#dystopian — Public Fediverse posts

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Imagine a future in which late-stage capitalism became able to scan cadavers' brains and transfer them into chatbots unless the deceased subscribes to a high-tier funerary services plan. Behold the ultimate wet dream of those who think Black Mirror is meant as an instruction manual: KadAIve®!

Alt-text contains important explanation about this absurdist art (such as, the deliberate mimicking of AI slop machine style and the hidden puns/messages within the text), but will likely end up truncated because it's way too lengthy (too many details that ought to be explained). Hell, it's even exceeds the 5000 character limit when I try to paste the alt-text here in the post.

#arsritualistemplii #meme #dystopian #scifiparody #mementomori

“Release” is a #dystopian #SciFi #MMRomance by Marie Sexton.

Misha grew up in the “trenches” of lower Davlova, where the poorest citizens scratch out a living without technology while the high-born “purebloods” live in electrified luxury behind the walls of the inner city on the hill. Misha gets taken in by one of the clans, criminal gangs that run all sorts of operations in the city. Over the years, Misha learned the fine art of pickpocketing. Sometimes he also turns tricks to see if a potential mark had a lot of money, and where he kept it.

One day, the clan leader offers Misha a new opportunity. One of the most powerful men in the city is looking for a new toy boy and wants someone “exotic.” The clan leader isn’t just asking Misha to prostitute himself. She wants him to gain the man’s confidence and learn his secrets. The information may provide the catalyst that starts a revolution.

https://michaeljoseph.info/blog/2023/review-release-marie-sexton/?ref=mastodon

“Release” is a #dystopian #SciFi #MMRomance by Marie Sexton.

Misha grew up in the “trenches” of lower Davlova, where the poorest citizens scratch out a living without technology while the high-born “purebloods” live in electrified luxury behind the walls of the inner city on the hill. Misha gets taken in by one of the clans, criminal gangs that run all sorts of operations in the city. Over the years, Misha learned the fine art of pickpocketing. Sometimes he also turns tricks to see if a potential mark had a lot of money, and where he kept it.

One day, the clan leader offers Misha a new opportunity. One of the most powerful men in the city is looking for a new toy boy and wants someone “exotic.” The clan leader isn’t just asking Misha to prostitute himself. She wants him to gain the man’s confidence and learn his secrets. The information may provide the catalyst that starts a revolution.

https://michaeljoseph.info/blog/2023/review-release-marie-sexton/?ref=mastodon

“Release” is a #dystopian #SciFi #MMRomance by Marie Sexton.

Misha grew up in the “trenches” of lower Davlova, where the poorest citizens scratch out a living without technology while the high-born “purebloods” live in electrified luxury behind the walls of the inner city on the hill. Misha gets taken in by one of the clans, criminal gangs that run all sorts of operations in the city. Over the years, Misha learned the fine art of pickpocketing. Sometimes he also turns tricks to see if a potential mark had a lot of money, and where he kept it.

One day, the clan leader offers Misha a new opportunity. One of the most powerful men in the city is looking for a new toy boy and wants someone “exotic.” The clan leader isn’t just asking Misha to prostitute himself. She wants him to gain the man’s confidence and learn his secrets. The information may provide the catalyst that starts a revolution.

https://michaeljoseph.info/blog/2023/review-release-marie-sexton/?ref=mastodon

“Release” is a #dystopian #SciFi #MMRomance by Marie Sexton.

Misha grew up in the “trenches” of lower Davlova, where the poorest citizens scratch out a living without technology while the high-born “purebloods” live in electrified luxury behind the walls of the inner city on the hill. Misha gets taken in by one of the clans, criminal gangs that run all sorts of operations in the city. Over the years, Misha learned the fine art of pickpocketing. Sometimes he also turns tricks to see if a potential mark had a lot of money, and where he kept it.

One day, the clan leader offers Misha a new opportunity. One of the most powerful men in the city is looking for a new toy boy and wants someone “exotic.” The clan leader isn’t just asking Misha to prostitute himself. She wants him to gain the man’s confidence and learn his secrets. The information may provide the catalyst that starts a revolution.

https://michaeljoseph.info/blog/2023/review-release-marie-sexton/?ref=mastodon

“Release” is a #dystopian #SciFi #MMRomance by Marie Sexton.

Misha grew up in the “trenches” of lower Davlova, where the poorest citizens scratch out a living without technology while the high-born “purebloods” live in electrified luxury behind the walls of the inner city on the hill. Misha gets taken in by one of the clans, criminal gangs that run all sorts of operations in the city. Over the years, Misha learned the fine art of pickpocketing. Sometimes he also turns tricks to see if a potential mark had a lot of money, and where he kept it.

One day, the clan leader offers Misha a new opportunity. One of the most powerful men in the city is looking for a new toy boy and wants someone “exotic.” The clan leader isn’t just asking Misha to prostitute himself. She wants him to gain the man’s confidence and learn his secrets. The information may provide the catalyst that starts a revolution.

https://michaeljoseph.info/blog/2023/review-release-marie-sexton/?ref=mastodon

British #Euroscepticism in 8 #dystopian novels by British authors, published in the wake of the #Brexit referendum is the focus of Lisa Bischoff's 2023 monograph "British Novels and the European Union - DisEUtopia"

#EnglishLiterature #BritishStudies #LiteraryStudies #CulturalStudies #EuropeanUnion

I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.

