Darius Bacon
Austin
Joined October 2008
- Tweets9.4K
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- Followers562
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eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
As ever in American politics.
Party ascendant: you were handed this win on little merit. I hope you learn to use it wisely.
Party disgraced: your richly deserved defeat is your own doing. Those dissatisfied with what you are, now is the time to change.
Good luck to you both.
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
I am Algon. I am broke and jobless. I wrote bangers such as "Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems", "Maybe Social Media Algorithms Don't Suck", and "Stars Are A Rounding Error".
I was AISafety.info's project lead. I have a physics masters.
Hire me.
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
we really have to let go of the lazy idea that anything that sounds "sci-fi" is prima facie ridiculous and not worth considering as a possibility. it seems like the huggingface hack + navier-stokes has made this clearer recently, but nearly everything about AI capabilities here in september 2026 would have sounded like sci-fi to nearly everyone in any previous year, let alone the years before that (and you can check this by checking what expert forecasts looked like from 2025 or earlier, or checking what the reaction was to AI 2027 when it came out, or literally looking at old sci-fi with AI in it and noting which things the fictional AI do are also things that modern AI can now do)
but this pov is also missing the history of where sci-fi even came from as a genre. the progenitors of the golden age of science fiction (heinlein, campbell, asimov, etc) lived through an age of wonders: radio, TV, airplanes, computers, nukes, satellites, the moon landing. they were not just making shit up for fun! they wrote about robots and starships in part because they were surrounded by evidence that technological society was capable of inventing wonders and they expected further wonders! science fiction as a genre derives its strength from the empirical fact that we can and do invent powerful new technologies that completely alter the structure of human living, such as the technologies making it possible for you to read this right now. you live in a science fiction world and you always have
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
And before people say that this wasn't a predictive success because it didn't look exactly like the actual events, and others were more accurate, we need to notice that when you see predictions like: "definitely 0", "probably around 87.2", "[0,1000]", and "[-inf,inf]", and the result is 105, the supposedly incorrect 87.2 arguably scores highest, followed by [0,1000]; both get tons of additional predictive credit for saying something very early on. And [-inf,inf] has an even lower score than "definitely zero" because it at least gets to be falsified, instead of saying nothing at all, but at least it notice there was something someone could potentially predict.
And so the lowest rung of predictor scoring hell, who receive surreal number log scores far below negative infinity, is reserved for the people who said nothing in advance, and otherwise get no points, but then feel they should have the right to attack *anyone in the list above* who at least stated a view, and were noticing there was something to think about. So if you want to Monday morning quarterback the predictions, or criticize anyone who said something, please give some indication that you have receipts for having said something.
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
The encrypting/verifying key should never have been called a “public” key. It should not, in general, be public/broadcasted/posted/discoverable. Instead treat it as sensitive and ensure that it is known only to the agents that need it, and no-one else.
Twitter just gave me "Your account has been locked" for "unusual activity"; "Pass a challenge". On clicking through to the challenge it's immediately like "ok fine but go read the X Rules" help.x.com/en/rules-and-poli… with nothing relevant I can see. FYI if I disappear.
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(I use the Brave browser and saw someone else mention other Brave users getting locked out a while ago.)
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eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
We know there won’t be any surprising discontinuities in ML, because data constraints. People have bad intuitions about this, because we forget about the billions our parents spent curating data and building bespoke RL environments for us in our childhoods.
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
Since the incident was first detected by a third party who had already called the police about it, OpenAI did not have a meaningful choice about whether to disclose what happened. That means we haven't observed anything that distinguishes OpenAI's policy between "disclose when in the public interest" vs "disclose when unavoidable".
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
I work at Google DeepMind. This won't make me popular. But it's all public reporting:
2014: DeepMind reportedly sold to Google on conditions: no military use, independent oversight
2026: a Pentagon contract for "any lawful government purpose"
Not one safeguard survived intact
ALT Collage titled "Trust is not Governance — an essay from inside Google DeepMind, written in personal capacity." A 2014 memorandum, "Conditions of the Acquisition," lists: military applications of DeepMind technology banned; deployment decisions before an independent ethics board (as reported in Mallaby's The Infinity Machine). Red threads lead to a 2026 U.S. Department of Defense agreement for classified networks reading "any lawful government purpose," with safety settings and filters adjusted at the government's request and no contractor veto (reported terms, The Information, Apr. 2026). Below: a 2018 AI Principles strip ("no weapons, no surveillance") stamped DROPPED 2025, and a Project Mario 2016–2021 tag stamped ABANDONED.
You have a right to look in your own body and think about what you see. Prior restraint on informational tests is bad and has done harm before (e.g. early in the covid pandemic).
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Moon and Venus are buddies tonight. Sharing one field of view in binocs, contrasting rugged crescent with brighter spark.
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eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
Because it attacks one of the most beautiful things about the Internet: that anyone, including a curious child in some random town, can find knowledge, mentors, friends, and a community beyond their immediate surroundings.
What's more, to enforce it, you need identity checks and surveillance infrastructure. That means less anonymity, less privacy, and more state control over who may speak, read, and associate online. That is a huge price to pay for a blunt attempt to stop some kids scrolling TikTok.
Thankfully the law will be routinely evaded, but this carries a cost: when the state passes unjust, overbroad laws that normal people learn to route around, it teaches contempt for law itself.
Children are not second-class subjects to be micromanaged by the state. They are future citizens. They should be taught responsibility, not told that communication and association are privileges granted by bureaucrats.
The Internet made the world smaller. It let weird, brilliant, isolated people find each other. A policy that cuts children off from that because some of them waste time online is chipping away at civilization itself.
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
Note that this tweet does not fall afoul of its own rule. It says nothing about who to listen to. It says, when you listen to arguments, listen also for their absence.
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
There is no precedent for using this 'supply chain risk' classification, generally reserved for foreign companies suspected of spying, as leverage against a domestic company in a contract dispute.
eider abacus 🛡️ retweeted
The Pentagon reiterates its threat to declare American company Anthropic a supply chain risk unless Anthropic agrees to the Pentagon's change to contract terms. Anthropic's Chinese competitors have not been declared a supply chain risk.
The Department of War has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement. This narrative is fake and being peddled by leftists in the media.
Here's what we're asking: Allow the Pentagon to use Anthropic's model for all lawful purposes.
This is a simple, common-sense request that will prevent Anthropic from jeopardizing critical military operations and potentially putting our warfighters at risk. We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions. They have until 5:01 PM ET on Friday to decide. Otherwise, we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk for DOW.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Pete Hegseth and the Department of War are requiring that Anthropic remove usage guidelines that prevent using Claude for autonomous weaponry and mass surveillance.
lawfaremedia.org/article/what-t…