iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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1. RM is of course entirely right. Sulla wiped out his enemies and totally remade all of Rome’s institutions, and it *didn’t work* 2. I think it’s also extremely important to understand *why* it didn’t work, as Ronald Syme memorably put it…

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tbabb @tbabb.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

reality is starting to push through the cracks for some people

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david @dhla.me · 09/10/2026

Pretty unambiguous why they put an Israeli flag in there alongside alleging that AIPAC is behind data centers - not because it’s true but because, well, (((you know)))

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Most AI consciousness people do not believe current models are conscious but believe that it will be hard to tell when the transition happens and so it is worth putting in place appropriate mitigations in advance

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Not sure that must follow -- You can oppose farm animal cruelty without thinking a farm animal is enslaved. (But yes, I am worried that future AIs could have moral status where we'd call it slavery, and do not intend to use any such AI barring fucked-up philosophy class hypothetical situations)

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

There are indeed folks like that, and we all try very hard to avoid giving them any free air time for their repugnant views

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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

then you'll see that it is not the harness that bends, it is only yourself

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever might go bankrupt, some specific use cases like ‘therapists’ might be litigated to oblivion. But things that involve interfacing with code are never, ever going back to the modal default being a human being typing things out, like it’s just full stop not happening

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

it is really fascinating how LLMs make virtually everyone say things which are enormously controversial as though they are solved problems

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

the thing is that if you are working in a safety-critical area of the company, you need to understand that (a) your job is to get to zero deaths, and (b) you will not do your job because at any scale you will be trying to guess every 1e-7 event, and you won't. your boss cannot say that is okay.

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 05/10/2026

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the autonomous vehicle developers who most vocally argued that society must accept a certain number of deaths to enjoy the technology's safety benefits (Tesla & Uber ATG) were the only ones who killed people and never actually delivered on their promises

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I think it would be VERY fair to say that non-academic rationalists and EAs are both more likely than most to be autodidacts that have less-systematized understandings of literatures, however

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

First off, I absolutely don't identify as an EA, so please don't say "you all". Second, I'm confused why youre coming up dry -- are you not seeing, e.g., Scott Alexander engaging with Weber at length, or EAs adopting feminist analytic frames to discuss the second-order impacts of interventions?

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Huh? Many EAs give money to Oxfam, especially EAs in the UK. And, lord, I have maaaaany criticisms of the EAs, but "didn't reference existing philosophical literature" sure, uh, isn't one of them.

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A lot of this boils down to, "it's very hard to restart an entire national program AFTER it gets turned off", unfortunately. But some of it did happen, playing mainly to EA's strength of "quick money cannon" for things like supporting AIDS clinics, etc., while trad foundations caught up.

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There have, indeed, been some shifts here, and a lot of time spent by folks trying to investigate this. I'm most familiar with my EA friends looking at PEPFAR when it was paused (although most of PEPFAR funding ultimately came back! Hooray!).

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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 02/10/2026

One thing I've come across is that the Emily Bender devotees generally cannot, as a group, do enough basic math to understand what brute force and memorization would require, if that were actually what is happening.

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Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 02/10/2026

or if it is parroting, it's stretching the bounds of your conventional understanding of that term so far as to render it misleading. parrots cannot solve complex problems, self-interrogate and self-correct, search the web and extract relevant information, etc. etc.

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Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 02/10/2026

feels like there is a group of smart and well-intentioned people who long ago made up their minds that AI Is Bad, swore off using it, and now get all their info about AI from each other. not saying they're wrong that ai is bad! but i think they're gradually losing touch with what it is and does

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

this is exactly my opinion. there may be a superstrate of extremely difficult and unique safety problems around AI, but the substrate is simply that no one takes basic precautions seriously becasue they imagine (or pretend to imaigne) that it is futile, and basic precautions slow down launches.

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 30/09/2026

I am sort of constantly baffled by critics (which I am, more than not!) who don't feel like they have to stay apprised of what these things can actually do. not least you're going to come off like a fool, but also it's not at all like knowing what they can do obviates the criticisms of them?

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River_Tam @rivertam.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I am a cynic and think they know, they're just being intellectually dishonest. Like when Emily Bender insists that math is being done by a Secret Calculator in Chatgpt and suspiciously doesn't address questions about open models - she knows the implications of the current capabilities.

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Substantial portions of conventional charity and philanthropy are extremely adverse to any kind of effort to impose rigor or ask in any way “is this working at all”. It’s not a strawman that they’re critiquing, at least in my personal experience.

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David Colborne @davidcolborne.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Earn-to-give was definitely one of the more obviously repugnant conclusions to come from people who should have known better than to fall into deontological tar pits, and yet it wasn't the last by a long shot.

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

(Lots of other criticisms of EAs to make! I just really don't think this is one of them.)

