Unlurker|Replay|About
I asked Claude build a physically accurate O'Neill cylinder you can walk around (island-three.gruberbuilds.workers.dev)
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This is crazy Claude built this.
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On iOS Safari: Island Three could not start Range consisting of offset and length are out of bounds Reloading the page may help. A screenshot of this to @gruberbuilds on X helps fix it. I’m not on X
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Neat. I enjoyed the NPCs chatting about life onboard.
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Anyone else getting this error on android chrome? >HipparcosGraphics error on arm valhall: device lost: A valid external Instance reference no longer exists. (tap to close; a screenshot to @gruberbuilds helps fix it)
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Just a heads up - this site managed to choke WindowServer on MacOS 27/Safari long enough to trigger a watchdog reboot. I never managed to load it and had to rush to kill its tab after the OS restarted and it began choking the machine again.
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I saw the landing page and I was like, "no way, Claude built that in real-time? Incredible." And then it loaded and it looked like a videogame from the 1990s. Pretty impressive for AI to have built it , and for something like that to run in the browser, but it's so clunky and ugly that I couldn't try it for more than a few seconds. I hate it when products promise something so breathtaking in posters or trailers that is utterly detached from how the products looks or works. I might have tried it longer had that landing page not set this high of an expectation. Overselling a product may getting you a higher conversion rate up to a point, but it will only hurt you and crater the rest of the funnel.
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I suspect it needs a few tokens spent on optimization and clean-up.
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Takes forever to load, runs terribly and looks awful.
> The sunlight here comes from its mirrors, and its "gravity" comes from its spin. Where do the clouds come from? The AI?
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They were in the original 1970's renderings too: https://nss.org/o-neill-cylinder-space-settlement/ Given Earth-like gravity and Earth-like atmosphere, a sufficiently large structure will also have Earth-like clouds.
I can't use the site on my phone, can barely even read any of the text, so I don't know the text you're quoting. If you are asking if clouds in such a structure are realistic, I'd expect so: clouds do form naturally in even much smaller spaces, e.g. one of the NASA buildings, I forget if it was the Saturn V or Space Shuttle assembly building or both.
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The Vertical Assembly Building was used for both the Apollo Program and the Space Shuttle, though it had much more ‘headroom’ for the latter. From what I’ve read the rumors of clouds forming inside of it are actually a myth, though there are condensation and airflow issues. I don’t have citations handy as it’s been a while (decade) since I’ve read this.
Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back (github.com/omlahore)
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This should have been a prompt.
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Not a lot of good reasons to upgrade to 27. They removed Rosetta and you have to reinstall that if you want it. So is MacOS turning into something that more regular people are going to have to maintain in the future or end up with something like Windows 11? I switched to MacOS 3 years ago because of Microsoft and the writing on the wall seems to say I got another year left before I'm forced into Linux. Because if I have to maintain my own OS then I might as well install Linux and do it once.
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If a temporary tool being retired is the reason you switch, then wait until you find out how many LOC are being deleted from the linux kernel this year and next
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> Every release is built from its tag by GitHub Actions and carries a build provenance attestation. Huh cool. They're doing curl | bash properly.
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Is there a way to do this manually?
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How do we believe this tool? Is it secure?
This is stuff on the level of O&O ShutUp10. Which is a good tool, but also, a Windows tool for very (back in the day) Windows-specific nonsense. What's going on at Apple product strategy?
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It's interesting to see more customisation tools appearing for macOS, as just a few years ago I was looking for ways to strip down the OS (CI related), and while such info was widely available in the Windows world, to the point that customised "distros" are available, it was nearly nonexistent for macOS; only the Hackintosh community had some useful articles on how things worked. Could the rise of LLMs and vibe-coding have motivated people who otherwise wouldn't bother?
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It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited. Admittedly this helps keep idiots from destroying their filesystem and also blocks many malware attacks on the system, but, for example. I don’t believe you can delete the chess program.
