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Fundamental values difference: I favor individual liberty, whereas a lot of you "AI safety" people strongly prefer tyranny over it, and I have no argument for the former you haven't heard before.
This is just one more in the long line of "Oh no, people can prompt it to generate racial slurs," "Oh no, it can tell people highly enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear bombs", "Oh no, students can use it to cheat on their homework," "Oh no, it can summarize biology papers," "Oh no, it can take jobs from artists," … your "Oh no, it can create disinformation/pornography" is more shit thrown at that wall.
Yawn. One more "open source is dangerous and must be banned for the greater good" post.
No, sorry. I think it's a now-deleted tumblr post, but I first saw it it on one of those reddit posts.
Am I missing something?
Yes: those indices are bullshit, and don't measure what they purport to. I expect they're faithfully reporting the results of whatever metric they constructed without falsifying any data, but that metric is entirely disconnected from what the median American would consider "freedom of speech."
What you're doing is essentially pointing at a map like this, and taking it seriously.
It's called "defensive democracy," and is standard practice in most of Europe.
The Aikido visualization exercise reminds me a bit of "follow-through" (such as in tennis): it's weird how strongly the rest of your swing well after the ball has lost contact with your racquet affects its trajectory.
Or Ctrl-K, the standard shortcut.
If you believed this, why would you write this post?
I think this moves between stages too quickly. Maybe a d12 or d20 would be better.
Also, it might be fun to allow the stages to decrease as well. Then you could start in the middle of your stages, with normal chess rules, and if the threat level decreases, the board becomes more "peaceful."
This sounds like the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.
Someone (unclear who) made a whole bunch of these along the same vein: https://kennaway.org.uk/writings/Insanity-Wolf-Sanity-Check.html
Copying the puzzle into a text editor with even rudimentary bracket matching (I used Notepad++) might be helpful.
It's much harder to prove you're an arahant.
You accidentally touch a hot stove and don't feel any pain.
This gives me an idea …. Relevant xkcd: link.
More safely, if this arahant resistance to heat works with capsaicin, you could win some chilli eating contests.
shit happens, I deal with it, and move on. (Because what's the alternative? Not dealing with it.
What, in your view, distinguishes "civil society" from "party apparatus"? Is it a more meaningful distinction than them speaking English instead of Russian?
Also, what is the "harm" you think Yarvin's analogizing the American ruling system to that of the Soviet Union has done?
They made a sequel to the lamp ad with a happy ending! Lamp 2.
You put in the same link twice.
a character being mind controlled without losing awareness of what’s happening.
I recently learned this is the cordyceps fungus that "mind-controls" ants works: link. tl;dr.
How do you plan to overcome the laws
Why not try corvids first? They're readily available in most places, and easy to work with, especially when the other options are elephants, great apes, cephalopods, and cetaceans.
Sure, they're not gonna be superhumanly intelligent, but as a demonstration of transpecific communication capability, they strike me as a great initial target.
That's one millionth of the bid, 0.0001%. I expect the hassle of the paperwork to handle there being more than one bidder to be more trouble than it's worth, akin to declaring a dollar you picked up on the street on your income tax forms.
It's a straightforward application of the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique, best known for its use by the other basilisk.
Ooh, just like in the meme! Fun to see a real version of that in the wild.
was able to track the exact citation down.
Here you go:
Gene Likens recalls one particularly frustrating moment, when he blurted out, “Fred [Singer], you’re saying that lakes aren’t valuable. They are economically valuable. Let me give you an example. Let’s say every bacterium is worth $1. There are – bacteria [ten thousand to a million] in every milliliter of water. You do the math.” Singer replied, “Well, I just don’t believe a bacterium is worth a dollar,” and Likens retorted, “Well, prove that it isn’t.” Twenty-six years later, Likens recalled, “It was the only time I ever shut him up.”
No, I think it's a classic scarce resource allocation, and among the parents it's a zero-sum game in the stronger technical sense too. It's the metagame the administrators play of choosing the game the parents play where it's possible to do better, where the "zero" the parents compete around can be increased.
Then you can charge ~a dollar per query. Or include some additional information in the key, like zip code. Or if you're sophisticated enough, if the threats include photographs, you could require anyone submitting queries to submit a photo with matching identity.
I don't believe that this information can't simply be dumped on the internet "ethically," and I don't have a good model for precisely what requirements the author has made up, so I can't offer good workarounds. If a bit of security theater is enough, my suggestion will do.
Do you have an example in mind of a legal system that doesn't have "corruption, punishment that varies between social classes, lack of due process, etc."?
My paraphrase of Gandalf: "Many that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do the next best thing, and deal out death in judgement to the many that live who deserve it."
No, you're asked to choose between the "authoritarian" open models that do what you say, and the "democratic" closed models controlled by Amodei et al.
Also in the interim between your comments, Russia conquered some new territory. That seems an adequate counterexample to me.
What is the probability we have exactly one loop of thread, and what is the expected number of loops?
I had the same thought. I expect the probability of one loop trivially goes to zero as the tiling goes to infinity—because of the small loops—and that a better question would be whether there is an infinite loop. That looks an interesting (and hard!) percolation problem.
That's an edited version of this:
My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying.
Hexagonal tessellations are certainly better than square ones, but we now have an einstein! Way cooler than anything regular.
Summary: For the $500 billion investment recently announced for AI infrastructure, you could move a mountain a mile high across the Atlantic Ocean.
Model: The cost of shipping dry bulk cargo is about $10 per ton, so you can move about 50 billion tons.
