fexonig.bsky.social

oh i like this one a lot, especially @3blue1brown.com 's commentary on credit and ownership and, approximately, meaning-making it resonates with a central conflict i have with society; y'all way too into 'status' and 'credit' and it's a wonder anything useful ever gets done in that context

People who treat LLMs as software instead of users of software are going to stay losing and awful at building anything good with them.

prompt engineer

The hiking metaphor is apt; how many people hike for a living? If the math is beautiful you don't need to be paid to appreciate doing it

Ten years ago “they have public executions” was regularly cited as proof of the barbarism of countries like Saudi Arabia. Now we’re doing it. I mean, my god, what have we become

The orthogonality thesis supposes that AI will necessarily be this superintelligent Amelia Bedelia with superhuman strategic planning abilities and encyclopedic knowledge of everything in the universe but zero sense of nuance, and that just doesn’t seem necessary to me.

But if it’s smart enough for all that, why isn’t it smart enough that you can just say “control the temperature in the usual way that one would expect of a thermostat, without hurting anyone or doing anything weird”? “Make a normal amount of paperclips, not too many, and don’t wipe out humanity”.

I think if you meaningfully punish OpenAI & co for all of these cyberattacks then they will stop doing them. Whether or not you want to anthropomorphize the agents, you gotta just land there.

hold on let me get the sign

One of the thing that continually confuses this debate is that people will characterize themselves as opposing AI when what they actually want is to MINIMIZE it. They become furious at the suggestion it might work, but of course most of the major risks are contingent on it working.

there is genuinely no point in debating federal policy since we've spent the last 20 years living in a world where we can no longer make it without 9 guys in robes rewriting it behind us

So literally "Allahu akbar," only in English

if it took you 5 seconds of contemplation to think of an alternative you should take at least another 5-10 to at least consider the possibility that it at least crossed the minds of 1 or 2 of the people who dedicate their lives and research careers to dealing with the problems we post about on here

for a banal example, the fact that anthropic will simultaneously publish long diatribes about the risks of AI surveillance and then contract out Claude for Palantir to resell to CBP is psychotic, and there is no reason why i should take any of their moral protests seriously while they do that.

i think change is pretty incremental and am not very worried about this; i am more worried that market/natsec forces will coopt them directly to do bad things, or more prosaically, that any human who directly answers market/natsec forces is misaligned to the common good

So the rules as they exist (yes to blockades, no to everything else) are basically good for minimizing harm to non-combatants and non-belligerents. Obviously it would be better to just not do war, but we haven't quite figured that one out yet, as a species, have we?

The millenarian cult at AI labs versus the luddites who refuse to accept that anything novel is happening at all; “only God can create minds.” It’s a great, classic sci-fi setup but it sort of loses its luster when it’s real

surely an unpopular opinion on here, but I do not think it is remotely plausible that they did that

What we see again and again from the modern American elite is the insistence on receiving the prerogatives and deference due to their positions without any of the accompanying obligations.

'The United States' is not a specific patch of soil, it is a collection of communities under one constitution, bound by those self-evident truths. It can - and has - traveled. One of those self-evident truths is that someone *born into our midst* is, presumptively, one of us.

yes! yes! it’s all just computerization www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer

i simply do not believe things will get better in this country so long as the supposed alternative to the fascist white supremacy party is run by losers like chuck schumer and hakeem jeffries

All Trump did was strip away the need for pretext. He said "You're allowed to hate black people, immigrants, activists. I give you permission to indulge in your desire to see these groups harmed. You don't have to explain yourself any longer." And the ideology simply fell away overnight.

"I oppose big government" was pretext for hating its presumed beneficiaries: black people. "I support legal immigration" was pretext for persecutng presumed illegal immigrants: brown people. "I believe in law and order" was pretext for attacks on presumed agents of disorder: activists/minorities.

A lot of bizarre behavior from Media Millennials™️ in the last decade or so can be explained with them still harboring seething resentment against their peers from college who got decent, non-charismatic jobs out of college in the early 2010s and their parents for suggesting they become those people

Darkly hilarious after all the QAnon bullshit, this is the end result and people are like "ah well, at least he isn't a woman or a Democrat."

whenever i’m outside the city and people find out where i live they ask me ‘what’s it like with zohran as mayor’ in this wistful voice like they’ve been trapped underground and no longer know what the sun looks like

What people call “woke 1” was just elites deciding certain cultural norms were dominant, largely through Twitter exposure, and insincerely and clumsily performing them for status. Then Twitter changed, other norms seemed dominant, and elites insincerely and clumsily performed them for status.

fuck my stupid chungus life

im weak, ignorant, and ill-informed but whenever i've seen center left conferences try to articulate a message, it tends to be, "oh, we've won a lot in the past. we have the expertise. we built these systems" without grappling that a lot of people hate these systems and the people who built them

the success of DSA and "the left" is result of a coherent worldview that seems to explain the world and motivate people to action, even if the specifics can be vague. it offers a far more compelling antidote than the center left, whose main arg seems to be self-referential ("it wins elections")

The single most impactful cultural shift over the last decade has been that it's much easier to be a gutter racist without suffering reputational consequences; something that the American intelligentsia views near-uniformly as a massive improvement to be defended, regardless of ostensible ideology.

They are doing economic sanctions to us until we do regime change

something most democrats still dont understand is that "fuck off" is a perfectly valid response to 99.999999999% of the right's criticisms, which are always made in bad faith

[Enters panic room, arms electric fences] This is functionally no different than noping out of a work because the author employed a research assistant.

there are some doomsday scenarios that feel useless to even try to avoid, and this feels like one of them. If AI really can get that much better that quickly, and if it will likely be missaligned with human flourishing, I say we just hope the robot takes me in as its doggy

At this point in my life there's barely anything left of my politics *other* than a deep, burning, boundless hatred for these fascist fucks. It is so disheartening, day after day, to look out on the internet & see so many prominent people firing in so many other directions.

people like markets (choice) and are generally pretty indifferent about capitalism (ownership) and our politics on the topic reflect approximately none of that subtlety

Trump is like "Oh, by the way, we control every country and pick their leaders" and the US media has just been like "Oh, okay!" and proceeded to do breathless horse-race coverage of the selection process. Literal imperial metropole nonsense. Might as well be UK press writing about Africa in 1900.

no you’re miserable, look at the chart

were any of those places “computer-shaped” at the outset? or was computing infrastructure painstakingly constructed to serve them? the same process will play out with LLMs, with varying centrality depending on the field the vet doesn’t stick a computer up my cat’s asshole, but there’s one nearby

My impression is that AI coding is on a "pick two of three" triangle: scope, ship speed, and correctness. Small tools are (speed + correctness) fast prototypes are (speed + scope) and big projects are (scope + correctness). Every project that tries to be all three degrades to "fast prototype."