It’s going to get ugly on the AI front

Normally, I’d say that Sam Altman deserves any pushback he gets. But the AI hatred seems to be getting a little too intense.

On the morning of Friday, April 10th, a 20 year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama was arrested for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Less than two days later, police arrested 25 year-old Amanda Tom and 23 year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein for allegedly firing a gun at the same house from their car before speeding away.

Earlier the same week, and thousands of miles away, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots into the front door of city councilman Ron Gibson, who had just voted to approve a new data center in Indianapolis against a groundswell of public outcry. A sign that read “NO DATA CENTERS” was left tucked under the doormat.

I can understand why all the AI-hate: data centers are environmental catastrophes, they represent a gross invasion of our privacy, they don’t seem to contribute much of value to society, but wow, they sure help improve billionaires profits. Unfortunately, in addition to a rational opposition, there are also crackpots with bizarre paranoid fantasies.

Little is known about the motives of Tom or Hussein, or the politics of the Indianapolis shooter, but reporters and the online commentariat quickly dredged up Moreno-Gama’s Discord chats and Substack posts. He was a reader of rationalist and AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argues, as the title of his last book puts it, if Silicon Valley builds a “superintelligent” AI, “everyone dies.”

Yeah, if you’re citing Yudkowski, you’re a victim of extreme derangement. I guess it’s predictable that if your reaction is to throw molotov cocktails at people’s houses, you’re probably not building your case on a sound foundation. AI is not superintelligent, or even intelligent at all, it’s a tool that can be used by bad people to do bad things. Unfortunately, it’s also the case that AI proponents have built up this gigantic edifice of hype, pumping up the imagined power of AI to the point that they are actively asserting that it might lead to the end of humanity.

If you take at face value what the AI executives themselves have been saying for the last decade, that an AI powerful enough to make humans go extinct is nascent, then acting with force to stop it would be a rational action. The AI industry and its executives—including Sam Altman—need to own this outcome, not blame it on Yudkowsky, safety researchers, or worried activists who take what they say literally.

That’s fair. The people who have pumped up the hype are reaping what they have sown.

The nonsense promoted by the Less Wrong crowd isn’t the real danger, though. This is the real danger:

Inequality is through the roof. A bona fide tech oligarchy is ascendent, buffeted by leverage provided by AI. Its data centers, which bring few jobs and hike electricity bills, are enraging communities on the right and the left. Slop is everywhere. AI-generated art and text is undercutting creatives, powered by pirated, non-consensually ingested work. Employers from Amazon to Block to Duolingo to Meta are firing tens of thousands of workers and citing AI as the reason. AI may one day cure cancer, we’re told; great, even if we believe that, who will be able to afford the treatment?

That’s the anger fueling the anti-AI violence. To the handwringing AI industry insiders blaming doomers and poor messaging, ordinary people are saying: Wake up. We have good reason to hate AI and the people who profit from it. And yes, as people get desperate, as young people increasingly feel like AI elites have mortgaged their future, as residents who vote to regulate AI or ban local data center projects only to see their will overridden in favor of industry interests—well how do you expect them to feel? What do you expect? There is a distinct risk of further escalation.

If I had the opportunity to vote to stop the construction of a local data center, I’d take it, no question. I’m not at the point of throwing molotov cocktails, though. At the rate this country is falling apart at the hands of the oligarchs, give me a year to come around.

Medical mystery explained

Back in October, Trump got an MRI as part of a supposedly routine physical, which was weird. MRIs aren’t routine, they’re usually done in response to specific concerns, and further, Trump didn’t know what was scanned.

Following persistent social media speculation, as well as a November 30, 2025, call from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to release Donald Trump’s MRI results from his October visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (via Twitter), reporters aboard Air Force One pressed the president to clarify the reason for the advanced imaging. Trump said he didn’t know which part of his body was scanned, but insisted, “It wasn’t the brain, because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.”

I think that a legitimate part of a cognitive test would be to put the person in a massive clanking, clunking machine on a dolly that shuffles them back and forth and ask them what was scanned. If they don’t know, they failed it. Amazingly, I’ve had two MRIs this past year, once for my head and once for my knee, and I knew exactly what they were for every step of the way.

I am pleased to know what the purpose of the president’s MRI was, finally.

President Trump undergoes MRI of rectum to determine just how many Republicans remain firmly wedged there.

