Just found this on sneerclub, this seems like a reasonable intro to the subject. Thanks!

Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?

I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me "wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies" I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.

Edit: thanks everyone for responses, I'll get my friend started with Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse and then point him at rational wiki for any further questions.

Yeah it's really bad, I've been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it's not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it's pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I've been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.

At least being on ravelry and checking out other people's project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.

Ideally that would be the case, but the last few years were a disaster for the consumer electronics market due to all the RAM and GPUs in the world being sold to AI hyperscalers. So if there's just physically no components to make these things from, then that's that.

As others are trying to convey, it's not about the bot but about allowing yourself to indulge in this behavior. The bot could be substituted for a rock or a rubber duck, but you are training yourself to subconsciously think that this behavior is acceptable. It increases the chance that you'll one day start treating actual people like that.

Imagine this scenario: you come home after a long day of work. At work, you use AI a lot and curse and swear at it when it makes mistakes (which is often). At home, you ask your spouse/child/roommate/parent to do something for you, which they attempt but proceed to mess up. They apologize, and instead of handling it calmly you instinctively react like you've trained yourself to react - by screaming at them.

Is that what you want to be like?

You might be screwed. I had an instagram acount, wasn't using it for a while so I uninstalled the app from my tablet, now wanted to check something there and got hit with the same thing. I did not manage to recover that account. Can't even delete it and make a new one, it's just stuck in limbo. I don't care much since I was only lurking there, but it's really scary how Meta can just randomly cut you out of your digital life. And all support was of course delegated to an incredibly stupid chatbot which can't do anything.

Good luck and uhh let me know if you solve it?

...which improves the metaphor even further, genius!

• Disco Elysium
• Outer Wilds
• Morrowind
• Rimworld
• Subnautica

...I'm so sorry, and it's good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way it's been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing you're going through to come in a few months.

Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Really weird, abstract and interesting. Anyone labeling it as Dark Academia or a magic school book is both completely correct and dead wrong at the same time.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar both have very interesting concepts and great executions.

When it comes to interesting concepts in fantasy/sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky has some bangers. Elder Race, Children of Time, or Alien Clay are some random example recs.

China Mieville's New Crobuzon trilogy is really out there too. 2nd book is the best and can be read independently but does spoil some things from the first.

...the house elves are in Hogwarts too. They are not staff, they are school property. Harry owns a house elf after book 5. The books openly ridicule Hermione for being the only sane person and trying to end house elf slavery because apparently the house elves like being enslaved and she's just overreacting. Need I go on?

Spec-driven development is when you take these AI generated design docs and make it all you as a dev interact with. It's waterfall but make it stupid and AI.

You give AI some guidelines and a feature description, then you twiddle your thumbs while it generates giant specs and occasionally asks you for some inputs, then you attempt to read the thing, give up, and give it to some other agent. Rinse and repeat until you burn a GDP of a small country in tokens and the agents agree that it's going to work, and then you finally pull the lever and hopefully a feature matching all your specs appears. Or it doesn't! And if it didn't, it's surely your fault because you didn't give AI enough context.

I'm tired, boss.