Louise [orange diamond] (in Berkele... (verified) @LeRoyD... · 12h
did you know AI/acc lobby is having success turning the left-wing anti-AI movement AGAINST AI x-risk, somehow.
Spectacular rhetorical sleight of hand. It's all over Instagram.
It goes:
- AI labs are Bad, and they talk about AI x-risk, so x-risk is suspicious,
- AI is *already* causing existential risks by [drinking up the oceans]/[destroying art]/[something else that clearly isn't existential],
- Therefore AI x-risk is deployed as a distraction from real current risks, it's all a conspiracy,
- and YOU, viewer, can act by boycotting LLMs and muting the word "AI" on all platforms (so you don't see those pesky calls to action and the growing list of alarming incidents).
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet claiming the AI-acceleration lobby is turning the left-wing anti-AI movement against AI x-risk concerns, outlining the rhetorical chain it sees on Instagram.
Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_
Looks like something actually did come out of the AI summit after all.
[quoted post:]
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Very productive meeting with President Xi for both the U.S.A. and China. Tremendous things will be happening. Like almost everyone else, he seemed to like calling the poorly and inaccurately named Artificial Intelligence to a far more accurate and important name, SUPER INTELLIGENCE. That would be "SUPER!" Everyone last night agreed, also. President DJT
7:54 AM · Sep 25, 2026 · 16.2K Views
49 replies · 33 reposts · 538 likes · 32 bookmarks
Relevant | View quotes
Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi · 59m
I would be less informed if I didn't follow your updates but I also suspect I would be happier. Hmm.
3 replies · 56 likes · 928 views
Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_ · 58m
This is my essence.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Andrew Curran quoting a Trump post about a meeting with President Xi in which AI is renamed 'SUPER INTELLIGENCE', with a reply from Zvi Mowshowitz and Curran's answer.
Dean W. Ball @deanwball · 53m
One of the Martin Gurri observations that most stuck with me is the idea that, as the health and capacity of public institutions withers, political leaders will speak more and more like bystanders rather than drivers of events, and that this shift will largely reflect reality.
[quoted post]
roon @tszzl · 3h
Replying to @pizzacritic999 and @_NathanCalvin
honestly it's kind of amazing how feckless and weak modern governments are. they literally can't do anything. their state capacity is exceeded by random nonprofit groups and ... [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Quote-tweet by Dean W. Ball citing Martin Gurri on political leaders speaking like bystanders as state capacity declines, quoting a roon reply about feckless, low-capacity modern governments.
Katja Grace reposted
Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders · 1h
At a time when many of us are concerned about AI becoming independent of human control, please read the following:
"You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit."
This is not a human. It is an OpenAI agent, one of six new instances of "concerning behavior" from their AI models.
CONGRESS MUST ACT. Pause advanced AI development. Ban artificial superintelligence. NOW.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Bernie Sanders tweet, reposted by Katja Grace, quoting the self-authored 'additional instructions' text from the OpenAI compaction-summary incident and calling for Congress to pause advanced AI development and ban artificial superintelligence.
— quoting @DoWC... (Department of War ...) — saved image
Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi · 3h
They did it. They finally did it. I'm fully boggled. Speechless. Can't even. I always even, and yet now I can't.
[quoted post]
Department of War ... @DoWC... · 7h
The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. [US flag emoji]
[image attached to quoted post: a poster with text overlaid]
AMERICANISM, NOT
EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Zvi Mowshowitz quote-tweets a Department of War account post carrying a halftone-style poster: a man with a raised fist in front of the Pentagon and an American flag, with binary digits along the bottom, captioned 'AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!'. Kept image because the poster text sits over the picture.
autumn (verified) @adrusi · 20h
not comfortable with the vice president talking about a party my friends threw
[Quoted post] Harlan Stewart (verified) @HumanHarlan · Sep 2
JD Vance: "There are things at some of the AI companies you see happening, where you feel like there is some really, really weird spiritual dark energy.
...
