Just found this on sneerclub, this seems like a reasonable intro to the subject. Thanks!

Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?

I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me “wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies” I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.

Edit: thanks everyone for responses, I’ll get my friend started with Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse and then point him at rational wiki for any further questions.

Yeah it’s really bad, I’ve been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it’s not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it’s pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I’ve been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.

At least being on ravelry and checking out other people’s project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.

Ideally that would be the case, but the last few years were a disaster for the consumer electronics market due to all the RAM and GPUs in the world being sold to AI hyperscalers. So if there’s just physically no components to make these things from, then that’s that.

As others are trying to convey, it’s not about the bot but about allowing yourself to indulge in this behavior. The bot could be substituted for a rock or a rubber duck, but you are training yourself to subconsciously think that this behavior is acceptable. It increases the chance that you’ll one day start treating actual people like that.

Imagine this scenario: you come home after a long day of work. At work, you use AI a lot and curse and swear at it when it makes mistakes (which is often). At home, you ask your spouse/child/roommate/parent to do something for you, which they attempt but proceed to mess up. They apologize, and instead of handling it calmly you instinctively react like you’ve trained yourself to react - by screaming at them.

Is that what you want to be like?

Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Really weird, abstract and interesting. Anyone labeling it as Dark Academia or a magic school book is both completely correct and dead wrong at the same time.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar both have very interesting concepts and great executions.

When it comes to interesting concepts in fantasy/sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky has some bangers. Elder Race, Children of Time, or Alien Clay are some random example recs.

China Mieville’s New Crobuzon trilogy is really out there too. 2nd book is the best and can be read independently but does spoil some things from the first.

Spec-driven development is when you take these AI generated design docs and make it all you as a dev interact with. It’s waterfall but make it stupid and AI.

You give AI some guidelines and a feature description, then you twiddle your thumbs while it generates giant specs and occasionally asks you for some inputs, then you attempt to read the thing, give up, and give it to some other agent. Rinse and repeat until you burn a GDP of a small country in tokens and the agents agree that it’s going to work, and then you finally pull the lever and hopefully a feature matching all your specs appears. Or it doesn’t! And if it didn’t, it’s surely your fault because you didn’t give AI enough context.

I’m tired, boss.

I feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and they’ve done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise we’d surely be left behind 🫠

And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. I’ve tried it over the last few days since it looks like it’ll be mandatory for larger work.

And boy. Boy oh boy.

There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in R’lyiehian that would do it.

The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isn’t that bad, then it’s kinda working.

It’s just… idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, let’s be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think I’m supposed to read and correct but can’t because it’s unreadable. It’s like a textual white noise. It’s pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.

I think I’ll be defining all of my work as small from now on.

It’s perpetually in progress but what’s there is already pretty much a complete game, dev just can’t stop adding/revamping things. I’ve played it like 5 years ago, spent 50+ hours and had a great time. There’s also an active modding community.

I guess the silver lining here is that “his team” might accidentally discover some actual way to help sufferers of this disease? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

I don’t listen to this band much but I’m quite partial to Siamés - the Wolf. The animation, limited color palette, and the music all together feel very satisfying.

Depends where you live, it’s somehow still alive and well in Poland! You’d usually use the lowercase xd for a more refined and low-key vibe tho, the full caps ones are reserved for special occasions.

In Poland we use standard qwerty keyboards with Polish keyboard layout set (called Polish Programmers), you press alt+character to get the special version (like alt+s gives you ś, alt+a gives you ą and so on, the only nonintuitive one is alt+x which is ź, because alt+z is taken by ż). Combine with shift or caps lock for capital versions. No issues.

Fun, but I don’t love the Polish word selection because a lot of these are supposed to contain special characters and they’re not actual real Polish words without them.

Like blad - that’s not a word. Błąd is a word, it means a mistake. So does this count or no? Or kal vs kał, one is a word (means feces) and one is just some letters.

Wait, three? What’s the previous 2? I think I’ve only heard about this case (…and a lot about Mythos so that proves your point nicely).

I’d love it if Secret World (preferably the original release, not Legends) was a singleplayer RPG instead of the half-assed MMORPG that it was. You could lower the enemy density and respawns, maybe add some computer-controlled party members Guild Wars 1 style, and it would be the dopest thing ever. The lore, vibe, and worldbuilding in this game is immaculate, it’s just a shame it’s strapped to an MMO framework.

Sorry that that happened to you! Unfortunately there are many people in lesbian communities that can be quite judgemental about such things.

And some people just simply haven’t considered the difference between being attracted to and physical enjoyment derived from sex with somebody. Look at asexual people (who generally experience very limited or no sexual attraction) - some of them are having partners and enjoying sex, and it’s incorrect to say that they aren’t ace anymore because of that (although there has been some drama regarding this topic, go figure). Same in your case.

I’d say saying you’re a lesbisn is absolutely fine - you’re the final arbiter of your own identity.

Arbitrarily forcing a choice to clarify your feelings on the matter can actually be very useful, it’s just a bit rude to use other people for it. When I have a choice like this I’ll sometimes throw some dice (d6, 1-3 for white, 4-6 for blue), if I’m happy or don’t mind what they landed on then it’s the correct choice, if I’m not I’ll probably realize which option I was secretly hoping for and go with that.

I had to check what community I’m in, still can’t believe this is not the Onion.

Nah, honestly anything better than the bottom-of-the-barrel acrylics is going to add up quickly when you buy enough of it to make something like a sweater. If you want to use natural fibers (wool, cotton, I’ll take bamboo too) that’s a large jump in price, even if you’re not getting anything too fancy. And I feel like if I’m going to spend months hand-knitting a sweater, I don’t want to end up with something that’s all plastic and will degrade in a year.

I do also have some fancy hand-dyed yarns that were properly expensive and these ones are indeed 100% on me :P But they’re not really what I’m talking about here.