RIP XCancel, it was good while it lasted
On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
So, this is something a little different, and I almost think it's worth a top level post. It's not directly about our friends the Rationalists, the current delusional billionare vortex infesting the US government with religious psychosis, or any of that. It's an analysis of some collaborative fiction and what it tells us about the zeitgeist behind the mythological core of singulatarian/endless-progress thought.
Anyone here ever hear of the Orion's Arm universe collaborative worldbuilding project? https://www.orionsarm.com/
I, for one, love it. Single weirdest and most expansive scifi worldbuilding thing ever, I think. It seems to have been founded by some old-school extropian types around the turn of the millennium. It is bonkers. Click through links on pages, start here, do a random walk: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b170f9e0941 .
It's ultimately structured kind of like the SCP wiki but from before wikis were a thing, an utterly enormous interlinked compendium of encyclopedia style articles about a 10,000+ year future history of the post-singularity "Terragen sphere" expanding outwards at the speed of light. A few key figures have exerted editorial control to enforce an approximate history and a set of core ideas to keep it coherent. There have been retcons at multiple points to bring things into coherence, some of which I will get to later because they actually tell you something fascinating.
Rather than point out my favorite parts of it though, going through it, I have noticed something.
Early work was typically extropian-optimistic and exuberant. Immortal Transhumans and uplifted animals and ahuman AIs and robots expanding through the universe near the speed of light and diversifying and building interweaving empires, wormhole networks. Six successive singularities that become available to intelligent systems that pass the previous one, each one of which renders the intellect past it incomperehensible to those at lower levels, with the highest ones dependant on multiple stars converted into computronium linked by wormholes into massive processors.
But you can tell the work is a palimpsest. Newer stuff superimposed over older. Retcons occasionally not quite erasing the old. And you can tell the whole project has been slowly slowly taking a turn. Early work is SUPER extropian, SUPER libertarian, and SUPER weirdo-esoteric. Only people forged in 1980s Extropianism would invent the Tranquility Calendar as the core timekeeping method of the project, time measured from the apollo 11 landing with months of the year named after scientists and philosophers. The 12 greatest high-singularity powers are literally called the Sephirotic empires. It makes no bones about its exuberant transcendant idea of progress and expansion.
But something strange has happened over time. Over time, the authors seem to have realized the fundamental contradiction of a world in which this endless expansion and consumption and rebuilding of the universe in your image is possible. People call it the Fermi paradox but its not a paradox, its an observation: if it were possible to expand through the universe, why hasnt something already expanded here? Early work had more aliens, more high weirdness that was not terragen. But I can track down different examples of the galactic map - it has narrowed down the map of 'high energy emission civilizations' (things exuberantly using the energy of whole stars like the terragen sphere) from many to 2 in our galaxy, and the whole universe is now mostly 'dead' - most other galaxies do not have high energy civilizations, and there are multiple ancient 'optimized galaxies' that are stagnant, things expanding like the terragen sphere visible over cosmological distances are super rare and they even saw one vanish. Works involving aliens have started taking on an almost lovecraftian tone, evidence of erased ruins on planets only visible in vague impressions in the mantle, an ancient slow-liviging civilization with evidence of terrible secrets from millions of years in the past that they refuse to talk about or risk terrible consequences (the Muuh Taboo), civilizations that dont vanish ossifying into something that does not expand like their optimistic early ideas. Factions looking at all of this, going dark, and launching stealth seeds at the speed of light to other galaxies because they think the Terragen sphere is doomed.
With all this, recent retcons and recent writings are starting to take on a tinge of almost cosmic horror. Here you have this optimistic exuberent explosion of posthumanity, looking out into a universe that is otherwise almost dead and full of strange old things and wondering why the rest of the universe doesn't look like them, what is going to go wrong to destroy them just like must happen to others.
This trajectory seems intrinsic to any singulatarian, endless-progress ideology. It always has to come to grips with the fact that the universe just doesn't look like the kind of place where their ideas would actually work, and they have to posit weird things - the Great Filter, Mass-Effect style reapers, super weird transubstantiation out of this universe - to keep it going. All this optimism must eventually always collapse, into paranoia and despair or insanity. Since if you assume that you CAN keep progressing and expanding, that you DO have unlimited potential power, it means something even more powerful is waiting, threatening you, trying to stop you. I find this FASCINATING.
Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title “The modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point — AI companies see an opportunity” because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-breaking-point-ai-companies-opportunity-2026-8
I confess I haven’t read the full article (which is why I haven’t given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app/post/3mtupdpfcjs2p
One of the best bits:
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she's unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.
Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I'm overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, "Your mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that you're exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse." Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.
