Crowstep
6d ago
People are still masking in the year of our Lord 2026?! I had to check the date. I had expected it to be from 2022.
I find it strange that there is a bar that requires masking. You would think the kind of hypochondriacs who are still scared of COVID (?) wouldn't want to go outside at all.
Crowstep
15d ago
But surely if the Chinese companies aren't going to pace the frontier, then the US frontier companies have even less incentive to slow down (or in this case, to lobby the government to force them to slow down)? If the US government forces them to slow down, then their Chinese competitors will find it easier to overtake them. The fact that they are lobbying for a slowdown in spite of this suggests that their stated concerns about alignment are real.
The best explanation of the C-suite AI safety concerns is that the frontier AI companies are not making enough money to justify their capex
That explanation is certainly popular on Reddit. It combines cynicism and a dislike of big corporations, and it demonstrates the poster's intelligence. Other variations include that the frontier companies are worried about open source models threatening their business model or that they are juicing the numbers for an upcoming IPO. If you want to get really spicy, you might claim that Hugging Face was a publicity stunt and was deliberately set up.
But is it really the best explanation? I would say the best explanation is that the people who know most about AI are genuinely worried about it. They have been talking about the risks for years, after all. They've read about the Hugging Face incident and the similar cyber attacks from Anthropic. They understand the race dynamics involved, both between frontier companies and between the US and China. They've read AI 2027. And above all, they've seen what the internal, unreleased models can do and know how they are training the next generation to be even more powerful.
Crowstep
18d ago
Angus Barbieri survived for more than a year with literally no food. He was obese and lived off his stored body fat, which presumably included lots of PUFAs from all the deep fryer oil (he worked in a fish and chip shop). There's a school of thought (that I subscribe to) that it's actually excess PUFAs in vegetable oil that is causing the obesity epidemic.
IIRC, lioleic acid has a half-life of about two years, which could explain why it's so hard to lose weight through dieting. If your body fat is full of linoleic acid and it has such a long half life, any calorie controlled diet is just going to release a bunch of LA into your bloodstream.
Crowstep
18d ago
*Please note, lack of essential fats - rabbit starvation - is literally the fastest-killing form of malnutrition; if you were to eat a truly fat-free diet, you'd be incapacitated in a week and dead in three.
Rabbit starvation isn't caused by lack of fat. It's caused by lack of fat and carbs. Or more accurately, by excessive protein. The body can survive for months and up to a year with zero fat because it makes its own fat from carbs, as well as having stored body fat.
Crowstep
20d ago
And not to sound like a broken record, but what is really really means is "please please regulate us so we can get an oligopoly and cash out our insane valuations before China eats our lunch"
If it's in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI, why isn't this coming from their press offices instead of individual employees? And why aren't the two companies putting out a joint statement?
Also, China only has about 16% of global compute. They only way they are staying 6 months behind the frontier is by distilling the American models. They're not about to eat anyone's lunch.
Crowstep
22d ago
Yes that's part of it, but there are 1.3 billion people in Subsaharan Africa, and that subcontinent isn't producing nearly as many smart fraction people. Nor are any Subsaharan countries doing the kind of O-ring stuff that India is managing.
Crowstep
22d ago
The interesting thing about the subcontinent is that they built nuclear bombs, run high end-intelligence programs, and Pakistan has a heck of an Air Force. These are very hard problems, and subcontinentals achieve them
I don't know about Pakistan, but Indians aren't really an ethnic group. 3000 years of caste-segregated breeding means you essentially have a country with thousands of ethnic groups, some of which are very smart. It's as if India was 5% Ashkenazi, 10% Chinese, 15% Polish, 20% Algerian and 50% Somali. Their smart fraction is providing half the CEOs to Silicon Valley while 20% of the country can't read.
Crowstep
22d ago
But a good Karate, Taekwondo, or Jujitsu club will still improve your fighting abilities compared to someone with no formal training.
I don't think that's right. Karate is basically worthless. Spending most of your time on kata and drills that have no correspondence to actual fighting, and then 'sparring' by playing what is essentially tag with your hands and feet. The same is true of Taekwondo (with a weird reluctance to use their fists). Brazilian jujitsu is absolutely valid, but the traditional Japanese kind is closer to aikido (the bullshittiest of bullshit martial arts) than anything that resembles fighting.
Not learning to fight while thinking you're learning to fight seems like a dangerous combination. Far better to practice the mystical ancient art of running away and phoning the police.
Anything that doesn't involve punching, kicking, grappling, throwing, pinning or submitting a resisting opponent is basically dancing. And if you're gonna learn to dance, at least make it a style with hotter girls like salsa.
But if learning to fight means risking injury, well yeah. Fighting is hurting the other guy. That's a pretty inescapable tradeoff.
Crowstep
22d ago
Yeah that's probably a better way of putting it. In any case, any style that isn't intensely stress-tested on the mat/in the ring isn't worth bothering with. Judo may not be a huge part of MMA since the fighters don't wear clothing beyond shorts, but judoka do fight competitively (although there is definitely a groundfighting gap there that BJJ fills).
Crowstep
22d ago
Martial arts is a solved problem. The optimal fighting style is MMA.
Any style that can't prove itself in the octagon isn't worth looking at, if your goal is to actually fight.
Crowstep
22d ago
The far-right AfD got 43.8% of the vote
If a party is getting close to 50% of the vote, I'm not sure you can call it 'far' anything. Surely the political centre should be defined by what the public actually vote for?
Crowstep
24d ago
This whole system seems extremely fragile.
It's worth noting that only some common law jurisdictions require unanimous juries. Some allow majorities or supermajorities, or they aspire to unanimous decisions but will allow majorities or supermajorities if that isn't possible.
Crowstep
24d ago
That seems to be happening in a few European countries.
It makes sense. The biggest threat to the gay way of life is Islamic fundamentalism, so rational gays should vote for the parties most likely to reduce muslim immigration.
Crowstep
26d ago
That said, I get the postpartum argument
Wasn't her youngest eight months old? That is not 'postpartum' by any commonly used definition of the term.
This seems like straightforward familicide to me. She wanted to kill herself, and didn't think that her kids could live without her. Intensive parenting taken to a destructive conclusion.
Crowstep
29d ago
Pornography, by definition, is produced with the consent of those depicted
I hate to nitpick but is that really true, definitionally? All the dictionaries define it more narrowly as 'material meant to sexually arouse'.
Consider a deepfake nude made of a celebrity, or fanfiction about another celebrity. Are these somehow not pornographic because the celebrities weren't consulted?
Even non-culture warry revivals suck. Futurama was bad when they brought it back from cancellation, so was Arrested Development, so was X-Files, so was Twin Peaks.
Shows should be allowed to die, even if they die prematurely (RIP Firefly).
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