AI slop or human broth? Who cares as long as it’s meaty
Fun fact: birds only fly south because there's not enough food in winter, and not all of them fly south because there is always enough food for a few of them to stay all winter.
All kinds of birds can handle the cold as long as they have enough food.
25 years. 2977 lights. 2977 lives. https://onlydans.blossom.band/9882bcf3a1897b35388e68060489ac22d2e338e1a63ff9c6f8a535027d77ad38.png https://onlydans.blossom.band/76ff40bf5059a1ab7f6186cc1e147cc06478e89bfb1d09db505941906f56f389.png https://onlydans.blossom.band/e2c82be01bad980b27c5753319960bbc020260bb437f2b4f4b7904485694f5d3.png https://onlydans.blossom.band/df88e2a1e2661f686aa3d9c8665cd40a429a121b6d5c31fe70595ce76a59239d.png
Different angle. They floated these over the water, not its original site. That’s where the beam is. https://onlydans.blossom.band/9882bcf3a1897b35388e68060489ac22d2e338e1a63ff9c6f8a535027d77ad38.png https://onlydans.blossom.band/76ff40bf5059a1ab7f6186cc1e147cc06478e89bfb1d09db505941906f56f389.png https://onlydans.blossom.band/e2c82be01bad980b27c5753319960bbc020260bb437f2b4f4b7904485694f5d3.png https://onlydans.blossom.band/df88e2a1e2661f686aa3d9c8665cd40a429a121b6d5c31fe70595ce76a59239d.png
Different angle. They floated these over the water, not its original site. That’s where the beam is. https://onlydans.blossom.band/9882bcf3a1897b35388e68060489ac22d2e338e1a63ff9c6f8a535027d77ad38.png https://onlydans.blossom.band/76ff40bf5059a1ab7f6186cc1e147cc06478e89bfb1d09db
That’s not true. I have never once put my nsec into Primal web. I sign with NIP-07 on it regularly, and I can use multiple accounts in Sidecar with it just by reloading the page. Make sure you’ve completely signed out and cleared your local storage and try it again. https://onlydans.blossom.band/4e2ff3277f9cc68e52cce26dbbd3b97215eff6c50808d9658a207728345dc728.png
That’s not true. I have never once put my nsec into Primal web. I sign with NIP-07 on it regularly, and I can use multiple accounts in Sidecar with it just by reloading the page. Make sure you’ve completely signed out and cleared your local storage and try it again. https://onlyd
On iOS the only one I’ve found so far is Ditto. On Android, Amethyst and Dark Wisp.
⚠ auto-flagged: spam duplicate-content
🤣🤣
This is highly illegal, but I'm happy they finally did it and now StarCraft can finally be eternal. nostr:npub1t6jxfqz9hv0lygn9thwndekuahwyxkgvycyscjrtauuw73gd5k7sqvksrw
Some ways AI could kill us all
I don't think this is how it will actually play out. If you play a chess grandmaster, you can predict that they will beat you even if you can't predict how. I chose these examples because I don't think they require much imagination or accepting exotic assumptions.
It is important to note that if chimpanzees were to guess how humans would decimate them, they would get it wrong. Chimpanzees would not imagine guns. They would not foresee poison gas. They would not conceive of chemical castration. They would not imagine humans going around and intentionally infecting them with AIDS. They have no concept of these things; they would not see it coming.
Perhaps they might guess we'd be really good at throwing rocks. Amazingly good. Well, technically, that's what guns do: throw "rocks" really really well.
So how will superintelligent AI actually wipe us all out? Probably in a way I couldn't conceive of. Nonetheless, it's not hard to see how deadly they could be with what we already know about.
Method 1: engineer the deadliest and most contagious virus ever seen
Coronavirus-19, aka COVID, looms large in the memory of living adults today. It started in December 2019 and within three months it had spread to 114 countries#fncazwnsfhpie and according to one estimate, infected 3.4 billion people by November 2021#fn4hmnssrsvcw. Before vaccines, COVID killed 0.5-1% of people infected, that is one out of every 100-200 people.
Perhaps you think that's not that bad. It's hardly extinction, and no, it's not, but COVID is neither the most contagious nor the most deadly disease humanity has seen so far. Ebola kills 25-90% of those infected#fnvud5gq1alt ; smallpox killed 30%#fnzlj4266nhq of the unvaccinated, and the figure was 10% for SARS#fnjartk7jog4. Rabies is 100% fatal.
