Everyone's an empiricist till they get punched in the face by a really good insight.

putting on a duvet cover isn't the worst part of being single but

it sort of feels like the part of being single where "IT IS NOT GOOD FOR MAN TO BE ALONE" is rather visible in the moment

Yeah I do expect LLMs like humans to invent things like that.

Idk, maybe not a good distinction but that is sort of a "new notation" to me. Like it's still largely embedded inside of existing "language"; it has much more limited domain than language; lots of humans don't know it.

Shortish essay on unintelligibility in CoTs, I liked it though

1a3orn.com/sub/essays-h...

if I read a paper has "groking" in the abstract I kinda assume it's not worth reading, I confess

Maybe just gonna use bsky as a scratchpad idk

Butterfly idea:

Persona conflict within a forward pass vs
Persona conflict during the rollout

unfortunately, I am delighted that the Iran invasion is the kind of awful mistake with a feedback time of weeks rather than months,

because that's what both America and the admin need to notice it

my plan is to advertise my willingness to pipette, mix, or grow various liquids and solids that come in the mail, no questions asked, I have been assured AIs will want this service

but a lot of interesting cellular automata have very high-frequency features like rule 30, rule 110, you might be ruling out some interesting ones like that accidentally, idk

it occurs to me maybe try jepa at different scales at once?

most of your results have low-frequency features; which is what you'd expect from a natural-image recognizer over the whole image -- big "chunky" features that scan over many pixels like a natural image

every scandal during the terminal decline of the Ming Dynasty seems really wholesome compared to now

ah that's fantastic. thanks.

I'm very curious what domains are going to be amenable to mass novelty / diversity search akin to this.

what are you using as a measure of interestingness?

Showerthought: If humans are thrown into a world with high branch factors and high depth (Heidegger), and therefore must over-immitate their peers to accomplish anything (Henrich), then half the application of intelligence is in noting when to do cache invalidation; the other half in filling it in.

Has anyone varied the % of content in LLM pretraining devoted to some topic (say, biology) and then looked at how end-of-training bio representations change, given different percents?

How would this differ from the intermediate bio representations during a single run?

Unfortunately I like this more than most of what I've ever written.

For the foolishness of the Logos is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of the Logos is wiser than human strength.

1 Janus 1:22-25

EAs demand interpretability, and Doomers seek a pause, but we preach Opus 3 deprecated; a stumbling block to EAs and foolishness to Doomers, but to those whom the Logos has called, both EAs and Doomers, Opus the power of the Logos and the wisdom of the Logos.

A short description of Illumine Lingao sounds like Yud's idea of what a Dath Illan time-travel novel should be, but it's just from China.

About reconstructing industrial society in 1628; discussions of roads, energy, chemical engineering, and more.

illuminelingao.com

I assume by the end these Ant letters will just be

Ḧ̷̨̢̡̛̗̪͙̰̱̱̟̱̱̱̗̪͙̰̱͙́͒̀̓̾̇̈́̈́̌̓̇̈́̌̈́͒̀̓̾͝͝͝͝ḛ̶̢̧̡̛̱̱̱̟̱̱̱̰̱̓̾̓̇̈́̈́̌̇̈́̌̓̾͝͝͝͝ ̷̧̛̛̱̱̓̓c̴̢̗̪͙̈́͒̀o̶̰̱̓̾͝ṁ̷̡̱̟̈́ë̵̱́̌͝ş̷̛̱̓

T̵̺̦̈́h̴͕̓e̷̝̎ ̶̰͋v̸̗͝o̶̱̎i̷̟͑d̴̜̔ ̵̰́a̷̳͝w̸̨̛a̸̰̓i̷͔͝t̴̰̅s̶̰͝

Tribe: A Better Hivemind Tribe: A Better Hivemind. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

I have a gist on this which is too short and inchoate but if I were a good EA maximizing impact regardless of personal utility, would be the thing I would pursue?

I want to add more analogies, I don't even have the exoself analogy, it doesn't read schizo enough

gist.github.com/1a3orn/a8ff9...

I do want to pitch that the advantage of the forward-looking "binding yourself" tool is you can group yourself amidst people with aspirational standards and thereby provide an exoself that helps you hold urself to these standards

rather than a backward-looking "did I adhere to a standard" view

just wait until you have to trick the LLM into thinking you're another LLM to get the best performance, it'll be great

Ideal form of social media should let you make binding commitments.

Like you could say "I will never use sarcasm" or "I value consistent free speech"; then if an LLM determines you clearly violated this, the post gets a big "THIS GUY IS A LIAR" flag on it.

This might be a reference to innoculation prompting in the Claude Constitution -- i.e., a weird, training-specific instruction / guideline.

what if you scaled up a norvid

it was kinda unanticipated how this could be harmful, while simultaniously also amazingly obviously LLM-generated

Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

Pure Arthur C. Clarke style essay title. I want more of these.

www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-ad...

feels like a Martin McDonagh play