@davidgerard wrote:

“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse

But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.

These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”

First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.

There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.

You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.

A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.

This is a good paper that goes into it:

In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634

The big problem in discussions about AI in programming is the either-or thinking, when it’s not about using it everywhere or banning it entirely. Tools like AI have specific strengths and weaknesses. Saying ‘never’ or ‘always’ oversimplifies the issue and turns the narrative into propaganda that creates moral panic or shills AI. It’s a bit like saying you shouldn’t use a hammer just because it’s not good for brushing your teeth.

AI tends to produce code that’s simple, often a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It’s usually pretty easy to read and tweak. This helps with long-term maintenance. But AI doesn’t reason about code the way an experienced developer does. It makes mistakes that a human wouldn’t, potentially introducing security flaws. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use for where it works well, which is not everywhere.

AI works well for certain tasks, especially when the scope is narrow and the risk is low. Examples include generating boilerplate code, internal utilities, or prototypes. In these cases, the tradeoff is manageable. However, it’s not suitable for critical code like kernels, operating systems, compilers, or cryptographic libraries. A small mistake memory safety or privilege separation can lead to major failures. Problems with synchronization, pointer management, or access control can cause major problems, too.

Other areas where AI should not be used include memory allocation handling, scheduling, process isolation, or device drivers. A lot of that depends on implicit assumptions in the system’s architecture. Generative models don’t grasp these nuances. Instead of carefully considering the design, AI tends to replicate code patterns that seem statistically likely, doing so without understanding the purpose behind them.

Yes, I’m aware that Microsoft is using AI to write code everywhere I said it should not be used. That is the problem. However, political pundits, lobbyists, and anti-tech talking heads are discussing something they have no understanding of and aren’t specifying what the problem actually is. This means they can’t possibly lead grassroots initiatives into actual laws that specify where AI should not be used, which is why we have this weird astroturfing bullshit.

They’re taking advantage of the reaction to Microsoft using AI-generated code where it shouldn’t be used to argue that AI shouldn’t be used anywhere at all in any generative context. AI is useful for tasks like writing documentation, generating tests, suggesting code improvements, or brainstorming alternative approaches. These ideas should then be thoroughly vetted by human developers.

Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.

A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.

That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.

Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.

They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.

Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.

@davidgerard wrote:

“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”

They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.

It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.

It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.

It’s wild to me that the idea that if you cannot persuade someone, it is okay to bully, coerce, harass them, or spread misinformation to get what you want—because your side is right—has become so normalized on the Internet that people can’t see why it is problematic.

That people think it is okay to hurt others to get them to agree is the most disturbing part of all of this. People have become so hateful. That is a large reason why I don’t interact with people on social media, really consume things from social media, or respond on social media and am writing a blog post about it instead of engaging with who prompted it.

I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.

@davidgerard wrote:

“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse

But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.

These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”

First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.

There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.

You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.

A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.

This is a good paper that goes into it:

In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634

Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.

A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.

That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.

Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.

They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.

Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.

@davidgerard wrote:

“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”

They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.

It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.

It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.

I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.

@davidgerard wrote:

“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse

But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.

These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”

First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.

There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.

You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.

A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.

This is a good paper that goes into it:

In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634

Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.

A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.

That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.

Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.

They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.

Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.

@davidgerard wrote:

“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”

They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.

It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.

It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.

I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.

@davidgerard wrote:

“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse

But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.

These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”

First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.

There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.

You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.

A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.

This is a good paper that goes into it:

In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634

The big problem in discussions about AI in programming is the either-or thinking, when it’s not about using it everywhere or banning it entirely. Tools like AI have specific strengths and weaknesses. Saying ‘never’ or ‘always’ oversimplifies the issue and turns the narrative into propaganda that creates moral panic or shills AI. It’s a bit like saying you shouldn’t use a hammer just because it’s not good for brushing your teeth.

AI tends to produce code that’s simple, often a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It’s usually pretty easy to read and tweak. This helps with long-term maintenance. But AI doesn’t reason about code the way an experienced developer does. It makes mistakes that a human wouldn’t, potentially introducing security flaws. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use for where it works well, which is not everywhere.

AI works well for certain tasks, especially when the scope is narrow and the risk is low. Examples include generating boilerplate code, internal utilities, or prototypes. In these cases, the tradeoff is manageable. However, it’s not suitable for critical code like kernels, operating systems, compilers, or cryptographic libraries. A small mistake memory safety or privilege separation can lead to major failures. Problems with synchronization, pointer management, or access control can cause major problems, too.

Other areas where AI should not be used include memory allocation handling, scheduling, process isolation, or device drivers. A lot of that depends on implicit assumptions in the system’s architecture. Generative models don’t grasp these nuances. Instead of carefully considering the design, AI tends to replicate code patterns that seem statistically likely, doing so without understanding the purpose behind them.