Oh, things are about to get worse with the new macOS "privacy/security" measures. They are going to curb agentic workflows even more. I don't know how Apple just finds new ways to annoy developers, but we're in a minority after all. Of 200 million Mac users, probably just up to 1 million are developers, and the rest are normies who can't tell when they should authorize or cancel the pop-up.
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It’s not about privacy, it’s about kneecapping competitors, just like when they blocked the advertising ID but exempted themselves from this because “Apple is not a third-party, we’re a second-party”. Apple is an advertising company and thus inherently untrustworthy.
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With LLMs, everyone's a developer now. Welcome to the mainstream.
Uncomfortable, but true. GNOME has reached maturity and hasn't changed significantly in years, while Apple is busy destroying macOS.
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Really? GNOME is not what I would recommend to people. I should applaud their efforts, and I get that much of it is voluntary, but their bugs are numerous, notable and the way they interact with the rest of the universe (both people with accessibility needs, and the wider developer ecosystem on linux) can most accurately be described as arrogant and hostile. KDE is the bastion of maturity here, and I would agree that it is mature. I’m not sure how the love for GNOME continues when KDE (while not my personal choice) has clearly been running circles around it since GNOME3 and the gap has only widened since that change too.
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Both desktops are pretty mature. I've run both of their Wayland stacks, and Mutter/KWin both perform great these days. It really comes down to personal preference for most use-cases.
Meanwhile on Windows we mostly use the store or winget, funny times.
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Yeah. I think of Windows as basically “homebrew comes preinstalled”.
So don't install Chrome.
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Most people want Chrome for the inevitable site that doesn’t work in Safari. The problem is Apple intelligence is decent, but not worth 20% of your storage decent.
Saying that Siri "works" is peak Apple fanboism.
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Also "those who can't accommodate the storage" is funny. What's that? You didn't pay Apple's 1200% markup on storage, so you can have enough room for your actual work after the OS fills your disk with a bunch of bloat? What are you, poor?
Stop the curl | bash insanity. https://nocurlbash.com/#en
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> Bash starts before the download finishes ... Drop the connection mid-transfer and you get partial execution: a command like rm -r /usr/share/program can truncate to rm -r /usr. Commands ran, cleanup didn’t. curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world. > The server knows you’re piping — and can lie This `sleep` based trick is always a cool demo to show freinds yes, but the server can also sneak in malware in a multitude of other ways given you're downloading code and binaries from them. > You trust DNS, TLS, the CDN, and the origin simultaneously. A compromised CDN or BGP hijack delivers malware silently. Well yes, that's how the internet works. If TLS of the server is really compromised, then the attacker will replace the checksum as well as the signing key. In real scenarios, you are going to be reading the signing key and checksum from the same domain. [1] > You can’t reproduce what ran `| tee inspect.sh | bash` > Add sudo and it’s game over Most credentials and important files live in the home directory, root is a red herring. If you're running it on shared server, then well... don't add sudo. [1] Yes of course there are legitimate usecases for signing software. Common example: linux distros which are mirrored at many domains, but the checksum and signature are hosted on the canonical domain. But if I am curlbashing uv's install.sh from `astral.sh`, then doing signature verification using the public key hosted on the same astral.sh isn't adding much.
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I think that's missing the forest for trees. The problem with these curl-to-bash approaches is not that you are literally unable to intercept and inspect them. The problem is that: 1. The effort and care needed to test is unnecessarily high. You've got to guard against way more tricks from an interactive source. 2. With no "standard" artifact that can be exactly compared, that work cannot be shared. > curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world. Why would a convention often followed by good/careful actors bind what malicious/careless people create?
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> curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world. Please take a look at this before making any assertions... https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI/blob/main/install.sh
What’s your suggested installation method instead? Unless it’s “download and read the source before running it” this is no worse than npm install, or pip install, or clicking “trust” on a git repo in VSCode
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Why is this even an app? It looks like it just generates a mobileconfig profile on the fly. Instead, seems like they could be offering a download of a pre-generated mobileconfig, which seems like it would be much safer than installing some app via curl|bash .... but then I guess there wouldn't be a chance to have an "app", get github stars, and do whatever else.
