dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
My steelman of @sarker is: yeah LLMs are cool but the real advances come from RL which is narrow and special and difficult to do in non-easily verifiable contexts. General superintelligence is therefore not coming soon.
My counter is something like: just from pre training alone we see huge leaps towards general intelligence and some glimmers of superintelligence. LLMs even in GPT4 era are surprisingly good at chess despite no specific training in chess, for example.
We may not need RL across every possible domain to get general superintelligence, just poking at enough diverse points in the frontier may solve the whole.
And there's lots of room to poke at it through RL approaches: revisiting the DeepMind stuff for example, build a bot that can kick ass at every video game with the same training set. Including building a robot hand that can operate a controller and robot eye that sees what's going on by watching the TV. (Despite all of the hype DeepMind was nowhere close to any of this). I have a hard time believing that nailing that narrow seeming RL problem can't generalize widely.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2hr ago
But LLMs are getting freakishly good at things they haven't been specifically trained on. Their intelligence does generalize.
Such as?
This already seems like such a skeptic's lens that any example I provide will be dismissed as "but it was in the training data lolol".
I meant to use "warehouse" to de-hand wave "an academy". Like just put robots in a big space far away from people and give them diverse tasks to train on. I did not mean to literally imply we'd put them to work in a warehouse and simulate them.
The aim is not directly "build better box stacking robots", it's "we're reaching limits on what we can teach by training on words/code/math so maybe we can get the rest of the way there by doing enough different real world tasks and just from having robots amble about in an environment that we unlock general intelligence".
Training on words on the internet has limits so next lets train agents embodied in spaces, virtual and physical.
I would say Fable is already superhuman at software in general. It's much faster than I am at writing and debugging code and exhibits a high degree of decent taste. The only problem is I run out of tokens so fast. The writing code part is impressive enough but the way it can just look at buggy programs and bang out 50 line test scripts to isolate bugs and test hypotheses is something else entirely. I just watch in astonishment as it does debug cycles that would take me 1-3 hours at a time (plus one coffee) that it does in a minute or two. This is all from my weak user reports like "it doesn't work when I do thing X".
If I were an employer I would definitely pay something like $500-1000/day to arm a senior developer with Fable than I would hire a second senior developer.
What is the bull case, beyond drawing lines on a graph, for AI achieving superhuman, or even human, performance on tasks that are not quickly verifiable?
But LLMs are getting freakishly good at things they haven't been specifically trained on. Their intelligence does generalize.
Perhaps we only need to RL them in a few more domains to clinch the rest of generalized superintelligence. E.g. you can have them pilot robots and put them in virtual environments and RL fast them there, or real environments like an academy (a warehouse) a bit less fast.
Partly this is a sample efficiency question - there simply might not be enough data for them to learn this stuff to human level, and architectural advances that improve sample efficiency may lead to huge gains in quality. But it's not clear to me why people expect this to happen.
I agree the sample efficiency is terrible and a large limiter and it falls back to RL and we need at least one more architectural breakthrough. But in 2026 I certainly wouldn't bet against AI labs with armies of Fable agents at their disposal and seemingly infinite investment dollars sorting this out.
Christ I resemble this article. I do like the overall life lesson though.
You come at the King, you best not miss
You decide to have an MMF threesome with your wife you best not freak out when you see the other man's dick
If you're gonna be Napoleon, you best not be sick about it for six days
Generally: if you're going to claim the exemption, you best actually be exempt. One is not granted the exemption by merely claiming it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
Great post. For context, I would just like to add that I also enjoyed reading Kitchen Confidential and also binge watched a bunch of No Reservations episodes and would do it again.
Do you think I'd piss on Ram Dass' grave too? Did I pick on Iggy Pop?
I pick on Bourdain because he's so widely celebrated and because I think it's misplaced. If you're going to be an advocate for the Hero's Journey, I require you to at least not die pathetically.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
You gotta try Claude in voice mode. I read the glazing in its sanded down Manchester accent now and it makes it extra special.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
I missed it, but what does Bazzite Linux mean to you?
Also
Calling all AI boosters, I've had the ChatGPT moment. All of the running down of the local LLMs set some pretty low expectations for me, so I was surprised when I found lots of utility there. Yes, I'm sure it hallucinates way more often than the better online stuff, and buddy, does it like to hallucinate here and there, but it's usually blatantly obvious that it's off the reservation anyway. Yes, mode collapse can be a Thing, especially in certain situations, as can verbose mode, and yes, there are only so many tokens that can be processed locally, and yes, the token limit really sucks, comparatively speaking. But with all that said, this ain't ELIZA with extra steps, and running llms on an RTX 5080 seems to be thoroughly... mid? And I'm still more than a little shocked that I can get half-decent images out of a local instance of Stable-diffusion. I was not expecting that.
