one nice thing is that the migration process to the bluesky is painless and straightforward. if we had the ability to not only take our toots (export does exist) but also move them to a new mastodon server, that would be a very nice boon for the fediverse. (it’s also one of the oldest open tickets in mastodon’s github issues. and yes, i know of slurp, but that’s not really frictionless.)

No, it will not harm the anarchist—it will make his day, his year, and maybe his life. All the money and power in the world will be at his defense. He will not even need to lift a finger to organize his own lawyers, much less pay them. In the end, as with many of the BLM rioters, he will probably be well compensated, with taxpayer funds, for his trouble. Not to mention all the pussy and/or dick s/he will, as a martyr, be entitled to! For the Islamist, this reward is only in heaven. But for the leftist it comes on earth.

ah dammit, anarchist HQ did an anarchy to my martyr’s genital preference form again. now I’m getting dicked down harder than I’ve ever been - straight thru the mantle to the core of the earth. It’s like a porn parody of The Core over here, and I’m not even anywhere near Portland

“I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”).

“Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”

“Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”

She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.

Credit where credit is due, I found this via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552565

Also per https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-finances, author is Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund in question.

If you called me a boomer in my mentality, I wouldn’t really disagree. I still believe that things like cash flow and return on capital matter.

Guess im part boomer as well. (Holy shit we are so fucked if this is a “boomer” thought in the stock market)

I think Yud’s “ethical solution” to pedophilia will always have a place in my top ten of maximally unhinged shit I’ve ever seen on LW.

(The whole thread is a doozy.)

It wasn’t on LW proper, but Yud endorsing a pedo science-fiction book as “basically Safe For Work” has to be up there.

https://awful.systems/post/2972738

Also PrimalPoly’s dating advice:

https://awful.systems/post/67

The reflective altruism guy has an ongoing series on hbd in the rat community that includes a bunch of that, you should check him out.

For example https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/09/19/human-biodiversity-part-9-ea-forum-continued/

Sadly I misremembered and this one wasn’t from LW but I’ll share it anyway. I think I had just finished reading a bunch of the “Most effective aid for Gaza?” reddit drama which was like a nuclear bomb going off, and then stumbled into this shrimp thing and it physically broke me.

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.

source: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think

Discussion here (special mention to the comment that says “Did the human pet guy write this”): https://awful.systems/comment/5412818

Scott’s Reactionary Philosophy In A Nutshell comes to mind. Also, don’t forget to plug it here once the pilot is up somewhere. Count me as very interested.

ooh finally I’ve got a second podcast to listen to other than BtB

If you want a little hit of an unfair one, might want to look into the some of the weird manosphere guys who joined LW early on. Like https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini (link was dead just now but assume it will be back).

My mom has a Dyson sphere Ball. It sucks, which is actually good in this case because that’s what it’s supposed to do.

You can get a mod to insert Weyland-Yutani cells, after a short incubation period you’ll see a real burst of improvement.

They sell adapters so you can attach dewalt batteries to your computronium fantasy.

After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.

I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.

Got another bonus sneer from the comments as well:

Polluting human knowledge with crap, making internet useless, taking away jobs from creative people by making things that look creative enough. Governments are complicit, politicians are bribed. Like that suck-up youtuber [Two Minute Papers] repeats, “What a time to be alive” right ?

(Sidenote: It massively fucking sucks how Two Minute Papers drank the AI Kool-Aid, I used to love that channel.)

I’m not really concerned about it. The overlap between people who give a shit about AT and people who don’t already use some kind of ActivityPub platform is microscopic. I’m happy to let Bluesky shoot itself in the foot by adopting the number one main thing people complain about Mastodon, namely the existence of multiple instances and having to choose from among them.

AIUI the AT protocol is in fact a bona fide open protocol with a Free (MIT/Apache-2.0) reference implementation available. If this is openwashing, I welcome this new style of openwashing where you actually publish open source software instead of just implying your proprietary software is not really proprietary.

This author touches on a point that dovetails with my thinking:

Dijkstra, in “On the foolishness of ‘natural language programming’,” wrote, rather poignantly: “We have to challenge the assumptions that natural languages would simplify work.” And: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulation, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”

I think it likely that these tools will not be judged, in the long term, by the ambitions and hopes of the AGI cultists and hype-men, but by comparison to the many other attempts at natural-language programming in English. Smalltalk, Visual Basic, I even want to throw in AppleScript, as simple and threadbare as it was. How are all of these doing now?

AppleScript has been complemented or perhaps superseded by at least two more graphically-oriented attempts at system automation targeted at non-technical users. One could argue that its falloff came from an imperfect marriage with the message-passing/service-oriented architecture based on Objective-C and inherited from NeXT in Mac OS X, a system design which is itself now vestigial. The comparison with LLM coding assistants is imperfect, as they seem to be typically targeted at the more granular level of the class or the method, rather than explicit high-level hooks in an application. A better comparison here would be the last year or so worth of “AI agents,” but, uhm, ahh…

Smalltalk seemed to have a pretty big boom in the late 80s/early 90s, but tapered off rapidly after that. I like the more modern implementation of Pharo well enough, but it strives to throw in everything and the kitchen sink, with a downright balk-worthy amount of packages listed when you open up the class browser. On top of that, a few weeks ago I noticed someone in their Discord telling a newbie that current good practice is to file out your code every once in a while and then start over with a fresh image, as various background processes in stock images typically become unstable over time. This is orthogonal to the natural-language-like design, but it is a stumbling block to the sense of “liveness” and interactivity that is similarly a big hook for LLM assistance. Furthermore, as far as I know, they still don’t have a stable answer for system-level parallelism in the VM. All I’ve seen is a rather awkward technique for spinning off tree-shaken child VMs if there’s some method you want to run in parallel. You’ve got to really love Smalltalk to want to work past that shortcoming!

VB.NET I can’t really speak to, except that it seems Microsoft now considers it a stable language with little if any new feature development. The original implementation never seemed to have a good rep for maintainability, and the very idea of native Forms seems out of fashion compared to JavaScript web-app frontends. And the land of JavaScript, of course, seems to be the most fertile and uncontested kingdom of LLM coding assistance. I’m genuinely interested to hear more experiences with modern VB, as it strikes me as the last great corporate-sanctioned push for non-technical users to build their own apps, and thus the most worthy comparison.

All this is to say that each of these previous attempts at natural-language programming haven’t bit-rotted too hard, implementations are still available and you can probably salvage a legacy project with some effort. But each of them have been sidelined by industry over time. Not necessarily because of Dijkstra’s objection to the ambition of approaching natural language, although I don’t think we can totally discount that as a factor. But other technical or platform restrictions certainly hamstrung each of them. And LLM tools are still mostly API-based SaaS, which always has the glaring technical vulnerability of the provider running out of money. Yes, people will still pursue local models, but the bubble bursting could do a lot more harm to this approach than proponents anticipate.