ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
11hr ago
Not just yours, it's a common misrepresentation.
ulyssessword
14hr ago
He's very publicly in favor of an international alliance of USA, EU, Russia, and China firebombing rogue data centers.
Airstriking. He chose his language deliberately so it doesn't get confused with a call for individual action.
ulyssessword
15hr ago
"At what p(doom) do you saw your own leg off?"
Why are you so certain that firebombing is the most effective strategy available? It doesn't have a great history, to say the least.
ulyssessword
15hr ago
If a person believes...
You're missing a step: They have to claim that they're a bad group, then actually kick them out so that they aren't a part of the larger group anymore. Cut them off from funding, stop inviting them to events, denounce them, etc.
These two ideas go in hand and hand. A belief in collective responsibility leads to denial of someone in your own collective ever doing any wrong. A Scotsman who believes in collective responsibility will have to say "That murderer isn't a real Scotsman!" because admitting he is a Scotsman = Scotsmen are murderers in that logic.
Whereas if I was a Scotsman, I could say "that murderer is a scotsman too, but he's not me, so I'm not responsible".
You have to bite the bullet and accept it, otherwise you're a hypocrite. I'd say "It's a tragedy that brings shame on us all". Now, if the murderer was a recently-deported immigrant, I could say that the murderer isn't a scotsman because he isn't.
So what? If collective responsibility is resolved by saying "I don't support that" or not doing the thing in question, then collective responsibility doesn't make sense to begin with.
It's resolved by actually not supporting it, and by opposing it. Simply saying something might not be enough.
Sure you can kick them out of a specific rationalist group, but you can't kick them out of "rationalist".
Yeah, "The left as a whole" has a lot less control than "Democrats", and that causes less responsibility to fall on the broad movement than the specific organization. In the absence of new evidence, I'd draw less of a connection to the Left for this assassin than I do to the Democrats for Sam Brinton.
As I've wrote elsewhere, this is incredibly easy and simple to dismiss by anyone motivated to put down the anti AI movement that this is just plausible deniability of stochastic terrorism.
Yeah, motivated reasoning can get you pretty much any result you'd like. If someone's dedicated to being wrong, I certainly can't stop them.
I've never really seen a person go "I believe in collective responsibility, someone in an adjacent group of mine did something bad, I am responsible".
I've never seen it cash out like that, but the general theme isn't uncommon in my experience. It's usually more like "I won't join that group because I would be supporting their bad actions" or "I regret joining that group...". People don't share their personal failings very openly.
I'll give one personal story, with all the serial numbers filed off. I was playing sports with an aggressive teammate, and he injured an opponent. I felt bad, the coach felt bad, my teammates felt bad. We accepted collective responsibility, the coach pulled him from the rest of the match, and all of us increased our focus on sportsmanship and fair play in the next few practices and the rest of the season.
We could've partially dealt with our responsibilities by kicking him out of the team, but it turned out to be unnecessary.
ulyssessword
16hr ago
Are you an anti-Trump believer, or a member of an anti-Trump activist group?
If you're actively pushing anti-Trump rhetoric, then be careful of what you're doing and what consequences it has. If you're supporting others pushing rhetoric (even if it's just social/moral support, not necessarily concrete/financial support), then you still have to pay attention.
If you simply believe it in your heart of hearts, then pretty much think whatever you want. If you don't have any power, then you can't be expected to do anything about it. You might still get hit with guilt-by-association, but not enough to matter.
ulyssessword
16hr ago
Well, I guess I disagree with the government. Isn't the first time, won't be the last.
ulyssessword
16hr ago
Kudos to the club, they're doing their civic duty. Maybe check on the lessons they're giving and see why extremists are attracted to them, but they covered their ass pretty effectively.
ulyssessword
16hr ago
Take half a second and think about this with your brain. "My movement is only good people and bad ones are unrelated" is the conclusion someone would have if they also believe "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty"". You're not arguing against me, you're agreeing with me in pointing out the flaws of this logic.
What? Maybe if they're a hypocrite.
Simple example: A large group contains a small number of baddies. Does it affect their reputation? I say: Yes, they are one group and share a reputation. You say: No, the large group's reputation is not impacted by the bad individuals.
How are those identical?
Actually my stance gives full consequences for bad things to the people who do bad things, instead of trying to absolve them.
Guilt doesn't diffuse to nothing, it multiplies. A hitman can't get off from a murder charge because he was just doing a job. Instead both the hitman and the purchaser are guilty.