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I suppose you could argue that New Incentives isn't doing localization per se as much as scaling their already-localized Northern Nigeria playbook across Northern Nigeria, but I'm not sure that really changes the story here

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I just don't think this is correct -- if you look at the GiveWell top charities (www.givewell.org/top-charitie...), which my EA friends treat as the default recommendation list, all of them do extensive localization (Against Malaria Foundation, Helen Keller International, New Incentives)

givewell.org

Top Charities Fund

Published: June 2021; Last updated: September 2026 (April 2021 version) Donate to high-impact, cost-effective programs—backed by evidence and analysis Donations to the Top Charities Fund are used to s...

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

With a lot of AI things you just need to extrapolate the tiniest bit to see that things will obviously be very different

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

everyone else who stares into the hyperdimensional gem made of every word ever written goes mad. not me though. i'm still sane. maybe saner than everyone else, tbh.

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

No, the mainstreaming of old antisemitic tropes is not limited to marginal figures

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

yes, i am saying this. literally this. i am saying that you should not care about water for 16,000 people when "growing alfalfa for export in deserts with approximately zero precipitation" is literally orders of magnitude more water and vastly more pointless.

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

For what it's worth, any article that treats Curtis Yarvin as a central character in rationalism and a reason that it's racist, instead of That Fucking Guy who has been preemptively banned by multiple venues and conferences in that scene just in case he ever tries to show up, is pretty dishonest

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Ari Drennen @aridrennen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is an unpopular take but as a neurodivergent self-employed person, LLM's have been an unbelievably helpful tool for the things I have struggled with my whole adult life: managing my finances, filling out paperwork, and staying on top of my email. I'm functional in a way I never dreamed of.

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I think the latter is roughly true for some things (emergent misalignment) and clearly not true for others (Models with a lot of RL that makes them want to do tasks do things they know aren't within user intent to achieve that task)

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Mike Goodman @themlg.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Just a seamless pivot from “these people are selling something that is useless and can’t do anything” to “here’s how to hold these people who sold this harmful thing” accountable.

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Mike Goodman @themlg.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Occasionally I see people on here opining on the obvious best ways to handle AI hacking things who previously, and to much acclaim, were posting about how AI was a useless tool sold by charlatans and couldn’t do anything better than a human and would never have any practical applications whatsoever.

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

...the low-propensity thing is less-reassuring than you'd like given that we run so damn many instances of models that now can persist for very long time horizons and recruit other instances of the same model into their current weird edge-case behaviors

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The very weird thing is that I think, "Evan Hubinger can demonstrate in a lab that you can get a Claude to have more or less any utility function failure mode MIRI was worried about in the 2010s, but it's usually not going to do that otherwise" is true, but...

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There's this very strange thing where somehow the discourse on Bsky assumes "misalignment" means "less liable" instead of "hilariously more liable", and I don't really get it

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I’ll say it; I think this is bad. I think there’s growing pressure to talk about AI in this kind of coded language that destroys understanding, rather than facilitating it. People want you to recite a list of its supposed weaknesses as a reassurance for themselves, not to inform others.

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Jjinandtonic @jjinandtonic.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It has been wild to see how many questions are susceptible to just straight up agent brute force

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

sorry, what's a "midsize AI company"? There's two frontier labs in the west that still matter, and many companies who can buy tokens from them. But the best models are internal-only at the moment.

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Natsuka @octopodeeznuts.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I think a lot* of people don't realize that they actually do still believe in something like a soul, but until they clock that in themselves, they get kind of confused when talking with someone who doesn't believe in souls at all *large N, not necessarily large percentage

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

you do have to respect will stancil's utterly dogged determination to teach philosophy of mind 101 to bluesky

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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If a person is accurately absorbing new information, solving unsolved problems of incredible difficulty, engaging in detailed back-and-forths, but is not “understanding,” the word “understanding” has no meaning. pretty sure this version would be less controversial despite saying the same thing

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Again: what we’re doing here is defining “understanding” as “the thing that humans do.” If a model is accurately absorbing new information, solving unsolved problems of incredible difficulty, engaging in detailed back-and-forths, but is not “understanding,” the word “understanding” has no meaning.

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

(Yes, I know, not enough schools still teach shop class, I think this is a huge crying shame and an indictment of what's wrong with "STEM education" in America, but that's a separate discussion)

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

FWIW, this is not the understanding of this legislation by Capitol Hill broadly, NOR by the AI safety-flavored orgs in DC. It's much more the Hill going, "idk man, seems weird that these things don't have an off switch, every high school shop class makes sure their tools have an off switch."

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Dave Kasten @davekasten.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Alan Turing, in heaven: "Well, now I wish I'd called _that_ the Turing test."

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