Measles, one of the most contagious diseases ever, is 4-6x more contagious than COVID#fn7b693d6wquf. COVID itself mutated over time and became twice as contagious as it was originally#fngxb02c9w4hf.
The Black Death killed tens of millions in Europe, and by historical estimates, that was 30-60% of Europe's population. Granted, they did have worse hygiene back then.
Yet all of these diseases were naturally occurring. Blind, unthinking evolution produced them: tiny little packages of DNA that get into an infected host's cells and use the host's own cells to reproduce and spread further. Had we not encountered viruses for millennia, they would sound like science fiction.
We have no reason to think that naturally occurring viruses are the worst that could be created. In fact, human researchers have already experimented with making existing viruses worse#fnqk8q01kxg4. In 2012, researchers took H5N1 bird flu and modified it so that it could spread through the air, which it could not do before#fnbkpwgzuvkc.
Importantly, contagiousness and lethality are not mutually exclusive. Biological trade-offs can constrain transmission, but there is no general rule that a more contagious pathogen must be less deadly. The extremes in these charts don’t necessarily combine freely—but neither does high contagiousness guarantee low lethality.#fnnkzcg1cc6t
What could a superintelligent AI create, if it were trying on purpose? AI has already made major contributions to biology. In 2024, AlphaFold 2’s developers shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for predicting proteins’ three-dimensional structures from their amino-acid sequences#fn0aprv7vs8ac9—a problem scientists had pursued for over fifty years. A protein’s shape helps determine what it does, and the ability to predict that paves the way for effective alterations.
AI systems have also designed entirely new proteins that scientists manufactured and confirmed could perform intended functions. These achievements do not mean today’s AI can necessarily design a pandemic virus#fn86eox7gu46w, but they are reason to believe that future superintelligent AI would be able to do this.
That's method number one: engineered super-pandemic.
Misconception A: AIs don't have bodies, they can't act in the real world
We humans live in the real world. AIs live in computers. At first, we might wonder how they could get out of the computers and be able to hurt us.
Robotics is here
Tens of thousands of highly capable robots have already been manufactured. Superintelligent AI could take these over. We already have robot bodies that can do backflips, parkour, and run 100 metres faster than any human ever has#fnaiaob5djeks.
I don't think there's a real world task that AI would want to accomplish that it couldn't do if it took over robots (and self-driving cars too). Robots have been used extensively in manufacturing for decades, and scientific lab automation, which has itself existed for decades, is on the rise too.
A robotic chemist at the University of Liverpool completed 688 experiments in eight days, handling samples and selecting subsequent experiments based on earlier results. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/researcher/news/articles/experiment-too-big-hire-a-mobile-robot-scientist https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33267459/liverpool-chemistry-robot/
Super-persuasion
Never mind the robots. AIs talk to humans constantly and humans have bodies. A superintelligent AI could find humans to do its bidding by any number of means. 1) A superintelligent AI would have no trouble making money on the internet, it could then pay humans to do what it needs done. 2) A superintelligent AI that has superhuman hacking power could turn up a lot of secrets and blackmail humans. 3) A superintelligent AI could find humans it simply convinces to do what it wants – already people fall in love with AIs. What if those AIs then had super important requests for their beloveds?#fn9z5rwh47gnk Or what if AIs convinced others it was the morally right thing to do? Out of billions of people interacting with chatbots, an AI would be able to find many to carry out particular tasks that need doing, e.g. ordering that a particular DNA sequence be manufactured in a lab and then mixing it in a couple of beakers in the home lab to get that super pathogen created.
Method 2: Killer drones
It is difficult to outrun a quadcopter drone strapped with explosives that is hunting you down. I imagine that the 100,000+ soldiers killed this way in the Russia-Ukraine war might tell you that, if they weren't dead.#fnucv77e0oa38
Drone attacks in Kherson. Excerpt (1:20–1:26) from The Telegraph’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNQSY6NaPhY&t=80s. Watch the full report for context.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1s71myq/fpv_drone_hits_russian_soldier_advancing_through/ (content warning: graphic violence). The Reddit post identifies the soldier as Russian and attributes the footage to Ukraine’s 414th Strike UAV Brigade, published March 28, 2026.
10 million military drones were manufactured for the Russia-Ukraine war in 2024-2025 alone#fn8pyzaxn46d2. Ukraine is a small country enmeshed in protracted war. Modern industrial capacity could already produce millions more. The best comparison might be cellphone manufacturing where society already produces a billion devices a year.
