Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.

I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. […] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasn’t able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.

The “evidence” he has provided up to this point:

1. A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We can’t see the prompt, but the output starts with “You’re right.”
2. Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words “nofap” and “autogynophilic”
3. A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasn’t transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
4. A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.

Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.

“Hey listen, I’ve been listening to these gender critical feminists and I think they might have a point. Check this out, what if we used psychiatry and hormone therapy to enforce traditional gender roles and normatively gendered bodies, but without creating trans people?”

“We have to pick between the climate or AI”

No we don’t??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with climate change.

The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html

Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. “Doom trolling” does have a better ring to it than “critihype.” Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.

however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not

See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they can’t just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know that’s a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.

Prometheus the AI startup is a bit on the nose isn’t it?

/u/bakkot

Wait, ~bakkot? I knew he was a vibecoder but I didn’t know about the SSC/LW connection.

The moderators don’t exist. Sole moderator Oliver Habryka hasn’t commented on Reddit in 3 years, and is extremely busy with vastly more important things like AI safety, Lighthaven, and the actual LessWrong. Spammers continue indefinitely for months until, presumably, they earn a site-wide ban.

The guy who objects to delegating? I guess he decided that nobody on a forum can handle the responsibility of moderation?

The more I read the less it makes sense, largely because the LLM that they used to fluff up the original napkin pitch decided it should promote high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off. Yeah, building a community around ct scanners seems definitely the way to go.

Towards the end they basically stop just short of claiming that building the medical tricorder from startrek is the inevitable outcome of this pivot.

We think it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.

Deploying this stuff at scale at so called midjourney spas while supposedly working with FDA to eventually get approval just screams that the actual business plan is letting Peter Thiel collect full body scans indiscriminately.

Surprisingly, “democratizing ct scanning” doesn’t appear anywhere in the post.

“PED” (Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)

You can’t make this shit up.

A close friend of Epstein told me he was an integral part of a group called Edge, a strange organization involved in what my source called “the TED Talk community” that would serve as his primary gateway to the scientific world.

Edge, which has called itself “the world’s smartest website” and claims to “redefine who we what and are,” would hold TED Talk afterparties in Monterey Bay called “The Billionaire’s Dinner,” where people like Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt of Google, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Pinker, Richard Thaler, Joichi Ito, Margaret Levi, Frank Wilczek, Richard Dawkins, and many of the world’s high-profile scientists (including Nobel prize winners), business executives, and intellectuals would show up. Edge’s website calls itself the online version of “The Reality Club” which, the site claims, was an “informal gathering of intellectuals who met from 1981 to 1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms and elsewhere,” the hallmark of which was a “rigorous and sometimes impolite (but not ad hominem) discourse.”

Epstein had close ties with Edge’s founder, John Brockman, a self-described cultural impresario who on his bio page introduces himself with an uncredited quote that reads, “If the creation of contemporary culture had a global hero, his name would coincide with that of John Brockman.” He claims to have invented the term “intermedia” as well as “intermedia kinetic environments.” Epstein bankrolled Edge’s events and financed the majority of the organization—from 2001 to 2017 Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total $857,000 received by Edge. He was photographed at Edge’s premiere annual event, The Billionaire’s Dinner, several times between 1999 and 2011. Multiple photos of him have been scrubbed from the website, such as one with Brockman’s son in 2003.

Media coverage of the Epstein case has given considerable attention to his absurd scientific pursuits, like the New York Times story about how he wanted to seed the human race with his DNA, or how he wanted to have his penis frozen and resuscitated in the future, and I myself heard from people in the black book that Epstein had told them he had a cloning lab down in Mexico and that he was very into “transhumanism.” Followers of the Epstein story have debated whether these were signs of a true mad-genius supervillain or whether they were elitist hot air. I’m here to tell you that all of this bullshit, every bit of it, came from Edge and its assemblage of chinstrokers. The transhumanism, the cloning, the “What is up? What is down?”—all of it is perfectly at home on the deranged pages of Edge.org.

From “I Called Everyone In Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book” by Leland Nally, Mother Jones, October 2020

A step up from last week’s uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I’ll take it, but they’ve still got a ways to go to convince me that they’re not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029

The Edge from U2?!?!

This situation is the first time I’ve become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kiki’s. I’m gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed

What’s a Dimes Square lady to do?!

Honestly, a black comedy about the rats and/or the AI bubble would probably make bank. The years of sneers people have cooked up on them would provide plenty of material for the writers, and there’d be plenty of catharsis in seeing those responsible get ripped into for 2-ish hours straight.

Glitch just wrapped a Youtube series by putting their final episode onto big screens in multiple countries. There’s been a lot of media noise about the difficulty of getting films into theaters, and a lot of blaming Glitch, but there’s not been any understanding about what Glitch actually did differently that is scaring Hollywood. I think it’s that, just like with the Youtubers producing Backrooms and Iron Lung and FNAF, the thing Hollywood misses is the audience demographic. Glitch and other Youtubers are targeting an emerging young-adult audience which wants edgy, gritty, emotionally sincere content that fills the gap between PG-13 and R ratings. To older folks, e.g. Murder Drones is facile cringe, while to tweens (young teens, PG-13 sensibilities) it’s too intense and scary. But it’s a happy medium for catcher-in-the-rye emo young adults, which is why every second t-shirt sold at Hot Topic has a murder drone on it.

By literally no coincidence, Glitch’s next greenlight is a grimdark gritty deconstruction which critiques the dystopia of Disney parks, illustrated by their brand-new 2D animation department, designed by a former Disney showrunner who left because Disney wouldn’t let them tell stories aimed at young adults. (Dana Terrace, not Alex Hirsch.) Disney’s not the only game in town; Turner previously ran shows by Owen Dennis and Rebecca Sugar while putting pressure on them. Lotta animators with big dreams who have been told “no” by big producers; in particular Lauren Faust supposedly has been waiting for decades for somebody to give her an animation team without creative limits, like Glitch just gave Terrace. (Faust worked on The Iron Giant and animated the character of Sawyer in Cats Don’t Dance; the sheer poetry of her career could be enough to transform the industry (again).)

Hey we got lisp out of it.