Patrick Collison

Boy this fella sure gets around. I’m sure he dutifully attends all the meetings, too; a high-level operator like him can’t just be an open checkbook available to be bilked by any old troglodyte

Good lord it’s a wannabe advertising executive trying to write a Zen fable

In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE)

You came up with your own calendar system centered around your institution and you want to tell me you’re not a cult???

Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.

Dude hasn’t been around. I’ve noticed quite a bit of anxiety around even terminal-supply transmission lines adjacent to new-build neighborhoods in wildfire risk zones. I’ll agree that this is irrational; the big problem is people were persuaded to buy a house in a fire zone because a big landowner and a developer wanted to cash out some marginal land, but there is a degree of actual rationality here. People feel that a big, most likely the biggest, chunk of their personal wealth is at risk. Calling that “straight up moral panic” is ignoring how real people actually rationally calculate risks, and ignoring potential opportunities to help them improve, if that’s really what you want to do.

But we already knew that Zvi was a disingenuous idiot, so I digress.

I really need to pick Simulacra and Simulation back up off the reading pile

That slot will probably be filled by whatever moneyed post-Trump US Southern snake-fondlers Thiel manages to bilk with his Antichrist bullshit. And therefore not likely large or long-lasting

Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.

Art Bell was not a non-problematic person, but if he were still alive, at least this era would have an appropriate narrator. His replacement George Noory essentially turned the show into a shill-a-thon for anyone with woo bullshit to sell (quite literally, any guest I’ve heard since Bell died was clearly there to pull the listener into their sales funnel).

Which makes me a bit surprised that I haven’t heard about any of our friends being booked!

the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything

A corollary to that: the rationalists and those downstream assume that AI, as a technological category, will necessarily be more intelligent and capable than its users. Therefore they are willing (and arguably even enthusiastic!) to uncritically accept badly designed, opaque, and barely-functional software from whoever labels it AI. Learned helplessness in action. They claim to be experts at the highest level, but they’re not even really able to get over the starting line of criticism.

What does Tom Cruise do for Scientology? (Not that I think Radcliffe would have fallen for it, I have the impression that he’s a fairly level-headed guy as former child actors go)

What If: A Chick tract was 600,000 words?

I suppose my kneejerk objection to their appearance reminding me of PUAs from Strauss’ “The Game” is rooted in a fear that it’s another manifestation of the rationalist pathology of reinventing everything from first principles. Rainbow eyeliner and random feathers aren’t inherently terrible on their own. But using over-the-top fashion as a tactic to cultivate more sexual attention was a central part of Strauss’ cohort 20 years ago, it was widely publicized (and often mocked) all over the internet, and that subculture was ultimately harmful to a lot of people! We can learn from the past! And most of the people Strauss hung around with and documented were specifically and obsessively pursuing heterosexual sex and norms, so I don’t trust whatever remains of that culture to automatically be cool with trans and nonbinary people, especially if it gets cross-pollinated with whatever the hell Aella is doing.

Whoever CJ TheX is, they look like they strolled straight out of Neil Strauss’ book. Is it valid to call somebody an “unreconstructed pickup artist” if there was never any attempt at (or even possibility of) reconstruction?

edit: they/them pronouns

I get the impression that The Argument was started as part of the Abundance grift complex? Jerusalem Demsas is certainly one of the more annoying “liberal and tolerant but not like that” writers from the Atlantic. And they’re on Substack and putting effort into it, not just picking it by default, so that tells you something too. So most likely there are TESCREAL bux in the mix, but from the sort who are OK with not foregrounding the Terminator bullshit because it scares the normies.

A very strange story about Bill Gates’ daughter’s startup troubles: https://futurism.com/future-society/bill-gates-daughter-traitor-startup

It honestly doesn’t sound any more shady than any of the bullshit her dad got up to in the 90s (which is to say, it’s still pretty damned shady!), but this Futurism blog seems to be trying to push the story into some sort of bizarre celebrity-gossip soap opera:

While the story has been well hashed out by now, Bloomberg‘s sourcing is noteworthy for what it implies: the leaked Slack messages strongly suggest that someone inside Phia is hell-bent on taking Gates — and quite probably the entire company — down.

Anonymous internal sourcing seems like a typical feature of these exposés, so framing it like this struck me as a laughably absurd overreach. Plus the site has 3 or 4 different tiny articles on this same topic, making me wonder if it’s one of those “any exposure is good exposure” sorts of things where Gates Jr.'s PR team is using the outlet as a cutout to raise her profile.

Bonus laugh line from Gates Jr. herself:

“Our target consumer is a young woman who’s hustling,” the recent Stanford graduate told Fortune. “She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”

What does it even mean to shop like a genius? I guess Erdos probably had his amphetamine plug’s number well-memorized…

So, paradoxically, it’s going to catch on with rationalists any day now?

If you haul garbage to a municipally owned landfill, is that technically a form of nationalization?

And of course our favorite polyamorist turns up:

The most important would turn out to be Amodei, whom she started dating in 2014. Just previously, beginning in 2011 and lasting for three years, she was in a relationship with Schmidt, who was then executive chairman of Google.

Definitely seems like an echo of Altman’s path to influence. If your “meritocracy” keeps empowering these odd mini-Rasputins, where’s the merit?

I mainly understand “foom” as a sound effect onomatopoeia from comic books. Which is totally appropriate given the foundational texts of LW

I’m probably going to stumble over some of the terminology here, but I think it might be possible to describe what @BioMan@awful.systems is proposing as a consequence of LLMs ultimately being lossy compression systems. Inference is a function over a lossily-compressed data set, and “chain-of-thought reasoning” and “agents” may sound sophisticated, but are simply applying containerization and DevOps tools to VM images of the inference application in an attempt to get around hard memory limits on the context window for inference. “Chain-of-thought” attempts this in a serial fashion, passing results from one instance to the next, while “agents” implement this hierarchically and recursively (and woe to the poor bastards who wished that mess upon themselves). But in both cases, the “finalization” phase is necessarily a further lossy compression step, attempting to compress a result from the inference process to a fresh instance of the inference application, so as not to immediately blow out the new instance’s context window.

Given this necessity, it comes to seem somewhat intuitive that there may be “strange attractors” in the higher-dimensional vector space that is the compressed data set which surround code that creates and maintains message passing channels. No matter what you’re doing with an “agentic” process, the inherent necessity of context cramdown & message passing means that querying into the space where such code examples lie is a hidden requisite of running the damned things, thus turning such functionality into the sort of selfish elements that BioMan is talking about.

The problem in investigating and concretely describing this phenomenon is nailing down the exact functions and processes that make it happen. Given the godawful messes in the Claude frontend codebase that @jonny@neuromatch.social has been documenting, I’d be surprised if there’s one developer in a hundred at Anthropic or OpenAI who can describe in detail how the intentionally-developed context-passing code for their “agents” works.

Somebody writes a low-level kernel for Emacs and the revenge of the Lisp machines begins

what the hell is facebook “shipping” that’s so important anyway? more fake trump-as-jesus photos for louisiana snake-fondlers?