I for one would find breaking all of Bitcoin to be quite useful. Once again the conservative comedy-heavy portfolio pays off for the laughing investor!

On one hand, Anthropic sourcing suggests that this is probably at least partially nonsense. On the other hand, though, if there’s any accuracy at all I’m going to spend the rest of my life infuriated that I went down the technical degree route and actively avoided a liberal arts education in order to improve my career outlook and then this happened.

Like, I don’t think they were trying to mislead but I feel like every guidance counselor for kids ought to have a plaque in their office saying “please note that the world is complicated, ever-changing, and scary and I might actually have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about”.

It’s both less sad because he’s probably not completely LARPing as his entire family on twitter, but also more sad because that’s his actual mother who couldn’t be arsed to actually be present and decided to slop it up for social media clout instead.

If it is a firm I hope they’re getting some good word of mouth on the back-end because they’re on point.

I want to piggyback off this to talk about the inevitable Uber comparisons, because not only is the mismatch between investment and returns several orders of magnitude greater, but there’s also a difference in kind. Uber’s model was to undercut the taxi industry and establish a dependence within their niche before increasing revenues. It’s the classic enshitttification cycle. But the AI plan, at least as advertised, isn’t to undercut a specific industry as much as it is to undercut literally the entire white-collar labor force. There are several problems with this, starting with the fact that the technology isn’t actually able to replace the target in the way it would need to. More significantly, however, is that labor doesn’t work like taxis. If labor can’t get work it shuts down the entire economy because they lose their income and can’t actually consume any of the things the market offers. Also labor tends to get mad and break out the pitchforks and molotovs if things get too bad, and “restructuring the economy to no longer provide you the means to sustain your family” seems like the kind of situation that definitionally makes things too bad. In either event the point is that even if this tech is somehow as revolutionary as advertised then there’s not really any winning for the company.

Glad to see that “regulatory uncertainty” continues to mean “we figured out that the government might actually care if we do something illegal”

Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

I don’t necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systems’ lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what it’s going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesn’t do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.

Ed: hadn’t realized that the guy we were taking seriously was the author of Sapiens. Gonna have to assume I was extending entirely too much charity in my assessment.

Honestly that part alone reminds me of the pastebin debacle where people just failed to consider that these things are in fact publicly accessible.

I keep bouncing back to this one and I think that the core objection is that the method of discourse that they’re trying to advance here is fundamentally incapable of handling people actually disagreeing. Like, the whole concept of “identifying a crux” basically requires that there’s a central point of agreement somewhere. In my experience a lot of these issues are better understood as tradeoffs and compromises. It is simultaneously true that some people will do terrible things left to their own devices and locking them up seems to be one of the only things society can collectively agree to do about it and also that locking people up is fundamentally cruel and it’s bad that we do it. The challenge isn’t in identifying the central point of agreement between those two but in managing their fundamental incompatibility.

However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can’t recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated “from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale,” without backing up any of the encrypted data.

As usual, even when these things display legitimately impressive capabilities they still fuck up in ways that completely negate the whole point of doing it in the first place.

I never said it was a good old Star Wars expanded universe novel.

Did anyone else read the old Star wars Novel Darksaber by Kevin J Anderson? The Hutts kidnap/hire the designer of the original death star to build them one of their own, and while the new Republic is gathering up the requisite heroes to do what they do to death stars we get to see the Hutts cutting corners and embezzling. The fleet arrives just as they’re ready to turn it on and instead of blowing our heroes up the subpar construction fails and it just fucking explodes.

No idea why that came to mind all of a sudden after reading this piece.

I mean at some point someone is going to try and make this argument so they can actually extract profit from their slop-inator. And it’s gonna be real funny to see what they had to say about copyright law during the training data gold rush.

This gets dangerously close to acknowledging that the rationalist method isn’t actually very useful for any area where it isn’t trivial.

Yeah. The Haitian revolution was absolutely a high point of postcolonial Caribbean history, but the resulting state wasn’t exactly able to project power and export their revolution through material support. It gave slavers a reason to double down on repression, but outside of Haiti itself it’s a propaganda win more than a change in the scales.

It’s also fascinating because I thought the OP was pretty clear that there’s a difference between decision theory and “desirable dispositions” which I interpret as covering the kind of counterfactual preferences indicated here. Actually there’s an even more fundamental issue with this as a decision theory problem which is that it misidentifies who is actually making a decision. Changing the applicant’s decision theory (while leaving their preference for thievery intact) doesn’t matter to the person actually deciding here.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s also a wildly racist example to put forward, it’s just also a bad example and where there is an argument it’s addressed in the OP.

Yeah. For being a little strange I find the shrimp welfare stuff pretty unobjectionable. Like, he vastly overstates the magnitude of good done by those stunners because he does appear to be a shut-up-and-multiply bro, but I’m comfortable with the general notion that we should be nicer to shrimp and other animals we eat, even the ones that don’t make good PETA glamour shots.

Ed: oh sweet merciful Jesus the Epstein take. Nope. I’m actually investigating whether we should torture shrimp even harder just to make sure since their most ardent defender is like this.

Also, I showed this to my wife since we’re all going through it, and she points out that that burger looks like it knows what an Atari is.

This may be true in the general case, but if you consider that my depression and anxiety make me vaguely megalomaniacal you would understand that I am different and uniquely terrible for having literally any problems ever.

My wife keeps lamenting that we haven’t found ways to help pet rats live as long as cats but I don’t think this is what she had in mind.