Part of what makes the RatFic version of this so weird imo is that despite being ostensibly rooted in relatively low-hanging fruit (e.g. what if we industrialized this pre modern setting, what if we rationally looked at the rules of this magic system, etc.) nobody other than the protagonist has ever thought about these things and even once the protagonist starts demonstrating some real world-conquering results (benevolently, of course) nobody ever really seems to want to copy their successes. Part of what made the actual industrial revolution unfold the way it did was because of the ensuing arms race of it. In addition to causing the lines on various economist’s charts to go nearly vertical this also basically culminated in the first world war, which seems like the kind of event that they should be aware of. But of course in RatFic it seems like anyone who can’t be talked around to joining up with our protagonist is too weak or woke or stupid to actually pose a threat to the Glorious March of Rational Progress.

You know, when I think about securely holding onto things and protecting them without damaging or dropping them, I think of a fucking OPEN CLAW said nobody ever.

I don’t know, I think there’s real value in allowing the public to keep an eye on aspiring supervillains.

I… “Fireproof steel I-beams” has to be taking the piss, right? Right???

Requiescat en urina, more like. Does that make the first of this generation of slopmakers to actually get shut down?

Oh sure, but when I send a cover letter where claude code told me about serious security issues and I used that knowledge to replace their internal app portal with my face I’ve “violated the computer fraud and abuse laws” or whatever.

I feel like “valuation goes down when bad things happen” shouldn’t be this surprising and yet here we are.

That’s going to have some overlap with the Central Rationality Application Program

Look, I’ve read some long-ass web novels. I enjoyed Worm, A Practical Guide to Evil, and Katalepsis all start to finish. I have also spent more hours than I could count (even if I did care to) perusing excessively detailed fan wikis and reading interninal debates between nerds about minutia. I have done all of this and enjoyed myself greatly.

But the way they’re describing this sounds absolutely exhausting and incredibly dull. If this isn’t the result of some kind of collaborative project where the debates are between different actual people then it sounds like you’re just dumping your worldbuilding notes into the page and throwing a “he said” every so often.

My understanding is that most professional podcasters start off more or less like this, start getting a Patreon or some light sponsors going in order to fund actually decent equipment, and then look at the numbers one morning and realize that actually they could just do this for a living.

I mean, giving inflated titles and grandiose plans is part of the sales pitch. Y’know, for the cult.

Like, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here. The problem isn’t that the people who want to be cult leaders are able to attract a lot of people who are preinclined to be cult followers and those people suffer the associated psychic damages. It’s that even the less culty parts of the rationalist subculture seem to produce a weirdly high number of wannabe cult leaders, even if they don’t conceptualize themselves that way.

I’m sure glad that the people screwing over literally everyone else on the planet for their own benefit aren’t going to screw over us, the investors. Surely there’s no way they could screw over the people who have been giving them a functionally blank check for nearly a decade.

Insert surprised Pikachu face here

Rather than use an LLM to churn through however many zillion tokens and parameters and do an ungodly number of matrix multiplications, maybe consider thinking about the problem and writing the relevant “if()then;” blocks yourself!

You know, like a caveman (according to these same bosses a few months ago).

Seriously. Instead he announced he was going to be throwing somewhat less money into that specific dumpster fire and the investors decided that was worth 4%.

I will confess that my initial reaction was from a partial reading since I got derailed ranting about the silicon valley attitude towards neurodivergence and how much damage it’s doing to us, and basically right after that bit it starts taking a much more (appropriately imo) cynical tone that was honestly refreshing.

Let this be a lesson to those of us who must learn, I guess.

In other news, Cade Metz’ latest piece is actually pretty critical, especially by NYT standards, but you wouldn’t know it from the headline.

“A.I. Agents: They’re Fun. They’re Useful. But Don’t Give Them the Credit Card.”

Ask for it to be password protected.

I think I’m having a stroke. Or at least I hope I’m having a stroke and that this unparodiably dumb piece isn’t any more real than it sounds.

Did someone tell him that Perun had cut the “here’s why the US doesn’t have enough boats to escort all the traffic through the strait and would need a coalition to have any chance of success” part from his latest video, or is that just a deeply ironic coincidence.

Isn’t that new Chris Pratt movie I keep seeing the first 5 seconds of a trailer for basically this, but mixed with a Minority Report knockoff?

I’m more concerned that the writer could listen to this, presumably multiple times on his tape, and still wrote the rest of the piece like these guys are acting in good faith. Regardless of the unanswerable question of whether they believe their own hype, they are clearly saying things for a purpose of self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement rather than out of any concern for other people, and that is where the story should be. Even the guys most ostensibly interested in protecting humanity are still, when they think the mic is off and the journalist is out of the room, joking about how they’re manipulating the press into saying what they want.