TechTakes

If anyone ever wondered why I am constantly angry about AI its shit like this...

I was looking at options for securing a few services hosted behind a caddy reverse proxy and found a project with the very serious and official sounding name 'caddy-security'. To get started I tried to find some proper documentation for it and immediately found this announcement. In future, instead of a proper documentation you will get a bunch of files in the repos .codex/skills directory. These, according to the developer, help 'both humans and AI agents work with the codebase'. I don't know how this is supposed to help me because the files aren't linked to each other and are anything but proper documentation, but I guess they want me to point a slop agent at them and have it generate some security configuration for me.

William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with "the Leverage folks" and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that "we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did" which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.

The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on "Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff" and "an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism" if you need to rub anyone's nose in it.

Sneerable names include Toby Ord ("negative utilitarianism is bad! Oops, now there is a line of negative utilitarians in dress shirts outside my door") and Peter Singer ("When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed").

Edit: Nick Bostrom is the academic EA who said "I hate Ni****s", Toby Ord is the academic EA who gets followed around by negative utilitarians who want to debate him

Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.

Large amounts of the LW commentariat cannot get their heads around how students JUST. DON'T. GET. AI.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai

They are extremely surprised by:

Perspective #1: There has not been rapid AI progress. My students do not have any intuitive sense that there has been rapid AI progress in recent years or really have much of a framework for thinking about that issue... With the exception of image/video generation, GPT-4 could do most of what they were looking for from a chatbot. Three years is a long time in their world, and their sense is that chatbots have been a mature technology over roughly that amount of time. They are an imperfect technology — students are well-aware of hallucinations — have been one, and will continue to be one... Historical context I gave them made this worse. The basic sentiment here was “AI was superhuman at chess a decade before we were born, and this is all they’ve done with it since?”...

Perspective #2: Impressive progress or not, AI is going to wreck their lives, the economy, and the social contract.... Corporate leaders are always looking to get rid of workers, even if it is irrational to do so. Various motivations were posited here (hatred of the working class, FOMO, a preference for technology, machines can’t go on strike, etc.) but many of them think that a CEO would ultimately choose to pay twice as much to get AI to do a task half as well... AI will do substandard work that makes products and experiences worse but is capable of just barely scraping past the bar of minimal functionality (many of them independently brought up constantly malfunctioning self check out machines). This will be rapidly rolled out, enshittifying most things.

Perspective #4: Catastrophic/existential risk arguments are sci-fi distractors from the urgent social/economic/political problems associated with AI. My students have a fairly strongly held view that “rogue” AI does not represent a real threat... They also mostly think that, if one does believe that AI is existentially risky, then the strategic interaction is not prisoner’s dilemma or even chicken but rather just a game theoretically boring setup where you die if you defect. Mash these together, and you end up with the view that expressed concerns about existential risk in the AI industry can’t be sincere... Students (both independently in written work and then later in group discussion) hypothesized that this might be a deliberate rhetorical choice to distract from present or immediately foreseeable harms from AI by directing attention towards a sexier but entirely hypothetical scenario.... they see discussion of “rogue” AI as an attempt by the companies to divert blame (and perhaps legal liability) away from themselves as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on “rogue cars.”

Perspective #7: The Hugging Face Incident (summer students only) I described the Hugging Face incident to students in my summer course. None of them had heard of it beforehand. Their basic reaction can best be summarized as “OpenAI told a model to do some hacking and then it did some hacking. And?” None of them understood this as representing any kind of meaningful misalignment, nor anything particularly interesting.

Perspective #8: This is definitely a bubble and it’s about to pop. No one had heard about Hugging Face, but a third or so of the summer students had heard about the Situational Awareness meltdown and several brought up Michael Burry. There was near universal consensus that we are in a bubble, it’s about to pop, and everyone will look very silly.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/101070-study-finds-63-of-religion-books-on-amazon-likely-ai-written.html h/t naked capitalism

Over the first six months of 2026, the company scanned the three elements of books available on Amazon: summaries, author bios, and in-book samples, with the samples serving as the study’s primary metric. Any text with a score of 50 or above was classified “Likely AI.” (The study’s authors note that detection indicates a book was likely written with AI, but doesn’t prove authorship.)

Originality.ai found that AI is most prolific among the subgenres of witchcraft (in which 78% were “Likely AI”), Hinduism (76%) and Taoism (74%), and least used in the subgenres of Satanism (22%), atheism (40%) and Mormonism (42%). The authors note that the sample sizes for the last three categories are smaller than the first three; they also offered up a theory about why Eastern religion books are likely AI-generated: “Our hypothesis is that non-native English speakers are likely using AI to enter the English-speaking market.”

"Satanists least tainted by AI, says AI detection AI". it WOULD say that. /s

on an unrelated note on the same topic, I read the ebook by Jesus Freak Computer Geek blogger that argues that LLMs are actually channeling nephilim / demons (hence the six fingers in dalle) and that they have used the Mandela effect to corrupt the KJV and also herald the antichrist. Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.

over on the corporate hell site, Timnit has found a link

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-guys-i-knew-that-we-were-going-to-connect-share-7496569471848054784-yJjK/

Well guys, I KNEW that we were going to connect the network hounding Arday to the TESCREAL bozos somehow. I could smell it.

This is a "paper" by the professor of "ethics" who hired the vile Cofnas at Ghent University. This is the kind of "research" they do.

✴️ Reminder the L in TESCREAL stands for "longtermism". Read more at https://lnkd.in/ge2VFMe4. These are the eugenicists who pushed generative AI down your throats, including Ben Goertzel who told Epstein that when he creates a super brain, there won't be the kind of women who accused Epstein of rape.

✴️ "Dysgenic pressures" is the opposite "eugenic pressures." In this so-called paper, they're talking about undesirables like Black people reproducing too much.

Presented without comment ::: spoiler spoiler

A street ad for a breakfast burrito with an AI-generated image of a disgusting burrito that is full of maggots

OT: I just turned 26. I'm taking a trip to a local steakhouse to celebrate.

UC Berkeley Law:

This policy seeks to ensure that our courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default. It provides students with the opportunity to develop the skills they need to conceptualize, outline, draft, revise, and edit their work by forbidding the use of AI for these purposes in connection with work submitted for credit. It also forbids using AI to translate work for credit, thus providing students with the opportunity to develop and exercise their own fluency with legal English. [...] The use of AI is prohibited for aid in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit. AI use is prohibited for any use for any purpose in any exam situation. Students may not upload course materials—including assignments, readings, slides, class recordings, or other class content—into generative AI systems.

Annie Altman, Sam Altman's sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:

If any harm ever comes to me “mysteriously” - you know who it was.

I love my life.

https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529

She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".

Scott Alexander has told many stories about why he is pseudonymous. In 2013, when he was applying for medical residency, he told a simple story which begins with an interviewer saying he would have to take his LiveJournal down if he were accepted:

I originally deliberately linked this blog and some of my other writings to my real name in order to bury Google evidence of certain stuff I did online when I was a dumb teenager, but that mission is pretty thorougly (sic) accomplished and now I agree with my interviewer that even if I don't get hired (cue serious of elaborate ritual hand gestures to ward off unthinkable misfortune) it is to my benefit to switch back to my normal totally un-Google-able pseudonym of Scott Alexander (well, actually just my first and middle name).

FYI, this is why its a red flag that someone has public profiles on dozens of sites. Its a standard technique to bury negative posts in Google results, PR firms will write the profiles and get you a few press releases and talks to help. I hope this is the last thing I have to say about this particular creep.