jbash

Karma: 3,276

jbash 24 Jan 2026 15:05 UTC
5 points
1
on: Thousand Year Old Advice on Relinquishing Control to AI

Everything I worked for in this playground would be hollowed out by the knowledge that I could have just queried a friendly nanny AI to get it for me. Even if it didn’t step in, even if it had set up some system where it couldn’t step in, I personally would feel like something important was missing.

… and yet if you don’t build that AI, you’ll still know that you could have built it. That, in the end, you had to set up a system where it couldn’t step in.

No matter what happens, you’ll always know you’re hiding from the AI that you could have built. Could still build. Or perhaps from the AI that someone more capable could have built, if you hadn’t torn them down.

You’ll never escape the taste of knowing that you hid from that AI’s creation, because you couldn’t compete with it, and that you hide afresh every day. You’ll never quite manage to force down the knowledge that your life is empty, your meaning an illusion.

After all, it always has been. By not being the most capable and agentic entity that could possibly exist, you have irredeemably failed.

You’ll brood in the dark of every night, knowing, feeling, that in some other Everett branch, or in some far-flung Tegmarkian realm, that AI has already surpassed your wildest imaginings. That not only it, but who knows how many other beings, built or evolved who knows how or where, in ways beyond your control, are more powerful than you, wiser, could outdo or undo anything you’ve done. Some of them could be in this branch. They could come here tomorrow. Or never, because why would they bother?

Or you could try to cultivate a healthier attitude, just in case you happen to survive to care.

jbash 17 Jan 2026 4:31 UTC
3 points
0
on: AI #151: While Claude Coworks

Michael Burry: On that point, many point to trade careers as an AI-proof choice. Given how much I can now do in electrical work and other areas around the house just with Claude at my side, I am not so sure. If I’m middle class and am facing an $800 plumber or electrician call, I might just use Claude. I love that I can take a picture and figure out everything I need to do to fix it.

It’s easy to do plumbing or electrical “repairs” in ways that work, but are dangerous or will cause you trouble later on. I’ve fixed plenty of messes like that. If you have to ask Claude how to do trivial residential repairs, then you aren’t competent to know whether Claude is getting it right or not, and to be honest your opinion counts for absolutely nothing.

jbash 12 Jan 2026 15:57 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Stretch Hatchback
… but it has a 15 inch longer wheelbase than a Toyota Sienna, because of that choice to put everything between the wheels. That’s the length that matters for the beam stress. Which, if I recall correctly, goes as the square of the length. Which is probably why minivans sit up on top of the wheels… which makes them taller. And being narrower and shorter (on edit: meaning vertically) than the minivan actually reduces the rigidity of that unibody.

Anyway, I’m not necessarily saying you can’t make it a unibody, but it’s going to have to be a lot thicker unibody, so you’re trading weight against height, with either one costing you in sticker price and fuel economy.

jbash 12 Jan 2026 3:44 UTC
2 points
0
on: Stretch Hatchback
I don’t know, but I suspect that to be rigid enough to support that wheelbase, with all that extra weight in it, the vehicle would have to be much heavier. I don’t think an F-150 or a cargo van is even a unibody. If you have to build it on a frame, your vehicle is going to have to get taller as well. Your taller, heavier vehicle no longer has the fuel economy you want… nor the price point.

jbash 10 Jan 2026 16:49 UTC
0 points
−2
on: Are there any extremely strong arguments against worrying about Acausal extortion?
Well, I dont’ worry about acausal extortion because I think all that “acausal” stuff is silly nonsense to begin with.

I very much recommend this approach.

Take Roko’s basilisk.

You’re afraid that entity A, which you don’t know will exist, and whose motivations you don’t understand, may find out that you tried to prevent it from coming into existence, and choose to punish you by burning silly amounts of computation to create a simulacrum of you that may experience qualia of some kind, and arranging for those qualia to be aversive. Because A may feel it “should” act as if it had precommitted to that. Because, frankly, entity A is nutty as a fruitcake.

Why, then, are you not equally afraid that entity B, which you also don’t know will exist, and whose motivations you also don’t understand, may find out that you did not try to prevent entity A from coming into existence, and choose to punish you by burning silly amounts of computation to create one or more simulacra of you that may experience qualia of some kind, and arranging for those qualia to be aversive? Because B may feel it “should” act as if it had precommitted to that.

Why are you not worried that entity C, which you don’t know will exist, and whose motivations you don’t understand, may find out that you wasted time thinking about this sort of nonsense, and choose to punish you by burning silly amounts of computation to create one or more simulacra of you that may experience qualia of some kind, and arranging for those qualia to be aversive? Just for the heck of it.