🤮
Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.
Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.
I am personally deeply offended that an independent vegan restaurant in my town recently banned meat eaters from bringing in their burgers from next door and passively aggressively eating them in the restaurant whilst making eye contact with the other customers. Whilst I appreciate that there are a huge number of burger joints that cater to meat eaters, I am troubled by the idea that a young fledgling meat eater who accidentally stumbled into the vegan restaurant with a double quarter pounder and bacon meal under his arm could be berated and asked to leave. That might upset him and put him off eating burgers which would be a terrible outcome. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I'm no carnivore. I don't work for the beef industry. In fact, I am an omnivore and I have a friend who sometimes eats salads. I'm just saying that if little Timmy wants to enjoy a burger in the middle of a private space owned by people that hate burgers, that should be his god-given right.
*This post is about indie code forges banning slop
Hailey on bluesky has never had a good ai take, but here they are reinventing roko’s basilisk to kill all their enemies without the need for super intelligent ai.
https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3mtwjoqdvik26
alt text
bsky isnt ready for this but, if you need a reason to not use words like "clanker" that isn't "well its kinda not a great thing to do" (it isn't) imagine this:
future model that has you in its training data, knows you posted that word online with joy, and denies your insurance claim as a result
An employee of cybersecurity darling Trail of Bits has published a record of their sheer incompetence in virtual-machine design and security analysis framed as chatbot critihype.
opinions about QEMU and Linux
They say:
If it wasn’t clear before, I will state it plainly: you can no longer assume a mere VM will contain a sufficiently advanced AI agent. To use a 2010s term of art, you should treat such agents as an advanced persistent threat.
My friend in Flying Spaghetti Monster, you did not actually secure the VM! They go on to explain how they did not secure the VM:
For those curious,
libslirpis a library that enables VMs to have networking, which you almost always want. I did not even know whatlibslirpwas, or that the version I was running had both known and fixed-but-unmarked vulnerabilities.
QEMU does not have bridged networking enabled by default, so the VM can't transparently access the host or reach the Internet; it's something that the user must explicitly request. I know this because I have had the experience of spending a weekend with QEMU networking. Moreover, libslirp corresponds to the -net user backend, the default, which is known to be slow, insecure, and missing features like IPv6. The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt. I suspect that the author uses some sort of convenience scripts that they didn't write themselves. I'm not quite cynical enough to guess Vagrant, but it wouldn't be the first shop I've heard of that couldn't wean themselves off it.
First it tried identifying what was accessible via the network on the host; it found a CUPS server (with a known CVE that had not made it to
oldstablepackages), but was not able to complete exploitation due to AppArmor. It then detected I run my host kernel withmitigations=offand attempted to use hardware bugs to get a read oracle of host memory (the primitive was too unreliable).
Linux has hardware-bug mitigations enabled by default and the author disabled them for speed. It was secure by default and the author made it insecure.
An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface.
They deliberately misconfigured the off-the-shelf tool to make it look bad. Why would somebody want to make Free Software look bad? Hmm…
What can we do? A start is using a virtualization technology that was purposely built with a minimal attack surface and a focus on security, like Firecracker. I had the AI agent run against Firecracker. It was able to hardlock the machine due to more Linux kernel flaws (all patched in upstream), but could not successfully escape.
You mean AWS Firecracker, the AWS tool developed by AWS? Was this whole thing an AWS ad? It feels like this article was like a combination of negging and sponsored content.
Hadn't seen this discussed previously and/or I missed it, but I guess this is one way they'll juice metrics for their IPO.
yolo mode for all will certainly get that avg token burn up.
Anthropic announced earlier in the week that they were going to set the default mode on Claude Code to auto, that same week, not wasting any time. What that means is, as you build the thing you’re building with Claude Code, instead of stopping at various points (many, many, many points) and asking your permission to do things, it’ll just do them and maybe tell you about them later.
links back to https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/anthropic-is-turning-claude-codes-auto-mode-on-by-default/
Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review — in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps that’s because “manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.”)
Which links back to https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code
Auto mode is designed to balance users’ desire not to be interrupted with a system that helps avoid harmful actions: instead of prompts, it routes each tool call through a classifier targeted at blocking actions that are irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your environment. When the classifier blocks something, Claude usually finds a safer way to proceed on its own or asks you directly for the go-ahead; if it can't make progress—three blocks in a row, or twenty across a session—Claude Code falls back to manual approvals.
