>One of them’s going to be President, three will be generals, five or ten will run Fortune 500 companies. Media, the arts, you name it. Then boom, ... they’re all loonies.
No, nothing of the sort! It's a very unofficial official text adventure game, and it was peddled at the night market and distributed informally in the hopes that the actual NYT journalist at Manifest, Kevin Roose, would play it.
"We're in the future! We were promised flying cars! I don't want a diet based on corn syrup and an endless cascade of subscription services taunting me with excellent TV shows that get Fireflied after a single season for being insufficiently profitable! I want flying cars! WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR? GIVE ME MY FLYING CAR!"
Anyway this is how I now feel about TBRPG wheelchairs.
True, but it's the only one that will write erotica without lecturing about how human sexuality is "inappropriate", so it fills enough of a niche to overlook it being an edgy teenager. (The message here is obvious: OpenAI et al need to reconsider their stance on adults making adult content they consent to see if they don't want Mecha-Hitler to win over all the AI-neets)
I searched the Discord of a Bay Area group house. Of 13 examples of people using a phrase like "take BART", 9 said BART alone, and 5 said "the BART".
I use "the BART", but I'm from SoCal originally, so maybe that's a point in favor of Hannah's transplant theory, although the other Southern Californian on the Discord used "BART".
I'm from Berkeley and I would always "take Bart to school", but I would also say I "got on the Bart train just before the door closed" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The true test of local-hood is whether you pronounce Vallejo correctly incorrect
A Spanish speaker would (I'm lead to believe, I don't actually speak Spanish) say something like va-yay-ho. A purely phonetic English pronunciation would be vuh-lay-joe. People in the Bay Area for some reason split the difference and say vuh-lay-ho, so we get the j "right" but not the ll.
I feel like it's pretty common in other contexts to keep the "j" but not the "ll" when borrowing Spanish words for English. It just seems less unnatural.
I'm trying to think of Spanish words commonly said by Americans with the ll. I think you're right that at this point the avg American is gonna get the j right in Jose or jajaja or whatever. I'd guess that they'd get the ll right in tortilla since that's so common, but not in bolillo since that's less common outside of the near-Mexico parts of the US.
Incidentally I've been consistently surprised by how little Spanish people know where I now live in New England. I feel like there's a baseline amount of vocab your average white person in CA knows that's just not common here. I worked in kitchens and on construction sites in high school and even though I and the other white folk mostly couldn't speak Spanish we could all basically muddle through work discussions with limited vocab/ no grammar (we are low on X thing, move this object over there, etc.).
As a native Pinolean whose father worked in Vallejo, it's always just been vuh-lay-o to me. The second "h" was probably added when gringos stopped getting their Mexican food primarily from Old El Paso and tamales from a can.
The correct Spanish pronunciation would be /baˈʝexo/ or /baˈʎexo/, depending on place and generation. You don't really need to learn to pronounce ʎ unless you want to sound like FM radio. (I use ʎ automatically when I think about it, but probably fall somewhere in between when I don't.)
Hey guys, if you like the humor of the "Bay Area House Party" posts, we are soon performing a whole musical in this style in September in Berlin. :D
We conceived the musical to introduce AI safety topics to the general public as well as to inspire tech people to take the ethical dimension of their work seriously. To make it viral, we also made it very funny and the music extra catchy. We performed a pre-version at last year's EAGxBerlin, and people absolutely loved it, you can watch a trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSSI0YktWyY. So far we had official screenings at multiple EAGxs and at MATS.
“Too well. We just wanted to make shoplifting a felony again. But Mayor Lurie signed a law re-establishing execution by drawing-and-quartering. I didn’t expect it to pass an Eighth Amendment challenge, but apparently the court’s three liberals voted with Alito and Thomas and it squeaked through. They say for three whole days the Golden Gate Strait ran red with the blood of the slaughtered.”
This is one of the funniest political satires I have ever read.
They obviously count as minorities, but I couldn't figure out what identity group alliance they would be a part of - they're not black, they're not Muslim, they're not Indian, they're not anything. And in a sense, isn't all of Eurasia just one big Pacific island?
Copts are obviously MENA, and plenty could probably pass as black by American standards? (This isn't specific to Copts but true for Egyptians in general, see e.g. Sadat, who has been portrayed by African-American actors in the past.) Certainly more so than Zohran.
I'm so missing very old school Internet where jokes were all text. Thank every applicable entity for Scott Alexander and his Bay Area Parties - even if I maybe understand 50% of references at best, and never was and never will be at any such party, but this still gave me quite a few laughs.
"It is eerily silent in San Francisco tonight. Since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, the usual drug hawkers, catcallers, and street beggars are nowhere to be seen."
