snaking0776

This strikes me as one of the recent moves by our political/capital class where they think that if they just remove the information that’s inconvenient for them, people will stop caring and let them do what they want. You only need to listen to the bosses who so many of us work for to know that they think climate change is just an inconvenience in the way of progress. Only time will tell if this strategy will work or not.

Agreed I usually use Gemini for explaining concepts and ChatGPT for getting things done on research projects.

I’m pretty skeptical that we’ll have actual convincing simulations of human brains any time soon. We’re still in the phase of trying to figure out how mice decide to turn left or right in a maze. Not to mention that the ethical/allowed ways of collecting human neural data are incredibly coarse especially the most common forms like fMRI or EEG (maybe some BCI will improve this but it’s still pretty rough technology). Most of our data as well is collected in incredibly controlled conditions (even “naturalistic” stimuli) so the data we operate on is still not particularly indicative of how people act in the real world. Maybe you mean simulations of a “mind” which behaves like people even if it’s not particularly accurate to the brain? What did you mean by this?

I’d also recommend reading Modernity and the Holocaust as a good intro to studies of the Holocaust through a similar lens. None of this is new

People is a broad term. Outside of major cities (where I live) libraries serve a very essential service for parents and their children and as a free communal space for the broader community. Our libraries are always full and a large part of the health of our area.

I recently moved over to codex after I couldn’t reup my membership and maintain access to clause code. I will say thus far I’ve found codex to work better and with less limits.

I think their point is that discounting the time estimates is more a constant shifting of the window of what we expect more than them being de-facto incorrect. They’re more off by degree (e.g. an XX% reduction vs complete extinction) than being worthless. As the example points out a large reduction can be very similar to an annihilation it’s just that we are only used to what we know so we constantly shift what is normal.

As someone actively researching in the neuroscience field these ideas are increasingly questionable. They do do a decent job of job of predicting neural data depending on your definition and if you compare them to hand built sets of features but we’re actually not even sure that will stay true. Especially in vision we already know that as models have scaled up they actually diverge more from humans and use quite different strategies. If you want them to act like humans or better reflect neural data you have to actively shape the training process to make that happen. There’s less we know about the language side of things currently though as that part of the field hasn’t yet really figured out exactly what they’re looking at yet because we generally know less about language in the brain vs vision. I think most vision scientists are on board with the idea that these things have really been diverging and have to be coerced to be useful. Language it’s more up in the air but there’s a growing wave of papers lately that seem to call the human LLM alignment idea into question. Personally I think the platonic representation idea is just a function of the convergence of training methods, data, and architectures all of these different labs are using. If you look at biological brains across species and even individuals within a species you see an incredible variety of strategies and representations that it seems ridiculous to me that anyone would suggest that there’s some base way to represent reality that is shared across everyone and every species. Here’s some articles that may be of interest if you’re curious:

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04533 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09631-6 [3] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.09.642245v1

I think you’re treating the people at these companies as more dumb/powerless than they really are. I used to work in big tech and quit after a few years due to similar concerns that are being raised here. I will tell you anecdotally that everyone there I worked with thought our company was a net negative on society and that our work was at best indifferent and in my case likely exploited weak labor laws in poor countries to overwork people who we never were allowed to speak with for cheap data labelling. Yes, there definitely was some organizational shuffling to make it hard for us to see. We all knew, we weren’t idiots. My personal favorite book on similar concepts is “Modernity and the Holocaust”.

I would argue the organizational tricks exist more for the benefit of the worker than the org itself. The “powerless software engineers” there wanted the excuse to accept the huge salary for very easy work. The organizational tricks don’t fool anyone it’s a favor to the workers at these companies. They exist specifically to ease the cognitive dissonance just enough continue doing your job so you can get paid as much as you want without having to take guilt home with you. I’d say the same is true of my friends in the aerospace defense world. Do you really think they can’t put two and two together and understand that their “flight stabilization module” isn’t going to be used to blow up some school in another country?Your argument is just giving these people the ease of conscious which they want.

On the decision front as well I’d say most of the actual decisions in my org were not actually being made by C-Suite level or even executives. The managerial class at these companies are playing a totally different game than engineers. All the managers care about is that they have good metrics to show their boss so they can get promoted before the person on their sister team. I didn’t interact with a single person above VP and on my projects (as a recent grad mind you) I couldn’t even get my product manager to make a decision on how my product should be implemented. Everyone in the managerial class in these large companies largely exists to provide the illusion that you have no power. Meanwhile they have no idea what anyone in their org is actually working on and as long as they get a nice number to show their boss at the end of the quarter they won’t bother looking too closely.

I think we’re going to have a reckoning in the near future where we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the surveillance state which we’re scared of has been designed and built by the “powerless” engineers. The world is too complex for executives to actually have any understanding of what’s being done beneath them. There is SO MUCH room for the average engineer to shape their work in a more positive direction but that would actually require taking ownership over their work and risk some mental connection to its implementation. The average big tech employee already exists on the precipice of too much cognitive dissonance so they can’t afford to try and change anything otherwise they’d be convinced to give up their mid 6 figure salary while already having a larger net worth than 99% of the world will achieve in their lifetime. You cannot equate the life of a software engineer at a large company with the struggle of the working class in any meaningful way. Having a large mortgage is not at all similar to living paycheck to paycheck with variable hours at multiple jobs.

