domain:mattlakeman.org
anon_
53m ago
my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis
Yeah, California famously voted to make racial preferences illegal decades before SFFA v Harvard, and reiterated that in a recent vote.
It's one of those strange thing politically, that UCB might be far more progressive than (e.g. Brown) along a number of axes (Chesa failed upwards from his recall in SF to law prof) but has long had a far more meritocratic (albeit still biased) admissions process.
anon_
56m ago
I'm just flabbergasted that you posted something about Michael Jackson that doesn't have him a the peak of soft power. The man was among the first truly universal superstars. He commanded the admiration of millions.
anon_
1hr ago
I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot
Indeed. I think the points of agreement are so broad and deep that they almost vanish into the background. We take them for granted and so the only things that are salient are the outliers.
anon_
1hr ago
I don’t object to free expression of ideas even in contentious situations on controversial topics.
That is true. On topics where there is a live social controversy (most of the Culture War), this is probably ideal.
At the same time, I think this can be weaponized to by people that want to express ideas that are beyond the pale and who want to reap the social approval of having people accept their views because of "etiquette". One particular example that comes to mind is the voluminous academic (at least in the sense of "coming from the academy") literature rehabilitating the "Minor Attracted Person" and wanting us to take this idea seriously. It's a demand for social acceptance of something that society ought not accept.
Of course, the inverse kind of weaponization happens as well -- cancel culture as an entire phenomenon is predicated on wielding this against views for which there is no social consensus. The fact that some views are outside the window of acceptable discourse is temptation enough to realize that one can try to put one's opponents views in that bucket.
[ And of course, this is all inside the bounds of free speech. But then again agitating someone's employer to get them fire for asserting there are 2 genders is also free speech. That doesn't solve much. ]
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
I had chikungunya once, back in India. Worst fever of my life, and it prostrated pretty much my entire family. This was presumably well before vaccines, I was a small child.
DradisPing
1hr ago
The mosquito-borne disease discussion always bothers me. The diseases are tied to specific species and to me the solution is obviously that we should make an effort to eradicate those specific dangerous species.
There's always a knee jerk "oh no we can't do that". But generally things like the Anopheles mosquito are invasive and well outside of their natural territory. There is just no downside to exterminating them in most areas, and no real downside to completely wiping them out.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
Is this what is going on? I had thought deep thinking had more to do with scaffolding built to continuously reprompt itself sometimes even using totally different specialized models for tasks.
Reasoning models can be a little heterogeneous as a class. But if you're talking for different "specialized models" in this context, you might be thinking of either a mixture-of-experts setup (a name that sounds obvious but which is somewhat misleading) or a routing system where prompts are assigned to different models depending on what they're good at it/what the prompt requires. That would be the router seen if using the auto mode for GPT-5.
A minimal definition of a reasoning model is one that spends a certain amount of time generating tokens that do not necessarily represent the intended final output to the user, usually delineated by special tokens or tags. Then a lot of funky additional post-training happens to enhance capabilities, you'll have to ask someone better informed.
Speak for yourself, I want my output to be part of the machine god.
Oh I want to be immortalized too. But Apollo included a canary, and if I'm quoting them this much, I feel obliged to ensure I'm not the reason the data gets scraped. In general, I couldn't care less if I'm trained on, and I actively prefer it.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
I want to see more political prosecutions, and I want to see more naked corruption between republican governments and their aligned NGOs
Emulating the worst aspects of communist governments... to own the libs?
I'm perpetually amused by the argument of "the Dems shot our country in the foot, therefore, when we're in charge, we should make sure we shoot the other one even harder"
Aren't you supposed to be patriots? You clearly don't want what's best for it
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
I imagine this isn't the kind of recursive self-improvement you probably had in mind, but I think you'll find it enlightening to examine your intuitions about why this kind of recursive self improvement doesn't "really count".
Maybe I'm too tired but I'm genuinely not sure what the enlightenment is here
Doesn't this just mean that when people say "recursive self improvement" what they actually mean is "holistic full stack recursive self improvement that allows the entity to improve all bottlenecks simultaneously"?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2hr ago
That's not my own canary, I quoted extensively from Apollo's posts and I included their canary to help reduce the risk of accidental contamination when some scraper comes and takes a snapshot of us.
That's likely the most common route for benchmark contamination. Even if a lab is responsible and doesn't directly train on the test, there's no guarantee that the information won't leak from someone else and end up in the corpus.
It'll only work if a scraper is well behaved, but at least Apollo and other labs will be able to tell that a leak happened, should future models be able to generate that canary string.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2hr ago
I mean my entire post, of course. If you want to see how biased they are in less clear-cut cases, feed the wiki page of Kobi Kambon and ask if this is science.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2hr ago
“It’s annoying when ‘I am very careful about not creeping out women’ gets interpreted as ‘I am a bad boyfriend risk’.”
In most domains of life, the only way to credibly demonstrate capability and low risk is to have a track record of actually undertaking that activity successfully. If you were in a place to loan out thousands of dollars to a stranger, you’d want to see a credit history too.
aiislove
3hr ago
My rankings are subjective and I'm not married to any of them. If we all filled out the chart with the same people we'd probably all have everybody in (slightly to wildly) different positions, especially considering different people move throughout their lives and as others pointed out can depend on the situation or social surroundings.
Also, come on. Is Ellen really more powerful than Oprah? No one thinks that.
I think that, if I was serving them in some context I'd probably give creepy Ellen whatever she wanted while I'd be inclined to openly roll my eyes in Oprah's face. I think Ellen commands more respect than Oprah based mostly on their vibes and appearances. Oprah seems more haughty and irritating while Ellen seems like she'd keep the interaction on a more professional level which translates to more soft power.
aiislove
3hr ago
Lots of women have the same thing going on - they may want to be rich, clever, happily married etc. but in the moment they are far more emotionally validated by evidence that they are hot.
