Brian Hacker

Hackers literally only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting

now a deleted post, but this is the ultimate end point of capitalism, ai will completely atomize everyone and there will be zero shared experiences. there will be no culture, only pure consumption. this must be resisted

I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back: We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective. Look no further than U.S. capital markets. Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital. And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it. But look at what else it's done along the way: - Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard. - Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in. - Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents. - Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500. - Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it. None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about. And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been. So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes. That's the whole problem.

Guy who thinks the real GOAT is Tim Duncan

Fleabag and 6 Feet Under should be on here but tough exercise.

Listened to an EA-adjacent AI safety expert from Redwood Research on podcast, and you come away with 2 obvious realizations. 1. The current working theories for how AI takes control of civilization are...for lack of a better word...ridiculous. The arguments consist of dozens of contingent assumptions held together by made up probabilities assigned to future states nobody can possibly know. Change just one variable and the whole web of doom unravels. That's not to say AI is harmless. Obviously a technology this powerful carries real risks. But if we’re going to accept extraordinary claims about human extinction (and then make major policy decisions around them) we should demand extraordinary rigor. 2. It’s a great reminder that the genius is no less prone to delusion than the midwit. If anything, they may be more prone because of their gift for rationalizing to their own conclusions. And that’s what’s so bizarre about this whole debate. You have outlandish, quasi-religious claims delivered with an air of inevitability, and somehow the perceived intelligence of the messenger gets mistaken for evidence that the arguments themselves are sound. At a certain point, it’s really no different from Tom Cruise talking your ear off about thetans...

Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR. We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use. Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…

Trump’s joint presser with Mamdani was not originally planned, source familiar tells Playbook Mamdani asked Trump on the spot if he would join him and called on the three news outlets Trump had banned from White House:

To put it differently, making AI safe is the same problem as cutting fossil fuels. Discipline the powerful to force them to invest in safety. But we have a harder time conceiving of the rule of law applying to the powerful than bots taking over human civilization.

All of the 'ZOMG AI is going to destroy the world' theories are simply observations of problems that result from the fact that we don't govern. They aren't AI-specific. But since none of these people pay attention to governance, actual social risk is new to them.

They’re taking colloidal silver and then tanning because they’re turning blue but it doesn’t fix it 🔒 my final answer

America’s democratic socialists are obsessed with the Nordic model. The problem? These countries aren’t socialist, writes @mj_koch. Read more: on.wsj.com/4wPtTGe