not persuaded that you can learn very much at all about someone online, and this is also probably why people like it. everyone is running from the wound of being actually seen
do you think anything triggered the heightened interoception other than practice? better physical health or something
yea. leftism is largely a coalition of people who see nothing worth protecting in the world. on the other hand once you see something worth saving there really is no limit to the ends employable
Yes. England universalized through strong state eugenics, particularly executing criminals. Gave birth to modernity. Most universalization processes are about inviting the left tail rather than culling it though.
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Has anything become more beautiful as a consequence of becoming more universal (i.e. more broadly accessible and legible)? It seems like there is a sweet spot - e.g., making the Bible more accessible to illiterate peasants resulted in stained glass, which is arguably a more beautiful representation than words on a page - but beyond a certain scope, things seem to degenerate and become ugly. An airport terminal optimized for use by all humans on Earth is sterile & purposefully forgettable (i.e., less beautiful). The universal language on the internet is brainrot; the universal sound is some swampy local minimum between reggaeton & drill
adults without trampolines: ngmi
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yea but we should hear this kind of stuff as a cry for help. society and most of the people in it are deeply sick. for example we were hurtling towards ~100% obesity rates and only managed to reverse course in the last couple of years with GLPs. it's REAL bad out there
My personal intuition is that superposition / polysemanticity is far closer to being safe (albeit in general not interpretable), so recent results should be terrifying to safetyists. This tracks all of our personal experience in life, like rationalists being so easy to oneshot and send off the rails with a single argument leading to a single interpretable prior getting flipped.
The recent "safety" breakthrough is basically a vibe that monosemanticity of neurons is good, but it seems to me that all it means is you only need to wiggle one neuron to send an AI off the rails.
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yea. everyone with high discount rates that isnt too distantly related seems to suffer an acute lack of having ever been loved, even by themselves. not sure about distantly related subpops though
you are missing the point. yea, men generally have a higher sex drive. but if the dick is good women always do. its just that most people are not in good relationships so most people experience female drive as lower
they never tell this part of the story (about Miss Storey), but every case of true love lost results in a boy locking in like this
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People don't understand how insanely high IQ Newton was. This is a man who had no background in math or algebra until he was ~20. In <3 years, Newton got himself to the frontier, then invented calculus, thought of the inverse square law, and the theory of colors & light. He was so intellectually superior he withdrew from the scientific community because he had no peers. Only when Halley was trying to calculate planets' motion by means of an inverse square law, he remembered he knew this old, extremely intelligent professor; he might be able to help him. When the problem was taken to Newton, he said "it's such and such." How do you know, asked Halley. "I proved it a couple of years ago." That's what led to The Principia; it was the exposition of what Newton had uncovered in his younger years and was lying around as a pile of private papers.
alexander retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Strongly endorse this view. A huge security premium is going to be baked into large swaths of the world's energy supply in the coming years and people who can minimize it / avoid it will have huge competitive advantage.
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Spicy take incoming. 🔥🔥
The combined bomber offensive in WW2 finally crippled the Axis powers by destroying their fuel supply chain. Then it took the industrial might of the entire US to build tens of thousands of bombers.
Now anyone between you and the Middle East can burn down a refinery, tank farm, pipeline, or tanker, with an easily assembled robotic flying bomb that costs less than my AI subscriptions.
@PeterZeihan predicted "the tanker war" would happen in the Indian Ocean but it doesn't matter where. There's only one country that could plausibly enforce global peace on shipping lanes and only one industrial power that is self sufficient on oil supply, and it's the same country.
Trump asks Iran and Zelensky to please stop blowing shit up for five minutes, but the primary victims of this phase of the kinetic conflict are China and Europe, both places that have spent decade(s) ignoring and/or undermining the Pax Americana and, in Europe's case, going out of their way to destroy their own economies.
China wants to be a big boy on the global stage? Let them spend their own blood and treasure pacifying the Middle East.
Europe wants to stick it to Trump? It's easier to tell the yanks to get fucked if you don't rely on them for literally every aspect of your industrial infrastructure and economic stability.
I've been in rooms with senior energy ministers from Europe and China. The Chinese are rational and pragmatic, the Europeans are functionally comatose, but neither party has a better plan than getting into a bidding war to buy whatever LNG the US can spare, forever.
It is blindingly obvious to me that the least unstable future equilibrium is one where oil users localize supply using solar synthetic fuel tech, essentially a silico-industrial form of farm-to-table agriculture. Short supply chains, locally secured.
It is equally obvious to me that a generation of people who grew up in the "developed" world are going to endure a decade or more of severe hardship before they, collectively, accept the L and move to the next step. Most people would rather watch their neighbor freeze than admit they were wrong.