What’s a government backstop, and does it happen often? It sounds like they’re asking for a preemptive bail-out.

I checked the rest of Zitron’s feed before posting and its weirder in context:

Interview:

She also hinted at a role for the US government “to backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen”, but did not elaborate on how this would work.

Later at the jobsite:

I want to clarify my comments earlier today. OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments. I used the word “backstop” and it mudlled the point.

She then proceeds to explain she just meant that the government ‘should play its part’.

Zitron says she might have been testing the waters, or its just the cherry on top of an interview where she said plenty of bizzare shit

it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.

I am firmly on the side of it’s possible to pay attention to more than one problem at a time, but the AI doomers are in fact actively downplaying stuff like climate change and even nuclear war, so them trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room is a legitimate problem.

Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.

That Yud is the Neil Breen of AI is the best thing ever written about rationalism in a youtube comment.

this seems counterintuitive but… comments are the best, name of the function but longer are the worst. Plain text summary of a huge chunk of code that I really should have taken the time to break up instead of writing a novella about it are somewhere in the middle.

I feel a lot of bad comment practices are downstream of javascript relying on jsdoc to act like a real language.

Managers gonna manage, but having a term for bad code that works that is more palatable than ‘amateur hour’ isn’t inherently bad imo.

Worst i’ve heard is some company forbidding LINQ in C#, which in python terms is forcing you to always use for-loops in place of filter/map/reduce and comprehensions and other stuff like pandas.groupby

My impression from reading the stuff posted here is that omarchy is a nothing project that’s being aggressively astroturfed so a series of increasingly fashy contributors can gain clout and influence in the foss ecosystem.

Definitely, it’s just code for I’m ok with nazis at this point.

pro-AI but only self hosted

Like being pro-corporatism but only with regard to the breadcrumbs that fall off the oligarchs’ tables.

We should start calling so-called open source models trickle-down AI.

and actually use an AI that cites it’s sources

make the hallucinotron useful with this one weird trick

Zitron catching strays in the comments for having too much of a bullying tone, I guess against billionaires and tech writers, and being too insistent on his opinion that the whole thing makes no financial sense. It’s also lamented that the entire field of ML avoids bsky because it has a huge AI hostility problem.

Concern trolling notwithstanding, the eigenrobot stuff is worrisome though, if not specifically for him about how extremely online the ideological core of the administration seems to be, as close to the lunatics running the asylum as you’ll get in a modern political setting.

Micrsosoft will be adding numbers on total meetings summarised, total hours summarised, and various classes of prompts.

So the manager types are also affected? This might be interesting.

Governments are toppled, not opted out of, is all I’m saying.

Also not sure I agree that all consumer activism is inherently in vain.

This wasn’t a pro-spotify post, it was a your government isn’t something you can just boycott away post.

Like, your taxes are already paying for ICE directly.

I feel that if you are an USian who thinks that accepting US government contracts has become morally incorrect then fretting over swedish audio streaming companies is a waste of your time.

edit: free market solutionism as a response to having a dollarstore sturmabteilung running the streets in the USA just rubs me the wrong way. Sorry if the original post reads a bit coy, I just feel it would be incredibly cringe of me to make overt recommendations on how to handle things from the relative safety of living in a first world country on the other side of the world.

Google says it’s giving instructions to LLMs via invisible ascii characters.

So much psychic damage (and also /r/brandnewsentence material) in that thread…

The problem is solved by pairing those who wish to live longer at personal cost to themselves with virtuous pedophiles.

edit: That’s not the alluded Yud’s solution btw

edit edit:

I still wouldn’t be all that tempted in his place, if pedophilia is merely a positive description. There’s little advantage in not being a pedophile.

Man rationalists from back when they didn’t worry about being youtube-ready were something else.

The reflective altruism guy has an ongoing series on hbd in the rat community that includes a bunch of that, you should check him out.

For example https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/04/18/human-biodiversity-part-7-lesswrong/

That’s easy, it’s because LLM output is a reasonable simulation of sounding like a person. Fooling people’s consciousness detector is just about their whole thing at this point.

Crabs should look into learning to recite the pledge of allegiance in the style of Lady GaGa.

Airlock can be a verb.

Don’t worry about it, managing to run inference on a raspberry is really cool actually.

Also it’s true that Zitron is winging it a lot of the time when it comes to technical details, but not in a way that matters for what he has to say, so dismissing him on those grounds seemed deliberately adversarial, sorry if i got carried away.

I never got the impression that Zitron’s reception here has ever been more than lukewarm, which I think (personal grievances like him being a dick in person aside) is partially because his Mahabharata length blog posts were posted here even before he emerged as a significant voice in the AI discourse, i.e. when the tiresome to interesting ratio wasn’t all there yet.

That said, you post is both the nittiest of nitpicks and also wrong. “But achktually LLMs aren’t the same as diffusion models and also they can run on low end hardware, after a fashion, not reading any further, zero stars”–are you serious?

The wrong part is that addressing the latter part of your post (i.e. the broader economics issues) is like Ed Zitron’s whole entire shtick that you somehow managed to miss on your way to remind people that once upon a time someone somewhere managed to complete an inference run on a Raspberry Pie as a proof of concept, when the scale of the issue at hand is more like that load bearing chunks of the US economy are being propped up solely by imaginary hundred-billion-dollar data center construction and nvidia moving GPUs from one trouser pocket to the other.