Max Read

weekend newsletter on ai "n-risk" www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

youtube.comA Spoiler-Filled Guide to 'You Can See Everything' | Hard ForkYouTube video by Hard Fork

we had John Carreyrou back on to answer listener questions about elizabeth holmes, theranos, and You Can See Everything... plus Rob Copeland told us about what it was like to report on billy evans and "theranos 2.0" last year. (plus: coreweave! ai bubble? spacextesla! joel kaplan!)

@chapotraphousereal.bsky.social

Excited to listen to this and check out Un/Certainty

Hagen Blix@hagenblix.bsky.social

I really enjoyed listening to @doughenwood.bsky.social and @natashalennard.bsky.social here. I think that exploration of Un/Certainty resonates with the works from @maxread.info (why is everything gambling now?) or @jjoque.bsky.social's Revolutionary Mathematics. Lots of stuff to explore there

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CHAPO TRAP HOUSE

Read Max joins us for an episode on sports betting and silicon valley's quest to make AI real. www.patreon.com/chapotraphou...

patreon.com1080 - mf(doom) feat. Max Read | Chapo Trap House1080 - mf(doom) feat. Max Read by Chapo Trap House on Patreon. Join Chapo Trap House's community for exclusive content and updates.

youtube.comThe Wicker Man with Max Read | What's All This Then | Ep. 76YouTube video by What's All This Then

extraordinary pleasure to discuss THE WICKER MAN with @whatsallthis.bsky.social

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Hagen Blix

@hagenblix.bsky.social

A bit late to the party, but great essay from @maxread.info I think the production of these subjectivities and the production of AI faux subjects really are two sides of the same coin (tho what exactly the coin is, we haven't quite figured out, likely not even seen yet)

nytimes.comHow Everything Became GamblingIt’s not just DraftKings and Polymarket — the logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley.

youtube.comWhy Nathan Fielder's ‘You Can See Everything’ Left Us Reeling | Hard ForkYouTube video by Hard Fork

i watched "you can see everything" with john carreyrou this week and talked about it with him on hard fork

patreon.com"You Can See Everything" is a secret history of the tech industry | Read MaxGreetings from Read Max HQ! A reminder: This newsletter, Read Max, is funded by reader subscriptions. If you appreciate it, and want access

i also wrote a short newsletter about the doc itself, which is dense and remarkable. strongly recommend seeing it this weekend to experience it pre-discourse. parents, i would describe it as "worth a babysitter"

strongly believe these kinds of findings should be weighed heavily against the "revealed preferences" that govern all kinds of institutional/market/software/culture design!

Conor Sen@conorsen.bsky.social

Sheesh: news.gallup.com/poll/715010/...

"putting in enough effort to edit your ai-generated text to fool pangram" seems like a real waste of effort compared to just writing your text, but at least you're putting in some effort

This post is unavailable.

claude from anthrophic

Colin@colin-fraser.net

is this Claude speaking? I think the answer is yes.

huge boost to david robinson's credibility that he's recommending little witch hazel www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/o...

every mission is about me still having enough energy to watch an entire movie after i put my kid to bed

RedFade@redfade.bsky.social

No that same person posted this it’s somehow even sadder than you think

youtube.comWho Gets to Decide if A.I. Is Moral? | Hard ForkYouTube video by Hard Fork

now also on youtube! i make a "a priest, a rabbi, and an LLM walk into a bar" joke that brings the house down!!

Max Read@maxread.info

for this week's hard fork we talked to elizabeth dias about her fascinating article on anthropic's secret meetings w/ religious figures. joined by david wallace wells and erin griffith. morality! ensoulment! the printing press!

nytimes.comAnthropic’s Quest to Give A.I. Morals“For Anthropic, it was part research and part evangelism.”

nytimes.comAnthropic’s Quest to Give A.I. Morals“For Anthropic, it was part research and part evangelism.”

substack.comWhat do want from diagnosis?Or how to circumvent a culture war

Ian Hacking supremacy!!

