Nerding out about Dune is tremendously cool, you can pick any thread to pull and it always goes somewhere.

The details of the plot don’t necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about.

Isn’t aspiring for the aesthetics while ignoring the (admittedly heavily lore driven and not especially applicable to irl) substance exactly what the torment nexus meme is about though? Except I don’t think there is a dust-speckness aspect to the GP, you aren’t future-human-population-maxxing¹, the point seems to be to ensure there is a future where humanity’s collective free will isn’t utterly tethered to a prescient autocrat², and the prescriptive aspect is that we should be part of an open system instead of say locked in with the great man of history du jour, which is also in keeping with the ecological framing.

It’s been a while but I don’t think the Golden Path is even that front and center in the text, Dune 4: GEOD is basically a character study on the God emperor, who is one of the most unique and fascinating characters in sci-fi³.

I think this is why the GP is a TINA situation by authorial decree, it’s Frank Herbert going listen, I’m doing my best to write a suicidal rebirth god archetype as a layered and relatable-yet-utterly-othered character, you are not supposed to be worrying that much if there could be a GP-but-liberal with more individual thriving and less oppressive totalitarianism, I assure you he’s thought about it extensively and he thinks there sure can’t and that’s it.

Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? It’s a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbert’s obsessions from a new perspective.

The Bureau of Saboteurs books along with Godmakers were my favourite non-Dune Herbert books! I also found the Dragon in the Sea fascinating 20 years ago and think I should revisit, and also finally read the follow up collaborations that only seem to be available unofficially. Also The White Plague gave late-teens me nightmares.

I remember Dosadi as being more about FH going all out on the intrigue and deep lore to the point where the latter parts of the book are basically written in innuendo, you are literally expected to read between the lines to understand what the hell is going on, I wish my parents had as much faith in me as Frank Herbert had in his readers.

But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.

The worst aspects of FH I’m aware of are that he was a shitty fucking parent and hated Iron Maiden, unambiguously evil seems stretching it, unless you were his son.

I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard, using sci-fi literature as an efficient outlet for his psychedelics/mysticism/ecology/psychosexuality obsession oscilliation and actually leaving a descent literary legacy instead of starting a cult or several, but this post is already running so long it’s starting to need an editor.

1. sigh
2. This has additional metaphysical implications with how prophecy works in the duniverse, in the sense that it’s not only about being forever in complete submission to Empire in some traditional ultracolonialist sense, you are essentially reduced to just a part of another man’s waking dream as they pick and choose what future track to lock the timeline in.
3. And is also the first person narrator of the book. Both the remaining Dune books also switched to full first person point-of-view narration with very little in terms of an omniscient guiding perspective, it’s fairly ambitious actually.

dog whistle

Ashkenazi IQ (and asian SAT scores) absolutely are the “but I have a black friend!” of race science, but further mythologizing Yud and Scoot on those grounds also happens.

the 4000 years of necessary tragedy and sacrifice, aka the golden path, is also remarkably similar to the rationalists’ teleology! specifically the longtermist stuff! i.e. it’s okay to sacrifice lives today to ensure humanity’s survival.

Only in the broadest sense where humanity survives into the far future by spreading so far and wide that no matter the scale of a catastrophe a significant part will always continue to thrive.

However, where longtermism is about papercliping the entire universe into compute to fulfil some vague utilitarian notion of virtual happiness quota, the GP seems to be more about crippling the substructure that ostensibly causes humanity again and again be reduced to the whims of some supreme authority, be it the automated thinking machines from their past or their current much harder to escape succession of psychic tyrants let loose by selectively breeding for something humanity had absolutely no natural defence against.

The GP isn’t even a utopia, it’s a response to an immediate incredibly out of the box problem, the inevitability of an eventual dynasty of space wizard genghis khans.

i think herbert’s feelings about breeding programs are … complicated. he never presents it as ethical but he does seem fascinated by the concept and he’s very very into the idea of forging supermen from extreme environmental pressure. like “comes up several times per book” levels of fascinated.

