if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever.

Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so there’s probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.

Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because it’s harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.

maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

I wasn’t around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when it was mostly entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.

A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.

jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad

From github thread:

I can’t actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.

Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/

Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.

It helps that most of their audience seems incapable of considering that non-market driven societal change could be possible, better spend a fuckton of philanthropy money to buy a castle in case it helps indoctrinate a John Galt type to argue AI safety on our behalf, that’ll solve everything

Seems like run-of-the-mill yada-yada boosterism for the most part.

Points for managing to write an entire blog post without lamenting how the persecution of nerds is a historical level atrocity, much unlike the ongoing state-sponsored genocide by Israel which is very fine and very justifiable, I guess.

While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature,** a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies**. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that “paranoid views regarding AI” may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians’ trial, thanks to their “attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent,” and belief that “humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so.”

And so on and so forth, a good part of the article is about how the feds are afraid that once the trial gets going basically people will think Ziz is making too much sense and anti-AI-infrastructure violence escalates.

Yud, despite his near-infinite IQ, will apparently be the last one to suspect that grassroots organized violence is an incredibly obvious short-term solution to the alleged problem he’s spent most of his life beating the drum about.

And let’s not forget that ridiculous AI2027 assertion that people who are faced with almost certain annihilation should not pursue extreme uncooperative actions.

They literally jailed a guy for making light of Charlie Kirk’s bullet related mishap in social media, and a group of pro-palestine protestors winning their case after months of trials is still fresh on the news.

So you most certainly can be prosecuted.

LessWrong, an online community that started out as a place to discuss Yudkowski’s writings, who among other things is the If You Build It Everyone Dies guy.

LessWrong also directly gave us Effective Altruism and the Zizians.

Siskind’s “chat vet local election candidates according to random pundits I like and also some other broad preferences” is both grossly misrepresenting the technology’s abilities as well as normalizing habits that would look obviously irresponsible in any other context, like voting by random online quiz as you describe.

Additionally, I would think most countries have various unofficial voter to party matching online services at this point, but they don’t have nearly the penetration or the cultural clout of the all knowing chatbot (voters skew old and have access to chatbots via social media, but good luck making them take an online test), and local online services are also much more sueable if a candidate thinks they are being misrepresented.

While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.

I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.

Well now you’ve made me look at the image too long, too.

#1’s belt probably wraps twice around that waistline, I’d say photoshop/AI but there’s that 1/3 of the shirt hanging off to the right with nothing to fill it so yeah, and also Phil Davis¹ exists.

#10 is aspiring to be the jock from scooby doo and I don’t think that jacket can actually close, similarly to #1 the whole thing probably only works for very specific poses and angles.

#6 looks like he runs a leopard print handbag delivery service, #4 is horny youth pastor in his aunt’s kitchen, 7-9 look comfy but contrived, #5 really wants you to know he’s wearing a possibly expensive wife beater under that shirt and 2 & 3 are all sorts of dodgy, esp. #3 who looks like a tourist trap gift shop keeper whose face is noticeably untanned because he has to hide it a lot for undisclosed reasons.

#2 mostly has a raging case of resting netflix true crime serial killer face syndrome.

I get that the point probably was to only show the broad strokes of how it should look if you’re making an effort, but whatever.

I don’t know Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos

He is supposed to be the original instigator and public face of so-called e/acc or effective accelarationism, i.e. the rationalist (or maybe rationalist inspired idk) spin-off of people who feel whinging about alignment isn’t necessary and that it’s in fact awesome when new technology is killing people and ruining the environment because it means we’re getting to the singularity faster, and also openly rooting for fascism on main is based now.

His magic heatless AI processor startup feels like a grift to fleece investors and as far as I know has only ever produced an obviously staged video of sciency looking individuals fawning over a 3d printed wire mesh while touring what looks like a chip fab with an extremely lax contamination protocol.

I do not know if that can work because only a few percent of the company will be for sale

I think a 30% chunk will be available for non-institutional investors, which as far as these things go is supposed to be humongous and also an indication that they are very much counting on stupid money to prop their valuation.

Maybe he thinks employing a weirdo facade makes people lower their guard, taking a page from Jimmy Saville.

Isn’t the ability to manipulate people a defining trait of intelligence according to rationalists?

It’s more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you can’t tell that just means your enterprise code isn’t discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.

I’m assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, it’s going to be a big legal deal.

Microsoft releases cost calculator for GitHub Copilot for the new token usage based billing. Previously you were being charged per request, kind of like hiring a cab and paying the same whether you went to the next corner or the next continent.

Turns out Zitron may have been seriously low balling the actual cost to subsidized billing ratio.

Building infinite compute is hard, man

As if LLMs being the last step before AGI/ASI/The Metal Messiah is a foregone conclusion. As far as I can tell even the AI 2027 thing only argues that once the bots completely nail down programming (any minute now) then the foom happens and the models will magic themselves into true AI, because apparently being good at solving coding problems is a sufficient proxy for superintelligence, hence the METR infatuation.

In other Scott of Siskind news, he just posted an entirely unnecessary amount of words to aggressively push back against the adage that “all exponentials sooner or later turn into sigmoids” as if it was by itself a load bearing claim of the side arguing against the direct imminence of the machine god.

It’s just a bunch of arguing by analogy ( “helping you build intuition” ) and you-can’t-really-knows while implying AI 2027 was very science much rigorous, but it also feels kind of desperate, like why are you bothering with this overperformative setting-the-record-straight thing, have you been feeling inadequate as an AI-curious stats fondler of note lately?

He probably paid a rationalist date coach good money to tell him to do that.

the need to distribute sex to needy men

It always trips me up how this is about state sponsored arranged marriages (preferably to virgins), instead of like pushing to decriminalize sex work in the united states.