Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th April 2026

JFC at least wait until you have a de-facto monopoly before musing about extracting the rents! This is capitalism 101.

Ah right, I need to get a 365 license for word, which comes with a free copilot agent, who needs a 365 license for its copy of word, which comes with a free copilot agent, who needs a ...

Ahh sh*t if all my rent-seeking employee-reducing dreams come true, i'll lose money on my product subscriptions rents! Quick! I should come up with bullshit that will solve everything!

It's ludicrous to pay taxes on the wealth your robots make, but it's savvy business to charge each software-delimited robot as a separate being - just like charging per-cpu-core was!

Also, it’s apparently enough for an LLM endpoint to be paired with an email inbox to be considered an “embodied agent”, words mean nothing.

This is a very interesting glimpse into the managerial class' psyche. A person is their email address. Very simple. Why would you need more than that.

Do you get a refund when an "agent" inevitably blows out its context window and starts emitting deranged output, or does that automatically get rolled over into starting up the next "agent"

Unless he specifies his problem was with ostensibly leftist academics being specifically too dismissive of race science and incelist tropes this is worthless, just run of the mill face-leopard schadenfreude.

Also the second half (the what? what's the cut-off point?) of his career has been if anything more mask off, and it's not like he stopped whining about woke after posting a half-hearted disapproval of trump like three days before the election after years of writing about how cool it would be if there was less regulation especially for healthcare.

I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts,

He admits it!

"It's only monarchy if it's got a Habsburg jaw, otherwise it's just sparkling tyranny."

Good link, thanks.

The commenter totally missed what a shock the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI were. The natural reaction to "if the king is bad just kill him" is for the king to more or less aggressively remove threats to their persons.

Love a good no true Scotsman in the title.

Unrelated: apparently our king/queen (no idea which one specifically was to blame) is why .nl doesnt celebrate 1 may.

On one hand, I appreciate their acknowledgement that legitimacy matters to a government's ability to govern. While the talk about the king as a figure tied to a broader structure that creates obligations and requirements just as strongly as it does power and privilege isn't entirely historically accurate it's at least less absurd than Yarvin's notion of the dictator as a kind of unmoved mover - someone with both absolute power and absolute discretion to do what they want with it.

At the same time, if you follow that chain of thought to it's actual conclusions you end up with some kind of radical democracy. Like, legitimacy is just a way to ask the question of why anyone should bother to do what the guy calling himself king says. Historically speaking this often boils down to trying to judge how credible the threat of violence is should you refuse. If the king isn't going to be around in a week due to an ongoing succession crisis then there's no point in getting ready to pay his taxes next month, essentially. But if we reframe the question another answer becomes available: why should people consent to be governed? And the democratic answer is that the government represents their interests and is trying to organize and take actions they support. Government by consent of the governed is a descriptive statement about how governments operate, not a normative one about how they should. Once you account for the extra costs and consequences of needing to manufacture consent through violence and repression the supposed efficiency of dictatorship evaporates.

If all you have is a blog, it's natural for you to think that you can effect regime change through blogging.

But there's a very large step between

1. blog a lot
2. ???
3. absolute CEO-king

Culture matters. The US has had a de jure republic for almost 250 years. Even though the presidency has steadily moved to a more central role, it's one thing to have a literal KING in place. There needs to be a story there, and saying "we need to be more effective or the Chinese will win" doesn't really cut it.

It took France almost 100 years to finally establish republican rule: revolution, Directory, First Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist monarchy, Second Republic, coup, Second Empire, catastrophic military defeat, Third Republic.

Then we get narrow Pyhrric victory in WW1, defeat again, collaborationist dictatorship, 4th republic, de Gaulle gets fed up, 5th republic.

Even today the French president has more power than in many other republican constitutions.

How does Yarvin propose to remove the republican idea from American consciousness?

The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.

What the fuck happened here. How did a shoe company get so high and how on earth did it lose 98% of its value? Were shoes really big during covid and then the demand disappeared, wtf

What makes all this extra funny is Yuds lifes work. Wants to ensure AI alignement and fix human rationality. Creates terrorists instead.

Reminds me a bit of his AI in the box experiments, which according to the stories always worked on his fans, but as soon as somebody skeptical did it, he stayed in the box.

I've never understood how these things are simultaneously gaining their abilities based on statistical analysis of all kinds of random writings online including social media, fanfic, reddit, etc. but also are simultaneously supposed to end up as experts rather than a much faster and more agreeable dumbass. Like, the training data may include all the great works of literature, all the scrapable scientific studies and textbooks they could steal, and so on. But it also included every moron who ever shared conspiracy theories on Twitter, every confident-sounding business idiot on LinkedIn, and every stupid word that Scott or Yud ever wrote. Surely the bullshit has to exceed the expertise by raw volume, and if they took the time and energy to curate it out the way they would need to to correct that they wouldn't be left with a large enough sample to actually scale off of.

