In his second twitter account, Brangus / Ronny Fernandez talks about using substances including LSD and 5-MeO-DMT which is found in plants and the Colorado River Toad, as well as methamphetamine. He says its really funny to drug women without them knowing to gaslight them, and that he uses substances before committing sexual abuse. I updated the big post on LessWrong and psychedelics.

I have tried and failed stopping the ensloppification of my company, and I have failed greatly. We now have a new policy that you have to write a justification for making a PR yourself instead of using the chatbot. All the strict checks that were implemented over the years (clear documentation, no more than x files per commit/PR, etc.) are out of the window.

This comes after the push for a fucking AI audit where every employee is supposed to justify why they are not using LLMs for certain tasks. Also some person blew the token limit with some web scraping bullshit last cycle and was lauded for embracing the technology.

Also our CEO has recently begun subtly insinuating he's now heard of fucking AI doom cultists.

I hate everything.

Unsurprisingly, the Coxon dipshit who is getting all the press for quitting his cushy AI-industry job is a MIRI fanboy:

I've been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can't deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.

If MIRI was Sam Altman's old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can't work in it, isn't this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?

The way I relate to rationalists is it's like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These "specialized minds" can also make them off-putting to many people.

I don't know if I'd consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.

"I'm intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I'm sold!"

Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he's an absolute wanker.

Tired of people misrepresenting HPMOR as a Harry Potter fanfic where Harry uses science to study magic.

Anyone who has actually read the fic knows it's a Death Note/Waiting for Godot/Spaceballs crossover fic about aristocrat failchildren bringing glowstick swords into an airsoft match. There are zero superfluous sentences. Every sentence a painting, especially when Glup of the Most Noble and Ancient Judean People's Front of Shitto casts Compelled Duel on Backgroundella O. C. Technicallynot of the Superlatively Posh and Antiquarian Judean Popular Front of Whatsherface.

In the words of Anton Chekhov: if you establish in the first act that you must never burn anything you have transfigured, you must have a character transform something into a rocket in the third act and then fire that rocket without any harm done. This will prove you're a better writer than Chekhov.

Final exam question: You are facing the most reddit serial killer of all time and his dumbass henchmen. Armed with only your wits and a spell that can transform anything into anything else, devise an escape. For extra credit, invoke one or more of the following science fiction plot devices: nuclear fusion, carbon nanotubes/fullerenes, wormholes/warp drives, neutronium, wave/particle duality, brown notes, grey goo, the anthropic principle, quantum tunneling, Maxwell's demon.

HPMOR: the only novel that has been fully read by fewer people than mistakenly believe to have fully read it.

Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.

https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera

Very brief observations from micahflee:

https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v

This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software.

• It's on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021
• It's on Android patch level 2018-06-5
• It's running Linux 3.18, released in 2017

This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities.

Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.

Fucking android?

No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective 'wtf is wrong with these people' and 'wait all the top AI guys are like this?' moments. And it is funny to see.

Sadly the 'you can't explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people don't believe you remains a bit true.

E: ok one link: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3mvpuq2deo22u (Guess this is a reference to the SE Gyges thread).

The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have decided that Jacob Coxon does not need an encyclopedia article all about him for now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jacob_Coxon

So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to 'slow down' "AI" development:

1. it's too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
2. the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and there's no obvious way to fix that

I'll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.

edit I missed "blatant regulatory capture"

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/14/big-ai-sets-out-its-terms-for-regulatory-capture-and-calls-it-pace-the-frontier/5296067

Bethany Brookshire (who's an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:

People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists.

And one even got PUBLISHED.

In Science.

Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:

The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!

I've seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren't all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. [...] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said "Hell no!". Who has the time to do someone else's job? They tried "me", "I" didn't deliver, so no thank you.

I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their 'do not commission' list because of this person's actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they've had a bad experience with the fake one.

More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I'm not sure what we can do about that.

Science has retracted the fraudulent story.

Sorry for the X screenshot but XCancel is shut down from legal pressure.

Normally I'd sneer at their 10% chance of extinction claims, but now that I think about it, if you take their claims seriously at face value, you realize just how these people are monsters. We rightly condemn brutal dictators who commit genocide, but even their crimes would pale in comparison to anything with a 10% chance of exterminating all of humanity.

These "reasons" are laughably indefensible given the supposed stakes here. The first is already terrible, and they just get worse.

1. The only moral thing to do here is to immediately stop working for the AI companies, and do whatever you can to stop anyone else. It's not okay to piss in a pool just because you suspect other people are also doing it. And what makes you think that somehow you are uniquely positioned to succeed in making it safe?
2. This is the Sam-Bankman Fried defense (complete with a reference to "EV" (expected value)). When you decide to gamble with the lives of everyone in the entire world, did you first ask them if they are okay with you gambling with their lives? Sure, I might die, but if the ball lands on red, things will be great! How moral does this sound?
3. What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, "At least I had fun and got rich and worked on 'cool tech' with friends."

