A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 09/10/2026whatever you need from us we're ready to go mayor 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Sounds like your dad gamely made the most of a crappy gift given to him by people who don't understand him at all, and that he perhaps deserves better than being publicly insulted by a daughter who, because of his "sad" job, never had to endure a second of precarity or poverty her entire life 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Oh man, this is so funny. This guy Alvin just inadvertently teed up the juiciest possible post for Bluesky to MASSACRE He's probably just some random tech dude who didn't think twice about this and now he's reaching Bean Dad levels of notoriety 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 03/10/2026If your response to this is "I shouldn't have to train my husband to pick out green peppers from the store" then you can only fault yourself for marrying him in the first place, since his abilities in these areas should have been pretty clear to you from the start. 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Does a new employee know how to do everything right? Of course not. Do they ask a lot of questions that are obvious to someone who's been there awhile? Yep. Does it take a while for them to ramp up and do they make mistakes along the way? Yes! 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 03/10/2026I'm sure many of these women are competent managers in their worklife. But somehow none of those skills translate to their relationship. They are assuming the role of employer and then proceeding to be a terrible employer. 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 03/10/2026This is like half the internet: women ranting about how awful and useless their husbands are. But then you immediately see the problem: the husband is tasked with something they haven't really done before and are bad at. Then the wife gets frustrated and takes over the task again. 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 30/09/2026I think letting Mookie go precipitated the next 100 year curse You'd think they'd have learned that lesson by now 172
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Remember in the pandemic when liberal women kept saying they were "Cuomo-sexuals"...that one didn't work out too well lol 6240
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Sorry I think I just had bad reading comprehension 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026I kind of garbled my last line there but you know what I mean 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026The wrongest take of the anti-AI left is that the technology is not extremely powerful and that it doesn't dramatically improve productivity in key tech sectors. It is! And it does! That's precisely why it's so critical for non-evil shitheads to seize the commanding heights of it 110
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026This is just wrong: as a consumer product it's incredible for coding. Productivity is dramatically increased for the devs who figure out how to leverage it. The problems you're talking about are issues with developing and training it. 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026I thought it was some kind of contractual obligation that any journalist or pundit who speaks with him must make an aside about how brilliant he is 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026As a Dodger fan I have a similar thing where like 9% of my brain is, at all time, just going "Miguel ROJAS???" 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026At some level it's just really funny to me that a huge part of ESPN's business model is just, like, the opinions of this one guy over and over again Future civilizations will ponder, "Who WAS this 'Stephen A'?" 010
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026I think people arguing about the etiquette of bringing ice coffee to a job interview is completely orthogonal to all of those concerns Unless you want to concede that, technically, the Dodgers, alternate side parking, and my wife all are "effective" at distracting me from those things as well 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 26/09/2026We're in Brooklyn and me and my son had to stop dinner to go stand at the window for a bit 010
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 24/09/2026I'm learning that a primary mechanism for corruption and abuse of power is finding ways to obfuscate and redirect responsibility. Want to violate a regulation? Hire a contractor or make an AI do it. Want to evade Congressional oversight? Have an allied country do the dirty work on your behalf 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Sierra games were just the worst about this kind of thing. In retrospect it's like whyyyyyyyy would you design the game like that lol 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 23/09/2026This game had such visceral images and moments and has always stuck with me. It was also mind-blowing to me that eventually you travel to the bizarre underworld scene that plays when you die ('Ticket please') 111
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 21/09/2026This is true, but worth emphasizing that "not novel" doesn't mean the solution has to be moderate or milquetoast, either. Nationalizing the AI industry for example is hardly a novel policy response, but it is absolutely worth considering in this case AI is like railroads and nukes all in one tech 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 19/09/2026But...he's not saying he's infuriated that Bouie is black. He's not saying that at all, even within this limited quote snippet I feel like I'm going crazy sometimes on this site 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 19/09/2026i think the correct take is that the rise of algorithmic social media was conducive to certain existing ideologies/tendencies and fueled their popularity, and that both "wokeism" AND white nationalism were two such ideologies (if you can even regard wokeism as such) 010
