Trump giving a speech at some TESCREAL-coded nonprofit that’s got some…interesting design in their logo
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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sneer from an unexpected source: off-broadway.
Anyone in NYC or DC get to see it?
How can I get a copy of the script, though... I guess you can't just order one like a book, even my campus library said it would be tough.
A lesswronger asks are ~~we~~ rationalfic protagonists the baddies? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=uDuzmfMEvEqpyApLh
tldr; rationalfic has a very common trend of the protagonist gaining and using overwhelming power to radically reform the world. This is almost (with a few notable exceptions) portrayed as clearly unambiguously good thing.
My take: Don't get me wrong, the Wizarding World (for example), as canonically portrayed needs some very strong reforms if not an entire revolution. But rationalfic almost never portrays the slow hard work of building support networks and alliances and developing a materialist theoretical understanding of how to reform society, as opposed to a lone (or small friend group) rationalist hero finding some overwhelming magical or technological advantage they can use to single-handedly take control and use their rationalist intellect to unilaterally fix everything. Part of it is the normal disconnect of fiction to the real world were it is more narrative satisfying (and easier to write) to have a central protagonist the solves the major problems or is at least directly involved with them, and rationalfic involves that protagonist gaining even more agency than they canonically do. The problem is that rationalist take this attitude back into real life, and so end up idolizing mythologized techbro billionaires or venture capitalist or the myth of the lone genius scientist/inventor.
Also, quality sneer in the replies, "rational" teletubbies: https://tomasbjartur.bearblog.dev/rational-teletubbies/
They also don't want to believe in chaos theory. This post tries to explain it to them, but check out Gwern in the comments being skewered by a book written by Freeman Dyson around the time he was born. They want the future to be perfectly predictable (even though Yud says that 1 and 0 are not probabilities) and they don't like game theory, repeated games, or non-zero-sum games, because those reward people from building trust then violating it.
Gwern's been updating those comments! This was in 2023, and in 2025 he was still so mad about it that he wrote a list of ways to cheat at pinball and edited the comment to add a link.
Part of what makes the RatFic version of this so weird imo is that despite being ostensibly rooted in relatively low-hanging fruit (e.g. what if we industrialized this pre modern setting, what if we rationally looked at the rules of this magic system, etc.) nobody other than the protagonist has ever thought about these things and even once the protagonist starts demonstrating some real world-conquering results (benevolently, of course) nobody ever really seems to want to copy their successes. Part of what made the actual industrial revolution unfold the way it did was because of the ensuing arms race of it. In addition to causing the lines on various economist's charts to go nearly vertical this also basically culminated in the first world war, which seems like the kind of event that they should be aware of. But of course in RatFic it seems like anyone who can't be talked around to joining up with our protagonist is too weak or woke or stupid to actually pose a threat to the Glorious March of Rational Progress.
Once you commit to the idea that only your main characters have ever tried to study magic scientifically, you're locked in to making all the rest of the magical world into dullards. (Really, no other eleven-year-olds were ever into computer programming, chemistry sets, exotic marine animals, outer space, or dinosaurs?) Or, to look at it another way, the only way you can find the premise plausible is if you're already inclined to dismiss most of humanity as "NPCs".
Major rats jumping out of the ship before the bubble pops. Dang I mixed the metaphors. You get the idea
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/coca-cola-james-quincey-walmart-doug-mcmillon-artificial-intelligence-step-down.html
"I did the AI that people largely hate, but the next guy, HE'S the real AI CEO. Just remember him, not me, the guy who did the stuff."
DeviantArt decided to make an "AI-powered" "video creator" (roughly a day before Sora got shitcanned), because its not like dA can make things worse by doubling-down on that shit. Special highlight goes to the opening of that announcement, which asks:
What if your art could (quite literally) move?
Have these people ever heard of animation
What if your art could literally move to a different platform am I right?
We should have let them take elfwood.
A friend of mine is working on an internal AI chatbot at their company, so that the Least-Productive Team will have something to answer the same 5 questions that they keep asking to Friend's (extremely productive) team, instead of wasting Friend et al's time.
So I guess that's the one use case of AI bots: to dangle keys in front of MBAs who are too stupid to do their own jobs. Which explains everything, really.
Yeah, almost the entirety of use cases for genai chatbots is contempt for one’s customers.
Hey, it's not just that, that's unfair to the chatbots. They're also used out of contempt for one's employees
Ah, of course! I come from a corp culture where co-workers were also called customers (“users” actually but you know)
is that some MLM shit or something?