Yes, I’m aware that Microsoft is using AI to write code everywhere I said it should not be used. That is the problem. However, political pundits, lobbyists, and anti-tech talking heads are discussing something they have no understanding of and aren’t specifying what the problem actually is. This means they can’t possibly lead grassroots initiatives into actual laws that specify where AI should not be used, which is why we have this weird astroturfing bullshit.

They’re taking advantage of the reaction to Microsoft using AI-generated code where it shouldn’t be used to argue that AI shouldn’t be used anywhere at all in any generative context. AI is useful for tasks like writing documentation, generating tests, suggesting code improvements, or brainstorming alternative approaches. These ideas should then be thoroughly vetted by human developers.

Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.

A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.

That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.

Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.

They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.

Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.

@davidgerard wrote:

“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”

They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.

It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.

It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.

It’s wild to me that the idea that if you cannot persuade someone, it is okay to bully, coerce, harass them, or spread misinformation to get what you want—because your side is right—has become so normalized on the Internet that people can’t see why it is problematic.

That people think it is okay to hurt others to get them to agree is the most disturbing part of all of this. People have become so hateful. That is a large reason why I don’t interact with people on social media, really consume things from social media, or respond on social media and am writing a blog post about it instead of engaging with who prompted it.

I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.

@davidgerard wrote:

“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse

But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.

These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”

First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.

There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.

You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.

A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.

This is a good paper that goes into it:

In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634

The big problem in discussions about AI in programming is the either-or thinking, when it’s not about using it everywhere or banning it entirely. Tools like AI have specific strengths and weaknesses. Saying ‘never’ or ‘always’ oversimplifies the issue and turns the narrative into propaganda that creates moral panic or shills AI. It’s a bit like saying you shouldn’t use a hammer just because it’s not good for brushing your teeth.

AI tends to produce code that’s simple, often a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It’s usually pretty easy to read and tweak. This helps with long-term maintenance. But AI doesn’t reason about code the way an experienced developer does. It makes mistakes that a human wouldn’t, potentially introducing security flaws. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use for where it works well, which is not everywhere.

AI works well for certain tasks, especially when the scope is narrow and the risk is low. Examples include generating boilerplate code, internal utilities, or prototypes. In these cases, the tradeoff is manageable. However, it’s not suitable for critical code like kernels, operating systems, compilers, or cryptographic libraries. A small mistake memory safety or privilege separation can lead to major failures. Problems with synchronization, pointer management, or access control can cause major problems, too.

Other areas where AI should not be used include memory allocation handling, scheduling, process isolation, or device drivers. A lot of that depends on implicit assumptions in the system’s architecture. Generative models don’t grasp these nuances. Instead of carefully considering the design, AI tends to replicate code patterns that seem statistically likely, doing so without understanding the purpose behind them.

Yes, I’m aware that Microsoft is using AI to write code everywhere I said it should not be used. That is the problem. However, political pundits, lobbyists, and anti-tech talking heads are discussing something they have no understanding of and aren’t specifying what the problem actually is. This means they can’t possibly lead grassroots initiatives into actual laws that specify where AI should not be used, which is why we have this weird astroturfing bullshit.

They’re taking advantage of the reaction to Microsoft using AI-generated code where it shouldn’t be used to argue that AI shouldn’t be used anywhere at all in any generative context. AI is useful for tasks like writing documentation, generating tests, suggesting code improvements, or brainstorming alternative approaches. These ideas should then be thoroughly vetted by human developers.

Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.

A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.

That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.

Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.

They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.

Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.

@davidgerard wrote:

“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”

They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.

It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.

It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.

It’s wild to me that the idea that if you cannot persuade someone, it is okay to bully, coerce, harass them, or spread misinformation to get what you want—because your side is right—has become so normalized on the Internet that people can’t see why it is problematic.

That people think it is okay to hurt others to get them to agree is the most disturbing part of all of this. People have become so hateful. That is a large reason why I don’t interact with people on social media, really consume things from social media, or respond on social media and am writing a blog post about it instead of engaging with who prompted it.

So, I am a Computational Biologist. Keep that in mind. I’m an actual scientist who works with ecological concepts, specifically the microbiome. One of the most insufferable reactions to the cyberpunk era we inhabit is the emergence of anti-science ideas from the left in response to techno-fascism. The strange part is that many people on the left do not even recognize them as anti-science, because they assume the left is aligned with science and the right opposed to it; ergo, if the left says it, it must be scientific. It is insane: washing your hands is technology. Medicine is technology.

I think, because the Internet has hijacked people’s brains, many conflate technology with electronics or machines. Anthropologically, technology consists of material objects, techniques, and organized practices through which humans intentionally intervene in their environments. Technology is culture, and human culture is technology. When someone learns a skill or a discipline from someone else, that is an extension of technology.

Technology encompasses craft traditions (blacksmithing), agriculture, and institutionalized processes of teaching and learning. Agriculture is one of the oldest forms of technology. Yes, farmers are tech workers. I write code, but I also spent a large amount of time on a farm, and I can tell you that many tech workers who pride themselves on writing code would not know what to do with farm equipment.