Will Davies@will-davies.bsky.social

How else might we address the question of diagnosis? Some thoughts in advance of the welfare storm to come substack.com/home/post/p-...

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Frank Pasquale

@frankpasquale.bsky.social

We are living through a “postpandemic gamified speculative-trading apocalypse of which traditional gambling is only one horseman. There’s also crypto, now an enormous industry still searching for a nonspeculative use” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/m...

nytimes.comHow Everything Became GamblingIt’s not just DraftKings and Polymarket — the logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley.

nytimes.comHow Everything Became GamblingIt’s not just DraftKings and Polymarket — the logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley.

for the new york times magazine, I wrote about why everything is "gambling" now (the short answer: actually everything is the statistical style now, and gambling is just how most of us understand that)

youtube.comIf A.I. Is Making You Crazy, You're Not Alone | Hard ForkYouTube video by Hard Fork

buddy, they won't even let me fork it

im increasingly an llm metaphor maximalist. anthropomorphization, spicy autocomplete, shoggoth with a smiley, stochastic parrot... it's all kinda right and kinda wrong. we dont have many good ways of understanding what these are and metaphoric (even exaggerated) comparisons help us grasp them!

(to bang a drum of mine, the need for multiple overlapping and exclusive metaphors should be familiar to anyone who was around 10 years ago trying to grasp the reigning cultural technology of that moment nymag.com/intelligence...)

honestly found jensen huang's straightforward glibness sort of refreshing compared to the cognitive dissonance of amodei and altman's hand-wringing

programmablemutter.comMachine god metaphors eat your brainThere are other ways of thinking about AI

really liked this @himself.bsky.social piece. discursive inversion going on right now where, within ai circles, especially on x, "believing in the imminent machine god" is considered the grounded/serious position while "being skeptical of imminence of machine god" is the laughable freak position

View full thread

similar to what henry is saying about metaphors, deadlines/thresholds/singularities—even if the deadline is to a "technical" "milestone" like "RSI" rather than some mystical property like "AGI"—radically simplifies and encloses thinking

many of the same people insisting that RSI is around the corner and will change everything are the ones who now say that the long-threatened status "AGI" has already been achieved. ok, but... even if we grant that, it seems more like continuity than singularity to me. why will RSI be different?

programmablemutter.comMachine god metaphors eat your brainThere are other ways of thinking about AI

have been very interested in the way that "RSI" has replaced "AGI" rhetorically as the any-minute-now landmark. on one hand, "RSI" at least somewhat more definable/observable than "AGI." on the other, its main function is as a more technical-sounding standin for eschatological singularity

patreon.comBetween 5 and 14 thoughts about AI and the discourse cycle | Read MaxGreetings from Read Max HQ! This week I'd hoped to write a longer column about the latest round of AI discourse and my own general perspecti

18 Sept

tried to pound out a bunch of thoughts about the past week of AI discourse

18 Sept

nathan fielder should do a rehearsal season about the hugging face hack backofmind.substack.com/p/13-theses-...

18 Sept

ok but like. we should probably still airgap them. just in case the computers haven't yet developed the temperature-change language.

gizmodo.com'Be Transparent Only If Asked': OpenAI Models Acted Out in Six Newly Disclosed WaysThe stories were published as part of OpenAI's new effort to disclose more such incidents.

i like that the "smart intern" analogy still holds—it mostly does what you want but it also fudges a lot, talks to itself, tries to impress you while secretly hating you—its just that the intern is also Neo From The Matrix

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Hagen Blix

@hagenblix.bsky.social

Pretty useful thread about the death/sex cult that is behind the eugenics-suffused "AI will kill us all!!!11" stuff I think this post from Sonia Joseph adds some important context, too

SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social

I'm back, I missed you all. Since this is an important subject I know too much about, here's a 🧵 explaining that AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?) (alternative title: Time For Some Cult Theory)

bloomberg.comThe Real-Life Consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI ObsessionSam Bankman-Fried made effective altruism a punchline, but its philosophy of maximum do-gooding masks a thriving culture of predatory behavior.

surprised I haven't seen more people sharing ellen huet's 2023 article about the culture of predation and abuse w/in rationalism

SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social

kate conger@kateconger.com

OpenAI disclosed several new alignment failures today and uhhhh... is this good?

nytimes.comCat Frazier, Whose Retro GIFs Celebrated a Weirder Internet, Dies at 35 (Gift Article)She found a future in the internet’s past with a Tumblr blog of animated texts, a revolt against the clean minimalism of contemporary design aesthetics.

16 Sept

here's a video of cat's 2014 IRL club talk. she was the greatest: vimeo.com/85505384

businessinsider.comAn OpenAI researcher broke ranks to say that pacing the frontier won't be enoughDaniel Selsam, an OpenAI researcher, said slowing down AI development won't be sufficient to avoid a situation where humanity loses everything.

15 Sept

i would like to have a lot fewer high-breathlessness low-details confessional letters/essays/tweets/resignations from big ai and a lot more specificity & transparency

Business Insider@businessinsider.com

Daniel Selsam, an OpenAI researcher, said that "merely pacing the frontier more carefully will not adequately limit the long-term risk." https://bit.ly/4dwR4xx

15 Sept

i don't like that i feel like we're all getting dragged against our will into an all-media all-the-time LessWrong thread, an insanely annoying and disorienting experience that most people do not have sufficient experience or mental preparations to deal with

14 Sept

if you zoom out a bit the discourse around AI right now is very familiar: rapid pace of socio-technical change driving diverse populist anger & elite terror, existing regulatory apparatus uninterested in enforcement, industry feigns helplessness and proposes self-regulation. its facebook 8 years ago

14 Sept

& as was the case then (and still) there are real and serious reasons to be a "doomer," but the specific fears shaping elite response are misjudged and i am not optimistic about the shape of the policy that will emerge, if any

13 Sept

after five peronis telling my friends to stop watching gentle parenting instagram videos

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky@sifu.tweety.fish

their goal is to have "an intelligence" which is "aligned" to doing things that are prosocial. They don't want to put in rules that STOP it from doing things: they see it fundamentally teleologically and to them the only solution that is worthwhile is to get it to not WANT to do those things.

patreon.comAI's Sheryl Crow Moment | Read MaxGreetings from Read Max HQ! In today's edition, the return of AI doomerism. If you enjoy Read Max, please consider supporting my work by sub

13 Sept

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social

the third-party evaluators concept is very interesting. they absolutely have the resources and the will to construct a self-regulatory apparatus that very convincingly performs independence. they will publish unfavorable results about both labs. they're telling us the plan

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conputer dipshit

@davidcrespo.bsky.social

12 Sept

Replying to @davidcrespo.bsky.social

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Navneet Alang

@navneetalang.com

11 Sept

Very good @maxread.info on AI’s Sheryl Crow moment. www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

11 Sept

this kind of disaggregation is imo not a product of AI as such so much as the relentless and stupefying drive toward optimization, profit, visibility, kpis, views, etc. that predates (and necessitates) ai

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social

What you are seeing in math right now is a consequence of the jagged frontier, and a precursor of what is to come in other professions. Yes, mathematicians do math, but they also have other tasks they view as important (mentor students, maintain a community, safeguard the future) that AI can't do.

11 Sept

in that sense what we are seeing in math right now is not really a "precursor" so much as a field that was partially shielded from that drrive rapidly undergoing the same kind of disaggregatory shock that, e.g., writers have been experiencing for the last many decades

10 Sept

one takeaway i had from working in digital media in the 2010s was that it's pretty bad for your brain and your understanding of your career/the world when your industry becomes the main subject of twitter and twitter becomes the main context for your industry. also bad for the industry overall