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Fed the source to LLM for analysis?
Great initiative. I recently got stung by an advert on reddit for "HBO Max for MacOS, 6 months free" from the official HBO user (don't get me started on how that slipped through). Front and center was a curl | bash copy to clipboard that obfuscated the payload source in base10. I knew better, but I think we've made this kind of thing way too acceptable. Of course it was malware and I realized the instant I pressed enter. Thankfully I didn't give it my password and immediately disconnected from the internet and killed the machine. I'm genuinely concerned these kind of attacks are going to become much more commonplace with AI, plus the ability to inject malicious code in to things that get run by trusted scripted installers.
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You curled and executed bash code allegedly from _HBO_?
Don’t be obtuse, the intended audience is developers with enterprise credentials sprinkled throughout their environment. Its a different threat model. You should not curl bash.
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Developers with enterprise credentials sprinkled throughout their environment running anything from the Internet deserve what they get. But I assumed the intended audience are home users with entry level macbooks/minis with 128 GB RAM where this patch actually helps them.
Lol, thinking the exact same thing. No, we don’t read next to 0.0001% of the code we run.
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Code from trusted repositories is an entirely different thing compared to running 'wget some_github_repo_shell_script | sh' . That said, the likes of Tailscale are setting a bad example.
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You download a dmg and run it blindly? You download an exe and run it blindly. I wish it were in an rpm or deb coming from signed repos, but it's not so here we are
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The script, and the code the script downloads, both come from the same repo and were written by the same developer. If you've already decided you trust the author, what's the actual threat here?
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I would not trust the author just like that. But then again, I'm a bit paranoid. At a minimum I would download the script and read it, and if it was too long or not written clearly enough then I would just drop it and find something better.
there's a homebrew alternative
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Which installs via a random 3rd party tap, which honestly isn't much better than yolo curl|bash.
Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage (1011now.com)
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I thought that DC ran on tears from underaged children targeted by psychological warfare based advertising techniques.
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kind of confusing numbers here. the 13 million gallon figure refers to one specific datacenter, but you add on five more datacenters and the number grows to... 765 million gallons? The datacenter in Papillion accounts for 548 million of those. Is it bigger? Is it less efficient? not a lot of info apparent in this report. If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
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This is also likely insignificant compared to how much water is constantly evaporated by a large lake.
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If everything was on the up and up they wouldn’t be hiding things behind shell companies and ndas. The water and electric usage is the least of our worries. These things will make cancer alley look like a Sunday picnic. There is a reason executives won’t live anywhere near the hot zone.
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From a redaction point of view: I can't believe this is still happening. Surely by now all government and local government offices have a data/records person and policies about information handling. I guess it's not really sensitive info like the name of a government informant. Maybe they intentionally leaked it with a 'whoops, we tried' excuse. If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that. If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
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Seems like a lot of water to me. And what does society get back from google in return?
So what? Water used for cooling doesn't disappear.
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no it doesn't but it doesn't go back to where it was taken from either. So it does affect local aquifers.
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A lot of people think it does, surprisingly. People memed too hard about "querying ChatGPT drains lakes" and anyone who contested it was deemed a booster, so it stuck.
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I thought some cooling setups aren't closed loop?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle
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It doesn't mean the water goes back into the same sources it was pulled from, though
There is sometimes incorrect conflation between what the datacenter is permitted for and what the datacenter actually draws. > Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1] This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either. [1] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?open=false#%C2%A7every-popular-article-about-how-ais-water-use-is-bad-for-the-environment-in-the-last-year-has-had-a-wildly-misleading-framing
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Why is Masley "problematic" and what's he been wrong about?
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He won’t toe the official line. You will always get a vague claim of being “problematic” if you don’t challenge the status quo.