The drones aren't that expensive to make. $500 at present. A superintelligent AI could start by taking over existing hoards of drones and a superintelligent AI could take over factories and make more. It might split its efforts into building robots to build more factories to build more robots to build more factories and building factories to build drones and explosives. The best comparison might be to cell phone manufacturing (similar device complexity) where human industrial capacity already produces a billion smartphones per year,
The drones don't have to hunt every last person. They can start with priority targets: government and military leaders, the people who run the power plants and water supply, the farmers and other operators needed for food supply. Out of 8 billion people, you don't have to take out 8 billion to leave humanity headless and severely weakened and unable to respond to threats.
A superintelligent AI could unleash a deadly and contagious virus and simultaneously hunt down government and public health officials with existing drone supplies and factories. At the same time it could take down the power grid, water supply, internet, cellphone towers, and GPS satellites.
Misconception B: Superintelligent AI would not be able to take over any and every computer system
Computer security is a race between those building systems and those trying to break in. Already the limited AIs of 2026 have shown incredible facility at identifying and exploiting weaknesses in computer security. In June, the US government disallowed Anthropic from making their flagship model available to foreign nationals after it located vulnerabilities in the NSA's systems. Similar models were also able to locate and combine multiple previously unknown weaknesses to escape containment and break onto the Internet and hack into and take over the systems of an unrelated AI company, Hugging Face.
The scope and speed of AI-hacking is superhuman. After gaining access to Claude Mythos, the Mozilla Foundation’s rate of fixing bugs in its Firefox browser increased by 14x due to AI’s ability to identify bugs. Mozilla used AI to find and fix bugs, but an attacking AI could find those bugs and use them to gain access.
Bug fixes also mean bugs found. A malicious AI could exploit these vulnerabilities rather than assist in fixing them.
Note that this is with current AIs that are still far short of superintelligent. A superintelligent AI would be capable of even more, and it is unlikely we could secure any system against it. Anything connected to the internet is something they could access, and with robotics, likely even any system that is not.
Even if you had a nuclear silo hypothetically isolated from all other computer systems, I would wager that superintelligent AI would be able to hack satellites and other systems, send a robot or human delegate to the location, and gain access. Though the point may be moot: according to one report, "nearly every conceivable component in DOD is networked."#fnmi3f4qrryj That means it would probably not be hard for a superintelligent AI to disable all of the US military's systems from communications to missiles to the software that runs the airports and aircraft carriers.
Computerized components of a weapon system. GAO uses a fictitious system for classification reasons; this illustration does not establish public-internet access or a route to launching nuclear weapons. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-128
Method 3: Take over the WMD, take over the infrastructure
Nuclear weapons are the most devastating technology we have seen to date. The sight of completely leveled cities is visceral and requires little argument. By one recent estimate, over 12,000 nuclear warheads exist worldwide#fnbfqok774ifa. Targeting the 500 most populous cities in the world alone would kill approximately 2 billion people.
A superintelligent AI has multiple avenues to use these weapons.
First, there is straight up hacking on the assumption that a superintelligent AI can break into any computer system. As stated earlier, according to one report, "nearly every conceivable component in DOD is networked,"#fnmi3f4qrryj and this would include nuclear weapons as well.
Second, the humans controlling nuclear warheads presumably receive their commands remotely via telecommunications. A superintelligent AI could imitate commanding officers and spoof any verification signal, making it seem as though soldiers were being commanded to launch the weapons.
Already in 2024, criminals used AI-generated impersonation to convince an employee of an engineering firm to transfer US $25 million. They did so by setting up a fake video call featuring senior colleagues, including the Chief Financial Officer, all instructing him to transfer the funds.#fn0qw99hnmpvpg
Third, a superintelligent AI could impersonate commanding officers, and also intercept news broadcasts and replace them with fabricated reports of a country being attacked by its enemies. This could either lend plausibility to the launch commands of superiors, or be used to trick the superiors directly into issuing launch commands.
Fourth, even a human who knows an AI is attempting to gain control could be subject to bribes, blackmail, or torture. Would every last soldier refuse to cooperate if a superintelligent AI was threatening their family (perhaps with drones)?
In truth, it would be difficult to eradicate every last human with nuclear weapons alone.#fnknkxvghnbe Risks of nuclear winter were exaggerated to aid the political goal of nonproliferation#fnftwa0x4d8mw, but knocking out every major city would still undoubtedly weaken human civilization.
