TechTakes

Last week 404 Media reported on some DOGE deposition videos.

The videos were since removed via court order, but are available on Internet Archive.

For anyone unfamiliar: this slots under TechTakes because DOGE is basically Elon Musk's army of naive fascist silicon valley tech-bros rampaging about the federal government with Chat-GPT, SQL, and unsecured thumb-drives.

This article is behind a paywall, but links to the following video snippets from the depositions:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVyhJT9jf4f/

For example here Justin Fox talks about deleting federal grants that he considered in-scope for an anti DEI executive order: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/

Q: "Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI"

A: "It's the gender based story 🤷 that's inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group 🙄."

Q: "It's inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?"

A: "The gender based. So, females 🤷 during the Holocaust."

He goes on to clarify that it's DEI because it focuses on Jewish women. Oh that's OK then!

There is a lot of video to work through but I know there is more ~~comedy gold~~ rage inducing punchable nazi snippets within.

Scratch a Moldbug and find a neocon

Does anyone know a summary of the shakeup at CFAR in 2016? In January AnnaSalomon promised LessWrong that "CFAR's mission is to improve the sanity/thinking skill of those who are most likely to actually usefully impact the world." In December she announced a pivot to preventing the Reign of Steel. Julia Galef left that year and has not been very visible since. Her husband Luke Muehlhauser is OpenPhil's Managing Director for AI Governance & Policy so still Roko-curious.

LessWrongers sometimes say that Michael Vassar influenced the curriculum of CFAR's workshops even though he was no longer employed by a Rationalist charity. Brent Dill was living in Berkeley participating in rationalist events at that time.

And locally, UAW RPSP just announced a tentative agreement, apparently they got a technology policy through without calling out AI explicitly. Might be too little too late tbh.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uxn_Tq-CMVyPstXD9GnCzuiRp660QdAw/view

found a paper that may be of interest and review interest to some here

linked via this toot that hit my feed

Results are in: people hate AI more than they do ICE

this has now been made into its own post

New post from Iris Meredith: Tech's empiricism problem

Back in 2019, Ben Pace of Lightcone said that CFAR and Lightcone were one legal entity, but two boards with no overlap. Did CFAR + Lightcone really spend $22 million on real estate in Berkeley without spending a few grand to create a separate nonprofit and separate the finances? In 2024, CFAR still had the real estate and the mortgage on its books. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eR7Su77N2nK3e5YRZ/the-lesswrong-team-is-now-lightcone-infrastructure-come-work-3

I have never opened a US business bank account, but I would think it would be hard to keep the bank accounts separate if one organization has no independent legal existence, and transactions in the millions or tens of millions tempt the most righteous person to stick his fingers in the till.

Anybody else having problems with archive.is and its variants? I keep getting into an infinite captcha loop. I already tried making it an dns over https exception in firefox, which worked once.

E: tried a different browser, and same problem. Same on phone, it does work going from wifi to mobile however.

E2: I seem to have fixed it, by oddly rebooting my router. Which makes no sense to me.