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He’s a Pro-AI ideologue who engages in the same motivated reasoning he complains about others using. His piece on heat island effects fell over under scrutiny because he just doesn’t have the analytical background to actually do these investigations. His whole blog is a “broken clock is right twice a day” situation.
I don't really understand the hand-wringing about data centers and water. Unlike fossil fuels, when you "use" water, it doesn't go away, it goes back out into the environment. And since DCs use it for cooling, not some industrial process, it doesn't even contaminate the water in any meaningful way. The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
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Your use of "into the environment" is too broad. If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain. For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars. Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
Fresh water supply has been on a downward trend for years. We are already looking at a future without enough fresh water, before the new datacenters come into play. The datacenters are being installed in some of the driest areas of the country that were already water stressed. In some cases they can also contaminate local water systems.
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I’m not disagreeing with that but it fundamentally feels like a misdirection. It’s easily hand waved away eg “it uses less than a golf course” and yet it’s still a constant media talking point.
I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient. The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
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> I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
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Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.
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How can you tell he is lying? His lips are moving.
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Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company's data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.
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Yeah that’s a bullshit justification. Your efficiency is not a trade secret and a community deserves to know the impact. Noticeably they initially shared this info and then stopped. It seemed to stop around the time researchers started investigating the projects.
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Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up. Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
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How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
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Absurd! every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses. If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.
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It’s not high security if everyone is mandated to do it. Power consumption, energy sources, water usage for coolant, waste water treatment plan, etc. I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-ai-drought-water
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Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue. Now that it has been, though…
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That would not be good PR because a) it would be seen as flippant and b) no one would believe Google. Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Ok and? This wouldn’t be an issue if google et al would just share the numbers instead of hiding behind NDAs and whatever else.
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Not sure why this is being downvoted. If you noticeably distort the local economy then people are naturally going to want to know what resources you're consuming. but trade secrets I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
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Industrial use should never get to hide. It’s such impactful use so every aspect should be scrutinized.
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The irony is that it is unlikely datacenters would hit that "above a certain size" The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
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You have some very motivated people with deep pockets who do not like negative press. Say anything negative and the downvotes will roll in.
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Surely the people who have worked in tech, with datacenters or even in them for decades are wrong, and the people who learned the word "datacenter" 6 months ago are right.
Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something. Giving those people concrete numbers is not gonna change such misconceptions (and that's assuming they look at such numbers in reasonable relative terms in the first place).
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Fair point. But if I had initially learned that google was putting data centers in and it recycled water and it was a minor amount I would be more receptive than hearing that google is bullying communities and hiding details behind NDAs.
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Seems easy enough to report multiple numbers and be clear on what water comes in (can even separate initial filling/construction from ongoing usage) vs what gets lost and what comes out as waste. I think people can understand this and it isn't a good enough reason to not share the numbers.
it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf.
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> it's interesting how much this sounds like astroturf. It is also interesting how much the anti-datacenter panic sounds like astroturf.
LinkedIn CV says 8 Years working for google as a Data Center Facilities Technician, so. Yeah. Not necessarily astroturfed but definitely biased.
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Biased, or well informed?
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In that specific position probably leaning more towards biased than towards well-informed, though both components likely do exist. It's not well-paid enough to be immune to kool-aid etc, and it's not on the sociopathic management level either, so we can expect a certain degree of very human rationalization going on.
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How would being high paid help make you immune to kool aid? In my experience in low paid work, it’s a lot easier to hate the company…
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Being paid well enough gives the mind an out from cognitive dissonance that doesn't involve actually believing the company narrative. It offers the compelling counter-narrative of "yes, we're evil, but hell yeah this is lucrative af". That makes the ego even happier, as in that story, one is the clever mastermind playing the system, so we can reasonably assume that that path will be taken. If that path is unavailable, and cognitive dissonance sets in, the other path left is actually drinking the kool-aid. The corp must be nice, after all. (This all assumes that people do in fact want to do good and have a conscience, but for those that doesn't apply to, there's the sociopathy path as mentioned in the previous comment. Reality is slightly more murky and dynamic, but I'd argue that this rough if-ladder exists as described.)
