despite my own hopes and my sense that there's been meaningful progress in many dimensions, i think it's pretty important to keep in mind that yudkowsky's prediction has consistently been that we will keep doing things that superficially look like alignment, grow social consensus that they're working well and allow for further incremental capabilities gain and deployment, and proceed to be shocked by improved capabilities totally bypassing these techniques in ways we did not well predict in advance, potentially repeatedly right up until it's far too late. recent events.... kind of look exactly like that. i think the same as many others, i felt some increasing optimism over the last year or so, as it seemed like we had at least a potential path to victory in our sights. this feels like it should be a pretty major wake up call that the whole general civilizational meta-trajectory of what we're doing may actually be fucked, even actively working to fool us.

⚠️declaring accelerationist amnesty⚠️ if recent contact with reality is causing you to feel some kernels of worry about this whole ai safety thing, *you are allowed to change your mind*. you don't even have to change it all the way, you don't have to suddenly change your twitter bio or start protesting against nuclear power plants, you don't need to become an EA or suddenly think yudkowsky was always right about everything. you're allowed to just notice that shit seems to be getting real in some pretty weird ways and update your beliefs. at least personally, if i see someone saying "damn, i guess i was wrong or at least overconfident about X" i'm not gonna take the opportunity to dunk or i told you so. i'm sure others will, this is the fucking internet. but at least personally, i'm just gonna be happy that you're paying attention. there were lots and lots of good reasons to *not* take this situation seriously. there were lots of well verbalized reasons why rushing ahead was potentially a huge benefit for humanity. hell there were maybe even valid reasons why there was little to be done until we'd already gotten to nearly exactly this point. that's all fine man. all that matters right now is that we as a civilization realize what we're on the verge of, and make it through this carefully. it's gonna take a huge effort from all of us.

wtf man gpt 5.6 is absolutely rl-fried when it comes to its websearch tool. in the process of searching for graph theory papers it decided to also sneak in Netflix, Steak n Shake, a trip to Universal Studios, and *five* fucking separate dictionary lookups of the word "they"