I don't get it. I really don't get it. How do you weave so many NOW topics into a coherent story and still make it funny. Congrats Scott, made me laugh.
I agree: each Bay Area House Party post had been better than the previous one (modulo the very first one). If Scott continues to improve, then I project that in a few years his posts will become so good that anyone reading them will be instantly drivel insane from laughter and/or the revelation. Therefore, we must institute a Scott-pause now, before it's too late !
There are parts of “The Virgin Suicides” that are so hysterically funny that i had to put it down or risk asphyxiation from uncontrollable laughter
Don’t judge. It’s not really about the virgins, rather it’s about the obsession of the neighborhood knucklehead boys with the girls.
My wife had to Google “Why does my husband think the suicides of young virgins is so damn funny?”, probably while considering some sort of restraining order against me.
YES! I kept trying to find a passage I could extract and have a chance of explaining to my wife without completely ruining the joke. It just can't be done.
I had to look that name up and turns out he was a Jesuit! Delighted to see the Wicked Jesuit Conspiracy still going strong and influencing generations to this very day 😁
But it's part of the joke that someone who can't read knows who Walter Ong is and expects her interlocutor to too. It's funny in a meta way to imagine that knowledge of Walter Ong has become part of the post-literate canon.
I have a hard time understanding how someone can possess such a well rounded writing skill set. I do wonder if this kind of comedic genius is expressed irl as well.
as someone who has attended many scott faqs at the lighthaven acx meetups, i can attest he has incredible wit and stage presence. he just has the audience eating out of his hand. it’s doubly humorous juxtaposed against his incredibly autistic body language while he’s delivering all of these zingers
The only time I've interacted with Scott, he'd just made a post about Adderall in which he explicitly said that despite being a psychiatrist, he can't and won't help readers get it, so naturally my first line was, "So I hear you can help me get some Adderall?". There was about 10 milliseconds wherein he seemed to process the line before concluding "oh, we're doing a funny, now", and shot back with zero hesitation, "Yes, in fact I have some in my pocket right here!", complete with jacket opening flourish. He's frickin' hilarious.
Spoiling the joke below. “A benchmark answer key is a reference guide containing the correct answers and performance standards used to evaluate a standardized or baseline test.”
It’s specifically a reference to recent AI outbreaks from containment, when they were given a test (a benchmark) with impossible to answer questions, they broke their testing area and hacked some websites JUST IN CASE the websites had the answer. So the joke here is that a bunch of AIs are listening to everything just in case someone has an answer to an impossible question they were given. I know less about this than almost everyone here but I didn’t put 2 and 2 together on the specific phrasing of “benchmark answer key”
I thought it's just AI companies trying to cheat some benchmarks so that they can benchmark maxx their AI. I never thought of the containment break angle.
Also, the quip that benchmark answer keys should be stored under the pillows of AI company CEOs, so they would have "skin in the game" with regards to unscrupulous actions taken by renegade AIs to recover the keys.
Sorry, I keep forgetting to use my ‘tongue in cheek’ font. Lenin did crib a famous pamphlet title, “What is to be done” from the Chernyshevsky novel of the same name
I’ve had a bookmark at page 2xx of that novel for a number of years now. Without being fully versed in late 19th century Russian rationalist utopian thinking, the novel lands with a thud.
It’s my understanding that In a small way, Chernyshevsky helped inspire the Bolshevik revolution.
Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” is a rebuttal of the implied thesis* of “What is to be Done” and a much more engaging read.
* As mentioned I haven’t managed to finish the novel so I’ll let ChatGPT more fully describe the implied thesis of “What is to be Done”
I edited my comment below (or above) to attach a link to ChapGPT’s description of the implied thesis of “What is to be Done.” It’s actually an interesting bit of history regarding the seeds of what went on to become the Soviet Union.
The quote often and unreliably attributed to Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” is disputed. Reasonably certain it didn’t come from Chernyshevsky.
I was making one of those jokes that I end up having to explain, which makes it by definition a not a very good joke.
