swlabr

joined 2 years ago
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 50 minutes ago

The ideal wronger future after all is a simulation where human experience is deleted altogether!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 51 minutes ago (1 children)

Yeah weird thing to eliminate from a city, or weird thing to see without context. Basically: Wrongers try and envision a better world without deleting the parts of human experience that make it meaningful or worthwhile challenge (impossible)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago

Is General reasoning in the room with us now?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

Hexagons are great, would love to see some hexagon based city plans. Especially if they have designed for walkability and public transport!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago

It’s more the latter. I can’t really stop anyone from using it, and playing the game of “can you tell if this snippet of code was LLMed” is a fools errand, so I have to choose to ignore that part of it. Testing de-risks bad code, but there is never enough testing… well, there’s only so much I can do within my pay grade.

I’ve since asked this person to stop talking about their copilot usage, so this issue has been resolved, for now.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 23 hours ago

xharts

xcretions

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Man, if only there were some way to get rid of documents permanently. Like how one might get rid of a body by cremating it. Oh well, time to secretly hide these binders in a coffin.

That being said I’ve heard the alternative theory that trump buried her on mar-a-lago grounds (or wherever the fuck it was) so that he could claim that the grounds were a graveyard, for tax purposes. (I do not believe this)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

I absolve you of your perceived need to think about it. You’re cured!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

This is democracy manifest! (rip)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

Hmm, the way I’ve chosen to interpret this is to propose the analogy of a person eating corn as a model of LLMs. You can eat a huge variety of foods and your poop looks more or less the same. Sometimes, you eat something like corn, and the result is you can spot kernels of things resembling real food (i.e. corn kernels) in the poop. However, if you were to inspect said kernels, you would quickly realise they were full of shit.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Here's the full text of the article, which, unfortunately, xcancel doesn't seem to support.

Full text in spoilerI know a bunch of people who were involved or adjacent, including someone who accidentally got some footage. The summary below is based on talking to these people, looking at court documents, reading blog posts, etc. (I was also at the protested CFAR reunion and knew Daniel)

More info at the bottom (especially for journalists who would like interviews)

Pre-2019 Curtis Lind allows people to live in trailers and containers on his Vallejo, CA property, initially offering affordable housing to artists, woodworkers, and electricians. Over time, some tenants stop paying rent and are later referred to as "The Cult" by neighbors. The cult consists of Ziz (Jack LaSota), Emma Borhanian, Somni (Alexander Leatham), and Gwen Danielson. Separately, at some point Ziz attends a workshop by CFAR, which is a nonprofit focusing on behavioral psychology and AI.

2019 November 2019: CFAR bans Ziz and Gwen from their alumni reunion, partly due to fears of violence. November 2019: Ziz, Emma, Somni and Gwen protest at the reunion with accusations of bad decision theory (it's complicated) and transphobia. (All four of them are trans). The protestors get arrested for blocking entrances (while there are children on the grounds) and wearing Guy Fawkes masks. They're released on bail.

2021 August 2021: Ziz advocates for "airlocking" (a sci-fi term for killing) various people in blog comments and claims many people seek "suicide by Ziz." Ziz runs a blog which appears to be the primary attractor for this community. They claim that people have two hemispheres, and are either non-good, single-good, or double-good (very rare, which Ziz herself is). Ziz advocates for a ruthlessly enforced altruism towards all living creatures, and to follow the principle that it’s never valid to surrender. She promotes the punishment of “non-good” people, particularly those who are not vegans. 2022 February 2022: Jamie Zajko, a close friend of Ziz, claims that Ziz threatens to kill Jamie, if Jamie does not kill Jamie’s girlfriend and provide proof of it. April 2022: Gwen Danielson, one of the protestors, stops appearing for court hearings, and their lawyer suggests they have died. July 2022: A different friend of this group commits suicide and cites ideas from Ziz’s blog in their suicide note. Ziz appears to suggest their ideas caused the suicide. August 2022: Ziz fakes her own death in a boating accident and stops showing up to court hearings. The Coast Guard conducts a search for her, but finds no body. An obituary is released. November 2022: Emma Borhanian is killed by Curtis Lind during a violent altercation at his Vallejo property. Somni stabs Lind with a sword, and Lind shoots both Somni and Emma. Lind is stabbed dozens of times and loses an eye. Lind’s account is that they had been threatening him for some time, and one day requested he come fix a leak. They hit him from behind, and when he woke up they were attempting to cut off his head (he has scarring consistent with this claim). He then shot Emma and Somni in self defense. His friend claims upon entering the trailer afterwards he found surgical equipment and chemicals he believes were intended to dissolve Lind’s body. Somni and Suri Dao are arrested. Ziz and Gwen are seen at the scene, alive. It seems likely Gwen had faked their own death earlier to escape court appearances, much as Ziz had. November 2022: Somni attempts to escape from jail (twice).

