there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural

This is a big reason why I felt so much anger towards the piece. Gyges is basically still pitching his complaints at people who organize their community around Twitter; by leaning so heavily on dredging up old tweets, kowtowing to the in-group consensus that Yudkowsky is a genius with a pivotally unique perspective, and obliquely referencing the "woke mind virus" memeplex at the end. But Twitter is part of that problematic structure, especially under Musk but even before. It's a platform and power structure that has long carved out plenty of room for general bigotry, misogyny, and abusive material up to and including CSAM. Gyges wants to have his clout-farm, but just dispose of the more rotten produce.

I'm being a bit flippant with the previous post, but really, Gyges was right to retract this. A number of the allegations he's resurfacing are serious, and there most likely is more abuse going on the rat scene than has come to light... but leaning so heavily on Twitter posts as primary-source evidence makes his whole effort here come off as lightweight and cranky. To me, rather than a scathing exposé, this resembles a Dear Lowtax letter from somebody who got banned from Something Awful (a place where some of the moderators really were pedophiles, who really did have to be evicted from the community and prosecuted!).

We've known for a long time that Aella's attitudes are problematic, and that we don't want to spend time with her in olfactory distance, let alone tactile distance. Nothing new there. This Brangus dude was previously unknown to me, which is probably a good sign that my social-media hygiene of staying strictly away from Twitter is working... but also, and I don't mean to say this by way of minimization, he ultimately seems like yet one more Tate-swilling Twitter manosphere bigot. He just happens to be the one infesting Gyges' community of affinity. It would be hard to make the case, given the evidence presented, that he's done much more than perform for the tech-savvy subset of Rogan/Tate adherents. Enough that people should reconsider associating with him, yes, but not enough to convict and remove him from public life.

And his conclusion starts off so laughable that it drowns out any accusation he might level against Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is a great man whose most recent equivalent is... Lenin?! What on earth? Yudkowsky doesn't even measure up to Hubbard, his closest American parallel. The only grace I am willing to give Yudkowsky is that he has not, generally, been as openly predatory or as single-mindedly focused on creating a high-control organization as Hubbard was. Yudkowsky's attempts at re-establishing group control and setting boundaries against outgroups typically consist of whiny tweets and LW posts that very quickly reach into "ur not takin p(doom) seriously!" hyperbole. The Sea Org and Guardian's Office this is not.

I also strictly disagree with Gyges' implicit assumption that Yudkowsky was the most effective popularizer of these ideas, or somehow more effective than Kurzweil. Without Kurzweil projecting exponential growth curves forward and back in time, no VC GP in the mid-2010s is going to start writing checks for the early generations of genAI. And, for crying out loud, I distinctly remember Disney children's TV having an episode about grey goo taking over the world in 1996! https://gargwiki.net/Walkabout Almost 10 years before Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near, and two years before the first Harry Potter book would be published in the US! Omitting Kurzweil and Drexler to hype Yudkowsky is just plain silly. And no, he's not on a level with Lenin; we can already tell that the AI companies' marketing which adapts AI-doom ideas is backfiring and being laughed at by the general public.

I've gone on for too long, partly because this is a diverting way to procrastinate, but by the end of this, Gyges once again demonstrates why he's an unreliable fellow traveler. I am very reluctant to quote directly from a document that has been officially retracted, but the second to last paragraph where he talks about "understand[ing] what people mean when they say certain ideas are demonic, and that they spread like a disease..." Hmm, you obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter to dig all this shit up, tell me, what's the "mind virus" they keep ranting about over there? Fuck you, Gyges, you're a few invitation-snubs or one bad layoff away from goose-stepping with the rest of them.

Not sure how far I'm going to read this, but leading off with roon is a giant blinking red [More citations needed]

I continually notice that the assertion some particular skill is needed to properly utilize the LLM, is rarely accompanied by any meaningful description of the path to develop that skill. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places.

This article deserves dedicated post status. He comes in more gently than I would at the end, but the tl;dr that needs to be hammered into peoples' heads: Hacker News is not a neutral forum for technical discussion. It is an advertising and propaganda operation administered to shape and condition technical discussions.

https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/

The folks at Reason continue to misidentify as libertarians, not realizing they're advocating for the shambling corpse of what was already an unhealthy movement

Damn, who knew this would yield material for my boy-band cover/parody project. Foom flop, doo wop wop wop...

To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.

Even from beyond, he's still sticking his fingers into our hearts ❤️

I think it's a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.

I've seen "cognitive surrender" bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term "learned helplessness" doesn't cover the underlying concept just as well.

Bonus: A galaxy brain take: maybe since Caroline has already messed up so massively, that means she actually has the best experience!

Yeah, this Mohamed Atta guy is a great airline pilot, he just had a botched landing that one time