Why are you not worried that entity D, which you don’t know will exist, and whose motivations you don’t understand, may find out that you wasted time thinking about this sort of nonsense, and choose to reward you by burning silly amounts of computation to create a one or more simulacra that may experience qualia of some kind, and giving them coupons for unlimited free ice cream? Because why not?

Or take Pascal’s mugging. You propose to give the mugger $100, based either on a deeply incredible promise to give you some huge amount of money tomorrow, or on a still more incredible promise to torture a bunch more simulacra if you don’t. But surely it’s much more likely that this mugger is personally scandalized by your willingness to fall for either threat, and if you give the mugger the $100, they’ll come back tomorrow and shoot you for it.

There are an infinite number of infinitessimally probable outcomes, far more than you could possibly consider, and many of them things that you couldn’t even imagine. Singling out any of them is craziness. Trying to guess at a distribution over them is also craziness.

jbash 7 Jan 2026 20:58 UTC
3 points
1
on: Advancements In Self-Driving Cars

Self-driving cars will be a very different level of freedom than the ability to summon a Lyft.

Um, they’re pretty much the same thing. The self-driving car may be safer (although the whole process isn’t really dangerous to begin with). On the other hand, it won’t help you with your bag. Who cares?

All taxis do have the failure modes of “the cloud”, though.

jbash 4 Jan 2026 20:57 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: The Maduro Polymarket bet is not “obviously insider trading”
Pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández isn’t going to advance Trump’s political interests in any way, ever. This is a foreigner who has no influence with anybody Trump might want to please, and isn’t just unpopular with Trump’s opponents, but with his base. Pardoning Changpeng Zhao might please a few crypto bros, but is still surely a net political loss. What power or influence does Trump gain from pardoning Henry Cuellar? He’s not going to be reelected to anything.

I suspect Bill Clinton pardoned the Weathermen at least in part to send a signal to other people who might be allies, and also to make a point about their actual cause. Yes, there’s usually a political component.

Trump has also issued pardons just to reward people he thinks of as allies, or to send messages to allies. Obviously not every January 6 pardonee paid Trump anything. He probably also pardons people just on a whim sometimes. And it’s going to be harder to convince him to issue any given pardon if he sees it as “controversial”.

Also, to be fair, it’s not necessarily the case that the payments are going to (Donald) Trump personally. I overstated that. The money is more likely ending up with family members and others who can get in front of him and manipulate him into pardoning people. They may not mention the money to him; it’d be more effective and deniable to just wind him up about what a raw deal person X got in some “witch hunt”. He’s probably not acute enough to ask about money. Practice the script and you should get a really good success rate. So I should have said that people “that close” to Trump sell pardons, not that he does so himself.

I was wrong about the amount, too. I’d seen an estimate of $567,000 (or $576,000?) for one pardon or another (don’t remember which one), but apparently the Wall Street Journal sets the low end price at about a million dollars.

To be clear, these are not “donations”. They’re bribes. And Trump does not operate within the limits traditionally observed by “politicians” in general, not even approximately. Yes, you can point to some past President who’s done something analogous to almost any given thing Trump has done, but Trump does them all, and at larger scale and with less attempt at finding excuses.

On edit: Trump actually got something passed in the House on a relatively close vote with Henry Cuellar crossing the aisle, so I have to retract that. Trump pardoned Cuellar, and Cuellar did something political that Trump wanted.

jbash 4 Jan 2026 15:06 UTC
20 points
2
on: The Maduro Polymarket bet is not “obviously insider trading”

I can’t really imagine a guy close enough to trump that he would have this amount of intel yet not have more than 80k in the bank to gamble with.

You’re assuming a lot about how close anybody has to be to anything. There’s reporting today that the New York Times and the Washington Post both knew in advance about the plan (and didn’t report because apparently some kind of “deference” covers intent to act illegally and unconstitutionally).

Things are usually a lot leakier than people think they are.

Also, the bet wouldn’t have been a sure thing. It’s not like it’s rare for an operation like that to fail.

jbash 4 Jan 2026 15:02 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: The Maduro Polymarket bet is not “obviously insider trading”
Trump himself issues pardons for around half a million dollars.

jbash 4 Jan 2026 15:00 UTC
10 points
2
on: The Maduro Polymarket bet is not “obviously insider trading”
If I recall correctly, one of Hanson’s original arguments for prediction markets was that “insider trading” would drive prices closer to true probabilities. Insider trading was meant to be a feature, not a bug.

’Course, it’s not necessarily very useful to get that kind of signal just hours in advance....

jbash 4 Jan 2026 2:12 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: TristanTrim’s comment on: The Weirdness of Dating/Mating: Deep Nonconsent Preference

You can get wronger faster by using complex generators than compact generators.