Basically, either I'm dramatically misunderstanding something or the best we can hope for is the Average Joe on Reddit, who may not be a complete dumbass but definitely isn't a team of PhDs.

"Cursed spaghetti"

🤌

This feels somehow tied to the whole "agentic" thing I've ranged about previously. Like, individual acts of violence are strictly destructive because the people doing it aren't sufficiently "agentic" to change things, even though American history is full of cases where (usually racist) vigilante violence had a huge impact on people's decision-making. But when the government does it it's different because people in government got there by proving their agency and ability to actually impact the world. Like, it feels almost like he's offended that the NPCs might try and do something as drastic as killing someone without GM permission.

Meanwhile in reality, people legitimately do feel like they don't have a lot of options to protect themselves from the real harms this industry is doing, to say nothing of the people who buy his line about the oncoming class-K end-of-life scenario. Anger is an appropriate response to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn't be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.

eliezer misses that (as used in decolonization/civil rights era) nonviolence is effectively a sophisticated propaganda strategy that takes existing injustices and violence and uses it to bait opponent into attacking you, all while your own people take photos and show to entire world carefully crafted messaging that appeals to general public conscience. the messaging part is extremely important in this. there's no fucking way this could work for him because his cause is comprehensible only to those who already buy his cult messaging as ground truth. he's in just for the moral superiority of being nonviolent. he's never gonna get it because comprehending it requires touching grass

But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force.

Remember the cartoon of the bombs being dropped on people and the people going 'I hear the next bombs will be sent by a woman', this but 'with lawful force'.

We end up 100% dead after slightly more time.

On a long enough timeframe...

Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals

This is always one of those things that baffles me, and makes it clear to me these people have never even been close to any real movement. All these movements have violent and non-violent parts. Hell, you see it even now with the far right, they have a violent and non-violent part, and the non-violent part scores points by pointing to their violent friends and going 'we are not with them' while going to the same parties, sharing the same ideas, and all being friends with each other. Hell, look at the various LW people who went 'wow, all these rightwingers in our mids are horrible' and then not stopping being friends with them. I see now how Sam got the drop on all these naive people.

It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell

Life is too short to be that pompous

Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don't know his main messages. It used to be orthodox that you cannot have a two-faced message any more without each audience learning what you say to the others, but that assumed you were a good communicator aiming at a mass audience.

Yud has strange views about legal responsibility:

Anthropic Claude Mythos is already a state-level actor in terms of how much harm it could theoretically have done -- given its demonstrated and verified ability to find critical security vulnerabilities in every operating system and browser; and how fast Mythos could've exploited those vulnerabilities, with ten thousand parallel threads of intelligent attack. Mythos hypothetically rampant or misused could have taken down the US power grid, say... at the end of its work, after introducing hard-to-find errors into all the bureaucracies and paperwork and doctors' notes connected to the Internet.

But if you release a virus and it infects people, we don't hold the virus responsible, we hold you. If you build a car and it explodes when it gets rear-ended, we don't blame the car, we blame you.

From the second post:

A seasoned security leader would never build a defensive program and then measure offensive capability only, making remediation a second-class story. That is the kind of dog and pony show that any good security initiative would slam the door on. Or it’s like a surgeon telling you they have an even sharper scalpel to cut you deeper and faster. Yeah, so then what?

Dark and paranoid thought: given that Anthropic very recently ran into issues with their defense contracts, are they playing up their offensive capabilities targeting a notoriously tech- and security-illiterate political establishment to try and force their way back into those sweet government contracts as an impossible-to-ignore offensive tool? I mean we've talked about how the cash burn rate for all these companies is sufficiently absurd that it's going to take something truly crazy to turn these companies self-sustaining before the world runs out of investor money, and military and intelligence budgets are notorious for dragging ludicrous amounts of public money into a dark alley where nobody can see what's happening to it.

The notorious socialists at the (checks notes) World Economic Forum rank social mobility in the USA as 27th in the world behind Sweden, Germany, Canada, and Japan (!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States So this seems like another demonstration that being very rich is like being kicked in the head by a horse or drinking a bottle of wine a day.

There is quite a contrast between the call for conscription (6.), the whining that civil servants have too much pay and respect (8.) and the praise for public life (9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.) I think he means that earning a living wage for getting up every morning rain or shine and delivering an old man's bank statements is BAD, but if you accept a modest position as Chief Technology Officer or Cabinet Secretary nobody should be allowed to criticize you.

