TIL piquant is pronounced 'pee-Kent' and not 'pee-quant'

Too past centric. In 20 years people will be hitting a number of businesses with “back then all you had to do was…” You’re in this era now, but for all business verticals that first capitalize on the use of AI use, labor, and outputs. You can bemoan past ease, or find your era’s ease.

There is a glitch in the Matrix

Twitter data science project that probably can't exist: survivorship curve of all accounts who ever posted "never deleting this app".

My expectation is “true zero days will be massively scarier due to ease of scaling, but most typical security flaws will be massively less common.” Net result will be security moving to a “black swan” pattern where script kiddie stuff basically doesn’t work anymore but threat actors are terrifying.

this is wild lol

The societal consequences of “recording technology transformed poetry from “THE premier wordcel flex” to “the market for lemons on musical talent” are still reverberating

Latent space tier list: "grammar errors" to "wordcel aura loss" Top tier "absolute, immediate, permanent". Bottom-tier "useless info-hazard dodged, aura gained".

Decamped to bluesky + unsubbed from x day 1 feelings - it’s wild how the winds have changed on usage: my xposts here dramatically out-engage my OPs - I do miss longposts on X, and here, this is THE big feature-gap for me. Pretty much everywhere else besides this and feed velocity, bsky wins/ties.

I'm the person who wrote the tweet above. I wrote four blog posts condemning Elon killing the children, argued about it on Twitter extensively, and donated $50,000 (partly my own money, partly contributed by other EAs who read my blog) to help the African clinics effected.

Feels like an artifact of being locked in Mary's room. If the visual referent of "stairs" had no physical qualia-ic salience to sense-make what you're looking at, that salience would prob move to listable properties: "it's a connecter, it blocks things, it's a node for graph search", and so on.

Crossposting a longpost: "Why is Yud so negatively polarized against Dario in particular?"

Insufficiently time-traveler-pilled answer tbh Alternatives of “go pull the fire alarm” or “call in a series of threats that force building evacuations in affected buildings” are probably worth double to triple digit life saves

My wall-of-text thoughts on the recent AI doom Citrini paper, and software investing more generally right now

Hard to understate ongoing X usage decline. At least in my analytics, despite ~no change in posting volume, my reach was reduced by about 66%, with monthly likes dropping from ~3.5k-6k to a consistent 1k or less. Anecdotally, my content got way better; it's just the platform's kinda dead now

Untouched 401k, short timelines, high p(doom). Pick 2.

A useful proxy for “how much uptake will bespoke software get in practice?” Is “what’s the non-tech public’s usage of FOSS?” Windows/Mac had linux. Photoshop had Krita/Gimp. Max/maya had blender. Office Suite had Libreoffice. One google search away, all are free, all are great. Uptake was abysmal.

Most rat predictions of the ongoing ML cycle have been marked by "good base theory, correct focus, terrible theory of mind". "People will ever keep the AI in the box." "the first impulse of AI will be immediate sociopathic paperclipping." "global pause is possible, even apropos inciting incident."

Hate sink nodes, and their vassals:

The new 97% Bostrom paper number has been the subject of a lot of recent misinformation I want to dispel. The paper is best understood as attempted existence proof that ASI development isn't a 0/-∞ gamble, but one where edge can and will exist:

Massive "this entire thread" + 2 bonuses First is "friends don't deny friends safe environment red-teaming"; pretending it's Kant's axe murderer w/ history's worst take, if asked to play mafia, is a wedgie-able offense. Second is "if u don't like me at my mafia, u don't deserve me at my Diplomacy"

not enough words? my loss is your gain go.bsky.app/NLTs56N

There's an emotional sensation I call "buzzy". It's the slot machine whirls spinning. It's the scrolling finger, stroking up for 3 more posts. It's the cookie clicker combo popping off. It's the pinball machine dinging 5 times, "5,000 POINTS!". It's the screaming yt intro, "I JUST FOUND A RARE-"

Pleo's been posting media takes, so I wanna talk about the future of increasingly upscaled monkey-boulder posting. I think there's going to be four tiers in Dante's hell of future AI content. (1/n)

moral duty to be training data for our future ai overlords with a mix of pascal mugging and rokoism is this anything

You can't run on these fumes forever. You may want to predict that the graph is going to stop moving, the line will stop going up. But you have to look at the line one day.

It's actually kind of striking how these arguments are stupid and don't matter because they don't have any predictive power, and if the prediction is "These systems can't do knowledge work", then those predictions are simply wrong.

Re-watching "The Menu" forced me to make a cheeseburger immediately afterwards. Big Burger should be paying them royalties tbh

The irony of OP having this exchange on bsky, and not x, is not lost on me

In which I write a few hundred words on the purported death of software business models, and do a little war-gaming of what serious software disruption might look like in practice. x.com/FleischmanMe...

Bsky just letting you externally link in an OP without de-prioritization, after X, feels luxurious, decadent, and crushing.

Rand can often write compellingly but I think much of her work hinges on very careful framings. A fun game is “would this Atlas Shrugged speech sound preposterous if instead of metal foundries, copper mines, or trains, it was about Juicero, pet rocks, or Labubus?”

Very cool, but this bathroom is too in-distribution. Kinda want to see how it handles "truly foul" conditions.

My main productivity trick is "open a notepad file and type out the next two things you need to do right now" Usually leads to 2-5 hours of good work because even having 2 solid steps to tackle usually combos into full task completion.

Has anyone else noticed "flash-out" behavior of posts on X? For some posts that are either platform negative or long-form outside of articles, when on desktop, if you load your profile page, you briefly see the posts, then they instantly flash out of view and are removed from the feed.