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ThenElection


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 16:19:15 UTC
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User ID: 622

ThenElection


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 16:19:15 UTC

					

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User ID: 622

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Code is a nearly solved problem, and I regularly see the leading models create correct output on the first try for things that haven't existed before, so long as you give them a reasonable spec.

That "reasonable spec" bit is a pretty big caveat, but the coding portion can be fully automated even today.

Maybe O'Reilly's "It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal"? https://web.archive.org/web/20240114184321/http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/sigmoidal-not-exponential.html

I feel like I've seen your snappier version elsewhere, though. Maybe it's an echo of "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."

The tricky bit seems to be that it's very difficult to know where you're on on a logistic curve until you're past the midpoint. Though with the limits of pre-training people started running into last year, the claim that we're on still clearly on the left side is more tenuous.

I don't think it makes sense to treat Altman as a PMC apparatchik, though I agree that the blog post is written in that dialect. He just doesn't want to scare the hoes, the hoes here being normie investors and consumers excited about being able to cheat on their homework easier. That dialect is meant to be comforting and create a sense of normalcy.

One thing to understand about the folks at OpenAI etc is that they've thoroughly drank the Kool-Aid. Any communication coming from them has to be assumed as adversarial, and looking for honesty about intention or scope, if that honesty would interfere with achieving that goal, is a fool's errand.

Phrasing it as the precursor to the "screw you over" step is kind of right, but potentially misleading. Altman isn't hoping for the conventional "take your money before riding off into the sunset laughing at the rube" kind of screwing; he's thinking about dominating the light cone and paperclipping it with his values.

I wonder if there are populations where A can breed with B, ..., Y can with Z, and Z can with A, but A can't breed with M. In theory it seems possible.

In some sense, every species is a ring species, except through the temporal dimension instead of spatial ones. Leaves in the present can't interbreed, but there's a continuum through time connecting the leaves.

What's the point of that subreddit? To poke fun at the people who like Luigi, or the people who hate Luigi? It just doesn't make sense to me.

Chaos. It's literally an op by rDrama to make people on Reddit of every "side" post angry comments to share and laugh at them.

The end result of this is /r/FuckLuigiMangione: an entirely invented drama op that exists purely for lulz.

I won't deny it's given me some belly laughs, but I don't see how it could be good for society. It's not even hurting Reddit: it's volunteer engagement farming that gives them more opportunities to display ads.

Welfare/jobs. I can certainly imagine a set of institutional and political incentives of politicians and military bureaucrats that would result in billions of dollars being spent on something pointless. And people making spending decisions might not even know about the program. (Not making the claim that that's what's happening here.)

There's also a keeping up appearances factor, though I suspect usually nations would want to publicize the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant weapon.

Of course they did. China was rife with collaborators, motivated by a combination of self interest, ideology, and domestic politics. Wang Jingwei was Chiang Kai-shek's left wing arch rival within the KMT, who eventually ended up as China's Quisling. He was more than willing to praise Japan post Nanjing, and actually set up the capital there.

But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture.

I'm not so sure.

The (East) Asian work culture is in part a model for economic labor: overall, it seems to be best suited for transitioning away from a low productivity regime to a high one, after which point it manages to stumble through okay but not exceptionally.

But it's also a social model. You hear about crazy hours etc., but those are in large part inflated, with large spans of doing nothing. What the hours do is bind the worker to a larger collective. Even aside from idle hands and all that, the social connections formed working act as a kind of behavioral safety net, particularly for men who would otherwise end up doing antisocial things. You have authority figures you have to answer to. You face shame for not meeting some minimal standards. You have to be presentable, and you have to develop the executive capability to at least physically turn up somewhere at a specific time. A large part of your limited social budget is forced to be spent with a more diverse group than total fuckups.

In America, those same people vulnerable to behavioral dysfunction put in their time doing marginal work before going home to (at best) isolated electronic activities or (worse) go out with people who will exacerbate their worst instincts. Or, increasingly likely, they won't work at all.

It's a kind of socialism that redistributes good behavior. In a world where behavioral norms are hurt far worse by the bottom 25% than helped by the top 25%, that's a massive win. (A variation of this argument applies to education as well.)

Is the social aspect separable? I don't know of a place where you can get the social benefits while moving to a better work model, though I'm all ears if you have an example in mind.