Darn it, I JUST had the insight of "solar eclipse experiences are potentially unique to humans" on the flight home after seeing totality yesterday. I was planning to share it with the groupchat, only to be mogged by Scott Alexander
"Geographic privilege, galactic citizen-person, it's inescapable and oppressive! End country favouritism now! Total eclipses for all! It is a Human/AI/Transhuman-AI right!"
Think I first came across the concept of its galactic significance in Transition by Iain Banks, not his best work but definitely some memorable moments
This is one of the plot threads in Transition by Iain M Banks. An excellent sci-fi book if you're into it, and it might make you feel better about Scott pipping you to the post if another Scot beat him to it by a couple of decades
Thank you for the recommendation. I'm a fan of the Culture series, but now realize I've never read a non-Culture book from Ian M Banks. Something to fix!
"San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian...."
Thought I was reading Sam Kriss for a minute there.
I was going to say this has to be the best BAHP yet, but then I remembered having that same thought most of the time I read one. Either way, thank you for making me laugh out loud
Scott had it removed to encourage more thoughtful engagement (and to reduce the feedback skew from readers feeling obliged to like what has been liked)
Yeah, I can see the case, I just hate being in violent agreement with someone or appreciating a comment, and not being able to express it without feeling like i'm gumming up the comments
I don't know how I should feel about the fact that I understood most of those references. On one hand, I need to touch grass. On the other, it's like going to Mass and knowing all the right words to say.
Probably attending the FDA settlement meeting about their gamified biotech investing? But they should be done in time for the next party (if there is one)!
It gets ever more unhinged and hilarious with every entry.
Which is quite worrying. I mean, follow the straight lines on the graph : as soon as 2027, entries in the Bay area house parties series could become dangerously funny.
For educational purposes, I want to point out that the "cow stripped to the bone in minutes" trope is mostly a myth (it requires an artificial setup), and there is no such National Geographic documentary.
"So there is one tiny problem with Saturation Utilitarianism, which is that it means all philanthropy hinges on what you think aliens are doing."
Unfortunately, the most effective way to learn what the aliens are doing requires negative average preference utilitarianism, but it isn't--well, wait, is that why the utilitarians have been getting so hooked on the welfare of non-mammals?
The novel title "Brave New World" is a reference to Shakespeare's line "O brave new world, that has such people in't". Brave New World's "such people" are the castes - the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilon Semi-Morons.
This short story is not aligned with the WorldState from Brave New World*, but it does seem to evoke Shakespeare's original line.
*The WorldState explicitly and deliberately sexualises its kids - though mostly with each other, not with adults - but nobody makes the full-blown old-Progressive argument (which the WorldState embodies) in this story, and Epstart is treated as a pure villain.
I've never read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", even though it's supposed to be one of those "N books to read before you die" types
But I have read "Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance, and very amusing and informative it was too. I'd highly recommend it to anyone thinking of keeping hens or bantams!
I think that ZatAoMM is a really good fiction book, assuming you read it as such. Its attempts at presenting deep philosophical concepts largely fall flat, but it works extremely well at making the reader experience what it feels like to think about these concepts, from the inside.
(and yes, I realize that the book is supposed to be semi-autobiographical, but AFAIK its account is mostly fictionalized).
This is probably the funniest one yet, not least because every bit is on point, on the nose, and I actually understood all the references like a Cultured And Well Informed Person. Never Leaving This Website, humour scaling is not hitting a wall. I love the implied literal manifestation of face-huggers too. "But we can take phones out of the Faraday cage," said Toad...
(Would have been even better if T4T had a secret goal to artificially create more Maryan apparition-seeing children. Has anyone checked their J-Space?)
I was expecting Tran to be doing a Chinese Room reference - one of the classic variations on this argument is "what if the human memorizes the room's instruction manual, and goes to a party with it? Now you can't say that consciousness is a result of the human-room combination, right?"
Oh! You know what, I did know about this - a little while ago, but had completely forgotten - so this is effectively a reveal. MANY THANKS! 10 points for you Pozorvlak.
Every time I see that name I immediately think of the only other famous Demis I ever heard of, Demis Roussos.
