coffeemug

9 ms·

1.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
A government agency tests all medications, why not models?
2.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
Imagine a model that's 10000x more intelligent than any human. You integrate that model into a sensitive industry. You now effectively have an extremely powerful foreign agent running e.g. your energy sector. This is qualitatively very
3.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
I'm not advocating for the policy, I'm just saying that there is a legitimate argument that's not so easy to dismiss. > And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans
4.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.
5.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
I am not supposing a low-risk event. This is an obvious attack vector that an adversary would almost certainly exploit. I would exploit it if I were them.
6.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
Suppose a foreign actor deliberately builds an unaligned model, and dumps it at a very low cost through subsidies. Since the cost is lower, everyone integrates it into their business. But now the foreign actor has control; perhaps the model
7.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
I disagree with the first part (that this is merely a voice). There is a distinct difference between an author's unique voice and slop. It may be hard to tease out exactly what the difference is, but it seems self-evident to me it&#x27
8.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
Would you feel the same way if he attached good faith probability estimates to those claims?
9.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
As a language Lisp is great (though the ecosystem is limited). It has two flaws-- it's very open-ended so unless you're talented and disciplined you can fall into a rabbit hole of hacking fun Lisp stuff and not actually getting an
10.
by coffeemug 2mo ago
I don’t find Opus to be overly left-leaning. I think it’s generally pretty balanced with a slight lean left, but when pressed it will happily steelman rightwing arguments and operate within a right-leaning belief framework in good faith. (I
11.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
Not anything. There are domains where precedents empirically don’t balloon and domains where they do. Federal government is nearly always the latter.
12.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
The issues with this are precedent/slippery slope. Today it's a small stake in a small number of companies, but empirically government initiatives almost always grow. Once entrenched, I would be willing to bet that the government
13.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
When I was lifting weights I went from 170lbs to 210, and back to 170. Doing that isn’t technically hard, and maintaining is even easier. But I had to think about it _all_ the time. Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but I just don’t want to
14.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
Regulatory agencies limit uses of other products without acts of congress-- cigarettes, vapes, drugs, pesticides, chemicals, explosives. Even firearms, despite a constitutional amendment! Why not models? (Note I am not arguing it's a g
15.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
Another plausible future is AI reshuffling the economic hierarchy. In a technological civilization the pressure valve need not be political. As an aside, you made me curious if Trump made this constituency materially better off. Here's
16.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
It depends on whether you believe US action is overdetermined, but I think if Trump didn’t get elected we would have continued on the path of free trade. His election wasn’t predestined. He had just the right mix of features to win at the t
17.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
That’s a very uncharitable way to interpret public opinion. A more charitable way is that people have different ethical intuitions. Some of us lean more utilitarian than others, and almost no one is a pure utilitarian. It isn’t merely a mat
18.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
“Billionaires v. the underclass” is such an unsophisticated discussion. Markets have all kinds of externalities, equilibrium traps, information asymmetry flywheels, and hundreds of other phenomena that interplay to trip people’s sense of fa
19.
by coffeemug 3mo ago
Giving normal people something that has only been available to rich people is a staple of technological innovation. The problem in this case with Siri isn’t that people don’t want an assistant. It’s that it doesn’t actually work yet.
20.
pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution(github.com)
474 points by coffeemug 3mo ago|108 comments
21.
by coffeemug 4mo ago
Microsoft is no longer rest and vest and hasn’t been for a long time. The expectations and pressure are very high (at least the corner I’m in)
22.
by coffeemug 4mo ago
The balance of power between capital and labor fluctuates; qualitatively it definitely felt different ten years ago. For whatever reason labor seems to have much less power today. Not zero, just less. It isn't that companies used to be
23.
by coffeemug 4mo ago
Both arguments can be (and are) right at once. What OP said is definitely true on the micro level-- not "even/might/some aspects", but the whole thing. It's true that in any given organization there are fewer senior
24.
by coffeemug 4mo ago
I think your first equilibrium would be hard, for two reasons. First, empirically insurgencies are extremely difficult to exterminate; over the long run they tend to win. Second, in the U.S. at least, people tend to look at politics up clos
25.
by coffeemug 4mo ago
The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.
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by coffeemug 4mo ago
Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicl
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by coffeemug 5mo ago
I had the opposite experience. Opus 4.6 extended feels like the first genuinely intelligent model to converse with, Opus 4.7 adaptive feels like slightly smarter LinkedIn slop.
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by coffeemug 5mo ago
In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow. On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no re
29.
by coffeemug 6mo ago
A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a little of it nobody cares, if you demonst
30.
by coffeemug 6mo ago
> Now I have no illusions about who looked stupid and who were stupid. Could you expand on what you mean?

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