guy
19d ago
This is Plan A, which involves four principles:
Buy Time: Slow down whenever is needed to have high confidence in safety.
Total Research Transparency: Make almost all AI research fully visible to the public.
Diffuse AI Broadly: Many companies in many countries at the frontier.
Reversibility: Limit algorithmic progress; maintain Mutually Assured Compute Destruction.
In fleshing out the scenario, they say:
This principle is largely achieved by the interaction of the previous two:78 Because algorithmic secrets are made public and the pace of progress isn’t accelerating, other companies will catch up to the frontier. The result will be a competitive market for AI, in which consumers of AI services have many options to choose from and excellent visibility into what they are buying. Because frontier model training is totally transparent, people can verify that the published Spec accurately describes the goals and values being trained into a model.
Normally, a regulator faces a difficult tradeoff between safety and national competitiveness. Competitors who cut corners will pull ahead of those who proceed cautiously.
But because of the transparency, AI research happening anywhere in the Consortium is visible to everyone else, and the results of regulatory decisions are likewise immediately visible. So if one country’s regulator allows its companies to cut corners, this won’t actually give a competitive advantage to that country because other regulators will immediately notice, get angry, and respond in kind.
guy
19d ago
Unfortunately the majority of AI safety activists believe that safety comes only through obscurity, regulation, and incumbent dominance, in contrast to all previous history.
The AI Futures Project is proposing the opposite-- regulation, yes, but with openness as to training and algorithms with many players able to enter the arena. It's in the regulation-free environment that the labs (save the Chinese ones that are behind anyway) have been extremely closed and secretive.
guy
21d ago
Yeah, I've been meaning to take on the (LLM-assisted) project of reviewing every citation in The Sequences to see which ones are bunk. The Sequences were written before the replication crisis (was named/noted) and so much of EW's work is based on cognitive and other social science. I'm starting to suspect that a majority of the science behind his arguments is just BS.
I'm tempted to say "But the core of what he wrote is still so true and valuable!" It sounds like special pleading. If it works just as well with all the science, then why was all the science there in the first place?
guy
1mo ago
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice really is the classic popular novel. Most of what people read today are novels written for the masses, and before ~Austen's time no one was really doing that. (I'm not saying she was the groundbreaker, but she's certainly the one that had staying power.)
[SPOILERS BELOW I GUESS]
Also Mr. Darcy is quite an admirable character; he's on my personal list of exemplars of male virtue. The novel really does a great job of taking you with the viewpoint character in really hating him for half the book. I remember reading it and feeling mad at the thought that he was going to turn out to be the love interest, namely how dumb it would be that she "changes" him for the better. But it turns out he was actually a stand-up guy the whole time, and it was Elizabeth who had fallen into trapped priors! She's the one who changes, and Darcy is ultimately rewarded for his steadfast honesty and integrity.
guy
1mo ago
I'm curious to hear your Fable use cases. In the brief time it was available, I didn't get to do much. The only project I had on my plate was a simple web application, which it pumped it in a way that felt no better/worse than if I had Opus. What sort of task would you recommend for Fable that you wouldn't for Opus?
guy
2mo ago
My priors put heavy weight some sort of reporting error. What are those screenshots taken from?
guy
2mo ago
That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down.
office-theyre-the-same-picture.jpg
The price of labor will be forced down if the pie is fixed. If the pie is growing and immigrants are adding more jobs as well as more goods and services, it means that wages throughout the economy offer more buying power.
guy
3mo ago
My son's school high school does this. He says about half of the clubs actually function as study hall.
guy
3mo ago
Ahhh there are so many negatives here (the sarcasm, the fake news, the "hasn't been, the "didn't hold up things") that I can't actually tell which position anyone holds!
guy
3mo ago
Damn. I had not heard of that. That is just pure evil. I just can't get over how offensive it is.
Ah!
On December 11, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted Conahan’s sentence as part of the some 1,500 sentences he commuted for those individuals who had been placed under home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic
guy
3mo ago
The kibbutzim are/were more than just a worker-owned business; they were also income-sharing communities. You can have the business end of it without the communal living part. Mondragon corporation is often pointed-to as the prime example of a large corporation running as a worker co-op.
guy
4mo ago
I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career.
