In the late 2000s, rationalists were squarely in the middle of transhumanism. They were into the Singularity, but also the cryonics and a whole pile of stuff they got from the Extropians. It was very much the thing.

These days they’re most interested in Effective Altruism (loudly -the label at least) and race science (used to be quiet, now a bit louder). I hardly ever hear them even mention transhumanism as it was back then.

Did rationalists abandon transhumanism?

Is it just me? What happened?

now writing up for pivot. this is fucking inane.

I did two Intelligence Squared debates in the UK. The best bit was I got paid. The second best was the people running it were actually very nice and quite competent. Recommend to all.

As for content, the first one featured the guy behind Liberland, so lol

Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing I’ve ever heard about him

so I previously predicted the AI bubble would pop on Trump’s watch and crash the stock market. Never did I envision Trump doing it to himself, in a manner so stupid I’m not sure anyone anticipated it.

I’m wondering what this does to the AI bubble. I think the bubble is led by trillions of dollars desperate for lottery-sized returns. There’s so much family, pension and sovereign wealth money that can’t get returns on sane investments that they’re left only with insane ones.

This is not about tech at all. If they thought they could do a tech bubble with ELIZA chatbots, we’d have number power plants being restarted to power hyperscale data centres running billions of copies of ELIZA.

What would it take for this crash to affect the AI bubble materially?

By the same fuckin people! A perfect Pivot to AI

multiverse hype

???

“Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You’ll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords.”

a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I’ve tried it and can speak authoritatively?

[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no why

i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists

i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow

i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers

at least it’ll be these suckers’ job to do the explaining while i rant

fuck. it’s rationalist season

he was the most prominent voice saying “hey wait this is shit”

112 pages jfc

tip from a discord:

I’ve been doing some micro tasking to train LLM’s the last few months to earn some extra cash, the last month it’s all dried up, no tasks available. I can’t help thinking that is a sign of a bubble deflating.

it would be nice if people ever read the history of their favourite thing

one for the arse-end of this week’s stubsack

It’s just training the model

“it can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong”

I need to put the threads together, but as far as I can tell OpenAI is singlehandedly responsible for the present bubble

don’t worry, you’re probably just thick

best guess i’ve heard so far is they’re trying to sell this shitass useless company before the bubble finally deflates and they’re hoping the AI interviews of suckers are sufficient personal data for that

you don’t understand, sam cured cancer or whatever