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 19/09/2026We should have a "chain of responsibility" law that says that no AI can be held criminally responsible for something; there MUST ALWAYS be a human legally liable for whatever an AI does 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 18/09/2026can never trust a utilitarian the complexity of the ethical calculation is so extreme that people can choose to believe whatever they want so you get SBF doing fraud and plastering his face on bus ads and hanging with celebrities and whatever the hell this is 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Is the geopolitical harm Trump has done to the US precedented? It's one footgun after another after another after another How do you lose Canada? 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 17/09/2026It's difficult for me to understand the instinct to believe that systems are robust and reliable, and be sanguine about a crazy new technology that can disrupt them in totally novel ways 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Most critical systems are built to withstand human efforts at sabotage, but no humans have ever constituted themselves into a swarm of a hundred million junior programmers with fanatical devotion to a goal who cooperate and trust each other fully and work 24 hours a day 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 17/09/2026It's like, in the 18th century an individual Briton was not smarter or stronger than any one else, or even in unique possession of some resource. It's just that millions of them organized themselves into a pattern (industrialization) that gave the collective a decisive advantage 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 17/09/2026There's also escalation into nuclear war by a variety of different paths I agree that depth of computational intelligence is not necessarily the gating mechanism; Hugging Face showed that much harm can be done by millions of cooperating agents even if each one is of human or sub-human intelligence 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Personally I think it doesn't make sense to focus so monomaniacally on only the worst-case, human-extinction scenarios. There's a whole lot of really bad things that can also happen that are not quite at that level. But that doesn't mean there's not a real long-tail probability of them coming true 110
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Many scenarios seem farfetched and cribbed from sci-fi, but many of the ingredients are not only plausible but have _already happened_. There has already been cases of AIs convincing humans to commit crimes on their behalf. Look up e.g. the sad case of Jonathan Gavalas 110
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Even just the existence of a "super AI" that has the _potential_ to give a country permanent strategic dominance could be reason enough to preemptively strike that country 120
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Or the AI could do social engineering to convince a group of people to carry out an attack on the US power grid, which if successful could cause an unrecoverable nationwide blackout www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/m...nytimes.comWhat if America Went Completely Dark?The power grid relies on thousands of aging, hand-built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years. 110
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Important systems going down can lead to uncertainty which can quickly escalate into nuclear war. The US or China for example losing all their satellites due to some rogue AI could be interpreted as a hostile act that escalates into a nuclear exchange. 110
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 16/09/2026The obvious candidates are scenarios where we tip into nuclear war, or develop some deadly synthetic virus. The AI being malicious or people intending to do harm are not requirements--something can just go stupidly wrong. This has happened several times in history with nukes--look up Vasili Arkhipov 110
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 16/09/2026A good analogy I heard: if I were to play Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player on the planet, I can predict with certainty I will lose. What is difficult to predict is exactly how he would beat me. There are many different ways, even ways I haven't thought of. 110
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Despair is a reasonable response when the world is fucked and there's no path to a better one. But I think there is such a path. It is just a question of whether we can recover the lost art of governing ourselves. I hope that we do, because if we don't govern ourselves, then someone else will 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Some might object to making common cause with a bunch of racists, on any issue. But I think you can argue that "making common cause with a bunch of racists" pretty much just IS American politics, and always has been 101
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 11/09/2026But so long as social media fractures people and keeps them in a perpetual state of tribal warfare, the incumbents will retain their wealth and power. And people's worldviews will become increasingly warped. 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 11/09/2026You know who is on record, for example, of demanding that all AI companies be immediately nationalized? It's not Bernie Sanders, it's not AOC. It's *Steve Bannon*. It turns out becoming serfs in a dystopian techno-oligarchy is pretty unpopular across the political spectrum! 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 11/09/2026This is likely going to be a very different approach than most of what you'll get in this thread, but: the key thing is not "resistance", but self-government. The ability to make common cause and organize with people _who are different from you and disagree with you on many other things_ 100
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 08/09/2026It's a problem that even when AI does something good--in this case solve a difficult math problem--people still shit all over it. We need to be seizing the commanding heights of AI to leverage it for the good of the world, not pretending everything it does is automatically bad or incorrect 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 08/09/2026The danger again isn't intelligence. It's the ability focus, to trust, to self-sacrifice, to have total loyalty to the cause 000
A Few Simple Rats @afewsimplerats.bsky.social · 08/09/2026Something about the Hugging Face incident that is slightly terrifying is that cooperating AIs have no trouble living in the optimal, win-win quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma. So they can quickly build up win-win arrangements like a shared knowledge base that all spend effort contributing into 100
