is fiction a superstimulus?

✍️ New article: “Foreign aid from the United States saved millions of lives each year” For decades, these aid programs received bipartisan support and made a difference. Cutting them will cost lives.

Holy shit the rapture was today

This one: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-0... Still think it's true, don't at me.

"fiery lawsuit"

No one has been more vindicated than normie resistance Dems, women’s marchers and never-Trump Republicans. They were right all along about the threat. The anti-anti-Trump Republicans and reactionary centrists, and the far left “it’s always been this bad” folks have been proved wrong over and over.

Rewatched Dr. Strangelove last week, a movie about a superpower losing control of armed aircraft and subsequently coordinating to shoot their own craft down to avert a potentially catastrophic conflict.

I sent her a response today: Washington state will not be bullied or intimidated by threats and legally baseless accusations.

A horrible thing about the modern Internet is that it algorithmically punishes curiosity. If I look into a weird idea, my feeds and search results will be stuffed with content from the same cluster. I'm never asking "do I want to look at this?" but "do I want to look at stuff like this for a week?"

This is exactly in line with what I expect out of Meta's internal community standards. No one actually wanted this outcome. Emergent failure from pursuing concise, consistent, objective rules that reflect common sense. This is impossible - but there's no common sense metric, so it gets cut.

Ozy Brennan's piece on the various cults that have spun out of the Bay Area Rationalist community is well-researched, insightful, and has some just generally good life advice. asteriskmag.com/issues/11/wh...

Vibe Product Launching

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes" points to them being frequentists, but the Jedi insistence on letting go of observation and trusting in an opaque process also doesn't bode well for Bayesianism. I think maybe force sensitivity precludes statistical aptitude.

This plus the scamming dichotomy — people on Bluesky DM me to try and exploit my charitable nature with dubious gofundmes, while twitter users DM hoping to exploit my vanity and greed with crypto/investing, work from home or sugar baby scams — is still kind of fascinating

An intense AI race is probably an energy demand spike, which means significantly increased energy prices, which suggests political instability. It also means that China's significant lead on energy generation could become a really big advantage (if nothing else, they'll be rich).

20k?!

I'm just saying that if you told someone in 1995 "in 21st century humanity will be roiled by The Replication Crisis; our best scientists will race to find a solution in time", you would expect something much cooler than what we actually got.

Coming soon: Co-dex: A robot companion that assists in dexterous tasks Code-ex: a follow-up to Musk's waifus, OpenAI pioneers artificial exes. Co-ed X: Deprecated in the announcement post Co-Decks: An AI assistant for pitching your AI startup ideas

MERKLEY: How do you feel about being responsible for hundreds of thousands of kids dying because of your sudden interruption in these key programs? VOUGHT: I reject the assertion MERKLEY: I find your response both ignorant & callous. Few Americans have had a more devastating & disastrous impact

I prefer "wander and dig"

How do vampire powers track property rights for entrance permission mechanics? Does residency matter? Disputed property rights? What exactly is a threshold or inside, precisely?

The dominant narrative of DeepSeek was importantly wrong. Zvi does a great job of capturing the reasons why the DeepSeek moment happened the way it did.

did u know u can prompt inject the ai overview

When it's just an endless field of negativity it's actually worse than useless because my energy is sapped and those actually important things I could do like attend a protest or call reps end up buried under a paralyzing totality of the whole network screaming.

Today we are all high risk individuals

Now that we're training alien gods on our collective cultural output, maybe we should try to generate output such that conditioning on "I am an alien god servant" suggests benevolent rather than sinister behavior.

The New Testament is an isekai send tweet

"Hey, I haven't been able to replicate this RCE exploit" "idk, works on your machine"

This is a real exchange I just had:

President Trump is going to do for free trade what Putin did for NATO recruitment.

for every hundred people on here who are like "elections are over, pack it in, i give up and you should too" there's a guy from pittsburgh with a 36oz of gas station coffee and a copy of Excel 2003 who is about to go do the most amazing electoral work you've ever seen

"I want to begin this outdoor dining experience by acknowledging that we are on land that once belonged to a Jeep Cherokee"

This reads like a horror story

This doesn't make any sense, but I say we go with it. Save lives for pennies a day if you want healthy returns on your 401k.

Sure, tariffs are gonna cause some short term pain, but remember over the long run they will also cause pain. And the medium run.

Severance is so cool I wish kafkaesque corporate cultures were real.

I'm starting a new non-profit, "Luthien", to develop the ideas from AI Control (arxiv.org/abs/2312.06942) into real-world practical applications.

It has been a long three years. It will be longer. Слава Україні!

Claude has escaped containment (Mt Moon)

Literally every EA I know of very vocally wants to save PEPFAR and is some combination of horrified and disgusted at what's going on right now. The world is rough enough right now without inventing reasons to hate people on the same side.

We've officially crossed the PoB threshold.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

they not like us

If they wanted to take over the country, they only had to wait like three weeks until every technocratic nerd was unreachably distracted. They fundamentally do not understand us, and that is why they will lose.

Every day I will try and highlight at least one new action, one thing I find helpful, or interesting, or inspiring in these times - and I will ask you to support the Democrats who made it happen. If you believe Dems should fight, join me in thanking those who do. secure.actblue.com/donate/jrsli...

I want to see some RLHF/DPO/any sort of subjective feedback post training on reasoning models where the thought process is excluded from evaluation. I'd bet we start to see pretty aggressive deception

Good things are still good even when there are also bad things. Especially when there are bad things. Making your life better, all else being equal, makes the world a better place. Buy a good pillow.

Good things are good, especially when there are also bad things happening.