Also outright dishonest to not add that as a disclaimer!
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>> During my career there
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I certainly read that as "there" being the town, not the actual data center!
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The use of the word "we" seems pretty clear to me.
Seems like it'd depend a lot on e.g. carbon impact of the marginal watt v.s. environmental impact of the marginal gallon? Might depend on the individual site.
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Is there much impact of a marginal gallon? This is evaporative cooling, no? It's gonna come back down as rain and refill wherever datacenter took it from.
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
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Odd to hide behind an LLC (LLCs) then.
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That’s more of a convenient way to distribute and isolate risks than it is anything nefarious.
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Or to shift blame and hide wrongdoing.
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Please elucidate if I'm wrong, but, isn't the problem the distribution of the water and not the amount? If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water. I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
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This feels like an important point! People comparing to leaks (or other distributed examples that aggregate similarly) are not thinking about how the amount of water used in a single location changes the scale.
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> If you install a building of people in a road that is not prepared for that, all people down the people are in risk of lack of water. Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance . Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
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What I now wonder is why the hell they're trying to hide it then. If the numbers are strongly on your side, why hide them?!
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We have perfectly good reasons to hide behind shell companies and ndas! Anyone who disagrees is a hater!
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Because nobody reasonable believes water use is any issue, but these numbers are proxy for the usual stuff companies don't disclose for usual reasons (ones that rhyme with "competition" and "stock market")?
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They sure as hell aren't making it easy for the "reasonable" to take their side when their response to the "unreasonable" is "the numbers you claim are bad are actually good, but you don't get to see them because they go to a different school".
Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365. The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
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Remind me median income?
Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.
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Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated). So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.
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I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.
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>they are not meaningful users of water. How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year. See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commercial-bmp-watersenseatwork_section5.3_commercialpoolsandspas.pdf
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Yes. GP is literally saying that 1-2 million gallons of water is a pretty small number not meaningful to anything at scale. It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
You can’t eat your algorithm. So while pointing to agriculture and saying look there - those guys & gals way more than us it’s a red herring because we need food. Sure improve efficiency of ag, but a better comp for water usage should be made. Reasonable people tune out.
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That's why they talked about ethanol.
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you can't eat ethanol either, you burn it to create more global warming
Concern about water use is the distraction they caused in the media so we'd too busy thinking about fake issues to think about the real issues.
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Excess water use is actively harming people right now.
The evolution of effective altruism (economist.com)
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First time hearing the term. I dont know about conquering the world.
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I've unconquered the title above and replaced it with something bland. Hopefully that will reduce the rush to inflammation in the thread.
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I'm always curious why effective altruists attract so much sneer and disdain when the topic comes up. My best they are just people trying to donate money to effective charities like mosquito nuts in Africa. At worst, they might be wasting their money on animal treatment or AI safety. This doesn't seem like enough to fuel the kind of backlash I see
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I think it's got two components - first, people don't actually understand the tenants of mainstream EA. For instance, some people think that one of the core principles of EA is "make as much money as possible at any cost", which is incorrect. Second, EA is a small movement with an above average amount of crazy people (IE someone who does think you should make as much money as possible at any cost), who then basically monopolize the media attention. This then feeds into the first component. EA is in a fairly bad spot where nobody seems to be really attempting to understand it or meaningfully engage with it's ideas, instead just parroting the same few talking points (SBF anyone?)
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I think a possible explanation is, they support billionaires giving away money. So you get a rare alignment of people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires, and people who'd rather see poor people die than see billionaires have fewer superyachts. United they're a powerful force. Edit: Also weird nerds.
