Astroturfing is as American as apple pie.
I'm no fan of Greg Egan's fiction but I am a fan of him pissing of rats:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbqJfCz9qvfptNbCQ/an-angry-review-of-greg-egan-s-didicosm
Link to short story: https://www.gregegan.net/DIDICOSM/Complete/Didicosm.html
also
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hx5EkHFH5hGzngZDs/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon (shared in a comment to the above)
Here's the short story that pissed Zack off: https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DeathGorgon_Egan.pdf
Edit I found the time to read Didicosm and while it suffers from an Eganesque infodump (with diagrams!) it's not nearly as bad as the LWers are wittering on about. Part of me thinks they're mad because the main scientists are all women while the main dude is a stable, well-adjusted partner in the relationship.
in b4 "Committee for AI Safety" seizes control and executes people who are too smart with a guillotine.
Habryka doesn't have time to write all the crazy shit he's mulling on, so he offers a summary.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqgwHJ93pJpaeHXs6/posts-i-don-t-have-time-to-write
Do you enjoy living in a society that takes fire safety seriously? Sucks to be you, I guess:
- Fire codes are the root of all evil
How about we just make all the mosquito nets flammable. That's effective altruism!
Also Switzerland is a libertarian paradise apparently.
I think the entire business idea was hallucinated by an LLM.
A go-live at 11PM is a recipe for disaster as sleep-deprived engineers struggle to fix all the teething bugs.
This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.
"tenant of white supremacy"
White Supremacy is the worst landlord.
As for the prospect that AI will enable business users to do more with fewer humans in the office or on the factory floor, the technology generates such frequent errors that users may need to add workers just to double-check the bots’ output.
And here we were worrying about being out of work...
Normal person: an LLM is trained on publicly available images of MRIs, most with tumors, so presenting an image of any MRI will naturally generate text related to brain tumor descriptions.
Brain-addled prompt fondlers: clearly this response proves Claude is more intelligent than any doctor.
I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.
Anyway...