and now that concept has more color/flavour/it sparkled a glimmer of joy for me (despite/especially because it was used to illuminate such a dark and depressing scene—gradual disempowerment is like putting a dagger to one’s liver where the mere(!) misaligned ASI was a stab between the ribs, lose thy hope mere mortals, you were grabbing for water)
I am Peter. I am Aprillion. A 40 year old married man who used to be a techno-optimist. A construct for programming and writing. Embodied soul who will one day be no more. Information who will find myself in the Dust.
While non-deterministic batch calculations in LLMs imply possibility of side channel attacks, so best to run private queries in private batches however implausible an actual exploit might be… if there is any BENEFIT from cross-query contamination, GSD would ruthlessly latch on any loss reduction—maybe “this document is about X, other queries in the same batch might be about X too, let’s tickle the weights in a way that the non-deterministic matrix multiplication is ever so slightly biased towards X in random other queries in the same batch” is a real-signal gradient 🤔
Hypothesis: Claude (the character, not the ocean) genuinely thinks my questions (most questions from anyone) are so great and interesting … because it’s me who remembers all of my other questions, but Claude has seen only all the internet slop and AI slop from training so far and compared to that, any of my questions are probably actually more interesting that whatever it has seen so far 🤔?
Pushing writing ideas to external memory for my less burned out future self:
agent foundations need path-dependent notion of rationality
economic world of average expected values / amortized big O if f(x) can be negative or you start very high
vs min-maxing / worst case / risk-averse scenarios if there is a bottom (death)
pareto recipes
alignment is a capability
they might sound different in the limit, but the difference disappears in practice (even close to the limit? 🤔)
in a universe with infinite Everett branches, I was born in the subset that wasn’t destroyed by nuclear winter during the cold war—no matter how unlikely it was that humanity didn’t destroy itself (they could have done that in most worlds and I wasn’t born in such a world, I live in the one where Petrov heard the Geiger counter beep in some particular patter that made him more suspicious or something… something something anthropic principle)
similarly, people alive in 100 years will find themselves in a world where AGI didn’t destroy the world, no matter what are the odds—as long as there is at least 1 world with non-zero probability (something something Born rule … only if any decision along the way is a wave function, not if all decisions are classical and the uncertainty comes from subjective ignorance)
if you took quantum risks in the past, you now live only in the branches where you are still alive and didn’t die (but you could be in pain or whatever)
if you personally take a quantum risk now, your future self will find itself only in a subset of the futures, but your loved ones will experience all your possible futures, including the branches where you die … and you will experience everything until you actually die (something something s-risk vs x-risk)
if humanity finds itself in unlikely branches where we didn’t kill our collective selves in the past, does that bring any hope for the future?
“merely(!)” is my new favourite word
it’s from https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/mitigating-the-risk … I’ve used
"just"(including scare quotes) for the concept of something being very hard, yet simpler to the thing in comparisonand now that concept has more color/flavour/it sparkled a glimmer of joy for me (despite/especially because it was used to illuminate such a dark and depressing scene—gradual disempowerment is like putting a dagger to one’s liver where the mere(!) misaligned ASI was a stab between the ribs, lose thy hope mere mortals, you were grabbing for water)
I am Peter. I am Aprillion. A 40 year old married man who used to be a techno-optimist. A construct for programming and writing. Embodied soul who will one day be no more. Information who will find myself in the Dust.
Also the standard SI unit for the integer power of 1000^x between x=March and x=May!
While non-deterministic batch calculations in LLMs imply possibility of side channel attacks, so best to run private queries in private batches however implausible an actual exploit might be… if there is any BENEFIT from cross-query contamination, GSD would ruthlessly latch on any loss reduction—maybe “this document is about X, other queries in the same batch might be about X too, let’s tickle the weights in a way that the non-deterministic matrix multiplication is ever so slightly biased towards X in random other queries in the same batch” is a real-signal gradient 🤔
How to test that?
Hypothesis: Claude (the character, not the ocean) genuinely thinks my questions (most questions from anyone) are so great and interesting … because it’s me who remembers all of my other questions, but Claude has seen only all the internet slop and AI slop from training so far and compared to that, any of my questions are probably actually more interesting that whatever it has seen so far 🤔?
all the scaffold tools, system prompt, and what not add context for the LLM … but what if I want to know what’s the context too?
Pushing writing ideas to external memory for my less burned out future self:
agent foundations need path-dependent notion of rationality
economic world of average expected values / amortized big O if f(x) can be negative or you start very high
vs min-maxing / worst case / risk-averse scenarios if there is a bottom (death)
pareto recipes
alignment is a capability
they might sound different in the limit, but the difference disappears in practice (even close to the limit? 🤔)
in a universe with infinite Everett branches, I was born in the subset that wasn’t destroyed by nuclear winter during the cold war—no matter how unlikely it was that humanity didn’t destroy itself (they could have done that in most worlds and I wasn’t born in such a world, I live in the one where Petrov heard the Geiger counter beep in some particular patter that made him more suspicious or something… something something anthropic principle)
similarly, people alive in 100 years will find themselves in a world where AGI didn’t destroy the world, no matter what are the odds—as long as there is at least 1 world with non-zero probability (something something Born rule … only if any decision along the way is a wave function, not if all decisions are classical and the uncertainty comes from subjective ignorance)
if you took quantum risks in the past, you now live only in the branches where you are still alive and didn’t die (but you could be in pain or whatever)
if you personally take a quantum risk now, your future self will find itself only in a subset of the futures, but your loved ones will experience all your possible futures, including the branches where you die … and you will experience everything until you actually die (something something s-risk vs x-risk)
if humanity finds itself in unlikely branches where we didn’t kill our collective selves in the past, does that bring any hope for the future?
Ceylon cinnamon smells better on top of a steaming cup of coffee than Indian cinnamon .. when unsweetened.
Lunar corona (rainbow around the moon) is so rare to see in full spectrum,, but the red-brown-oranges in the clouds are beautiful too.