If I had Bluesky access on my phone, I’d be dropping so much lore in that thread. As a public service. And because I am stuck on a slow train.

The genocide understander has logged on! Steven Pinker bluechecks thusly:

Having plotted many graphs on “war” and “genocide” in my two books on violence, I closely tracked the definitions, and it’s utterly clear that the war in Gaza is a war (e.g., the Uppsala Conflict Program, the gold standard, classifies the Gaza conflict as an “internal armed conflict,” i.e., war, not “one-sided violence,” i.e., genocide).

You guys! It’s totes not genocide if it happens during a war!!

Also, “Having plotted many graphs” lolz.

Christ, what a fucking asshole.

Here’s a rundown of the who’s who in The War on Science.

It’s Jonathan Ladd saying,

Scott Alexander, the most influential figure in the online rationalist movement, wrote a review praising white supremacist Richard Hanania’s book The Origins Of Woke in 2024.

Yesterday, he congratulated Hanania on the Trump admin adopting the recommendations.

With a link to Scott Adderall’s blog.

Ed Zitron:

Sam Altman is talking about bringing online “tens of thousands” and then “Hundreds of thousands” of GPUs. 10,000 GPUs costs them $113 million a year, 100k $1.13bn, so this is Sam Altman committing to billions of dollars of compute for an expensive model that lacks any real new use cases. Suicide.

Also, $1.30 per hour per GPU is the Microsoft discount rate for OpenAI. Safe to assume there are other costs but raw compute for GPT 4.5 is massive and committing such resources at this time is truly fatalistic, and suggests Altman has no other cards to play

Whilst flipping through LessWrong for things to point and laugh at, I discovered that Sabine Hossenfelder is apparently talking about “AI” now.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist and science communicator who provides analysis and commentary on a variety of science and technology topics.

She also provides transphobia using false balance rhetoric.

x.AI released its most recent model, Grok 3, a week ago. Grok 3 outperformed on most benchmarks

And truly, no fucks were given.

Grok 3 still features the same problems of previous LLM models, including hallucinations

The fundamental problem remains fundamental? You don’t say.

Be sure to pick up your copy of The War on Science, edited by … Lawrence Krauss, featuring … Richard Dawkins and … Jordan Peterson.

Buchman on Bluesky wonders,

How did they not get a weinstein?

Tim Burners-Lee

(snerk)

From elsewhere in that thread:

The physics of the 1800s had a lot of low hanging fruit. Most undergrads in physics can show you a derivation of Maxwell’s equations from first principles, and I think a fair few of them could have come up with it themselves if they were in Maxwell’s shoes.

Lol no

central preference vector […] central good-evil discriminator

bro is this close to reinventing g but for morality

Declaring that an AI is malevolent because you asked it for a string of numbers and it returned 420

For those who missed the news, yes, tickets are on sale.

an oppositional culture

[enraged goose meme] “Oppositional to what, motherfucker? Oppositional to what?!”

Ian Millhiser’s reports on Supreme Court cases have been consistently good (unlike the Supreme Court itself). But Vox reporting on anything touching TESCREAL seems pretty much captured.

AOC:

They need him to be a genius because they cannot handle what it means for them to be tricked by a fool.

The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers?

Good point.

Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.

Oh, the warping and twisting started long before Ziz. (The Sequences are cult shit.)

LaSota and those in her orbit alleged that CFAR and its leadership were laced with anti-trans beliefs and practices. (“That’s preposterous,” one member of the rationalist community, who is also trans, told me. “Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I’ve seen that isn’t explicitly about being trans. You’d just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”)

The leadership can’t be transphobic because 20% of the membership is trans. In related news, the United States government cannot be sexist because [breaks down into bleak and bitter laughter]

Don’t think in detail about the future superintelligence that can hug you and turn you into TANG!

I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying “paint their discourse with the purples”.

It’s conceivable that there was some amazing math lurking in one or more of the non-string-theory ideas, and nobody was lucky enough to find it.