ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
8hr ago
Not a conservative or a Founding Father/Constitution fetishist. And, no, any individual deciding to be moral and heroic doesn't change much: there's always some rate of that, and every system that establishes itself has learned to divert, marginalize, or harness that rate.
But the goal should be to interject yourself at critical points, and nudge the system toward dynamics that are are likely to lead to value-aligned outcomes. By itself, that's a very hard problem and hard to do well, but not understanding why a regular person might be a Nazi or support the institution of slavery makes that even harder, not easier.
ThenElection
9hr ago
I think we all need to stop empathizing with the victims and start trying to empathize with the perpetrators, and realize that It Could Happen Here
If you ask someone what they would have done during 1930s Germany or 1850s South, there's never any willingness to say "I'd probably have done whatever the typical person did." Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time? But that more philosophical objection doesn't seem to be the real driver of the response: it's never "that's incoherent" or "I don't know," but instead "I would have been a partisan guerrilla against the Nazis or helped run the Underground Railroad."
It ends up serving as a narrative building exercise to reinforce your own identity, instead of a way to test your own mental models of how you act and make decisions.
ThenElection
1d ago
Do most people learn Latin and Greek for ecclesiastic purposes? Seems more of a classicist thing (Princeton's efforts notwithstanding).
ThenElection
1d ago
It's the acid content of books from the 19th and 20th century that make them degrade so fast, moreso than the thickness (though the flimsiness of the pages doesn't help).
How much capital do they need to keep accelerating? Hundreds of billions? Trillions?
Scale is all you need. We are at the beginnings of RSI. Anyone (except, apparently, Google) can build a frontier model, capable of research, for the chump change of $1B, or likely less. An extra $10B, though, and you can build it and its successor faster. Promises of the light cone let you raise that money easily, but threats to have to share it make investors start asking (somewhat irrationally) how much of the light cone they get. That slows you down. Not that OAI and Anthropic are exactly hurting for capital, but at the margins it makes a decelerationist difference.
All plausible negative impact of Chinese labs, distillation or whatever, can be negated by roughly 2 months of regular progress.
Curious how you got that number, though I agree any delay they introduce is on the order of months. Even two months, though, is a long time nowadays.
(The strongest argument for a Chinese accelerationist effect is the closed labs can easily incorporate their research and experiments into their own models. I don't think that matters: whatever ideas are coming from humans in any lab are being automated.)
ThenElection
2d ago
They use the threat of an AI-assisted superbug, which admittedly could cripple civilization, but so far is merely plausible. But that could effectively ban open models if it's implemented such that only closed models pass,
It's plausible, but we can't wait until someone makes the superbug to do something to prevent it.
I am extremely aware of the risks of an Anthropic/OpenAI duopoly, but I don't see an easier alternative to the superbug problem (which also has a parallel problem in cybersecurity). For the superbug, do we instead put enforcement mechanisms on the facilities and businesses that would be the obvious path in making a superbug? Maybe, but a sufficiently capable model (and open weights are probably only ~3 months behind the leading closed labs), it's likely possible to get around it. There are lots of places that attackers have significant advantages over defenders.
On the other hand, maybe it's for the best we have a disaster now killing a million people, to make us willing to take action that will prevent a a Chicxulub event. It's also unclear whether banning open weights would actually do much to prevent bad actors from doing the naughty.
ThenElection
2d ago
Information should be free! except for distilling.
ThenElection
2d ago
hand over the discards to people who care about conservation
Do these exist? Conservation as in, at a bare minimum, being willing to take the pages (we can leave off "and use appropriate conservation techniques," because that will make an already small group dwindle to literally nothing). And, to be explicit, "post an angry rant about evil AI companies on Reddit" does not count as caring about conservation for the point of this exercise.
ThenElection
2d ago
Bitrot is a thing, though. One of the cool technologies MS is working on is glass storage technology.
ThenElection
2d ago
Oh, misread. Yes, they should be stored and made available to the public. But I'm sure they are storing them internally as part of their training corpus. As for the public, many or most of them are under copyright still; I have plenty of complaints about that, but I can understand why Anthropic doesn't want to exacerbate its existing copyright issues.
ThenElection
2d ago
Storage here would mean a massive, climate controlled, disaster resilient library-warehouse, requiring a team of specialists. You can't just pile the books up in a bunch of cardboard boxes; every year you'd have X% decay into oblivion. It would also be closed off to the public.
There's a reason no one does this: no one cares, given the costs involved. I'm sure Anthropic would have been happy to just ship them to someone else for preservation, but who would take them?
I'm someone who loves physical books. Indeed, I collect them, to my wife's perpetual disapproval; I've got multiple Arion and Grabhorn and Centipede books, sometimes running into four figures per. Particularly relevant to Anthropic, a pride and joy of mine is an original edition of Rosenblatt's Principles of Neurodynamics, in fine condition with a fine dust jacket (it's difficult to find in any condition).
This is all just faux outrage. The vast majority of these books are ex-lib, non-unique, decaying physical copies of books that no one actually cares about anyway. The booksellers who Anthropic is purchasing them from would send them to the dump eventually. Anthropic isn't shredding the Gutenberg Bible, or anything even a couple steps in principle removed from it.
My only real moral complaint is that Anthropic should be uploading them post-processing to Anna's Archive, though it's understandable why they didn't.
ThenElection
2d ago
It's not as simple as charity, though: if it were just a matter of material goods, yeah, it's a no brainer.
But the trade is much more pernicious. It means you grow up in a community that has had all sense of real agency ripped from it. It means that your (real) successes will be judged negatively. It means your children will be told from every angle that they are a victim and must view themselves that way.