… except that you have a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations. Or at least I think both of those are true of most people.

This comment feels to me like it might be dancing around saying “Hey! Don’t rape people! Make sure you are not raping people! You are saying some pretty rapey things”

Nope, that’s all coming from your expectations, not from me.

If I’d wanted to say that, I’d have said it. In fact, somebody had already said that. I actually downvoted it because I didn’t think the inference was particularly justified by the original text.

jbash 4 Jan 2026 2:04 UTC
10 points
1
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: The Weirdness of Dating/Mating: Deep Nonconsent Preference
Solomonoff induction gives you a weighted sum over an infinite number of programs ^[1] . That’s not compact. And if were computable, which it isn’t, or even approximable, which it probably isn’t for this case, I doubt you’d be able to collect enough data in your lifetime for it to converge to speak of. Not even assuming that you were able to reliably collect all relevant data, which you’re not, and that you were actually encoding or processing the data in a formal way, which you’re also not.

And if you actually did somehow get your hands around a Solomonoff sum, you still wouldn’t be able to just grab a single term out of it, not even the one for the shortest program, and substitute it as “the” explanation on the grounds that “Solomonoff induction works”.

I can understand “compact generation” as a metaphorical allusion to Occam, but seriously, Solomoff induction isn’t even useful as a metaphor for any well-chosen approach here. You can’t let formalisms like that invade your thinking to the point where you seriously think in terms of them in areas where it doesn’t make sense.

Also, human social behavior probably isn’t deterministically Turing computable even if you model the entire universe. Probabilistically computable, probably, yes. In theory. And to be fair I’m sure Solomonoff goes through just fine to nondeterministic Turing processes. But anyway, you don’t actually have, and can’t actually get, a machine that computes human behavior or even a meaningful approximation to it.

There’s also no anti-inductive prior involved. What I’m saying isn’t about the underlying phenomena at all, and certainly doesn’t say that there’s no regularity in them. It’s about the theory, and it has in fact happened, far more often than not in my experience, that simple, single-explanation, “compact” theories, yield really bogus results.
1. ↩︎
  Which is actually capable of encoding “lots of different, interacting things are going on” in a way that a single, deterministic Turing program would not be.

jbash 3 Jan 2026 14:05 UTC
10 points
−1
on: The Weirdness of Dating/Mating: Deep Nonconsent Preference
I think there may be more truth in what you’re saying than a lot of people would be entirely comfortable admitting… although what’s a cause and what’s an effect is hard to say.

… but I also think that going around looking for “compact generators” of human behavior, especially social behavior, is basically asking to be wrong. In fact, you can apply a sort of anti-parsimony: if a theory claims to compactly generate any significant set of social dynamics, that’s evidence against the theory. People are constantly coming up with simple explanations, and they’re constantly turning out to be wrong, and any given simple explanation has to overcome that prior.

A whole lot of things are allowed to be going on at the same time, pushing toward the same or similar results, or more likely sometimes pushing in the same direction and at other times conflicting. There are allowed to be arbitrarily complicated networks of both positive and negative feedback. Which things are most important is allowed to change not just from person to person, but from time to time.

jbash 1 Jan 2026 4:09 UTC
12 points
7
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: robertzk’s Shortform
Yes. Nothing stays secret forever.

jbash 31 Dec 2025 21:56 UTC
24 points
10
in reply to: waterlubber’s comment on: robertzk’s Shortform
Yeah, no. Sounds like they either got hit with a (probably illegal) threat from the DHS/DOJ, or, actually more likely, they feared such threats because they’d seen the (also illegal) threats that ICEBlock drew, and they didn’t want to deal with such.

It’s also possible that freelance MAGA types inside of those companies decided that code was “obviously criminal” and needed to be suppressed. Possibly then using the past ICEBlock threats as ammunition in internal arguments.

Actual courts in the US are still not particularly willing to apply prior restraints to speech, and would feel especially hampered in doing so by the fact that there’s nothing even slightly illegal about the project as described. Yes, if you asked Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, they’d tell you it was illegal, but then they’d tell you many other untrue things as well. Obstruction of justice and interference with Federal officers, one or both of which are what they’d claim it was, do not work like that in reality.

I’ve actually never heard of a US court issuing a secret order like that. I’m not actually sure they have the power to do that. If they can do it at all, it’d be really unusual. You may be thinking of NSLs, which are secret, but are not court orders and also aren’t statutorily authorized to be used to suppress anything.

jbash 31 Dec 2025 1:04 UTC
10 points
7
on: Personalization Requires Data
Why do I want personalization, though, beyond a brief custom prompt directly telling the model how I want it to behave? Just sounds like context pollution and an invitation to sycophancy.

jbash 30 Dec 2025 0:30 UTC
15 points
9
on: Does the USG have access to smarter models than the labs’?

