r/BetterOffline post

Marcus article 1

Marcus article 2

(unpaywalled ver)

(reddit post)

Sneerers likely already know this, but compiling all this for future reference.

(Shoutout to Emile Torres for providing most of this)

From his Bankless podcast interview:

”have basic moral questions about whether it’s ethical for humans to have human children, if having transhuman children is an option instead. Like, these humans running around? Are they, like, the current humans who wanted eternal youth but, like, not the brain upgrades? Because I do see the case for letting an existing person choose, “No, I just want eternal youth and no brain upgrades, thank you.” But then if you’re deliberately having the equivalent of a very crippled child when you could just as easily have a not crippled child…..Like, should humans in their present form be around together? Are we, like, kind of too sad in some ways? … I’d say that the happy future looks like beings of light having lots of fun in a nicely connected computing fabric powered by the Sun, if we haven’t taken the sun apart yet. Maybe there’s enough real sentiment in people that you just, like, clear all the humans off the Earth and leave the entire place as a park. … Yeah, like … That was always the [thing] to be fought for. That was always the point, from the perspective of everyone who’s been in this for a long time.”

Clip from his interview with Stephen Wolfram where he says he’s not concerned with being replaced, only that he’s concerned that the thing replacing him won’t be ‘better’.

(full interview here)

Eliezer tweet about the ‘worthy successor’ and another one

And saving the best for last, from his podcast interview with Daniel Faggella:

“If sacrificing all of humanity were the only way, and a reliable way, to get … godlike things out there — superintelligences who still care about each other, who are still aware of the world and having fun — I would ultimately make that trade-off.”

(full interview here)

Feel free to add anything I’ve missed

Turning this sneer into its own post because you need to hate AI companies (and the US) more

The US power sector would emit 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, after factoring in planned AI projects. That’s 618 million tons more than 2025 levels, by the Sierra Club’s calculations, or about a 42% increase.

But how much is a difficult question to answer. There’s so much uncertainty in the projections for power emissions that the lowest and highest estimates differ by more electricity than the combined demand of California and Florida. The Sierra Club’s estimate of the climate impacts of the data center buildout is higher than others released so far. The wide range of projections is due to questions around how many facilities will actually be built, what technologies they will ultimately use and how much renewable energy capacity comes online over the next few years.

Originally posted about in the stubsack but decided to make this its own post because what the hell, let’s see how everyone’s favourite scenario is doing!

There are two takes on it: the author’s own (their 2025 evaluation is here) and another one from this website called AI 2027 tracker (not run by the authors) pretty sure this one only evaluates the qualitative predictions and not the quantitive ones

Both of them show that we are behind AI 2027’s predicted pace. By the author estimate: 2025 was only at 58% and 2026 is 69% of progress. AI 2027 tracker shows a consistent decrease in accuracy over time (from 100% to 81% to 91% to 46%)

From the Old SneerClub

From the recent influencer camp, our friends have made a parody music video on AGI apocalypse. I wish I was joking

now, I’m no business guy but this seems pretty bad for a pre-IPO OpenAI

More links: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/apple-openai-lawsuit-trade-secrets.html

https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-secret-theft/

Originally posted in the Stubsack, but decided to make it its own post because why not

this was already posted on reddit sneerclub, but I decided to crosspost it here so you guys wouldn’t miss out on Yudkowsky calling himself a genre savy character, and him taking what appears to be a shot at the Zizzians

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago

full transcript:

Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.

Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.

In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

I searched for “eugenics” on yud’s xcancel (i will never use twitter, fuck you elongated muskrat) because I was bored, got flashbanged by this gem. yud, genuinely what are you talking about