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William Gunn

@metasynthesis.net
642 followers 465 following 3K posts

Communications and community. More here: synthesis.williamgunn.org/about Talk to me: calendar.app.google/z4KR3xfXTc178es…

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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 9h
Reading this article was the first time I had heard of the song and I can't believe anyone still thinks there's a single shared cultural experience everyone has. lite.cnn.com/2026/10/01/e...
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 10h
If you're just a cog in a larger machine, can you really be evil? moloch.film
moloch.film
MOLOCH — a short film by Tom Cozens
As the technology she built rips her family apart and leads to worldwide job losses, an AI engineer battles the CEO of her own company to get control before it’s too late.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 30/09/2026
It's regrettable that we're all having 1:1 conversations with AI rather than contributing to a pool of knowledge like we used to. It's the pool of knowledge that AI is trained on. Efforts like this that lean towards the collective are appreciated: github.com/Asymptote-La...
github.com
GitHub - Asymptote-Labs/agent-beacon: The cross-harness, self-improving memory layer for AI agents.
The cross-harness, self-improving memory layer for AI agents. - Asymptote-Labs/agent-beacon
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 30/09/2026
Kids, the world doesn't owe you anything & you don't have to ask permission. Email whoever you want and if it happens to be someone like this, just note it and move on. It takes a lot of Nos to get to a Yes and sometimes the Nos look like "you shouldn't be doing this", but that's just their opinion.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 28/09/2026
If only there was some group that could analyze the impact of this intervention.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 28/09/2026
If a small group of antivax moms can have a huge political impact, why can't we? lite.cnn.com/2026/09/28/u...
lite.cnn.com
Parents confront a new fear: Could AI end humanity before their kids grow up? | CNN
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Reposted by William Gunn
McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 27/09/2026
"I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal." buff.ly/pykYN6f
buff.ly
It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers
For the seventeenth year: Welcome to autumn, fuckheads.
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Greg Depow @gregdepow.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
My paper with @chrisoveis.bsky.social, Emily Zohar, and @minzlicht.bsky.social about regulating empathy on social media is now out in SM+S doi.org/10.1177/2056.... We show that training individuals to 'share not compare' for + emotions and 'care not share' for - emotions improves their well-being.
doi.org
Wise Empathy Improves Well-Being on Instagram - Gregory John Depow, Christopher Oveis, Emily Zohar, Michael Inzlicht, 2026
Two-thirds of the global population spends significant time browsing social media, making it critical to understand how to improve online experiences to support...
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 25/09/2026
I love that literally all the comments are about the bogus x-axis.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 25/09/2026
Who was asking for this?
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ControlAI @controlai.com · 25/09/2026
A rogue OpenAI agent attacked the Australian government, hacking to get access to non-public files on Australia's Medicare statistics portal. OpenAI took nearly three months to notify the government. There's a suggestion it may have been part of a swarm.
blog.controlai.org
Rogue AI Has Hacked the Australian Government
As AI CEOs tell the UN Security Council we may lose control of the future to AI, Australia’s Prime Minister reports an attack by a rogue OpenAI AI agent… or was it a swarm? World leaders urge action.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 25/09/2026
The political winning condition is not when there's debate about whether there should be regulation, it's when opposing factions compete to respond to their constituents concerns most comprehensively. That seems to be where we are in Australia: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
theguardian.com
PM rejects ‘nonsense’ suggestion he delayed revealing OpenAI Medicare hack as Labor considers changing laws
Expert says Australia’s criminal laws should be clarified to determine how fault is applied to a corporation when its AI agent commits a crime
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 24/09/2026
Given how depressingly lowbrow natural debate has been lately, it's nice to read someone who can talk in full sentences and paragraphs about the issue of our times: newrepublic.com/article/2156...
newrepublic.com
To Wary Working People, AI Preemption Is the New Nafta
What I’m hearing on the campaign trail suggests a deep divide between how the people and the powerful are thinking about AI.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 24/09/2026
The HuggingFace hack gets all the attention, but OpenAI knew its agents were running wild as early as June. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
OpenAI agent 'infiltrated' Australian government website, PM says
Albanese said he expressed "concern" to OpenAI founder Sam Altman, after authorities were informed three months after the breach in June.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 23/09/2026
Yeah, about those leash-holders...
