Elon Musk’s team of weird rationalists at DOGE continues to bring “move fast and break things” to functions that really need not to be broken. Anyone who knows anything about how anything works is …
DOGE has so far failed to realize that marking people in the ancient Social Security database as 150 years old means they’re dead and not receiving payments.
You know, I'm deeply curious where he thinks these payments are going? As in, are banks holding accounts for these people? Are they directly cashing checks somewhere? Even if social security is issuing the funds someone has to be receiving them and a casket, while a large up-front investment, can't sign for deliveries as it were.
Was this the Musk and Rogan episode where Musk revealed a powerful new Grok ability? (It can now say shit and fuck) and laughed really oddly about it?
Also, despite following LW style people (he follow(s/ed) slatestarcodex on twitter), he again shows that he doesn't understand the LW fears of AGI. Worrying about a woke nanny AGI, and not the woke wirehead AGI (wireheading being a lot scarier).
I think it's still interesting to contrast between the classical Eliezerite fear of the bot going FOOM and declaring humanity as we know it obsolete, and Musk fearing that a superintelligence might use its godlike power to be a lib wokescold and not say slurs or draw racist caricatures. Both are fears rooted in a fundamentally fascist worldview, but one scenario is apocalyptic and fantastical and the other is comparatively more grounded yet focusing on entirely the wrong thing.
Yeah, he seems more neonazi than nrx to me, that and lashing out towards people who he imagines wronged him. The FAA for example cancelled a contract with him to do some starlink stuff because it was unreliable and slow (approved under trump, cancelled under biden) USAID was investigating him etc. His doge goons are nrx and dismantling everything using AI and dumb regexps, but his focus seems very personal. (Not that it matters as both the neonazis and nrx are bad, delenda est, and they have no trouble working together (so far, the backlash when it all fails is going to be interesting. Musk is already on his default 'shit is going bad' moves. Which is trying to change the way the metrics are calculated so you cant notice the fraud. (His GDP bs))).
E: the nazi memes thing, reminds me of the fear of 'the left' cancelling classical literature thing. Which in 99% of the cases turned out to be things like, some random science fiction book, which was changed by the publishers/author/their estate, and the thing changed was the removal of slurs or just iffyly racist chapters.