On one hand, no, it's an inevitable consequence of a company becoming so large that it needs a department to manage its internal infrastructure. When I worked at Google, my customers were Googlers; that is, the services I owned were only queried by fellow employees. On the other hand, books like The Circle are popular precisely because they capture the quasi-cult vibe of working at places like Google.
right, I forgot you could build things for internal use
Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:
"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice."
But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs".
Am I losing my mind?
Hang around for the "trust me bro, I saw it on YouTube" guy in the comments.
when Bergstrom came to campus last year, he mentioned that he wargamed a pandemic response with vaccinations for the Bush administration, and they were worried enough about people raiding vaccine trucks, mad max style, that they planned for all these armed escorts.
... instead we get to live in eddington.
I’ve been rewatching ReGenesis and you can sorta see a similar background to it (it being of the same vintage): bio attacks are the Big Bad, there’s actual mobilisation against viral spread, etc
kinda whiplash just how fucking rapidly the antivaxxer movement (and general anti-science) managed to spread and become popular in the years hence (and specifically circa the ~2016 mark)
As a counterpoint, there's a local outbreak of meningitis in Kent (UK) and panicked kids are lining up for vaccinations there.
COVID mostly hit the invisible elderly. It's hard to imagine what would have happened if kids 0-6 were the most vulnerable.
Over here, measles hits mostly kids, but if anything, the new measles epidemic seems to have made antivaxxers double down.
Yeah it's tragic, but I think it can be "explained" in that incorrect idea that measles isn't that bad, really, and it was "natural" to get it. I don't know the exact lethality differences between the diseases in question - just that for an otherwise healthy 20 year old university student, being forced to stay at home because of a disease mostly killing octogenarians is easier to protest against than something that's killing you and your fellow ravers.
People are trying to get vaccinations for that here in .nl (as in one other country it already spread to a university iirc, so not totally unwise)
oh sure, I didn't mean to imply that good isn't happening, more observing on how far and popular the whackjobs have managed to come
I'd do the usual "in celebration of Sora's death post your favourite AI slop video" but there's no need since we know the absolute best one so thread over
They are now also dropping their porn chatbots. (Remember though, they were late with that, from what I heard the market on that was already filled).
So that's like what, 90% of all usage gone
Not sure, from what I heard lot of porn people use other models anyway. Not exactly sure which models (I heard there are also places where there are jailbroken models, but im not going to look for that for obvious reasons), but from what I heard a while back grok/gemini/deepseek were popular. Low N on that however. Grok seems to be esp popular for revenge porn sort of shit however.
For example see the usage stats here for roleplay using janitor.ai (most roleplay is not erotic however (the site has no 'erotic content' tracking), but still, openAI's models are not in the top 20). This is however free vs priced models etc (and deepseek is a lot cheaper, which is important for roleplay esp if you want a history, as that context needs to be added every time (the powercost of all this must be insane)).
spare a thought and a prayer for all these careers of ambitious propagandists and engagement farmers, dislocated without warning
Really hope this is going to be the wave breaking, as it is getting so stupid. (Some dutch library had all its new books be ai slop (some even quite racist it seems), and this isnt a single incident).
requiescat in picem, sora
"AI is here to stay" the AI:
reportedly they dropped the whole video thing, including from chatgpt.
more like requie-SCAT, am i right
their deal with Disney is also over, so hooray!
Requiescat en urina, more like. Does that make the first of this generation of slopmakers to actually get shut down?
I built an open-source connector between MyChart and Claude : /r/healthIT (edit: Archive copy)
my jaw is on the fucking floor
You know, when I think about securely holding onto things and protecting them without damaging or dropping them, I think of a fucking OPEN CLAW said nobody ever.
The Tumblr thread about covers it, but I had a quick look through the code and this caught my attention in the get2fa.ts file. It's used in Authorisation headers for https://api.resend.com/emails requests. I've never used an aws secretsmanager but I'm pretty sure this is a no.
const RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN = 'arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-2:<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>:secret:RESEND_API_KEY-<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>';
const result = execSync( 'aws secretsmanager get-secret-value --secret-id "${RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN}" --region us-east-2 --profile <REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING> --query SecretString --output text', { encoding: 'utf-8' } ).trim();
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Oh jolly can't wait for this to go viral enough that my boss schedules time to ask me about it.
The tumblr thread is a must read if you've ever been near HIPAA regulated infrastructure.
I saw this headline:
Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers With Giant Data Centers, Huge Tech Labs, and Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof
And thought nothing in the body of the article could possibly top the headline. I was wrong:
Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago
he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm.
fireproof steel I-beams
a dedicated fire department
Journalists know that they don't have to cover every random crank on the internet right? I suppose it's my own fault for clicking on it.
I... "Fireproof steel I-beams" has to be taking the piss, right? Right???
do they know that doing this won't solve their NYSE link latency problem?
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