slackmobiles<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0They agreed to pay Lind $1,000 a month for space that would accommodate four trucks.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\u201cI didn\u2019t want us to stay there for very long,\u201d Danielson says. \u201cI wanted us to arrive there, get box trucks for Emma and Somni, outfit those box trucks, and then get out. That\u2019s what I wanted, and that\u2019s what I kept trying to push for.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe foursome had been on the lot for a few months when the pandemic struck in March 2020. That same month, the price of Bitcoin \u2014 in which most of Borhanian\u2019s life savings was invested, money that was covering much of the group\u2019s expenses at that time \u2014 cratered. Soon after, the four of them stopped paying rent to Lind altogether.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tFlowers sit outside of the property where Lind was killed in Vallejo, California.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJanie Har\/AP<\/p>\n
\n\tLaSota, in particular, Danielson says, took the pandemic and the risk of Covid infection extremely seriously. When anyone left the lot, whether for court appearances or errands, they wore full-body dust suits and full-face respirators,\u00a0the kind that resemble a gas mask. When they returned, they would sanitize their suits, gloves, masks, and shoes \u2014 anything that had been exposed \u2014 using UV lights and sanitizer, Danielson says. \u201cIf one of us messed up the containment process, which I think I did once, then I was in quarantine from the rest of them for a few weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson says, \u201cWe took it very seriously because if any one of us got sick then all the rest of us could have gotten sick, and that could lead to permanent degradation of the ability to think, and the ability to work on problems that were important.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile Danielson was responsible for logistics \u2014 work that included outfitting the group\u2019s trucks and getting groceries \u2014 and Ziz was taking responsibility for dealing with the legal fallout from the protest. Leatham and Borhanian, Danielson says, weren\u2019t doing much at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWe were talking about philosophy a lot,\u201d Danielson recalls. Increasingly, the person driving the group\u2019s philosophical discussions \u2014\u00a0and driving them in a direction Danielson was becoming uncomfortable with \u2014 was Borhanian, whom Danielson describes as \u201cthe most intelligent person that I\u2019ve ever met \u2014 for good and bad.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cEmma accelerated philosophies towards violence,\u201d Danielson says. She was an edgelord, prone to taking \u201ca philosophy out to its limits \u2014 scenarios where that philosophy might, as stated, compel violence, or might seem to justify it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cExploring the limits of a philosophy is a way to poke holes in it, and that is how some philosophical advances happen, but it\u2019s also a way to get people to accidentally make commitments to things that they wouldn\u2019t have made,\u201d Danielson says. \u201cIt was a challenge because Emma would introduce some interesting concepts that were entangled with these violent attitudes in a way that took work to disentangle\u00a0 \u2014 and it took a special work because Emma was really intelligent.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson believes Borhanian exerted particular sway over LaSota, with whom LaSota, Danielson says, had begun a romantic relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBy spring of 2022, Danielson was deteriorating mentally \u2014 to the point where they were considering suicide. \u201cI was not liking the direction things were going in terms of Emma\u2019s philosophy holding weight in the group. The fact that we were still there [on Lind\u2019s lot] and everything was stagnant, nothing was moving\u2026\u00a0I was just constantly dealing with sirens going off, metaphorically speaking. Like, standing on the bridge of an aircraft and all the alarms are all going off, all the time.\u00a0That had been the state things were in.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn March, they wrote a note to LaSota, telling her they were leaving all of their belongings, including their truck, to the group. Then Danielson walked off the property on foot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson says they spent the first couple of nights sleeping by the tracks in Vallejo, then in a park in Benicia. \u201cI was holding myself ready to commit suicide while I paused to think through my philosophy on the matter, consider whether there were other alternatives,\u201d Danielson says. \u201cI eventually came to the conclusion that there was an alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson says they made their way to East Bay, where they slept in a homeless encampment in Berkeley at night, and picked up enough work as a day laborer to pay for a cross-country bus ticket. \u201cThe Bay Area was not a good place for me to heal,\u201d Danielson says. \u201cI traveled to the other side of the country\u2026 Frankly, the place that I found was a very, very good choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThat place, Danielson says, is where they were living in the fall of 2022, when Curtis Lind sought and obtained a court judgement ordering Danielson, LaSota, Borhanian, and 19 other individuals \u2014 names, Danielson believes, Leatham used for Amazon deliveries that arrived at the Vallejo lot \u2014\u00a0to pay him more than $60,000 in back rent. (Danielson says they were not aware of the judgement or the fact that they were named in it.)<\/p>\n
\n\tLind had already initiated eviction proceedings against the remaining tenants when, early on the morning of November 13, 2022, he was allegedly attacked by Borhanian, Leatham, and a third person, identified in court documents by the name Suri Dao, whom Danielson knew by their Discord handle, Silver-and-Ivory.<\/p>\n
