If LW is a cult, they're doing a terrible job at recruiting:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yhrrhTzTeiZ8PzQZn/where-do-young-rationalists-go
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Somewhat buried by EdZ's exposé... Nvidia trying to raise $21Bn with bonds this after Google raising money too...
Seems that even the mag 7 know the jig is nearly up and are trying to liquidate and get as much cold hard $$$ as they can now
i'll just quote it straight because i can't make it any funnier:
maia arson crimew 🏴 > @crimew.gay SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will be...
We are good on opsec
zitron got a scoop on openai: 8.8B loss in 2024, 60.3B loss in 2025, 1.17B from ms + softbank, promises more detailed analysis later https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!
tbf i expected that ed got openai's s1 at that point. anything more detailed would be nice to see. that also suggests that saltman knows that leak occurred, and maybe who leaker is
A nice person develops a digital version of the Little Free Library for banned books. Hackernews spends a hundred comments arguing over whether it would be better to share Nazi shit instead.
Anthropic: Oh no! Our new model is too powerful! It's dangerously good!
US Government: okay then you can't export it or allow foreign nationals to access it
Anthropic: Wait not like that
We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Of course this has less to do with the actual capabilities of any model and more to do with Anthropic openly telling the Trump administration "no" on exactly one occasion, but we can still roast some marshmallows over this dumpster fire, right?
that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)
please god let them block ChatGPT access like they did with Fable. it would be so fucking funny
Of course, the "AI Control" in Firefox for Android conveniently doesn't include the "make-a-jerkoff-motion-to-llm-summarize a-page" "feature" Mozilla has added.
Bwahaha I didn't believe you but it's there. Gotta find the option in about:config to kill it.
Who is that for? "Ahh I'm so angry, why are you showing me big words and multiple paragraphs phone? where are the emoji bullet points? Ahhh — oh hey it got replaced with something vaguely related and unchallenging. Thanks firefox"
A migrant from the San Francisco Bay Area returned for a software conference and was creeped out by the ads on billboards and public transit. "VIDEO CREATES SHAREHOLDER VALUE" "YOU DO NOT EXIST WITHOUT VIDEO" https://www.simplermachines.com/something-is-very-wrong-in-san-francisco/
This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.
The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don't need to list them in this forum.
Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.
First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.
Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don't keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don't produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.
Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn't be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We're doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.
@samvines @techtakes It's also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.
(If they'd led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)
It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.
the original GMO crops
The original GMO crops would be like, broccoli existing and bananas not sucking ass. Monsanto are villains but they didn't invent genetics or selection.
I also question the degree to which "the other 99% of readers" actually don't care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of "I guess this is the world now" rather than actual acceptance. And I know we've talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn't a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can't tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the "median reader" statistic is misleading because the median reader isn't particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it's the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they're not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.
"It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests"
The preprint:
it's nice to have a preprint about a phenomenon that has been weaponized years ago. it's easy to say that in retrospect, but it was easy to say that in advance too. there are also bots that might try to do something similar on lemmy
The AI hype wave is the Dancing Plague for people who can't dance.
nasb some criticism of the human damage is tasting up eve in places like ieee spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/measuring-ai-societal-impact-khan