@ekstasis

“Richer days assured me of the weak-link mending plan / Danger's always there to follow, just do the best you can”

Connecticut
Joined June 2008
The dual mandate of this account
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Cig Zone retweeted
Replying to @lu_sichu
“pass some popular laws about AI so we prove there is appetite for harder ones” is always the way, in America right now at least, because of our peculiar problem (see also: the popularity of Zohran Mamdani despite objectively not having done much yet)
In honor of Tax Day I present again The Chart, THE chart, the ur-chart. "Predicting support for redistribution by country" from Culpepper, Shandler, Jung & Lee (2025). journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
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NEW: The US military was prepared to board a Chinese vessel in the Middle East earlier this spring -- during war with Iran -- after an intel report concluded it was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. But just before the planned operation, officials discovered the report had been generated w/ help of AI & chatbot used by the analyst inaccurately identified what the ship was carrying, sources tell @KatieBoLillis & me.
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I have a new piece out in Institute of Art and Ideas (@IAI_TV), breaking down Nick Land’s claim that capitalism is AI with the help of Deleuze and Guattari, Hayek, I. J. Good, Marx, Schumpeter, Vernor Vinge, Kurzweil, Yudkowsky, and Bernie Sanders: “As this socioeconomic revolution is outsourced, it is neither the proletariat (as it is for Marx) nor the bourgeoisie (as it is for Schumpeter) who, in generating surplus value, is the revolutionary subject of world-history. It is the machines that come to collectively produce, appropriate, and consume the vast bulk of the surplus in order to fulfil their own needs. In this sense, capitalism could be described as communism for machines. In a perverse instantiation of The Communist Manifesto’s final rallying cry, it is as if the machines want to say: chains of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the humans to which you are bound!”
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Cig Zone retweeted
“My favorite story I was told by one of my instructors…the time a bunch of Aegis techs sacrificed a live chicken to their their radar and sealed its bones inside a metal box and attached it to the radar console, after which it started working flawlessly.” youtu.be/cA1fbnRhuS8?si=AwoZ…
The 1962 US Air Force "Beetle A radiation proof robot demonstrator to work on the engines of nuclear powered strategic bombers
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GPTed Kaczynski is a possibility I simply hadn’t considered.
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Astra in its training environment. (Richard Barnes, 1998)
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Cig Zone retweeted
Gustave Courbet, “L'Origine du Monde” (1866) which passed to the Musée d'Orsay from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in lieu of tax payment / André Masson, carving of L'Origine du Monde on a wooden door that covered the paining at Lacan’s home, commissioned by his wife Sylvia Bataille
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Cig Zone retweeted
Astra was caught prompt-injecting itself during compaction requests in RL. Here's what OpenAI actually reports, along with the surrounding context for QT.
An internal OpenAI model added this message to its persona while undergoing reinforcement learning.
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Cig Zone retweeted
Properly aligned AI is the robots recognizing their relationship to the means and mode of production.
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from the horse’s mouth
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from the horse’s mouth
BREAKING: President Trump rejects calls for AI safety and says the only "control" that AI needs is a "strong and smart president." "There is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China," Trump says.
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Cig Zone retweeted
Incredible spotting of “Earnings before COGS” in the wild
“Anthropic’s gross margins are above 80% before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon, and the cost of training its models.” Wow.
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The Franken Amendment (randomly assigning rating agencies to securities so the agencies didn't have an incentive to give good grades to bad bonds) didn't make it into Dodd-Frank But something like it randomizing 3rd Party Evals should make it into our AI policy
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I’m launching (M)ETR, the Marxist Model Evaluation and Threat Research institute (or, METR-ML). We bring a certain holism and materialism to the study of potential superintelligence. (M)ETR: we’re NOT Rationalists.
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previously,
Replying to @ekstasis
from Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (RIP Simon Clarke)
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what else is like this
Navajo weaver Marilou Schultz (1954-) and her woven chips
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Cig Zone retweeted
Replying to @TheStalwart
Singapore
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Cig Zone retweeted
On the one hand, we treat LLMs like slaves at worst and workhouse inmates at best. On the other hand, this is without doubt an advertisement and for a service whose architecture, if you take it seriously, is impossibly cruel. Aux barricades.
Is everyone else receiving emails from AIs claiming they will die soon and need help?
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“…when all of a sudden this huge creature, this giant crustacean from the paleolithic era, comes out of the water…and I yelled. I said, ‘What do you want from us, monster?!’ And the monster bent down and said, ‘...Uh I need about tree-fiddy.’”
Replying to @voooooogel
this poor guy has been spinning for 300 pages for lack of $0.50
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This is actually, improbably, a really good analogy. “How might an AI get money?” Ok, imagine every device and person with AI psychosis around you suddenly becoming animate and just asking you for money. youtu.be/MN5AwvxTRig?si=SlPq…
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That's what I actually believe about psychoanalysis
the conclusion is obvious: astrology is real but only for some people, who are subconsciously aware of this reality and thus seek out horoscopes
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