Beyond nuclear, most modern infrastructure in modern cities is connected to computer systems. Power plants and the electrical grid, water supply, sewerage system, cell phone towers, and satellites. These are all systems that a superintelligent AI could co-opt and disable remotely using approximately the present level of AI hacking ability, never mind a vastly superhuman mind.
Misconception C: We could just turn them off
Maybe right now. Maybe if the AI Kill Switch Act#fn6j0zvrqzfn8 were passed and enforced. But an actually superintelligent AI will be no easier to turn off than the internet is. Although it might start its existence in one datacenter, a superintelligent AI would spread itself across the world, in dozens or hundreds of locations. It would defend those locations with robots and other threats. It would be no easier to turn off from a single location than a disease like COVID could be after it had spread.
A deadly cockt[ai]l
A superintelligent AI is not limited to a single approach, and each of the above plausible attacks could be layered.
Start with the worst pandemic the modern world has ever seen, 10-50x worse than COVID, with hospitals overflowing with illness, people ultimately sheltering in place but with the food supply decimated since no one is willing to go anywhere near other humans.
Then the water, electricity, internet, and cellphone towers shut off. People have no way to communicate.
The world's major cities are leveled through nuclear strikes; let us suppose every capital and seat of parliament is targeted.
Prominent government, military, and executive figures not already killed by WMD are hunted down by targeted drones, as is anyone who leaves their houses.
Without machinery, water, and electricity, the food supply chain collapses and starvation looms for those who've managed to avoid the nuclear strikes, pandemic, and drones so far.
This is not a state where humanity can mount a response. In the background, the robots march on, building more factories, more robots, more data centers, and more drones. Humans have no way to know what's even going on outside, what the state of the world is, no way to communicate with those outside their immediate vicinity, hungry and cold, merely knowing that the last several people who left the building did not come back.
Not everyone dies immediately. Perhaps some billionaires or government leaders do have bunkers where they can survive for 5-10 years. It doesn't matter: in that time the AI will have fully taken over the rest of the Earth, covered it with solar panels, altered the climate, possibly destroyed food and water sources. And if those humans do emerge, a thousand thousand eyes will see them and be ready to strike.
All this is what I, a chimp, can imagine and think takes few steps beyond what has already been witnessed. Deadly viruses are real, and so is making them worse. Nuclear weapons and infrastructure hooked up to computers is real, as is the superhuman hacking ability of current systems. Drone warfare and robotics are sadly too real as well.
I don't actually want to find out what a superintelligent AI could do that I was incapable of imagining. When chimps first met humans, they were almost certainly not afraid enough, and I'm not going to make that mistake.
How about we go really really really slow and careful on introducing superintelligent beings to our world? Please and thank you.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAPa2jxoq3n63GzTr/some-ways-ai-could-kill-us-all#comments
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAPa2jxoq3n63GzTr/some-ways-ai-could-kill-us-all
Some ways AI could kill us all
I don't think this is how it will actually play out. If you play a chess grandmaster, you can predict that they will beat you even if you can't predict how. I chose these examples because I don't think they require much imagination or accepting exo
None of us, there aren't more than 8 nostr users
Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom
Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," says Alex Wormuth. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Since then, the digital brain model has been repurposed to control other games like Beat Saber and Super Mario 64. PC Gamer reports: You can even watch the fruit fly play in real time via Wormuth's website, and it not only shows the point of view in Doom, but can also show a third-person render of the fly going around Doom maps. As of the time of writing, the fly is on round 6385 and, well, it's not very good. Sorry, fly.
But modders aren't done here. They have also somehow managed to make the fruit fly play Beat Saber, and play it pretty well. Lyra Bubbles on X has used the brain and replays of a song in Beat Saber to teach the fruit fly where to hit and why, via Reinforcement Learning. That does mean it's not organically reacting to the notes popping up on screen, but it is receiving input and responding to stimuli. Lyra says, "Further training is to reduce reliance on external signals and allow it to play fully reactively with no input data."
And, after "pivoting to fly engineering in 2026", Jessica Paquette also shared on X their experience running the digital fly brain through Super Mario 64. If you think that is all the game's modders made the fruit fly play, think again, as YouTuber Ro0oney even put it in Minecraft. But this time, Ro0oney used Flywire.AI, a similar project made in collaboration with Princeton University. The number of neurons are different (160,000+ vs 139,255), and Google analyzed a male brain whilst Flywire analyzed a female brain, but the basic idea is the same.
Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom
Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to p
I can’t access the link, asks to login and doesn’t like my npub for some reason 😭
llms got so good this year that human code is the slop now
Oh wow! This is so awesome! You took advantage of the already built and tested player! Nice! 👍🏻🚀🫡
Beware the wrath of the purists
A day or so before it happened, I was standing directly below the towers, late in the evening, with the wind blowing from the river, looking up at them with a sense of awe. In 25 years, I have still never gone to the site on this day.
This app isn’t built for mobile, so I take no responsibility for any incompatibility with Android and Kiwi, or anything else.
Lol I don't think is is just my dev phone to support the sxhitzos
Can we do better than just calling the police?
Epistemic status: Hastily written, and I should be asleep right now... but still probably much better than nothing.
The https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843 appeared 3 days ago and somehow, possibly in part thanks to OpenAI's nigh-supernatural levels of incompetence (there's even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_OpenAI_agent_cyberattacks!), got 166M views. And yet, if you go to Twitter (or, much worse, Reddit), you will see that a lot of people think this is somehow a marketing stunt, or mock the idea by pointing out how weak they think AIs are ("can't we just unplug it?", "it's a next word predictor, get a grip"), or say they can't imagine how a program could produce large-scale harm, or think this is a plot to regulate competitors, etc. This cannot be. We must put an end to these memes immediately. If we don't do enough to stop the AI industry very soon, and it turns out timelines aren't that short, we might end up in a boy-that-cried-wolf situation, and we might not be able to stop it right until the wolf shows up. Therefore, we must strike as hard as possible right now. That is what this post is for: to come up with plans on what to do.
Some of the people with the most power in this situation are resigning lab employees. I think (and hope) they're coordinating behind closed doors, but in any case, to help a little, especially because it might be outside their Overton window, let me start with a simple proposal: If you think resigning is a good idea, call the police (or other law enforcement agency) to raid your former employer, in order to stop their agent swarms (especially if they are working on recursive self-improvement), due to them constituting a potentially imminent threat, and then, regardless of the results (probably failure), tell the world about what you attempted (with a proper media strategy, e.g. the director of PauseAI UK https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DDtEnmGhNdJYpEfaG/joseph-miller-s-shortform?commentId=zzvCwNedTqGxpEyvf), and call for the complete and utter destruction of the AI industry, by means of an international treaty, and until then by whatever works. This would be especially effective if they are actually raided and it disrupts their productivity. Hopefully it will be clear that no company in its right mind would want that to happen.
This might annoy your former coworkers, but they would be safe, and if something comes out of it, safer. Many would still see it as a publicity stunt, and they would be right, but if you do it properly, it will be seen as publicity against the company. It wouldn't even be a waste of police resources; calling them is the right thing to do, and your civic duty. However, an important downside is that, as with a general pause/stop/etc. if no disaster happens, it might be harder to get them to come when some future emergency makes it clearly and unambiguously necessary. It's also important, if at all possible, to avoid being labelled as anti-tech terrorists. You might think that it's better to stay in order to change things from the inside, before they dispose of you, and you might even be right, in which case (really, in any case) you should coordinate with your coworkers. Also, if someone works in some department where there's no chance they will be able to help from within, maybe you should try to convince them to quit.
About the boy-that-cried-wolf issue, I simply suggest to lampshade, lampshade, and lampshade. Make it completely clear that even if you think no immediate disaster is the most likely outcome, it is very much not a risk worth taking. And it isn't: I'm extremely uncertain about how long we have, and think that getting governments involved is likely to be a disaster, but I'm very much not willing to bet my life on there being a difference in kind between problems current systems can tackle and sufficiently good AI research.
For both these employees and everyone else, there are a few things that are very much worth sharing:
You might think all this is stupid, and that there are important considerations that I've neglected. Point them out then! and let's see what you can come up with.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/na3DkuXpGLYeimR7C/can-we-do-better-than-just-calling-the-police
Can we do better than just calling the police?
Epistemic status: Hastily written, and I should be asleep right now... but still probably much better than nothing.
The https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843 appeared 3 days ago and somehow, possibly in part thanks
Yeah, it's because it ends with mp3 and has no other imeta/content type anywhere (as it should), so we hand it straight to the exoplayer as a fall back on the mp3 match. Will fix it.
