Sabine Hossenfelder claims she finally got cancelled, kind of - Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy cut ties with Sabine Hossenfelder.

Supposedly the MCMP thought publicly shitting on a paper for clicks on your very popular youtube channel was antideontological. Link goes to reddit post in case you don’t want to give her views.

In collaboration with cryptocurrency outfits Coinbase, MetaMask, and the Ethereum foundation, Google also produced an extension that would integrate the cryptocurrency-oriented x402 protocol, allowing for AI-driven purchasing from crypto wallets.

what could possibly go wrong

In either case, the goal is to maintain an auditable trail that can be reexamined in cases of fraud.

Which is a thing that you only need to worry about if you use these types of agents.

Which in any case you can’t, because

The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf and engage in complex real-time interactions with retailers’ AI agents.

Can’t see how this doesn’t defeat the purpose, if you have a mock data generator of sufficient fidelity you already have a well-defined mechanism to describe the data, shouldn’t you be using that instead of developing a new model to capture the characteristics of the model that creates those characteristics?

I feel that strip mall dojos where you were ostensibly taught some very mainstream belt-based martial art like karate or TKD (or straight up make-believe stuff like ninjutsu) but were essentially glorified daycare should figure somewhere in the history of the term.

190IQ is when you verb asymptote to avoid saying ‘almost’.

It’s possible someone specifically picked the highest IQ that wouldn’t need a second planet earth to make the statistics work.

Siskind did a review too, basically gives it the ‘their hearts in the right place but… [read AI2027 instead]’ treatment. Then they go at it a bit with Yud in the comments where Yud comes off as a bitter dick, but their actual disagreements are just filioque shit. Also they both seem to agree that a worldwide moratorium on AI research that will give us time to breed/genetically engineer superior brained humans to fix our shit is the way to go.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone/comment/154920454

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone/comment/154927504

Also notable that apparently Siskind thinks nuclear non-proliferation sorta worked because people talked it out and decided to be mature about it rather than being scared shitless of MAD, so AI non-proliferation by presumably appointing a rationalist Grand Inquisitor in charge of all human scientific progress is an obvious solution.

Nice. Here’s the bluesky account as well.

Some quality wordsmithing found in the wild:

the only people who like prediction markets […]

Apparently Donald Trump Jr. has found his way into the payroll of a couple of the bigger prediction markets, so they seem to be doing their darndest to change that.

assuming prediction markets are magic

Bet it’s more like assuming it will incentivize people with magical predicting genes to reproduce more so we can get a kwisatz haderach to fight AI down the line.

It’s always dumber than expected.

Apparently the hacker who publicized a copy of the no fly list was leaked an article containing Yarvin’s home address, which she promptly posted on bluesky. Won’t link because I don’t think we’ve had the doxxing discussion but It’s easily findable now.

I’m mostly posting this because the article featured this photo:

This is too corny and overdramatic for my tastes. It reads a bit like satire, complete with piling on the religious undertones there at the end.

Getting love bombed in that rationalist con he went to recently probably didn’t help matters.

The common clay of the new west:

Shamelessly reproduced from the other place:

A quick summary of his last three posts:

“Here’s a thought experiment I came up with to try to justify the murder of tens of thousands of children.”

“Lots of people got mad at me for my last post; have you considered that being mad at me makes me the victim and you a Nazi?”

“I’m actually winning so much right now: it’s very normal that people keep worriedly speculating that I’ve suffered some sort of mental breakdown.”

I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. […]

Honestly what he should actually be grateful for is how all his notoriety ever amounted to^[1] was a couple of obscure forums going ‘look at this dumb asshole’ and moving on.

He is an insecure and toxic serial overreactor with shit opinions and a huge unpopular-young-nerd chip on his shoulder, and who comes off as being one mildly concerted troll effort away from a psych ward at all times. And probably not even that, judging from Graham Linehan’s life trajectory.

[1] besides Siskind using him to broaden his influence on incels and gamer gaters.

It’s like a one-and-a-half-page article that also comes in audio and video form, don’t be lazy.

The people at Zitron’s subreddit have thoughts

• I mean if anything all he proved that DeepSeek-R1 could be profitable

• if any of this was true these companies would actually be making money

Modern move money between pockets for profit economics seem to give The Hitchhiker’s Guide bistromathics a run for their money.