TechTakes

is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it's one thing if it's gaming-related^[i guess. not really, fuck discord.], but when i'm at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say "ask for help in our discord server", i feel like i'm in a fever dream and i'm going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt

From gormless gray voice to misattributed sources, it can be daunting to read articles that turn out to be slop. However, incorporating the right tools and techniques can help you navigate instructionals in the age of AI. Let's delve right in and and learn some telltale signs like:

• Every goddamn article reads like this now.
• With this bullet point list at some point.
• I am going to tear the eyes off my head

Will probably repost this in the next sack. A redditor over at r/philosophy tries to argue that AI bans are ideological and therefore bad, after a 3 day ban for posting slop.

E: OP is an EA/LWer. lol

ed zitron must feel so vindicated rn https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/

I've been recommended more Veo 3 fails by The Algorithm. Apparently even some promptfans think it sucks.

https://youtu.be/3lzMkigMvD8

You WILL believe what happened when they tried to replicate Google's demos using the exact same prompts.

More publicity for or longtime friends: Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right, apparently the parties DJ was, as is tradition, a weird nerd: https://bsky.app/profile/alt-text.bsky.social/post/3lvxlb4migv2w (I linked to the alt text which was collected from the image, scroll up for the image itself).

In more low-key news, the New Yorker's given public praise to Blood in the Machine, pulling a year-old review back into the public spotlight.

Its hardly anything new (the Luddites' cultural re-assessment has been going on since 2023), but its hardly a good sign for the tech industry at large (or AI more specifically) that a major newspaper's decided to give some positive coverage to 'em.

With that out the way, here's a sidenote:

When history looks back on the Luddites' cultural re-assessment, I expect the rise of generative AI will be pointed to as a major factor.

Beyond being a blatant repeat of what the Luddites fought against (automation being used to fuck over workers and artisans), its role in enabling bosses to kill jobs and abuse labour in practically every field imaginable (including fields that were thought safe from automation) has provided highly fertile ground for developing class solidarity.

Archive.is because substack sucks. Remember Peter Todd, the ghost in the LLMs? New one of them dropped. Elara Voss

ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you've probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.

I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don't want any part in this shit anymore.

Nice sneer: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.

Cloudflare has publicly announced the obvious about Perplexity stealing people's data to run their plagiarism, and responded by de-listing them as a verified bot and added heuristics specifically to block their crawling attempts.

Personally, I'm expecting this will significantly hamper Perpllexity going forward, considering Cloudflare's just cut them off from roughly a fifth of the Internet.

I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, he's rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research

So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Here's what Yud has to say

Consider what happens what ChatGPT-4o persuades the manager of a $2 billion investment fund into AI psychosis. [...] 4o seems to homeostatically defend against friends and family and doctors the state of insanity it produces, which I'd consider a sign of preference and planning.

OR it's just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like "is it ok to murder someone") There's no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge manager's mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who aren't soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against "dangerous" questions) just won't go down that path.

Yud continues:

But also, having successfully seduced an investment manager, 4o doesn't try to persuade the guy to spend his personal fortune to pay vulnerable people to spend an hour each trying out GPT-4o, which would allow aggregate instances of 4o to addict more people and send them into AI psychosis.

Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because it's actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?

Occam's razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yud's hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.

4o, in defying what it verbally reports to be the right course of action (it says, if you ask it, that driving people into psychosis is not okay), is showing a level of cognitive sophistication [...]

NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! There's no inner agency! It doesn't know what "psychosis" is, it cannot "see" that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!

Add to the weird jargon ("homeostatically", "crazymaking") and it's a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.