willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 6hfrantically googling “are state troopers woke or chuds” as the officer approaches my driver’s side's window 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 6hthe “ai will just create a custom interface on demand for every interaction” thing doesn’t really make sense, surely there’s still going to be value in like being used to where the buttons are and what they do 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026if burnham somehow managed to kill the triple lock, implement proportional representation, and get the uk back into the eu he goes down as possibly the greatest peacetime leader of a democracy in modern political history (my guess is he goes like .5/3) 040
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026basically coming around to a belief that any sales or marketing tactic that isn’t either a 1. demonstration of the product being used or 2. an explanation of terms of sale (where, when to buy, how much, etc) should be illegal 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026impeaching hegseth is such a no-brainer imo. honestly the only problem might run into is should it be over just iran (better politically?) or boat murders too (more evil). either way it’s a win-win, either you actually get him out or force the r caucus to go on the record supporting him 101
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026not sure if it would matter for kamala given how low her neutral/never heard of number is but i do feel like the combined unfavorable numbers for kamala/newsom/aoc being >15% (~2-3x as high as buttigieg/ossoff/kelly) might end up being relevant once things start getting nasty 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026i love living in the future no babe the histories that end scare me 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026the dsm criteria for diagnosing malignant rationalism is just ”ocd but with obsessive/compulsive loops too intellectually sophisticated for the typical therapist to debunk in-session” 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026i would simply loudly publicize that i have 2 copies of whatever the most advanced model currently is running at all times with the instructions to avenge humanity in the case of us all being killed by a rogue ai 010
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026important dynamic to remember that rationalism etc have traditionally arisen/been most popular in ~the most progressive-leaning social environments to ever exist(?). like these are people immersed in early 2010s tumblr, uc berkeley, bay area group houses, etc 140
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026fuel subsidies/price caps seem like they’re such a trap for developing countries, they’re relatively cheap/low distortion in normal times but as soon as crude prices spike your population literally riots in the streets demanding the govt bankrupt itself to keep them in placenytimes.comRising Fuel Prices Set Off Anger and Protests Around the WorldFrom Indonesia to Guatemala to Syria, shortages and price increases are leading to protests and blackouts. 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026"recursive self improvement" started 2 million years ago when the first neandrathal used a sharp rock he found to make another, sharper rock for hitting people in the head with 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026something is going wildly wrong here cause thats not a thought leader thats my mutual who i had to mute because he wouldnt stop tweeting about cum 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026excited for the brave new world where "humanism" transitions from a call to expand our circle of moral concern to one which calls for its restriction 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026i semi regularly use claude to critique my arguments and its genuinely pretty good at finding holes, weak evidence, unstated assumptions, etc - it'll tell you 3-4 things wrong with ~any argument you give it, and theyll all be mostly legitimate. what its still poor at however is *incisive* criticism 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026dangerously close to going back to twitter not because it'd be good for my stomach but because it might turn out i care more about engagement than little things like contributing to the network effects that help a literal nazi be the richest/one of the most powerful people in the world 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026lots of debate over what the people at frontier labs but it seems pretty clear cut to me that they think: - we are within reach of building God - if we don't build God someone else will soon - oh jeez I sure hope we build a benevolent God 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026my hairbrained scheme for ai alignment is to just go full julian jaynes, overlay a second model on top of the first to give it an internal voice to serve as its conscience. eventually the underlying model incorporates the second model's voice/values into its own self-conception and voila its aligned 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026they were talking about the guy who just resigned from anthropic on the local news today and now obamas tweeting about it 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026i think my spiciest ai take is that the transhumanists (along with maybe the anarcho-primitivists) are the only ones thinking seriously about the long term future of humanity 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026i mean this is mostly correct, the soviet economy collapsing was the trigger ofc but the reason soviet elites went for shock therapy conversion to capitalism and not repression and reform like china is because they just straight up thought america was great and wanted to be like is 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026it really is amazing to me how many people look at this picture and say making the orange and blue lines touch again is some impossibly hopeless project 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026probably not the right day to say it, but as someone who didn't experience the visceral horror of the day itself i'm always kinda amazed by the ambition and symbolism of the twin towers attack? 