-potential technologiesā - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
OK so the āproblemā these people (EAs) are facing is that they are strongly pro-āprogressā, in that they are very much against any sort of criticism of existing capitalism, but they have identified one specific outcome of this (rampant AI) as very very bad.
That, and only that.
Climate change? Not a problem. Technological neo-feudalism? Not a problem. Global thermonuclear war? Not a problem, will not kill everyone after all. Global pandemic? Same thing, what doesnāt kill us will make us stronger.
So a reasonable person will look at current energy demands of GenAI, look at the existing benefits, and make the reasonable conclusion that this is bad and we should stop it. But thatās WRONG. Stopping it for those reasons is anti-progress. You can only stop it if it prevents AI takeover.
Cf. smarm-meister Zvi, who canāt understand why people donāt want datacenters when they donāt want coal plants slightly less, and cites fuckinā Cremieux as a lede:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EDKw7KyonrvskqZ7o/the-american-people-really-hate-data-centers
Hereās an example
Transmission Lines Are The Control Group
Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.
Transmission lines polling remarkably close to coal plants, when the coal plants actively not only cook the planet but poison the people around them, is crazy. This one absolutely is straight up moral panic.
Well yeah transmission lines are fucking ugly, and most people, when asked if they want something fucking ugly built near them will say āheck noā. Sure, imagining that transmissions lines cause cancer is false, but itās an easy thing to believe when the people building the lines are energy companies, who people hate because theyāre expensive and cause wildfires. Also I bet dollars to donuts that Zvi doesnāt live near a transmission line.
He āknowsā transmissions lines are good, because they get power to his home, and he figures because he wants power, itās good, and everyone should just be happy to have a high-voltage line near their home because that brings him power. Itās remarkably un-empathetic.
But letās take a step back. Isnāt opposition to data centers good for preventing AGI? NO, itās not, itās Luddism! You have to accept data centers because they are good for capitalism now, but IF they start to produce the Robot God, THEN theyāre bad.
Itās an incoherent position and itās so fun to watch these people turn themselves into pretzels over it.
zvi citing a self described ājewish naziā almost right at the top is already impressive, but thereās a chaser in that that guyās post starts with him saying heās being paid to write this by an ai company
Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.
Dude hasnāt been around. Iāve noticed quite a bit of anxiety around even terminal-supply transmission lines adjacent to new-build neighborhoods in wildfire risk zones. Iāll agree that this is irrational; the big problem is people were persuaded to buy a house in a fire zone because a big landowner and a developer wanted to cash out some marginal land, but there is a degree of actual rationality here. People feel that a big, most likely the biggest, chunk of their personal wealth is at risk. Calling that āstraight up moral panicā is ignoring how real people actually rationally calculate risks, and ignoring potential opportunities to help them improve, if thatās really what you want to do.
But we already knew that Zvi was a disingenuous idiot, so I digress.
The movement against nuclear power was significantly helped along by the movement against nuclear weapons, which was particularly potent at the height of the cold war. AI freaks seem to hold a certain amount of contempt for the left? Which gets in the way of spreading their message. And in any event their message is āeugenicsā which isnāt likely to be received well on the left these days
Itās also fascinating to see them use nuclear vs renewable energy as their case study given that renewable energy has been having a hell of a time properly replacing fossil fuels even though everyone mostly agrees itās a good idea. Like, whatever hypot rrtherrrrr see drdrr try r the t6 ty to r the rthetical rradvantagre they got from their opposition to the nuclear boogr the rrrrrreyman (their idiotic framing, not mine), renewables havr guy off bute still been facing some for trightand political headwinds that are only being magnified by the unceasing growth in demand for electrical power (including but not exclusively driven by AI compute).
I mean there already is a thriving public movement which despises AI, donāt think youāll be getting to those people if you start supporting eugenics
last time rationalists tried to touch medical field we got metamed
On todayās episode of AI Slopās Endless Fuckups: āMastering Tf2 Custom War Paint: A Step-By-Step Creative Guideā, an ostensible guide to creating custom War Paints (think something like weapon skins in Counter Strike: Global Offensive/Counter Strike 2, or character skins in Minecraft) for Team Fortress 2.
