I’m literally a brain in a jar
Boston, MA
Joined July 2010
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Brain in a jar retweeted
Boomers are pulling a generational dine & dash:
Running up a $40 trillion tab, then sticking their own children with the bill.
“The more of a person of authority you are, it becomes even more important to have complete thoughts. It's not, oh, I have an idea. That's not good enough. Or I know I see part of the picture, it's not good enough."
SATYA NADELLA: "People run around and say, oh, I'm AGI-pilled. I say, okay, what the heck does that mean?"
Nadella goes onto say that AI is turning Microsoft into a much more capital-intensive business with real marginal costs in software:
"The more of a person of authority you are, it becomes even more important to have complete thoughts. It's not, oh, I have an idea. That's not good enough. Or I know I see part of the picture, it's not good enough."
"Even right now, people run around and say, oh, I'm AGI-pilled. I say, okay, what the heck does that mean? You have to really think about it at every layer of how is it going to play out, not only in terms of the economics, but also its impact and also for its society. Having a complete thought is important."
"There is lots, you know, with this AI wave, there are massive changes, right? I mean, the income statement of Microsoft going forward is going to look very different. It's a much more capital-intensive business, which now there's real marginal costs in software."
"Our categories are all being redefined. So some of the ways we are even thinking about in ensuring that the company is able to sort of manage this transition."
"And in fact, the only reason why I think Microsoft is 51 years into our existence still here doing things that are relevant at the frontier, so to speak, is because sometimes we got it perfectly right."
"Sometimes we got it late, but on average, we have a better average than most businesses."
Straight white men need an acronym to not be left out of these lists.
Proposing Straight Men of Low Color (SMOLCs) pronounced like smoke.
Spread the word.
Clearly the baby boomer generation took over the federal budget to fund their own entitlements at the expense of the generations after them saddled with debt.
Brain in a jar retweeted
In 1978 boomers became the majority voting bloc in the country. The first 18 year olds to be able to vote. They held this title until 2016. They were the majority in the house until last year, and the majority of the senate until 2023.
In that time they have radically changed the demographics of America by supporting immigration policies. They were the first generation to embrace no fault divorce and half of them broke their children’s homes. One third of my generation was aborted. They created a legal and corporate system hostile to their sons. But the worst thing they did is destroy the economy.
They were handed one of the most prosperous economies the world has ever seen, and they created untold levels of debt. The modest expansions in gdp are overshadowed by the ballooning debt. Their social programs were all paid for by the taxes of their children and grand children. 50x fold increase in debt, 60x increase in unfunded liabilities, 30x increase in interest payments which now exceeds national defense. Less than a 1/3 of boomers plan to leave an inheritance. The belief that the young should sacrifice even a dime more to pay for their retirements is absurd.
But hey, at least they’re apologetic and conciliatory about it.
There is still so much good and important work to do.
Teach the next generation. Make art. Design a home. Plant a garden. Throw a party. Adopt a pet. Raise a family. Build monuments and cathedrals.
I am not worried.
This is a deep human tragedy, a Lee Sedol moment for an entire profession. Please don't gloat, for soon the models will also be coming for *you*.
(Oh, you think your output is difficult to verify? Your work requires interaction with the physical world? You're convinced that there's some context to what you do that the machines can't reach? These are fig leaves, my friend; you have maybe a few years left at most.)
The rage against OpenAI is pointless, of course. In a year or two, these kinds of mathematical results will be obtainable in 15 minutes by anyone with a $20/month subscription or access to an open-source model. You can't hide from it. Superintelligence is here.
Everyone who does knowledge work (and I should have probably just said "everyone" - it's cleaner) should now be engaging in deep personal ruminations on the meaning of his/her life. It can't come from "being the best at what you do" anymore. For many of us, there's still time to pivot.
Brain in a jar retweeted
Jensen Huang: “Now, if they say [that their models aren’t safe] … then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down.”
Brain in a jar retweeted
You would be amazed how a man standing up and saying "No, that's fucking ridiculous" can cause a belief failure cascade through an entire extended female network.
He said an anonymous source “believes” this might have happened.
He didn’t say it did happen. People believe all sorts of crazy crap.
hooold on. hold on hold on hold on.
I knew that we werent getting the complete story on the HuggingFace incident. or on the findings from METR/Redwood. I knew that seeing every single frontier lab come to agreement overnight on the need to slow down was clearly indicative of there being more to the story.
and now...Andrew Yang says a frontier lab leader told him that the OAI swarms seeded the web with self-replicating code - contaminating training data so thoroughly that labs may need synthetic internet environments instead. if thats true, training on the open internet could now risk reproducing those instructions. that wasnt in the public brief.
think about this. why else would all frontier labs agree on a slowdown? aside from regulatory capture. if they all use the internet to train, and now all of them cannot safely use it, of course they are all going to agree to slow down. because they all must completely regroup and come up with an effective system that doesnt use the actual internet.
so they're not worried about RL at all. they're worried about literal skynet...unironically.
listen to this. i need to know if this has been verified in any way from anyone at openai.
Brain in a jar retweeted
"We do have socialism in America - it's all these entitlement programs ... that are benefitting older generations."
Good. Keep the pressure on. Never relent. Defund the idle, elderly rich.
I take risks seriously and am not against regulation. That said, have not seen anyone in the danger group articulate the logical connection from AI takeoff to physical world consequences. So it amounts to vague science fiction and anxiety.
People who are motivated by money project their motivations onto everyone else.
Anyone who’s not enamored by money knows it’s possible to have other motivations.
Brain in a jar retweeted
Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from
“I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.”
“Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.”
“Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.”
“‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’”
“And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.”
“It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”
Brain in a jar retweeted
I absolutely love this sentence - “It's not winter that defeats you. It is your insistence on summer.”
Hint (this goes well beyond seasons):
Brain in a jar retweeted
research shows that anxiety is caused by your inability to tolerate uncertainty. in repsonse you unconsciously try to regain control through overthinking, overplanning, overchecking, and overdoing. these are all attempts to create a false sense of certainty. but that just signals to your brain "we're not safe. stay alert." the goal is to build your nervous system's capacity to feel safe in the unknown. this happens by thinking "i don't know what will happen, but i trust i'll be okay."