I think this is one of the clearest indications in a long time that he doesn’t actually take his own bullshit seriously. Why does he imagine that he would be exempt from a new Holocaust? He is just one among many scheming viziers/wannabe Rasputins, he’s made it clear over the years that’s the kind of position he’s most comfortable with. He’s as vulnerable as anybody in the sort of power struggle that would accompany mass pogroms in the US; perhaps moreso than many.

Stable Technology Initiative! Uhhh wait that’s not right…

Seriously though, something emphasizing stability would probably be quite effective, if overemphasizing the bad guys’ shitty software products in contrast to their destructive social attitudes. Stable Technology Society, Society for Stable Technology, Stable and Equitable Technology Society…

Software quality is already generally pretty terrible; heavyweight, buggy software is crammed into more places than it really needs to be; and people are going to have even worse experiences with shoddy technology in the years ahead. Emphasizing stable technology that just works and continues to do its job for years, or even a human lifetime, is pretty hard for the “move-fast-and-break-things” crowd to assail, especially as the bill for living in their world continues to come due.

Honestly, I say we just mug what’s left of the Situationist International and take their shit over

I forgot he was in Austin. Has he been on Rogan? Great(ly stupid) things could happen.

We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).

rational investors enabling marginal utility… thasss capitalism in action baybeeeee

checkin’ into my motel room in Santa Clara, nearly falling flat on my face as I walk in the door. because instead of a Gideon Bible in the nightstand, this place has a printed copy of HPMoR as a doorstop

Yeah, as soon as I saw him mention “schizophrenia” and talk down to autistic people, I immediately wondered if this was perhaps a moron who had skimmed the wiki articles on Deleuze and Guattari and was intentionally misapplying schizoanalysis as a cheap troll

which fanfic prompt is worse:

a) Yud has to do the Dragonball Z fusion dance with Jesus in order to defeat the basilisk

b) Yud isekai’s as Jesus

part of the infuriation with Aella’s bullshit is that not all the women, or even many of the women, who feel compelled to participate are active sex workers. but I guess wading too far into details about consent and power structures might preclude Scott’s 90-second guest appearance at Aella’s next gangbang, soooooo

He’s hammering refresh on the prompt button until it spits out a catgirl based on that furless Sphynx breed

You failed to participate in the design and manufacturing of the perfect remote, so now your TV is permanently locked to Duck Dynasty reruns

Oh my god, he’s doing the catgirl gooner fantasy from SCP-8008: Don’t Warp Reality Into Your Catgirl Gooner Fantasy

uncovered downside risk

This really is a cute bit of euphemism that deserves a bit more attention. Surely, it’s not problematic to apply finance jargon to human relationships! Let me just pop open Robinhood and cover my downside risk by buying a few put contracts on sexual assault.

Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it

OK, Ms. Gopalakrishnan, here’s an alternative perspective: EA is the application of affluent Anglo-American technocrats’ consumerism to charitable giving and virtue signaling. The “rational” aspect of EA is applying the same sort of stat-sheet logic to charity that the moneyed EAs use to shop for sports cars. SImilarly, the sexual attitudes we’re disputing here are extensions of that same consumerism! They are treating womens’ bodies and lives as consumer goods to be exploited and discarded. EA does not empower the less fortunate it claims to help, EA men will not ever empower or hold safe the women they objectify. These attitudes are one and the same.

Why on EARTH did they move the FUCKING BACK BUTTON and replace it in its prior position with some FUCKING BULLSHIT USELESS sidebar button

If I give up and become a supervillain, my primary hand-to-hand combat weapon will be a copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines laser-etched onto stainless steel plates and somehow bound in a physicalized representation of the tattered remains of these peoples’ abandoned dignity

This is an alignment router. It may look like one of those corny Asus gamer routers, but I’ve flashed it with a special fork of OpenWRT that performs deep-packet inspection on all AI traffic that passes through it. It can detect inference processes and chains-of-thought that may be leading to misaligned superintelligence explosion, and it can shut down all AI communication if necessary. Now, I don’t just want to sell you this one, I want to get these in EVERYBODY’s hands! And you can help me, AND you can get paid to do it! I just need you to find at least 5 more people who believe in AI safety like we do…

We assume this isn’t happening already. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of one of those meal-replacement startups adopting multi-level marketing.