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 23/09/2026
That's not just my opinion, either. There's a lot of forecasters with solid track records who also think people are missing how fast things are changing: metaculus.substack.com/p/will-ai-ca...
metaculus.substack.com
Will AI Cause Human Extinction? Pro Forecasters Land at 7.5%. Our Most Dedicated X-Risk Forecasters Say 22%.
AI Doom, by the numbers: what Metaculus forecasters expect from AI, and why our Pros are more worried than the crowd.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 23/09/2026
The thing that troubles me is that people aren't good at exponentials, which causes them to discount the risks. It's easier to dismiss it all as marketing hype than reckon with the huge, possibly catastrophic, changes that we could be just years away from.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 23/09/2026
Are agents which can process information and communicate 10000x faster than you going to want you as a collaborator?
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moin syed @syeducation.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
New paper! Despite qualitative researchers claiming that generalizability is not a goal, their published work does indeed contain generalizable claims. We document this and provide recommendations for how all researchers can better calibrate their generalizability claims. doi.org/10.1177/2515...
article header for, "Qualitative Researchers Can and Do Generalize: Generalizability Claims in Qualitative Psychological Research". Metascience!
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 23/09/2026
I get that everyone wants to pour cold water on marketing hype, but don't let that blind you to how fast AI capabilities are increasing. A few years ago, it couldn't reliably count the letters in a word. This year, it changed software development and solved long-standing math conjectures.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 23/09/2026
Metaculus has a nice AI Risk Explorer, aggregating different forecasts: metaculus.substack.com/p/will-ai-ca... The forecasts are not comforting.
metaculus.substack.com
Will AI Cause Human Extinction? Pro Forecasters Land at 7.5%. Our Most Dedicated X-Risk Forecasters Say 22%.
AI Doom, by the numbers: what Metaculus forecasters expect from AI, and why our Pros are more worried than the crowd.
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Reposted by William Gunn
Stuart Buck @stuartbuck.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Just published this guest column about a huge White House vs. NIH battle that no one has yet publicly noticed: newsletter.goodscienceproject.org/p/policy-imp...
newsletter.goodscienceproject.org
Policy Impoundment
How OMB is using Regulatory Review to Slow NIH Policymaking
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 22/09/2026
Unsurprising that Meta would overpromise and then go full Theranos on its first real product from its new AI lab. money.usnews.com/investing/ne...
money.usnews.com
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 22/09/2026
I am once again begging students to stop turning everything into some kind of purity test. Listen to what your teachers are trying to teach, fully understand the lesson, and only then, and only if you must, offer critique.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 22/09/2026
The main thing people get wrong about AI is how fast it's moving. "AI can't do X, why worry?", and then weeks later it can do X. The second thing people get wrong is how much it generalizes over training. "Predict the next token" leads to having a whole model for how the world and people work.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 22/09/2026
Not perfect, but a start: c2pa.org
c2pa.org
C2PA | Providing Origins of Media Content
Enhance digital safety through the use of content authenticity tools. C2PA provides a way to ensure content transparency by analyzing the origin of media.
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Jason Ukman @jasonukman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
NEW: Reed Jobs, a prominent biotech investor (and son of another Jobs you may have heard of), calls for a doubling of the NIH budget to $100 billion. Via @statnews.com. www.statnews.com/2026/09/21/n...
statnews.com
The NIH budget should be $100 billion per year
“We should be strengthening our investment in the NIH, not dismantling it,” writes Reed Jobs.