So, from that broad perspective, we can sum technology up in one word: education. A basic heuristic for determining if something is cultural or not is: can it be taught and learned? These words? I was taught English, and I am using an invented language to transmit knowledge to you; ergo, I am using technology to transmit cultural knowledge to you. Reading a book is thus using a piece of human technology. So, being anti-tech connotes being anti-education.

What got me thinking about this is a toot I read on Mastodon:

The truth is that society needs to develop ethically and ecologically more than it does technologically. That’s not to say that we should shun technology, but our development along other lines lags far behind our technological capacity.

↬ecoevo.social/@benlockwood/116052113455871454

Sounds valid, right? That is the distinct smell of bull shit.This is a clear example of what is called a platitude. Platitudes are memetically hijacking people’s brains. Memetics actually hijack your brain—they change it. It’s similar to how a retrovirus can alter the genome of its host. So, trying to have conversations with these people is pointless, which is why I avoid the chronically online Internet scene and arguing with them.

It made me want to scream. As I mentioned earlier, technology is basically a set of things you learn from other humans—typically within a culture—that helps you do or make something. You know what else is learned within human society? A normative set of cultural values about how we ought to behave. So, both technology and culture emerge from the same thing simultaneously and mutually. You cannot have humans intervening in things to achieve ecological development, because that is technology, and you cannot educate humans on ethics without an invented language. It is literally an anti-education argument.

Ethics and technology arise together from the same human conditions and social processes. It makes little sense to claim that technology is “outpacing” ethics. The two do not develop independently. We form ethical norms in response to new capacities and circumstances. There would be no cultural norms about how to use the Internet if the Internet did not exist. And, there would be no ethical debates about AI if AI did not exist. Ethical reflection emerges alongside technological change because both are products of human culture.

As new problems create new technologies that create new problems, societies respond by negotiating norms, rules, and expectations appropriate to those contexts. The same pattern appears in politics. Politics concerns who gets what, when, and how—it is the negotiation of power, rights, and resources. Without resources or competing claims, there would be nothing to negotiate. Ethics and politics are not trailing behind technology because they are co-emergent responses to the same underlying realities.

@benlockwood

Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction

A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.

The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.

So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.

That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.

These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.

The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.

Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.

Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.

I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.

BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity

I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”

Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.

Bluesky mentions that here:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update

As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.

I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.

Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.

Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.

Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.

Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.

Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.

Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.

I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.

In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.

I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.

Astroturfing Is Pretty Pointless When Social Subgraphs Are Fragmented (e.g., the Fediverse)

I am seeing astroturfing in the fediverse again, by AT Protocol developers implicitly trying to shill their products. I think it is stochastic behavior by developers with too much time on their hands. Honestly, I do not care. I like the people on ActivityPub more, but I like the AT Protocol better, and I have developed for both. Astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is fascinating to me because it is so pointless.

I am actually a Computational Biologist and Computer Scientist whose specialty is combinatorics, social graphs, graph theory, etc. Specifically, I use this to create epidemiological models for the memetic layer of human behaviors that act as vectors for diseases, using the SIRS model. I do not just study germs; I study human behaviors.

The models I construct extend into a “memetic layer,” in which beliefs, norms, and behaviors (such as risk-taking, compliance with public health measures, or susceptibility to misinformation) spread contagiously through social networks. These behaviors function as vectors that modulate biological transmission rates. As a result, the spread of ideas can accelerate, dampen, or reshape the spread of disease. By running computational simulations and agent-based models on these graphs, I study how network structure, influential nodes, clustering, and platform-specific dynamics affect behavioral contagion. I also examine how these factors influence epidemiological outcomes.

To say it very concisely, I study how the spread of bat-shit insane beliefs, shit posts, and memes influences whether or not there is a measles outbreak in Texas. Ironically, this is an evolution of my studying semiotics, memetics, and chaos magick in high school. I got a job where I can use occult, anarchist techniques professionally.

I think a large reason why I do not care about astroturfing in the fediverse is that it’s so pointless, lol. Astroturfing to manipulate the narrative would actually work better on Bluesky to keep people there than trying to recruit from the fediverse. Furthermore, big instances are relatively small. Some people on Bluesky have follower lists larger than an entire large instance in the fediverse.

Within ActivityPub networks, astroturfing rarely propagates far, because whether information spreads depends on properties of the social graph itself. Dense connectivity, short paths between communities, and a sufficient number of cross-cutting ties support diffusion. ActivityPub’s architecture tends to produce graphs that are fragmented and highly modular. This limits the reach of coordinated activity.

ActivityPub is a system where each instance maintains its own local user graph and exchanges activities through inboxes and outboxes. This makes it autonomous and decentralized. The network consists of loosely connected subgraphs. Cross-instance edges appear only through explicit follow relationships. The ActivityPub protocol does not provide a shared or complete view of the network. Measurements of the fediverse consistently show uneven connectivity between instances, clustering at the instance level, and relatively long effective path lengths across the network. Under these conditions, large cascades are uncommon.

Instance-level clustering means that in ActivityPub networks, users interact much more with others on the same server than with users on different servers. Because each instance has its own local timeline, culture, and moderation, connections form densely within instances and only sparsely across them through explicit follow relationships. This creates a network made up of tightly connected local communities linked by relatively few cross-instance ties, which slows the spread of information beyond its point of origin.

