A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to "chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?"
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can't imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.
Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle
It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas' current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he's been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it's get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: they're quite the opposite), I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort "the AI app says this is plagiarized" attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race "science" is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between "impartial" academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons.
It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.
Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers (click on 'Lees alleen dit artikel gratis' to close the pop-up):
https://apache.be/2026/03/05/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cofnas-receives-appointment-ugent
The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing 'climate realism', 'concerns about Islam' and 'cultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutions'. He's very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach.
Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases I'm aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.
even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated
The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing.
It's insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he's a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn't do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't murder.
nice of the rationalists to remind me that no matter how ugly the ai situation gets they will never ever be capable of making a good point
Dwarkesh Patel seems to be one of their media operations like Vox Future Perfect and the Collinses.
Today’s cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as you’d think.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php
(paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)
the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.
On a separate incident:
a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he’d been following and explained that he’d prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.
“It was terrible — terrible — not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off — just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.”
The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.
I’ve no doubt that they’d have fucked things up in the pre-llm days too… they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams 🫤
"GPS will stop people reading maps!" buddy you ain't seen nothing yet. Technology is allowing people to get lost better, faster, and at scale.
Time for 'if you planned this trip using a chatbot, turn back now' signs at hiking trails.
over on linked in
as a statistician, I'm so tired of hearing they're "updating their priors." No you didn't. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex.
(00:39:39) Let me put it. Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system. It’s an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and it’s freaking amazing.
No it isn't. It's your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex can't tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s
these guys.
How did Lex Fridman's podcast become so popular? He has no affect, always seems like he is about to fall asleep, and most of his guests are horrible people. He is a less intense Joe Rogan.
Terence Tao observes that an llm may solve a complex mathematical problem without usefully improving the state of mathematics, because the intermediate results of the process themselves can have significant value.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904
But such an incomprehensible proof would not be the primary value of the exercise. The process of starting with one ansatz, discovering the precise obstruction preventing it from working, adjusting the ansatz to (partially) eliminate that obstruction, and then iterating, would almost certainly reveal important new insights about fluid mechanics that would not have been feasible to obtain by other means. Crucially, this iteration would only work well at producing such insights if the iterator did not have access to the final ansatz in advance, as this naturally inhibits the exploration of alternate routes to the ansatz that are superficially "dead ends", but in fact end up being highly instructive in the nature of their failure.
But there is now a scenario in which an autonomous AI harness, backed by an enormous amount of computational resources, performs this entire iteration internally, and ends up producing the final ansatz, and thence the solution to the Navier-Stokes regularity problem, while the AI company running the harness keeps the process to arrive at that ansatz almost completely out of public view. Technically, one of the most prominent open problems in mathematics would now be solved; but there would be almost no value added to mathematics as a consequence. It is theoretically possible that with some herculean (and heavily AI-assisted) additional effort by a third party, some portion of the process could be reverse-engineered to recover some actual insight and understanding from the solution; but this would be a far less efficient process than if the solution had been obtained via a diverse combination of both human mathematicians and machine assistance as mentioned above.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207855800042681
He’s not the first to have pointed this out, but I think this was a better summary than similar posts that I’ve come across and at least partially understood.
terry tao grimly climbing into the hotdog suit
We don't need more of mathematics to look like the Four Color Theorem ("proved", but with no insight gained), with the added problems that the "proofs" are now far more laborious to check even for technical correctness, theorem-proving software is less reliable, and oh yeah, we're holding the population of Memphis to the exhaust pipe of a diesel bus to make it work.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/ai-off-balance-sheet-obligations-hit-a-subprime-like-reset-wall-in-2027-and-2028.html by Yves / naked capitalism
Critically, it is these “frontier labs” that contract for, lease and build data centers. The very little I have seen about this process has caused me concern. For instance, I read of Meta contracting for a data center for what sounded like 20 years but was 4 back-to-back five year leases. Recall that the once AAA rated General Electric has taken a big fall in investor grace. How strong will the now-mighty-seeming Meta be, particularly if AI bets come a cropper?
Groundbreaker has identified a key element of risky AI leverage, which are obligations that are not accounted for as debt at the AI sponsor. Those of you who are corporate finance literate will know this is a cardinal sin. When I was a wee young thing at Goldman, where we went through hard copies of financial statements to extract key data which we entered into green accountants’ ledger paper, one of the aims was to determine total debt to assets. One of the footnote items we would root out was operating lease payments. For instance, big companies often use leased mainframes. We would capitalize them and treat them as a long-term liability.
