Crowstep
10hr 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
3d 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
3d 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
5d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
9d 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
9d 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
10d 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
14d 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?
going for traditional family values (30yo marries 18yo virgin, they find out if they are sexually compatible after the ceremony and start making babies
It's worth mentioning that there is really nothing trad* about large marital age gaps (except maybe for widowers). Amish and Haredi men marry when they are 21/22. Their brides are typically 1-2 years younger. 'Sexual compatibility' isn't really a thing. Couples grow together, both in their sex lives, and the rest of their lives.
*Caveat here that I'm talking about the west. You do see larger age gaps in Africa, but it's not as if those guys are sleeping around in their 20s, they just can't afford the bride price when they're young and poor.
Crowstep
15d ago
I think you're really grasping at straws. Here's a quote from Weir himself:
I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that.
I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that.
He's talking more about politics, but when the author describes himself as an agnostic and says he deliberately avoids putting a political or social commentary in his books, I really don't think you can conclude that the book is a religious allegory.
Crowstep
15d ago
The partisan gap goes in the same direction as the sex gap, but it's much larger. So American women might be 10-20% more pro-immigration then men, but Democrats are 40-70% more pro-immigration than Republicans. Unfortunately I can't seem to find any questions that have this specific crosstab (Republic women vs Democrat men) for direct comparison, but Claude estimates that we would expect something like 60% of Republic women to support an anti-immigration policy vs 20% of Democrat men, extrapolating from questions where we do have more in-depth crosstabs.
Of course, it's also worth mentioning that this is basically an Anglophone phenomenon. Outside of the English-speaking world and Northern Europe (who are I would argue are functionally anglophone in terms of English skills and how they interact with the internet) the gender gap on immigration is either tiny or non-existent.
Crowstep
15d ago
I think both you are the writer are setting this up as a binary. Either he had vitiligo, or he was trying to change his appearance to look more European.
My understanding was that he did have vitiligo, and once he realised he wasn't going to be able to cover it up, he decided to go the other way to lighten his skin. He then had the surgeries to make everything 'match' racially.
What's the alternative, that his doctor diagnosed him with a disease he didn't have and gave him drugs he didn't need, all so that a handsome, popular African American popstar could race-swap for no reason? It's not as if his ancestry was a shameful secret.
What policy and politicians do female voters prefer?
They prefer less war than men in the UK.
You seem to be defining the BLM riots/protests and Biden's immigration policy as war, which they are not.
Although with regards to the BLM riots, I asked Claude to dig into the crosstabs of this Yougov survey on whether they were 'mostly peaceful' or not. 67% of women said they were, with 66% of men said they were, so there's no sigificant difference there. The same is true about questions of police response, who is responsible for the protests turning violent, and other similar questions.
There is a small gap between men and women on immigration/border issues in the Anglosphere, but it's trumped by a much larger partisan one.
Crowstep
15d ago
I don't think it is a Jesus allegory. There's certainly the Hail Mary pun, but plot-wise it's just a straightforward 'hero overcoming the odds' story written by an atheist.
Crowstep
16d ago
If it was that bad then, how much the worse now that half the electorate is under moral hazard conditions to pull the trigger? And as we see in Ukraine, the minute the fighting starts it is exclusively the women who [are permitted to and as such immediately] make a run for it, which is absolutely crooked- that whole "be worth it" thing evidently won't matter when it counts.
That seems like cheating. If your argument against female suffrage (and to be fair, it's not clear if you're arguing that) is that they don't have skin in the game if a war starts, it seems unreasonable to use a war where women were literally disenfranchised as evidence that it could be worse.
In Better Angels of our Nature, Stephen Pinker makes a pretty convincing case that female politicians at least are slightly less warmongering than their male counterparts.
Crowstep
17d ago
Also women seem to be in position to be more threatened by AI. Which explains why the foaming at the mouth AI haters are mostly women.
I would put that down more to women being more risk averse and less interested in technology generally. Women are more NIMBYish than men when it comes to building houses, and men are more optimistic about technological progress generally.
And I don't think we can confidently argue that women are more threatened by AI in any case. If AI takes over all jobs, then really the only 'jobs' left will be interpersonal roles e.g. mothers and fathers, and the housewife role works better for women than for men. I suspect AI will hit white collar workers harder than blue collar ones, but blue collar workers aren't just plumbers and tradesmen, it also includes nurses, care workers, childcare workers and cleaners. And one of the main male blue collar roles (drivers) are getting automated away as we speak.
Crowstep
17d ago
But I think she's still a bit too refined and intellectual to a be a proper "chud." Frankly, I'm not sure it's possible for any woman to be a chud, that's almost an oxymoron.
I guess that's what I'm getting at. You describe JD Vance as a chud because he has socially conservative or anti-woke beliefs, but I think we agree that those aren't the same thing. I would argue they probably aren't even very correlated. The barstool conservative may be anti-woke because he doesn't like being scolded and doesn't like woke's puritanism, but he's not socially conservative.
What would it take to convince you their concerns about safety are real?
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