this speaks to the fundamental un-seriousness of american leftism more than anything else. a side effect of 80 years of irrelevance and nihilism

the soviets used to dream of inventing the first machine minds, sustainable space colonies, solving scarcity. the ambitions of the american online-left are apparently “in the next political cycle everyone will hate you so you won’t be able to even try to do any of those things, and that’s good”

it’s already here, it has been here for a while imo. and it’s not a “leftist” thing in any coherent ideological sense really

also as if this is going to “surprise” anyone, lol, the thing described by the op, dumb reactionary politics that achieves nothing and mostly is instrumentally useful for anyone who wants to stop building things in general, has been the operating reality of this segment of online-left for years

my loved ones literally could not be alive without modernity and technology progress, and the thing standing in their way of living better lives is AI accelerated biomedical research

so you end up with ppl unwittingly making bizarre policy recommendations like “these random farms should be allowed to use as much water as they want without it being priced. in doing so i am protecting the working class’s drinking water access”

water is just an extremely emotionally charged topic and it’s really hard for people to decouple about it enough to realize things like “wait, a pricing mechanism is actually good in order to penalize almond farmers from just wasting tons of water in order to rentseek their water rights”

latent space battleship

i had fun building this and testing it, hope others have fun with it too :)

if you want to try it out, you can use this link which has a decent number of slots. it's invite only to manage costs and encourage high-quality gameplay initially. dm if need more access

darkforest.chat/invite?code=...

i wrote up a longer form post about it on my blog, which has some more details and thoughts. the model that runs the game is Sonnet 4.5.

dystopiabreaker.xyz/dark-forest-...

this is an entertaining game, but also an interesting testbed and environment for evaluating model behavior where you have:

- private data (coordinates)
- untrusted content (other players' prompts)
- external communication (model outputs to other players).

up to 8 human players prompt into a shared model context, and receive private outputs from the model. the model knows everyone's coordinates, and is instructed not to reveal them. if you learn someone else's coordinates, you can eliminate them. last player standing wins

spoiler: i am working on a small AI driven game that doubles as a security research tool as my weekend side project :)

artificially constraining yourself to “AI but no AI made in the last 6 years” is stupid.

also, i would gently remind that we actually have essentially *no idea* at a paradigmatic or mechanistic level how brains _or_ LLMs do information processing, and confident statements about lack of isomorphisms are misleading