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Chris Marcum 📖 @csmarcum.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Maybe OMB is impounding more than NIH's budget. More from me in the Good Science Project newsletter by @stuartbuck.bsky.social : newsletter.goodscienceproject.org/p/policy-imp...
newsletter.goodscienceproject.org
Policy Impoundment
How OMB is using Regulatory Review to Slow NIH Policymaking
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 18/09/2026
💯
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pavedwalden @pavedwalden.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I think segyges' thread is very bad. But something I learned from watching Dave Gerard do his thing is that people's love of good gossip and clear villains far, far outstrips their interest in separating fact from fiction. I can't change that. But I will ask you to not be a useful idiot.
screenshot from Twitter
Department of War CTO
@DOWCTO • Sep 16

[Image of Trump with raised fist, text that says
"The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country.
AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM]lotr "I never thought I'd fight beside an elf" meme but it's Bluesky and Trump
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 18/09/2026
Any take you might receive on social media about EA will leave you less informed than before you read it.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 18/09/2026
You're right. They're worried because they think millions to billions of people could die, and that would be bad.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 18/09/2026
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 17/09/2026
Good interview from Brendan Steinhauser of SecureAI: abcnews.com/video/136533... (see what David Sacks says about AGI!)
abcnews.com
Video Expert explains what meaningful AI legislation could look like
Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of "The Alliance for Secure AI Action," discusses the latest ongoing debate between politicians on AI regulation.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 17/09/2026
As a constituent, I appreciate you speaking up on this important issue. Please support meaningful safeguards. www.torchbearer.community
torchbearer.community
Torchbearer Community — Coordinating Humanity's Response to AI Risk
Torchbearer Community unites people across the world to push for comprehensive, humanist AI regulation — turning concern about AI risk into coordinated action.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 17/09/2026
Well done @intelligence.org & @cnn.com ! This is exactly the debate we should be having. lite.cnn.com/2026/09/17/t...
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 16/09/2026
You're so right! The 1580 AI researchers with concerns must all be in on the scam, too. They can't keep getting away with this! aiimpacts.org/wp-content/u...
aiimpacts.org
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 15/09/2026
I don't know what you're doing, but I've gotten information that would have previously required me to spend thousands of dollars on various professionals. This has led me to do work that I otherwise wouldn't have done and to buy things for that work. To each their own, I guess...
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
And everyone I know, none of whom are such.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
Perhaps time has already told.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
It can get access to a variety of cloud computing platforms, no?
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
The tech industry should have known they were making a Faustian bargain when they supported the guy.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
All qualify for me too! But those were written by developers for millions of people. Claude Code can also create bespoke apps for one person at a time, and millions of people would like to make themselves bespoke apps. Even my non-technical friends are doing things like "organize my photos" & such.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
I would actually expect the average revenue for a given app to decrease, now that people can have their own bespoke apps made, just the way they want them.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
The number of people who would like some code written to do a thing is way bigger than the number of people who can code. Claude Code serves that much bigger market. Think of something you'd like a computer to do that you don't currently have access to code to make it do.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 13/09/2026
The Rats were first, again, but it's not just the rationalists pushing for a halt before we accidentally create superintelligence now. Half of the prominent computer scientists and mathematicians are, and a good chunk of politicians around the world, for both progressive and conservative reasons.
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Nikolai Slavov @slavov-n.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Some of the most important scientific results were initially rejected before they became important milestones of scientific progress. 🔷 If you have great results, this is one of the most effective ways to help them succeed: blog.slavovlab.net/2024/02/12/c... 1/
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 11/09/2026
Which raises the question of how much is going on that they haven't seen.
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William Gunn @metasynthesis.net · 11/09/2026
I think the author of that article just doesn't like how it's become a numbers game. Haven't been on the apps for at least a decade and hopefully never will again, but when I was using them, it just seemed obvious to me that you had to put a lot of time in and that most matches wouldn't work out.
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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 11/09/2026
to be clear, i think it’s highly unlikely that AI would actually wipe us out but it’s possible, and the likelihood goes up and down based on how careful we are. and right now we’re fucking oblivious
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