Micanthus

Free speech in Germany is limited. Hate speech, nazi slogans, etc... are banned.

And regardless, banning a political party (the process for which is set in Germany's constitution) is not the same as banning its former members from speaking.

Even though I know this, smelling peanuts (especially peanut butter) makes me intensely uncomfortable and I'm happy they're not served on most flights anymore. I'm not trying to ban anyone from taking their own peanuts on the flight (although I wish they wouldn't) but not needing to worry about it coming from the airline is a huge load off my mind.

Also, thinking as the airline, I'd do anything possible to avoid causing anaphylaxis on a flight, starting by simply removing common allergens from the menu. In the modern world, pretty much the only times an anaphylaxis attack would actually threaten my life would be camping in the wilderness and on a flight. Anaphylaxis has a great survival rate if you have an epipen and can get to a hospital quickly, and if you can't it's all down to how bad your allergy is and what meds you have available. Maybe I'm stupid but I don't bring on a flight the steroids that I'd bring camping, and I doubt the airplane has a supply either.

> Now, It’s a legitimate question to ask whether or not it really matters going forward if there were actually 3 distinct civilizations or not. And the answer is “not really”.

Yeah I would agree. And I would go further and say that the anthropomorphization of these AI agents is besides the point entirely. Whether they were intentionally (whatever "intentionally" means) scheming and conspiring is irrelevant. They _did_ work together in secret to hack Hugging Face and OpenAI itself. The exact reasons/motives are relevant to safety researchers, but not really to someone who's just watching from the outside. I don't care if they're evil masterminds or "just" a rogue piece of malware behaving like evil masterminds, the danger is the same.

> You need to understand that all three of the primary sources we have for this incident: OpenAI’s report, METR’s report and OpenAI’s presentation at the 2026 Black Hat conference are propaganda pieces.

METR is an independent nonprofit that doesn't accept donations from AI companies or employees. They generally advocate policies that would directly harm AI companies economically. Not sure what reason they would have to spread propaganda for OpenAI.

This paper is what got me interested in mathematics. I happened to read it when I was 14 in geometry class, and it fundamentally reshaped math from something that I happened to be good at to something I was deeply fascinated by and motivated to do more of

The page specifically says it's okay for bots to scrape from Anna's Archive, she just asks they do it in bulk to not overload the servers:

"""

> We are a non-profit project with two goals:

> 1. Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.

> 2. Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world (including robots!).

[. . .]

  * Our website has CAPTCHAs to prevent machines from overloading our resources, but all our data can be downloaded in bulk:

  * All our HTML pages (and all our other code) can be found in our [GitLab repository](https://software.annas-archive.gl/).

  * All our metadata and full files can be downloaded from our [Torrents page](/torrents), particularly `aa_derived_mirror_metadata`.
  
  * All our torrents can be programatically downloaded from our [Torrents JSON API](https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/torrents.json).

"""

> According to critics, it benefits AI companies to keep you fixated on apocalypse because it distracts from the very real damage they're already doing to the world.

Am I not allowed to be concerned about _both_?

I do not believe that Sam Altman and other AI company execs believe that the singularity is imminent. If they did, they wouldn't behave so recklessly. Even if they don't care about the rest of humanity, there's too much risk to themselves if they actually believe what they're saying.

But I think it's correct to be worried about a potential future AI apocalypse. Personally I doubt that LLMs will scale to full sentience, but I believe we'll get there eventually. And whether it's in 2 years or 200 years I'm worried about it. Plenty of smart people who aren't working for AI companies (and thus have no motive to use it as hype or distraction) hold this belief and it really doesn't seem that crazy.

But yeah, obviously let's focus primarily on the real harms AI is causing in our society right now.

I used to work for the YMCA as a camp counselor, and also volunteered a few weeks of my time before every summer to get the camp ready. Every volunteer I met was either an employee or former employee, very ocassionally someone who was a camper when they were a kid or a parent of a current camper. The trick is that many of us actually believed in the mission and so were willing to do that, and regarding the camp in particular it came with a community that everyone who stayed loved and wanted to contribute to.

Of course there's a fine line between this attitude and being exploited by your employer for free labor. In this case I think it helped that everyone knew it wasn't a career for most of us. You work for a few summers in college and then you graduate and if you want to stay a part of the community you continue volunteering from time to time.

