gerikson @ gerikson @awful.systems

Posts

10

Comments

596

Joined

2 yr. ago

"Free speech" is now a rightwing dogwistle, at least for me.

I have downloaded the relevant page from an open tab in Firefox ("Save as HTML), but it doesn't contain the latest craziness. If anyone is interested, let me know the best way to host such content.

What's scary is the raw number of upvotes he got for basically admitting to defrauding a FLOSS maintainer.

Well that took a turn.

The initial comment spawned a GIANT THREAD which I haven't had time to parse, but after 2 days or so the initiator (username Kerrick) ragequit.

Here's the modlog message (timestamp 2025-05-15 23:02)

User 7u026ne9se

Action: Banned

Reason: Was ~Kerrick from kerrick.blog who picked and lost every fight in /s/gkpmli, deleted/disowned all his comments, lied about stalking bc someone told a maintainer he admitted to misleading them, and asked us to delete his username change from the modlog. No.

Here's the old profile:

http://web.archive.org/web/20250312141826/https://lobste.rs/~Kerrick

I suggest open source projects keep an eye out for this username and maybe take an extra look at their contributions.

Edit found the last comment they made before deleting. Textbook DARVO, considering they have almost unmerited amounts of positive karma in the thread itself.

I came here to give a simple explanation of why people aren’t noticing as many open source vibe coded contributions as they’d expect. Fights were picked with me by others: I was called a sneak, incapable, a pedant, an ignorer of consent, and a threat to human expression. All through that I’ve worked extremely hard to steer it away from such abhorrent behavior and towards the free expression of ideas, rather than engaging in the same kind of name calling.

Even so, I’ve been emailed, text messaged, and even called on my cell phone about this thread. Someone stalked me to other social media to bring it up there. This thread has brought about the most toxicity I’ve ever experienced on any forum, and these last couple days have been the among the worst in my life.

This broke containment at the Red Site: https://lobste.rs/s/gkpmli/if_ai_is_so_good_at_coding_where_are_open

Reader discretion is advised, lobste.rs is home to its fair share of promptfondlers.

Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???

LWer suggests people who believe in AI doom make more efforts to become (internet) famous. Apparently not bombing on Lex Fridman's snoozecast, like Yud did, is the baseline.

The community awards the post one measly net karma point, and the lone commenter scoffs at the idea of trying to convince the low-IQ masses to the cause. In their defense, Vanguardism has been tried before with some success.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qcKcWEosghwXMLAx9/doomers-should-try-much-harder-to-get-famous

Yes the rationalists are an incredibly large market and their opinion can make or break an author, sure you betcha

Thanks for posting this, it was entertaining.

Signed!

Expect the "AI safety" weenuses to have a giant freakout too.

New eugenics conference just dropped

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ZExgaGnvLevkZxR5/attend-the-2025-reproductive-frontiers-summit-june-10-12

"Chatham House rules" so they can happily be racist without anyone pointing fingers at them.

Good on Quora members for debunking too.

should have gone with "Moldbuggery" Scott

Here's an interesting nugget I discovered today

A long LW post tries to tie AI safety and regulations together. I didn't bother reading it all, but this passage caught my eye

USS Eastland Disaster. After maritime regulations required more lifeboats following the Titanic disaster, ships became top-heavy, causing the USS Eastland to capsize and kill 844 people in 1915. This is an example of how well-intentioned regulations can create unforeseen risks if technological systems aren't considered holistically.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ARhanRcYurAQMmHbg/the-historical-parallels-preliminary-reflection

You will be shocked to learn that this summary is a bit lacking in detail. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Eastland

Because the ship did not meet a targeted speed of 22 miles per hour (35 km/h; 19 kn) during her inaugural season and had a draft too deep for the Black River in South Haven, Michigan, where she was being loaded, the ship returned in September 1903 to Port Huron for modifications, [...] and repositioning of the ship's machinery to reduce the draft of the hull. Even though the modifications increased the ship's speed, the reduced hull draft and extra weight mounted up high reduced the metacentric height and inherent stability as originally designed.

(my emphasis)

The vessel experiences multiple listing incidents between 1903 and 1914.

Adding lifeboats:

The federal Seamen's Act had been passed in 1915 following the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels.[10] This additional weight may have made Eastland more dangerous by making her even more top-heavy. [...] Eastland's owners could choose to either maintain a reduced capacity or add lifeboats to increase capacity, and they elected to add lifeboats to qualify for a license to increase the ship's capacity to 2,570 passengers.

So. Owners who knew they had an issue with stability elected profits over safety. But yeah it's the fault of regulators.

”Canola” was minted because ”rape seed oil” is an even worse name.

They're Internet Native/Terminally Online, so they can SEO their own appearances, plus now they are fully plugged-in to the right-wing hype machine so they're probably turning down appearances instead of chasing them.

Bruce Sterling is active on social media but he's pretty forward-looking. I tried complimenting his Heavy Weather from the early 90s and get a self-deprecating dismissal.

Early Gibson short stories are tinged with late 70s SF, not surprisingly.

Incidentally superhero movies are current western SF/fantasy hybrids.

I wonder how much of "the cyberpunk movement" in SF was authors getting sick and tired of "woo" psi powers etc. For me personally it really felt like a breath of fresh air.

I don't know anything about Abe apart from him being a right-winger. Was he also very very worried about Japan's birthrate (just like Hackernews is)?

"Gross thrice-married orange man wants you to bonk more" is gonna be a hard sell but rest assured, his pals in tech will make sure their ad selection supports it.