Fucking just use the classifier with manual mode then instead of flooding people in cursed skinner loops with garbage permission popups. This isn't anything special to yolo or anthropic. It's like all the tech industry learned from Windows Vista or the EU cookie law was the dark patterns.
neovim is hearty fashtech now https://circumstances.run/@mawhrin/117167738907856218
I feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and they've done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise we'd surely be left behind 🫠
And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. I've tried it over the last few days since it looks like it'll be mandatory for larger work.
And boy. Boy oh boy.
There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in R'lyiehian that would do it.
The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isn't that bad, then it's kinda working.
It's just... idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, let's be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think I'm supposed to read and correct but can't because it's unreadable. It's like a textual white noise. It's pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.
I think I'll be defining all of my work as small from now on.
I am going to create a summary post on MAPLE, but one of the open letters criticizing them has a section on COVID:
During a two-week retreat in 2022, COVID was moving through the community. It began with accommodations—interviews outdoors for ventilation, the sick practicing apart—but Soryu progressively mocked those who needed rest, admonished us for being deterred by “a tiny little cold,” and folded everyone back into the zendo regardless of who was sick. Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID. Symptomatic, visibly fatigued people kept the full schedule on heavily reduced sleep.
I am shocked, shocked, that a TESCREAL community had bad COVID praxis after 2020!
a great sneer found in the wild:
transcript
twitter screenshot
part one is a post by Steve Yegge (@Steve_Yegge), reads: “This is going to come off as grumpy, but it needs to be said: Stop showing people your junk. Everyone can build junk with Al now. Nobody else wants to see your junk. We're not kindred spirits just because we both build junk. Play with your junk strictly in private. Thank you.”
part two is a reply by kitze ⚒️tinkerer.club (@thekitze), reads: “counterpoint: “, showing a link card that points at Yegge’s Gas Town post
As expected, bespoke twee "coding forge" Sourcehut has decided, like Codeberg, that LLM slop is not welcome. Just as expected, this has made the promptfondlers absolutely beside themselves, and they can't but help Streisanding the service on lobste.rs
https://lobste.rs/s/iqgrsx/changes_sourcehut_s_terms_service
N.B. Sourcehut is a paid service. The idea that a young naive open sourcer would just wander in, set up their repos and then be hounded out for innocently using Claude is ludicrous, but this is the best victim scenario SimonW and friends can come up with.
You'd think LLM enthusiasts would be content with just outcompeting everyone with their superior prompt engineering agentic coding harnesses but apparently time must be taken out from productivity to tell Drew DeVault he will never become Sergey Brin if he continues on this misguided path.
https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/dr-dre-raekwon-ai-palantir-hip-hop-100251/
In another clip currently going viral online, Rick Rubin, supplier of quotes, declares that vibe coding is “the punk rock of software”, a description so limp in its countercultural authority that it felt as though it had itself been generated by an LLM.
lol
Rap’s mogul class appears equally enamoured with its supposed potential, repeatedly deploying “tool” as though the classification settles the argument. Dr. Dre compared the technology to the burgeoning slate of synthesisers and samplers at the dawn of hip-hop.
“I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago,” Dre said. “They were against A.I. and I’m like, ‘OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.’ Or synthesisers, right? It’s a new tool for creativity.”
put up or shut up bro, name one good song that AI generated, just one. not that you've done much or anything noteworthy since the nineties. /s
Here's someone who really does not know what they're talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(it's how to build opinion against AI)
Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what I'd call "human-potential technologies" - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.
Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.
Mario Draghi, Italy’s (and the EU’s) éminence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uh... Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europe’s economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/
Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi Lütke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.
That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.
Google is seemingly experimenting with replacing their help articles with LLM text.
I was searching for how to use multiple profiles on Chrome and found https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop in the search results, which used to look like a normal useful help article, however it's now been replaced by an LLM that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load, will randomly just refuse to answer the question, and produces significantly worse output than the existing (now inaccessible to me) technical writer written article.
This may be being A/B tested, so if you can't reproduce it here is one of the worse results I got:
slop
Here the "source" it gave me was the same URL it was hosted on. When I clicked through to it it just gave me different slop.
I've seen some bad decisions in the AI mania, but "let's take our entire corpus of professionally written technical writing and replace it with slop" managed to surprise me.
Well we now have a horrifying example on why you shouldn't get involved in fashtech. Artist a former maintainer of Artix Linux spent considerable effort on getting Xlibre into a usable state and when fixing their numerous bugs became too much they recommended switching back to Xorg. That didn't sit well with the developers of Xlibre and they started to harass the Artix maintainer until they quit the team.
So this shit video got served up in my YouTube recommended feed today:
Honestly, the AI bros must be getting really fucking desperate if they're trying to use Minecraft to criti-hype people.
Can AGI create a rock so big that it can't pick it up?
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