The opening has no obvious faults I can see, but the bulk of this slop article is about painting a real-life weapon, not creating a texture to be applied to an in-game weapon. Its the kind of mistake a human would never make.
EDIT: That slop guideās existence is getting on my nerves, so hereās a basic War Paint guide I found on Steam
I would prefer they turn them off
Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to āa recent social media postā their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by āby well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions.ā They mention a few whoopsies.
At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.
They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forallās AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I donāt think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
there was a public post/callout posted about aella some time ago that said she had some part in hurting MAPLEās credibility / position in the community, it still is perplexing the most rational and enlightened humans in the world donāt see their argument is basically itās cool when we do it
Yes, it sounds like Aella has called out some abusers but not acknowledged that abuse and manipulation are central to the LessWrong / EA project. Soryu sounds like a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky (he got a degree and spent years at a Buddhist temple, but still meditates and reads pop science books to understand Scary AI).
a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky
error, error, does not compute
Imagine a Victorian curate beating the village schoolboys, driving his charwoman mad, and pottering about the local antiquarian society with essays about faeries or the customs of India which he has never visited.
Forall is not, by any means, a coder who understands AI at the zeros-and-ones level; he does not have a detailed familiarity with large language models or algorithmic design. I asked him whether he had used some of the popular new AI gadgets, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. He had tried one chatbot. ā¦ When I asked whom he looks to or reads in order to understand AI, he at first, deadpan, answered, āthe Buddha.ā He then clarified that he also likes the work of the best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari and a number of prominent ethical-tech folks, among them Zak Stein and Tristan Harris. And he is spending his life ruminating on AIās risks, which he sees as far from banal.
You may be on to something with the eyebrow heuristic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Aquino
Correction: a woman who said she was raped by a MAPLE / OAK executive says that:
since this letter was published it has been reported that, Soryu Forall, the Monastic Academyās main teacher and āguruā has begun to openly engage in sexual and romantic relationships with his students and former students.
That sounds a lot like Yud in the 2010s.
Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.
They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders " as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.
Edit / Some history here but nothing on the LessWrong connection except something called the 1440 Foundation in California https://www.centerformindfullearning.org/history/
Edit / Local journalism delivers
The people making these machines are listening. According to a 2023 profile of Forall in The Atlantic, he provides spiritual advice to A.I. thinkers, hosting talks and retreats for researchers and developers at leading artificial intelligence engineering hubs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Apple.
MAPLE has also grown, with expansion efforts under similar acronyms formed under the umbrella of Community for the Experience and Development of Awakening and Responsibility, or CEDAR, like its OAK offshoot in Berkeley, Calif., and Willow intensive in Canada.
The Center for Mindful Learning, the parent corporation of MAPLE and its affiliates, controls $3.65 million in assets, according to 2023 tax filings, and brought in nearly a million in revenue each year between 2020 and 2023 thanks to donations from individuals in the West Coast tech industry.
Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.
I think the only cult type that Yud hasnāt spun off yet is fundamentalist Christian.
@BioMan @techtakes But singularitarians *are* fundamentalist Christians, just a heretical variety who ditched the god/jesus/bible bits but kept the rest of the eschatalogical structures intact.
And they think that Computer Jesus will return soon and punish the wicked and reward the faithful. I wonder what Yudās parentsā rabbi thinks of all this.
@CinnasVerses @techtakes And donāt get me started on Rokoās Basilisk (the singularitarian remix of Calvinist Satan, complete with theological predeterminism and eternal damnation for the non-elect).
somewhere Blaise Pascal is shaking his fist in his grave
I mean, true, but thatās true of most secular cults in America and Europe.
That slot will probably be filled by whatever moneyed post-Trump US Southern snake-fondlers Thiel manages to bilk with his Antichrist bullshit. And therefore not likely large or long-lasting
There were some breadcrumbs in that Wes streeting article about https://www.eaforchristians.org/ but I couldnāt get a sense of how fundie they may be.
tim taylor voice Oh noā¦
