stumbled across an ai doomer subreddit, /r/controlproblem. small by reddit standards, 32k subscribers which I think translates to less activity than here.

if you haven’t looked at it lately, reddit is still mostly pretty lib with rabid far right pockets. but after luigi and the trump inauguration it seems to have swung left pretty significantly, and in particular the site is boiling over with hatred for billionaires.

the interesting bit about this subreddit is that it follows this trend. for example

or the comments under this

or the comments on a post about how elon has turned out to be a huge piece of shit because he’s a ketamine addict

mostly though they’re engaging in the traditional rationalist pastime of giving each other anxiety

the cherries metaphor hinges on him willingly having eaten shit covered ice cream

about 3 in 100 americans are in prison, on parole, etc. so if that’s the definition of a criminal, you would get 97% accuracy by just guessing not criminal every time

he supposedly posted in a reddit ama many years ago that civ is one of his favorite games. since (1) it was a reddit ama and (2) i can’t find any other time he’s mentioned civ, i doubt it was him

there’s got to be a better name. bogocoding?

excellent method, compatible with all worst practices and suitable for posting on hackernews as well

was discussing a miserable AI related gig job I tried out with my therapist. doomerism came up, I was forced to explain rationalism to him. I would prefer that all topics I have ever talked to any of you about be irrelevant to my therapy sessions

deleted by creator

fascism also embraced fascism and is doing well, so by that logic the left needs to embrace fascism

ok so on the one hand fuck solitary confinement on the other hand

this is so embarrassing. “you say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?”

State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas”

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas

buddy,

the answer is yes

ok I looked up the transcript and these were the most spicy bits, which in my memory had come to dominate the whole episode

EDIT: her shtick does not seem to have been confined to this interview

I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.

he certainly doesn’t himself have such a mindset, and I am not convinced that he knows why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, nor am I convinced that it is necessarily a big deal. for example with five seconds of searching

All earth dams leak to some extent and this is known as seepage. This is the result of water moving slowly through the embankment and/or percolating slowly through the dam’s foundation. This is normal and usually not a problem with most earthen dams if measures are taken to control movement of water through and under the dam.

https://damsafety.org/dam-owners/earth-dam-failures

one would suspect a concrete dam leaking is pretty bad. but I don’t actually know without checking. there’s relevant domain knowledge I don’t have, and no amount of “engineering mindset” will substitute for me engaging with actual experts with actual knowledge

I listened to ezra klein’s podcast sometimes before he moved to the NYT, thought it was occasionally interesting. . every time I’ve listened to an episode since he moved it’s been some of the most credulous shit I’ve ever heard

like, there was one episode where he interviewed a woman whose shtick was spending the whole time talking in what I can loosely call subtext about how she fucked an octopus. she’d go on about how they were ‘tasting each other’ and their ‘fluids were mingling’ and such and he’d just be like wow what a fascinating encounter with an alien intelligence. this went on for an hour and at no point did he seem to have a clue what was going on

a really big boat is the ultimate compound. escape even the surly bonds of earth!

I think it’s more like $188,000 in stock, $31,000 in cash, annual pay of $45,000, and you currently have a $60,000 loan. the new loan would be an additional $16,000

According to The Information, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is planning to borrow $16 billion to invest in AI, and may borrow another $8 billion next year. The following points are drawn from The Information’s reporting, and I give serious props to Juro Osawa and Cory Weinberg for their work.

SoftBank currently only has $31 billion in cash on its balance sheet as of December. Its net debt — which, despite what you think, doesn’t measure total debt but rather represents its cash minus any debt liabilities — stands at $29 billion… They plan to use the loan in question to finance part of their investment in OpenAI and their acquisition of chip design firm Ampere.

According to SoftBank’s reported assets, their holdings are worth about $219 billion (33.66 trillion yen), including stock in companies like Alibaba and ARM.

am I reading this correctly: softbank has $50 billion in debt, equal to about 25% of their total assets? is that… normal? these are genuine questions, not sure whether I’m misunderstanding something/whether this is actually usual

I’m kind of puzzled that he would ditch the editorial staff. major publication opinion sections are pretty uniformly propaganda by and for comfy elites; I’d think he’d like that

also not clear on the connection between the AI story and the clearing out of the opinion section