🐥 Founder @ https://teapawt.org/t.co/MCoq9YFCzW 🤖 Director of AI @ https://teapawt.org/t.co/uVSPSnHLJ0 💻 AI + writing @ https://teapawt.org/t.co/DXvlOJllLa
Washington, DC
Joined September 2011
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The fact that some animals are purposefully bred into existence only to live miserable lives and then be killed and thrown in the trash is one of the saddest things I can possibly think of
Smithfield reduced food waste by 57%!
This is a win for animals bc less food waste = fewer animals needed to feed the same # of people!
Good work!
meatpoultry.com/articles/335…
I created my own personal news site 🤯
I was tired of scrolling mostly useless things to find the diamonds in the haystack, and thought "shouldn't I just have my own personal news site that filters down to just the good stuff?"
So I did it!
Every morning, my news site shows me a selection of news related to my interests: animal advocacy, AI, science and technology, and general global/US news.
Here's how I did it:
(1) Open up ChatGPT Codex on my phone (connected remotely to my Macbook)
(2) Tell it I want a personal news site that covers these topics, pulling from general news sources, Substack, EA Forum, X, and other related news sources
(3) Tell it to deploy it to a subdomain on my website (my website and domain are on Cloudflare) so I can open it up from wherever, but with a login so only I can access it (through Cloudflare logins)
(4) Check the results, iterate, then tell it to set up a scheduled task to refresh the news daily
(5) If it doesn't have access to something, ask it to troubleshoot or get it to tell me how I can help
Voila! Personal news site. 🎉
People always ask how to have AI help them manage email... so we wrote up a guide! resources.veganhacktivists.o…
If email is a pain point for you, check this out.
I personally have these running and find them extremely useful:
(1) A daily "chief of staff" scheduled task in ChatGPT (desktop app) that surfaces important emails for me each morning
(2) An "Amplify operations" scheduled chat that inserts drafts to participant emails where it can. (It also handles registration operations through Mailchimp and Google Sheets which is super cool.)
Also, here's your regular reminder to be more ambitious in your efforts to help animals! 🚀
Steven Rouk retweeted
Jose Andres says we can’t ban foie gras because we need to solve ICE, global hunger, and ‘so many other issues’ before we can worry about animals.
It reminds me of when I collected signatures in Chicago to preserve the city’s foie gras ban.
In wealthy parts of town, high-minded liberals would chide me: 'You’re collecting signatures for ducks? People are getting shot in this city. You should be ashamed.’
When I went to the poor parts of town — the places where people were actually getting shot — no one said that.
Instead, when I explained how foie gras was made, the near-uniform reaction was: ‘They do that to a bird just so some rich asshole can eat foie gras? That’s f’d up.’ Almost everyone signed.
For political elites, banning animal cruelty is a distraction from the Big Serious issues they’re focused on.
For most people, it’s just common sense.
What backslash Jessica? 🧐😇So we are banning all meats? If Duck goes all goes next? …I’ve been through this in California…..just lets concentrate on things that matter…..cars with children are being shot by ICE, immigrants working in farms and restaurants being deported many with green cards and even citizens…so many other issues! Yes let’s bring the ducks now….one more issue for restaurants to handle!😅🕊️
What a perfectly reasonable take that I wish other people shared
Steven Rouk retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
I think it's only collectively as humanity that we are not idiots. Thus we should expect the contributions of each one of us to be, on average, somewhat idiotic.
The key is that each idiotic contribution from each one of us also usually has a bit of useful truth in there as well.
Society is the somewhat mystical process by which all of the useful bits of our contributions aggregate, while all the idiotic bits eventually cancel each other out. Or at least, that is what we hope society is.
We should therefore endeavor as individuals to decrease the idiocy of our contributions and increase their usefulness, while understanding that, as individuals, there will always be some amount of idiocy to the things that we contribute. We must not let our idiotic parts completely keep us from contributing to this process, lest we deprive everyone of the useful bits we may have.
And we as society should strive to keep building this mystical process through which we pull together all the useful bits of everyone's contributions while lessening the harm that any one idiotic contribution can do.
I keep telling people that plant based foods need to be "functionally equivalent" and cheaper, and then I think no one will care whether it's plant or animal based, and you will get a market shift towards the plant based options. (Or cultivated / precision fermented / etc.)
Plant based eggs in pancakes can serve the function of animal eggs pretty closely—so people don't notice and don't care as much. But plant based eggs are not currently as good of functional equivalents for scrambled animal eggs. It's very noticeable when you have one or the other.
Some people might say "yes but even if plant based or cultivated meat/proteins are functionally equivalent and cheaper, people want to know it came from an animal." This may be true for now but is a secondary preference that has no relationship to the core function itself, so we should expect this preference to disappear over time, just like how most people don't care what material a cup is made out of as long as it serves the function of being a cup well.