An amazing accomplishment by OAI.

On the economic level, they spent roughly $1M to run a benchmark and got a result that any STEM student could surpass.

Is that yawnworthy? No: it shows that you can solve human-style reasoning problems by throwing compute at it. If there was a wall, it has fallen, at least for the next year or so. Compute will become cheaper, and that's everything.

Agreed that casual marijuana use is widely accepted. But being a stoner is stigmatized. I know one couple who sent their teenage son to a ritzy rehab for it.

No one in the left elite professional classes supports alcoholism or drug abuse among themselves, no more than they want their daughters to go into sex work. It's still considered a personal failing, which at the very least needs to be covered up.

I had an interviewer laugh at me when I turned up to my first tech job interview in a suit.

It seems like certain psychedelics are doing just a reroll on your neural wiring. Ego death. Good if you're suffering from debilitating PTSD, risky if you're above average functional.

Caroline Ellison’s Tumblr

I missed this. Any choice juicy bits? Or just reminiscing on drug-filled orgies?

Escape with nobody having any clue what either of you looks like.

Drones have serial numbers, and their components have serial numbers. There's probably a dozen different identifiers baked into flight controller board.

So maybe no face information, but all the interactions involved in the purchase of the drone would be available. Maybe if you stole the drone, but even that would give away a fair amount of information about who you are. Or if you recovered the drone post assassination, but that's adding yet another possible failure point.

That's a really insightful observation about different approaches to tree pruning!... That's a really interesting hybrid approach! It makes a lot of sense... That's a brilliant analogy! It really captures the interplay... I agree about... That's a profound observation... [Your idea] is fascinating

RLAIF is the next frontier in DL.

Challenge: get Claude to say any idea is stupid or off base.

Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.

What would be gutsy and genuinely salutatory would be for Biden to offer broad, blanket pardons of controversial figures on both sides. And it would be helpful for Democrats: they wouldn't spend the next four years chasing down crimes, real or imagined, that don't really matter (compared to other issues) and that don't help them win elections.

Back in the 19th century, it wasn't uncommon for a black person, or especially a mixed person, to try to pass as white.

There's also the classic Eddie Murphy SNL skit where he goes about a day of his life in whiteface (White Like Me), though viewers seeing it as absurdist might be taken as a sign that it wasn't common.

Kamala was potentially an ideal candidate for this kind of narrative. In San Francisco, she was on the "Right," a prosecutor who actually prosecuted and got criminals off the street. She also has her race and gender: she had much more space to jettison the more extreme ideologues without getting called racist and misogynist.

The issue comes down to intra-Democratic culture. The type of person to succeed isn't the type of person who embraces personal agency and is willing to take risks. Success in the Democratic Party (particularly, the CA state party) isn't something that comes to those who are willing to rock the boat, but to those who are team players. This selects for people who can excel at following the rules of a controlled system but doesn't produce individuals who are constitutionally capable of competing in open systems.

Just out of curiosity, I wanted to calculate the wealth Gini coefficient that comes from your life-cycle only model, and got numbers around 0.35. Interesting.

Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.

Can you elaborate? My 401k tracks SPY almost perfectly.

It does. It seems orthodontics are less invasive than those options, though I acknowledge that it might just be familiarity bias.

My dentist says they make it easier to brush, floss etc, but not sure how much I believe her.

Not quite a suicide and more "nothing to see here, just bad luck," but the crash of the airplane carrying Lin Biao.

The official story: Lin Biao was planning a coup against Mao, but once he realized it was going to fail, he hopped on a plane with his family to flee to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, he forgot to put any fuel in it, so it ran out of fuel early on and crashed in Mongolia.

There are some conspiracy theorists who find this suspicious.

For a second I was thinking maybe it was warped because of the risk of no longer existing if you win the bet (is there a name for that? Not quite counterparty risk), but that would cause mispricing in the opposite direction.

It seems the Yes side is whale dominant. A nuclear test explosion would also cause it to resolve to Yes; the big Yes whale could well be some Russian or North Korean general with insider knowledge of an upcoming test hoping to make some side money.

ETA: the Yes whale has also bet on Iran getting a nuclear weapon before the end of 2024, so I guess that's his theory.