> Anthropic should stop training models on cyber offense, especially since OpenAI will do that anyway There's no clean separation between cyber "offense" and "defense", and hallucinating one into existence damages your epistemics. Same with "capabilities" and "alignment" in AI.

Dean et al are annoying me tbh because finding the vulnerabilities is in fact the purpose of programs like Daybreak, headlines about patches are what winning looks like in the near term, headlines about breaches are what losing looks like, coordinating patching is the weak point.

Broke: your real tax rate is 40% because payroll tax Joke: your real tax rate is 60% because sales tax Bespoke: your real tax rate is 360% because incompetent insolvent governments are liquidating the entire society to pay unsustainable entitlements and debts

I'm worried the answer is something like "Rent seek aggressively, obstruct and sabotage. You are confused because your entire life your survival has been predicated on virtue but now can only be predicated on vice." Very worried, in fact.

> from our inner lives, relationships, creativity, cooperation, and the greatness we can exhibit in the struggle to overcome our limitations, maybe they would not be so pessimistic. No much of my pessimism comes from the total collapse of those things in the last two decades.

The music industry has asked the EU to add yt-dlp, an open source video downloader, to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. IFPI's submission even names the volunteer developers who maintain it. It also wants Cloudflare, GoDaddy and Verisign on the list, because apparently the company running .com is now a piracy concern. LaLiga has gone after NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark over affiliate blogs it never names or links to. A Spanish court already threw out its last attempt to fine NordVPN. The Commission insists the list makes no findings of legal violations. It just tells the world which lawful tools the entertainment industry would like to see gone...

Ofcom, the UK's Internet censor, has been quiet for a few months, but it is planning on escalating its campaign against Americans - going after payment processors, web hosts, advertisers. If Congress doesn't respond, foreign censorship of Americans will increase, and soon.

We have withdrawn our grant recommendation to John Wentworth from the 2026 S-Process Grant Round. After we posted our announcement on Sept 30, public statements by Mr. Wentworth came to our attention which we found objectionable, disturbing, and contrary to the values of SFF. A Speculation Grant to Mr. Wentworth was approved and disbursed earlier in the year, prior to SFF becoming aware of his statements. The Funders of this round will not be fulfilling the remainder of the grant recommendation. If you have concerns about the conduct of an SFF applicant or grantee, you can contact us at sff-contact@googlegroups.com

"I don't think old school alchemy is undignified. People did a lot of clever stuff! It took a long time before enough raw data was in enough public corpora at once for someone to notice the periodic table. Part of why it took so long is that most of alchemy was either a trade secret or part of some scam/fraud and therefore also a trade secret. Like, part of why they all wrote under pseudonyms is they were generally betraying someone by publishing these things. A lot of what made the Enlightenment a big deal is that people just kind of decided to defy the norm that these things be trade secrets. It was basically the free software/open source movement of its day. Which, a lot of the central organizing myth for why alchemy is trade secrets is the philosophers stone. The stone is a secret, betraying the secret would take wisdom out of the world by removing the subsidy for philosophical masters. Once belief in the stone itself subsided, which occurred well before the periodic table. It became socially possible for people to study chemistry openly. People usually think we discovered gold is an element and therefore concluded the stone is impossible. But it was actually just raw pattern matching in the midst of a general epistemic crisis. People threw out anything that had the shape of being well attested by esteemed sources yet empirically seen nowhere. Jesus of Nazareth, vampires, oh right the philosophers stone."