Are you sure about this? Do any women on this site want to share their experiences? I genuinely don't know if women think this way, because if I swap the genders it seems 100% true but I suspect women are less obsessed with being hot than men are, and are happier with soft status qualities like wealth, cleverness and happiness in marriage and so on. Personally as a man I don't really care about the secondary soft status I just want to be hot and loved for my intrinsic qualities rather than any sort of skill, virtue or prowess
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
o3 sure is spooky, as is the stuff about rationality forums. Janus the LLMwhisperer also goes on about how tiny amounts of training data can radically change a model's self-conception, training on the information from these alignment tests has a special effect he says.
It's incredibly ironic how badly the classical AI safety movement has failed. Sam Altman credited Yudkowsky for getting all these people interested in AGI and ASI back in the day.
https://x.com/xriskology/status/1622197122979209218
eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else. certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc.
It goes to show how unpredictable the long-term effects of our actions are. What we have today is exactly the outcome Yud didn't want!
aiislove
3hr ago
Ah, yes, I just skimmed this page but it seems like this is very much what I was trying to describe. I was wondering if anyone else had teased it out before, I'll look into this. Thank you
aiislove
3hr ago
I am not married to the quadrant names, I had considered Barbarian for that quadrant but thought the term was more politically charged than Caveman which is more politically neutral so I went with that one
aiislove
3hr ago
Oops, I meant Charles III. My bad
Not all starlets migrate that way, I even said that Britney went from Princess to Whore and is either at Whore or Hag. Anyone can go any way on the chart depending on the way they move in terms of hard and soft power, it's just easier and more common for people to follow a certain path, because of age and experiences that lead to a certain direction of progression. You could say it is "the same status" in the sense that they are on the chart in the same way or you could say it is "not the same status" in the sense that it is different qualities leading to different positions in different times of their life etc.
anti_dan
3hr ago
If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates.
Therein lies the problem. Universities are not about education, they are about selection. Until you can reliably demonstrate you are getting better admittees than Stanford, Stanford will be better than you. And no one will agree to go to your school instead of Stanford until you show you can place them...
So the burn it down plan is the only plan that has a chance of working. Once people are dubious about going to the current universities because they cant take out loans to go there and no one else can either, so why bother? Then something else can spring up.
anti_dan
3hr ago
Your hard status rankings seem way off fairly regularly, using your own definitions.
In what way is Prince William comparable to Michael Jordan (well I am at least kinda assuming we are talking prime age for both) in the Jungle? William is fine, and fit, but he's not to the FAR right. That is prime athletes with good looks, etc. I think Ray Lewis in his prime coming off the murder charge is a great example for your "caveman". And the women. By golly. How are you rating snooky higher on hard status than Marilyn Monroe? MM is hard to the right on that dimension, the tough question is how she balances on the princess/whore scale.
Also, come on. Is Ellen really more powerful than Oprah? No one thinks that.
I think you come with decent ideas, but need to workshop the actual rankings a little harder.
NunoSempere
3hr ago
NunoSempere
3hr ago
Some headlines I'm reading:
AI getting good at detecting bugs and vulnerabilities in curl
UN imposes 'snapback' sanctions on Iran
NATO boosts Baltic surveillance as drone threats rise in Europe
US Marines set to conduct joint exercises to gether with Panamanian security forces. This announcement comes at a precarious time, with fears escalating regarding a potential U.S. military action against Venezuela, which is situated approximately 925 kilometers east of Panama. Donald Trump has increased U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, dispatching eight warships, a nuclear submarine, and ten fighter jets to Puerto Rico, supposedly to combat drug trafficking but likely targeting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This naval build-up marks the most substantial in the region since the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, an event that left hundreds of civilians dead.
Fears of disaster as Russian nuclear submarine reports major malfunction in Mediterranean | The Standard
Dozens dead from hunger and disease as devastation decimates North Darfur
Russia a ‘paper tiger’: How Trump changed his position on Ukraine, NATO Russia-Ukraine war News Al Jazeera
Tony Blair in discussions to run transitional Gaza authority
Putin Orders Highest Fall Conscription Target in 9 Years, 135K men
Widespread anti-Israel protests after it stops an aid/PR flotilla
Eurovision Song Contest: Organisers EBU to hold vote on Israel's participation
Trump gives Hamas ‘three or four days’ to respond to Gaza peace plan or face ‘a very sad end’
More kids with the flu are getting severely ill or dying as vaccine rates fall, CDC reports
CDC reports highlight 2024-25 flu season's deadly impact on US kids; highest since the H1N1 pandemic in 2009-10. Not significant shares of the population though.
Electronic Arts Sold to Saudi Arabia and Trump's Son-in-Law (Jared Kushner) for $55B
Peace in Democratic Republic of Congo Mostly a Promise, Mission Head Tells Security Council, Stressing That Reality Still Marred with Violence
Congo’s Former President Sentenced to Death in Absentia
India released some statistics for 2023. Dowry-related cases rose by 14%, with 6.1K women killed.
UN approves larger force to combat Haiti gang violence
This type of self-development journey is more common than you'd think. Also everyone goes through a period of feeling the mortality of their parents and themselves.
From the outside it seems like you're doing pretty good. Finishing a PhD is no joke. Also some of your other achievements aren't small things.
Keep doing what you're doing. I wish I had a bit more to add, but you're already socialising in hobby groups and keeping fit. Meeting a romantic partner would nice, but its not as easy as it sounds while you're juggling all the other stuff.
More options
Context Copy link