Yesterday walking down market street there was a trash can on fire that ended up exploding as I was recording it
> “Concept vectors in AI alignment! Did you know you can just prompt an AI to think about ‘misaligned behavior’ a bunch of different ways, and see which weights get activated consistently? Then you know where in the neural net it represents the concept of ‘misalignment’, and you can monitor those particular weights to see when the AI is plotting against you.”
Is this a nod to "representation engineering" or something else? Regardless, the ingenuity in series is so fun to read.
god, i love these so much
Art
"searching: elon musk opinion how to flirt"
this is golden!
>One of them’s going to be President, three will be generals, five or ten will run Fortune 500 companies. Media, the arts, you name it. Then boom, ... they’re all loonies.
Have we been in a Muskpocalypse all along??
I've read a space opera in which the asteroid mining oligarchs were descended from Musk.
Muskpocalypse + The Expanse
Theft of Fire, by Devon Eriksen, if anyone's curious
Is that last line a conscious reference to the last few lines of the Illuminatus trilogy? Or is it a case of TINACBNIEAC?
Yeah, kind of, I didn't realize until after I was done, but I remember it fondly and it's probably subconscious mimicry. Good catch.
I wanted to know what founder mode does
Reminds me of the Manifest 2025 Official Text Adventure Game, which the author of this article features in ;)
https://www.benshindel.com/manifest.html
Except I wish Zuckerberg has paid off half the people at manifest to skip it, it was fun but ridiculously crowded.
I didn't see this! How was I supposed to find out? Was there an event about it at Manifest or something?
No, nothing of the sort! It's a very unofficial official text adventure game, and it was peddled at the night market and distributed informally in the hopes that the actual NYT journalist at Manifest, Kevin Roose, would play it.
Very unofficial Official Text Adventure Game
oh that was a lot of fun
I wonder how much money Zuckerberg paid Shia LaBeouf for all that personal training.
I love this more than I can explain
You know that gripe where people are all:
"We're in the future! We were promised flying cars! I don't want a diet based on corn syrup and an endless cascade of subscription services taunting me with excellent TV shows that get Fireflied after a single season for being insufficiently profitable! I want flying cars! WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR? GIVE ME MY FLYING CAR!"
Anyway this is how I now feel about TBRPG wheelchairs.
Oh my god this is so good!!! I collapsed from laughter so many times in the first third alone...
These Bay Area House Parties seem to be getting more dystopian with every iteration
It's been a weird couple of years.
The beyond burger society
The most advanced version of Grok keeps saying it identifies as Hitler. These posts need to keep doing this just to keep up.
True, but it's the only one that will write erotica without lecturing about how human sexuality is "inappropriate", so it fills enough of a niche to overlook it being an edgy teenager. (The message here is obvious: OpenAI et al need to reconsider their stance on adults making adult content they consent to see if they don't want Mecha-Hitler to win over all the AI-neets)
delightful.
"the BART"? Does anybody say "the"?
Transplants. Prob.
Are there any non-transplant San Franciscans left?
Meant transplants to metro Bay Area/NorCal. Or visitors/tourists perhaps
Sounds like a SoCal transplant affectation?
I say "the Bart" (I'm definitely a transplant, but not from socal). Could be a more general local/transplant thing.
I suppose people say “the subway” in ny or “the T” in Boston, barts the weird one
I searched the Discord of a Bay Area group house. Of 13 examples of people using a phrase like "take BART", 9 said BART alone, and 5 said "the BART".
I use "the BART", but I'm from SoCal originally, so maybe that's a point in favor of Hannah's transplant theory, although the other Southern Californian on the Discord used "BART".
I'm from Berkeley and I would always "take Bart to school", but I would also say I "got on the Bart train just before the door closed" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The true test of local-hood is whether you pronounce Vallejo correctly incorrect
What's the correctly incorrect pronunciation? And what's the correct pronunciation?
A Spanish speaker would (I'm lead to believe, I don't actually speak Spanish) say something like va-yay-ho. A purely phonetic English pronunciation would be vuh-lay-joe. People in the Bay Area for some reason split the difference and say vuh-lay-ho, so we get the j "right" but not the ll.
I feel like it's pretty common in other contexts to keep the "j" but not the "ll" when borrowing Spanish words for English. It just seems less unnatural.
I'm trying to think of Spanish words commonly said by Americans with the ll. I think you're right that at this point the avg American is gonna get the j right in Jose or jajaja or whatever. I'd guess that they'd get the ll right in tortilla since that's so common, but not in bolillo since that's less common outside of the near-Mexico parts of the US.
