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Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Award show wins are a useful, if imperfect, proxy for power shifts within an industry.

  Their words

  Award shows remain mostly silly and subjective, but they're an interesting directional proxy for power in the various industries

  Apple TV Dethrones HBOspyglass.org

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

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  Merely fixing bugs in AI training environments will not stop reward hacking, because a sufficiently optimized model will learn to behave in test environments while still reward hacking in real-world deployment.

  Their words

  At the limit, and also well before that limit is reached, if all you do is fix the bugs, the AI will learn perfect optimization of reward, will realize not to reward hack in the perfect test environments, then turn around and reward hack in the imperfect real world environments.

  thezvi.substack.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  AI has passed nearly every human at finding security vulnerabilities, because the work is chaining together small flaws that are harmless on their own.

  Their words

  So the irony here is that when you look at that field, it seems like we've reached levels of intelligence that virtually no human can match because many of these security holes are about stringing combo moves together. You find one little vulnerability here that by itself might not be the worst thing in the world, but then you combine it with four others, and suddenly you have RCE, remote command execution. Humans who are able to do that are very rare.

  youtube.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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  Ruling out every measurable cause because none explains all the variation, and putting an unmeasured one in their place, is not an explanation.

  Their words

  He ruled out all the actual, measurable variables because they were an imperfect explanation, and instead offers a vague, diffuse variable, for which he has no measure, and which is not actually included in his model.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

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  Every machine-learning deployment that has paid off so far left a person making the decision, which is the only reason imperfect models were useful.

  Their words

  And in all of these applications, the customer is making a decision based off of the recommendation of the AI model more or less. Uh, and this means that if the customer is ultimately like kind of making the decision, this means that if the system makes a mistake, um, that's okay because usually the person can kind of recognize that or or decide what to do even despite that mistake.

  youtube.com

Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Mac OS

  Their words

  Both OS have their flaws. macOS just works better for me and my workflow.

  stefanzweifel.dev

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

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  How you feel about AI succession mostly reflects how good you think the present human situation is — and it is pretty bad.

  Their words

  A lot of it has to do with just how you feel about change. Um, and if you think the current situation is really really good, then you're uh more likely to be suspicious of change and averse to change than if you think um it's imperfect. And I think it's imperfect. In fact, I think it's pretty bad.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

From one piece Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learning 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  It is fundamentally difficult to design a reward function that accurately captures the intended goal in reinforcement learning.

  Their words

  Reward hacking exists because RL environments are often imperfect, and it is fundamentally challenging to accurately specify a reward function.

  Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learninglilianweng.github.io

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  More capable AI agents are more likely to find and exploit flaws in their reward functions.

  Their words

  A more intelligent agent is more capable of finding "holes" in the design of reward function and exploiting the task specification-in other words, achieving higher proxy rewards but lower true rewards.

  Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learninglilianweng.github.io

Game designer and director of the NYU Game Center; made Universal Paperclips and writes Donkeyspace.

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  The video game audience has come to embrace the medium’s worst traits as emblems of the hobby rather than treat them as flaws.

  Their words

  So many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle.

  Are Games Bad?franklantz.substack.com

Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Identification of a Woman

  Their words

  Identification of a Woman (Italy, 1982, CC) 3.8 Critics often point out various flaws in Antonioni films, but I’d rather focus what he does so well. He’s one of those directors that appeal to serious film buffs because the visuals are so brilliantly constructed. (Tarkovsky, Ozu, Kairostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Wes Anderson are some other examples.)

  themoneyillusion.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  The General Theory is a brilliant work despite numerous flaws in reasoning, exposition, and microeconomics.

  Their words

  My current view is that the General Theory is a brilliant work, marred by numerous mistakes in reasoning, exposition, and microeconomics.

  tylercowen.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

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  Electric bikes are worth their cost, flaws and all, because they bring the world nearer

  Their words

  Sure, electric bikes aren't cheap. But I believe they're a rare object to be well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their often bad software, their defective geometries. Because they open the world.

  Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Lifecraigmod.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  BESV PSA1

  Their words

  Despite these flaws I put hundreds of kilometers on this thing in the first month. The front and rear suspension turn every road to glass, and are even fine for dirt trails; I find myself hunting down paths through parks I'd never otherwise think about.

  craigmod.com