i occasionally read their posts when i want a sincere-seeming, self-consciously capital L Liberal’s perspective. “They’re less annoying than the chatterers of the ezra klein/MattY/Noah Smith/Jon Chait class” is about the nicest thing i can say about them. This is a bad sign i guess, but i don’t really care that much at the end of the day.
i generally like Dr. Fatima, so i was curious about this video, but it was pretty disappointing. I have several more thoughts but i wanted to keep this reasonably short.
The first section about “back end harms” is the best part. Unfortunately, section 2, the “Front End Harms” section names valid problems but falls flat when it comes to solutions. She rolls out a lot of lib tropes about “education” and gestures at companies self-regulating the sycophancy of their own models despite evidence (a massive amount of it if we consider corporate “self-regulation” more broadly) to the contrary. Remember “media literacy” discourse about social media misinformation? it went nowhere, because it’s not a problem that can be solved with education, it’s imperative to actually learn lessons from history and bring this technology under political control. You cannot do this effectively when your government is 3 monopolistic corporations in a trenchcoat.
She says that anthropic are “better than the competition” which is trivially true but extremely credulous. If faced with the choice, I would prefer that Claude beats out Grok and chatGPT but this is ultimately a marginal difference due to the nature of the industry and ultimately of capitalism itself.
Section 3 is fine for what it is, but it’s really about the psychology of persuasion and not AI as such. Some of the discourse on this site would benefit from the reminder that moral absolutism isn’t very persuasive, but this section is way too long, we can just dispense with the moralizing and “harm reduction” anyways, because just like plastic recycling, personal reduction in AI use for harm reduction reasons is a fake solution to a systemic problem.
The harms of AI are intimately linked with the nature of monopoly & platform capital. You cannot defeat this enemy if you cannot actually describe it properly, and no amount of leveraging NIMBYism to defeat your local datacenter project will fix it.
Maybe Dr. Fatima isn’t the right person to be delivering that message, or simply doesn’t view the problem through a materialist lens. It’s not enough to be against AI, you need to be for something. This is the disease of liberal technocratic managerialism and it manifests in myriad ways including AI critique. We need to move beyond it.
i regret to inform you all that another technonce manifesto has hit our collective psyches. If you woke up with a headache today, this is probably why, gratis Alex Karp:
greatest hits:
- Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
the “government is like a business and should be run like one” meme, for the dumbguys
- Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
naked hypocrisy from the man who wants to erase a nebulously defined “leftism” from public life.
- No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
Sure, our society structurally requires an increasingly large fraction of the population to be economically precarious and eternally on the precipice of financial ruin and death, but it could be even worse! you should be grateful.
- We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . .
BE NICE TO ELON! sure, his ideas are vaporware bullshit that don’t make sense, but he produced a lot of shareholder value and is definitely not just enriching himself. Another one for the dumbest people you know to seal clap over.
Every single bullet point here is sneerable, but i’ll stop there and let other people have some fun.
in a world of draftkings and polymarket, this almost feels quaint. the stock-based gambling houses are losing to the prediction markets and sportsbooks and they’re flailing around trying to catch up. I wish them all the worst
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html
Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 400%
I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.
The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. The stock surged over 400%, from under $3 a share up to $13. The shoe company had a market cap of about $21 million Tuesday.
Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn’t a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?
Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.
if even half of this is true, it’s really fucking bad lol
to what extent does he actually believe this? is that even a meaningful question? i think this narrative is way too esoteric and absurd to really convince anyone, so it doesn’t even appear valuable if his goal is to flood the zone with post-truth nonsense.
monkey’s paw curls and AI destroys the profession by creating infinite andrew tate and freshnfit clones so that more people than ever watch manosphere podcasts, but no actual humans can make a living from producing them.
this is nearly as dumb as elon’s “show me your 5 best lines of code” shit while he was err, downsizing twitter. What are you supposed to do when a code review flags some bad code? fondle your prompts repeatedly until that part gets fixed? Sounds like a solution that will often be much less efficient than making edits by hand. Maybe they just don’t do code reviews now, that would be cool.
It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality and that’s just amazing, i love it for everyone. I choose to laugh rather than cry.
i don’t know if it’s a convention even in the “serious” AI research industry to use anthropomorphic jargon, but it drives me up a wall to see shit like this:
17.6 Theory of Mind Limitations in Agentic Systems
Agentic systems don’t have “theory of mind”, they cannot infer mental state. they are probabilistic word generators operating within non-deterministic frameworks. They can have a system prompt that tells them to generate text that appears to be an interpretation of another entity’s “mental state”, and they can even be directed to refer to it as context, but it is not theory of mind and the entity they’re generating in reference to may not have a mind at all.
I wish there was some way to stop these dorks from stealing the imprimatur of cognitive science.
the answer is definitely not to sanction and attempt to destabilize them on behalf of your two equally evil regional client states. The corollary to that is that you cannot produce the necessary conditions for future prosperity by destroying their economy in a way that harms the average person more than the elites.
And that’s assuming that we (the west) even want them to prosper or care about their future as a nation. Perhaps in an alternate universe, that would be the motivation for regime change but that is not and has never been the case.
i expected alastair reynolds to look different but i’m not sure what i actually expected him to look like
you’re right, Amodei and others have published a lot of criti-hype, shameless hype, and delusional anthropomorphization in the past few years. While i was looking for other examples of their bullshit I found this article which was published just after my comment, with a nice sneer:
edited to say thanks for sharing the article
https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421
Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn’t actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.
i don’t find that name too strange, it’s a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth
They’re not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter
Their financials are not even in the shitter! except insofar as their increased AI capex isn’t delivering returns, so they need to massage the balance sheet by doing rolling layoffs to stop the feral hogs from clamoring and stampeding on the next quarterly earnings call.
anyone who can get a job at palantir can get an equivalent paying job at a company that’s at least measurably less evil. what a lazy copout
while it’s obviously stupid and misguided to try to hold the nobel foundation criminally liable for making yet another bad selection for a prize that has been given to egregious war criminals (kissinger), it is a very funny joke.
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent — where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you don’t control, can’t inspect, and didn’t shape.
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
this is extremely low hanging fruit but i have to do it:
https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2051374498994364529?s=46
marc andreessen reveals his AI prompt. my favorite part is where he tells it to use as many words as possible, as if LLMs are normally too terse. But i also really like the part where he tells it not to hallucinate, and the part where he tells it it’s really smart as if that will make it do a better job.
really, the whole thing is an elaborate way to say “make no mistakes, but anti-wokely”. Thought Leader in the investment space btw.