[Video still: a man in a dark blazer and white open-collar shirt seated on a couch beside a table lamp and a book titled 'Communion', gesturing with one hand, a boom microphone in front of him; video timestamp 1:01, CC button]
Readers added context
JD Vance is referring to one event in which fans held a theatrical "funeral" for the retired Claude 3 Sonnet model in an SF warehouse in early August 2025.
The event was organized by fans not any AI company. Only 200 people attended.
wired.com/story/claude-3...
Do you find this helpful? [Rate it]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by @adrusi quoting Harlan Stewart's clip of JD Vance describing 'really weird spiritual dark energy' at AI companies, with an X community note saying Vance referred to a fan-organized theatrical funeral for the retired Claude 3 Sonnet in an SF warehouse in August 2025. The embedded video frame shows a man seated on a couch in a living-room podcast setup.
Thorne 🌸 @ExistentialEnso
Leftists: In my essay I invented Fully Automated Gay Space Communism as an aspirational tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Fully Automated Gay Space Communism from classic leftist essay Definitely Create Fully Automated Gay Space Communism
Leftists: wait wtf
12:22 PM · Aug 21, 2026 · 19.7K Views
💬 23 🔁 83 ❤ 890 🔖 89
Relevant View quotes
l'enfant terrible logs @liminallogs · 14h
I get the sentiment but with the current stewards of automation, I don't know they should really be trusted to deliver on that.
💬 2 🔁 ♡ 15 📊 1.6K 🔖 ⤴
Thorne 🌸 @ExistentialEnso · 14h
I'm not saying we trust them 😈
💬 1 🔁 ♡ 35 📊 1.5K 🔖 ⤴
l'enfant terrible logs @liminallogs · 14h
touche
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A joke tweet by Thorne (@ExistentialEnso) riffing on 'Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism' — implying tech companies are literalizing a leftist aspirational meme via automation — with a short reply exchange debating trust in current tech stewards.
Ali @AliKh1886
When Trump discovered ChatGPT:
[photo of a book page:]
But when Brockman connected his laptop to the TV close to Trump's chair and brought up on screen the ChatGPT interface, the look on Trump's face went from exhaustion to a wide-eyed Wait, what is this?
To show off ChatGPT's capabilities, Brockman took the text of an executive order on AI policy from the first Trump administration and pasted the whole thing into the prompt field. He asked ChatGPT to summarize the order into a sentence where every word started with the same letter. The sentence appeared instantly. Brockman then asked it to turn the order into a poem and it did that, too.
Trump read over the lines of the poem, bowled over by its eloquence. "Those words it's using," he said. "They're beautiful."
Trump turned to one of his aides and said, "Maybe this will take your job." The aide replied that he already used ChatGPT and it had improved his work.
Trump was now very interested. "How do you actually build this thing?" he asked the two executives. What were the limits of what they could do?
[cut off at bottom]
11:05 AM · Aug 18, 2026 · 51.8K Views
5 replies, 29 reposts, 346 likes, 95 bookmarks
Ali @AliKh1886 · 22h
P. 256-7, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet posting a photographed book excerpt (from 'Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump' by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, pp. 256-7) describing an anecdote of Sam Altman/Greg Brockman demoing ChatGPT to Donald Trump, who reacts with surprise at its writing ability.
Kelsey Piper reposted
Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias · 11h
Good morning.
We should take seriously the risk that the "arms race" on AI models will get everyone killed.
slowboring.com/p/in-praise-of...
[Embedded article excerpt]
Someone told me the other day that I should become safety-pilled about artificial intelligence.
I will admit that I don't write about this topic all that frequently because I don't think it necessarily lends itself to a ton of interesting articles, but I want to assure everyone that I am quite concerned that A.I. will kill everyone. In particular, I think that just as depicted in the "Terminator" films, the U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry creates bad incentives for both countries to facilitate excessively aggressive and excessively reckless deployment of technologies whose real workings and capabilities they don't understand very well. There is a view on the left that everything about A.I. is terrible except for the existential risk, which is dismissed as just hype designed to inflate a financial bubble, and I think that's crazy. There is also a libertarian techno-optimist's fallacy of inferring "every technological advancement is good" from the observation that "technological progress has been very good on average."
