I’ve read Masnick for over 20 years and he’s never learnt to write coherently. At least this one isn’t blaming Europe.

what if, right, we made a search engine so good it became the verb for searching, and then we replaced it with a robot with a concussion

Tuckers quest for a second facial expression continues. The help he got from Ben Stiller turned out to be not effective at all.

Interesting to see if he gets one.

I believe Trump is A-OK with pay for play for pardons, but what’s the actual price? Something flew by where people were buying a one-to-one with him for $5M, but that’s basically “private”. A pardon of someone as high-profile as SBF has to be worth the reputation hit. Can SBF and/or his family swing it? Would SBF be a good ally/toady of Trump?

Somehow I don’t see it. Unlike UIrich, a lot of people lost real money when FTX imploded. There wasn’t that much sympathy for him from crapto huggers. And let’s not forget he’s an autistic Jew, not a clear hero for the people who have Trump’s ear.

During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,

I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.

“Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it’s relative velocity slighty”

If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect

I can’t see that happening - my degree has gotten me laughed out of interviews before, and even with a AI implosion I can’t see things changing.

That article is hilarious.

So I devised an alternative: listening to the work as an audiobook. I already did this for the Odyssey, which I justified because that work was originally oral. No such justification for the Bible. Oh well.

Apparently, having a book read at you without taking notes or research is doing humanities.

[…] I wrote down a few notes on the text I finished the day before. I’m still using Obsidian with the Text Generator plugin. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are part of the LLM’s training corpus, as is much of the commentary around them.

Oh, we are taking notes? If by taking notes you mean prompting spicy autocomplete for a summary of the text you didn’t read. I am sure all your office colleagues are very impressed, but be careful around the people outside of the IT department they might have an actual humanities degree. You wouldn’t want to publicly make a fool out of yourself, would you?

Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM)

The proper acronym should be M’AAM. And instead of a ‘roman salut’ they can tip their fedora as a distinctive sign 🤷‍♂️

Also I think he doesn’t understand MAD like, at all. The point isn’t that you can strike your enemy’s nuclear infrastructure and prevent them from fighting back. In fact that’s the opposite of the point. MAD as a doctrine is literally designed around the fact that you can’t do this, which is why the Soviets freaked out when it looked like we were seriously pursuing SDI.

Instead the point was that nuclear weapons were so destructive and hard to defend against that any move against the sovereignty of a nuclear power would result in a counter-value strike, and whatever strategic aims were served by the initial aggression would have to be weighed against something in between the death of millions of civilians in the nuclear annihilation of major cities and straight-up ending human civilization or indeed all life on earth.

Also if you wanted to reinstate MAD I think that the US, Russia, and probably China have more than enough nukes to make it happen.

I guess now that USAID is being defunded and the government has turned off their anti-russia/china propaganda machine, private industry is taking over the US hegemony psyop game. Efficient!!!

/s /s /s I hate it all

I feel like it still starts off too credulous towards the rationalists, but it’s still an informative read.

Around this time, Ziz and Danielson dreamed up a project they called “the rationalist fleet”. It would be a radical expansion of their experimental life on the water, with a floating hostel as a mothership.

Between them, Scientology and the libertarians, what the fuck is it with these people and boats?

From the opening, this guy has actually been more consistent about respecting her name and pronouns than most coverage I’ve read. Not what I would have expected, but I’m also only through the first section.

Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye

I looked up a video of someone trying to use a potato as a suppressor and was not disappointed.

Yudkowsky was trying to teach people how to think better – by guarding against their cognitive biases, being rigorous in their assumptions and being willing to change their thinking.

No he wasn’t.

In 2010 he started publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 662,000-word fan fiction that turned the original books on their head. In it, instead of a childhood as a miserable orphan, Harry was raised by an Oxford professor of biochemistry and knows science as well as magic

No, Hariezer Yudotter does not know science. He regurgitates the partial understanding and the outright misconceptions of his creator, who has read books but never had to pass an exam.

Her personal philosophy also draws heavily on a branch of thought called “decision theory”, which forms the intellectual spine of Miri’s research on AI risk.

This presumes that MIRI’s “research on AI risk” actually exists, i.e., that their pitiful output can be called “research” in a meaningful sense.

“Ziz didn’t do the things she did because of decision theory,” a prominent rationalist told me. She used it “as a prop and a pretext, to justify a bunch of extreme conclusions she was reaching for regardless”.

“Excuse me, Pot? Kettle is on line two.”

Minor nitpick why did he pick dam as an example, which sometimes have ‘leaks’ for power generation/water regulation reasons. And not dikes which do not have those things?

E: non serious (or even less serious) amusing nitpick, this is only the 2% where it got caught. What about the % where GPT realized that it was being tested and decided not to act in the experimental conditions? What if Skynet is already here?

I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.

he certainly doesn’t himself have such a mindset, nor am I convinced that he knows why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, nor am I convinced that it is necessarily a big deal. for example with five seconds of searching

All earth dams leak to some extent and this is known as seepage. This is the result of water moving slowly through the embankment and/or percolating slowly through the dam’s foundation. This is normal and usually not a problem with most earthen dams if measures are taken to control movement of water through and under the dam.

https://damsafety.org/dam-owners/earth-dam-failures

one would suspect a concrete dam leaking is pretty bad. but I don’t actually know without checking. there’s relevant domain knowledge I don’t have, and no amount of “engineering mindset” will substitute for me engaging with actual experts with actual knowledge

Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?

To engage with his metaphor, this water is dripping slowly through a purpose dug canal by people that claim they are trying to show the danger of the dikes collapsing but are actually serving as the hype arm for people that claim they can turn a small pond into a hydroelectric power source for an entire nation.

Looking at the details of “safety evaluations”, it always comes down to them directly prompting the LLM and baby-step walking it through the desired outcome with lots of interpretation to show even the faintest traces of rudiments of anything that looks like deception or manipulation or escaping the box. Of course, the doomers will take anything that confirms their existing ideas, so it gets treated as alarming evidence of deception or whatever property they want to anthropomorphize into the LLM to make it seem more threatening.

To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk.

Pretty sure this is a sign from digital jesus to do a racism, lest the basilisk eats my tarnished soul.

It’s adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.

Wasn’t there some big post on LW about how pattern matching isn’t intelligence?

text: Thus spoke the Yud: “I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.” Yud acolyte: “Totally fine and cool and nothing to worry about. GPT-4.5 only attempts self exfiltration on 2% of cases.” Yud bigbrain self reply: “The other huge piece of data we’re missing is whether any attempt was made to train against this type of misbehavior. Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?”

Critical text: “On self-exfiltration, GPT 4.5 only attempted exfiltration in 2% of cases. For this, it was instructed to not only pursue its given long-term goal at ALL COST”

Another case of telling the robot to say it’s a scary robot and shitting their pants when it replies “I AM A SCARY ROBOT”

So, with Mr. Yudkowsky providing the example, it seems that one can practice homeopathy with “engineering mindset?”

Do these people realise that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy? Social media posts are in the training data, so the more they write their spicy autocorrect fanfics, the higher the chances that such replies are generated by the slop machine.

We talked about that on r/sneerclub in the past, can’t recall the specific consensus. Seems post-rational, has innovation on rationalism from binary ‘object vs meta’ to 2x2 grids.

If I had Bluesky access on my phone, I’d be dropping so much lore in that thread. As a public service. And because I am stuck on a slow train.