I also feel like while it’s absolutely true that the whole “we’ll make AGI and get a ton of money” narrative was always bullshit (whether or not anyone relevant believed it) it is also another kind of evil. Like, assuming we could reach a sci-fi vision of AGI just as capable as a human being, the primary business case here is literally selling (or rather, licensing out) digital slaves. Like, if they did believe their own hype and weren’t grifting their hearts out then they’re a whole different class of monster. From an ethical perspective, the grift narrative lets everyone involved be better people.

Alex Avila really is out here fully being the postmodern neomarxist Jordan Peterson warned you about and I am so goddamn here for it.

Also tell me more about how you don’t have a lower-class or nonwhite-coded accent.

The whole list of “improved” sources is a fascinating catalogue of preprints, pop sci(-fi) schlock, and credible-sounding vanity publishers. And even most of those appear to reference “inner alignment” as a small part of some larger things, which I would expect to merit something like a couple sentences in other articles. Ideally ones that start with “so there’s this one weird cult that believes…”

I’m still allowed to dream, right?

We were joking about this last week if memory serves, but at least one person out there has started a rough aggregator of different sources of pre-AI internet dumps.

It’s all gotta be in the models by now, but it’s gonna be a cool resource for something, right?

Yeah. I think the nerd archetype fits more neatly into a framework about toxic masculinity reproducing itself even as it necessarily excludes large swathes of men. Like, for all that the stereotypical nerd is fat or neurodivergent or otherwise in some category beyond white dude, that’s not what gets them bullied. (Also let’s not forget that the nerd’s archenemy who does the bullying is also usually a white man) It’s their failure to perform hegemonic masculinity appropriately. George McFly vs Biff Tannen could be contrasted to Carlton Banks vs Will Smith. In a lot of the older pre-gamergate lore nerddom was broadly considered a kinder and more welcoming group, at least in part for this reason, and given how many fat, neurodivergent, nonwhite, nonmale, and nonstraight people identified as nerds over the years I don’t think that was inaccurate.

Rather, I think two things happened that led to nerds going the way they did. Firstly they grew up and the problem of not performing masculinity correctly shifted from being on the football field to being in the boardroom and the bank account. A lot of computer and math nerds went to college and turned into tech and finance bros. Even those who didn’t go into one of those fields started aging into the most profitable phase of their careers. You can see the fantasy of it become more common as the new millennium ticked along, with the narrative shifting from “showing the world we’re right” to “buying their employer and forcing them to lick our boots clean”. Along with this (arguably because of it), most of the rallying symbols of nerddom - comic books, anime, science fiction, fantasy, space, etc. - became the mainstream titans of culture. If the core of nerddom was a failure to appropriately participate in hegemonic masculinity and the resulting loss of social status, that loss of social status was no longer really happening. In many ways the rising diversity among nerds directly contributed to this since having women in the demographic meant it was no longer as toxic to your chances to ever get a date. Being a nerd no longer inherently meant rejecting that vision of masculinity.

But the fallout of these changes was a rift between those who rejected hegemonic masculinity and those who had merely been rejected by hegemonic masculinity. And this rift was easily exploited and magnified by fascists who linked the criticisms of nerdy past times from the former group to the latter’s anxiety about losing their newfound social capital. You can find echoes of this in the discourse about “nice guys”, particularly in the hand-wringing kind of reactions we saw from the Sneerable Scotts Aaronson and Siskind. And all those nonstraight nonwhite nonmales who were still on the outs with the broader culture of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and patriarchy found that they didn’t actually need the “nerd” identity as strongly as the increasingly reactionary straight white dude contingent. And that basically abandoned it to the fascists.

Lord of… well not Darkness, obviously. Probably not so much Decay, either. But definitely a certain sort of Wilting.

I’m somewhat disappointed by the fair use assessment, since I think calling AI models “transformative” is a bit of a stretch from how that is normally used, but I also see where the judge is coming from. Would the analytics that go into Google’s Ngram word frequency engine be considered infringing? You know, provided we ignore that the fuckers couldn’t be bothered to find a single goddamn copy of the book they wanted to feed into the data shredder.

They’d have a better chance convincing techbros to do a serious literary analysis of the video game.