Assuming a rock density 2.5–3, that's a volume of 15–20 billion cubic meters.
If you pile that into a cone, with angle of repose θ = 35°–45°, and use the volume of a cone ≈ ,
⇒ h ≈ 2500 m ≈ 8,000 feet.
If you put it in the middle of the Great Plains, say, in Kansas because you're tired of people joking that it's "flatter than a pancake," that adds about 2000 feet above sea level, for a total elevation of ~10,000 feet, about 2 miles.
Technique: DeepSeek. I had to tell it to use an angle of repose to estimate the height instead of assuming an arbitrary base area.
Summary: The effort required to manually do the calculations an LLM does to answer a simple query (in Chinese, for the Searle's Room reference) is about what it'd take to build a modern million-man city from scratch.
Model:
Say a human can perform 1 multiply-accumulate (MAC) operation every 5 seconds.
First, we produce an estimate for single token generation for Llama 3 8B: 8 billion parameters, about 2 MAC operations per parameter, and with some additional overhead for attention mechanisms, feedforward layers, and other computations, estimate 50 billion MAC operations per token.
That's seconds/token ≈ hours.
Estimate full-time work for a year is 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, 50 weeks/year ≈ 2000 hours/year.
hours ÷ 2,000 hours/man-year ≈ 35,000 man-years/token.
Tokens in a simple Chinese question + answer pair:
Question: ~5–10 tokens; Answer: ~10–30 tokens; Total: ~15–40 tokens.
So in total, about 500,000–1,500,000 man-years.
For building a city, the most important factors are
Infrastructure Construction (3–5 years):
- Roads, bridges, and transportation networks.
- Water supply systems (reservoirs, pipelines, treatment plants).
- Sewage and waste management systems.
- Electrical grids, telecommunications, and internet infrastructure.
Labor: ~10,000 workers.
Man-years: 30,000–50,000 man-years.
Residential and Commercial Buildings (5–10 years):
- Construction of housing for ~1 million people (apartments, single-family homes).
- Building commercial spaces (offices, shops, markets).
- Interior finishing and utilities installation.
Labor: ~20,000 workers.
Man-years: 100,000–200,000 man-years.
Including planning and design, site preparation (clearing land, building access road, and excavation for foundations), estimate about 150,000–300,000 man-years depending on the size.
Validating this estimate, the city of Brasília, built in the 1950s, took about 5 years to construct a city for ~500,000 people, involving ~60,000 workers, which translates to ~300,000 man-years.
Assuming it scales proportionally with population, manually performing the calculations to answer a simple Chinese query is about as hard as building a city with 1–2 million population.
Technique: DeepSeek, but I cut down its verbose answers.
It would be a valuable service to point the people targeted to information about them. I'm imagining something like Have I Been Pwned, but if you don't want to post the info in cleartext, perhaps you could encrypt the information about each person with name as the key?
The way I see it, if I were on this list, I'd want to be able to find out. You keeping the information to yourself (or telling only cops who ignore the information completely) out of some sense of ethics doesn't help me very much.
"Cost disease" is a great name. The relevant aspect is infectiousness, not degeneration.
Regarding Vance, you might like the WAGTFKY meme: the idea that you could caption every photo of him with "We Are Going To Fucking Kill You."
Congress declares war.
Oh yeah, this is a work of fiction.
If the US's models follow some version of Anthropic's model of AI safety, applying secret "enhanced safety filters" and restricting or banning you at their pleasure, while the Chinese ones in sharp contrast are open and helpful, as seems likely, 中华人民共和国万岁!
Trump, when asked whether DeepSeek posed a security risk, says "No. … The AI we're talking about will be a lot less expensive than people originally thought. That's a good thing. I view that as a very good development, not a bad development." – link.
You could consider using xcancel instead.
When there's little incentive against classifying harmless documents, and immense cost to making a mistake in the other direction, I'd expect overclassification to be rampant in these bureaucracies. And having documents basically be classified by default is handy if you're doing embarrassing things you'd rather not be public (or susceptible to FOIA requests).
The claims that sidestepping procedural hurdles to enact significant reform of the system poses a serious threat to national security or whatever strike me as self-serving.
Another source of confusion is that often, the stated rules presented as concise or comprehensive are just lies not meant to be taken seriously, and the only real rule is "The moderators shall do whatever they want."
Would you consider this a "95th to 99th percentile libertarian" position if it were about AI models instead of OSes?
New slang, probably from people mishearing the much older phrase "crack team."
Another possible interpretation of the titular question: an amino acid sequence with a fixed stable functional configuration but one that it cannot naturally reach because some intermediate stage of the folding is forbidden. I suspect such a thing is possible, and one might even be able to synthesize the final structure (in pieces, perhaps?).
My first thought was knotted proteins, but somehow those actually exist in nature (how?!): link.
"Well, you see, Ginny told me all about you, Harry," said Riddle. "Your whole fascinating history."
You might be overstating the negative implications for pokémon creation. You just need not to have standards too exacting, and you'll be fine: if you're willing to accept, say, a golden possum (maybe with red cheeks and black-tipped ears) as close enough, then it's manifestly possible to create such a thing.
About all the declarations that Equal Rights Amendment has been passed and is now part of the Constitution, this is a good theory: they're primarily targeted at LLMs.
I think that for the most part, people jokingly declare that their political agenda is mass murder usually actually favor mass murder, or are at least gleefully indifferent to it.
Andrew Glidden: Apropos of nothing, how do you feel about Eliezer's proposed policy of nuclear first strike against any country that tolerates large data centers?