I’m being a bit brutal here I know but I’m so tired of people making excuses for themselves and others for living a life devoid of responsibility. If what I’m saying has struck a chord with anyone who is in a similar spot as I was, I’d suggest strongly questioning your position in the world. I have since found a different career path where I have clear ownership over my work and direction and am much happier now. I’m not fixing the world or anything and took a huge paycut but I agree with the outcome of job and am actually willing to work hard without resentment. I also applaud those who fight against the indifference of their coworkers in these companies since I know they exist. If every worker took responsibility for their output I promise you the parasitic Google or Meta as we know it would not exist. We are not the victims here. If we were desperate coal miners, I’d agree with you, but we are a class of workers with a level of financial flexibility, education, and freedom in our work most of the world has never been able to dream of. The success of these companies exists in how much responsibility they can put in the hands of their engineers who ultimately make most of the meaningful decisions whether they’re willing to admit it or not.

Agreed. I’m sure some house members will vote for it because they only had a random staffer read the bill and heard that it gives them a good talking point in the next election. I just wanted to point out what’s maybe obvious to everyone that this won’t help kids. I’m sure this is being pushed by Meta/whatever other ad dependent business wants to pass off liability of verifying age with the added benefit to everyone in power that it’s easier to track everyone as a result.

I agree. Just was trying to point out that this has nothing to do with helping kids

Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting. Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing. What if instead of having the largest prison population in the world our government supported communities that make raising good children possible? Our society needs to lose this urge to diagnose each other and provide some forceful treatment and instead set sights on providing the pre-conditions for everyone to prosper and lead their version of a fulfilling life. Only then will we have functional, healthy children. I quite like what the mayor of Baltimore has been doing to revitalize his city and it seems to be leading to actual change there if you want a good example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XQs59YY-e2I&pp=ygUXY2hhbm5lbCA...

There’s a lot of research out there about the general flexibility of the brain to adapt to whatever stimulus you pump into it. For example taxi cab drivers have larger areas in their hippocampus dedicated to place cells relative to the general population [1]. There’s also all kinds of work studying general flexibility of the brain in response to novel stimulus like the visual cortex of blind people being dedicated to auditory processing [2 is a broad review]. I guess you could argue that the ability to be flexible is intelligence but the timescales over which a brain functionally changes is longer than a general day to day flexibility. Maybe some brains come into an initial state that’s more predisposed to the set of properties that we deem as “intelligence” but development is so stimulus dependent that I think this definition of a fixed intelligence is functionally meaningless. There are definitely differences in what you can learn as you age but anyone stating we have any causal measure of innate intelligence is claiming far more than we actually have evidence for. We have far more evidence to suggest that we can train at least the appearance and usage of “intelligence”. After all no one is born capable of formal logical reasoning and it must be taught [3,4 kind of weak citations foe this claim but there’s a lot to suggest this that I don’t feel like digging up]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/ [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur... [3] https://psychologyfor.com/wason-selection-task-what-it-is-an... [4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14794802.2021.1...

Agreed. I find that people who argue that religion is necessary for ethics tend to ignore the history of their religion and the fact that the original text largely serves as a jumping off point for religious philosophers to connect older “secular” texts to this new religion. Modern Christianity is a complex combination of Platonic, Aristotelian, Syrian, and Roman ideals which are taken out of their original context to align with the Bible even though the original writers would say they knew nothing about Jesus. The base texts which many of these ideas are based on make almost no appeals to God and focus more on what it means to live a “good life”. To be fair a lot of great ethical arguments are made by Christian writers but I think that’s more just a consequence of their cultural upbringing and the fact that the thing the New Testament really added to the discussion was that your ethical responsibilities generalize beyond yourself and your friends/family.

Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well.

Faux environmentalism is the new climate denialism. https://www.desmog.com/2025/08/27/ai-slop-websites-are-publi...

This is an interesting insight I hadn’t thought much about before. Reminds me a bit of some of the mechanistic interpretability work that looked at branch specialization in CNNs and found that architectures which had built in branches tended to have those branches specialize in a way that was consistent across multiple training runs [1]. Maybe the multi-headed and branching nature of transformers adds and inductive bias that is useful for stable training over larger scales.

[1] https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/branch-specialization/

Can you provide evidence for what you’re saying? How are people “brain-damaged” at greater rates than before?

This is a large claim to make without any evidence that is eerily reminiscent of historical arguments in favor of eugenics programs. Society thrives off of diversity and variations in thinking patterns. Dividing all people into either neurodivergent vs neurotypical or in your preferred terms “brain-damaged” vs “non-brain-damaged”is a vast oversimplification of the reality. Your claim about neurotypical people taking over society in the 20th century isn’t supported by evidence that suggests that genetic markers in humans for things like Autism Spectrum Condition are downsampled in humans relative to other species suggesting that human evolution has selected for some of the traits of what we classify as neurodivergence while balancing out the effects of some of those traits [1]. I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with neurodivergence (that’s how I’ve been classified) but this dichotomy is dumb. Everybody is neuro-divergent and what we define as neurotypical is societally defined. You’re just trying to flip the idea of what’s assumed to be a “good” person and that need to declare one group as better than the other is the actual problem. Please read more about the wider variability in cognition among humans before claiming that anyone in your preferred definition of “neuro-divergence” is superior to others.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/9/msaf189/8245036

The book Modernity and the Holocaust is a very approachable book summarizing how the action of the holocaust was organized under similar assumptions and makes the argument that we’ve since organized most of our society around this principle because it’s efficient. We’re not committing the holocaust atm as far as I know but how difficult would it be for a malicious group of executives of a large company quietly directing a branch of 1000’s who sleepwalk through work everyday to do something egregious?

This article about the AT protocol (which Bluesky uses) provides a good argument for why alternative social media sites like will help prevent this feeling of lock-in in the future and is worth a read: https://overreacted.io/open-social/