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Cause they produced Dam Bankman Friedman and people like him. Cause somehow their idea of best altruism ends up amounting to "earn as much money and power with little regard to how, because so that you can use them for good in the future in a very top down way". Effectively, it is very swlf serving.
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Much of the world will be surprised to hear that they have been conquered by effective altruism. Seriously what kind of spheres does the person live in who wrote that article? I think they need to hire some people who spend less time in online blogs and on twitter and more time idk, traveling to China or India
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[flagged]
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Please recommend some worthy publications
There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land. There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.
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When people talk about ineffective altruism, they're generally talking about organizations like the American Heart Association, which spends over half of annual donations on payroll ( https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135613797 ) and uses the other half for vague purposes with no concrete goals. I don't think many people in the effective altruist movement would complaint about a targeted trust that successfully and reliably achieves some niche goal.
EA sounds like an excuse for billionaires to continue being the opposite of altruist.
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They define "altruism" as "don't actually do anything about the problems of today, so that you can do more about them tomorrow". But does tomorrow ever come? Bluntly, I trust Jesus more than them. And in Luke 16:10, Jesus said, "One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much."
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"Can I have a dollar mister?" "Sorry I can't it's unethical to give more to you just because you are closer to me, I need to do some excel sheets and maximize my mosquito net donations to africa."
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We will use our big brains to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom. For our first bold conclusion we have determined that all of the world's money should be in the hands of people with big brains who intend to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom. This concludes the planning phase. There will be an additional planning phase once we've collected all of the money, we promise.
> The movement’s long-standing fears of an AI catastrophe make it a villain in the eyes of the Trump administration. “Americanism, not effective altruism,” is the Department of War’s attack line. The president’s allies are going after Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, as a representative of effective altruism. I'd wager that it's simply the government wanting absolute power (as it should) and going after misaligned oligarchs. So, effectively, power struggles in circles beyond our reach. Arguably a good thing that the government would eventually try to claw back power there, given that in theory, it's democratically elected and all.
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No, in a system of limited government, the government should not want absolute power. If it wants it, it should absolutely not get it. Mind you, I don't want the effective altruists to have the kind of power they seem to want, either...
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The purpose of the government is to serve the people, not "absolute power", unless you enjoy kings and fiefdoms.
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Yes, and how does it do that if random people without a democratic mandate can just hold power over some important resource? That's what is meant by "absolute power"
I do not think you can call it a social movement because it does not have any significant mass of people behind it and by its nature, never will.
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Maybe if you consider the wealth of the in group vs out group. It makes more sense to me that way. Scary how few people it might need to keep the world from moving forward.
Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-macaskill-responds-to-our-cover-story-on-effective-altruism
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Added above. Thanks!
Genuinely curious why you feel that way?
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First, you can read about Sam Bankman-Fried; then you can say "oh, he's not _real_ effective altrusim...and do your backflips.
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But that is one human, and not a very honest one. Is that the standard you hold everything to?
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Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one. Someone who wears the EA label, and actually does things to help with real problems.
Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry. I feel like there is this weird thing where people will criticize people who do charity work in not quite the right way (from the criticizers perspective), but are totally fine with people who just use their money to buy a yacht. I'd much rather have people spend their money on feeding the hungry, even imperfectly then spending it on other pursuits. I sometimes wonder what the critics of EA are doing to eradicate the ills of the world or even their local community. Is it more than what EA is doing? If not, i'd say those in glass houses should be wary of throwing stones.
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> Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry. Are they? To what degree are they? And to what degree are they not helping the hungry today, in order to amass more money so that they can in theory help the hungry more tomorrow? I can respect someone like Bill Gates. He hasn't been perfect, not by a long shot, but he's put real money into really trying to help real problems. What's the track record of the effective altruists? (Genuine question - I haven't researched them enough to know.)
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This is a motte and bailey fallacy. I don’t think many people take issue with feeding the hungry. However the longtermist sect and their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later leads to the actual controversial actions especially when taken to its logical extremes. And the AI fanaticism got mixed in there somehow.
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