People might have a near term preference for whatever they're used to, but ultimately arbitrary preferences are overruled by the core functionality and price of the product. This is one reason why chicken as a meat has exploded in popularity over the last 100 years: it serves many of the same core functions as other meats (nutrition etc.) while being cheaper and perceived as healthier.
In a survey experiment, U.S. consumers were more likely to say they’d purchase plant-based eggs when they cost less and were used to make pancakes rather than served scrambled.
faunalytics.org/what-makes-u…
I just told someone today that I have no idea how a frontier lab CEO can possibly keep everything in their heads and make good decisions
It's too much, and it moves too fast
I'm asking ChatGPT about existential risk due to AI and I keep poking it to update its probability of AI-caused catastrophe based on this year's AI progress, and the numbers only seem to go up the more it looks into it.
"Under the fast-RSI scenario, I now put roughly a 1-in-8 chance on an AI-caused event killing at least a billion people by 2035, and roughly a 1-in-4 chance on effectively permanent human disempowerment."
I typed in one prompt to AI before bed last night and woke up to this Cows With Buns game ready to play: cowswithbuns.stevenrouk.com/
The prompt was basically this (but a tiny bit little longer) running in Claude Code with Opus 5.5:
"I want to make a web game inspired by the viral YouTube video Cows with Guns, a side-scrolling Mario-style thing. I want it to be animal advocacy related; we can create new pro-animal lyrics as needed. I want the whole vibe of the thing to be fun and funny and entertaining, but also with witty animal advocacy and animal welfare messages in there, like you're really rooting for the cows and the chickens and the fish. Brainstorm what would make this fun and entertaining, with the pro-animal message. Include real organizations or ways that people can help animals too as info slides or something. Build the game end to end from scratch."
Technically I needed a second prompt to deploy it to the cowswithbuns subdomain. I did that this morning.
Incredible what you can build with AI these days!
DO DO DO DO DO → local optimum
THINK THINK THINK THINK THINK → nothing happens
Be more like this:
THINK → DO → OBSERVE → THINK → DO → OBSERVE
Only through doing do you move.
Only through thinking and adjusting do you escape local optima.
There's a massive difference between:
1 -- solemnly accepting killing animals as a necessity for survival while still caring deeply about animal welfare (although we can challenge the necessity argument), and
2 -- replying "gosh your post made me hungry" to a post about animal cruelty
Try to be more like #1. Try to be less like #2.
(Extra points: try to be *even more* like #3 -- actively working to reduce suffering wherever you find it.)
If you're stuck in analysis paralysis mode, remember: small reversible experiments can be especially helpful when you're the most uncertain, because they buy information cheaply.
Steven Rouk retweeted
Imagine we discovered a basement crammed with 100 crated animals, filthy from living in their own waste, maniacally chewing the bars of their crates in a hopeless attempt to escape.
We then learned their owner had cut off parts of their bodies — teeth, tails, testicles — with a blunt knife and no pain relief.
We'd call him a sadist, a psychopath, a monster. We'd prosecute him for felony animal cruelty.
Now imagine he called his basement a farm and added thousands more animals in worse conditions.
We'd call him a pork producer. And we'd grant him legal immunity from our animal cruelty laws.
I have qualms with EA as well but y'all really need to understand that (a) EA is not one thing and (2) a ton of it is literally just "how can we help people and animals have better lives and do it more cheaply/easily".
And "communism with extra steps" is a pretty bad characterization, imo. EA is in my experience way more capitalist than much of the left, for example, much to the left's dismay.
Now some EAs may come to conclusions you don't like, but one thing I admire about the EA space is that it's a community norm for them to engage with clear arguments about why they might be wrong. Generally in EA if you think something is wrong you just need to put together a well-reasoned argument for it. I've seen EAs shift on an issue because of a particularly compelling argument that showed a previous position as wrong.
Out of all the things one could point to from all the EA writings, it's kind of hilarious to highlight the most obviously-correct and least-objectionable statement ever. Anyone who spends 5 seconds looking into animal ag knows this is true.
There's someone named Michelle spending 3 weeks in one of these crates in a big plaza in the UK to protest this kind of thing. This is 100% a super evil practice.
Google "Michelle pig crate uk", it'll pop up. Truly heroic "best type of human" kind of behavior.
Big news: The Senate Ag Committee just advanced the Farm Bill WITHOUT the Save Our Bacon Act.
Sen. Joni Ernst tried to add it—legislation that could wipe out state protections and allow the pork industry to return to confining mother pigs in gestation crates so tiny they can’t even turn around.
Imagine spending month after month trapped between metal bars, unable to take a few steps or turn your body around.
We stopped it today. But this fight isn’t over.
One of the most important pieces I've read in months, drop your plans and read this cover to cover: meatmatters.substack.com/p/c…