Similarly, the rioters throwing molotovs, the protesters giving them cover, and the pundits encouraging them all carry blame for the damage in the BLM riots.
Like how the "rationalists" had the niche cult of "zizians" who murdered people. But would you blame someone like Scott Alexander or Yudkowsky for those murders?
They split from the group, CFAR kicked them out, they had the cops called on them, and had (at least one) callout post against them. This is the appropriate reaction. They weren't members in good standing, so the blame is very heavily dampened.
That Yud can claim all he wants that he doesn't want houses firebombed, but his anti AI rhetoric lead to this so he's guilty too.
He does claim that he doesn't want houses (or data centers) firebombed. Repeatedly and consistently, both before and after the fact(s). Again, this is as it should be.
And as a member of TheMotte, a rationalist adjacent site, do you accept responsibility for how the fleas you apparently laid down with tried to firebomb Sam Altman's house?
Yes, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of the responsibility falls on me. I don't really worry about it, because at that far of a remove it's just the cost of being alive in society.
I'll believe you are sincere in your "personal responsibility for other people being bad" stance when I see you apply it to yourself and accept personal responsibility for bad people existing in your own groups.
I'm not writing an autobiography for you, so I guess you'll never believe me. Darn.
ulyssessword
1d ago
There were reports, but the messaging is currently leaning the other way.
Journalist(?): "One Service agent told me the shooter is confirmed dead."
Trump: "The shooter has been apprehended"
ulyssessword
1d ago
I'm a huge critic of the "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty" sort of arguments,
I'm a critic of "My movement is only the good people, and the bad ones are unrelated." Sorry, but if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Your stance would give zero consequences for extremism.
What does it matter if the guy who shot a police station was actually a boogaloo boy false flagging instead of a BLM protestor? No one is accountable for his actions except for him.
As an example, imagine that there was a gas attack on a public place. The police arrest the perpetrators, and discover that they were all members of the California Chemistry Club. Shortly thereafter, there's another gas attack and the perpetrators are also members of the CCC. And again, and again, and again. It's weird that it keeps happening, but it's not like the Club has any relation to the attacks. No one is accountable for the the perpetrators' actions except themselves. Under your framing, people couldn't even think that the organization might be promoting or benefiting from those actions, because only a small number of their members are carrying out attacks.
If Boogaloo Boys are shooting up police stations, then it's evidence that they're a violent group and should be (formally or informally) punished for that. The alternative is playing whack-a-mole after the fact.
ulyssessword
1d ago
Here's a fictional population with similar numbers and no gender mismatches:
- 90 women are in dedicated monogamous relationships with 90 men (90 relationships total)
- 10 women have broken up and gotten together with each of 10 men (100 relationships total)
100/190 = 52.6% of partnerships are with 10/100 = 10% of men. It's one guy sleeping with ten girls, but it's also one girl sleeping with ten guys.
ulyssessword
2d ago
After reading a headline, I thought that mainstream media had finally put out some timely reporting on AI. But no. They were reporting about Claude Mythos two weeks after it was publicized, and hadn't even noticed Opus 4.7 was released five days before they published it.
ulyssessword
4d ago
What actually is reactive power and vars, do we know? I don't. Even amongst experts it seems to be contested. Is it real or is it mathematical abstractions?
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I thought that was pretty simple for college-level science.
When you have a resistive load on AC power, you can predict the instantaneous current by the instantaneous voltage, as they are directly proportional. When you have an inductive or capacitive load on AC power, you can't. The instantaneous current doesn't only depend on the voltage, it also depends on how "full" the capacitor or inductor is. As a result, voltage and current don't line up with each other. Due to how things work, this makes the current be sine wave that's offset forwards or backwards by a bit from the voltage.
Calculating power is as simple as multiplying the current and the voltage. It's utterly trivial in a steady-state DC system, and simple integral in an AC resistive system. When there's a reactive load, you have to remember that sometimes the voltage is positive but the current is negative, and a positive times a negative gives you a negative value for the load's power consumption. They are literally recharging the grid for a fraction of each cycle, which means they aren't making use of the power.
ulyssessword
6d ago
6 year depreciation schedule.
Is that because they break down, or because four cycles of Moore's Law means that the newer ones are 16x as powerful? I know that consumer-grade GPUs running in consumer settings with consumer duty cycles last for more than six years, but I don't know how well professional grade ones in a server farm running 100% of the time last.