I think they come second to his concerns about ecology and humanity’s relation to the environment. Post-desert fremen are basically water-fat cosplayers, and in general, other than the deliberately paradigm shattering kwisatz haderach, the end product of genetic adjustment are never presented as an apex for humanity, more like a good fit for their niche, like how post-emperor fish-speakers either peter-out or get subsumed by other factions.

their philosophy aligns with the plot of dune

Only in the Torment Nexus sense. Like, in the original books it takes 4000 years of tragedy and sacrifice at an immense scale to somewhat unfuck the direct implications of said breeding program and ensure humanity’s continued existence.

edit: also the genetic engineering enthusiast faction/race are absolutely never presented in a good light.

overwhelmed/exhausted

In the blog he posted afterwards he says he has 40 years of experience, so he is also grandpa old.

Sometimes I think it’ll eventually come out that the inner circle rationalists already had a breeding program going by this time, deliberately mix and matching possibly oblivious parents according to desired characteristics like increased ability to mentally rotate shapes or an above average polymarket win/loss ratio, and there will be at least a few kids that will grow up having to deal with that shit.

Barely skimmed it, but it says stuff like

for the people saying things like “I’m a PhD from xyz uni and I’m telling your LLMs are just stochastic tools that make everything up and the world will fall apart if you use them”, I’m here to tell you that you are out of date. The world of software engineering has changed dramatically in the last few months.

which is sold-in-dumpster-alley quality copium, and also that version 3.5 is going to “raise the bar enormously with regards to rsync security”, so I guess we’re looking at a notably vibe coded security model for rsync going forward?

I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine

The brainwrinkles look if you put a brain though a make-it-look-like-a-sketch prompt, it’s pointlessly detailed (i.e. not pretty or crafty, not adding anything, just lines for the sake of lines), it has the piss filter hue and also there’s random orange shading. The background seems to be at least two separate layers of seemingly disjointed stuff.

Supposedly the plot hinges somewhat on AI shenanigans so this painting being noticeably GenAI’ed could the part of its point. or even a meta thing, but playing the game to make sure isn’t currently on my agenda.

There’s a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.

edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.

Unwell in terms of opinions held or physically?

Nothing to see here, just a rationalist reinventing a well known 2000yo memory technique from first principles.

An r/ssc thread showed up in my feed the other day, it was about physics professors petitioning to bring back the SAT math requirement for STEM majors, and the top comment was about how it was originally axed to hide asiatic math supremacy because it was too in your face evidence for a racial intellectual hierarchy.

The latest ACX is a book review that amounts to siskind endlessly ratsplaining the Frankfurt school while re-framing the cultural marxism conspiracy theory for a rat audience as a running bit.

So yeah.

Sure it counts, getting out of indeterminate time pre-trial holding with a payout after the state has charged you with a felony is a hell of a dice roll.

Posting memes about the killing on facebook apparently: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-tennessee-man-was-jailed-over-his-charlie-kirk-social-media-comments-now-hes-won-a-835000-settlement

The Palestine Action stuff was in the UK, my bad.

if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever.

Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so there’s probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.

Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because it’s harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.

maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

I wasn’t around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid were a major voice in the community, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.

A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.

jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad

From github thread:

I can’t actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.

Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/

Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.

It helps that most of their audience seems incapable of considering that non-market driven societal change could be possible, better spend a fuckton of philanthropy money to buy a castle in case it helps indoctrinate a John Galt type to argue AI safety on our behalf, that’ll solve everything.

Seems like run-of-the-mill yada-yada boosterism for the most part.

Points for managing to write an entire blog post without lamenting how the persecution of nerds is a historical level atrocity, much unlike the ongoing state-sponsored genocide by Israel which is very fine and very justifiable, I guess.

While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature,** a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies**. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that “paranoid views regarding AI” may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians’ trial, thanks to their “attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent,” and belief that “humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so.”

And so on and so forth, a good part of the article is about how the feds are afraid that once the trial gets going basically people will think Ziz is making too much sense and anti-AI-infrastructure violence escalates.

Yud, despite his near-infinite IQ, will apparently be the last one to suspect that grassroots organized violence is an incredibly obvious short-term solution to the alleged problem he’s spent most of his life beating the drum about.

And let’s not forget that ridiculous AI2027 assertion that people who are faced with almost certain annihilation should not pursue extreme uncooperative actions.