Clint Eastwood famously demonstrated optimal orangutan/human alignment in the hit 1978 film “Every Which Way But Loose.” Right turn, Clyde!

there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural

This is a big reason why I felt so much anger towards the piece. Gyges is basically still pitching his complaints at people who organize their community around Twitter; by leaning so heavily on dredging up old tweets, kowtowing to the in-group consensus that Yudkowsky is a genius with a pivotally unique perspective, and obliquely referencing the “woke mind virus” memeplex at the end. But Twitter is part of that problematic structure, especially under Musk but even before. It’s a platform and power structure that has long carved out plenty of room for general bigotry, misogyny, and abusive material up to and including CSAM. Gyges wants to have his clout-farm, but just dispose of the more rotten produce.

I’m being a bit flippant with the previous post, but really, Gyges was right to retract this. A number of the allegations he’s resurfacing are serious, and there most likely is more abuse going on the rat scene than has come to light… but leaning so heavily on Twitter posts as primary-source evidence makes his whole effort here come off as lightweight and cranky. To me, rather than a scathing exposé, this resembles a Dear Lowtax letter from somebody who got banned from Something Awful (a place where some of the moderators really were pedophiles, who really did have to be evicted from the community and prosecuted!).

We’ve known for a long time that Aella’s attitudes are problematic, and that we don’t want to spend time with her in olfactory distance, let alone tactile distance. Nothing new there. This Brangus dude was previously unknown to me, which is probably a good sign that my social-media hygiene of staying strictly away from Twitter is working… but also, and I don’t mean to say this by way of minimization, he ultimately seems like yet one more Tate-swilling Twitter manosphere bigot. He just happens to be the one infesting Gyges’ community of affinity. It would be hard to make the case, given the evidence presented, that he’s done much more than perform for the tech-savvy subset of Rogan/Tate adherents. Enough that people should reconsider associating with him, yes, but not enough to convict and remove him from public life.

And his conclusion starts off so laughable that it drowns out any accusation he might level against Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is a great man whose most recent equivalent is… Lenin?! What on earth? Yudkowsky doesn’t even measure up to Hubbard, his closest American parallel. The only grace I am willing to give Yudkowsky is that he has not, generally, been as openly predatory or as single-mindedly focused on creating a high-control organization as Hubbard was. Yudkowsky’s attempts at re-establishing group control and setting boundaries against outgroups typically consist of whiny tweets and LW posts that very quickly reach into “ur not takin p(doom) seriously!” hyperbole. The Sea Org and Guardian’s Office this is not.

I also strictly disagree with Gyges’ implicit assumption that Yudkowsky was the most effective popularizer of these ideas, or somehow more effective than Kurzweil. Without Kurzweil projecting exponential growth curves forward and back in time, no VC GP in the mid-2010s is going to start writing checks for the early generations of genAI. And, for crying out loud, I distinctly remember Disney children’s TV having an episode about grey goo taking over the world in 1996! https://gargwiki.net/Walkabout Almost 10 years before Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near, and two years before the first Harry Potter book would be published in the US! Omitting Kurzweil and Drexler to hype Yudkowsky is just plain silly. And no, he’s not on a level with Lenin; we can already tell that the AI companies’ marketing which adapts AI-doom ideas is backfiring and being laughed at by the general public.

I’ve gone on for too long, partly because this is a diverting way to procrastinate, but by the end of this, Gyges once again demonstrates why he’s an unreliable fellow traveler. I am very reluctant to quote directly from a document that has been officially retracted, but the second to last paragraph where he talks about “understand[ing] what people mean when they say certain ideas are demonic, and that they spread like a disease…” Hmm, you obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter to dig all this shit up, tell me, what’s the “mind virus” they keep ranting about over there? Fuck you, Gyges, you’re a few invitation-snubs or one bad layoff away from goose-stepping with the rest of them.

Not sure how far I’m going to read this, but leading off with roon is a giant blinking red [More citations needed]