Now, I think that these people sincerely believe that AI has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, because their minds have been poisoned by Rationalist ideology. Their Rationality is so effective that after Bernie Sanders took their premises at face value, they were shocked when Bernie immediately came to the conclusion of locking these people up for 20 years.

There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script. The rule of law does not even occur to them as they treat the extinction of humanity as just another dinner table conversation starter.

from engadget: Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments

the AGI is making the diamandingo bacteria!!! P(doom) just went up 4 epistillion percent

Via catturd2.bsky.social (probably no relation),

https://gizmodo.com/fbi-warns-ice-agents-not-to-trust-any-woman-willing-to-date-them-2000814283

Something something domino meme leading from “eron gjoni can’t handle being dumped” to “women in long dresses and who cover their hair declared national security risks”.

Just saw on r/sneerclub:

Department of War CTO twitted: "The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸"

And there's a photo of Trump with the text: "AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!"

Here's the reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1wj6r6n/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneerclub_vote/

University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:

And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I'm like, what do you want me to do? I can't control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn't tell me what it was.

The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who's the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They're going to figure out a way.

Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-must-create-the-shit-machine

Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.

Your favorite "CEO said a thing" journalists, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, are leaving their current podcast and starting a new one.

When they started Hard Fork, they chose the name from the soon-to-be-moribund blockchain concept. Calling their new podcast "Machine Gods" makes me more hopeful than ever that the AI bubble is about to burst.

Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:

Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts aren't wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.

This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then 'volunteering' to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage 'Too big to fail' t-shirts floating around on ebay.

Fun times!!

US government is using spicy autocomplete to hallucinate fake nuclear threats

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship

A critical piece on EA from somebody who actually lives in one of the poorest places in the world.

Somewhere in 2021, I contacted about a hundred people (mostly individuals) who identify as effective altruists, asking them not for money, but for social media posts ...

... one wrote back saying, “I usually share projects that have been vetted by Givewell or a similar organization….Why do you think your project is more effective compared to all the others?”

All that over a social media post.

Carl Brown (Internet of Bugs) has an excellent video about how to actually achieve AI safety, i.e. actually hold these fuckers accountable for their behavior. If I had a program run for several weeks that hacked into Hugging Face, even accidentally, I would get my ass hauled into a courtroom and thrown in prison. But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.

When will people finally understand that actions speak louder than words? Follow the money! Follow the incentives! Do you really think that there is any real reason that these companies would give a shit about safety?

Although, in the case of the AI industry, I can't fully blame people who don't follow AI news, since the AI industry has highly refined propaganda (inherited from rationalist propaganda, and helped along by the preexisting notions of AI from science fiction).

Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that?

6 August 2013, SANTA ROSA, Calif. (CN) – In a lurid lawsuit, a former employee claims the Marin County-based Foundation for Critical Thinking is a “cultlike” group whose married bosses tried to make him have sex with the wife, and fired him for refusing. ... Hale, a 40-year-old married man and father, claims he quit his job as a high school teacher to accept an offer to work as a “full-time Fellow” for the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) in August 2004. According to the complaint, the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based in Tomales, “trains educators how to analyze information in an ‘objective ‘fair-minded’ manner, without allowing their own biases, prejudices and opinions to influence their objective analysis of an issue. It is a ‘think tank’ of sorts that promotes a casual work environment. Defendants Elder and Paul frequently hold meetings at both FCT offices and their personal residence, where they sit and lie on the floor amongst pillows. To encourage the free flow of ideas, defendants Elder and Paul often discuss uncomfortable topics, and encourage employees to rid themselves of social, including sexual, taboos. ... About three years after he was hired, Hale claims, Elder and Paul began bringing up “inappropriate sexual topics” and asking him “about his sex life with his wife” during business meetings. ... In October 2010, Hale claims, Elder and Paul graduated from discussing sex to encouraging him to have sex with Elder. After calling Hale to a meeting, Paul “explained to Hale that he was concerned about defendant Elder, his younger wife by approximately 20 years, and wanted to ensure that her sexual urges could be satisfied,” the complaint states. “Defendant Paul proposed that Hale should have sexual intercourse with Paul’s wife, defendant Elder, while defendant Paul observed them. Hale immediately became uncomfortable and anxious, as he listened to defendant Paul, and worried about his ability to keep his job, if he declined. Hale politely declined defendant Paul’s request.”

I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.