In case you needed more evidence that the Atlantic is a shitty rag.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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The phrase "adorned with academic ornamentation" sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.
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got sent this image
wonder how many more of these things we'll see before people start having a real bileful response to this (over and above the fact that a number of people have been warning about exactly this outcome for a while now)
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transcript
title: I gave my mom's company an Al automation and now she and her coworkers are unemployed
body: So this is eating me alive and I don't really know where else to put it. I run this little agency that builds these Al agents for staffing firms. Basically the agent pre-screens candidates, pulls the info into a neat report, and sends it back so recruiters don't waste hours on screening calls. It's supposed to be a tool, not a replacement.
My mom works at this mid sized recruiting company. She's always complained about how long it takes to qualify candidates, so I set them up with one of my agents just to test it. It crushed it. Way faster, way cheaper, and honestly more consistent than most of their team.
Fast forward two months and they've quietly laid off almost her whole department. Including my mom. I feel sick. Like I built something that was supposed to help people, and instead it wiped out my mom's job and her team. I keep replaying it in my head like I basically automated my own family out of work.
Pressing F for doubt, looks like a marketing scam to me.
It's pretty screwed up that humble bragging about putting their own mother out of a job is a useful opening to selling a scam-service. At least the people that buy into it will get what they have coming?
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Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile and they're a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man "agency" has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.
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The usual suspects are mad about college hill’s expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, I’m in bed and can’t be bothered to link at the moment.
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
Weird rp wouldn't be sneer worthy on it's own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), it's contributing factors like...
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the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)
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the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (he's literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)
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the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)
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the fact that Eliezer think it's another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)
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the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of character's working for literal Hell... is certainly an authorial choice)
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and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)
...At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.
And it shouldn't be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.
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I'm sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If it's not the implicit racialization of everything, it's the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.
You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, we're going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and that's final.
To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!
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Gary asks the doomers, are you “feeling the agi” now kids?
To which Daniel K, our favorite guru lets us know that he has officially ~~moved his goal posts~~ updated his timeline so now the robogod doesnt wipe us out until the year of our lorde 2029.
It takes a big brain superforecaster to have to admit your four month old rapture prophecy was already off by at least 2 years omegalul
Also, love: updating towards my teammate (lmaou) who cowrote the manifesto but is now saying he never believed it. “The forecasts that don’t come true were just pranks bro, check my manifold score bro, im def capable of future sight, trust”
look at me, the thinking man, i update myself just like a computer beep boop beep boop
Clown world.
How many times will he need to revise his silly timeline before media figures like Kevin Roose stop treating him like some kind of respectable authority? Actually, I know the answer to that question. They'll keep swallowing his garbage until the bubble finally bursts.
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So, as I have been on a cult comparison kick lately, how did it work for those doomsday cults when the world didn't end, and they picked a new date, did they become more radicalized or less? (I'm not sure myself, I'd assume it would be the people disappointed leave, and the rest get worse).
... prophecies, per se, almost never fail. They are instead component parts of a complex and interwoven belief system which tends to be very resilient to challenge from outsiders. While the rest of us might focus on the accuracy of an isolated claim as a test of a group’s legitimacy, those who are part of that group—and already accept its whole theology—may not be troubled by what seems to them like a minor mismatch. A few people might abandon the group, typically the newest or least-committed adherents, but the vast majority experience little cognitive dissonance and so make only minor adjustments to their beliefs. They carry on, often feeling more spiritually enriched as a result.
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New piece from the Financial Times: Tech utterly dominates markets. Should we worry?
Pulling out a specific point, the article's noted how market concentration is higher now than it was in the dot-com bubble back in 2000:
You want my overall take, I'm with Zitron - this is quite a narrative shift.
Meanwhile on /r/programmingcirclejerk sneering hn:
transcription
OP: We keep talking about “AI replacing coders,” but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.
Comment: The future of coding is jerking off while waiting for AI managers to do your project for you, then retrying the prompt when they get it wrong. If gooning becomes the de facto way to program, maybe expecting to cum will be baggage we'll need to unlearn.
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New Atlantic article regarding AI, titled "AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event". Its primarily about the author's feelings of confusion and anxiety about the general clusterfuck that is the bubble.
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Ran across a viral post on Bluesky:
Unsurprisingly, the replies and quotes are universally outraged at the news.
Every task you outsource to a machine is a task that you don't learn how to do.
And school is THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LEARN THINGS, JESUS H. FUCK
"AI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system," referring to the part of the brain responsible for human emotions. "That said, I predict — counter-intuitively — that it will increase the birth rate!" he continued without explanation. "Mark my words. Also, we’re gonna program it that way."
Here's my idea to increase the birth rate:
Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won't have horrible lives.
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Our Very Good Friends are often likened to Scientology, but have we considered Happy Science and Aum Shinrikyo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
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Ultra-rare NIMBY W
Here's a blog post I found via HN:
Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and a Crisis of Credibility
Author works on ML for DeepMind but doesn't seem to be an out and out promptfondler.
