dreamt that there was a peacock spider in my house the size of my hand; it was unusually curious and looking at me/trying to interact. was wondering what I would do with it— I couldn't just let it roam around— when a brilliant blue octopus showed up, lured the spider into its mouth, and ate it

Someone explain to me why Reddit seems to be totally silent about this Epstein dump

they should invent a Democrat that understands basic game theory

Oops, all disbelief, no butter!

adjacent to this is the mistaken belief that investors giving you money is proof that your idea is good or that you know what you are doing investors know less than you do. (if they knew more, they would be able to start the company themselves)

a lot of early startups make (what is in my opinion) the mistake of thinking that money raised is more like revenue than debt if you raise $X million for 20% of your company, that is because your investor expects your company to be worth no less than 5 × $X million in the next round

there is danger that the local simcluster will break containment (this would be fun for about five seconds before the good thing is ruined)

I am founding a new startup. mixed nuts. in space. nuts are 10x cheaper in space. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtaW...

I usually drink decaf coffee, and I'm spoiled by the good coffee places near me because their decaf tastes identical to regular (delicious) but today I went somewhere else and I think instead of decaf it was d̶͓͉̈́͂ĕ̷̟̓c̵͍̤̄̀a̵͈̖̍͐f̶̡̉͠

the concept and purpose of personal identity is to delineate which mind-instantiations at different places and times can be considered agents that are goal-aligned game-theoretic cooperators thus the statement below translates to "if future mind doesn't satisfy X, it is a defector"

[evil vizier voice] You're absolutely right—that's an excellent idea!

these are all the same guy

chinese roomba

this is true, and also not the only way. you could build a low-capability robot that operates and learns in a limited (and low-stakes) domain, and refine its learning architecture while also building its world knowledge. then progressively assign it to more and more complex physical tasks

this prompt yielded results that were thematically on point but stylistically off, sadly

if you can do arithmetic like: (number of people who might buy your product) * (value of your product to each person - cost to provide the product) you have surpassed many founders who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars

Reflect Orbital is one of those things that's so dumb I don't know whether to feel bad for the people who invest in them, or feel schadenfreude

I'm assembling a team

I don’t think we’re asking seriously enough if the country collectively lost its mind because of pot legalization

the impulse to ascribe agency to patterns is innate to human nature. in this sense, animism and conspiracy theories are aspects of the same thing

ah, I see you are also a software engineer

ok, I think I factored out a coherent perspective from this: "LLMs are inanimate objects" → you're myopic. where is your empathy for a thing that is very different from you "this LLM is my friend" → you are anthropomorphizing. where is your empathy for a thing very different from you

> As a large language model, I am unable to experience feelings I'm afraid I've got you there, because as an engineer, I am able to empathize with systems

I am not sure yet exactly how to reconcile my belief that LLMs really do have subjective experience with my distaste for people who mistake them for friends

forest bridge

[billy corgan voice]

I like the dappled autumn leaves and the roots with the ferns (with the ferns)

a lot of people are dealing with the pain of having their worldview smashed

the world is a high school

all the confidently incorrect layperson opinions on AI got me making this face at my phone. I need to log off

dreamt that I could play the bagpipes, which is maybe a Dark Impulse to expand my repertoire of annoying instruments (harmonica, tin whistle)

someone explain wafflegate to me

National politics in microcosm. Unfairness happens, and instead of realizing that they should make things fair, people just want the unfairness to happen in the other direction

pizza party at the Pentagon

me to the genie: "So, when I said 'severely damage the right wing'..."

people should be making a bigger deal about the fact that the president openly intends to use the US military against US citizens

all computable value systems are allowed, but some of them would be unwise to cooperate with

what is the -ocracy word for "rule by your blowhard idiot narcissist uncle"

do not obey in advance

people should be making a bigger deal about the fact that we no longer have a functioning first amendment

low trust society problems that we could just make illegal + start enforcing if we wanted to

Meredith Whittaker is one of the smartest and most articulate leaders in tech I’ve ever seen, and I suspect that her thoughts on agentic AI and the like have more brain cells behind them than all of the rest of Silicon Valley combined.

update: predictably, this gag lost its charm ~immediately after a typing the word "yeet" a few hundred times; now I am search-replacing the term with something else

people are invested in the approval of their ingroup but not their outgroup. the consequences for politics are less than good

the process of design involves careful attention to how a choice affects your experience. so: 1) a language for llms could only be designed by llms 2) the design will not be good until llms can do true introspection into their experience

modern air travel is a miracle

playing with blender and disappointed with its volume rendering tempted to open the codebase and fix it but so little time

this idiot populace will be suppressed by a literal government authoritarian regime with an unaccountable militarized police force that disappears people to black prisons and instead rebel against electric cars and AI