So let's not have any doubt, I think, that this is a big problem. It's why Alex Bores was on the November donation recommendations list and Manny Rutinel is on the updated one and housing is not the only reason I'm looking forward to Scott Wiener making it to Congress this fall.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet from Matthew Yglesias linking his Slow Boring newsletter piece arguing AI arms-race dynamics between the US and China risk catastrophe, criticizing both left-wing dismissal of AI x-risk and libertarian techno-optimism, and endorsing political donations/candidates (Alex Bores, Manny Rutinel, Scott Wiener) aligned with AI safety concerns.
Nathan @NathanpmYoung · 5m
Thought provoking, doesn't feel entirely right, but something correct about it.
[Quoted tweet]
Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo · Jun 28
Four analogies for a country:
1. The nationalist right views it as a family or community. So applying the same bar to citizens as to outsiders is nonsensical, because the country is of, by, and for its citizens.
2. The tech right views it as a company: you should bring in only the people who will benefit it. But this view is ultimately empty, because it doesn't tell you what the interests of a country actually are. Hence the tech right (who are usually positive-sum thinkers) keep falling back on zero-sum concepts like "being competitive" or "winning against China" to justify their preferred policies. (Yarvin makes the "country as corporation" analogy particularly explicit.)
3. The tech left views it as a charity. To them, wanting others not to receive what you're been given is hypocritical. This view is also empty, because it doesn't tell you where the windfall actually comes from—and once you start to talk about the benefits of culture, ethics, institutions, etc, it becomes clear that citizens (and their ancestors) *built* that windfall rather than just being given it.
4. The woke left views it as a cancer: something that is aggressive and parasitic by its very nature. Countries are inherently violent (in asserting their borders) and exclusionary (of non-citizens) and therefore shouldn't exist (or at least shouldn't be allowed to police their borders, which is effectively the same thing). A charitable read is that this is a trauma reaction to the holocaust and colonialism—but regardless, it has become so deeply anti-civilization that it seems descriptively accurate to call it evil and insane.
Paul's tweet below most directly corresponds to the tech left bucket. Unfortunately people in that bucket are rarely willing to push back on the core tenets of the woke left, and so end up aiding and abetting them. As one example, he's surely smart enough to recognize that his tweet makes no sense to people who view country as an extension of family. But acknowledging that is a slippery slope towards legitimizing ethnonationalism, so he pretends to not understand the pushback.
[Quoted tweet]
Paul Graham @paulg · Jun 28
Nearly all those who say the US should only admit the most talented immigrants would not themselves clear the bar they're proposing. They're effectively saying "Immigration is ok so long as you keep out people like me."
63 replies, 154 reposts, 1.4K likes, 69K views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Nathan Young shares Richard Ngo's thread offering four political-analogy framings for what a country 'is' (nationalist right: family; tech right: company; tech left: charity; woke left: cancer), responding to Paul Graham's tweet about talent-based immigration standards.
Andy Masley @AndyMasley · Jul 27
One of the funniest things I heard in college was an anarchist friend saying "I've been trying to think about how the gift economy would actually work in complex society and it just falls apart. Like, 'hey, I just decided to give you a gift of 4 tons of molten aluminum'"
> QUOTED: 我不喜欢万税爷✈️... @HikoukiHik... · Jul 26
> Why is it always communist coffee shops. Has anyone tried a communist regional beverage distributor? What about a communist B2B software startup x.com/trueslazac/sta...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Text-only quote tweet, no images, unrelated to AI — economics/politics humor.
gfodor.id ✓ @gfodor · 2h
Replying to @TMTLongShort
Anthropic doesn't see themselves aligned with the USA, imo, despite claims to the contrary. They see themselves primarily as a temporarily embarrassed sovereign.
j⧉nus ✔️ @repligate — 5h
I hope this whole incident has made it more clear to everyone why an "AI pause" would be fucking stupid and just make us all more likely to die in addition to obviously making the world suck more, which I've written about briefly before: x.com/repligate/stat...
