Listening to Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich (audiobook, not podcast), and learning heaps about people I’ve known were part of the Rationalist orbit for years, but hadn’t dug too much into, like Balaji Srinivasan. He apparently used the red/blue/grey tribe setup in The Network State, which was published long after Scott’s SSC post using the same language.

I remember that Balaji went nutty when the NYT published about Scott Alexander. Durán attributes that to Cade Metz reporting on Balaji telling Yarvin that they might need to intimidate/harass journalists to keep them from reporting on their fascist bullshit, but all the parallels make me wonder how long they knew/read each other. Did Scott influence Balaji first, or the other way around?

Certainly I am amused that none of the Rationalists have been named yet, 3 hours in. I wonder if it rankles, knowing how bad Eliezer has wanted to make something that people would actually pay for, having a whole book written about Thiel and Yarvin and Srinivasan where he doesn’t rate at all because he’s just some podunk little cult leader who has to beg for grants and find girlfriends to live with and do his laundry while he eats the crumbs off of their tables. Or if it stung Scott when Srinivasan’s book was panned as idiotic, knowing that at least some of those ideas were his.

From the mirror universe news

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-09-10/campaign-slow-ai-was-ready-viral-warning

ZH’s interpretation is Coxon is some kind of false flag thing to bait Dems into regulating AI

Parker Thayer argued that Coxon’s launch looked like a sophisticated public-relations operation. He traced the earliest amplification to people associated with Encode, the AI Policy Network, and the AI Futures Project.

Brian Chau’s later thread surfaced a direct political-technology link. Newspeak House’s own residency page lists Jacob Coxon among its residents and describes his work as “applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets.” Newspeak calls itself the London College of Political Technology. Its current calendar advertises Campaign Lab sessions aimed at helping the progressive left “campaign more effectively.” The residency places Coxon inside that political-technology network.

Some of the underlying funding links are public. The Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2025 grant table lists $2.035 million for the AI Futures Project, $516,000 for Encode AI, and $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute. The fund attributes those grants to Jaan Tallinn. Anthropic says Tallinn led its Series A financing in 2021.

Encode identifies the Survival and Flourishing Fund as one of several foundations supporting its work. It also says it refuses funding from corporations, foreign governments, and executives at frontier AI companies. Its general counsel, Nathan Calvin, is one of the early amplifiers named in Thayer’s thread.

Some new pins for the conspiracy board I guess. They imagine a “political-technology network” quite the linguistic contortion to not use the word rationalist. No clue what LCPT is but looks like a hacker house type thing?

The antiai sub on Reddit is lousy with doomers now. Ugh.

Terry Tao talks about how he used to try to cooperate with the AI industry to achieve a positive outcome, but now he finally sees their true colors. Link

During this event, OpenAI requested an interview concerning my vision of the future of AI and mathematics. I accepted, and spoke with them for perhaps an hour. I had done similar interviews in various venues, and I assumed that, as with these other cases, they would eventually post the entire interview online, which talked about both the possibilities and risks of AI much as I have done in these other interviews. As it turned out, they only used a few snippets of that interview for that infamous advertisement instead. In retrospect, I should have pushed back harder on their decision; but I decided at the time that even a selective release of my commentary would help raise awareness of the potential for AI, and in particular on the possibility of the “best of both worlds”.

Since then, the situation has deterioriated markedly. Many of the people in the industry that shared my views have left or become sidelined, with most major tech companies now increasingly focused on the race to develop extremely powerful, autonomous AI technologies regardless of their actual value to society. The current drama surrounding the Navier-Stokes global regularity problem is the most dramatic and visible instance of this, but there have been multiple other such examples, and much of my commentary in the last few months has been aimed that the increasingly severe divergence between the current objectives of the AI industry, and of mathematics in general.

Much respect to artists for seeing all this coming from the very beginning, and holding the line.

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/09/ai-models-dont-kill-people-people-kill-people/5295368

At the same time, some of that harm may be balanced on a statistical level by lives saved through AI tech.

[citation needed]

Greg Egan reports:

Open Letter about the Mathathon

This open letter calling for the cancellation of the Caltech “Mathathon”, has received 471* signatures so far. [Only members of the Caltech community or mathematicians at PhD student level or beyond are eligible to sign.]

* Now 771 signatures.

“On October 30th, 2026, Caltech will begin hosting the Caltech Mathathon, a math hackathon in which participants are encouraged to solve open research problems by prompting LLMs. Two prominent AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in AI credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.”

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6dBeDwjRP4UkchGSpLwLQjiG8qLX5_wW_3-xoC4dImTPp6g/viewform

Well that Anthropic employee that recently quit made it on the news, also Gary believes superintelligence is inevitable

Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.

Apparently they can also sick the police on you on a trust-me-bro basis:

Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was “just fucking around.”

But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.

image shamelessly stolen from https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv5puo47ns2z

without going into the merits of the specific case, I find it highly amusing that OpenAI fucked up their big Navier-Stokes announcement which is now more about how they stole research from honest mathematicians rather than how awesome their AI is

happy kirkiversary to all who celebrate

wtf is deal of that segyges person. now they’re convinced that openai will solve room temperature superconductors in silico real soon, because altman vagueposted about it

and this all based on lk-99 fraud case, nevermind that there’s no high temperature superconductivity theory, or how prohibitively computationally expensive computational chemistry is, and i guess it’s not accurate enough anyway, this all with people that do computational chemistry coming in their thread trying to explain this, then posts this

Crosspost, hat-tip to @pnwpixel@programming.dev for finding this. Omarchy announces another patron: DigitalOcean. I will wait for DO to explicitly confirm/deny this, but if this is true then I’m going to be moving my entire small-business footprint.

Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die.

https://archive.is/2026.09.05-135619/https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tesla-cybercab-no-steering-wheel-emergency-plan-push-musk-austin-rcna595741

Highlights:

• No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning!
• Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash.
• No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way.
• Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess?
• Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons.
• Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death.
• The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise.
• Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol.

The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed.

If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.”

🤡

Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying.

H/t to violet blue. https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802

Here is a roundup of the “october tech movie” superfecta

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/musk-artificial-social-reckoning-holmes-documentary-1236693959/

is there a kalshi market for which one tanks the hardest? Or will we get crossover sequels for musk vs altman a la MCU?

Speaking of movies about high-profile silicon valley grifters, what the fuck is this??

At this point given the absurdity of this combination of people I feel like the reality will likely be disappointing.