IMO local LLMs are a 100% waste of time compared to Fable, if you have access to Fable. Thing is freakishly smart, and solves problems Opus routinely struggles with. Which is wild because 2 months ago I was impressed with Opus, and now I'm so goddamn bummed if I run out of Fable credits and have to use Opus.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
Presuming her account is the fact of what happened, sure that's rape.
It's plausible it's closer to he forcefully advanced on her and she didn't clearly say no. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of men consider this hot consensual sex.
Affirmative consent workshops teach you to look for an explicit yes and it you don't get one assume the answer is no.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
We bought a fairly small house for Americans when we first got together and the error of having our bedroom right next to the kid's bedrooms has not been more clear. Next house we are going to be floors apart.
Is it consensual unless you stab him or call 911? I sympathize with not trying to escalate if you're in a room with a man who could easily overpower you and kill you and be an ongoing source of misery in your life.
That all said, I love how Democrats really badly need a normal salt of the earth white guy who codes blue collar that you could have a beer with, but it turns out those kind of guys don't attend enthusiastic affirmative consent workshops and "I got this Nazi-looking tattoo when I was drunk in the Marines, what's your fucking problem" doesn't travel well among people where symbols can have meanings.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
I didn't know Bourdain apart from his reputation as a chef, and let's face it, celebrity chefs are not role models for stable, happy lives.
He's a role model in the progressive sphere for a lot of reasons. Honest blue collar work in a kitchen, diverse cuisine enjoyer, sneers at McDonald's, successful writer (the only way to get rich without exploitation under capitalism), had a show where he travels the world and advances the multi-cultural project.
All of these things are apparent virtues, but they weren't enough to save his life and maybe did him in instead. Maybe loser is the wrong word, but my claim is that the mental illness <-> lifestyle causal arrow might point both ways. What word would you use?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
Was just an act as a revealed preference, perhaps as the weight of it all caught up with him. But I think it would have ruined his image considerably if Iggy Pop's albums in 70s all included a little card that said "time traveler from the future confirms in 2026, Iggy Pop will be 79, still alive, living ascetically, vegan, no drugs, pursuing the simple pleasures where he values love and connection above all".
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
The funny thing is it sounds pathetic in your teens but by middle age in a marriage you're doing well if you have sex once a week.
We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here a few times.
Here's this travel writer's account of following in his footsteps and after Bourdain finally meets with her and validates her, she has a bit of an identity crisis when she realizes he's a sad loser.
Firstly, being a travel journalist is not as glamorous as it looks, having tossed her cookies after eating token cooked goat brain and local fruit
The fast life always slows down, but not how you’d expect. After enough time, you just get used to the pace, then it doesn’t seem so fast.
The next day, I spent the entire afternoon curled up at the base of the porcelain throne, praying for salvation from the unwashed melon. I was going to stop doing drugs, I told myself. Nothing was worth the panic of a comedown. Then again, I’d said that several times before.
I began to realize that going to different countries wasn’t a solution to a life. I had stopped being able to outrun my problems. Eventually, life on the road just becomes regular life. Whereas most people escape for adventure, when you’re a travel writer, you start craving an escape to stability. But people keep telling you that you have a dream job.
With my head over the toilet, I came up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.
But also, at some point she comes across an episode where Bourdain interviews Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk and his personal idol, and finds that an older and more mellow Iggy had come there from the gym, orders one drink, has the shrimp. Talks about how love and relationships are what sustain him now. It seems to crush Bourdain, who realizes the guy who invented live fast die young was just putting on an act, not leaving an instruction manual to be taken seriously.
Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.
I can't help but make the connection that the punk ethos and the travel-slutting ethos of taking the highs and the peaks and dodging the responsibilities and commitments, they might be a sign of enlightenment, or making the best of a cold uncaring world where nothing means anything, but probably it's an appealing outlet to the mentally ill and we should be skeptical of attempting to romanticize this kind of transience.
Quote our local @coffee_enjoyer back in 2024:
Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity. He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.
I am mostly unable to convince people in the progressive sphere that Bourdain's mental illness had anything to do with his lifestyle. Even Claude refuses to admit it. And adding the detail and sober account from this travel writer is met with the similar rejection. Mental illness just happens to people and living like a transient and dropping out of society and rejecting connection is just like, a totally valid way to live and says nothing about the mental state of the people living it, don'tchaknow? I just don't buy it, I guess.