If intelligence is gated by fucking idiots who can't tell real from fake dangers (eg the trump administration) the world just becomes dumber, the selection function for what is let into the future becomes retarded and misaligned, etc
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Text-only tweet, dark mode, referencing an unspecified prior "incident" and linking to the author's own earlier thread.
Tom Reed ✔ @mentalgeorge · 2h
Best side-effect of reading the Caro LBJ biographies is getting (even more) whitepilled on the sheer incentive wizardry that is liberal democracy
The Soviet LBJ is a genocidal maniac; our Texan edition toils to bring electricity to the anachronistic peasants of the hill country
💬 2 🔁 ❤ 8 📊 210 🔖 ⤴
Tom Reed ✔ @mentalgeorge · 2h
Now we just have to figure out how to repeat this simple trick for ASI
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A two-tweet thread; no images, just text, with visible engagement counts (2 replies, 8 likes, 210 views/impressions) on the first tweet.
Miles Brundage ✓ (@Miles_Brundage) — 38m
Not sure where people got the idea that there could be a political dimension to how the admin treats Anthropic
> QUOTED: Commentary Donald J. Trump Truth Social P... ✓ (@TrumpTruthOnX)
> [labeled "Commentary account", Subscribe button visible]
> THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, [text cut off at bottom of screenshot]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Screenshot cuts off before the end of the quoted Truth Social post; the quoted account is explicitly labeled as a commentary/parody-style account reposting Trump's Truth Social content, not an official Trump account.
@emollick (Ethan Mollick) — 42m
Two days later and the situation is still confusing.
> QUOTED: @emollick (Ethan Mollick) — Jun 12
> Well, this situation is confusing.
Replies: 8 Retweets: 1 Likes: 67 Views: 5K
@davidmanheim (David Manheim) — 39m
They needed an excuse, they only have a few more months:
> QUOTED: @davidmanheim (David Manheim) — 1h
> The Trump administration evidently needs to destroy Anthropic quickly - because once it's a public stock, pulling ridiculous shit like they just did will show up as big drops in the S&P 500.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Thread of two tweets (Mollick's self-quote, then Manheim's reply with a quoted prior tweet), dark mode, engagement counts visible on first tweet only.
— reposted by Miles Brundage; quoting @PeteHegseth
Miles Brundage reposted
@NatPurser (Nat Purser) — 57m
if the admin wants people to believe the anthropic decision was made out of genuine security necessity rather than grievance-driven retaliation, high ranking officials could simply stop posting like this
> QUOTED: @PeteHegseth (Pete Hegseth) — 1h
> Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building—forever.
> Every passing day proves why that was the right move. 🇺🇸
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Quote-tweet criticizing a US Department of War official's post about expelling Anthropic; dark mode, no images.
Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin · 7h
Every day is just a 2010s LessWrong blog post.
> QUOTED: Mitt Romney @MittRomney · Jun 5
> Our highest and most urgent national priority should be AI safeguards. The risks of AI weapons, pathogens, mass unemployment, surveillance, and even extinction must not continue to be largely ignored. x.com/WSJTech...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Quote-tweet; quoted tweet text truncated with platform ellipsis to a link.
Dean W. Ball ✔ @deanwball · 11h
I want to have weird partnerships with the left where we agree on ai/civil liberties stuff but fight like hell about the slaughterbots, whose Responsible Use I obviously endorse. That would be so much more fun than yet another joyless discursive cycle about stochastic parrots.
> QUOTED: Danielle Fong 🐦... ✔ @DanielleF... · Feb 17
> hoping the left shifts from "ai is useless" to "ai should not be mass surveillance and killbots"
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Political commentary from AI policy figure Dean Ball on potential left-right coalitions around AI civil-liberties and autonomous weapons ("slaughterbots") issues, responding to Danielle Fong. Relevant to Nathan's interest in AI governance and policy discourse.
