I've heard worse ideas. It's funny; I would have expected the people who were in tech because it looked like the best bet for a relatively stable in-demand career would have been the ones who were crap at it relative to the folks doing it purely for love of the game. But it turns out that having something else going on is closely linked to touching grass in ways that make you harder to lure into the cult.

Yeah, I probably should have included a warning about incoming psychic damage on that link. Sorry.

Although highlighting the phrase "intelligence displacement" construct dies illuminate that the whole case they make is built on the same foundations as that other Rat fixation: eugenics and race science! Like, I'm not saying the author is definitely a eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, but their argument is based on the same idea of what "intelligence" is in the first place. It's a distinct commodity that is produced or contained in certain minds and is the ultimate source of the value that they create. If you're a "knowledge worker" you don't provide a specific perspective, experience, expertise, or even knowledge, you just plug your intelligence into the organization like connecting a new processor bank to a server farm. Because it's disconnected from a person's individuality and subjectivity we can model it effectively as a commodity and look to optimize its production, either by automating away the squishy human element with ai or by increasing the productivity of current methods by optimizing for the ~~white~~ "right" kind of person.

I can see a situation where his bombing campaign fails to achieve the objective, a special operation like in Venezuela fails, and Hegseth or Rubio or someone (Putin? Netanyahu? Kanye?) convinces him to invade long enough that inertia carries it forward.

Of course, anything we do is going to take us to the same result we've seen with all these interventions. The US military and whatever allies join us will be, broadly speaking, terrifyingly effective at achieving their tactical and operational goals, but because the overall strategic plan is somewhere between non-existent and backwards those successes will fail to actually do anything. We will inflict and suffer that much more death and devastation, and all it will accomplish is making the world less stable and less safe for everyone.

Link to the Zitron sneer

It's a pretty wild read. This isn't a rational doomer screed about the annihilation of life on earth, though it similarly bounces radically between being overly vague and overly specific to create the appearance of analyjsis and consideration and confuse when it's claiming a fact with when it's extrapolating a trend (hint: it's almost always the latter and the trend may or may not be real). Instead it's written firmly for the McKinsey set to convince them their bets on the AI future weren't dumb and actually it's the naysayers who will lose their jobs and homes. Also David might need to update his site because there's an offhanded reverse-pivot back into crypto.

I think there's definitely something to that. It seems like it rhymes with my own interpretation, at least. I did 7 years of support for backend network infrastructure (load balancing, SSL optimization, etc) and one thing that I consistently found was that the way the applications and tech services at most of these companies were structured everything was treated like a complete black box by everyone who wasn't specifically working on that element. Like, I would find myself trying to trace a problem through the application flow and every other request was essentially being handled by a completely different team and the people I was talking to didn't even understand the questions I was asking. That level of siloed work is somewhat necessary given the sheer complexity of the systems and infrastructure that modern applications rely on, but also seems to cultivate a certain level of incuriousity. What's happening inside those black boxes doesn't even get considered because it doesn't matter; it's somebody else's problem right up until it suddenly isn't. The current crop of confabulation machines take this tendency to a kind of logical extreme where nobody can adequately look into the black box to understand what it's doing, and that will similarly be perfectly fine up until it very much isn't and there won't be anyone to call to figure out how to fix it.

From the outside? I'm gonna be honest and say I don't know that you do.

A computer that both does what you don't tell it to do and doesn't do what you tell it to do. I didn't think we could do it but - I tell you what - it's been done.

While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn't satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn't like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you're going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administration has shown a less-than-comforting attitude towards civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide.

Let's also not lose sight of the role that US and British intervention played in creating the circumstances for the Ayatollahs to come to power in the first place. The Shah wasn't exactly any kinder to the Iranian people and was a foreign puppet to boot.

Harris's take only works if, like him, you assume that the fundamental problem with Iran is Islam, rather than actually bothering to look at the history of the country and how it became what it is today. Because in that case once you get the ayatollah out of the way and introduce the light of Science! to the people they'll immediately become rational civil libertarians and believe exactly the same things he does. The Irreligious Right is exactly as reductive and stupid as the worst evangelicals, but can better use the language of STEM to hide it.

You know, it would be interesting if the "AI blog" keeps illustrating his descent into madness and hallucinates that he like leaves his partner for "her" etc. because that's how these stories go even in the hopeful case that he recovers before doing any more serious damage.

The Atlantic has a take on this too. Sam Altman is Losing His Grip on Humanity.

Somehow I had missed the boat on Donald Boat and now I have so many questions. Absolutely wild read.

Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?