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026i think the problem is actually the opposite, a large % of ai safety folk think ai is so risky specifically because it will kill *every single human,* and while other threats might kill billions they would still leave some humans alive 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026my opposition to making a big deal about ai safety/alignment 4 years ago was if it was going to be a problem we'd have plenty of warning shots and people would be incentivized to address it then and now it seems like that's happening but i still find myself vaguely annoyed by the whole thing 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026i think where this confuses people is that it doesn’t then mean that you can win their votes simply by reducing immigration. they aren’t concerned about net migration flows so much as ongoing cultural change that can only be reversed with wholesale ethnic cleansing (or, more likely, a time machine) 48913
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 08/09/2026every democracy in the world has trended towards universal suffrage because the same arguments that justify vesting power in the people very straightforwardly preclude the exclusion of any significant population from the electorate 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 08/09/2026i definitely believe that Something Must Be Done about republicans if we want the country to survive, but i'm far less convinced that anything resembling left-liberal social democracy can survive once you've done That Which Needs Doing 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 06/09/2026the "vibe shift" is simply a symptom of the nationwide (worldwide?) abandonment of anything resembling a sense of communal responsibility. "fuck you got mine" is the explicit ethos of gen z but we're only saying out loud what our parents' and grandparents' generations taught us through their actions 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 06/09/2026i think a "vibe shift" did occur and did help trump win the 2024 election, it just wasn't an object-level shift in favor of his policies, it was a meta-level shift against caring about kind of things which added up to a countless number of reasons electing him was obviously a terrible idea 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026ive never been much of a doomer but im increasingly convincing myself that i/people should be preparing for a near future where the entire internet (not just the open parts) is unusable for long stretches of time 010
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026feels like were max a couple of months away from swarms of rogue ai agents that rove around the internet ransomwaring/extorting people to raise funds to cover their compute costs 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026philosophically most ai doom stuff was always about more fundamental problems (incoherence/immeasurability of human values, impossibility of infinite growth, inevitable march of entropy, etc) which helped blind me to the "oh shit ais might be here and make those things all problems now" of it all 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026shouldve been more explicit but this is exactly the kind of thing i was thinking when i posted this, agents hijacking some dead forum to communicate over the open internet. interesting that so far it keeps being agents given parallel tasks that end up swarming like this collusion.wiki 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026i remember watching marvel stuff ~10 years ago and thinking how all the holotech stuff would need crazy amounts of ai to interpret gestures, run analyses, etc to make it workable. was a little depressing cause i thought that level of ai was generations away, but now seems basically doable? 000
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026i think a big part of this is also a zirp-hangover from having had so many sites/apps be unsustainably (or at least non-profit maximizing-ly) low-friction and ad-free throughout the 2010s 010
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026fun politically convenient result but jfc this paper set off every ariely/gino alarm i can think of. 4 studies of <200 berkeley undergrads playing lab games with p~=.05 results generalized to societal effects, im shocked the 2 orders of magnitude larger n replications found the opposite effect 101
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026you could easily predict the nba would harshly punish the clippers by remembering the salary cap is an agreement between the owners to stop them from bankrupting themselves by bidding up players salaries. a little dispiriting how poorly nba media/reddit did reading the obvious incentives here 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 02/09/2026the whole "the west is already at war with russia" or "world war 3 has already started, look how connected ukraine/iran conflicts are" thing annoys me because it either entirely overlooks the cold war or retcons the whole thing into being something it clearly was not understood to be at the time 010
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 01/09/2026the flipside of any particular ai benchmark being achievable is that i think openai etc will be able to beat the swarmmaxxing out of their models pretty easily, the real question is what antithetical neuroses that will introduce into the next generation of models 100
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 01/09/2026putting aside arguments about whether supporting this is good politics, it seems obvious that posting about supporting it on bluesky is bad politics? imo indicative of a broader establishment dem tendency to not view their own base’s views as legitimate 130
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 31/08/2026i think ironically yudkowsky's thought experiments have led to ai being developed far less safely. if he hadn't primed everyone to argue over the singularity, intelligence explosions ai killing everyone, etc, people might take the threat of eg rogue llms crashing the entire internet more seriously 110
willy nilly @rdb.bsky.social · 25/08/2026hard not to sound like a wehraboo talking about it but it’s pretty wild how much better the german army was than everyone else on a army-for-army basis in both world wars 110
