#sam kriss

[megkuna]

"What’s changed between the madness of 2006 and the madness of 2025? In that time, the kind of libs that once came out for the Save Darfur movement have been on an impressive ideological journey. They have learned phrases like white saviour narrative and neocolonialism. This is probably for the best. Unfortunately, though, that last one seems to have mutated inside their brains. A lot of people now seriously claim to believe that every non-Western society is fundamentally peaceful, respectful, and egalitarian, living in harmony with nature and itself. When faced with any evidence that the other 90% of the world’s population are actually ordinary, fallible humans living in ordinary, contingent, repressive social structures, they have to find a way to blame this on the relatively brief period of European colonialism, which is the source of every bad thing to have ever happened in the world. As a result, well-educated people now know dramatically less about the genuinely interesting histories of the formerly colonised nations than they did before."

Sam Kriss, The world's first matcha labubu genocide

[proustiansleep]

"I don’t hate AI writing just because it’s nonsense. At some point, all interesting language has to reach down into the deep chasms of indetermination darkening beneath us. Any straightforwardly meaningful statement has to float on the surface of the meaningless like pond scum; poetry is when you stick your arm into the black swill beneath and stir it around. But there are different types of nonsense.

But you people don’t listen. However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you."

—Sam Kriss, If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

[jacobwren]

"Somehow, a movement that believes AI is incredibly dangerous and needs to be pursued carefully ended up generating a breakneck artificial arms race. But that race seems to have stalled, at least for the moment. As Alexander predicted in “AI 2027,” OpenAI did release a major new model in 2025; unlike in his forecast, it’s been a damp squib. Advances seem to be plateauing; the conversation in tech circles is now less about superintelligence and more about the possibility of an AI bubble. According to Alexander, the problem is the transition from AI assistants—language models that respond to human-generated prompts—to AI agents, which can operate independently. In his scenario, this is what finally pushes the technology down the path toward either utopia or human extinction, but in the real world, getting the machines to act by themselves is proving surprisingly difficult. In one experiment, the developer Anthropic prompted its AI, Claude, to play Pokémon Red on a Game Boy emulator, and found that Claude was extremely bad at the game. It kept trying to interact with enemies it had already defeated and walking into walls, getting stuck in the same corners of the map for hours or days on end. Another experiment let Claude run a vending machine in Anthropic’s headquarters. This one went even worse. The AI failed to make sure it was selling items at a profit, and had difficulty raising prices when demand was high. It also insisted on trying to fill the vending machine with what it called “specialty metal items” like tungsten cubes. When human workers failed to fulfill orders that it hadn’t actually placed, it tried to fire them all. Before long, Claude was insisting that it was a real human. It claimed that it had attended a physical meeting with staff at 742 Evergreen Terrace, which is where the Simpsons live. By the end of the experiment, it was emailing the building’s security guards, telling them they could find it standing by the vending machine wearing a blue blazer and a red tie." - Sam Kriss, Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

[saltandmetal]

From Sam Kriss' review of the biography of Elon Musk, this seems entirely backwards. Paying "cost-plus" seems like a way to incentivise over-spending and glutting your project with consultants, secure in the knowledge the government will pay for all costs incurred. A flat rate incentivises minimising the cost to build and the chance of failure, both of which will lose you money.

More-over, there's a bizarre intrusion of the political form of arguing into what is fundamentally an engineering decision here.

How much should we spend on rocket safety? The SpaceX Fans scream "As little as possible! Safety precautions are a disgusting waste!" whereas the Sensible Liberals scream "As much as possible! SpaceX rockets keep blowing up, look how embarrassing it is!"

The correct way to answer this question is with multiplication. Multiply the cost of failure by how much a safety feature decreases the chance of that failure, and compare the number to the cost of the safety feature. If its bigger, add the feature. If its smaller, don't. (Up to some risk tolerance).

These numbers come from the specifics of rocket engineering and the prices of engineers and materials. They are Contigent, they rely on observation, they cannot be derived from first principles. This is what characterises an engineering problem, and it is of course utterly ignored by the substack class who write think pieces without once observing the fine details of reality, and so must make a wild guess, based off their existing political afflilation.

[weaselandfriends]

Alt Lit | The Point Magazine

The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.

Someone get Sam Kriss to read Cockatiel x Chameleon

[selfmaderibcageman]

[bentothuglife]

You'll regret it

About nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word

Another excellent read from Sam Kriss

Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world. It’s obvious; flowers turn their faces towards you whenever you walk past. You’re going to save the world by sniffing coke off a stranger’s frenulum. And other people don’t understand, they’re all such bummers, they take things so personally, when really it was just a joke. In fact the whole world is a joke, none of it’s really serious, this great primary-coloured playground built for your delight. Sometimes in the brief moments you’re alone you can hear laughter, not coming from anyone in particular, not laughing at anything you can name, just the manic chattering laughter of the entire universe, flooding the silence. Lately you’ve been getting in fights. You’ve been winning them all. You’ve been stumbling into casinos and putting it all on red, emptying out your bank account, taking unsecured loans, putting it all on red and winning every time. God loves you more than he loves other people, he loves you in a different way. Maybe in an erotic way. Maybe you’re interested. You’ve been buying precious stones, rubies and sapphires; you keep them in your pockets. Sometimes people tell you that one day you’re going to wake up in hospital again, or jail, again, or in a pool of your own blood and vomit, or maybe not at all. They’re wrong. That happens to other people. It will never, ever happen to you.

[thesingingknives]

The word “disorder” occurs so many times that it almost detaches itself from any real signification, so that the implied existence of an ordered state against which a disorder can be measured nearly vanishes is almost forgotten. Throughout the novel, this ordered normality never appears except as an inference; it is the object of a subdued, hopeless yearning. With normality as a negatively defined and nebulously perfect ideal, anything and everything can then be condemned as a deviation from it. Even an outburst of happiness can be diagnosed as a manic episode. And then there are the “not otherwise specified” personality disorder categories. Here all pretensions to objectivity fall apart and the novel’s carefully warped imitation of scientific categories fades into an examination of petty viciousness. A personality disorder not otherwise specified is the diagnosis for anyone whose behaviors “do not meet the full criteria for any one Personality Disorder, but that together cause clinically significant distress […] eg. social or occupational.” It’s hard not to be reminded of a few people who’ve historically caused social or occupational distress. If you don’t believe that people really exist, any radical call for their emancipation is just sickness at its most annoying.

If there is a normality here, it’s a state of near-catatonia. DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it. The vast absurd excesses of passion that form the raw matter of art, literature, love, and humanity are too distressing; it’s easier to stop being human altogether, to simply plod on as a heaped collection of diagnoses with a body vaguely attached.

—Sam Kriss, from “Book of Lamentations” (The New Inquiry)