TechTakes

I'm sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It can't be real (It''s definitely real).

Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if there's one problem with weed it's that it's not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing it's going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.

This is a serious blow to coolness, from which not even drugs will easily recover.

If it's "agentic," doesn't that imply it smokes weed for you

Wake me up when there’s an agentic butt plug

Agentic Ripz is my new jam band.

Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.

Does "read a second book" apply here, or is this a "read a first book" situation?

Habryka's all, "Dammit, why do you have to come here and remind everyone where the Zizians came from?"

EDIT: This person also seems to have no concept of the finality of death, which might explain why the Zizians were so murdery.

Uh oh

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/gwen-danielson-zizians-interview-1235552043/

Going on a media tour now

The back-and-forth between Gwen and LessWrong commenters is getting spicy. This definitely deserves a top-level post on SneerClub.

while it's technically plausible that Ziz was involved in a minor oopsy whoopsy fucky wucky deady weady or two or six, she's always been lovely to me, much of the time,

Their heart seems to be in the right place, police interrogation will be exploitative and brainwashy with no real consequences for the interrogators, but they sure chose the dumbest possible way to make their point:

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

"ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?"

It's fine, spyware is only a risk when it's bad people's spyware. It's totally fine when it's Anthropic™-approved spyware!

As for Mythos catching things, maybe they should have used Mythos on their very own Claude Code considering that it has hilariously obvious security exploits, such as this one which inserts an arbitrary string into a shell command. Actually, never mind I don't see anything wrong here, maybe we should burn another $20k in electricity running Mythos on it again to find out.

Okay, today's Rat fixation that I want to rant about is "constructing hypothetical examples to justify my idiosyncratic position." Like, I'm not even interested in arguing about whether their conclusion makes sense in their hypothetical world, I'm more curious about what kind of chain of thought leads you to speculate about that in 2026. Like, maybe I'm reading way too much into this but in practical terms it feels like "how do I justify voting for the Republicans no matter how far-right they might go, if my local Democrats try to move the tiniest bit left?" which feels like the rat/tech ethos in a nutshell.

Or maybe it's the more traditional past time of trying to construct arguments in favor of controversial-sounding positions so that you can feel smarter and more open-minded than everyone else.

Unfortunately, our problem right now is not Donna the below-average Democrat but Donald the fascist. And when it comes to fascists I do not ask if they are above or below average.

Who TF was using LED lights for indoor lighting in the 1990s? Compact flourescents were the lightbulb replacement in the oughties.

And how TF do you write that post without using the phrase "sensory sensitivity" and citing some women who know they have autism? Once you know you are more sensitive to your environment than allistics, you can start to experiment with interventions.

Dramatic fascistic "RETVRN" language and focus on aesthetics aside, my wife and I actually dug into some of this lighting quality stuff a while ago and while our very good friend here does a poor job explaining it there is a definite difference in normal LEDs vs incandescent or natural light. The LED spectra is fascinating - big spikes at a couple wavelengths and nothing in between. In my experience with switching to the fancier high-CRI LEDs the difference is pretty minimal. Feels like a possible case where you don't notice it, but your brain does. For my wife it seems to have helped reduce the incidence and severity of her crippling migraines, which is obviously more impactful. I don't think I'd say it beautified the space or brought us back to the halcyon days of our glorious past, but that's been huge for us all the same. The plural of anecdote is not cliche, but there's not nothing here.

Unfortunately there are a few things that make courts pretty tricky to implement in practice for things like the rationality, AI safety and EA communities. Badly implemented courts also can just make things worse by creating a clear target for attack and pressure. Seems very tricky, but probably we should have more courts (or maybe not, I would need to write the post to figure it out).

yesss yesss lesswrong people's tribunals and struggle sessions let's gooooooooo

The fire code thing really is an excellent example of LessWrong Brain. Fire truck drivers insist on needlessly large trucks (no citation) which makes roads 30% wider than they would otherwise be (no citation) which has "probably" "non-trivially" contributed to larger cars (no citation) leading to enough additional road fatalities to cancel out the lives saved by stricter fire codes (no citation).

The LessWrong Brain argument starts with a deliberately contrarian conclusion and proves it with a Rube Goldberg chain of logical syllogisms. Of course, citations are strictly optional, and they are free to misinterpret them as they see fit. The only real standard of each claim is "looks good to me", but you are supposed to be impressed that they managed to string a dozen of them together to reveal some shocking, deep truth of the world that nobody else knows about. The AI 2027 nonsense is an infamous example of this.

He uses the word "fermi" which is cult jargon based on Fermi estimation, a.k.a. guessing shit with back-of-the-envelope calculations. Not exactly what you want if you want to convince people to reform fire codes, especially if you have zero citations for anything.

I guess people just aren't rational enough, and the only reason the fire codes are so irrational is because people are emotional about fire codes. Firefighters are apparently revered as heroes, when it is the LWers who should be the heroes. After all, firefighters merely save people from fires, while LWers buy multimillion dollar mansions to talk about saving quadrillions of hypothetical people from hypothetical basilisks!

Fire codes are the root of all evil

Ah somebody got told by their landlord not to do something. (I remember our student housing landlord (a big org) was regularly claiming 'fire codes' as an excuse to get rid of stuff in semi public areas. The actual fire codes didn't demand this btw, it was just the excuse they used to stop students from filling everything with random trash).