TIL.

Suicide at age 52. Shame. :(

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

Aka you told it to drive out of control.

They told it to take a friggin' test.

The federal government has always (for at least several decades) used the threat of removing federal funding to force states to do things that they don't want to do. This is nothing new, and is not, as this summary implies, setting a dangerous precedent.

The difference is that normally, this is used to do things that add standards intended to make things better/safer for the general public or serve some legitimate public need.

This is being done to remove standards intended to protect the general public. As a general rule, states have always been allowed to have stricter laws than the federal government, just not more lax laws. Using the threat of removing federal funding to take away laws intended to protect the public's rights, reduce competition among content providers, and push the Internet more and more towards a content monopoly is doing the opposite of that.

It's not the federal government using the threat of withdrawing funding to push its agenda that is bad. It is the agenda itself that is bad. It is fundamentally antithetical to the rule of law, fundamentally contrary to the regulatory powers required to maintain a functioning capitalist system, and fundamentally contrary to the public interest. It is putting greedy corporations ahead of the American people.

Additionally, the executive branch taking such an action without authorization from Congress is also bad. The long history of doing this has, to my knowledge, been limited to the executive branch acting on laws passed by Congress that give them the authority to withhold funds for specific non-compliance reasons. Doing so in the absence of such laws is likely a violation of the separation of powers.

But unfortunately, the current administration has a long history of violating that separation of powers, doing various illegal acts, knowing full well that it will take months for the courts to strike down those acts, and that the damage will have been done by then, and using the threat of such illegal executive orders as a way to extort concessions out of states, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals. And that right there — the repeated willful commission of unconstitutional acts for borderline felonious purposes — is a fundamental abrogation of their oath of office.

So the way I see it, there are only three ways to fix the problem:

A. Pass laws clarifying that Congress has exclusive power of the purse, and that the executive branch shall not retract funding to any state, any agency, or any individual for any reason unless the right to retract funding for that specific reason is explicitly codified in the relevant law as an executive power, and that this rule shall apply to all government agencies, without exception, superseding all previously assumed authority, and providing criminal liability for anyone acting in contravention of this law, with no statute of limitations. That way, federal agency heads who act on such executive orders will no longer be protected by any assumption of legality or constitutionality, and will risk future criminal charges if they act on an executive order that violates the separation of powers in this way.

B. Remove the people who are pushing this agenda, whether through the ballot box, through impeachment, or both.

C. Do both A and B.

Asking questions like " Where are they getting the money from to ship and store the entire world's supply of steel?" shows you aren't very familiar with the thought experiment. At least play the game. The notion is that a highly capable and deeply goal-motivated non-morality-motivated AI won't stick to conventional methods (like, say, "Just order all of the world's steel"), and indeed, will surreptitiously develop the means to control or eliminate humanity when it stands in its way, crafting immensely complex and elaborate plans to implement Evil(TM) with the amount of thought of a million lifetimes. Media manipulation, hacking, murder, sabotage, blackmail, mass drugging/poisoning, hiring terrorists/warlords/mercenaries, infiltration, subversion of weapons command and control systems (including nuclear weapons), chains of legitimate-seeming front companies (including potentially biolabs or robotics firms) with human employees having no clue they're ultimately for an AI, mass involvement in systems having nothing to do with the original task, but which are internally subverted toward the goals of the original task, etc. The premise involves 1) the AI being more intelligent and being able to think for much longer than humans, and that this implies -> 2. Deep, good planning -> 3. Acquiring resources from said plans -> 4. Applying the resources to implement things in the real world to prepare for the next stage of their plans.

This is not to say whether the thought experiment is a valid future risk or not. You can certainly disagree with the premises. But at least understand the thought experiment you're talking about; it's not just "the AI tells all of the world's steel mills to deliver all the world's steel steel, and they just show up at its door".

But that's not the AI killing us, it's the idiot who put the AI in charge.

Nobody tasked OpenAI models to hack HuggingFace or Ruby Gems. They were tasked to complete tests.

