pclowes

Feels like this has been going on for 50 years. The AI acceleration just made it more visible.

Before it was artisanal non-replicable, p-hacked, publish or perish motivated, politically biased slop. Now we have some AI sugar sprinkled on top.

How do they know the accuracy of the clock? Eg: 2s of drift in 65M years.

Naively, measuring that seems more difficult than the clock. Wouldn’t you need a perfect clock as a baseline? There must be something really clever here.

Filtering these people is a feature not a bug.

This is a thought experiment. People keep running around glibly talking about p(doom) which is the extinction of the entire human race.

They are throwing numbers out like “10%”.

If they are serious and believed then yes, prepare for the possibility of very extreme reactions at a global and potentially nuclear scale.

World Wars flattened cities all over the world for much less.

We can’t talk about AI being the end of the species and not expect the most extreme reactions in global History.

Or maybe we just put some nerds who cant control their agents and keep running their mouths in jail?

Yes you can, the US could shut down the entire internet if it wanted.

While that is extreme, if there is a high p(doom) it is also reasonable.

We can absolutely do things to control AI and fine or imprison those who can’t control theirs. This is not some inevitable outcome.

We could vaporize these companies tomorrow if we wanted.

Any solid citations for "and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the Kessler Syndrome."?

I would be honestly intrigued but wary of just the usual Elon bad/good so all things he does bad/good narratives.

If we are on the brink of Kessler Syndrome in LEO I would expect market pricing to reflect that.

I mean maybe the super smart person will work at GOOG/META/Netflix to do some absolutely ground breaking work stuffing ads and slop pixels into as many ocular nerves as possible. However, I could see a smart person taking an "underpaid" (SpaceX SWE: ~$200-400k pre-IPO) to do the following:

Neuralink: to see the impact of increased independence and autonomy of a paraplegic one day after the operation

SpaceX: to quite literally approach the final frontier. Currently launches 80-90% of all orbital mass. Starlink is saving lives constantly.

Tesla: to kickstart the EV revolution and reduce fossil fuel dependence

Boring Company: to radically decrease tunneling costs applicable to all sorts of critical urban problems from transportation to utilities etc

I don’t love the guy and currently am receiving lawsuit settlement money from him but…

This is such cope.

Lets say you have a colleague named Bob. Bob is a pretty good engineer, but he is as confident when he doesn’t know as when he knows.

You can never tell his degree of confidence in his answer. For low-level things he is pretty good but for critical high-level things it is more ambiguous.

You work around this by checking Bob’s work. Having formal verification steps to check what he says.

Now let’s say you meet Bob’s twin brother Bill. Who talks and sounds just like Bob. He makes fairly grand high-level statements that you can neither test nor verify.

How much do you intuitively distrust him?

Having listened to him give a couple of talks I am always struck by how much he talks and writes like Claude code.

I don’t think he farms out all of his writing and talking to LLMs. I don’t think Claude code was trained to emulate him or anything.

I think his “voice” has been filed LLM smooth by years of agent based interactions. He claims Anthropic engineers use an average of 500+ agents a day. They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner.

Unfortunately, I see Claude being wrong often enough that I view it as a faulty narrator. Often helpful, sometimes totally full of it.

And now I subconsciously apply this filter to anything that sounds like Claude.

Makes me nervous that my voice may be becoming that of a faulty narrators.

Any court case involving an LLM you can point to where LLM output violated copyright AND that was held up in court?

General thought here is the entire economy is all in on a bet that that would never be enforced and I am willing to bet we would rather change the law than destroy the economy…

Why would anyone care about either of these things in a negative sense?

Isn’t that just saying “he uses modern tools and has subject matter expertise”?

I just have no idea how they are remotely going to enforce this.

Like the bad actors can make E2E apps and side load or have their own store. Now with LLMs, this is increasingly trivial.

You cannot stop pedophiles and terrorists from using math.

They might as well try to outlaw the Pythagorean theorem.

This just makes your average law of abiding citizen more vulnerable and the surveillance state more powerful.

Is this progress in the room with us right now?

The state of population level mental health seems to be declining in most measurable categories.