I wonder if this is just a really clumsy attempt to invent stretching the overton window from first principles or if he really is so terminally rationalist that he thinks a political ideology is a sliding scale of fungible points and being 23.17% ancap can be a meaningful statement.

That the exchange of ideas between friends is supposed to work a bit like the principle of communicating vessels is a pretty weird assumption, too. Also, if he thinks it's ok to admit that he straight up tries to manipulate friends in this way, imagine how he approaches non-friends.

Between this and him casually admitting that he keeps "culture war" topics alive on the substack because they get a ton of clicks, it's a safe bet that he can't be thinking too highly of his readership, although I suspect there is an esoteric/exoteric teachings divide that is mostly non-obvious from the online perspective.

I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. […]

Honestly what he should actually be grateful for is how all his notoriety ever amounted to^[1]^ was a couple of obscure forums going 'look at this dumb asshole' and moving on.

He is an insecure and toxic serial overreactor with shit opinions and a huge unpopular-young-nerd chip on his shoulder, and who comes off as being one mildly concerted troll effort away from a psych ward at all times. And probably not even that, judging from Graham Linehan's life trajectory.

[1] besides Siskind using him to broaden his influence on incels and gamer gaters.

Elon Musk wants to use imaginary future chatbot technology to brainwash (white) people into turning their vaginas into clown cars

"AI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system," referring to the part of the brain responsible for human emotions. "That said, I predict — counter-intuitively — that it will increase the birth rate!" he continued without explanation. "Mark my words. Also, we’re gonna program it that way."

Lasker himself is known to go by a pseudonym with a transphobic slur in it.

That the TPO moniker is basically ungoogleable appears to have been a happy accident for him, according to that article by Rachel Adjogah his early posting history paints him as an honest-to-god chaser.

AI is the product, not the science.

Having said that:

• Alignment research: pseudoscience
• AGI timelines: pseudoscience
• Prompt engineering: pseudoscience
• Problem solving benchmarks: almost certainly pseudoscience
• Hyperscaling: borderline, one could be generous and call it a failed experiment
• Neural network training and design fundamentals: that's applied maths meets trial and error, no pseudo about it
• I'm probably forgetting stuff

Sounds like they should nationalize OpenAI.

His commenters really didn't like the 'white' part.

Steve Saller is in the comments calling himself moderately reasonable. Also woke enabled pakistani rape gangs in the top comments.

Cracker Johnny calls this 'an unironically stunning and brave article and I'm here for it. I appreciate your post.'

TTLX thinks we should move to the obvious next step and finally start talking about how this is affected by deliberate sexual selection, combining inceldom and eugenics in a way that shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Siskind chimes in to say that seeing results in 2-3 generations is unlikely unless you get real hardcore about it and only allow the top 10% IQ havers to reproduce, otherwise more like 20-30 gen for 15 points, because that's how it worked for Askhenazis and also something something china.

There's also the communal living, the workplace polyamory along with the prominence of the consensual non-consensual kink, the tithing of the bulk of your earnings and the extreme goals-justify-the-means moralising, the emphasis on psychedelics and prescription amphetamines, and so on and so forth.

Meaning, while calling them a cult incubator is actually really insightful and well put, I have a feeling that the closer you get to TESCREAL epicenters like the SFB the more explicitly culty things start to get.

Here's a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, and alse separately highlights new posts, to make long running threads easier to follow. I'm posting it in the stubsack because it's the thread I had in mind when writing it.

Pasting it in the browser's console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I've cross tested it any... Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won't steal your crypto, or mine any new.

In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.

edit: Also if you prepend javascript: to the code and store it as a bookmark you can just invoke it by calling the bookmark, like a macro, see https://awful.systems/comment/4173451

Note: longer threads don't load all comments at once, so you'll have to rerun the script if you scroll down far enough.

edit: fixed for Edge, because why wouldn't it show dates differently there.

edit: updated it to check if there's a (xx New) notice in the post count in the OP and use the number to highlight the latest xx posts, i.e. all post made since the last time you were here. Change the value of variable newPostColor if you don't like the lovely shade of lavender I picked. Depending on if edited posts are counted as new or not the count might be off, and like, what if there's a new post that's also been edited? Solving that seems to mean moving away from the warmth and comfort of the quick and dirty territory, and also is there a public philthy repository somewhere?

edit: here's how it looks in the SAP thread:

edit: NEW: added some legibility changes and also consecutive executions now toggle old post highlights.

Code now in spoiler:

(() => {
    function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
        const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
        return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
    }

    const newPostCount = (() => {
        const text = document.querySelector("span.fst-italic").textContent;
        return text.includes("New") ? parseInt(text.match(/\d+/)[0]) : 0;
    })();
    const newPostColor = "#783AFF";

    const timestampNodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
        .map(x => {
            return {
                Node: x,
                PostBox: x.closest('.ms-2'),
                Date: Date.parse(
                    x.dataset.tippyContent
                        .split('\n').at(-1)
                        .replace(/Modified |at /g, "")
                        .replace(/(?<=\d+)(st|nd|rd|th)/g, ""))
            };
        })
        .filter(x => x.PostBox != null)
        .sort((x1, x2) => x2.Date - x1.Date);

    const minDate = timestampNodes.at(-1).Date;
    const maxDate = timestampNodes.at(0).Date;
    const hl = (dt) => getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, dt);

    timestampNodes
        .forEach((x, i) => {
            if (i < newPostCount) {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = newPostColor;
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.person-listing').style.textShadow = '1px 1px 0.75px #FFFFFF';
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            }
            else if (x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor == "") {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = hl(x.Date);
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            } else {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = "";
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = "";
            }
        });
})()

An interesting read in general but the writers proclaiming themselves ethical hackers in the opening paragraph only to turn into wittle birthday boys as soon as it turned out their uh experiment caused major disruptions was mildly off putting.

In yet another part of the article:

She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.

More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.