2023 January 2, 2023: Richard and Rita Zajko are found dead from homicide in their Pennsylvania home from gunshot wounds. Their daughter Jamie Zajko was associated with Ziz, and we suspect the homicide was an attempt to gain money (several million dollars) from inheritance. Police also suspect Ziz is involved in the murder. Police also suspect Daniel Blank, an associate of Ziz, is involved in the murder. Blank has not been seen since and we suspect he’s dead. January 13, 2023: Ziz is arrested in Pennsylvania for "obstructing administration of law" and "disorderly conduct." Ziz eventually makes bail (in June) and stops showing up to court. We suspect that the arrest was indirectly related the murders, and that the police didn't have enough evidence to make a full charge.

2025 January 17, 2025: Curtis Lind (who was set to serve as the primary witness in his assault case) is stabbed to death outside his Vallejo property. A man named Maximilian Snyder is later arrested for this murder. The previous year, he applied for a marriage license with a woman named Teresa Younblut, who was in contact with Ziz. January 20, 2025: Teresa Youngblut and a man named Felix Baukholt are stopped while driving by U.S. Border Patrol in Vermont. They end up in a shootout, and Baukholt and a border patrol agent dies. Police find tactical gear, firearms, and burner laptops in the car. According to the police, an unnamed person who purchased the firearms used in this shooting is also a suspect in the Pennsylvania Zajko murders. We think this is likely to be Jamie Zajko, given that the shooting is in the same town that Jamie Zajko has a registered address (Coventry, Vermont).


That's it so far. We still don't know the whereabouts of the people in this story who aren't either dead or in custody, and we sort of expect them to continue doing murders.


  1. If you're a journalist and want to get in contact with people around the community/rationalist scene who knows the people involved, you can fill out this form and your contact info will be shared around our networks

  2. My friend, trying to interview Lind about something else, ended up getting a bunch of footage of him talking about the attack. If you're a journalist or documentarian interested in this footage, please reach out to him here

  3. The above timeline is collected from sources the community has accumulated here. It also has some high-confidence guesses made by people familiar with those involved. Please doublecheck all claims yourself.

 

No link given because it's all over the news. If you ask for proof you're going to have to eat my ass.

A lot of people are going to say it wasn't intended as a Nazi salute, and to that, I say: it doesn't matter. Was it a dog whistle? A variation of a Nazi salute from a South African neo-nazi party? Or just the vanilla salute? Such pontification is a waste of time. Fokker is a Nazi; you didn't need to see him salute. To all the regulars here, Musk being a Nazi is just an axiom of his whole deal. I mean, it's not called technofascism for nothing.

 

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.

 

original link

“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”

 

Abstracted abstract:

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.

*

 

Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

https://archive.is/XwbY0

 

Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.

I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.

 

Uncritically sharing this article with naive hope. Is this just PR for a game? Probably. Indies deserve as much free press as possible though.

 

Followup to part 1, which now has a transcript!

As is tradition, I am posting this link without having listened to it. (too many podcasts)

view more: next ›