If we stall at the current capabilities, that's one thing. If we go back down to 2020-ish levels of compute availability, that's something else.
ulyssessword
7d ago
I would assume that they chose the best possible chunk of time to extrapolate into that $14B.
You would be incorrect, as they're currently extrapolating out to $30B. Well, they were two weeks ago. Things move fast.
Also it's especially strange that they show their run-rate revenue for previous years instead of just their actual revenue,
No? They put the same measure on the graph four times. Would you prefer three bars for total annual revenue and one for run-rate?
Edit: apparently actual total GAAP revenue from 2023 to the end of 2025 was only $5 billion: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-gives-lesson-ai-revenue-hallucination-2026-03-10/
Why are you saying "actual" and "only"? Interpolating from their reported run-rate revenue gets you less than that.
(fun fact: If you grow 2x per year, your revenue in any given year will be more than the total revenue of all previous years combined. If you grow 10x per year...)
ulyssessword
7d ago
Speak plainly, please.
This is the second comment in a row that's just literally restating my points, in the style of a rebuttal. What is your point?
ulyssessword
7d ago
My current layman's opinion is that the current environment is a bubble, but that bubble is entirely independent of the technology itself.
As another example of that, consider the dot-com bubble: the internet didn't go away when the companies failed.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Yes, I did note that in my comment. They had 1/12 of that revenue in 1/12 of the year (or some other fraction), and therefore they're on track to $14 billion in revenue assuming zero growth.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Lindy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Since it has been around for so long, it'll probably be around for a long time still.
ulyssessword
8d ago
I don't think we have any evidence beyond baseless speculation, but that sounds plausible.
The least impressive way to reach those numbers is still fairly impressive, though. It would be two steps:
-
Find a bad piece of code. Either as a novel discovery or else from someone else's work.
-
Search for that same code (either literally identical or practically similar) in a million projects, and get some hits.
They could probably get away with a couple dozen novel findings and a very thorough search, but that's still better than anyone else has done so far.
The fact remains that AI did find vulnerabilities that humans didn't. Even if it's only a result of low-skill drudgery, it still happened and it's still important.
ulyssessword
8d ago
$11 billion this year in expenses
...and $14 billion in revenue assuming zero growth. Or closer to $35B if their 10x/yr trajectory continues.
ulyssessword
8d ago
There's no need to talk about the Singularity: current AI models are already powerful enough to be dangerous. (if you had asked a year ago, though...)
Claude Opus helped plan the Venezuela and Iran attacks, and a special version (with less restrictive behaviour) is used in government biology labs. It's so important that the Department of War was flirting with the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to sell it to them before they went with the Supply Chain Risk designation instead.
Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing found many (thousands?) of serious vulnerabilities in common software. Anthropic chose to patch those bugs instead of exploiting them, but a foreign state wouldn't necessarily do the same. Heck, I don't think the US government would do the same.
Exporting chips to ensure there's an American "tech stack" behind foreign AI isn't quite as bad as exporting centrifuges to ensure there's an American tech stack behind foreign nukes, but it's similar enough to rhyme.
ulyssessword
9d ago
Whenever someone makes a bold but correct prediction, I'd sarcastically counter with an even bolder, even more correct prediction.
"Oh, you think the Supreme Court will overturn Roe? What's next? Trump will get re-elected and launch a one-day invasion of Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro?"
ulyssessword
9d ago
Build the Great Pyramid of Giza about four meters North, so it encodes the speed of light properly.
Yes you can! The Zizians were kicked out for pre-crime. No superhuman precogs required.
Sorry, wrong subject for that sentence. I have to bite the bullet and accept collective responsibility for my countryman's actions if I want to be consistent. You have already set yourself apart.
I know that there's an incentive to give myself a pass by claiming he isn't part of my group, but that would be a lie. He's a scotsman, and scotsmen murder.
That's tautological. The people who aren't responsible aren't responsible while the people who are, are. We simply set different boundaries. People can dodge blame by genuinely not being blameworthy.
They're wrong. There's not much more to add to that.
I've seen variations of "We failed at..." and "I wish I could have done something about..." alongside other implicit claims of responsibility. "I'm responsible for..." isn't a common saying in any part of society (unless it's something boring like a task at work), so I'm not surprised it isn't explicit here either.
Consider Autism Speaks. They are roundly and consistently criticized by other autism advocacy organizations for their stances. If they do something, it doesn't reflect on those other organizations because they have been kicked out of the cool kids club.
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