Thanks for the support, Ben!
Davis_Kingsley
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Signups Open for CFAR Test Sessions
Experimental CFAR Mini-Workshop @ Arbor Summer Camp
CFAR is running an experimental mini-workshop (June 2-6, Berkeley CA)!
The OODA Loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
CFAR has run European workshops in Czechia for many years, I think starting in… 2017 maybe, though with a break for the pandemic.
The venue used for workshops in 2022 was bought/is run by separate organizations from CFAR and holds a bunch of stuff besides CFAR workshops; I’m not totally up on what’s going on over there or the financial situation with the venue but I believe at least some events are still being held there.
Before that venue was acquired CFAR ran a bunch of European CFAR workshops in other venues; insofar as that venue does end up having to close down or whatever it would not in principle prevent CFAR from doing workshops elsewhere, potentially going back to some of the sites it used in the past, etc.
FWIW CFAR workshops were not AIUI funded by Sam Bankman-Fried and are not officially discontinued—though CFAR hasn’t done mainline workshops for a while it’s done various other less-public workshops and projects, and I think there’s a good chance that there will be at least something similar to the old mainline CFAR workshops in the future...
(source: work for CFAR sometimes)
Whatever happened to AppliedDivinityStudies, anyway? Seemed to be a promising blog adjacent to the community but I just checked back to see what the more recent posts were and it looks to have stopped posting about a year ago?
Fun little more dakka example—I drink a lot of water. It’s sort of annoying having to refill a glass/water bottle/whatever all the time, so I’m using this huge glass instead that I think was intended to be a vase or carafe or something. It’s great.
Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic
What is a “chara inductor”?
I’m personally rather annoyed by all the AI discussion here and have been a lot less engaged recently. I would like to see much more rationality-type content.
Features and Antifeatures
You say :
Whenever someone in your life asks you half-jokingly asks “how can I become smart like you?”, you no longer need to answer “Have you ever read Harry Potter?” because Projectlawful.com does not have Harry Potter in it.
On the contrary, this is a work I strongly wouldn’t recommend, and especially not to newcomers. It’s highly sexualized, contains descriptions of awful torture and various other forms of extreme misconduct, has a bunch of weird fetish material that more or less immediately disqualifies it as an intro rec in my opinion (far more so than Harry Potter stuff), is very difficult to get into thanks to the formatting, and also just… generally isn’t all that good? I like some of Eliezer’s writing, but I think this is very much not him at his finest.
Further, I very seriously doubt the idea that reading about a fictional government ruled by hell is meaningfully providing any real policy experience at all.
I’m not sure I agree. The normal art project also requires a bunch of “art director time”—there can be multiple rounds of back and forth between author and artist, different sketches or concepts to evaluate, and so on. If anything, I think there’s more context-switching cost required for a traditional project because of the inherent major delay in creating traditional art.
In other words, if I have an AI art prompt that doesn’t come out quite right, I know that very quickly and can then run another prompt to refine what I’m going for. If I have a traditional art prompt and a professional artist comes back a while later with sketches that aren’t right, I can send them art direction to refine the project—but doing so will impose more context-switching because of the delay on communications between us, the fact that these sketches/drafts will be arriving substantially after I’ve sent my initial piece, etc.
AI art isn’t “about to shake things up”. It’s already here.
This is already mentioned a bit elsewhere, but it seems perhaps worth flagging for potential readers that this technique (or perhaps, as you mentioned, a similar but different offshoot of it) is now considered… impure? flawed? risky? and is no longer part of the CFAR mainline workshop curriculum as I understand it—I would say it’s one of the more notable changes recently, though who’s to say where things will evolve in the future...
You know what I’ve been impressed by? Some eSports broadcasts intentionally upload videos with large amounts of dead air at the end if they’re showing a two-out-of-three where one side won the first two games—that way you won’t get spoiled on the result by the length of the video!
One other note is that CFAR has been holding some online test sessions recently while we develop new content for these workshops (and beyond!) -- if you’re interested in checking out some of what we’ve been working on (potentially in a very unpolished form), you can sign up here to be on the test session mailing list!