I enjoyed travel slutting (and by this I mean extended tourism) and while I never identified with punk, for awhile I did the psychedelic Timothy Leary adjacent thing of trying to take drugs with numbers in their name and break out of default living, but ... it's kind of hard. And neither of these things are all that fulfilling at length. I'm not sure what's going through the heads of people who say they could just happily tour Europe or drop acid for forever. The fact that Bourdain is not a fringe figure but like a progressive hero meant to be celebrated and emulated is wild.
Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying your sweetheart and having 2.3 kids and buying the house with a white picket fence and your thrills are drinking a beer, smoking a brisket and giving your wife a creampie every Saturday, but after seeing friends die so young or losing their minds or never really being able to hold a marriage together, to say nothing of the grim meathook reality I've seen traveling the third world, that lame conformist life looks more like a precious gift and I feel sorry for people who get conned into rejecting it.
I thought by Italian brainrot he was referring to Italian TV which would run those maddeningly stupid variety shows that seem like something that the guy's wife in Fahrenheit 451 would be addicted to.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8d ago
The water shutoff and sensors systems are a lot nicer than expected.
I'm not getting this exact system, but I wouldn't be sad if I did.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
9d ago
Okay so I'm moving into a new house with a lot more smart home shit. What's the most util maxxing smart home stuff you can think of? I'm already on board with adding either a moisture sensor or a rainfall meter to my home sprinkler setup to avoid overwatering.
I'm planning to add emergency water main valve shutoff as well if leaks are detected under one of the five sinks we have.
What else?
Internal home surveillance system that does continuous object tracking so we can tell where the kids left orange teddy bear?
Something about this article in The New Yorker, The Billionaires Vagina Club really irks me. As far as I can tell, this doctor is doing God's work in focusing on an under-served area of women's sexual health and promoting the idea that women should be able to have orgasms more frequently and regularly and throughout their later years if they want to. This should be an uncontroversial good, especially if you are a reader of The New Yorker. But I sense the article smacks of condescension and how problematic this all is.
She serves wealthy clients, like the wives of Silicon Valley techbros. She has a concierge practice, because that's the only space doctors are allowed to actually innovate. Oh, she also might be friends with Peter Attia, an allegedly toxic masculinity influencer. Are we sure these are good people? Are we sure they're not doing malpractice? Is this just another way the rich are enhancing their lives somehow at the cost of the rest of us? Are we sure men aren't just demanding their wives continue being interested in sex for their own selfish needs, with good Dr Sally Greenwald as a facilitator for the patriarchy? Really, wouldn't women be happier as lesbians?
Am I hallucinating all of this? Are these widespread concerns held by a real audience? I'm left with the alienating sense this article is trying so hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
I won't even get into how unfair this article is to Peter Attia, who is cancelled as a toxic masculine Epstein adjacent guy even though he clearly champions women's health. He (e.g.) says repeatedly across many episodes that his favorite videos to watch are of old ladies getting back into shape and quickly working their way up to doing body weight deadlifts. He even had Sally on his podcast last November and she dropped an astonishing amount of women's sexual health knowledge for 2 solid hours, but that's all negated by Attia being surprised that Sally was encouraging even young women to use lubrication and Attia wondered if there wasn't also a risk in too much lubrication reducing men's pleasure. God forbid you ask the sexual health expert if she runs into that concern and how she balances that out. Okay I guess I got into it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
15d ago
Song repeated words to this effect multiple times throughout the evening, putting everyone there on notice of his intent to shoot at police rather than be arrested.
Okay! If I was going to what I thought was a protest and the leader guy says we're all bringing guns because he's not going to jail I'd be pretty alarmed that this was not going to be an ordinary protest. I have to conclude you're either very dumb or you want to support shooting at cops if not do some shooting at cops yourself. Then you go protest and this protest is kind of rioty and the leader guy actually shoots at police. Looks bad!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
15d ago
What is the evidence that they were planning to do anything more aggressive than set off fireworks and make noise and vandalize stuff? The guy who shot at the police officer is obviously a dangerous criminal but what about the rest of them? Why couldn't they have all been planning to simply protest? The Wikipedia article says guns and body armor were recovered from the suspects (not clear if they all brought that with them to they protest or they found that at their homes) but how much are we allowed to read into that in Texas?
Good idea. Most of them do, with perhaps the exception of the sprinklers until it's replaced with OpenSprinkler. Once I get my home server rack up and running I'll probably vibeslop a single simple dashboard that uses the drivers from HA. For push notifications I'll probably use a Telegram bot to DM me directly any pics or questions.
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was not about preventing nuclear apocalypse. They just wanted a fantastical global regulatory regime.
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