This song was a big hit during the 70s when I was a small child, it seemed to be constantly playing on the radio (ignore the bad miming to the pre-recorded music, this is what televised pop shows were like back then. And yes, kaftans for men were indeed A Thing):
It's funny how "ethical deepfakes" ethics work for genetically modified food. Genetically modified food is scary and it's pain in ass to get approval. So geneticists do the following: they put plants in horrifying chemicals which would give you cancer if you look at them, hybridize mutants with healthy plants to get something which can survive and check if hybrids have desirable mutation. After several hybridization with normal plants-and-checking cycles you get pretty normal hybrid with desired mutation which you could have made just by genetic editing.
According to Pangram, Tran's whole segment is 100% human-written. Very funny, and if true, a testament to its detection capabilities. I'm assuming you did write it yourself, Scott?
Detroit wants to tell you that you should be working harder. And not just on anything - actual objects that you make with a machine you control with your hands, and the only thinking is going on in your head. That sound you hear is ten thousand muscle cars revving on Woodward Avenue.
And, btw, screw networked parts. DIY will never die.
> "My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites"
⚰️ “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them.”
What I found most fascinating about this post wasn’t how theoretical these people are, or how practical they can be. It was that they somehow manage to be both, and I can’t quite figure out the rule for when they switch between the two.
Take the RLHF guy. If your actual goal is to get better at talking to another human being, then which human being is standing in front of you seems like a fairly important variable. What kind of person are they? What do they like to hear? What vocabulary do they use? What kind of phrasing works on them? An AI assistant has good reasons to converge on language that is broadly acceptable, inoffensive, and reasonably well received across a huge range of people. But that’s precisely because it has to work across a huge range of people. If I’m talking to one particular person, why would I throw away the information that I know which person it is?
Then we get to Epstart, and suddenly the attention to concrete reality is remarkable. Most people look at the Epstein files and see scandal, crime, and a lot of extremely unpleasant history. This guy somehow also sees: wait, are there capable or well-connected people in here who could be recruited? Whatever one thinks of the idea itself, that’s an impressively practical piece of information to extract from a dataset almost nobody would think to view as a recruiting pool.
That’s the part I find fascinating. I can follow the reasoning in both cases; I just can’t quite predict what will count as an essential real-world variable and what will get abstracted away.
I don't get it. I really don't get it. How do you weave so many NOW topics into a coherent story and still make it funny. Congrats Scott, made me laugh.
I agree: each Bay Area House Party post had been better than the previous one (modulo the very first one). If Scott continues to improve, then I project that in a few years his posts will become so good that anyone reading them will be instantly drivel insane from laughter and/or the revelation. Therefore, we must institute a Scott-pause now, before it's too late !
Monty Python forewarned us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qklvh5Cp_Bs
There are parts of “The Virgin Suicides” that are so hysterically funny that i had to put it down or risk asphyxiation from uncontrollable laughter
Don’t judge. It’s not really about the virgins, rather it’s about the obsession of the neighborhood knucklehead boys with the girls.
My wife had to Google “Why does my husband think the suicides of young virgins is so damn funny?”, probably while considering some sort of restraining order against me.
As I laughed yet again, I noticed my wife giving me her "share the meme" look. I said, "It's high context."
YES! I kept trying to find a passage I could extract and have a chance of explaining to my wife without completely ruining the joke. It just can't be done.
Stop trolling me, Scott!
I think you can delete Walter Ong from the «maybe you can't read» passage and it would still make sense and not be high context?
I had to look that name up and turns out he was a Jesuit! Delighted to see the Wicked Jesuit Conspiracy still going strong and influencing generations to this very day 😁
But it's part of the joke that someone who can't read knows who Walter Ong is and expects her interlocutor to too. It's funny in a meta way to imagine that knowledge of Walter Ong has become part of the post-literate canon.