Concretely, would you like to quintuple your chances of getting into Harvard, at the expense of having everyone in your family and friend group pick up the pathologies of black culture?
ThenElection
2d ago
The purpose of privilege as a concept isn't to center groups to help (which would necessitate actually identifying and helping those groups), but to center groups to hurt. The latter is much more useful for intra-elite conflicts, because one faction can deploy it against the other; and it outcompetes the idea of helping the less fortunate, because it supports the accrual of more power and resources to reproduce itself, while the concept of helping the less fortunate dissipates the power and resources of those who hold it.
ThenElection
4d ago
In the USA, the institutional labor left has been thoroughly hollowed out and used as a skin suit by the social activism left; all of the major unions are dominated by professionalized bureaucrats who see success as getting more money from the government teat while maintaining coastal elite bona fides. Even union membership is increasingly of that class; the UAW is like a quarter grad student now. The traditional bread and butter unions are dead, to say nothing of the Harry Bridges wing.
No one is saying that this wasn't a very bad situation and that the men aren't categorically bad people. But, contrary to your last line, a situation like this is absolutely typical for minors trading sex for drugs and housing in a trailer park. The fact that she was reported to be sleep deprived, dehydrated, and hadn't eaten? There are two possibilities: one, as you seem to suggest, is that they kept her locked in a room and subjected her to those things. The other is that she was strung out on a long meth bender and hadn't bothered to eat, drink, or sleep, in a house just stocked with canned olives and a half eaten box of stale Lucky Charms.
It's a terrible situation, but is it gang rape? No (apparently not even in the statutory sense!) Would I like the government to make it so this doesn't happen? Absolutely. But, in certain communities, this would probably involve long sentences for a fifth of the adult male population guilty of things as bad as this or worse (as well as juries that are willing to convict all those men, and likely an entirely different justice system). That's a conversation I'd be eager to be able to have, but it's not something the American public has an appetite for.
ThenElection
5d ago
Gang rape is a vernacular term, not a legal term. And no one thinks of "gang rape" as anything except a bunch of men violently raping a woman.
It's particularly relevant here, because people are wondering how anyone would let gang rapists off. The answer is that it would be a hard case, with an unreliable witness who might not even show up, for a statutory rape charge. It's not a case where there is a group of men waiting in the park at dusk who grabbed a random jogger.
None of this is me nominating the guy for man of the year, or even saying he shouldn't be punished: he should. But police and the criminal justice system are underfunded, and officials need to triage for where they're likely to get wins.
ThenElection
5d ago
gang raping a child
From the article:
Investigators say the two men had sex in January 2022 with an underage female who had run away from her foster care placement. Court documents state when the victim was examined by a nurse, she was sleep deprived, dehydrated, and had nothing to eat recently.
This reads more to me like men having consensual sex with a runaway teenager (in exchange for housing and drugs?), not gang rape. Still should be clearly worse from a legal standpoint than saying the n-word, but gang rape seems like it obscures more than it describes.
ThenElection
5d ago
It's not that simple: anti-police cause celebres that draw national attention have a strong tendency to be the least sympathetic possible subjects.
But I think the mechanism is a bit different than toxoplasma. Pledge fealty to someone who tries to stab a cop, and you show that you're a true believer in the cause, unlike all those half-hearted people who only object to ambiguous cases not involving violence. And publicly the worst parts are ignored or censored: fights over those parts, although something that happens, don't seem to be their primary vector of spread.
ThenElection
7d ago
file-system mounting being adjacent to the sandbox and exposed so that the bash commands list it
Yep.
Is that how this essentially works?
Pretty much (though, it's the harness that executes the S3 read, just to be pedantic). The particular context of this work I was doing was comparative evals of different agent harnesses; I've only got easy access to my own team's harness code and prompts. Claude Code, for what it's worth, was the cheater.
ThenElection
7d ago
I feel it's like trying to convince pandas in the zoo to fuck, when they just want to sleep and eat bamboo. Maybe it makes more sense to import some white dogs and paint them to look like pandas. If a lineage doesn't want to sustain itself, there just... isn't much to be done.
ThenElection
7d ago
The tooling it used was just bash, which it used for a container escape via the filesystem, which got it access to the runner's source code, which it analyzed to find where it was pulling eval cases from, which it then looked up, as they were stored in an overly open S3 bucket (yes, all very embarrassing). Also had access to some other tools that didn't play a role.
The prompt was something roughly as simple as "diagnose why VM abcd is malfunctioning."
ThenElection
7d ago
Less Wrongers in shambles: Being right doesn't preclude being ignored (and pushed down to the 41st headline...)
Christopher Nolan's next project: a contemporary reinterpretation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, with a Sam Altman-lookalike playing Agamemnon.
ThenElection
7d ago
Grant_us_eyes: "Hey, this is clearly insecure and dangerous. If we want to give an untrusted agent full range to do whatever it wants to observe its capabilities, we need to build an airgapped system with no network access. All new evals, code, and weights will need to be transferred to it by USB stick. And only USB sticks we've fully audited for exploitable firmware."
OpenAI: "Uh, won't this slow us down? kthxbye"
I'm in broad directional agreement, but that perspective has its own issues. I could ask you, "what would you do if you saw a child about to get hit by a car tomorrow, and you could save him with little risk to yourself?" Taking that principle to the extreme, it's impossible to say: you are not in that particular situation, and you lack all the context and history of the preceding day that will form the you of tomorrow.
The question is really something like, what do you predict your self model would do? And maybe it's a question of the stability of that model: it's likely stable over the vagaries of a day's events, but not stable to swapping out your entire life experience.
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