Oh, man, I have opinions about the people in this story. But for now I'll just comment on this bit:
Note that before this incident, the Malaney-Weinstein work received little attention due to its limited significance and impact. Despite this, Weinstein has suggested that it is worthy of a Nobel prize and claimed (with the support of Brian Keating) that it is “the most deep insight in mathematical economics of the last 25-50 years”. In that same podcast episode, Weinstein also makes the incendiary claim that Juan Maldacena stole such ideas from him and his wife.
The thing is, you can go and look up what Maldacena said about gauge theory and economics. He very obviously saw an article in the widely-read American Journal of Physics, which points back to prior work by K. N. Ilinski and others. And this thread goes back at least to a 1994 paper by Lane Hughston, i.e., years before Pia Malaney's PhD thesis. I've read both; Hughston's is more detailed and more clear.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
- Michael Shermer: dry and limp writer, horribly dull public speaker, sex pest
- Sabine Hossenfelder: transphobe, endorser of sex pest Lawrence Krauss, on the subject of physics either incompetent or maliciously deceptive
- Eric Weinstein: Thielboy, he totally invented a Theory of Everything, for realsies, honest, but the dog ate his equations
- Curt Jaimungal: podcast bro who doesn't even rate a Wikipedia article, but in searching for one we learn that he has platformed a Bell Curve stan
- Scott Aaronson: author of a blog named for a sex fantasy, he has the superpower of making people sympathize with a cop
- Chris Langan: racist, egomaniacal kook
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A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:
On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubble's all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industry's relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,
Looking at the replies and quotes of a Bluesky post that shared some anti-AI headlines, one definitely gets the sense that a segment of the population will greet the bubble popping with joy not seen since Kissinger died.
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From the r/vibecoding subreddit, which yes is a thing that exists: "What’s the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it?"
what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they’re doing. makes me think vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part. am i missing something here or is it really just useless once you step outside the fantasy
(via)
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Okay so I know GPT-5 had a bad launch and has been getting raked over the coals, but AGI is totally still on, guys!
Why? Because trust me it's definitely getting better behind the scenes in ways that we can't see. Also China is still scary and we need to make sure we make the AI God that will kill us all before China does because reasons.
Also despite talking about a how much of the lack of progress is due to the consumer model and this is a cost-saving there's no reference to the work of folks like Ed Zitron on how unprofitable these models are, much less the recent discussions on whether GPT-5 as a whole is actually cheaper to operate than earlier models given the changes it necessitates in caching.
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so it's been observed by many that github's been getting worse for a while as they keep shoving copilot into every corner
with the upgrade diff review, I wanted to quickly fold closed the 485 files in the diff. I could've sworn github's diff view used[0] to have a button for this, and I know bitbucket does[1], but nope. so of course I open browser inspector to dig at elements (then quickly iterate over them with .click() in the js console)
which is when I noticed that even the elements are renamed for copilot:
<copilot-diff-entry data-file-path=".cargo/config.toml">
which both makes me wonder my memory is right and this did used to have a button that was just overlooked in the rush for terrible chatbot shit, and makes me boggle at how astoundingly far the org is deepthroating this nonsense
[0] it's been a few years of no longer actively using github
[1] fairly recently for client work
Not sure why this "member of technical staff at METR" felt the need to post about the lowered productivity of Black people in the southern US states after slavery was abolished. I'm sure it's nothing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zr37dY5YPRT6s56jY/thomas-kwa-s-shortform?commentId=iwGgqsmpY6Tcex5je
Free people have less prodictivity, time to wirehead everyone! A Brave New World!
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gwern: It's not "AI slop" if I wasted hours dicking around with MidJourney to make it.
rsaarelm: People don't appreciate the beauty of Substack's built-in slop generator.
gwern: "I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations." Have you appreciated the depth of my artist's statement?
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Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use Three Times as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the Entire City Of New Orleans, every year.
https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3lwyxhchxos2g
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New edition of AI Killed My Job, focusing on how translators got fucked over by the AI bubble.
The thing that kills me about this is that, speaking as a tragically monolingual person, the MTPE work doesn't sound like it's actually less skilled than directly translating from scratch. Like, the skill was never in being able to type fast enough or read faster or whatever, it was in the difficult process of considering the meaning of what was being said and adapting it to another language and culture. If you're editing chatbot output you're still doing all of that skilled work, but being asked to accept half as much money for it because a robot made a first attempt.
In terms of that old joke about auto mechanics, AI is automating the part where you smack the engine in the right place, but you still need to know where to hit it in order to evaluate whether it did a good job.
It's also a lot less pleasant of a task, it's like wearing a straightjacket, and compared to CAT (eg: automatically using glossaries for technical terms) actually slows you down, if the translation is quite far from how you would naturally phrase things.
Source: Parents are Professional translators. (They've certainly seen work dry up, they don't do MTPE it's still not really worth their time, they still get $$$ for critically important stuff, and live interpreting [Live interpreting is definetely a skill that takes time to learn compared to translation.])
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TIL some rats have started a literal monastery to try to defeat the robot god with good ole religion (well, Zen buddhism)
here's a mildly critical view that apparently still believes the approach has legs
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENCNHyNEgvz9oo9rr/briefly-on-maple-and-the-broader-community
I note in passing that there seems to be a mild upsurge in religious-friendly posts on LW lately.
Announcing my sneerclub follow up to MAPLE: “Man, All These Losers Are Bonkers” aka MATLAB
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