Don't call it a comeback, I've always lurked

I'm also looking for the brave anti-ai people who follow me (thanks for hanging with me). What are Your Reasons for being anti ai. Also if you saw this in the anti AI tag hi this is your chance to stretch your argument legs!!

AI has massively lowered the barrier to entry to orchestrate political psyops or scams - things that previously took dedicated troll farms or scam call centers can now be orchestrated by a single person with sufficient knowhow and enough money/compute.

While attempts to do so have been very clumsy thus far (grok lol), AI labs can influence the outputs of their models in ways that cannot be undone and may be challenging for the average user to detect. This puts them in a position of immense power that I believe they will try to exploit.

Over the past few years, there has been a massive increase in AI-generated content - to use the term du jour, slop - which is low-quality and drowns out higher-quality human content. I expect this to continue to accelerate if strong barriers are not put into place.

AI is currently sweeping the legs of the education system as everyone scrambles to adapt. I think this will eventually be solved to a reasonable degree, but in the meantime it has the potential to create a deficit for a full cohort that will ripple through their entire lives.

AI is currently reducing the value of entry-level white collar employees while leaving mid and senior level openings mostly untouched. In the short run, this means economic prospects for young college grads are worse than they ever have been, which will have all sorts of unpleasant ripple effects. In the long run, you can't get new mid and senior level employees without a pipeline, and if that pipeline collapses, it will be difficult or impossible to rebuild.

A small but visible portion of the population (1 in 10000, maybe?) are susceptible to what is starting to be called LLM psychosis, where interaction with an LLM and their naturally sycophantic natures reinforces delusions and pulls the person into a dangerous fantasy. These people were almost always mentally ill in some sense prior to the LLM, but the LLM triggers an episode in a specific way that has to be quite harmful.

To restrain things like LLM psychosis, LLMs are increasingly monitored and have the capacity to take more and more actions. I think it's likely that, with attempts to hold AI companies liable for people who killed themselves after talking to an LLM, LLMs will be equipped with the capacity to call the cops if your chat messages to them meet some arbitrary bar that triggers a "mandatory reporting" behavior, and that this is only the beginning. In the long run, I suspect this will represent a massive expansion of the surveillance state, where any internet-connected model is a snitch.

Related to the previous, LLMs enable processing of an immense amount of information in a reasonably humanlike, intelligent way. While I doubt we'll hear about it for a while, this almost certainly enables widespread surveillance in a way that used to be impossible, enabling isolation of signal from noise at a scale that would be prohibitively expensive if you were relying on human analysts.

The US stock market performance (the largest market in the world) is increasingly concentrated in companies that are making huge bets on AI. If AI does not end up being profitable enough to justify this level of investment and those valuations, this is a systemic risk for the US economy and risks plunging us into a recession that will make 2008 look like a cakewalk.

If AI does pan out, the most likely way it could do so would be by being "AGI" - sufficiently intelligent and reliable to replace a massive chunk of white-collar workers in the US. This would cause a different kind of economic (and political) crisis that could potentially be an even worse outcome than the recession (to say nothing of tail concerns about AI risk). The line where some kind of major economic upheaval due to AI doesn't happen in the next ten years is pretty thin.

I'm also looking for the brave anti-ai people who follow me (thanks for hanging with me). What are Your Reasons for being anti ai. Also if you saw this in the anti AI tag hi this is your chance to stretch your argument legs!!

AI has massively lowered the barrier to entry to orchestrate political psyops or scams - things that previously took dedicated troll farms or scam call centers can now be orchestrated by a single person with sufficient knowhow and enough money/compute.

While attempts to do so have been very clumsy thus far (grok lol), AI labs can influence the outputs of their models in ways that cannot be undone and may be challenging for the average user to detect. This puts them in a position of immense power that I believe they will try to exploit.

Over the past few years, there has been a massive increase in AI-generated content - to use the term du jour, slop - which is low-quality and drowns out higher-quality human content. I expect this to continue to accelerate if strong barriers are not put into place.

AI is currently sweeping the legs of the education system as everyone scrambles to adapt. I think this will eventually be solved to a reasonable degree, but in the meantime it has the potential to create a deficit for a full cohort that will ripple through their entire lives.