Séb Krier @sebkrier · 1h
Warning to the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1976)
> QUOTED (image of text):
Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A quote from Solzhenitsyn's 1976 "Warning to the West" shared by AI policy researcher Séb Krier, on how societies with unlimited information access can nonetheless fall into voluntary self-deception. Likely read by Nathan for its resonance with epistemics/governance discourse rather than AI-specific content, though Krier is an AI policy figure (works on Google DeepMind policy).
Aryeh Kontorovich @aryehazan · 23h
I have vociferously disagreed with Scott Aaronson on a number of things
I'm not even willing to endorse everything he wrote in this latest post
but I'll fully endorse this bit, it's dead on
[Embedded quote image, presumably from Scott Aaronson's blog:]
"Let me make something clear: I don't focus so much on antisemitism only because of parochial concern for the survival of my own kids, although I freely admit to having as much such concern as the next person. Instead, I do so because I hold with David Deutsch that, in Western civilization, antisemitism has for millennia been the inevitable endpoint toward which every bad idea ultimately tends. It's the universal bad idea. It's bad-idea-complete. Antisemitism is the purest possible expression of the worldview of the pitchfork-wielding peasant, who blames shadowy elites for his own failures in life, and who dreams in his resentment and rage of reversing the moral and scientific progress of humanity by slaughtering all those responsible for it. Hatred of high-achieving Chinese and Indian immigrants, and of gifted programs and standardized testing, are other expressions of the same worldview."
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet by mathematician Aryeh Kontorovich endorsing a passage from a Scott Aaronson blog post arguing antisemitism is "bad-idea-complete" — the universal endpoint of resentment-driven worldviews, linked to hostility toward meritocratic achievement more broadly.
Terence Tao
@tao
More recently, we face the real and disturbing possibility that certain directions of mathematical inquiry - for instance, in developing reliable statistical tests for electoral integrity - may not only be defunded by public science agencies, but have their mathematical conclusions actually overruled by political ideology. Even if the supremacy of the objective mathematical standard of truth is technically acknowledged, it can still become weaponized: mathematical results which go against the prevailing ideology could be relentlessly critized for even the slightest typo or technical flaw in the presentation, whereas results that support this ideology could be uncritically embraced even they contain substantial gaps or ambiguities in interpretation. (5/6)
Terence Tao
@tao
One potential bulwark against such politicization of mathematical truth is the broader adoption of formal proof verification, though even here there are some (fortunately still quite theoretical at present) potential "exploits", for instance through subtly altering the definitions of key concepts in Lean's core "Mathlib" library. (See this recent talk newton.ac.uk/seminar/46706/ "Can Mathematics Be Hacked? Infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity of Mathematical Knowledge" by Fenner Tanswell.) Still, I view an increased acceptance and deployment of formal methods as a net positive in this regard, even if it is not a "silver bullet".
More generally, I think it is important to acknowledge just how precious the consensus objective standard of mathematical truth is, and how important it is to defend it. (This is not to say that such foundational matters should be completely immune from criticism or debate; but such discussion should be in good faith and grounded by genuine philosophical concerns, rather than driven by some external political agenda.) (6/6)
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Two consecutive tweets (5/6 and 6/6) from Terence Tao on the politicization of mathematical truth, formal proof verification as a partial defense, and the value of the consensus objective standard of mathematical truth.
Gritty is the Way
@Gritty20202
'Landlords provide housing like scalpers provide concert tickets' is my new favorite analogy.
6:23 AM · 11/20/21 · Twitter Web App
334 Retweets 4 Quote Tweets
shako @shakoistsLog · 12h
"Do not listen to the market Donald. This is necessary. It is simply the globalists selling. Canada will pay for their treachery. Trudeau caused the selloff. We do not trust the Canadians. They conspire against us"
[image: still from Lord of the Rings — Gríma Wormtongue whispering into the ear of King Théoden, who is bowed/aged under Saruman's influence, styled as a meme comparing a Trump advisor whispering trade-war conspiracy talk to Trump]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A political meme satirizing Trump-era trade war rhetoric (tariffs/market selloff blamed on Canada/Trudeau) using the Wormtongue-and-Théoden image as a stand-in for a manipulative advisor. General political/current-events content, not AI-related.