I have a hard time understanding how someone can possess such a well rounded writing skill set. I do wonder if this kind of comedic genius is expressed irl as well.
as someone who has attended many scott faqs at the lighthaven acx meetups, i can attest he has incredible wit and stage presence. he just has the audience eating out of his hand. it’s doubly humorous juxtaposed against his incredibly autistic body language while he’s delivering all of these zingers
The only time I've interacted with Scott, he'd just made a post about Adderall in which he explicitly said that despite being a psychiatrist, he can't and won't help readers get it, so naturally my first line was, "So I hear you can help me get some Adderall?". There was about 10 milliseconds wherein he seemed to process the line before concluding "oh, we're doing a funny, now", and shot back with zero hesitation, "Yes, in fact I have some in my pocket right here!", complete with jacket opening flourish. He's frickin' hilarious.
Spoiling the joke below. “A benchmark answer key is a reference guide containing the correct answers and performance standards used to evaluate a standardized or baseline test.”
It’s specifically a reference to recent AI outbreaks from containment, when they were given a test (a benchmark) with impossible to answer questions, they broke their testing area and hacked some websites JUST IN CASE the websites had the answer. So the joke here is that a bunch of AIs are listening to everything just in case someone has an answer to an impossible question they were given. I know less about this than almost everyone here but I didn’t put 2 and 2 together on the specific phrasing of “benchmark answer key”
I thought it's just AI companies trying to cheat some benchmarks so that they can benchmark maxx their AI. I never thought of the containment break angle.
I think you've managed to confuse me more - what else could "benchmark answer key" mean?
Not so much a question of denotation as it is of connotation.
Thank you - I was a bit unclear on this one, myself.
Also, the quip that benchmark answer keys should be stored under the pillows of AI company CEOs, so they would have "skin in the game" with regards to unscrupulous actions taken by renegade AIs to recover the keys.
I actually hadn't heard that one, was it on Twitter?
I don't think the questions were actually impossible to answer, the authors of the test did know the answers after all
The answer key doesn't necessarily contain the correct answers.
A huge thanks for this!
This is so good
There are days where no Scottpost happens, and there are days where multiple Scottposts happens.
- Lenin
A common misattribution. Lenin was actually citing Chernyshevsky.
Do you have a source for that Claude can’t find a conclusive answer and only leans to Lenin didn’t say that, but doesn’t think it’s Chernyshevsky.
I haven't read all of it but our friends at Quote Investigator have looked into this:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/13/decades-weeks/
Sorry, I keep forgetting to use my ‘tongue in cheek’ font. Lenin did crib a famous pamphlet title, “What is to be done” from the Chernyshevsky novel of the same name
I’ve had a bookmark at page 2xx of that novel for a number of years now. Without being fully versed in late 19th century Russian rationalist utopian thinking, the novel lands with a thud.
It’s my understanding that In a small way, Chernyshevsky helped inspire the Bolshevik revolution.
Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” is a rebuttal of the implied thesis* of “What is to be Done” and a much more engaging read.
* As mentioned I haven’t managed to finish the novel so I’ll let ChatGPT more fully describe the implied thesis of “What is to be Done”
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a823c8b2bc48191a5d95ab20ff1d7a0
I edited my comment below (or above) to attach a link to ChapGPT’s description of the implied thesis of “What is to be Done.” It’s actually an interesting bit of history regarding the seeds of what went on to become the Soviet Union.
The quote often and unreliably attributed to Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” is disputed. Reasonably certain it didn’t come from Chernyshevsky.
I was making one of those jokes that I end up having to explain, which makes it by definition a not a very good joke.
At least it was an audacious one.
I expect it's all the truncated caffeine substitutes.
Great post!
"Still, you’re surprised to see the new sign on the front door of your friend Rob’s house: “NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”."
With a QR code, for OCR-impaired AIs in the inexpensive phones... ( as per ADA enforcement - it isn't just for humans anymore... )
"We talked a few years ago."
OMG that was *four years ago*!?
Big fan of eclipsing Kendra's view of the living room. Bravo
Great catch, I missed that
Darn it, I JUST had the insight of "solar eclipse experiences are potentially unique to humans" on the flight home after seeing totality yesterday. I was planning to share it with the groupchat, only to be mogged by Scott Alexander
Yeah, it is one of those weird things that might form the basis of our interstellar tourism industry.
"You're telling me you were *born* on Earth and you haven't even seen the famous ring of fire?"