We still don’t know the number, though. I’m sure it was huge, really huge, the biggest crowd ever.

How is your alma mater holding up?

This is news to make a professor shudder: a university closing its doors.

A Massachusetts liberal arts college is set to close permanently due to low enrollment and financial problems.

The board of trustees of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst founded in 1965, pointed to “financial pressures” that have been “compounded by shifting external factors”.

Universities have been under attack for decades, thanks to our ‘friends’ in the Republican party. Authoritarians and conservatives hate new ideas and helping people rise up out of poverty, and they’ve been whittling away at support for universities, throwing so much debt onto the shoulders of our students. The pandemic hit many colleges hard, too.

Hampshire College hits a little bit close to home. It was a little smaller in enrollment than UMM, my school, and was founded a bit more recently. It was also a liberal arts college, like mine. It differed in some significant ways. According to Wikipedia:

The college utilizes an alternative curriculum, with an emphasis on progressive pedagogy and self-directed academic concentrations, a focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and a reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs.

That’s interesting and I appreciate innovative education, but it does make the work of that university harder. UMM has a more traditional curriculum, but we’ve also struggled over the past few years. Our enrollment bottomed out about two years ago — which is why my senior level genetics course has only 8 students this year, rather than the 30-40 I used to see. (We’re working ourselves out of this hole right now — my fall courses are fully enrolled already, and we may have to pack more students into the class.)

The situation of Hampshire College is a reminder that the situation of all universities in this country is precarious.

What’s an atheist to think?

Here’s a conflict in human thinking in general. It’s revealed in this old exchange between Mehdi Hasan and Richard Dawkins.

Hasan is a believing Muslim, and Dawkins asks if he believes that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan says he does, that he believes in God and in miracles. Dawkins is incredulous.

My position, as a hard atheist, is that I agree that those are ridiculous beliefs that contradict reality and reason, and that it is very silly to believe in gods. I’m going to side with Dawkins a little bit on this one.

At the same time, though, I’m also going to side with Hasan a little bit…maybe a lot. He concedes that he could be wrong, which is a position I will always favor; he’s demonstrating tolerance for ideas that differ from those of his faith. I’ve never heard Hasan proselytize for Islam, and he says that he’s teaching his own child about Islam, which is fine with me as long as he’s also introducing that child to his principles of tolerance and a willingness to concede the possibility of error.

I also believe that everyone holds silly beliefs. Many people will go into the world of a movie or video game and suspend their strict adherence to the rules of reality for a while; I don’t think they go insane while doing that. Humans have an amazing capacity for stretching their minds out of congruence with nature, and that’s a good thing — we’d have no art, no music, no literature, if we didn’t have that ability. Some people might believe that the Minnesota Vikings are the greatest football team in the world, or that they’re a great cook, or that the sound of church bells is esthetically superior to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. We don’t condemn them for that, as long as they’re willing to tolerate the existence of church bells and the muezzin. I’m comfortable with a Catholic church down the street from me as long as they aren’t trying to compel me to revere a cracker.

The big question in my mind is always going to be what are you going to do about it? You can disagree with me about evolution, for instance, and I’m going to think you are a very foolish person, but I’m not going to have you arrested or burn down your church. On the other hand, I don’t trust a religious fanatic to not try to make my university illegal, or censor the things we teach — we’re already seeing that happening. You can’t police a belief or an opinion!

I’m afraid I don’t trust Richard Dawkins to not be authoritarian. He has strongly held beliefs of his own, about how science is the only acceptable approach to understanding the world, or about how people’s perspective on gender should be tolerated, and I think he has already been abusing the respect he earned for his science and writing to advocate for oppression and intolerance. Don’t give him any more influence.

So far, Mehdi Hasan seems to be mainly advocating for human rights for all people, and is acting as a positive influence in the world.

I could be wrong. I hope I’m not.

It’s official

I just submitted the official university paperwork resigning from my appointment as of April 2027. One more year, and then I’m outta here.

Don’t ask me how I feel about it yet. Ask me a year from today, when it gets real.

Right now I’m mainly stressed about the fact that Boeing sent me a letter saying they overpaid on my mother’s death benefits, and they want $5000 back right now. On the one hand, that’s peanuts for Boeing, they can go overcharge the government for a bolt to get that money back; on the other hand, do I really want to get in a fight with Boeing?