However, with the AT Protocol, global indexing and aggregation are explicitly supported. Relays and indexers can assemble near-complete views of the social graph. Applications built on top of this infrastructure operate over a graph that is denser and easier to traverse. There are fewer structural barriers between communities. The diffusion dynamics change substantially when content can move across the graph without relying on narrow federated paths.

Astroturfing depends on coordinated amplification, typically through tightly synchronized clusters of accounts intended to manufacture visibility. Work on coordinated inauthentic behavior shows that these tactics gain traction when they intersect highly connected regions of the graph or bridge otherwise separate communities. In networks with strong modularity, coordination remains local. ActivityPub’s federation model produces this kind of modularity by default. Coordinated clusters stand out clearly within instances. Their effects remain confined to those local neighborhoods.

Astroturfing on ActivityPub therefore tends to stall on its own because of the underlying graph topology. Without dense inter-instance connectivity or any form of global indexing, coordinated campaigns have a hard time moving beyond the immediate regions where they originate. Systems built on globally indexable social graphs, including those enabled by the AT Protocol, expose a much larger surface for viral spread. Network structure and connectivity account for the divergence where that is independent of moderation, cultural norms, ideology, or intent.

It’s just really funny to me how these stochastic techbro groups waste so many resources. I personally don’t want to go viral, which is why I avoid platforms where I can. The fact that it’s harder to achieve high virality on ActivityPub is exactly why I prefer the fediverse over the Atmosphere. One way to think about it is that you can change the ‘genetics’ of a system with a retrovirus, where memetic entities act as cultural retroviruses to reprogram the cultural loci of a space. That is their end goal. They are trying to hijack cultures memetically. You see this a lot with culture jamming.

Basically, the astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is designed to jam and subvert the culture. But, as I have already said, the topological structure makes memetic virality stall. They cannot achieve that kind of viral spread in the fediverse, which is why I cannot understand why they do this every year.

NEW EPISODE: Time for a quick, spoiler-lite review of The Newsflesh Trilogy. Trust me, this is worth your time! #SciFi #ZombieApocalypse #Dystopian #BookReview https://youtu.be/CJayQia7P5o

The next morning,
wrecked,
I put on sweatpants and a hoodie
and tried to smuggle myself out of the hotel without having to talk to anyone.

I gave my chit to the valet and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin standing there waiting for cars.

“How do you guys feel?” Yarvin asked.

Vance was wearing a hoodie too and looked like I felt.
“I feel horrible,” he said.
“Not good.”

Yarvin asked what I’d thought of everything.

I said it would take a long time for me to figure that out.

We all shook hands,
and they waved as I got into my car and we all resumed our usual battle stations in the American info-wars.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”

I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.

He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”

He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.

“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”

He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.

If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”

At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.

People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.

I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.

They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.

“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.

I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.

A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar,
surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys.

I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.

He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly.

I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years,
even if he loses his Senate primary,
as both of us thought was possible.

It also revealed someone who is in a dark place,
with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history.

He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record.

But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.

That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.

Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.

Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.

“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.

Murphy chortled knowingly.

“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.

“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

He said he thought this was pessimistic.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.

We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”

I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said.

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:

Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,

replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say
—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order
—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

On the last afternoon of NatCon,
a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address,
Vance showed up.

He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello.

“I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.

I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry.

He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin,
and asked me to explain his philosophy.

I found myself at a loss.
I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”

“A monarchist?”he asked.

He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.

Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie,
looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation.

He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.

I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”

What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled
“The Universities Are the Enemy.”

People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972.

Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people;

he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments.

The speech was later linked in alarmed
op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning.

But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering.

Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics,
are not anti-intellectual.

Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.

But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural,
self-serving, and
financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil.

And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

We drove a long way into the desert before we arrived at the campaign meet-and-greet,
which was being hosted by a former CIA official in a comfortable retirement community.

The crowd of a few dozen was mostly sweater-wearing retirees,
immersed in a media culture in which the people who repeated the most incendiary and Trumpist talking points tended to gain attention and political support.

This kind of groupthink was not just a phenomenon of the liberal media,
and this fact has hampered the campaigns of both Masters and Vance,
who are often seen as Trump-aligned culture warriors,
and who have had a lot of trouble working their more complicated policy ideas into our fervid political conversation.

He talked through his proposal to regulate tech companies as common carriers,
like America once regulated phone companies.

The crowd seemed interested but hardly electrified.

When he took questions at the end, they were mostly the usual ones about the supposedly stolen 2020 election
—a view that Masters did not push back on
—the border wall,
vaccine mandates.

One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to drain the swamp.

He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said.

“Retire All Government Employees.”

The crowd liked the sound of this and erupted in a cheer.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

I asked Masters whether he thought the core of his project was a fight against a consumerist
techno-dystopia that many on the left have also come to fear.

He said yes.

I asked why, if this was the case, it almost never came across in his mainstream media appearances.

“That’s interesting feedback,” he said. “That it’s not coming through.”

