Founder, 13/50 Project Pronouns: We/Us Will never inject experimental biotech gel.
Joined May 2010
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How about this: Government regulation that just happens to result in a duopoly, with both companies making generous political contributions (mostly to the DNC)
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
No, she does not realize anything.
No, she will not realize anything.
No, she will not change her belief system.
Because she has none.
Only high-testosterone, high-IQ heterosexual males speak and act as a result of their mental model of the system as a whole. Everyone else just says and does whatever they think will keep them safe, and maybe get them a pat on the head.
Her mental model is not "Diversity is good for France."
Her mental model is "if I say diversity is good for France, others will approve of me".
If you have enough voters who believe things simply because others believe them, democracy becomes irrelevant.
Actual opinion no longer matters, only the illusion of consensus. Because the people who are swayed by the illusion of consensus become the swing voters, and everyone who actually needs to be reasoned with becomes irrelevant.
That's what women's suffrage is really for. That's what immigration is really for. That's what government school systems are for. They are all for generating a critical mass of voters whose opinions are formed outside their heads.
That's why the entire Western political class appears to hate high-T hetero White men suddenly and all at once.
Western high-T hetero White men are the demographic that advances civilization at all, but they are also the greatest impediment to managerial rule. And guess which one the political class actually cares about.
So, no, women are not going to suddenly wake up and reverse course.
You are not going to seize power by changing women's minds.
You must change women's minds by seizing power.
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
When I say that women lack the concept of an honorable enemy, this is what I’m talking about.
Obviously a lot of the Democrats’ new vindictiveness is Trump derangement, but the Great Feminization is part of the story, too.
Men understand that the other guy is a professional just like me, and we should have an open fight by fair rules and both go home at the end of the day.
For women, conflict isn’t over until the other side is gone and they never have to talk to them again.
Men believe in hierarchy, so a fight is about establishing dominance within the hierarchy and making the other guy subordinate.
Women don’t, everything is egalitarian and consensus-driven, so if you do get conflict, the only possible outcome is total exclusion from the group.
It makes sense that the Democratic Party is abandoning old-fashioned ideas about honorable conflict as it becomes more dominated by women.
ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.
@ElissaSlotkin
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
Orwell understood well how utterly vapid many young adolescent females were & how vulnerable they were to Letist ideologues. In solidarity with the African migrant who set a french lady's face on fire leftists are trying to prove it's not that bad. xitter.cf/silly_200/status/21096…
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
October 6th, 2026
OpenAI Releases the Final Ten Minutes of 500 Previously Unreleased Films, Ushering in a New Era of Movie Watching
ALT OpenAI Releases the Final Ten Minutes of 500 Previously Unreleased Films, Ushering in a New Era of Movie Watching FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI today announced Endings-500, a public GitHub repository containing the final ten minutes of 500 feature films that have never been released, screened, or watched by any human being. Each ending has been formally verified in LeanBack, OpenAI's automated ending-verification system, which confirms that every film does, in fact, end. For decades, these 500 films have stood among the most stubborn open problems in cinema. Studios, critics, and audiences have long wondered how they turn out. As of today, that question has been definitively answered 500 times, by a system that has also definitively not explained any of the answers.
ALT What "verified" means Every ending in the repository passes LeanBack's rigorous checks. The verifier confirms that the final frame is followed by credits, that the frame rate remains consistent throughout, and that no scene contradicts any other scene contained within the same ten minutes. Scenes outside those ten minutes were not provided to the verifier and are therefore assumed to be fine.
ALT Highlights from the release Ending #217 closes with a woman whispering "And that's why we can never go back to the lighthouse." No lighthouse appears in the final ten minutes. The ending is verified. Ending #88 contains a major twist. We are confident it is a twist because the music changes and three characters gasp. What it twists remains an exciting direction for future work. Ending #341 consists of nine minutes and forty seconds of a man walking slowly toward the camera, followed by twenty seconds of him saying "So." LeanBack rated it among the most elegant endings in the set. Ending #403 initially ran nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds and was flagged by the verifier. The issue was resolved by appending two seconds of black screen
ALT Known limitations Three endings were found to contain an unresolved sorry. In each case, a character says "sorry" and the credits roll. We consider these endings complete, pending review. Twelve endings rely on an unstated axiom that it was all a dream. Four rely on the axiom that it was not a dream, which is in tension with the twelve. We are treating these as separate theories. Several endings appear to resolve storylines from films other than the ones they belong to. This may indicate a surprising and deep connection across cinema, or a file-naming issue.
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
aged like milk, I know...
I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does.
I am very happy that I’m allowed to say “I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does.”
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Korbak was fired ~3 weeks later. He says for safety concerns/METR talks (his job); OpenAI says mishandling sensitive info, not for speaking out.
x.com/tomekkorbak/st…
x.com/OpenAINewsroom…
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
Reading the comments of junior mathematicians confirms what many senior mathematicians have been warning about over the past month:
It is becoming clear that people with the intellectual ability to understand these proofs will not be interested in spending their lives training to check LLM logs.
This is the tragic side of what is happening that almost no one — except the actual mathematicians — seems to get.
Either we figure out how to keep people interested in doing mathematics, or in 20 years LLMs will have no one’s work left to recombine into new proofs, and no one interested in reading those proofs.
That would be the thermal death of mathematics.
The argument that “LLMs will read LLM math” is so shortsighted that it makes me want to cry…
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
You didn't misunderstand. The recent SPR releases are structured as exchanges (loans): companies return the borrowed oil plus a premium of extra barrels (around 20-25%), so the reserve refills with more volume later at no taxpayer cost, independent of market prices. Returns are scheduled over time into 2027-28.
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
Yes, exactly!
The best analogy is probably "flying", which is a word associated with birds.
Airplanes can outperform birds on some tasks, but they don't do it by "flying".
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
I wrote an essay about the imminent death of all science.
Go read it, it's fun!
doomslide.substack.com/p/mat…
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.
I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.
First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.
The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.
Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.
I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.
Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)
Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.
Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.
[Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
I think it's time to hang up my Three.js hat.
First of all, this is not a pity post—I'll be fine. I'm also not 100% confident about this.
But I'm an over-sharer and like to talk out loud, so I thought I would share some thoughts on where I see things going and why I'm considering quitting Three.js development.
Some signals I've noticed lately that have gotten me thinking:
- Since Astra was released, I've probably seen at least 10 posts from different people that have achieved similar quality to Three.js Water Pro or better.
- Someone downloaded a video recording of one my posts, fed it to Astra and recreated it with 90% accuracy
- I've had less and less clients referrals
- A Three.js developer I respect very much is retiring from the industry due to impact of AI and lack of interest
- I've heard 2nd hand accounts of other developers losing majority of course/plugin sales due to AI
- I've noticed Three.js posts have shifted from work created by seasoned developers to vibe-coded games and demos.
Fundamentally, I no longer really see value in what I do when it can be replicated so easily.
I've always enjoyed working on hard problems. Naturally, outsourcing the hard part to an agent takes away a lot of the enjoyment for me. High-level orchestration of agents does not tickle my brain in any special way.
At the end of most days I feel unfulfilled and bored. I honestly feel like I've lost much of my critical thinking ability as I've stopped coding. I find it harder to focus on tasks and my attention-span and comprehension is noticeably dropping.
My plan right now is to finish up Water Pro v4 and see how that performs. After that, I think it's time to start thinking about what else is out there for me.
I'd love to hear thoughts from other developers & freelancers on the matter, positive or negative.
Feel free to vent!
Friendly Nationalist retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me