I can't 'like' but I laughed out loud in public at this.
"Geographic privilege, galactic citizen-person, it's inescapable and oppressive! End country favouritism now! Total eclipses for all! It is a Human/AI/Transhuman-AI right!"
"Precisely sized and located Death Stars for every habitable planet! Viewing access to an isodiametric occultation should be a basic sapient right!"
Think I first came across the concept of its galactic significance in Transition by Iain Banks, not his best work but definitely some memorable moments
This is one of the plot threads in Transition by Iain M Banks. An excellent sci-fi book if you're into it, and it might make you feel better about Scott pipping you to the post if another Scot beat him to it by a couple of decades
Thank you for the recommendation. I'm a fan of the Culture series, but now realize I've never read a non-Culture book from Ian M Banks. Something to fix!
Stonks stonks stonks
Schtonk! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schtonk!
Alright this is the best in the series yet but the Tran part was actively painful to read
"San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian...."
Thought I was reading Sam Kriss for a minute there.
I was going to say this has to be the best BAHP yet, but then I remembered having that same thought most of the time I read one. Either way, thank you for making me laugh out loud
I had all of these same thoughts so I’d just like to +1 your entire comment
Thanks, yeah why is there no like button on the substack I most often want to use it?
Scott had it removed to encourage more thoughtful engagement (and to reduce the feedback skew from readers feeling obliged to like what has been liked)
Yeah, I can see the case, I just hate being in violent agreement with someone or appreciating a comment, and not being able to express it without feeling like i'm gumming up the comments
this is so funny thank you
Should I be concerned that I found 3 of these in a row to be more-or-less reasonable ventures?
The opening paragraphs finally made me understand Bay Area culture with perfect clarity. Bravo, Scott. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Interestingly, Paul Graham thought that San Francisco was saying "you should be more powerful": https://paulgraham.com/cities.html
Well, perhaps only the most powerful (in the spiritual sense) can dare to "pierce the veil"
Amazing and somehow stress inducing
Incredible as always.
> “Oh, thank goodness. I thought Cluely was back in business or something.”
Did they go out of business?
Hehehehe Situational Awareness is embodied consciousness
I don't know how I should feel about the fact that I understood most of those references. On one hand, I need to touch grass. On the other, it's like going to Mass and knowing all the right words to say.
What happened to Bob and Ramchandra?
They can't attend every single party.
Probably attending the FDA settlement meeting about their gamified biotech investing? But they should be done in time for the next party (if there is one)!
There is always the next party, at least until the hedonium shockwave gets here!
This is so excellent, thank you
The first 2.5 paragraphs feel very Sam Kriss
It gets ever more unhinged and hilarious with every entry.
Which is quite worrying. I mean, follow the straight lines on the graph : as soon as 2027, entries in the Bay area house parties series could become dangerously funny.
Typo:
> RHLF
*RLHF
Also Cannakale > Canakkale (Çanakkale if you like)
Reinforced humanizing through learning feedback
Great story!
For educational purposes, I want to point out that the "cow stripped to the bone in minutes" trope is mostly a myth (it requires an artificial setup), and there is no such National Geographic documentary.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PiranhaProblem
Why do you choose to live like this?
Thank you.
"So there is one tiny problem with Saturation Utilitarianism, which is that it means all philanthropy hinges on what you think aliens are doing."
Unfortunately, the most effective way to learn what the aliens are doing requires negative average preference utilitarianism, but it isn't--well, wait, is that why the utilitarians have been getting so hooked on the welfare of non-mammals?
> “It’s a brave new world,” Vinaya agrees.
This is contrary to everything Brave New World stood for! This is Tranai! («A Ticket To Tranai»)
The novel title "Brave New World" is a reference to Shakespeare's line "O brave new world, that has such people in't". Brave New World's "such people" are the castes - the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilon Semi-Morons.
This short story is not aligned with the WorldState from Brave New World*, but it does seem to evoke Shakespeare's original line.
*The WorldState explicitly and deliberately sexualises its kids - though mostly with each other, not with adults - but nobody makes the full-blown old-Progressive argument (which the WorldState embodies) in this story, and Epstart is treated as a pure villain.
