afthonos

They weren’t enough to impress others, but I think they were enough to feel impressive, which is almost as pleasant psychologically.

I think, without trying to disparage GP at all, that unironic watching is very hard for the generations that came after the 90s. Some gems shone through, like the LoTR movies, which managed to be unironic and good, but the fresh air of “Joss Whedon dialogue”, pointing out storytelling conceits as they were happening live on your screen, let everyone feel smart right when “smart” became the only thing worth being.

AI destroying, at alarming speeds, all the bastions of “smart” I think will lead back to a less ironic mood. “I’m so smart” does not impress people who can reproduce your brilliance by asking Claude for “insights, no mistakes.”

We shall never look upon her like again.

—Sent from Dollywood

Still waiting for Boeing to catch up to this marketing renaissance. They are probably salivating at their projected valuation when they start saying things like “our planes could crash intentionally to kill everyone on board” or “our bombers might decide to blow up your cities instead of your enemy’s!”

Imagine the fortune food supply companies will make! “Our lettuce just might poison your child!”

Truly a golden age is near, and you, perceptive geniuses that you all are, will be the only ones not fooled, not for a second, because it all makes sense, always and forever, as long as you squint hard enough to close your eyes.

No, green cards actually remove that constraint. You are a permanent resident, and you’re allowed to live in the US permanently. Irrespective of employment.

Relatedly, I think where I land is that the (current) challenge for humans is creating such oracles. AIs have patience and compute we can only dream of—I think someone estimated 100,000 person-years were spent on Navier-Stokes—but they still need a “reality” to measure against.

Even if you’re right, that doesn’t mean AI can’t get better than humans at everything.

Don’t ruin their vibe.

Yes, and that’s bad, but not as bad as training against the chain-of-thought. If you avoid pressuring the chain of thought, you reward methods of achieving goals that don’t care about being illegible; if a model then wants to be illegible, it may have to use methods that are not rewarded in its training, which is harder. Think figuring out how to do opsec on the fly, or even from reading books, rather than have someone tell you every time you screw it up.

Of course, this leaves the possibility that the best methods for solving generic problems obfuscate the chain-of-thought. That would be unfortunate.

Not quite; training against the chain-of-thought is the Most Forbidden Technique, because it might teach models to obfuscate the it. The point of avoiding that, though, is to ensure the chain-of-thought can be usefully read (and, done carefully, monitored).

“Our virtuous lobbying, their heinous punishing of political enemies”?

Are you making an ontological case, or a factual case? In other words, would anything be rogue AI in your mind?

The problem is that the world has spawned the insane take that because they didn't use the most basic safety protocol imaginable, they were clearly only testing a hot air balloon, and hot air balloons obviously destroy preschools in giant explosions, nothing to see here.

"If they believe what they say they were incompetent" -> absolutely true statement.

"They were incompetent, therefore they didn't believe what they said" -> Sir, I'd like to introduce you to human beings, you may not have met one before.

Unlike communicating via glass panels processing information at near-lightspeed, relayed by fiber optic cables laid down across thousands of miles of ocean floor, processed in datacenters filled to the brim with transistors etched at atom-scale.

You better start believing in science fiction; you’re surrounded by it.

I notice a giant leap between “hacking and exfiltrating” and ”making public”. Why would the AI do that for you? Are you just that charming?