So the news is now filled with stories about how AI will take over and the Ai companies might lose control of it gets smarter and at least one employee quit because it might kill us all. You know what I seem to be missing?

Actual employees doing sabotage. That is a bit odd right? They think Altman doesnt care about safety, but nobody has tried to wipe the backups. And we know they dont think that much about security.

And it isnt like sysadmins messed with systems in the past over lesser disputes.

Not even a “im turning whistleblower, here are all the internal chatlogs and documents of the employees and management”.

Lobste.rs news: after letting the DHH knob-slobblers and interested-in-the-fascist’s-newletters users weave enough rope to hang themselves with, the banhammers have arrived:

https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=(All)&what[users]=users

expect the next step be even more pressure on the mod team to get them replaced with people “more aligned with the mainstream”

Officials in desert state shocked to learn that water intensive industries (chipmaking) in desert states are vulnerable to sudden water shortages: https://www.theverge.com/science/993522/water-chip-semiconductor-manufacturing-colorado-river

in unrelated news: desert state continues allowing cultivation of incredibly water-intensive alfalfa for another arid region 8,000 miles away.

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910

uh oh you guys, sama and dario agree that progress needs to be “paced” at the “frontier”

call it: A) regulatory gambit meant to suppress open source chinese LLMs, or B) progress is slowing anyways and they need a good excuse that will also shine their IPOs

or C) both

Dario’s back at it again-agent swarms could shut down the whole internet in 6 months

He also wanted AI research to slow down over a month ago. Surprise surprise Anthropic didn’t do jack to slow down

So Altman and Musk agree with Amodei’s latest assessment that AI should slow down, whether or not they actually stick to that is to be seen

Listening to Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich (audiobook, not podcast), and learning heaps about people I’ve known were part of the Rationalist orbit for years, but hadn’t dug too much into, like Balaji Srinivasan. He apparently used the red/blue/grey tribe setup in The Network State, which was published long after Scott’s SSC post using the same language.

I remember that Balaji went nutty when the NYT published about Scott Alexander. Durán attributes that to Cade Metz reporting on Balaji telling Yarvin that they might need to intimidate/harass journalists to keep them from reporting on their fascist bullshit, but all the parallels make me wonder how long they knew/read each other. Did Scott influence Balaji first, or the other way around?

Certainly I am amused that none of the Rationalists have been named yet, 3 hours in. I wonder if it rankles, knowing how bad Eliezer has wanted to make something that people would actually pay for, having a whole book written about Thiel and Yarvin and Srinivasan where he doesn’t rate at all because he’s just some podunk little cult leader who has to beg for grants and find girlfriends to live with and do his laundry while he eats the crumbs off of their tables. Or if it stung Scott when Srinivasan’s book was panned as idiotic, knowing that at least some of those ideas were his.

Nice breakdown and takedown of Omarchy and its ilk. https://stopomarchy.neocities.org/

The chuds on HN of course hated my sharing it, though it hasn’t been flagged (yet). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661901

Despite all the doomer propaganda that has been swirling around for many years, it’s still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The antiai sub on Reddit is lousy with doomers now. Ugh.

From the mirror universe news

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-09-10/campaign-slow-ai-was-ready-viral-warning

ZH’s interpretation is Coxon is some kind of false flag thing to bait Dems into regulating AI

Parker Thayer argued that Coxon’s launch looked like a sophisticated public-relations operation. He traced the earliest amplification to people associated with Encode, the AI Policy Network, and the AI Futures Project.

Brian Chau’s later thread surfaced a direct political-technology link. Newspeak House’s own residency page lists Jacob Coxon among its residents and describes his work as “applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets.” Newspeak calls itself the London College of Political Technology. Its current calendar advertises Campaign Lab sessions aimed at helping the progressive left “campaign more effectively.” The residency places Coxon inside that political-technology network.

Some of the underlying funding links are public. The Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2025 grant table lists $2.035 million for the AI Futures Project, $516,000 for Encode AI, and $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute. The fund attributes those grants to Jaan Tallinn. Anthropic says Tallinn led its Series A financing in 2021.

Encode identifies the Survival and Flourishing Fund as one of several foundations supporting its work. It also says it refuses funding from corporations, foreign governments, and executives at frontier AI companies. Its general counsel, Nathan Calvin, is one of the early amplifiers named in Thayer’s thread.

Some new pins for the conspiracy board I guess. They imagine a “political-technology network” quite the linguistic contortion to not use the word rationalist. No clue what LCPT is but looks like a hacker house type thing?

Sometimes I feel inadequate. I was clumsy when burning Justin M. Keyes and, regardless of whatever trust was lost, I haven’t felt better even after a week of making fun of fascists. Maybe burning somebody else will help? I’d like to share my notes on Dan “Opcode” Jonsson, a relatively-unknown right-wing influencer, before he gets popular enough to have money. I think he’s spooked on Lobsters recently, but he’s been uploading to Youtube multiple times per week and there’s plenty to explore.

If this is also too clumsy and leads to Jonsson deleting his YT channel: good, actually! It’s the only source of revenue that I can find for his opinions. So I’m not going to worry too much about it.

👍

Per AP, it looks like Anthropic has been encountering some interesting requests from certain international users.

Now the actual threat of creating missile guidance systems using Claude is massively overstated. Like, making sure the missile knows where it is is pretty much a solved problem at this point provided you have the time and ability to study it, and I would be incredibly surprised to hear that the Houthis (or anyone else) was in a situation where the control and guidance software for these weapons systems was more of a problem than sourcing the material components themselves.

However, in conjunction with the math proof debacle earlier in the week, I think the privacy implications of the growing reliance we’re expected to develop on these damned things are becoming inescapable. In the same way that crypto mining platforms will front-run and sandwich you, any information you put into the prompt will be used against you or for the company’s benefit.

https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ais-sheryl-crow-169107221

Imagine a hypothetical future history of machine learning, perhaps one that focuses on the politics of AI in the 2020s. You may be thinking to yourself, Given the rapid pace of change, it’s hard to say what this book will contain, but there’s one thing I know for certain will not be in this book: Sheryl Crow’s Instagram account.

Well—think again:

“We know and have always known that AI has the capacity to outsmart us and eliminate us in order to continue,” the “All I Wanna Do” singer wrote on Wednesday. “It will have the codes. It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids. And, it has the financial data of every single person on the planet.”

In the future, I think, we will remember this as the “Sheryl Crow moment”: The week that, effectively overnight, everyone—which is to say previously uninterested normies, previously skeptical pundits, opportunistic politicians and many other people who had never before heard the words “light cone” and whose browsers had never navigated to LessWrong—suddenly started taking “AI safety” seriously.

E: holy shit that Joe Allan quote. that guy.