Selected egregiously dumb takes on AI (for future reference, will add to this over time, obviously no claim to comprehensiveness):

https://x.com/pmddomingos/status/2107598154799738891 https://x.com/esaagar/status/2107154086252380172

Sorry for tailgating you. I was trying to get a better connection to your mobile hotspot so I could look at Twitter while I drive

I have gotten much better at productively using AI recently, mostly because of trial and error but in large part because of following Theo Browne’s advice.

In particular, investing in setups where as much of my work as possible can get done on a remote machine, and treating my laptop as a display + thin client, has paid off in massive ways.

Inaugural Abstractions conference in Czechia was awesome! Looking forward to next year :)

Someone needs to get Linux working on the MacBook Neo… I think I’m going to have Astra give it a shot.

Update: OpenAI is flagging me for cyber risk :( Trying Fable

Update: Ended up joining forces with the Omarchy M team. I am daily driving Linux on the Neo. It’s almost perfect and improving fast! Working on my M3 Air now.

Re: OpenAI’s Astra and CoT monitorability:

It remains to be seen whether the new architecture will have a large impact on chain of thought monitorability, even once recurrence is no longer limited.

But more importantly I think that relying on CoT monitoring has always been a shitty plan and it’s good if this is happening earlier with respect to capabilities because it would force people to move off of an unsustainable crutch.

the robot made me a thing and you can use it too

https://states-ive-been-to.apps.au.pe/

Here are one piece of advice I have for people who are getting started in AI safety. (This advice comes with the usual caveat that it doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone, you should consider whether the opposite advice applies, etc.)

The AI safety community is a extremely diverse group of people who are motivated by some similar goals and share some beliefs but have a lot of major disagreements. My most important piece of advice is to think carefully about these disagreements for yourself and consider the arguments from all sides. One default failure mode is to place inappropriately high weight on the opinions and arguments of the people you happen to be around and to discount the ideas which are less popular in your particular subgroup.

You should identify and think carefully about the disagreements in the following areas:

• basic philosophies of ethics and minds
• different theories of change
• how to think about pursuing so called ‘dual use’ research
• risk weightings (e.g. balancing prioritization of mitigating xrisk vs power concentration vs gradual disempowerment, etc)
• what kinds of human structures, e.g. relationships with frontier labs, are productive

The best way to learn about these arguments is probably to spend a lot of time reading old blog posts, especially posts on LessWrong, and then writing about what interests you.

I’ve been doing some expected value calculations to understand the potential effects of eating different kinds of fats (the classic debate over saturated fats, linoleic acid, etc). And while it’s quite possible that my model is shit, no matter where I set the parameters (as long as they’re all within reasonable ranges), every intervention basically looks like a wash.