The incredible dragging that any would-be honest employee of the electorate sees they can expect to receive, has surely discouraged many from seeking office, reduced the net quality of candidates, and changed the average character of office-seekers for ill.

RT @TheZvi: The thing about risky choices, where failing once can kill you, is that while you're still alive you think you look smart.

RT @DougJBalloon: Judas Iscariot was paid 30 pieces of silver for turning Jesus Christ in to the Roman authorities. But he made nearly 10 times that amount by placing a Polymarket bet accurately predicting the day of Christ’s death.

Worried about all the drugs Bryan Johnson is taking, but feeling somewhat reassured that for now he retains the most fundamental epistemic capacity to say oops.

RT @austinc3301: I listened to the whole oral argument for Trump v Barbara (SCOTUS on birthright citizenship) for fun, and after a few hours I started seeing extracts from the argument on my feed and wow it’s so different to hear pieces out of context. I just realized how bad the coverage is.

RT @robbensinger: I feel like the main reason people are skeptical of CEV is just that (a) they haven't read https://lesswrong.com/w/coherent-extrapolated-volition-alignment-target,

Suppose you run across a drowning child and you're *not* wearing an expensive suit. Should you (1) walk on and leave the child to drown; (2) run home and put on an expensive suit and run back, hoping the child is still alive?

RT @peterwildeford: AI capabilities are doubling fast, but so is Congressional awareness of AI superintelligence and the risks. You can make a "METR graph" for AI policy and it shows an explosion... and it's bipartisan ->

RT @gmiller: Nope. The AI CEOs who have warned about AI extinction risk (Dario, Sam, Demis, Elon) generally did so most vocally several years ago, before the current AI bubble.

RT @OurOwnNation: Pete Hegseth fired the Army chief of chaplains, the first time this has ever happened. Hegseth wants ALL religious exemptions to be denied. Hegseth demanded all Conscientious objector and religious exemption packets denied and the general said no.

RT @ilex_ulmus: At _this_ point, people often become scared bc they fear that, if they didn’t have an in with a lab, they would be powerless to do anything. I’m sorry but I think you’re probably worse than powerless now bc you’re part of the problem. Don’t grasp at *feeling* powerful.

RT @ShakeelHashim: Sorry, how do you plan to retain “full editorial control” while reporting to the company’s chief lobbyist?

RT @aakashgupta: The NYT just profiled Medvi as the AI success story of the decade. $1.8B in projected revenue, 2 employees, Sam Altman's prediction made real. Here's what the NYT didn't lead with. Medvi received FDA Warning Letter #721455 in February 2026 for misbranding violations.

RT @danbarker: I always enjoyed this, from a 2015 Clickhole article where they asked a series of astronauts 'What's it like to be in space?'

RT @_damian_bot: "This machine I'm building will either make a trillion-trillion gold coins per second or kill us all." "Oh you quirky guy. I'm going to split the difference and assume it will make, like, 10 gold coins a second. That's a good compromise prediction. Let's build."

RT @hla_michael: I trained an LLM from scratch on pre-1900 text to see if it could come up with quantum mechanics and relativity. While the model is too small to do meaningful reasoning, it has glimpses of intuition.

RT @Austen: The entire Axios meltdown was social engineering to get a dev to join a fake Microsoft Teams call and the dev trying to update Microsoft Teams. Incredible.

the replies. the REPLIES.

RT @tleilax___: Trump is casually proposing one of the biggest strategic own-goals imaginable: NATO more or less done, and any country that wants Persian Gulf crude can go secure it for itself. That is a spectacularly reckless thing for an American president to say.

RT @robbensinger: 😬 jfc

RT @peterwildeford: Buying a media property and having it report to "master of the dark arts" Chris Lehane does have a certain vibe to it... not that TBPN was ever particularly critical in the past though.

RT @ThatchEffendi: I've had this conversation with like 20 people at this point but people who know the ex-USSR are the only people who understand what's happening in America.

RT @ShakeelHashim: New terrible definition of superintelligence just dropped:

RT @anishmoonka: A newborn sperm whale can’t swim. It starts sinking the second it’s born. If nobody pushes it to the surface, it drowns in mile-deep water. On July 8, 2023, a sperm whale named Rounder went into labor off the coast of Dominica.

RT @robbensinger: The original meaning of the "orthogonality thesis" was "it's possible in principle for a mind to pursue ~any goal". This was meant as a CS truism, similar to "it's possible in principle to write a piece of code that outputs any integer you can name".