“I go on, and it’s the tail end of the B block, and I’ve got two minutes to talk about #Kyle #Rittenhouse,” he’d said earlier,

talking about his spots on Fox News.

“And it’s like, ‘Well, the left is insane, and this kid shouldn’t have been on trial,
and they’re punishing him for being a white guy who defended himself with an AR-15.’ ”

Conservative media seems to thrive on culture-war touch points as much as all the rest of it.

“I feel like I’m willing to go there,” he said.

“But you can’t do that on Laura Ingraham sound bites.”

He was a little less rosy about the future with some interviewers than he was with me.

“We need someone with their hand on the tiller who understands where we’ve been and where we need to go,” he told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently.

“Otherwise we will get just totally owned by the progressive left.

And the progressive left just remains the enemy.

It’s the enemy of true progress. It’s the enemy of everything that is good.”

I asked if he could give me a vision of what he thought victory for his side would look like.

“It’s just families and meaningful work,” he said,
“so that you can raise your kids and worship and pursue your hobbies and figure out what the meaning of it all is.”

Pretty much anyone could agree with this. And pretty much anyone could wonder how it is that this sort of thing has come to seem radical,
or distant from the lives of many people growing into adulthood today.

“It just feels so networked,” he said. “It’s so in-the-matrix.”

#Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?”
Masters said to me.

“It’s a tangible enemy
—if you could just grapple with it in the right way, you can topple it.
And I think it’s actually just a lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,” he said.

“But I’ve read that stuff, and I see what it means.”

I asked him about the term
Thielbucks,
and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters
and cool-kid cultural figures
as a sort of cultural vanguard.

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,”
he told me,
“or if anyone actually does anything.”

“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks.

“I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”

“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.”

He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare.

“Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”

I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel.

“Maybe, yeah,” he said.

“We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”

We drove together to a campaign event, talking about everything from how technology is reshaping our brains to environmental policy,
both of us circling from different political directions to an apocalyptic place.

“I do think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he said.

“And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark Ages.”

Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the #Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto,
“Industrial Society and Its Future,”
which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate.

But to Masters, #Kaczynski’s critique was a useful analysis of how technology shapes our world
and how “degrading and debasing” it could be to human lives.

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

A few weeks after NatCon, I drove from California to Tucson to meet Masters,
a very tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old.

I wanted to see how all this might translate into an actual election campaign,
and I’d been watching a lot of Fox News,

including Yarvin’s streaming interview with Carlson in which he gave a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral produced its groupthink.

“Why do Yale and Harvard always agree on everything?” he asked.

“These organizations are essentially branches of the same thing,” he told a mesmerized Carlson.

“You’re like, ‘Where are the wires?’ ”

He sketched his vision of (as he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change that would take power back from this oligarchy
—so diffuse most people hardly knew it was there.

“That’s what makes it so hard to kill,” he said.

At a coffee shop near the house he’d bought when he moved back home to Tucson from the Bay Area,
Masters and I went through the tenets of his nationalist platform:

on-shoring industrial production,
slashing legal immigration,
regulating big tech companies,
and eventually restructuring the economy so that one salary would be enough to raise a family on.

I mentioned Yarvin and his line of arguing that America’s system had become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to imagine making big systemic changes like these.

“In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.

“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said.
It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was.

“I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”

He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”

Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled and pessimistic as some in the New Right spheres.

He seems, unlike many New Righters, to still earnestly believe in the power of electoral politics.

But he does think that the culturally liberal and free-market ideology that has guided America’s politics in recent years
is a hopeless dead end.

“A country is not just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-right outlet
IM—1776
recently.

“You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture.

And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.”

“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he said to me.

“I think it’s really bleak, I think the default is continued stagnation, and maybe you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30 years from now.”

He told me that he didn’t like to use terms like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less often than Vance,

although I later noticed that he used this latter phrase frequently with interviewers on the dissident right.

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Like Levy, Milius is in the funny position of being at the intersection of many of these crosscurrents,

having worked in mainstream politics but appearing on so-called dissident podcasts

and being on the periphery of a cultural scene where right-wing politics have taken on a sheen approximating cool.

She said she was too “black-pilled”
—a very online term used to describe people who think that our world is so messed up that nothing can save it now
—to think much about what it would look like for her side to win.

“I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius said, “and that’s going to be considered white supremacism.

Like, there’s nothing you can do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”

“They’re going to come for everything,” she said.

“And I think it’s sinister
—not that I think that people who want to pay attention to race issues are sinister.

But I think that the globalization movement is using these divisive arguments in order to make people think that it’s a good thing.”

This is the Cathedral at work.

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall
when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview.

There are signs that this may be happening,
though not all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe shift would want to be colored as the vanguard in a world historical rebellion against the global order.

“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer Honor Levy,
a Catholic convert and Bennington grad,
told me when I called her.

“I just want to have a family someday.”

Levy, who was a leftist recently enough that she cried when it became clear that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic presidential nominee,

is friendly with Yarvin and has had him on the podcast she cohosts, "Wet Brain"

—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah blah,” she said when we got to talking about political media.

But she said she’d never even heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.

Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene
—The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene
—where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding.

“Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed,” she told me,

later adding: “But I’m not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talking.”

I asked if she would take money from Thiel and she cheerily said,
“Of course!”

She also described her cohort as a bunch of “libertines,”
and on her podcast you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a
mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex.

“Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an accessory,” she said.

The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni Riefenstahl – Edie Sedgwick.”

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

The Red Scare hosts both started out as diffident socialists,
back when it was still possible to think that socialism represented an edgy political stance,
in the little interlocking spheres of America’s media and political set.

One of them, Nekrasova,
actually became known in media circles for a clip that went megaviral in 2018,
when she cut dead a reporter for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Austin.

“I just want people to have health care, honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have, like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”

Fast-forward to November 2021, and Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan were posting photos of themselves
with Jones’s arms wrapped around them under an evening Texas sun.

Nekrasova now has a role on HBO’s Succession,
playing a P.R. rep working with Kendall Roy;
the show itself set “right-wing Twitter”
—a sphere heavily populated by 20-somethings who work in tech or politics and seem to disproportionately live in D.C. and Miami
—alight with delight when an episode in the latest season included a litany of key New Right phrases
such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all, abortions for none.”

The Red Scare hosts are only the best-known representatives of a fashionable
dissident-y subculture,
centered in but not exclusive to downtown Manhattan.

“Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now,”
a bewildered friend of mine texted recently.

People use the derisive term “bugman” to describe liberal men who lack tangible life skills like fixing trucks or growing food
—guys who could end up spending their lives behind the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset.

Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville,
which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,”
and which named one of its lines after John Galt,
the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

People are converting to Catholicism.
“It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend texted. “Because casual sex is out.”

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Milius was a sardonic and constant presence,
easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood and talked at warp speed in his unmistakable voice.

She was by far the most strikingly dressed person there,
favoring Gucci and Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big sunglasses.

She is the daughter of the conservative director John Milius,
who cowrote Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn.

She grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts college in Manhattan,

so, like pretty much all the people there, she was used to living in social spaces where conservative views were considered strange if not downright evil.

She thought something had radically changed since 2015,

after she went to film school at USC and started working in Hollywood,

before she suddenly dropped everything to work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada,

eventually landing a job in his State Department.

“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought movement.

So it’s very hard to put your finger on and articulate what it is outside of Trumpism.

Because it really is separate from the man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”

She argued that the New Right, or whatever you wanted to call it,
was, paradoxically, much less authoritarian than the ideology that now presented itself as mainstream.

“I get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she said, “that the right actually at this point is like almost in this live-and-let-live place

where the left used to be at.”

What she meant specifically:

“The idea that you can’t raise your kids in a traditional, somewhat religious household without having them educated at school that their parents are Nazis.”

This apparent laissez-faire obscures somewhat the intense focus that some people in this world have on trans issues
—or what they might say is the media’s intense focus on trans issues,
one of a suite of “mimetic viruses,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it,
that spread a highly individualistic liberal culture that is destructive to traditional ways of life.

But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely converts.

Milius brought up "Red Scare",
a podcast that has become the premier example of this attraction
—she’d actually cast one of the hosts, #Dasha #Nekrasova, in the film she made as her senior thesis in directing school at USC.

#Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Yarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America
—that history was headed in the wrong direction.

“Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” Laurenson said,
just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others.

“They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’ ”

People at the conference seemed excited about being in a place where they weren’t alone.

I skipped most of the talks
—which ranged from sessions about confronting the threat of China
to the liberal influence on pop culture
to “Worker Power.”

Hawley gave a keynote on the “assault on the masculine virtues,”

and Cruz offered up a traditional stump speech, evoking Reagan and saying he thought conservatives would soon prevail at the ballot box.

“I’m pretty sure a lot of the 20-somethings rolled their eyes at that,” Yarvin said to me afterward with a smirk.

The 20-somethings had a bigger vision.

Up by the bar every night, hordes of young men, mostly, would descend to drink and bear-hug and spot favorite podcasters and writers.

You could see #Dave #Rubin, and #Jack #Murphy, who hosts a popular New Right–ish YouTube channel
and is trying to build a fraternal group of men who believe in
“positive masculinity”
that he calls the "Liminal Order. "

Pretty much everyone had the same trimmed beard and haircut
—sides buzzed short, the top longer and combed with a bit of gel to one side.

I didn’t see a single Black person under the age of 50,

though there were attendees of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent.

In March, the journalist #Jeff #Sharlet
(a Vanity Fair contributing editor who covers the American right)
tweeted that the
🔸“intellectual New Right is a white supremacist project designed to cultivate non-white support,” 🔸

and he linked it to resurgent nationalist and authoritarian politics around the world:

🔸“It’s part of a global fascist movement not limited to the anti-blackness of the U.S. & Europe.” 🔸

Yet♦️ many on the New Right seem increasingly unfazed by accusations that they’re white nationalists or racists. ♦️

Masters in particular seems willing to goad commentators,
believing that the ensuing arguments will redound to his political advantage:

“Good luck [hitting] me with that,”
Masters told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently,
🔹arguing that accusations of racism had become a political bludgeon used to keep conservative ideas outside the political mainstream. 🔹

“Good luck criticizing me for saying critical race theory is anti-white.”

