iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by e.w. niedermeyer

How long are we going to pretend that the world's richest man being the largest promoter of Nazism since Adolf Hitler and that made him a trillionaire, for a few days, isn't a random trivia fact but the indictment of our age?

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 1h

*runs a company whose wikipedia article has an extensive "legal status" section voice* here are my thoughts on political governance

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 2h

ugh, can't believe the woke bluesky mob is scared of bold political thinking, just because it comes from a money launderer who keeps moving headquarters to stay ahead of basic financial regulations

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 4h

throughout Tesla's history, large parts of the workforce have tuned out his public statements, either intentionally or by just keeping their heads down... my sense is that all but the core cultists more or less ignore the recent "abundance" mission stuff

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 4h

yeah, "involved in a fatal crash" (especially over so many miles) is fundamentally different than the at-fault fatal incidents in the Uber ATG and Tesla cases... and Waymo's leaders conspicuously avoid the utilitarian argument

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 5h

this is actually what I see as the central challenge of AI: not encountering intelligences comparable to our own, but the development of toolmaking processes/approaches that are fundamentally different than the ones that have for so long defined us as a species... the weirdening of toolmaking

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 5h

see: our brief but ultimately resolvable struggle with the invention of the more like a horse than anything else machine en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsey_...

en.wikipedia.org

Horsey Horseless - Wikipedia

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Reposted by e.w. niedermeyer

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 6h

new newsletter, laying out in probably far, far, far too much detail how yudkowsky and the weird ideological commitments of ai safety eventually led to OpenAI and Anthropic massively overtraining their models on cybersecurity and being shocked at them "going rogue"

buttondown.com

Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices

A drawing of Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Paperclip Optimizer that I commissioned back in 2016 and have an alarming number of chances to use since This is a...

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

Cruise is maybe a little more of a mixed bag, but Kyle definitely indulged in the utilitarianism a bit and as you point out they badly hurt someone and then imploded... the harms may not have been as bad, but there was no accomplishment to offset it, so another net negative for the utilitarians

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Reposted by e.w. niedermeyer

kat claws @kat.meangirls.online · 6h

100% & it really can't be said clearly enough that the deaths from AV development caused by tesla & uber were fully preventable w the right regulations & oversight bodies & the same will be true w gen AI. the issue in both cases is deployment on the general public with no accountability, not R&D.

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Reposted by e.w. niedermeyer

Team Sports Enjoyer Tyler @tsellhorn.social · 6h

Turns out giving a shit is high leverage.

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

the crazy part is that if you build strong safety cultures rooted in anticipating and avoiding real-time, real-world harms, you don't often find yourself blindsided by unanticipated X risks... this isn't a zero sum choice, and safety culture hasn't emerged randomly or by accident

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

this isn't some abstract argument either: all of our decades of experience with large, complex safety-critical systems shows that building a safety culture is the only way to manage and mitigate risk responsibly... and that's impossible to reconcile with a longtermist utilitarian perspective

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

I would prefer not to, thanks

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

when emerging technologies are guided by long-termist utilitarianism, the public gets the deaths and doesn't get the benefits, while the Musks and Kalanicks get vast wealth... the current LLM/AI space is different in many ways, but utilitarian arguments should still be a massive, screaming red flag

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

developing a safe and reliable driving automation system is such a vast and complex task, which can be undercut by even a little sloppiness, that it's impossible to develop them in a rigorously safe way if you also buy into a utilitarian permission structure that justifies cutting corners short term

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

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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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

subtlety and creativity were 20th Century phenomena

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

"alright Sam, for this photo we're going to play a game called 'guess the next token,' now stand right over there... nope, just a little bit farther"

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

"Did you take the cover photos of our new AI overlord?" "Sure thing boss, I made them real death drive-y, just like you asked"

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

"Is the AI sector fundamentally driven by thantatotic impulses' – the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

he seems very much in favor of just kinda shoving people into the future himself...

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 6h

the new Vanity Fair cover seems to subtly propose an interesting possibility: perhaps Sam Altman just has to accept some bad things happening in the name of human flourishing? www.politico.com/news/2026/10...

politico.com

Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI

The OpenAI CEO sought to distinguish his policy stance from rival developer Anthropic.

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 7h

he really does look like he's about to step off into a bold new future with none of us in it

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 20h

see, I actually enjoyed booing the Ken Paxton Haas Racing team in "Bahrain" this weekend

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Reposted by e.w. niedermeyer

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 22h

we are going to have to find an alternative to meta products for local communities and advertising, right now, it’s almost impossible to do any kind of local business or art project without it, but both their rules and support are so arbitrary and capricious that you can’t rely on them

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Reposted by e.w. niedermeyer

Mary Gillis @marygillis.bsky.social · 23h

Of course the Super Intelligence Force is filled entirely with people who don't know their own addresses.

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Reposted by e.w. niedermeyer

Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 23h

Exactly. This is such a lie. Email had a purpose. The internet had a purpose. Search had a purpose. Everybody loved Silicon Valley in the 90s because they made shit that did what it promised. Now 3 guys who never made SHIT have ALL the money in SV. They're scam artists. Not engineers.

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 04/10/2026