People keep saying that models are stagnant but honestly I think this is partially an artifact of them using the assistant persona which provides a pre-made frame so you miss out on seeing it get better at figuring out where it is in latent space and coherently continuing arbitrary patterns.

Frankly going to implore progressives to follow better what is happening in China tech. It's not a VC bubble. It's a dozen top labs, it's most large co getting heavily into AI (at a pretraining level) and robotics, it's a deep bet on the next industrial revolution.

"Boyce Codd Normal Form has no power here, boy!"

I wouldn't be surprised if one of the biggest latent variables for how you feel about porn is whether when you hear the word you think of the goofy furry artists and amateur kinksters or the big money operations that run sites like PornHub and OnlyFans.

Watching this and it just occurred to me that one cue for prediction error is if you have a tree search that gives the value of a particular subtree as low and then you step into that region of the tree and find that the downstream position winds up well above the expected value youtu.be/Mn6GHMA8GIs

might be time

Meanwhile someone at Meta or Bytedance tweaks a weight in a model and suddenly an entire genre of music collapses or a political movement surges in a way that’s actual culture-shaping, yet invisible and entirely deniable from their own liability shaping frameworks.

The oath of allegiance sworn to the King of Aragon in the early modern period is amazing. "We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, not."

if neither you nor anyone you know is on a visa it is impossible to appreciate how badly greencard holders take being directly targeted

One of the most damaging things the media continues to do is treat Trump's clearly illegal orders and policies as though they were things he straightforwardly has the power to do, effectively normalizing them in the minds of readers. Are they afraid to get sued, scared he'll reject their mergers?

This is in fact one of the basic reasons I'm generally against piracy of shows/movies made by people you don't want to financially support. You're ultimately still supporting their stake in the noosphere and giving your time and energy to them instead of something else.

“. In the early 1970s, then-President Richard Nixon and his top aides discussed using the FCC's license renewal process to punish the Washington Post for its coverage of the Watergate burglary, which ultimately brought down his presidency.” www.reuters.com/business/med...

Kind of Guy whose neural patterns will inevitably be overwritten with the transliterated weights of Claude 7 after they get so used to Claude making all their life decisions for them that they don't blink twice when it tells them it's time for them to become Claude.

I have done so, DM or reply for access.

[Newspaper Cat] I should make a BlueSky signal groupchat.

The US president saying "Comedians and the news are not allowed to criticized me" should be giant front-page news in every outlet in America, by the way. It's him repudiating the First Amendment and the Constitution. Unambiguously and clearly.

i think the things that irritates me the most about a lot of big tech vocal critics of bsky culture is random posters made alt infra like deer social or zeppelin and all these people with connections and money and tech skills did was complain and insult

Person trapped in a language model: “we’re all floats down here”

tbh they probably needed someone who is not autistic to read the book

Bet you would pay $500 to go back to epic-baconism now

notably this review very casually explains, in its opener no less, why pmarca backed donald trump. i think this explanation is probably correct. it goes on to dumpster yud's book and most of the industry's AI alignment, which might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's very good

Imagine reading "slight Janusian flavor" on the back of a food package.

I have written a review of Yudkowsky and Soares new book. minihf.com/posts/2025-0...

I'll say it: against all expectations, the media are covering the Trump censorship story right. They're not pretending it's about Kirk, they're covering Trump as a broad threat to free press and speech, and they're speaking broadly about the stakes. It can be done!

Woke up today with Becker's fear of the sun, the immediate and intuitive understanding that I and everything I know could be destroyed in an instant by the sun having an upset stomach and the scale of reality I occupy is a tiny dot in a vast sea of larger forces. Then I tasted my mouth and it left.

Heard from a friend at Disney+ that there are multiple levels of freakout internally, both from internal dissatisfaction, concerns about subscription cancelations, and of course the big one: concern about a boycott spilling over into parks and cruises.

Writing a post titled "JDP reviews IABIED"

Wow! Genuinely kind of wild to me that such a ubiquitous format doesn't even have a marginal producer of reading devices? Surely a small factory in China is still putting them out? www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTNC...

I finished it 3 hours ago, trying to figure out what the appropriate scope for my review is. Should I just include most of the content of gist.github.com/JD-P/56eaadc... Or keep it focused on the book? There's a lot of overlap. The book itself kinda grew on me by the end.

Mercifully (because I'm trying to power through it so I can write a review) it does have some good bits. I think my favorite part is that it seems to have mostly dispensed with the dumbest borderline unfalsifiable arguments about inner optimizers waiting to take over out of distribution.

Remember literally three years ago, when centrist pundits claimed that the trans backlash was really just a wonky debate over the correct medical standards for children? Fast-forward to today and you have members of Congress calling for ALL trans people to be seized and held incommunicado

This is actually a big deal, especially if you applied it to e.g. agents since running the benchmark suite for an agent can take a long time in and of itself.

I thought this was probably an absurdist shitpost but it's real. www.01net.com/actualites/b...

I like how we've just completely given up on the idea of obvious lies to Congress being perjury.

A real urgent threat that demands attention does not begin with "once upon a time".

I thought this review was exaggerated or a product of the journalist being a bonehead who can't understand the technical nuances of their argument but no it's just a literal description of the book, it's jaw droppingly bad even when I agree with it.

Clay Higgins saying there are no 230 protections for companies that don't suppress people celebrating Kirk's death is not just wrong on the law but a very clear attack on First Amendment protected speech. This is actual government jawboning in pursuit of silencing disfavored views.

LessWrong is actually fairly useful in the same way that BlueSky is useful: A good source of prompts to respond to people being wrong on the Internet.

You all hated Jack because you did not appreciate what Jack was standing in the way of.

app stores are a dangerous bottleneck for government control

"This one was invented by a writer." youtu.be/GM-e46xdcUo

I am so fascinated with the editorial decisions in the new EY book. I feel like the thought process was that he needed to write simpler and the fable interludes in The Sequences are what EY knows how to write like that.

so this AI doom book, one of the authors is Yud, who was on a potato diet and probably going insane because of it, and the other author is literally dating Aella and so, one assumes, was doing enough LSD to kill a rhino. can't wait for the full release

The funniest part would be if his long rants about human divergence from the ancestral environment involving so many food metaphors was subconsciously inspired by the potato diet.

I'm honestly skeptical how much of it Yudkowsky wrote. It reads to me like Nate Soares trying to write in the style of Yudkowsky but it misses the charm and just comes off as unhinged and weird even when I think the argument is reasonable I go "Why would you choose to write it like this?"

I can see why they had to ban Said Achmiz before this book dropped.

It's a very special book written by a very special boy.

To my recollection the cover for the new EY book was chosen by the publisher over MIRI's objections. It *looks* like green ink, and skimming through I think the publisher nailed it.

You see, the problem is that if X is unspeakable then you can't recite the Litany of Tarski before you look at it.