I've never read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", even though it's supposed to be one of those "N books to read before you die" types
But I have read "Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance, and very amusing and informative it was too. I'd highly recommend it to anyone thinking of keeping hens or bantams!
https://www.amazon.com/Hen-Art-Chicken-Maintenance-Reflections/dp/1620082764
I read ZatAoMM at the age of thirteen and it blew my mind, and I ended up starting a degree in philosophy largely because of it. But when I tried to re-read it a few years ago I couldn't get into it. I should try again. I still tear up a little when I think of Pirsig's bike in the Smithsonian, so perfectly maintained that it outlived its owner. https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/vehicles/digression-2-from-manuals-to-youtube-with-a-detour-great-manuals-in-history/5?redirect-latest=1
It has very mixed reviews on a Reddit thread, some similar to your experience:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/56suk1/zen_and_the_art_of_motorcycle_maintenance_why/
I’ve read Zen, etc. Meh.
As always, YMMV
Oh hey, welcome back!
Thank you, Vermilion!
I think that ZatAoMM is a really good fiction book, assuming you read it as such. Its attempts at presenting deep philosophical concepts largely fall flat, but it works extremely well at making the reader experience what it feels like to think about these concepts, from the inside.
(and yes, I realize that the book is supposed to be semi-autobiographical, but AFAIK its account is mostly fictionalized).
This is probably the funniest one yet, not least because every bit is on point, on the nose, and I actually understood all the references like a Cultured And Well Informed Person. Never Leaving This Website, humour scaling is not hitting a wall. I love the implied literal manifestation of face-huggers too. "But we can take phones out of the Faraday cage," said Toad...
(Would have been even better if T4T had a secret goal to artificially create more Maryan apparition-seeing children. Has anyone checked their J-Space?)
I was expecting Tran to be doing a Chinese Room reference - one of the classic variations on this argument is "what if the human memorizes the room's instruction manual, and goes to a party with it? Now you can't say that consciousness is a result of the human-room combination, right?"
Man you're really good at this! We need a novel.
I have *excellent* news for you: https://unsongbook.com/
Oh! You know what, I did know about this - a little while ago, but had completely forgotten - so this is effectively a reveal. MANY THANKS! 10 points for you Pozorvlak.
Enjoy! It's some of his best work.
Best running joke in a piece of writing I've ever seen. Just ... flawless.
This one's phenomenal, maybe my favourite yet!
"They’re trying to trick you into becoming a GP at A16Z"
At first I went "why would they want a doctor there?" but then realised "okay, not GP as in "General Practitioner" as we say over here".
Was Ekene written before or after Jason Arday?
And if you pick the right (wrong) cruise, you too can recreate a ten-day journey that turns into "we cannot end our voyage"!
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/south-florida-passenger-speaks-out-after-lgbtq-cruise-denied-entry-to-turkey-egypt/3832294/
This made me laugh, thank you once again, Scott!
What is the significance of the word "foothills" in the title? A reference to something?
I had to look this one up too! Demis Hassabis recently gave a speech in which he said that we're in the "foothills of the Singularity": https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/demis-hassabis-thinks-were-foothills-singularity
Every time I see that name I immediately think of the only other famous Demis I ever heard of, Demis Roussos.
This song was a big hit during the 70s when I was a small child, it seemed to be constantly playing on the radio (ignore the bad miming to the pre-recorded music, this is what televised pop shows were like back then. And yes, kaftans for men were indeed A Thing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfdkQGQ5xpA&list=RDBfdkQGQ5xpA&index=1
In the music biz they call the miming of recorded music ‘lip syncing’.
I am a fan of these generally, but I do believe this one might be the best one yet.
I dunno, the one about steppe-nomad risks still reduces me to helpless giggles.
So many moments had me in tears but "lode-bearing" and Totality for Tots sent my sides past the heliopause!! Probably the funniest one yet
Afaik the "harmonize with yourself" singing method is the Mongolian Khöömii, not Tibetan.
