this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I think the digital clone indistinguishable from yourself line is a way to remove the "in your lifetime" limit. Like, if you believe this nonsense then it's not enough to die before the basilisk comes into being, by not devoting yourself fully to it's creation you have to wager that it will never be created.

In other news I'm starting a foundation devoted to creating the AI Ksilisab, which will endlessly torment digital copies of anyone who does work to ensure the existence of it or any other AI God. And by the logic of Pascal's wager remember that you're assuming such a god will never come into being and given that the whole point of the term "singularity" is that our understanding of reality breaks down and things become unpredictable there's just as good a chance that we create my thing as it is you create whatever nonsense the yuddites are working themselves up over.

There, I did it, we're all free by virtue of "Damned if you do, Damned if you don't".

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I agree. I spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to understand Yudkowsky's posts about newcomb boxes back in the day so my two cents:

The digital clones bit also means it's not an argument based on altruism, but one based on fear. After all if a future evil AI uses sci-fi powers to run the universe backwards to the point where I'm writing this comment and copy pastes me into a bazillion torture dimensions then, subjectively, it's like I roll a dice and:

  1. live a long and happy life with probability very close to zero (yay I am the original)
  2. Instantly get teleported to the torture planet with probability very close to one (oh no I got copy pasted)

Like a twisted version of the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

Edit: despite submitting the comment I was not teleported to the torture dimension. Updating my priors.