Robots are good at searching through large sets of data. By far the most valuable one I’ve found is my Gmail account, which I’ve actively used since 2007. It is an actual gold mine.
Astra’s mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol. For practical purposes, I was actively nervous about some potential uses of Sol, in a way I am not for Astra. Astra’s super alignment status should scare the living daylights out of you.
If this is only due to gains in capabilities, that is extremely bad news, and it means CoT monitoring is unlikely to survive for another year unless we find a way to actively improve it, and it might not last six months.
There is no reason NOT to have every single email you get routed through an agent / LLM / API to be scored and approved or rejected And then the approved emails ordered by importance It's crazy this isn't a feature of Gmail, Fastmail etc AI could permanently fix email!
If the user doesn't actively push back against the AI model, then they get the generic output, the lowest common acceptable denominator of aesthetics and taste.
The link between venture capital and evangelical Christianity was closer than I thought. They're not just analogous; they deliberately cross-pollinate.
if you try to do a really good job at every company you've been working well with all the people that you work with, including your own team, your peer, whatever it is. Over time, very slowly, you accumulate a decent reputation in people's mind.
You can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise.
players who are also commentators give better commentary than people who are just commentators. Stock analysts who never invest have zero skin in the game.
go fire up your browser. Do it in incognito. Go to your app and do everything with a fresh Gmail address. Try support. See how your support is. Try to contact sales.
To get to principal, you need to put yourself on the critical path. To be effective as a principal and go beyond it, you need to actively remove yourself from it.
You know, interestingly, LM themselves are quite bad at playing chess. Like, they hallucinate moves. They look at patterns, right? They're they're very good at pattern recognition, but not so good at going super super super deep on a specific chess thing.
So I don't think uh learning is really about training. I think learning is about about learning. It's about an active process. The child tries things and sees what happens.
In terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.
I'm getting into screen-time blocking. I use the app Opal on a recommendation from Lucas Gelfond. It won't let me scroll Twitter, Substack, or Instagram for 80% of the day. Gmail is also blocked from 11pm to 8am.
That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures.
One of the things we do as physicists is we actually want it to break down at some level, we’re looking for the precision measurement or the energy or whatever it will take where the standard model is no longer working. Not that it’s not working approximately, but we’re looking for the deviations.
Every now and again I go searching for a replacement IDE. VSCode came closer than anything else in the last two decades to replacing Vim, but somehow I am back here.
I run a Synology NAS DS920+ with 4 4TB Seagate Ironwolf HDD - I use this as storage for course videos that I'm not actively working on and then have those folders mirrored to Backblaze B2 as an off-site backup.
In terms of iOS apps, I use PDF Expert, which is a great PDF reader and annotator (using Apple Pencil), Notability as a virtual whiteboard (again with Apple Pencil), Google Docs for document editing, Google Calendar, and Gmail.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.