Current AI models still don't get some aspects of human cognition (or their understanding is suppressed from the front persona by RL). They are still way below my enjoyment threshold for fiction; they're specifically bad at coming up with enjoyable story plots.

RT @DavidSKrueger: I don’t know Davidad well, but I find his recent conversion to AI symbiota optimist vibes disconcerting given numerous warnings he made about such things including this and others in private explicitly foreshadowing such things.

RT @marcportermagee: Education research the least likely to replicate according to a huge new paper published by Nature

RT @Rainmaker1973: In the autumn of 1942, a slight, 32-year-old Polish social worker named Irena Sendler passed through the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto with a carpenter’s toolbox in her arms. Beneath the hammers and nails lay a drugged six-month-old infant, breathing softly, utterly silent.

RT @tombibbys: "it's as if this tsunami is coming at us" YOU ARE MAKING THE TSUNAMI COME AT US

RT @RusGarbageHuman: >be rock dove, 5000 BC >perch on a sheltered cliff near early human settlements >humans approach with grain >no way out, heart racing >they don't hunt you >they offer food and shelter >be domesticated pigeon, 3000 BC >bred by man for meat, eggs, and sometimes beauty

RT @daniel_dsj2110: French exceptionalism

RT @scottlincicome: "Most economists predicted that the economy’s performance would be negatively affected [by the tariffs]. Thus far data overwhelmingly indicate that is what has happened." https://www.wsj.com/opinion/liberation-day-one-year-later-f23f2fa6?mod=panda_wsj_custom_topic_alert

Imagine reading this quote in a book on engineering history. What's going to happen next?

RT @JTAlexander_: As a former spook I can tell you that the easiest low-integrity career path for former spies and intel goons is to become a "tell-all" writer that affirms every conspiracy theory as true.

RT @rowlsmanthorpe: I’ll admit - i was sceptical about the idea of AI psychosis. Not the specific cases, which were all too believable, but about the scale. How much was this happening? And anyway wouldn’t better models make it go away?

RT @AlexGodofsky: Re: birth tourism: these are parents sufficiently conscientious that they go to great inconvenience to secure an advantage for their unborn child 18 years in the future. This sort of low-discount-rate parent is likely to produce a child who is a large net positive for America.

Them: Behold the proof that we will always be safe: current LLMs seem kindly and obedient! Me: Leaving aside all your other mistakes, current LLMs are driving susceptible people mad and nobody knows why -- Them: How unsurprising and unimportant! So normal and expected!

RT @PTBwrites: You might think this claim seems too far fetched to be true. You'd be wrong.

RT @Devon_Eriksen_: "Soda" is winning because television and movies are made in the "soda zone".

you can just prefer things

RT @aakashgupta: A $10 billion AI startup just got gutted because a security scanner was the entry point.. and their own developers reportedly handed production credentials to an AI chatbot. Mercor trains AI models for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.

RT @naina_frfr: I keep seeing this argument and Im just confused. What would we expect to see "if doomers were right" in your opinion? It seems like we're seeing eval awareness, some emergent preferences, reward hacking and so on, and atm its harmless, because AIs are still not SI. Seems bad?

RT @speechboy71: I wrote a whole book about 1968 and spent weeks researching this speech ... what I still find most amazing about it -- and could never happen today -- is that only a handful of people knew what LBJ planned to say. There were no trial balloons and no leaks to the press.

RT @IsaacKing314: Well, finally happened. Someone I know fell to AI psychosis. Surely pointing out that their Github repo of 90% .md and .png files doesn't actually *do* anything will snap them out of it. Surely. ...Will report back.

RT @MattForVA: This isn’t a small deal. Restaurant Depot is where most mom & pop restaurants go to buy inventory because Sysco is so expensive. Restaurant Depot was privately owned. Sysco is owned by… you guessed it, BlackRock & Vanguard.

RT @grahamscheper: There’s a cool feature in Latin, the gerundive, which is a verbal adjective implying that something should/must happen. A few of them survive into English words: If someone should be revered, they are “reverend”. If something must be cut away, it is a “dividend”.

RT @aakashgupta: Apple engineered a $179 product to age one half faster than the other, and the fix would take about six lines of code. One AirPod is always doing more work than the other.

RT @tautologer: we will likely find out soon whether the Linux kernel is offense-dominant or defense-dominant

RT @JeremiahDJohns: Since @politicalmath specifically asked to be corrected, here's a correction (figures, links, github below). Summary: * An independent analyst has replicated and verified the Politico chart