LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The algorithm has been horrific for a while

After Musk took over, they implemented a mode which doesn't use an algorithm on the timeline at all. It's the "following" tab.

I've heard that, in Las Vegas, if you put yourself on the government's "compulsive gambler" list, you can still walk into any casino, give them your money, and place a bet - the only difference being that, if you happen to win, the casino keeps your money as if you had lost.

I think it should work the other way around, making it the casino's responsibility to avoid accepting bets from self-proclaimed problem gamblers - if you're on the list and the casino doesn't stop you from betting, the casino has to give you back any money you lose.

Maybe there's a hope there, but many of the people needed to run a business (finance, legal, product, etc) are not idealistic scientists who would be willing to have their equity become worthless.

Markets put bsky exceeding twitter at 44%, 4x higher than mastodon.
My P would be around 80%. I don't think most people (who use social media much in the first place) are proud to be on twitter. The algorithm has been horrific for a while and bsky at least offers algorithmic choice (but only one feed right now is a sophisticated algorithm, and though that algorithm isn't impressive, it at least isn't repellent)

For me, I decided I had to leave when twitter blocked links to rival systems, which included substack. They seem to have made the algorithm demote any tweet with links, which makes it basically useless as a news curation/discovery system.

I also tentatively endorse the underlying protocol. Due to its use of content-addressed datastructures, an atproto server is usually much lighter to run than an activitypub server, and it makes it much more likely that atproto is going to dovetail cleanly with verifiable computing, upon which much more consequential social technologies than microblogging could be built.

I don't think Vance is e/acc. He has said positive things about open source, but consider that the context was specifically about censorship and political bias in contemporary LLMs (bolding mine):

There are undoubtedly risks related to AI. One of the biggest:

A partisan group of crazy people use AI to infect every part of the information economy with left wing bias. Gemini can't produce accurate history. ChatGPT promotes genocidal concepts.

The solution is open source

If Vinod really believes AI is as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, why does ChatGPT have such an insane political bias? If you wanted to promote bipartisan efforts to regulate for safety, it's entirely counterproductive.

Any moderate or conservative who goes along with this obvious effort to entrench insane left-wing businesses is a useful idiot.

I'm not handing out favors to industrial-scale DEI bullshit because tech people are complaining about safety.

The words I've bolded indicate that Vance is at least peripherally aware that the "tech people [...] complaining about safety" are a different constituency than the "DEI bullshit" he deplores. If future developments or rhetorical innovations [LW · GW] persuade him that extinction risk is a serious concern, it seems likely that he'd be on board with "bipartisan efforts to regulate for safety."

Found a link to the 100-page lawsuit of Guy Ravine vs Sam Altman and Greg Brockman here: https://guyravine.com/ 

They also filed a narrower complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.416410/gov.uscourts.cand.416410.103.0.pdf 

judo flip the situation like he did with the OpenAI board saga, and somehow magically end up replacing Musk or Trump in the upcoming administration...

If Trump dies, Vance is in charge, and he's previously espoused bland eaccism.

I keep thinking: Everything depends on whether Elon and JD can be friends.

Musk did also express concern about DeepMind making Hassabis the effective emperor of humanity, which seems much stranger - Hassabis' values appear to be quite standard humanist ones, so you'd think having him in charge of a project with the clear lead would be a best-case scenario for anything other than being in charge yourself.

It seems the concern was that DeepMind would create a singleton, whereas their vision was for many people (potentially with different values) to have access to it. I don't think that's strange at all - it's only strange if you assume that Musk and Altman would believe that a singleton is inevitable.

Musk:

If they win, it will be really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy.

Altman:

The mission would be to create the first general AI and use it for individual empowerment—ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest.

Typo, I think you meant singularity theory :p

Modern mathematics is less about solving problems within established frameworks and more about designing entirely new games with their own rules. While school mathematics teaches us to be skilled players of pre-existing mathematical games, research mathematics requires us to be game designers, crafting rule systems that lead to interesting and profound consequences

I don't think so. This probably describes the kind of mathematics you aspire to do, but still the bulk of modern research in mathematics is in fact about solving problems within established frameworks and usually such research doesn't require us to "be game designers". Some of us are of course drawn to the kinds of frontiers where such work is necessary, and that's great, but I think this description undervalues the within-paradigm work that is the bulk of what is going on.