\n\tLind \u2014\u00a0despite being stabbed in the eye and impaled with a samurai sword \u2014 managed to survive the attack. Borhanian, whom Lind shot, did not. Leatham and Dao, arrested at the scene, were charged with both Borhanian\u2019s murder and the attempted murder of Lind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tLaSota, who was handcuffed at the scene and brought to police headquarters for questioning, was never charged in the incident. Police say Lind did not identify her as one of his attackers.<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson was not on the scene the day of Lind\u2019s attack, Vallejo police confirm, but several days afterward, someone who gave police Danielson\u2019s name was detained at the Vallejo property, according to public records. Danielson denies they have been back to the property, and they shared personal records with Rolling Stone that indicate they were in another state at the time; they believe it was LaSota who gave their name to police. (A lawyer representing LaSota declined to comment for this story.)<\/p>\n
\n\tTwo months later, LaSota resurfaced in Pennsylvania, where state police, investigating the murder of\u00a0the parents of a Rationalist named Jamie Zajko, found her in a hotel room rented to Zajko\u2019s housemate, Daniel Blank.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tDanielson is ready to return to their work on AI alignment. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGriffin Lotz for Rolling Stone<\/p>\n
\n\tDANIELSON SAYS THEY LEARNED OF THE first attack on Curtis Lind through an internet search in early 2024, more than a year after the fact. They had plugged LaSota, Borhanian, and Leatham\u2019s names into DuckDuckGo, curious if the trio had resolved the legal problems stemming from the 2019 protest.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have surprised me terribly if they just stopped showing up to court, or if they\u2019d done some silly thing in court and got some kind of contempt order \u2014 these are things that I could easily have expected to see in the news,\u201d Danielson says. \u201cI did not expect what happened and I was confused by it\u2026\u00a0It was an enormous shock to my system\u2026 I was horrified and sad.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson was only slightly heartened to note that LaSota was not arrested in connection with the attack on Lind. Maybe, they thought, the incident served as a wake-up call. \u201cI had hope that Ziz saw that and was like, \u2018Holy fuck,\u2019 and went her own way \u2014 kind of like I did. I hoped that she had done that, but that isn\u2019t what happened,\u201d Danielson says ruefully.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn February 2025 \u2014 a few weeks after Lind was attacked a second time, fatally, by an admirer of LaSota\u2019s named Maximilian Snyder \u2014 LaSota was arrested, along with Zajko and Blank,\u00a0in Maryland. The three of them face felony charges related to weapons possession and possession of drugs with intent to distribute, as well as a number of misdemeanors, including trespassing. All three have pleaded not guilty and requested a joint trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin in June. (Blank was released on bail in February.)<\/p>\n
\n\tLaSota faces a separate case in federal court, where she is charged with being a fugitive from justice in possession of firearms and ammunition. She pleaded not guilty and is currently in federal custody, awaiting an assessment of whether she is mentally competent to stand trial.<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson says they are still struggling to process everything that has happened. \u201cI believe Ziz has made some mistakes, and our philosophy has diverged, but I don\u2019t think the mistakes she\u2019s made were bad enough or of quite the right sort to be the direct cause of what happened\u2026 What I can imagine is her hanging around people who misinterpret her philosophy, for whom the mistakes in it channel their own mental issues in a bad way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tDespite everything that has been reported, they still miss LaSota. \u201cWe were good friends,\u201d Danielson says. \u201cShe risked her life on my behalf, multiple times \u2014 sometimes just for my mere material interests\u2026 She led me to becoming a better person, and then also kind of contributed to me becoming a worse person, from which I healed, but still that former part does exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cShe is, still to this point, the one that I compare my other relationships to,\u201d Danielson adds. \u201cI don\u2019t know how to say it, but, yeah, I miss her, and\u2026 I hope for a resolution to this where she gets to heal. But, at the moment at least, I may be the only person in the world really meaningfully pursuing that objective.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDanielson\u2019s own healing process has been a slow one. It started, simply, with making a friend, then beginning to talk with a person they call their \u201cnot-formally-a-therapist,\u201d then joining Dungeons and Dragons games, and talking anonymously in Rationalist Discord servers. Those things helped Danielson restore their \u201cfoundations for social interaction.\u201d\u00a0The harder part of that process came later: \u201cIt was about being able to trust myself,\u201d Danielson says.<\/p>\n
\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n
\n\tFinally, Danielson says, they are feeling ready to return to their work on AI alignment. \u201cFor a lot of years, the idea of paying attention to what\u2019s happening in the field of AI was too scary\u2026 Just a concept I wasn\u2019t ready to handle in its totality,\u201d Danielson says. \u201cI had to put certain parts of myself back together before I could deal with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s something Danielson wants for LaSota one day, too \u2014\u00a0even as that feels somewhat foolhardy today. \u201cThere aren\u2019t a lot of people that I put any degree of faith in into being capable of solving alignment \u2014 or solving anything that really contributes to or creates the environment in which a solution to alignment can arise. Eliezer is one of them, myself is another. Ziz is someone that I also had some of that hope in \u2014\u00a0and reading what happened kind of dashed a lot of that hope.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"G wen Danielson has eyes like a pair of blue marbles, cheekbones that could cut glass, and an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74,262042],"class_list":{"0":"post-602331","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-ziz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}