Penalize ALL the TikTok psychics

One of the worst things I can imagine happening in my world is the death of a student. These are our charges, we get to know them and feel responsibility for them, and the pain of loss is deeply felt. Even worse is when students die violently. They’re young, and should have a long life ahead of them.

The second worst thing would be for a teacher to be falsely accused of killing a student, especially when there is no evidence suggesting such a thing. It’s more than a civil and criminal accusation, it’s morally villainous.

In 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were brutally murdered. This was a heinous act without excuse. The man who did it was arrested, confessed, convicted, and was sentenced to life in prison. In the wake of the murders, though, a woman named Ashley Guillard was riding high on social media, claiming to know who the killer was on the basis of her psychic powers and making TikTok video after TikTok video declaring that the tarot cards told her that a history professor at the University of Idaho, Rebecca Scofield, had been having an affair with one of the victims and had had them all killed.

Before authorities arrested Kohberger in late December 2022 in connection with the victims’ brutal stabbing deaths, Guillard published videos on the TikTok platform baselessly alleging Scofield had engaged in a romance with one of the four people slain.

Guillard – who is a resident of Houston, Texas, and described herself as a psychic crime solver on her TikTok account – accused Scofield on camera of ordering the quadruple murder to hide her relationship with one of the victims. She cited tarot card readings as evidence to support her unfounded theory.

It was a ludicrous accusation. Flipping cards in Texas will not tell you who the perpetrator of a crime in Idaho was, but apparently making inflammatory accusations without evidence was Guillard’s only claim to fame, and she profited off the attention she got for lying about people. Her slanders finally caught up with her, though: Scofield sued and won a $10 million award from her.

In a June 6, 2024, order, a federal judge sided with Scofield, ruling that the internet personality’s statements were defamatory and based “only” on her “spiritual intuition about the murders” — not “any objective basis.”

The judge also noted that Guillard’s social media posts continued even after the Moscow Police Department issued a press release in December 2022 stating that Scofield was not a suspect in the murder investigation.

Now Guillard is crying and calling the ruling Unfair!. Too bad. Slap her down hard, teach her that you can’t profit off false accusation. If she wants to complain about anything, it’s that TikTok has incredibly lax policies about enforcing rules and rights online. If you enthusiastically charge into a wild wild West of lawlessness and you get gunned down in a shootout, you don’t get to blame someone else.

Let’s extend the verdict. Anyone making factual claims on the basis of tarot cards, psychic powers, or Bible prophecy are charlatans who ought to face the full weight of the law when their claims harm people. Stupid people babbling on social media are small potatoes — go after the people who claim that politicians have divine favor because a god whispered in their head that they must be supported in even their most damaging actions. Prosecute those who claim to wage holy war first of all.

Losers

I am encouraged by the defeat of Victor Orban in Hungary. I’m happy for the people of Hungary throwing off the yoke of fascism and having hope for the future, and for the people of Europe as a whole building a stronger alliance.

But I’m selfish. I’m also happy to see JD Vance flop hard; it was unbelievable to me that Republicans from America were campaigning for Orban. Vance was politicking for Orban just recently, as part of his personal campaign to appear ‘presidential,’ and many right-wingers have been on the Orban train for a long, long time. The Hungarian election was a harbinger of the American elections to come, and the message is clear: Vance is a loser. Republicans are losers. Trump is a loser. They should be nervous, because they’re all just waiting for the axe to fall.

Down, down, in the dark

Shirtsleeve weather, the sun is shining bright, and there are stirrings in the darkness. I prowled about my yard, searching for spiders, but the best I could find was spider-sign — they’re out and about, leaving strands of silk in crevices and corners, but I saw none.

That is, until I turned to the ever-reliable compost bin. I found even more silk everywhere in there, but to find an inhabitant I had to bend over and stick my head upside down deep into the bin, way down low until I was look just above the edge of the decaying plants, and there at last I found one, a familiar old friend, Steatoda borealis.

S. borealis is entirely black in body color, and she was on the side of a black bin, in shadow, deep in darkness, so getting any kind of photo was difficult. But there she was, my first Theridiidae of the new season.

This compost bin is a favored spot. I think they snuggle down in the layers of rotting glop and overwinter there, and then they’re the first to reappear once the weather well and truly breaks. It’s kind of sweet to think of them sleeping down in the dark, in the mulch, all winter long, waiting to reemerge.