Okay much as I'm angry and want to I'm resisting the urge to go point-by-point until I have more time. But I also want to point out that in form it seems like The Beigeness has really caught on as a writing style. Like, we have 22(!) individual points, each of which gestures vaguely at the kind of militant interventionist white nationalist technocracy that could conceivably power the unholy chimera of a silicon valley tech giant and a murderous beltway defense contractor. But unless the book does so more openly, they avoid clearly stating the actual thesis. It's not really surprising, just interesting to note the pattern spreading from Rat spaces into the broader right wing.

That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants,

bah! Virginian voters need to read more LessWrong, where the benefits of both are explained beneath impenetrable layers of posts.

Also this evisceration of Zvi:

As for his argument regarding political violence, I’d point him toward John Locke, Nelson Mandela, Franz Fanon, or Walter Benjamin, but what’s the point, none of them printed their arguments on Magic: The Gathering cards.

BTW what kind of site is Naked Capitalism? I've heard of it but never read it before .

writing this up for today, will be mentioning Ziz

The optics is that his actions would paint EA in a bad light.

I think SBF's Scamfest Spectacular did a good enough job of that already :P

HN is more focused on the idea that Altman and co. are fomenting class hatred and the attack is more akin to Luigi Mangione’s attack on a health insurance CEO.

Altman and co's antics have repeatedly shafted the working class to billionaires' direct benefit, so I'll give the orange site that on the "fomenting class hatred" part. Thinking his actions are any way related to Luigi Mangione nailing the healthcare billionaire's fucking wild, though

more akin to Luigi Mangione’s

Didnt he also have sort of links to the LW idea space?

just one more data trove bro

Are new data-hungry players entering the market of are we still pretending that shoveling more social media posts to the data furnace will somehow overcome structural limitations?

as someone who’s disabled, the idea of “ethical eugenics” pisses me off to no end. There is no ethical eugenics! You’re systematically destroying classes of people because they don’t fit your standards, there is no way to make it ethical when the very core premise involves taking away human rights

They do have consequences! Crowded schools and preschools and daycare spread all kinds of dangerous infectious diseases and there are consequences of getting them. With the arrival of COVID and the decline in vaccination risks are rising.

'Getting sick builds resistance' is another of the folk medicine beliefs which we in the infection control community have been fighting since 2020. Some diseases are milder the second or third time, but generally you want to get as few infectious diseases as possible.

Sweden is an interesting example because they pioneered the let-it-rip approach to COVID. That was less disastrous than it could have been but not great even in a country with a lot of detached housing and nuclear families. https://kevinmd.com/2025/01/swedens-controversial-covid-19-strategy-lessons-from-higher-mortality-rates.html I would not have recommended putting children in daycare without strict indoor-air-quality standards between 2020 and 2024.

the worst kind of violence, the sort against people like me

all those other deaths? those aren't violence

we also need to care more about property

The Zvi post really pisses me off for continuing to normalize Eliezer's comments (in a way that misrepresents the problems with them).

This happened quite a bit around Eliezer’s op-ed in Time in particular, usually in highly bad faith, and this continues even now, equating calls for government to enforce rules to threats of violence, and there are a number of other past cases with similar sets of facts.

Eliezer called for the government to drone strike data centers, even of foreign governments not signatories to international agreements, and even if doing so risked starting nuclear war.

Pacifism is at least a consistent position, but instead rationalists like Zvi want to simultaneously disown the radical actions, but legitimizes the US's shit show of a foreign policy.

Another thing that pisses me off is the ahistorical claim by rationalist that such actions are ineffective and unlikely to succeed. Asymmetric warfare and terrorist tactics have obtained success many times in history! The kkk successfully used terrorism to repress a population for a century. The black panthers got gun control passed in California and put pressure on political leaders to accept the more peaceful branch of the civil rights movement. The IRA got the Good Friday agreement. The US revolution! All the empires that have withdrawn from Afghanistan!

Overall though... I guess this is a case of two wrongs making a sorta right. They are dangerously wrong about AI doom, but at least they are also wrong about direct action and so usually won't take the actions implied by their beliefs. (But they are still, completely predictably, inspiring stochastic terrorists).

The MCP thing feels like an I like to leave my keys as a huge bulge under the welcome mat type vulnerability. It seems really easy to not do that and also something that is kind of out of scope for both lock makers and mat salesmen to address directly.

Maybe the MCP ecosystem is such that it's hard to both avoid this and keep the impression that you're doing magic and not just implementing a heavily annotated API, hopefully secured and with specific and well-defined functionality, and also they are all hacks.

refreshing to see people tale actual deep dives and explain in detail why Mythos is nonsense

I'm glad someone else was able to coherently discuss how ass-backwards Saltman's response has been. Like, if anything the fact that he responds to this moment by talking up the importance of democracy over emerging technologies should just be evidence before some distant future revolutionary tribunal that he knows his company is literally Sauron (okay, maybe more the Witch-King of Angmar than Sauron) and doesn't care because he wants to be the one wearing the ring at the end of the day.

