Top all-time · #8064
Omniorthogonal
Personal blog · omniorthogonal.blogspot.comprogrammingphilosophy
Omniorthogonal is a personal blog at omniorthogonal.blogspot.com about programming and philosophy. Since 2010, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 36 times, most often “Hostile AI: You're soaking in it”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Omniorthogonal is a personal blog running about 17 years, mostly on politics, religion and non-technical topics, with some Lisp posts. HN links its 2013 post on hostile AI and superorganisms.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The god of abstraction subsumes all other gods.
Most-linked posts?
- Hostile AI: You're soaking in it3 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2013-07-26
- /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-10-05
What Hacker News says?
The system already has been a superorganism/AI for a long time: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?”Submitted Hostile AI: You're soaking in it as a story · 130 points
HN discussionhttp://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/ Mostly quiescent at this point, and mostly about politics and religion and other non-technical matters. But since its been going for 17! years, there's enough thoughts on Lisp to interest hacker types http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/search?q=lisp
Comment linking /search?q=lisp
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Did you know that China is run by engineers? I didn't. as a story · 21 points
HN discussionhttp://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “MailChimp deleted my account with no warning”Submitted Lisp is for Stupid People as a story · 13 points
HN discussionWhile I agree, is there any reason to expect different behavior from a replacement? Even scarier than a single corrupt tyrant, or even a cabal of "shadow government" figures, is the possibility that these institutions have taken on a life of their own, independent from any one actor. http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “Obama Promises Disappear from Web”Submitted Occupy Computation as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSee also: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “Asahi Linux for M1 Macs: progress report for September 2021”Submitted “God” == God as a story · 7 points
HN discussionCorporations are the original unaligned AIs: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre... The threshold to be concerned about is when agents swarms do understand humanity better than corporations and states (and the humans who compose them). It could be we'll hit practical constraints prior to that threshold, but seems unwise to assume that, when all the prognostications of LLMs/transformers runni…
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents”Submitted A Power so Great it can only be used for Good or Evil as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is pretty much Jaron Lanier's argument in You Are Not a Gadget (reviewed here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/02/review-you-are-no... ). They both have a point; systems which reduce human relations to very simpleminded database formalisms cheapen them. But they ignore that the human spirit is (or so we should hope) strong enough to survive Facebook if it is strong enough to survive the other insults an…
Comment linking /2010/02/review-you-are-not-gadget.html
on “The Horrible Future of Social”Submitted “The A-Word”–when “autism” is used as an insult as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe earliest I can recall being exposed to the concept was this 2013 blog article: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “Dude, you broke the future”Submitted Who you calling "coder", coder? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis hits the nail on the head. Alexander has a horror of power struggles and wants to believe they can all be rplaced with debate, but that simply doesn't work. He addresses this somewhat meta-level issue in his posts on Conflict vs. Mistake: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ (and I try and tear it apart here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.h... )
Comment linking /2018/03/conflict-theory.html
on “Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial”> There will never be a "next" Stalin. I find that somewhat naive, especially when Putin is enjoying wide popularity. (Not because he has anything resembling Stalin's track record of evil, but rather to demonstrate that many in the public still desire a powerful unitary executive.) There is an instinct in the human animal that craves charismatic, authoritarian power when times are tough. But even if you're correct,…
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet”https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre... This blog is where I saw the same idea recently, which also links to that post you link.
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html?m=1
on “Remarks on AI from NZ”We're at the middle of the process, not the beginning: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-... "Information has been running on a primate platform, evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense, we have a symbiotic relationship to a non-material being which we call language. We think it's ours, and we think we control it. It's time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving towards its…
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious ”This brings me back to the short essay from a few years ago about the corporation as human-powered AI: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “Ray Kurzweil: AI is still on course to outpace human intelligence”We already live in this reality, as eloquently described by Mike Travers: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-... I also love this quote: "Sometimes confused with a restaurant, [McDonald's] is actually a piece of licensed software 600 pages long, with a QA department, currently running around 14,000 instances in America." http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/12/01/algorithmic-governance-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “The Untouchables – Why it’s getting harder to stop multinational corporations”We already have a world awash in superhuman AI; it's just that this AI is at perhaps the same level of maturity as computers were in the 17th Century. This AI is of course the corporation: Corporations are effectively human-powered, superhuman AIs.[1] By crowdsourcing intelligence, they optimize for a wide variety of goals, their superhuman decision-making running at the pace of Pascal's mechanical calculator. Yet e…
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “Should AI Be Open?”That is, if he doesn't get clubbed with a barbell by Nassim Taleb. https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-anti-kurzwei...
Comment linking /2013/06/the-anti-kurzweil.html
on “Cavities were cured in 1985, and no one knows it yet”I don't mind a few massive assholes; what I fear are the non-human capitalists, mandated to be sociopathic by law: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “Peter Thiel: Competition is for losers”Point: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-... Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “The Servant Economy”Some commentary: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/06/moldbuggery.html The first link there offers a theory of how nerd culture interacts (or tries to avoid interacting) with politics to produce things like libertarianism and neoreaction.
Comment linking /2015/06/moldbuggery.html
on ““A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop””Systems and institutions can be evil even if every single human involved in them are upstanding citizens of good conscience. I think the general consensus of critics is that most NSA employees are decent human beings who (misguidedly) believe in their mission. http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “'60 Minutes': NSA Good, Snowden Bad”Corporations of sufficient size are indistinguishable from quasi-intelligent entities that merely utilize humans as processing nodes: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Comment linking /2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html
on “More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’”The discrete nature of MIDI and its purported effect on music is one of the main example complaints in You Are Not a Gadget , and one of the easier ones to evaluate. Has the richness of music been decreased since the MIDI standard was promulgated, or has it increased? Music is like many other sorts of human information systems (natural languages, laws, business practices) in that there are various forces both for an…
Comment linking /2010/02/review-you-are-not-gadget.html
on “What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web? ”
