I didn’t misspend my youth in any of the normal ways. Instead I got moderately invested in what was then called the Star Wars Expanded Universe and is now called Legends canon. On one hand I still glance fondly at the two separate editions I have of Timothy Zahn’s Thrown trilogy, with one being a newer set I picked up at a con to get signed and the other being the half-deatroyed set of old paperbacks I assembled from used book sales over a solid ~5 years or so, each of which was in at least fair condition when I first got it and is now much farther from it from the ravages of being carried around by a teenager and read and reread in any spare 5-10 minutes that didn’t have anything else to do. Oh the joys of having ADHD before smart phones were ubiquitous.

The tradeoff is that by virtue of picking things out of used book sales rather than seeking out specific series and the like is that I read so much weird junk The Jedi Academy trilogy which culminated in Luke’s first class of students collectively force pushing a whole fleet of star destroyers into interplanetary space? Yep. The Corellian trilogy featuring Han’s villainous cousin and yet another galaxy-rending superweapon that will only respond to a small child? Read it. Darksaber where Jabba the Hutt’s nephew tries to build his own death star only to be undone by his own corner cutting and incompetent workforce? Oh yeah. I also had bits and pieces of the Scholastic Book Fair-approved Jedi Apprentice series of YA stories about Obi-wan and Qui-gon’s adventures before episode I and more interestingly for this thread a few parts of a different children’s series I can’t remember the name of featuring a Jedi prince, multiple attempts to impersonate the emperor’s son, attempts to recreate iconic force powers with technobabble, and various other nonsense. Oh, and I almost forgot about the one where the rebels and empire team up immediately after Endor to fight off an attack from an army of soul-stealing dinosaur people.

It got so weird, so stupid, and honestly I loved it all the more for that. The little Bantam Books sticker managed to get past my elitist attitude towards straight-up fanfiction and the editing was just strict enough to keep everything coherent and readable, allowing me to have a whole lot of good times reading a very very mixed bag of books.

You know I was wondering about where the name came from and it’s sufficiently plausible that I believe it. Notably in the story her threat - the reason just being around her is so dangerous - is because she has some kind of perfect predictive ability on top of all the giant psychic kaiju nonsense. So she attacks a city and finds the one woman who needs to die in order for her super-thinker husband to go mad and build an army of evil robots or whatever.

It very much rhymes with the Rationalist image of a malevolent superintelligence and I can definitely understand it being popular in those circles, especially the “I’m too edgy to recognize that Taylor is wrong, actually” parts of the readership.

However, I do think that the unfolding of this story presents an object lesson in why “always escalate to the max” is a wildly stupid idea. It turns out that even when you have guns (metaphorical or otherwise) and a complete disregard for the consequences of failure the average group of citizens is still at a decided disadvantage to the state at higher points on the escalation ladder.

From what I’ve been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. I’m not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Roko’s Basilisk being a concern.

Man, after a long day this is the exact story I needed. Doing a vital public service as always, David.

To be fair, the highest-level claims of just about any conspiracy theory sound at least plausible. Even Qanon tends to start off with claims that are basically confirmed by the Epstein case before they start extending the conspiracy to more places, incorporating Jesus, and excluding their preferred Messiah figures.

OpenAI can’t simply “add on” DeepSeek to its models, if not just for the optics. It would be a concession. An admittal that it slipped and needs to catch up, and not to its main rival…

I actually disagree here. I think Ed underestimates how craven and dishonest these people are. I expect they’ll try to quietly integrate any efficiency improvements they can get from it and bluster through any investor questions about it. Their hope at this point has to be that more hardware is still better and that scaling is still gonna be the thing to make fetch happen. This again isn’t a revolutionary new structure, even if it is a significant improvement over anything Saltman and co have been doing.

This tied into a hypothesis I had about emergent intelligence and awareness, so I probed further, and realized the model was completely unable to ascertain its current temporal context, aside from running a code-based query to see what time it is. Its awareness - entirely prompt-based - was extremely limited and, therefore, would have little to no ability to defend against an attack on that fundamental awareness.

How many times are AI people going to re-learn that LLMs don’t have “awareness” or "reasnloning’ in a sense humans would find meaningful?

Don’t mind me, just imagining a brighter world where the people in power learn Settlers of Catan instead of Chess or Civilization.

You can’t be this divorced if you’ve ever actually been married, since that tends to create and/or require connecting with another human being and feeling something not unlike love, at least for long enough to get the papers files.

I don’t want to say with absolute confidence that there’s no scenario I can imagine to which a nuclear apocalypse would be preferable (the real kind, not the Fallout kind). But I have yet to hear one.

Goddammit why can’t the murder cult story just stay morbidly fascinating? Now I’ve got to worry about implications and how the worst people are gonna use this as ammo.

I do actually have a mechanism for using the sharp edges of NVidia cards for dick mouse trapping purposes. And we could - hypothetically - use the extraneous power inputs to mine Bitcoin or something, maximizing efficiency!

Fascism really is “we have imperialism at home”

In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that aren’t doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for “progressive monarchists”. It’s titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.

I don’t know if this is good news for the underlying risk of how willing the nuts and bolts of society are to resist unlawful or monstrous policies. IDK, on the subject of complicity I think the fact that we eventually joined the war has caused a deep cultural amnesia about how much influence the Reich had on the states and vice versa. Charles Lindbergh, Madison Square Garden, etc. We didn’t really acknowledge how much our cultural and political structures are open to authoritarianism, much less addressing those issues.

Thanks, I hate it.

Especially because Trump’s legal teams have historically been more than incompetent enough to produce this kind of work on their own.

It is a long-established truth that it’s significantly easier to con someone who thinks they’re smarter than you. Also as I think about it a little bit there seems to be a reasonable corollary of their approach towards Bayesian thinking that you not question anything that matches your expectations, which is exactly how you get taken advantage of by the kind of grifter they’re attached to. Like, they’ve been thinking about the singularity for long enough that the Sams (bankman-fried, Altman, etc) have a well-developed script for what they expect the first stages to look like and it is, as demonstrated, very easy to fake that.

Dan Shipper, who has been testing Operator for a few days, found that it often cannot access websites because they have blocked OpenAI from crawling it.

Wait so ghoulishly scraping the entire internet without regard for the performance impact on the sites you’re scraping and getting blocked from anyone with the good sense to do so has downsides?!?

Is there any rundown on this backstory for people who missed it happening live over the last few years that doesn’t get sidetracked into theological disputes with the murder cult?