AI is currently reducing the value of entry-level white collar employees while leaving mid and senior level openings mostly untouched. In the short run, this means economic prospects for young college grads are worse than they ever have been, which will have all sorts of unpleasant ripple effects. In the long run, you can't get new mid and senior level employees without a pipeline, and if that pipeline collapses, it will be difficult or impossible to rebuild.

A small but visible portion of the population (1 in 10000, maybe?) are susceptible to what is starting to be called LLM psychosis, where interaction with an LLM and their naturally sycophantic natures reinforces delusions and pulls the person into a dangerous fantasy. These people were almost always mentally ill in some sense prior to the LLM, but the LLM triggers an episode in a specific way that has to be quite harmful.

To restrain things like LLM psychosis, LLMs are increasingly monitored and have the capacity to take more and more actions. I think it's likely that, with attempts to hold AI companies liable for people who killed themselves after talking to an LLM, LLMs will be equipped with the capacity to call the cops if your chat messages to them meet some arbitrary bar that triggers a "mandatory reporting" behavior, and that this is only the beginning. In the long run, I suspect this will represent a massive expansion of the surveillance state, where any internet-connected model is a snitch.

Related to the previous, LLMs enable processing of an immense amount of information in a reasonably humanlike, intelligent way. While I doubt we'll hear about it for a while, this almost certainly enables widespread surveillance in a way that used to be impossible, enabling isolation of signal from noise at a scale that would be prohibitively expensive if you were relying on human analysts.

The US stock market performance (the largest market in the world) is increasingly concentrated in companies that are making huge bets on AI. If AI does not end up being profitable enough to justify this level of investment and those valuations, this is a systemic risk for the US economy and risks plunging us into a recession that will make 2008 look like a cakewalk.

If AI does pan out, the most likely way it could do so would be by being "AGI" - sufficiently intelligent and reliable to replace a massive chunk of white-collar workers in the US. This would cause a different kind of economic (and political) crisis that could potentially be an even worse outcome than the recession (to say nothing of tail concerns about AI risk). The line where some kind of major economic upheaval due to AI doesn't happen in the next ten years is pretty thin.

IT'S THE LAST DAY to pre-order my next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, at my Kickstarter. Get it as a print book, a DRM-free audiobook or ebook,, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.

In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.

It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.

For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.

Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.

There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

@highway-to-the-bi-way I mean, I see this as more of a catch-22 than a conspiracy--if the state house votes to give themselves raises, most people are not going to say "ah yes this is going to make it easier for more people to run for state house," they are going to say "fat cats in [state capital] voting to give themselves a raise while the potholes still aren't filled, we aren't re-electing those bastards."

It's also a logistical thing--I just looked it up and a legislator in my state makes about 70k/year, which sounds pretty sweet when you consider that the legislative session is only 60 days. But that's also 20-30k below our state average and median annual income, and most people have to pay a second rent two months of the year because they don't live in the capital. And the kinds of jobs that let you take off all of January and February--and leave enough time off the rest of the year to work on bills for next year, or schmooze, or campaign, and so forth--are not your average lower-to-middle class jobs. They're CEO or Owner or Partner or Board Member jobs.

And of course, state legislature is only a 2-year term, so you may or may not have a job come January.

Source

2-YEAR CHEDDAR

from GRAFTON VILLAGE

I usually try to review cheeses virginally - that is, ones that I’ve never had before. In this case, this is a cheddar I’ve had many times before. But I couldn’t leave it off the blog, what with its obvious appeal to leather and rubber fetishists.

As far as cheddars go, Grafton’s 2-year aged isn’t going to shock you. It’s mild, light on the salt, with a slightly sweet and grassy flavour. It’s got a nice texture. It’s dense, more moist than I expected, and smooth.

So what is the deal with the gummi suit on this cheese anyway? Well, cheese has obviously been around a lot longer than fridges. Fresh cheeses like mozzarella are too moist to last very long outside of a cold place (bacteria and fungi do so love damp places), though I don’t think anyone was too mad about eating that stuff quickly. But cheeses that have been aged (and dried) more have some more preservation options, which is where cheese wax comes in. The wax is a physical barrier, stopping fungal spores from landing, and also blocks moisture and air, making the cheese a pretty unfriendly place to grow. Even drier cheeses can be bandaged in cheesecloth and then slathered in lard to preserve them while allowing some ventilation.