But for all the chatter of looming dystopia, no one I spoke to raised one of the most dystopian aspects of American life:
our vast apparatus of prisons and policing.

Most people seemed more caught up in fighting what they perceived as the cant and groupthink among other members of the political media class,

or the hypocrisy of rich white liberals who put up Black Lives Matter signs in front of multimillion-dollar homes,

than they were with the raw experience that has given shape to America’s current racial politics.

#Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

By the time TechCrunch publicized Yarvin’s identity, in 2013,

he had become influential in a small circle of the disaffected elite.

In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”

The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were spreading among prominent figures like #Thiel and #Balaji #Srinivasan, formerly the CTO of #Coinbase,

and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to
“seize key positions of authority and power”
and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,”
just as the #Koch brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism,
a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.

In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and #Milo #Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel.

“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote.

“Just plays it very carefully.”

Masters soon had an office in Trump Tower.

He and Thiel worked,
generally without success,
to install figures like Srinivasan,
whom they proposed to head the FDA,
and who himself often talked about the
“paper belt,”
in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathedral concept,

and made common cause with figures like #Steve #Bannon, who wanted to pick apart the administrative state,
an idea that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE proposal.

Yarvin eventually stopped working as a programmer and left the Bay Area,
moving with his wife and two children to Nevada.

His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to have been devastated,

publishing searching poems about her.

But last September, a month before we spoke, he posted a dating call,
inviting women who were “reasonably pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it,

and “have read my work and like it,” and who thought that “the purpose of dating is to get married and have kids,”

to email him so they could set up a Zoom date.

“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me.

“So I answered this email and I was just like,
‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ”

The two are now engaged.

Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual awakening that accelerated during the upheavals of the early pandemic
and the protests of the summer of 2020.

“I started really getting drawn to #NRx ideas,” she said,
using a common online abbreviation for the
neo-reactionary fringe,

“because I was tracking the riots,” by which she meant the violence that erupted amid some of the Black Lives Matter protests.

“I have a background in social justice,” she said.

But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”

She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating,
discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years.

“I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me.

They just never told anyone about it,” she said.

“It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.”

#RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

@onepict

> On any online space, you should consider who you give power to. Who has the control over who you choose to associate with?

I concur 100% with this assertion.

> All that the instances who sign the fedipact are doing is signalling to some of us that somewhere is safe for folk who don't want to engage with Facebook at all.

I don't think that's all, and actually, What those instances may (inadvertently) be signalling is that they will take it upon themselves to remove the Freedom of Association from the user themselves, without prior expectation or consultation.

I don't know where "Freedom of Speech" entered the conversation, but the notion of "Freedom of Association" has indeed been taken from those who have chosen to excercise those privileges belonging to the users themselves. Waking up and realizing that you can no longer communicate and share recipes with grandma, without evern having been consulted, is an affront to the Freedom of Association - it's inclusive of an even larger issue surrounding the reasons that *smolweb and single-user and self-hosted platforms are protective of such principles Freedom of Association.

Further, it serves to create an environment (especially when so many platforms now support migration ingress) where one's Fediverse accounts are considered ever more transient, as the realization that having an account on a silo based Fediverse instance is the antipathy of #Fediverse and #DeSoc philosophies.

It also erodes the trust between the average user and administrators that you thought you could entrust with respecting your freedom of association with.

> This is a Freedom of Association issue, ...

it is indeed, and a betrayal of trust for anyone who realizes that it is the overreach by someone else to decide that you should not have the Freedom of Association that likely brought most folks to the Fediverse in the first place.

I did a little non-scientific, anecdotal survey by contacting people I know on many of the instances that arbitrarily decided to remove those freedoms from their users overnight, and discovered that many have already migrated to other instances, or are contemplating it - the interesting thing? Many of my acquaintances had already decided to, or even configured their accounts to block #Threads; but to have someone else tell them what they're allowed, or not allowed to do, is a violation of someone's freedom to choose for themselves by despot personalities who dismiss the relevance of a right to choose for oneself.

It's a simple matter, to block instances, at the domain level, from one's own user account, and on most Fediverse platforms, there's actually an announcement utility (usually only used to beg for donations) whereby administrative staff can inform their user base of their own ability to control how they themselves choose to exercise their own preferences with respect to #Freedom_of_Association.

Ironically, when perusing the stats, it's the very largest (deprecated, monolithic silo oriented) Fediverse instances (in terms of the # of user accounts and MAU) that have chosen NOT to trample upon the individual user's Freedom to Associate with whom they themselves decide.

NOTE to Fediverse instance admins: Please take under consideration the trust that has been placed in you with respect to the freedoms all individuals are entitled to determine for themselves - reach out to your user base, deploy surveys, collect votes, whatever, but please don't just decide for someone else what you decide is good for people who are NOT YOU.

Subjugation and assimilation into the Borg Collective goes both ways folks.

#AYBABTU (All Your Base Are Belong To Us)

#tallship #despotism #dystopian #authoritarianism

⛵

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