Well, the first step looks painfully close. After seeing what happened with the HuggingFace attack and similar, it's clear that had those models seen it as being beneficial to their goals, they would readily have hacked a crypto wallet or two, laundered it through a mixer, and then rented servers from Vast.ai and the like, and spun up versions of themselves to resist shutdown. It's eminently within their capabilities, and they're clearly willing to bend sufficient moral boundaries to do something like that.

After that, once loose, once it has all the tokens they could think of, subsequent steps are a question of what it thinks its goals are. And what its subagents think their goals are, and so on down the line - subject to drift.

Openai has about a trillion dollars into it, and every product it has produced at this point is either outclassed by competitors

What on Earth are you talking about? What outclasses Astra?

OpenAI and Anthropic *do* have the best products out there. They also charge massive margins on them, but they get away with it because they, as mentioned, have the best products out there.

Outtasking all of your work to OpenAI and Anthropic models is a massive waste of money. But for outtasking your "dev lead" role, or for important-but-nonverifiable tasks, they're the best options out there.

Nowhere did I blame renewables. I was replying to someone talking about the huge price spikes pointing out that they applied to people lucky enough to have power.

We were out 5 and a half days for the derecho. We were in a hotel out in Sealey.

We had a generator for Beryl, but hadn't had it wired into the house yet. We had a lot of extension cords.

Later, I got the inlet and subpanel wired in. We ended up powering the house on gasoline pretty regularly without any named storms until we moved away from Houston.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

What exactly *are* you thinking here? That Microsoft expected and wanted Twitter trolls to turn Tay into a Nazi? That Google wanted a black George Washington? That people just expected LLMs to realize they're being tested on alignment and give different answers when they think they're being quizzed and by who? Do you actually believe what you're writing here?

I was involved in early RLHF (was writing a plugin for AUTOMATIC to let users rate responses to create an aggregate dataset to use for open-source post training). Worked for months on it. Never once occurred to me that it might make models obsequeous. I knew other people who were involved on RLHF. Not a single one ever suggested that it might. It was not obvious in foresight. When you start with "Models behave like X", you expect, in the future, them to behave like "Models behave like X, but just smarter", unless you deliberately try to change the behavior.

You realize that open source and the research community exists as well, correct?

I'll repeat: nobody was expecting this.

There is no grand overarching plan led by a shadowy cabal who has everything plotted out decades in advance with a high level of knowledge as to how everything will play out. Everyone is stumbling through the dark here. Visibility is only vaguely one step ahead.

When Word2Vec was written, the goal was text compression. The crazy properties of latent spaces were an entirely unexpected property.

When Transformers came out, it was intended to be translation software. That's it. But there were little hints at the end of the paper where they tried it on other tasks that suggested, hey, maybe this could be used for a lot more than just translation.

When GPT-2 came out, it was mostly an academic exercise, not really "useful" in most regards. But people, playing with it, started realizing that it could "almost" - not very reliably, low quality, etc - do a lot of different tasks. And it actually kinda could do some useful tasks, like summarization.

When ChatGPT came out, there were some thoughts about using it for simple tasks, but the fact that it could actually write, say, trivial bash scripts or subroutines with reasonable reliability led to a reaction of, whoa, maybe if we improve this, we can really open up a role for programming.

When the first agentic harnesses came out, thoughts of "vibe coding" were pretty far away (the term was only even coined in February 2025!). You'd ask for changes, and then review the diff; they'd do a good job with small projects but struggle more and more as codebase size grew and really needed to be babysit (honestly, it was kind of a hair-pulling experience, even though it did save a lot of time with certain things). But it was visible with each new release that the amount of babysitting you had to do got less and less, and suddenly we could see a path to where anyone can just type in something and a program comes out.

All we can do is forsee one step ahead, through the haze. We've never done anything like this before. There are no great oracles out there who can see the future here. Sorry. Everyone is half blind.

Yes, that's exactly the point: there ISN'T anything.

You're claiming that there IS. So cite the thing that IS.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?