Did you ever ask him about his day job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Outside_of_writing is pretty colorful and the sword kickstarter especially was not a good look.

I feel like if a you want to train something off of my software or my other intellectual property, we can come up with a commercial licensing agreement for that. Or you can obey the terms of the publicly posted software license. Instead they are arguing that I am not allowed to negotiate and that big companies get to do whatever they want with code from small companies.

They already have an army of lawyers, so why do they need a get out of jail free card too? I wrote the thing, so what do I get? Fucked over is what I get.

I dug into the link at the bottom of the rfp, it’s definitely a lot more crypto / ethereum leaning than ai, none of the names rang any bells to me as I’m less acquainted with that group. https://www.paradigm.xyz/frontiers-2026 and https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing but they do have shocking amounts of js on their pages, hung the tab, probably trying to mine something.

in which le gwern and sword guy neal sponsor a writing contest

https://www.gpuworld.org/

Premise

Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.

So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM.

What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future?

I may as well through my name in the hat, I could use the cash. but, who the hell gave them $100k for this? I guess BTC is back up.

https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/the-future-is-not-tech-forward

whole thing is good but long, but then THAT GUY pops up again. Humans First has apparently already came and went, that other article left out this fun bit of lore:

Politics comes for Humans First too. In late March, there’s a high-profile spat online where pro-AI White House allies like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks retweet a piece critical of Humans First. Shortly after, the organization splits along partisan lines. The conservative wing keeps the Humans First name and makes the right-wing political activist Amy Kremer, who helped organize the January 6 “Save America” rally in DC, its chair; Allen leaves the group. When I ask Allen about the changeup, he is curiously coy (but characteristically body-horrible): The group was “undergoing mitosis,” he says. “I am now a lone organelle floating in the residual cytoplasm.”

It’s ok little buddy you still have steve bannon. /s

Being on YT is a big driver here, and Lex is smart enough to work the algo. Have John Carmack on, get views when people search for Quake. Have Elon on, get subs when people search for Tesla. Have Mr Beast on and get some kids in the funnel. He’s very good at piercing through filter bubbles to get extra reach and pull numbers, unlike an Alex Jones. (EDIT: For this, the bland persona is a feature not a bug)

I’d ballpark that he made $20k off this DHH interview and picked up some rails devs along the way.

Whenever new coworkers bring up Lex, I always feel like it’s a test, like are they oblivious, or are they secret closet magas trying to test the water. Slate Star has a similar thing. And YT is bad enough but now I have to see it pop up on LinkedIn too.

The thing that bothers me the most is that while this happens in Cambridge but over at Data Colada, Ariely is just like “whoopsie” and gets to keep his job. https://datacolada.org/138 - personally I consider fabricating your entire study to be worse than sloppy quotes, but it is insane how these two people are treated so differently.

I also think it’s really lazy that BBC couldn’t even mention Claudine Gay (AND Martin Luther King) since it was the exact same thing. Different country I guess.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/ai-off-balance-sheet-obligations-hit-a-subprime-like-reset-wall-in-2027-and-2028.html by Yves / naked capitalism

Critically, it is these “frontier labs” that contract for, lease and build data centers. The very little I have seen about this process has caused me concern. For instance, I read of Meta contracting for a data center for what sounded like 20 years but was 4 back-to-back five year leases. Recall that the once AAA rated General Electric has taken a big fall in investor grace. How strong will the now-mighty-seeming Meta be, particularly if AI bets come a cropper?

Groundbreaker has identified a key element of risky AI leverage, which are obligations that are not accounted for as debt at the AI sponsor. Those of you who are corporate finance literate will know this is a cardinal sin. When I was a wee young thing at Goldman, where we went through hard copies of financial statements to extract key data which we entered into green accountants’ ledger paper, one of the aims was to determine total debt to assets. One of the footnote items we would root out was operating lease payments. For instance, big companies often use leased mainframes. We would capitalize them and treat them as a long-term liability.

=> https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom

The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM.

Going to take me a while to digest this one

I looked her up, she was at MetaMed/Palantir/Longevity Research Inst, so definitely in the thick of things and in that world. That lying problem piece hits a lot harder post-sbf.

over on linked in

as a statistician, I’m so tired of hearing they’re “updating their priors.” No you didn’t. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex.

(00:39:39) Let me put it. Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system. It’s an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and it’s freaking amazing.

No it isn’t. It’s your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex can’t tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s

these guys.

Maybe this is just me being slow to put things together, but why exactly is that startup for AI cheating overlay for zoom job interviews now putting out workplace / startup humor shorts? They seem to have paid a host of clippers too. Ling Long is everywhere. Did the AI thing not work out for cluely?

eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmLOORRGW4U

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 “the punk rock of software”, a description so limp in its countercultural authority that it felt as though it had itself been generated by an LLM.

lol

Rap’s mogul class appears equally enamoured with its supposed potential, repeatedly deploying “tool” 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.

“I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago,” Dre said. “They were against A.I. and I’m like, ‘OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.’ Or synthesisers, right? It’s a new tool for creativity.”

put up or shut up bro, name one good song that AI generated, just one. not that you’ve done much or anything noteworthy since the nineties. /s

I’d be curious to see how they defined “harmful” in their test, since it looks like Claude code’s technically-not-yolo mode is looking for “actions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environment” which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in “your environment”.

I think more than half the issues would be solved with a well placed git stash and the rest .

And yes, I’m sure that the fact that the flow of operations they’re 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 they’re 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.

There were some breadcrumbs in that Wes streeting article about https://www.eaforchristians.org/ but I couldn’t get a sense of how fundie they may be.

Hadn’t seen this discussed previously and/or I missed it, but I guess this is one way they’ll juice metrics for their IPO.

yolo mode for all will certainly get that avg token burn up.

https://ehandbook.com/its-official-ai-coding-no-longer-needs-your-stupid-human-meatbag-input-32e04269319e?sk=586c08fd0f31c7c75dd107c3dfb77dcf

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 you’re building with Claude Code, instead of stopping at various points (many, many, many points) and asking your permission to do things, it’ll 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 — in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps that’s because “manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.”)

Which links back to https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code

Auto mode is designed to balance users’ 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 can’t make progress—three blocks in a row, or twenty across a session—Claude 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 isn’t anything special to yolo or anthropic. It’s like all the tech industry learned from Windows Vista or the EU cookie law was the dark patterns.

that already kinda happened (for a certain groups of users) with the public share links thing, but my money is on a corporate self-own a la the old AOL search data set.

man good for them. meanwhile down south we keep throwing good money after bad while also doing layoffs.

eg Fiscal 25 is public now

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.

Yeah I agree it isn’t about the legal risk, but going to a dispensary is different than ordering it from silk road, might talk to actual people that know a little bit about safer consumption or appropriate doses. hopefully.