I do wonder how much of the disconnect is in whgo gets considered part of the rich and powerful. Like, a lot of that 30% probably think specifically of liberal academics, celebrities, Democratic politicians, etc. and exclude or excuse people like Elon and Trump and whoever of his friends isn't currently the scapegoat for why he isn't ushering in the promised glorious reformation.

I mean I guess given how the current guy took a chainsaw to American soft power, industrial capacity, economic prospects, and so on I guess our wildly over funded military is probably the only comparative advantage we unambiguously hold onto.

It's also a trend that I don't see stopping without a major structural change. I don't think there's a point at which they're going to say "we've cut enough corners and are going to stop risking stability and service degradation." The principal structure driving the economy, especially in the tech sector, is organized around looking for new corners to cut and insulating the people who make those choices from accountability for their actual consequences.

It feels almost like Anthropic is trying to make this a marketing opportunity by reaffirming their mostly-illusory ethical stances. That was their original pitch against openAI, and this puts them rather than Saltman back at the center of the ai hype news cycle.

It's theoretically possible to keep them separate, but I would assume in this case that it's evidence that regardless of intentions CFAR and lightcone are sufficiently closely linked to be basically the same organization. I mean, if there's not a separate legal entity then I would assume anything involving money is going to require the same person or persons to sign off on the transaction, regardless of what the board looks like.

Somehow I had never found that dragon army retrospective before and had the fascinating experience of wanting to explain to someone that "no, what you're describing is actually a cult. Like, you're describing being a cult leader." Which is usually not the person to whom the cult dynamic needs to be identified and explained.

I mean it's not too far off from the standard color revolution conspiracy theories where nefarious American intelligence agents and NGOs are working towards regime change and civil strife across the world in order to advance their sinister ideology. But where the "classical" color revolution conspiracy serves to undermine anticommunist movements in Eastern Europe surrounding the fall of the Soviet Union by positioning them as patsies or victims of the CIA, this newer variant that Moldbug is working with is trying to discredit American domestic anti-imperial/anticolonial/antifascist sentiments by positioning them as puppeteers of oppressive foreign regimes. Kind of an uno reverse card being played on the original story, but one that fits with how the American right conceptualizes itself and its domestic opposition.

FT reports from Amazon insiders that they're investigating the role AI-assisted development has played in a spate of recent issues across both the store and AWS.

FT also links to several previous stories they've reported on related issues, and I haven't had the time to breach the paywalls to read further, but the line that caught my eye was this:

The FT previously reported multiple Amazon engineers said their business units had to deal with a higher number of “Sev2s” — incidents requiring a rapid response to avoid product outages — each day as a result of job cuts.

To be honest, this is why I'm skeptical of the argument that the AI-linked job losses are a complete fabrication. Not because the systems are actually there to directly replace the lost workers, but because the decision-makers at these companies seem to legitimately believe that these new AI tools will let their remaining workforce cover any gaps left by the layoffs they wanted to do anyways. It sounds like Amazon is starting to feel the inverse relationship between efficiency and stability, and I expect it's only a matter of time before the wider economy starts to feel it too. Whether the owning class recognizes what's happening is, of course, a different story.

Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.

the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men

You're not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don't take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.

However, the whole "good times breed weak men" meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It's rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it's also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.

And I'm sure he's sent several notices explicitly declaring that lack of contract between them that a judge evaluating the lien would be interested in.

Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?

"In what other profession do you need panic buttons?"

I'm just gonna look awkwardly at bank tellers, convenience store clerks, and so many other front-line customer service jobs that either have or would greatly benefit from a panic button to deal with dangerous customer interactions or outright robbery.