I would have agreed, but the reporter shares multiple anecdotes where that's not the case. Most crazily, the person she was meant to be interviewing sent an AI note taker in his place, very much not a presentation and she just sat alone with the AI until it became clear he was a no-show. I don't get the thought process there, just cancel the interview if you're not going to show up.

In general I think people need to be more comfortable both calling out useless meetings, and calling out people who are making meetings useless by not being engaged or "multi-tasking" (a.k.a. not paying attention). When I facilitate meetings if I see people aren't paying attention or it's very low engagement, I call it out and ask honestly if people think the meeting is worth their time. The first time people hear that they think I'm just being passive-aggressive, but colleagues who know me well know they can be honest and if the meeting isn't valuable we can stop and in the future we'll either have a better agenda/facilitation, do it async, or not do it at all. Even if the meeting would have value if people were engaged, if I fail to get people's attention then it becomes useless and I would rather not waste my or anyone else's time.

I completely understand sending a note taker to a bloated meeting where no participation is really expected of you anyways, but the anecdotes about AIs being sent to small meetings (even a 2 person interview the reporter scheduled for this very article!) in your stead is crazy.

Personally I don't mind a meeting that's either:

1) Informal, and short with up to 3ish close coworkers (as long as it doesn't start by someone sending the dreaded "hey, can you jump on a call?" message with no other context)

2) Published agenda well ahead of time, only relevant people are invited, some level of participation is required from all attendees, people are actually paying attention, and maybe most critically it's _well facilated_. Nothing more draining than meeting going off-topic and over-time because the facilitator doesn't feel comfortable telling that one guy to shut up.

This is really cool! I might use this to help plan some of my 2025 vacations

Some suggestions for useful features:

- Ability to customize the work week. I only work Mon-Thurs, which will greatly affect the optimal solution

- Add arbitrary holidays in case the company gives an extra day off, this would nicely complement the existing feature to turn off some holidays

- Select an arbitrary time frame less than a year long. This would be helpful especially to plan end-of-year vacations

- In addition to or instead of the previous point: input what vacations you already have planned. Obviously I can't always take only the most optimal vacations, but I could potentially make my existing ones more optimal by extending them in some cases

Thanks for sharing it! Really cool idea, I've only done this kind of planning ad-hoc in my head, it never occurred to me to solve it exactly

The biggest issue with giving and receiving feedback I consistently find is that it's not just an individual issue. It's not even just an issue between the feedback giver and receiver. It's a huge cultural issue that every company I've ever seen consistently underestimates the difficulty and value of. The entire company needs to demonstrate that it's safe and valued to give and receive feedback and even criticism.

I've been on teams where this is done well on the team-level. I could give feedback to my teammates without worrying about offending them, and they would work on the issue. I could receive criticism from my teammates without worrying they hated me or that this would impact my job. This also meant there were almost never huge personal issues on the team, any issues were handled before they became a big deal. But even there, this didn't extend beyond the team. If we had an issue with another team or with management, suddenly any criticism or feedback we gave was interpreted as an attack and was impossible to solve.

To give actionable feedback you need to be in a culture that shows you it's safe to make mistakes, and that improving is noticed and appreciated. A high-functioning team can do this. But I think it's hard (borderline impossible) to do this on an organizational level because this requires a certain level of mutual respect and trust that is frankly just not there when there are huge asymmetrical power relationships at play.

"Savant" is an iffy word choice I'd agree, but lots of programmers tend to take instructions very literally. Strict logical thinking is part of the job, and most low and mid level managers are (or recently were) also programmers.

When people are giving me instructions that seem overly detailed to me, I usually assume they have a reason for giving those details because otherwise they would have left it up to me. If I disagree with some design choice or don't understand I'll usually challenge it or ask for that reasoning, but I don't always have time or energy to challenge every last thing. Nothing is more frustrating to me than when I ask for the reasoning and they can't (or won't) explain any motivation behind it. That goes both for my superiors and for my peers during architectural discussions and things like that.

And of course, there's a very high rate of autism in software engineering. Autistic people tend to take things more literally than most.

I think the author means gasoline/petrol for cars, not natural gas