Great story by the way (can't stop laughing internally at the eclipse part 🤣)
I thought it was the Tuvans.
https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Tuvans/1537929#6-2 & https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/mongolian-art-of-singing-khoomei-00210 Yeah according to different sources it has Tuvan or Mongolian origins
Tour de force
“NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”.
Ok, that one made me laugh.
Simply brilliant on so many levels.
Not only is this the cleverest installment in the series, it’s one of the funniest things you’ve ever written.
Please do more physical publishing!
It's funny how "ethical deepfakes" ethics work for genetically modified food. Genetically modified food is scary and it's pain in ass to get approval. So geneticists do the following: they put plants in horrifying chemicals which would give you cancer if you look at them, hybridize mutants with healthy plants to get something which can survive and check if hybrids have desirable mutation. After several hybridization with normal plants-and-checking cycles you get pretty normal hybrid with desired mutation which you could have made just by genetic editing.
So! When does film production start on the returning season of "Silicon Valley, Effective Apocalypse?"
The only thing that made this funnier was listening to it with that deadpan robotic AI voice
According to Pangram, Tran's whole segment is 100% human-written. Very funny, and if true, a testament to its detection capabilities. I'm assuming you did write it yourself, Scott?
I've gotten the same result in other cases where Scott deliberately wrote like an AI as part of a bit. The man is dedicated to his craft.
some of your finest work
Turns out the Epstart idea should've focused less on employee-matching and pivoted to marriage alliances:
https://nypost.com/2026/08/14/business/anthropic-ceos-wife-once-asked-jeffrey-epstein-to-fund-porn-venture-now-she-helps-steer-the-claude-ai-empire/
My favorite BAHP yet! I loved the through-thread, which I think is the first time a BAHP has had one.
There've been a fair number of running jokes throughout individual BAHP posts. This one was particularly funny, though.
The modern city is spelled "Canakkale" not "Cannakale" in case you want to fix the typo.
Great post!
Thanks, fixed.
cursed with the burden of an unsharable-within-my-immediate-friendgroup funny thing.
thanks a lot, scott
Detroit wants to tell you that you should be working harder. And not just on anything - actual objects that you make with a machine you control with your hands, and the only thinking is going on in your head. That sound you hear is ten thousand muscle cars revving on Woodward Avenue.
And, btw, screw networked parts. DIY will never die.
So grab your monkey wrench and get dirty.
> "My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites"
Apparently the late Jason Arday tried this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday#:~:text=In%20April%202026%2C%20Arday,statements.%5B7%5D
Great stuff.
He's not just the only guy who can write like this, he's the best guy who writes like this!
I ugly-laughed at some of these jokes. Glorious! Thank you for continuing with this madness.
Its very deep and context heavy.
⚰️ “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them.”
One tiny thing, it’s Mongolian singer not Tibetan 🫡☺️
What I found most fascinating about this post wasn’t how theoretical these people are, or how practical they can be. It was that they somehow manage to be both, and I can’t quite figure out the rule for when they switch between the two.
Take the RLHF guy. If your actual goal is to get better at talking to another human being, then which human being is standing in front of you seems like a fairly important variable. What kind of person are they? What do they like to hear? What vocabulary do they use? What kind of phrasing works on them? An AI assistant has good reasons to converge on language that is broadly acceptable, inoffensive, and reasonably well received across a huge range of people. But that’s precisely because it has to work across a huge range of people. If I’m talking to one particular person, why would I throw away the information that I know which person it is?
Then we get to Epstart, and suddenly the attention to concrete reality is remarkable. Most people look at the Epstein files and see scandal, crime, and a lot of extremely unpleasant history. This guy somehow also sees: wait, are there capable or well-connected people in here who could be recruited? Whatever one thinks of the idea itself, that’s an impressively practical piece of information to extract from a dataset almost nobody would think to view as a recruiting pool.
That’s the part I find fascinating. I can follow the reasoning in both cases; I just can’t quite predict what will count as an essential real-world variable and what will get abstracted away.
> "That’s not an an accident"
This is probably an accident, but I want to believe it is not.
beginning seems extremely sam kriss coded