El Reg: At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto

Two tastes that go great together!

In the recent days there’s been a bunch of posts on LW about how consuming honey is bad because it makes bees sad, and LWers getting all hot and bothered about it. I don’t have a stinger in this fight, not least because investigations proved that basically all honey exported from outside the EU is actually just flavored sugar syrup, but I found this complaint kinda funny:

The argument deployed by individuals such as Bentham’s Bulldog boils down to: “Yes, the welfare of a single bee is worth 7-15% as much as that of a human. Oh, you wish to disagree with me? You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts”.

“Of course such underhanded tactics are not present here, in the august forum promoting 10,000 word posts called Sequences!”

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tsygLcj3stCk5NniK/you-can-t-objectively-compare-seven-bees-to-one-human

NYT covers the Zizians

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html

Archive link: https://archive.is/9ZI2c

Choice quotes:

Big Yud is shocked and surprised that craziness is happening in this casino:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians “sad.”

“A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”

Good news everyone, it’s popular to discuss the Basilisk and not at all a profundly weird incident which first led peopel to discover the crazy among Rats

Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.

Keep saving money for retirement and keep having kids, but for god’s sake don’t stop blogging about how AI is gonna kill us all in 5 years:

To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.”

Tired: the universe was created by a deity

Wired: the universe was created by physical forces

Fucking crazy: the universe was created by a figment of my imagination and I’m communicating with it using a blog post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uSTR9Awkn3gpqpSBi/dear-paperclip-maximizer-please-don-t-turn-off-the

“Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”

That’s it. That’s the take.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46xKegrH8LRYe68dF/vire-s-shortform?commentId=PGSqWbgPccQ2hog9a

Their responses in the comments are wild too.

I’m tending towards a troll. No-one can be that dumb. OTH it is LessWrong.

Maybe it’s to hammer home the idea that time before DOOM is limited and you might as well get your rocks off with him before that happens.

LWronger posts article entitled

“Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly”

OK, title case, obviously serious.

The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

Nope he’s going for satire.

And ladies, he’s available!

If you don’t get it, LLMs don’t either, and David’s work here is done.

Managers: “AI will make employees more productive!”

WaPo: “AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings” https://archive.ph/ejC53

Managers: “not like that!!!”

It’s English, but British, Jim.

The Myrdals are probably entirely discredited nowadays, both for being the quintessential social engineers and their son Jan happily destroying their legacy. As you’ll no doubt have learned, fertility has fallen everywhere in the developed world, both in countries with shit welfare for parents (Italy) and quite good (the Nordics). Realistically, the only way to reverse this is to enable draconian abortion laws coupled with a systematic repression of sex ed and contraception. Of course this is congruent with today’s fascists’ goals…

I have 3 kids, 1 bio and 2 bonus, and man it’s a lot of work. (youngest is technically an adult but de facto…)

I also feel there’s insane pressure nowadays not just to have a kid but to have the perfect kid - great childhood, great education - and if you miss just one PTA meeting you’re branded for life

Frankly surprised to see something this funny on LinkedIn.

Micro-sneer, inspired by this article on Swedish public service broadcasting

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/anna-bjorklund-folk-uppfattar-barn-som-valdigt-jobbiga

The background is that the center-RIGHT gov of Sweden is gonna put up an investigation (“utredning”) into why people aren’t getting (the RIGHT kind of) kids. Nothing new there, simply the same culture war fretting already percolating in the anglosphere.

Finland already has an investigation ongoing, and the spokesperson there raises the point that one societal change that’s happened in the last 25 years is… social media.

Wouldn’t it be delicious if it could be proved that Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok are the reasons people don’t get into relationships and have kids? Eat that, Elon!

This titbit by Molly White about how whales have captured Polymarket’s “dispute resolution” mechanism had me chuckling

https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/114779592623569008

Wrong thread, buddy?

I think they’re different people but may be in communication out of band.

edit a search for “HandofLixue” on Google only gives one hit, an old profile on LessWrong now renamed to “The Dao of Bayes”:

https://www.lesswrong.com/users/the-dao-of-bayes

Maybe instead of worrying about obscure wiki pages, Habryka should reflect why a linkpost titled Racial Dating Preferences and Sexual Racism is on the front page of his precious community now, with 48 karma and 22 comments.

Pretty sure Altman is gonna get away with settling with Iyo. Hopefully they demand cold hard cash and not weird-ass OpenAI company scrip.

Following up on the thread that spawned from my comment yesterday:

https://awful.systems/comment/7777035

(I’m in vacation mode and forgot it was late on Sunday)

I wonder if Habryka, the LWer who posted both there and on Xhitter that “someone should do something about this troublesome page” realized that there would be less pushback if he’d simply coordinated in the background and got the edits in place without forewarning others. Was it intentional to try to pick a fight with Wikipedians?