surprise level == 0 (or rather, short odds on the prediction markets)

El Reg: OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

yeah my kid had to get a gaming PC for school (gamedev) and managed to snag a decent rig before prices went parabolic

Circular at work states that the standard laptop we get from Dell has increased in price by 50% so they’re looking for alternatives.

Those S-1 filings are gonna be spicy.

OTOH does the SEC have any staff left ?

IRGC doing their part to Halt AI. Donate to them now!

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On this most terrible of online days, “enjoy” this LW attempt at humor

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3GbM9hmyJqn4LNXrG/yams-s-shortform?commentId=ik6ywoQYsGrrQv8Dm

edit there are more submissions on the theme of “humor” on site now. Let’s just say the cringe factor outweighs the humor factor by a large amount.

omg I don’t have anything better to do

• Lesswrong Liberated - they implemented a chat interface to redesign the LW site according to different themes. Mostly boring
• LIMBO: Who We Are, What We Do, and an Exciting High-Impact Funding Opportunity - probably not AFJ? Can’t really tell. Bad day to launch a call for funding if not
• Announcing Doublehaven with Reflections on Humour - protip do not try to reflect on “humour” (native brit speaker or pretentious LWer? flip a coin) with boring examples of “ratty humour”
• ACME Alignment Co Announces: Aligning Humans - this one is easy to call as AFJ
• Giving up on EA after 13 years - lol it’s funny because EA means “Electronic Arts” here
• “You Have Not Been a Good User” (LessWrong’s second album) - also seems to be a “straight” post, not a joke, but released on AFJ b/c then the community can “cut loose”? I dunno, and I am never gonna listen to any songs by “Fooming Shoggoths” in my life
• Announcing EA Omelas - “[Extensively co-written with Claude Opus 4.6]” you have been warned. Considering how every rat coverage of Omelas has been utter shit I’m just posting the link, not reading it

Kinda crazy that these date from 2025 and no-one has noticed (or bothered to complain) until now.

“an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”

Nah, Anthropic got an injunction against the “supply-chain risk” designation the other day, and I don’t think Team Trump-Hegseth has enough mental endurance to remember going after them.

Yeah it’s tragic, but I think it can be “explained” in that incorrect idea that measles isn’t that bad, really, and it was “natural” to get it. I don’t know the exact lethality differences between the diseases in question - just that for an otherwise healthy 20 year old university student, being forced to stay at home because of a disease mostly killing octogenarians is easier to protest against than something that’s killing you and your fellow ravers.

As a counterpoint, there’s a local outbreak of meningitis in Kent (UK) and panicked kids are lining up for vaccinations there.

COVID mostly hit the invisible elderly. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if kids 0-6 were the most vulnerable.

Depriving the steel beams of oxygen would help too…

followup, here’s a real substack interview with one of the originators of the collab novel

https://afraw.substack.com/p/first-dig-the-latrines

to be honest sounds like semi-fascist shit to me.

A LWer is super-impressed by the time travel fantasy Illumine Lingao (an example of Chuanyue)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=J4YGrY26Ezt5oMsot

Listen to this pitch:

the vast majority of the book is devoted to discussing every single technical aspect in excruciating well-researched detail. you don’t simply have a paragraph about them deciding to buy guns, you get an entire chapter of different gun experts arguing back and forth about exactly which gun to buy based on maintainability, range, differences between civilian and military models, semi automatic vs fully automatic.

Apparently they’re quite unaware of the extensive number of works in Russian with similar themes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_travel#In_Russian_fiction

maybe someone with a camera in SF can pop downtown and document this gathering

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZ7CWfo4tGDAS3wEg/michael-trazzi-s-shortform?commentId=yq38DLKfe7EMciyAB

apply exposure comp b/c everyone will be pasty white

I think it’s a specific genre of reportage where you objectively[1] report what you observe and let the reader draw their own conclusions.

[1] problematic term, engage!

“Judges love this one weird trick!”

Don’t knock scaffolding, at least it has everyday uses.

cue a thriller where a disgraced techbro billionaire is hunted by the surveillance system he gleefully created

scratch that, that will be a popular reality TV show enjoyed by millions