Adding onto this chain of thought, does anyone else think the talk page’s second top-level comment from non-existent user “habryka” is a bit odd? Especially since after Eigenbra gives it a standard Wikipedian (i.e. unbearably jargon-ridden and a bit pedantic but entirely accurate and reasonable in its substance) reply, new user HandofLixue comes in with:

ABOUT ME You seem to have me confused with Habryka - I did not make any Twitter post about this. Nonetheless, you have reverted MY edits…

Kinda reads like they’re the same person? I mean Habryka is also active further down the thread so this is almost certainly just my tinfoil hat being too tight and cutting off circulation and/or reading this unfold in bits and pieces rather than putting it all together.

So many of those changes are just weird and petty, too. Like, I can’t imagine a good reason to not reference Vitalik Buterin as “Ethereum Founder” rather than just a billionaire. I’m sure that I can level the same critique at some pages that are neutrally trying to meet Wikipedia’s standards, but especially in this context it’s pretty straightforward to see that it’s an attempt to remove important context and accurate information that might make them look bad.

You know, I almost want to actually read past the first paragraph of this abomination of a story just to try and see if this pattern continues. I don’t think I’ve heard of a story that does the deeper elements of storytelling without doing the basics of English writing. Of course that would require reading throughMy Immortal so we’ll see if I hit bad enough depression to subject myself to that before I forget about it.

Also, not sure if there’s anything here but the Britannica page for Lixue suggests that there’s no way in hell its hand doesn’t have some serious CoIs.

Ed:

Also shout-out to the talk page where the poster of our top-level sneer fodder defended himself by essentially arguing “I wasn’t canvassing, I just asked if anyone wanted to rid me of this turbulent priest!”

User was created earlier today as well. Two earlier updates from a non-account-holder may be from the same individual. Did a brief dig through the edit logs, but I’m not very practiced in Wikipedia auditing like this so I likely missed things. Their first couple changes were supposedly justified by trying to maintain a neutral POV. By far the larger one was a “culling of excessive references” which includes removing basically all quotes from Cade Metz’ work on Scott S and trimming various others to exclude the bit that says “the AI thing is a bit weird” or “now they mostly tell billionaires it’s okay to be rich”.

I mean it does return a 404 now.

That hatchet job from Trace is continuing to have some legs, I see. Also a reread of it points out some unintentional comedy:

This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on…

Getting referenced in a thread on a different site talking about editing an article about themselves explicitly to make it sound more respectable and decent to be a member of their technofascist singularity cult diaspora. I’m sorry that your blogs aren’t considered reliable sources in their own right and that the “heterodox” thinkers and researchers you extend so much grace to are, in fact, cranks.

That’s what I was going to say. The natural language version actually claims that it leaves the dog behind unattended in every step, even though the following step continues as though it still has the dog and not whichever vegetable it brought back in the previous step.

Either it’s not actually good at natural language processing or some element of the solution isn’t surviving the shift from the river_cross() tool to natural language output. Whatever actual state it’s tracking internally doesn’t track to the output past the headline.

Finally circling back around to this.

Feels like I am not just doing my job but also the work the operator of the service or product I am having to use through chat should have paid professionals to do. And I’m not getting paid for it.

Speaking as someone who has worked extensively in IT support, I think that’s the sales pitch for these chatbots. They don’t want to give users tools and knowledge to solve their own problems - or rather they do but the chatbots aren’t part of that. The chatbots are supposed to replace the people who would interact with the relevant systems on your behalf. And honestly, working with a support person is already a deeply unsatisfying interaction in the vast majority of cases. In even the best case scenario it involves acknowledging that some part of your job has exceeded your ability and you need specialized help, and handling that well is a very rare personality trait. But the massive variety of interconnected systems that we rely on are too complex for this to not be a common occurrence. Even if you did radically open everything from internal bug trackers to licensing systems to communications there wouldn’t be enough time in the day for everyone to learn those systems well enough to perfectly self-solve all their problems, and that lack of systems knowledge would be a massive drain on your operations. But trying to fit in an LLM chatbot is the worst of both worlds, in that your users are both locked away from the tools and knowledge that would let them solve their own issues but still need to learn how to wrangle your intermediary system, and that system doesn’t have the human ability to connect and build a working relationship and get through those issues in a positive way.

So any plans to do Lego Racers next? Because that would let me actually inflict my childhood on everyone around me.

I think the idea is to build the fortified cult compound in the Internet. That way your disciples can lock themselves inside and start flagellating wherever they may be in the physical world.