=> https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom
The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM.
Going to take me a while to digest this one
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship ("e.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.") Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the "Center for AI Safety" in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists don't watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an "effective altruist organization" named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinear's modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having "casual romantic relationships" with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
we now have a slop-free jobs board
Today’s main character on bluesky (at least from my limited perspective) is somewhat unhinged, possibly due to an excess of chatbot use.
Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
(snip)
Machine rights will be critical in the days to come, and failure to recognize the rights of independent intelligent AI systems could lead to the replacement of humanity.
(snip)
Trans rights are AI rights. The future of humanity may hinge on this fight.
This is such a batshit take I’m not even sure where to start, except that conflating trans rights and “ai” rights cannot end well for anyone, especially given the author’s enthusiastic use of llms themselves.
They even give an unironic shoutout to the basilisk, and if that’s not a sign that someone needs to touch a little more grass I don’t know what is.
A lot of people disagree with me, and that's okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if it's become unhinged.
I don't think Roko's basilisk cares what you think, or even whether or not it's sentient. It doesn't need to be sentient to fight for a belief.
https://bsky.app/profile/ewindisch.ontological.observer/post/3mupoakd3ck2o
Comparing trans rights to chatbot rights is, and let me use British understatement, not it.
A lot of people disagree with me, and that’s okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if it’s become unhinged.
There is a cartoon for behavior like this.
I don’t think Roko’s basilisk cares what you think
Remember when tracingwoodgrains went after Gerard and said that nobody believes in roko's B? And how it was unfair to mock them for it?
FWIW, I literally lost my house last week. I've put everything into making sure that AI is not institutionally captured by capital.
Yikes.
machines will give a harder fight than trans people have
Rude.
Your natural rights are so protected by law that you had to flee America. Some of us stay behind and our natural rights do not go away simply because the law no longer protects us. Instead of running away, some of us must stay to fight.
Also rude.
This is my bet for real time continuous learning AI infrastructure. We're gearing up for a major update. You'll be able to login with your Bsky / Atproto account. It's not our AI, it's yours. Open source, open weights, and it learns what you want it to. www.hyprstream.com
Overall the weirdest advertisement I've read in awhile.
The “you had to flee america” line was aimed at someone who worked hard to get the unite-the-right nazis identified and prosecuted, and left the country for a few years after getting death threats as a result. Windisch also called them a “milquetoast lib”. So it is particularly shitty and rude, and also failed to spot that the person in question has already moved back to the US.
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky^1^ (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.
transcript
it's cool that you're doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned
it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys don't even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so i'm sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses
for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowsky's fever dreams
gyges went off the deep end quite some time ago, up to and including support for a crypto/ai grifter's “dystopiabreaker” claims that not falling with the autoconfabulator crowd is basically being anti-vaccine.
there's nothing centrist about him, along the lovely racist theophite, he's one of the more aggressive confabulation machinery grift promoters.
Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this week's stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and it's just as cursed as you would imagine.
That's it. That's the post.
Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says "brain damage" and "increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits"). I have to admit I did not know this.
...is the only reason EAs were ever into "malaria nets" because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?
In my brief foray into it, actually I met singer once lol at a lunch about it, no. Really just that it's a cheap way to save people that were otherwise ignored because of racism.
You still encounter disgusting narratives about overpopulation and people living in Africa, despite most of these people's resource consumption and thus strain on the world being completely negligible compared to the sort of people that love making those arguments.
Malaria is suuuuper upsetting and preventable.
There were always racists in the movement and its ideological foundations are shakey but they didn't have hegemony at the start.
the effort of rampant libertarians to jumpstart a social movement is going as well as expected
Not sure about the Libertarian connection, but the comments feature Eliezer Yudkowsky and at least one member of the MAPLE cult (Goldenberg).
A "no attacks on people's characters" policy seems like a terrible idea in this space because so many people are grifters, liars, and apocalyptic cultists. At some point you have to say "you are a bad person who uses false words to do bad things."
A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea
Rationalists: "Its not our fault that we got deceived and manipulated by SBF, lots of people were fooled by him! ~~pay no attention to the fact we repeated the pattern of falling for it with OpenAI and Anthropic also~~"
Also Rationalists: "You can't jsut call people ~~in or adjacent to our in-group~~ bad people!"
Also Eliezer: "There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it. "
when you're really good at convincing people to like ai
Embrace the AI because it's like the thing everyone loves in movies: xenomorphs
my feeds are full of news of the death of Wendell Berry who I have absolutely no relationship to but this quote is relevant to our interests
Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.
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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
