chrismartin
Joined 11 years ago
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Member since
Apr 21
https://cmart.blog
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Comment · 1 month ago
Not sure why this is HN front-page-worthy. I wrote it for ~5 local friends, we haven't even tried it yet! (First one is this Friday.) But for anyone in Portland, feel free to join the mailing list, introduce yourself, and I'll provide meetup details.
For a bit more context, I wrote this a week after "Everyone Wants Everything to Be a Barbecue" ( https://cmart.blog/everything-bbq/ ), mostly as an attempt to make a useful program out of those realizations.
Comment · 1 month ago
Which "other, shady (imo)" interests? This feels like innuendo. Just say what you think actually motivates them.
Comment · 2 months ago
Fission is "conveniently" hard because two heavy, naturally co-occurring isotopes are nearly the same weight, and only the lighter one is spicy, and the capability of separating enough of them to be dangerous requires nation-state-level resources, and the supply chain of those resources has obvious choke points that we can use to make them less available. But there exist activities, which I understand to be quite bio-risky, that need such little equipment and expertise that it's info-hazardous to even talk about them. A single half-clueless technician could carry them out at an agent's direction. If your response is "thus, we should be worried about morally bankrupt researchers", I would agree, but I still think the risk increases as LLM agents get increasing amounts of control over wet lab equipment (whether via robotics or tele-operated humans).
> do you think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to put a filter on the LLM they sell to the US Military?
I don't think it matters, given the existence of strong open-weights models and the ease of post-training the guard rails away. Strong, bio-adventurous LLMs are imminently in the hands of much-less-reputable parties than the ones you describe. I think we are overall severely under-prepared to mitigate these risks, and could do much more.
Comment · 2 months ago
This argument only matters in the case of agents who are faithfully taking direction from humans. An insufficiently-aligned autonomous agent (or perhaps a swarm of such agents) could have (or illicitly gain) access to robotic wet labs that are operable using something like Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard ( https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-resea... ). Given this ability to manipulate the real-life laboratory, the agents could cook something terrible without any human in charge. This is not different in principle from the agent swarm that successfully attacked Hugging Face, despite receiving no human direction to do so.
Also, your own real-life examples show how "Anything that can kill other people can also kill you" has failed to stop people from tinkering with dangerous viruses! I'm not sure if you intend for these examples to be reassuring, but I'm not reassured.
> A lot of the people talking about bioweapons of doom are saying that standard graduate level knowledge is an existential risk to humanity.
The stronger version of the argument is: an insufficiently-aligned AI (which, being non-biological, is immune to viruses) having standard graduate level bio knowledge _plus_ the ability to operate a wet lab via tool calls (coming very soon if not here already!) adds up to existential risk to humanity.
You don't even need a maximally-automated lab if humans are willing to tele-operate equipment at the agent's direction, and those humans don't need to fully understand what's going on.
Comment · 2 months ago
It's absolutely manufactured! And labeled as 130 volts. Of course, people use them on 120 volt systems, but of course, they still work.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Feit-Electric-40-Watt-Soft-White...
https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/savant-ge-basic-in...
Comment · 2 months ago
Yes, the 130 volt bulb lasts longer when operated on 120 volts. My family would buy these when I was kid.
Some probably non-LLM explanations:
https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs
https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-...
Comment · 2 months ago
'Good' news, there seems to be nothing new architecture-wise. Same as Qwen 3.5 and 3.6, so llama.cpp doesn't know the difference.
Comment · 3 months ago
Best feature of paper notebook: no web browser, no chat apps.
Comment · 3 months ago
The endearing angle: refusing to keep cookies in the house, because you admit an inability to merely store them.