You seem to be using "entitled" and "deserve" interchangeably, but I think the distinction is very important. You can have your judgements about the desert of someone who got a lucky position at the right time, but if they had an employment contract they're damn well entitled to what that contract stipulates.
Are you operating under the assumption that our economic system should be set up to give people what they deserve? We have a system that (sorta) entitles people to the products of free exchange of goods and labor. This is a good system to have in place, as it provides prosperity and forms the foundation of a complex interactive society. I don't care if people deserve it or not. The reason the Googler makes more money than the trucker is because of the value they provide above the next-best guy they could hire to their employer, regardless if how much the truck driver "fuels the actual economy" (and you're kind of question-begging here: if people are paying for the Google guy's work, how's that less real than the cargo driver?)
Your argument is is one that proves too much, unless you are a skeptic about morals in general. Does a person who just happened to be taught good morals and suffered through just enough adversity and had the natural disposition to go out and be [your definition of a saint] deserve praise for the good they've done? Or were they just lucky in the same way the Google employee or even the cargo driver was?
guy
4mo ago
I guess I figured they're just investing in shills that will appear "real" when day when they need to express some activist opinion/astroturfed movement. If you try to spam bot comments on [current political topic], they can fairly easily be flagged as new/inactive/low effort accounts. If they've all been posting about random tech news for years, perhaps there's more cover.
guy
5mo ago
(Just got through the Schooner section, still have more to read.)
There's no constitutional basis for arresting Maduro, right? Sovereigns are considered equal and independent? Or is the move "well he didn't really win the election, so he's just a citizen."? I can't imagine threading the needle such that an(non-military/diplomatic) anchor baby is not subject to US jurisdiction, but a foreign head of state is.
guy
5mo ago
The "opportunity" to tip in advance is all over coffee shops, and in more and more quick take-out places (ice cream parlor, etc). You order your drink, they punch it into their tablet kiosk, then flip it around to you and it asks how much you want to tip before you swipe your credit card. It's pretty awkward to tap "other amount" and enter "0". I've seen on the internet (i.e. no idea if true) baristas saying they'll spit in drinks where they don't get tipped.
guy
5mo ago
What's easier? Going out on a friday night with the boys (expensive, requires planning and effort, payoff uncertain) or playing some games and then scrolling tiktok until you doze off?
This is still answering on a personal level, but I think Scott's take on "micromarriages" is a nice framing here. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/theres-a-time-for-everyone
That is, frame going out with the boys and being around girls as a win in and of itself. The attitude is the same in poker: praise yourself for making the right move (probabilistically) even if the pot doesn't go your way.
I wonder how we can encourage that attitude as a society. Maybe celebs start #nophonefridays where everyone goes out without their phones. Maybe establishments start offering some sort of stamps for showing up to events, which can somehow be turned into actual clout or gain.
I'd like to see better public social spaces. Bars are kind of the default, but they feel like a particularly economically extractive kind of space. It does feel like a waste to go to a loud, crowded bar, and buy overpriced drinks for a woman just to get the chance to socialize with her. Where's a place where someone can just drop a $25 and have a nice environment to chat and meet new people?
guy
5mo ago
but there's a certain irony in feminists getting offended by a joke where the point of the joke is that feminists are easily offended.
I disagree. It's kind of straightforwardly expected that someone would get offended at a joke that makes fun of them. It's a really frustrating Catch-22 attitude I see all the time:
"Men just want to uphold the patriarchy, and if you disagree it just shows how much you uphold the patriarchy!" "White people are so fragile! You don't think so? Aw, did that hurt your feelings wittle fragile white man?" "Women are so lame, amirite? Oh you're offended? See, I was right!"
Holy shit I'm sitting in a bus station in Mexico city and on their little advertising screens hanging from the ceiling --from which they apparently also show tiktoks-- they just showed a short about Therians.
guy
5mo ago
Yeah, I'm not saying I advocate for this program. Just that in the world where wee decided meal kits were something the government offered, better to use an existing market company than to build it from scratch as a government institution.
I think there's a game theory element to it. Remove the incentive for cops to violate the fourth amendment "just this one time" and take one for the team, or (more likely) pass off a new recruit as the fall guy. I'd be pretty damn upset if my fourth amendment rights were violated and I was consoled with "but don't worry, that guy who did it got fired." Excluding this evidence instead makes such a violation a worthless act.
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