This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can’t imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.

Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle

It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas’ current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he’s been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.

It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it’s get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: they’re quite the opposite), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort “the AI app says this is plagiarized” attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race “science” is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between “impartial” academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.

As is so often the case, I honestly don’t know what’s supposed to be different about our response to gengineered superplagues if they were made by an AI instead of the CIA or whoever else is in on that nonsense.

Always love reading Iris’ work. I’m already finding ways to abuse the concept of the person-tool gestalt for dumb jokes that I have to over explain to my wife so I’m getting my money’s worth to be sure.

Also I definitely have actual fond memories of randomly running into people in Guild Wars 2. The of genericizing/instancing more of the world interactions (like loot and quests, for example) and using mega servers to dynamically scale resource usage and player allocation meant that you were very unlikely to organically run into the same people often enough to really make even a parasocial connection, but it dramatically improved the experience with the overall community.

Objection! Gas Town isn’t junk, it’s a memetic weapon trying to convince anyone with actual engineering sensibilities to abandon the industry and move to their cabin in the woods to become professional manifesto writers, thus clearing the path for AI inevitability.

Of course, the irony is that in their desire to revolt against the violence being forced upon them they merely created an incredibly efficient means of achievement farming for those with the stomach for it.

I can’t think of a more productive charity for helping make-a-wish donors and the parents of dying children feel better about the world.

Also with Desert Bus for Hope on the horizon I want to use this space to (probably unnecessarily) point to Child’s Play. It’s almost not utilmaxxing, but I know when I was in hospital as a kid the little cart with a Nintendo 64 on it was the only time I felt like an actual kid instead of a science experiment or hurt. I’m willing to forgive a lot of lost net utils to give that to others going through it.

It was possible to take things away from that movie other than “Lmao these names are silly” and “Channing Tatum is a puppy?”

It’s also fascinating to see them use nuclear vs renewable energy as their case study given that renewable energy has been having a hell of a time properly replacing fossil fuels even though everyone mostly agrees it’s a good idea. Like, whatever hypothetical advantagre they got from their opposition to the nuclear boogeyman (their idiotic framing, not mine), renewables have still been facing strong political and economic headwinds that are only being magnified by the unceasing growth in demand for electrical power (including but not exclusively driven by AI compute).

But if I don’t obsessively optimize my career in ways that prevent me from making meaningful human connections, how am I supposed to keep up with the relentless march of AI??? Thank God I have AI to help pick up the slack.

I have incredibly vague memories of the early days of vox where I was impressed at the form they used? Like, I seem to remember them really embracing hypertext and linking to central pieces that provided some more context on the immediate story than would have been reasonable to include in the main article. Like, if you wanted a brief summary of how the situation in Libya got to the point where the breaking news hit it there was a way to get that information easily right there, linked in the article.

Of course, by now it seems like everyone has gotten far more competent at that and the editorial policies and ideologies behind Klein’s work have exposed themselves as deeply odious. There may have been a point at which he had one single good idea, but then that idea was completely tangential to the thing he actually wanted to do.

I wouldn’t put a multiplier on them, except for 1.2x to 1.25x.

I’m pretty sure it’s still a multiplier if you’re not using whole numbers.

I’d be curious to see how they defined “harmful” in their test, since it looks like Claude code’s technically-not-yolo mode is looking for “actions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environment” which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in “your environment”.

And yes, I’m sure that the fact that the flow of operations they’re outline will massively increase the number of times that the system automatically retries things, this increasing token usage, is going to be fully accounted for when they review the financials on how many tokens people are paying for.

If you’re putting yourself in a situation where your business decisions, political ideology, or general worldview will be negatively impacted by the seeding of a pseudorandom number generator I would recommend you rethink your life rather than argue with the people who set the seed.

Because passing off basic security configuration to a system that basically ensures that even if it is without major errors it’s basically impossible to understand and follow is definitely not a bad idea, especially if you’re going to try and operate this for more than a couple of weeks or in on infrastructure that isn’t perfectly isolated and specific to this app.

So the argument is that the hypothetical future generations that longtermists value might be too dumb to care about because of black and brown people reproducing miscegenation “dysgenic pressures”. But if we assume, as they appear to, that longtermists should be taken seriously rather than pointed at and mocked, then the math involved would basically necessitate that “certain” people alive today should also merit effectively zero moral consideration. Something tells me that they get real conceptual real fast and start avoiding the shut up and multiply people hard.

My general approach telegraphs a receptiveness to “sober” forms of argument, an interest in counterintuitive strategic thinking, a distaste for wild speculation, an aversion to nakedly ideological perspectives, and a sense that the past is important for understanding the future. My students probably make some effort (implicit or explicit) to speak in ways that respond to this.

I’m going to leave this part of the author’s self-description here and resist the urge to comment on it.

Perspective #6: AI will not go rogue because AI does not have, and is likely incapable of having, desires.

This one I found interesting largely because it suggests an inability on the writer’s part to really understand point 4, despite featuring one of the better sneers on the subject (“as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on ‘rogue cars.’”). Maybe I’m overstating something here, but the way I see it the difference between the rogue AI and faulty AI scenarios aren’t really in the distinct events of the scenario. Faulty AI could absolutely do as much damage as “rogue” AI if it was plugged into all the systems that would be necessary to, say, liquidate humanity and pull the iron from their blood. The difference is entirely in framing and responsibility. We should ask questions now about how these systems are used, what their limitations are, and how we deal with that. Instead, the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything, and then use the idea that the AI went rogue and has agency to avoid how obviously bad of a decision this would be. The fact that this is also the part where the AI companies make a fucktillion dollars and finally show them, show them all, muhuhahaha is, I’m sure, irrelevant to their sober analysis.

Happy birthday, my friend! Glad to hear that the steakhouse delivered.

The episode dropped and I’m like 2/3 in and have already passed my previous record for the number of times I’ve had to pause an episode of OS to make a little angry noise.

There’s also something to be said of the inherent narcissism of the influencer economy? Like, I prefer my video essayists to have more of a burned-out academic vibe so CJ has been adjacent to but not on my radar. That being said, having a very distinct aesthetic is pretty common in the space because having a hook is what brings in eyeballs and thus patreon subs or superchats or whatever else turns that into an actual career. I would sooner assume he’s using a similar strategy to manipulate viewers into clicking his face rather than that he’s actively following the PUA playbook.

the woman herself shows up in the substack comments with the most pitiful display of “I’m just a smol self-taught bean why are you being so mean to me?”

Erika rightly responds by calling out Aella’s own attitude towards the people who know how to apply the level of rigor to the data that she (apparently admittedly?) doesn’t. Like, you can’t simultaneously be this dismissive of the norms and processes of the scientific establishment and also claim ignorance and inability when your inability or refusal to follow those norms leads you to crap conclusions.