aoanevdus

This thread is cluing me in that I need new wording to describe my rare consumption of alcohol.

It’s tempting to anthropomorphize a company like Google, and assume that every behavior is part of some evil master plan. Just as often, it’s some small group of people within the company making a dumb mistake. I’d guess there is some team tasked with reducing the “app spam” problem, where there the store and (app review process) is crammed with thousands of near-identical apps, torturing the naive user with ads as they attempt to perform basic functions.

This targeting of this warning is over-broad, preventing honest new app developers from getting traction. That’s bad for the long-term health of Android’s app ecosystem, and a competitive disadvantage against iOS. There’s probably some other team at Google who is responsible for improving the development experience for Android, who hates this new warning.

Talking about the harmful outcomes of this warning, it’s good to get the news far and wide and try to get it fixed.

Analyzing why the thing got pushed in the first place, it seems to me a symptom of the challenge of coherently managing a hundred thousand employees.

The common pattern of requiring three days a week of in-office time makes it much harder.

When a large institution is faced with uncertainty about the future, it’s both feasible and prudent to make plans that account for multiple future outcomes. In this case, it makes sense to do both of the following:

1) Fight the administration in the legal system.

2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.

Supposedly there are hundreds in Concord.

In pure math at a school like Harvard, the standout kids like the ones in that quote are probably trying to become tenured math professors. There are very few such positions available. You can shoot for the stars, and if you succeed, make about the same as the average software engineer. More likely, get stuck a postdoc. So most students give up pure math at some point. If you realized you weren’t cut out for it in freshman year, you got a head start over the people who got a math phd before finding out the hard way.

This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.

Is it actually that hard to jailbreak? Maybe the prompt is a creative writing exercise, and a much simpler version would have worked?

When I was a kid, an adult told me that I should stop using “basically” as a filler word because people will interpret it as an insult to their intelligence (ie. “You’re not smart enough for the whole thing, so I will just tell you the basic version”). I’ve been attentive to the way other people use the word ever since, and I think they have a point. Some people say it very frequently and don’t mean anything by it. But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.

Quite a tangent, but what if we apply this logic of informed consent to property? If a person without a will dies, should we leave their house abandoned until it decomposes? Automatic organ donation is like probate for bodies.

I thought that was because the lab meat competes with farmers. I can’t think of any similarly situated rival to the lab bodies for organ transplants that would lobby against it.

Isn’t trading off of delayed disclosures basically being dumb money? You’re in a similar position to a pump and dump victim.

Would they need a veto-proof majority for that to work? You’d need like half the republicans to go along with that.

Don’t assume that because the article depicts this competition between the US and China, that the authors actually want China to fail. Consider the authors and the audience.

The work is written by western AI safety proponents, who often need to argue with important people who say we need to accelerate AI to “win against China” and don’t want us to be slowed down by worrying about safety.

From that perspective, there is value in exploring the scenario: ok, if we accept that we need to compete with China, what would that look like? Is accelerating always the right move? The article, by telling a narrative where slowing down to be careful with alignment helps the US win, tries to convince that crowd to care about alignment.

Perhaps, people in China can make the same case about how alignment will help China win against US.

Why even go through the effort of making a criticism when you can satisfy the urge simply by pointing and implying one exists?