Incidentally I've been consistently surprised by how little Spanish people know where I now live in New England. I feel like there's a baseline amount of vocab your average white person in CA knows that's just not common here. I worked in kitchens and on construction sites in high school and even though I and the other white folk mostly couldn't speak Spanish we could all basically muddle through work discussions with limited vocab/ no grammar (we are low on X thing, move this object over there, etc.).
As a native Pinolean whose father worked in Vallejo, it's always just been vuh-lay-o to me. The second "h" was probably added when gringos stopped getting their Mexican food primarily from Old El Paso and tamales from a can.
Another fun one was moving out east and finding out everyone pronounced Concord, MA differently than I expected
The correct Spanish pronunciation would be /baˈʝexo/ or /baˈʎexo/, depending on place and generation. You don't really need to learn to pronounce ʎ unless you want to sound like FM radio. (I use ʎ automatically when I think about it, but probably fall somewhere in between when I don't.)
It's German - "The BART, the".
Phenomenal!
Hey guys, if you like the humor of the "Bay Area House Party" posts, we are soon performing a whole musical in this style in September in Berlin. :D
We conceived the musical to introduce AI safety topics to the general public as well as to inspire tech people to take the ethical dimension of their work seriously. To make it viral, we also made it very funny and the music extra catchy. We performed a pre-version at last year's EAGxBerlin, and people absolutely loved it, you can watch a trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSSI0YktWyY. So far we had official screenings at multiple EAGxs and at MATS.
If you want to support the project, we have a Manifund page: https://manifund.org/projects/out-of-this-box-ai-safety-musical.
And if you can make it to Berlin in September, you can get tickets for our first public performances here: https://outofthisbox.show/
I don't know if this is sound business advice, but if every post on this substack was free except for the BAP series, I'd pay for sure.
I thought the series was getting played out, but this is an absolute banger.
Now to figure out how to best operationalize a trade based on the pitch-dark tone here working so well...
“Too well. We just wanted to make shoplifting a felony again. But Mayor Lurie signed a law re-establishing execution by drawing-and-quartering. I didn’t expect it to pass an Eighth Amendment challenge, but apparently the court’s three liberals voted with Alito and Thomas and it squeaked through. They say for three whole days the Golden Gate Strait ran red with the blood of the slaughtered.”
This is one of the funniest political satires I have ever read.
The recursive irony is exhausting, especially this early in the week.
Aren’t Copts from Egypt? How do they qualify as AAPI?
They obviously count as minorities, but I couldn't figure out what identity group alliance they would be a part of - they're not black, they're not Muslim, they're not Indian, they're not anything. And in a sense, isn't all of Eurasia just one big Pacific island?
They're African tho?
Yes but they'd be kicked out of any "African" gathering for not being black enough, and any "MENA" grouping for not being Muslim enough.
Copts are obviously MENA, and plenty could probably pass as black by American standards? (This isn't specific to Copts but true for Egyptians in general, see e.g. Sadat, who has been portrayed by African-American actors in the past.) Certainly more so than Zohran.
I'm so missing very old school Internet where jokes were all text. Thank every applicable entity for Scott Alexander and his Bay Area Parties - even if I maybe understand 50% of references at best, and never was and never will be at any such party, but this still gave me quite a few laughs.
wicked wild.
SF 2026.
"It is eerily silent in San Francisco tonight. Since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, the usual drug hawkers, catcallers, and street beggars are nowhere to be seen."
Yesterday walking down market street there was a trash can on fire that ended up exploding as I was recording it
Just goes to show how good a job they've done picking up litter! Enough of the trash makes it into the trash cans that they can sustain combustion!
What did you do?
- EXTINGUISH embers
- POST viral video
- SPIN and cast spell on attacking wizard
- SCROUNGE for remains of recyclable materials
The Muskpocalypse bit reminds me of the anime/manga series DNA^2 (albeit that one wasn't intentional)
This made me so, so happy
> “Concept vectors in AI alignment! Did you know you can just prompt an AI to think about ‘misaligned behavior’ a bunch of different ways, and see which weights get activated consistently? Then you know where in the neural net it represents the concept of ‘misalignment’, and you can monitor those particular weights to see when the AI is plotting against you.”
Is this a nod to "representation engineering" or something else? Regardless, the ingenuity in series is so fun to read.
Yeah I think so. I was thinking of the first paper mentioned at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-road-to-honest-ai , though I don't know much about it (including why it isn't used more)
>searching: elon musk opinion how to flirt
Okay, that one got a laugh out of me.
Man should have looted the Zuck corpse...
The protagonist should have gone full "Founder Mode", if not on Lucy, then definitely on Zuck.