Psychoanalysis really does seem to push the most obnoxious boundary in academic language. On one hand, it is legitimately valuable to create a specific framework to enable experts to talk about technical elements of the field. It reminds me of the old IT rant about users who think "turn on the computer" means "turn the screen on, no need to touch the actual computer part". But at the extreme it creates opacity for its own sake and makes it hard for people who haven't devoted their careers to the field to understand what's being done. Particularly in a medical or psychiatric field where the patient is by definition in a lower-information group than the person treating them, this amounts to making it hard for the patient to understand (and therefore consent) to what is being done to them. I am by no means immune to the simple pleasure of knowing something that other people don't, especially when the outside world reaffirms the value of that knowledge, and there is definitely a place for the specificity that this kind of jargon enables, but psychoanalysis seems to consistently stretch it too far.

Maybe it's just because I'm rolling back through Age of Mythology, but I died laughing at "it's like the centaur, Helen"

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

And seniors obviously grow on senior trees (assuming that this take is actually true)

So I don't have time to read the full paper and I probably don't have the background to make an informed critique of the methodology once I do (not that that's gonna stop me). But I feel like the challenge here is in mapping the distinction between junior and senior coding roles. To what extent do the senior coders get treated like a distinct job as opposed to being junior-but-seasoned?

Based on a quick amateur read of the abstract it looks like they're assuming the first option, that junior and senior developers are separate roles that can be largely disentangled. But if the other option is true, then in the event of a general industry downturn (say, after over hiring during recent periods of unsustainable growth) then it might make sense to look at the cuts to junior roles as simply removing the less efficient and effective people from the development role, rather than specifically cutting the juniors because they're uniquely exposed to AI replacement.

I don't know which model is more accurate to how the industry treats these roles or whether it varies by organization or what, but that's what seems like the most likely alternate explanation for the observed shift towards a very senior-heavy workforce.

or is there more going on?

One idea I've read about (heavily developed by Ed Zitron, but also a few other news sources and commentators have put it forward) is that SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses were heavily over invested in expectation of basically infinite growth over the past decade. SaaS growth was "exponential" in its early days, but then various needs of the market were basically saturated, so SaaS companies squeezed more growth out cutting cuts or upping how much they charged, and now it is finally catching up to them.

The AI hype means almost everyone tries to interpret everything the lines of AI causing it. The recent price correction in many SaaS companies was (mis)interpreted as the threat of vibe-coded replacements forcing them to cut costs. The SaaS companies trying to cut costs and going through layoffs is being misinterpreted as AI successfully replacing junior devs.

that looks like a heaping pile of correlation, without mentioning the general downturn

i heard that a couple of german dcs (owned by universities or other research institutions and therefore indirectly by state) do this, but this kinda depends on district heating grid existing and also puts some limits on thermal side, in simplest variant chips just have to run hotter. not to mention that it's kinda easier to do when you own the entire thing, long term, and can offload some of the engineering and design effort to some intern student writing masters or doctoral thesis. this works in part because when you switch from coal to gas and have district heating using that waste heat, there's less waste heat from CCGT of equal power, and it's all gone when you switch to renewables, so there's a grid that still needs some heat and dc boiler can fill that gap to a small degree. at the same time dc can't be the only source of heat because demand is seasonal and dc ideally should run 24/7 and while you can get enough storage for daily variation this won't be enough and some other source of heat is needed. this is why it makes more sense as a long term government backed project

People talked about doing this with bitcoin mining - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/16/bitcoin-crypto-mining-home-heating-energy-bills.html - but I'm not aware of anyone trying to scale it out or turn it into a company.

HEre's an El Reg piece about doing something similar for low-income UK homes

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/

You've reminded me about the whole edifice of Qanon lore where they would try to combine 4chan (and later even sketchier sites like 8chan) hints with whatever Trump was posting at the moment to decode secret knowledge about stuff like when the military tribunals executing all the democrats would be.

Anyway, in Eliezer's case, I kind of get the feeling the lesswrong rationalists have somewhat moved on from him? They are still excessively deferential to him, but the vibe I get from hate-browsing lesswrong is that the majority of the rationalists there put much lower odds on AI doom? (It's hard to tell exactly because Eliezer has avoided committing to timelines or hard probabilities on AI doom despite all his talk about putting probabilities on everything in the sequences). Lesswrong occasionally references his tweets but not that often. Like I think sneerclub actually references them more often?