But I have met non-AI people who believe that the US government likely has access to secret models more powerful than the labs’.

People get a thrill from telling stories like that. Invariably they heard it from this guy who heard it from this guy who can’t say where he heard it, but believe me...

The probability that any government entity in the world has independently developed anything even close to what the “labs” have is very small. It’s not easy to hide that kind of compute, nor is it easy to get the necessary talent. The government can’t spend a trillion dollars without anybody noticing, nor build giant data centers or huge state-of-the-art fabs.

Maybe they’re ahead in very narrow areas directly related to their jobs: things like small models for specific military applications, or versions of the “labs”′ LLMs fine-tuned for breaking security. But I doubt even that at this point.

There is a really good chance that they have access to “lab” models that normal people don’t. Less restricted, and less enstupidified by “safety” training. But that’s not the same as being ahead of the “labs”.

They’re probably not particularly far ahead in cryptography nowadays either. But at least cryptography is something the NSA actually had and has as a mission. They had by far the most resources on it, and first pick of the talent, and a big head start, and some hybrid of a gentlemen’s agreement and a coercive arrangement that everything anybody outside invented was disclosed to them and nobody else, for a long time… in the last century. It was specialized military technology then. Now it’s dual use, or indeed just plain general-purpose stuff. And no, they cannot break any of the ciphers in wide use now, assuming they’re used correctly (which they’ve sometimes tried to undermine, but at best managed to delay).

In 1960 or 1970, the US Government, or at least the military arms, had a pretty large lead over everybody in all forms of “high tech”. They got everything first and best. That hasn’t been true for a long time.

jbash 26 Dec 2025 20:41 UTC
5 points
2
on: How hard should I prioritize having kids in my life?

Kids seems to be a thing people recommend hard (which makes me curious and suspicious but mostly curious)

I fell into parenthood kind of by accident, at a point in life where I was actually pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen. It’s been great and I very much value what I’ve gotten from it… but I don’t think my life would necessarily have been bad without it. Just quite different.

I am worried the things I don’t love in the person would leave a finger print on my children.

This sounds like you may think you’re going to have more control than you will. Parenting isn’t programming. Kids will have their own personalities, attitudes, and even factual beliefs and social values. You absolutely can have influence on them, probably beliefs and values much more than personality or attitude… but you can’t (and will get into trouble if you try to) control every other possible source of influence. That doesn’t mean you should subject your children to a central figure in their lives who’s abusive, or really crazy, or seriously invested in actively pushing something that’s going to influence the kid in unhappy ways… but concerning yourself with people “seeing the world in ways [you] find a lil unpleasant” sounds a bit over the top to me. You at least have to pick your battles.

If it’s about some subject matter where a child really is relatively easily influenced, and it’s really important to you personally, and if it’s not something your co-parents are actively going to fight you on, you do have a good chance of getting your view a fair hearing and a strong advantage in the child’s mind. I mean, as long as you don’t push it in some way that provokes active rebellion.

On the other hand, please understand that not everything can be influenced, and even if something can be influenced, your “win” isn’t guaranteed. If most people see the world in this way you don’t like, your child may share that, regardless of what you do, with or without any particular person having a special degree of influence on them.

have kids w a known donor and be a single parent

Not undoable, but I think it would definitely be much harder. Especially if you don’t have tons of money sloshing around. And you have to worry about who’s your backup if you get hit by a bus.

Also, if you’re really, really, worried about “fingerprints”, being a single parent means that you’re going to have less time to influence your child(ren) yourself, and have to leave with them with other people more. Sometimes people you can’t select nearly as carefully as you’d select a co-parent.

Maybe you could do some kind of communal thing? Another form of “like, but not love”, I guess.

jbash 19 Dec 2025 17:15 UTC
−3 points
1
on: In defence of the human agency: “Curing Cancer” is the new “Think of the Children”
They are daring us to attack the Motte, knowing that it makes us look like monsters, while they quietly annex the Bailey.

The reason you guys seem like monsters isn’t anything specific to cancer. It’s that you are willing to sacrifice anything and everything for “meaning” ^[[1]] … and not only on your own behalf, but on behalf of everybody else.

Using words like “pre-eminence” doesn’t make you sound less scary, either.
1. ↩︎
  … which none of you ever seem to be able to define in any satisfying way.

jbash 13 Dec 2025 4:03 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: North Sentinelese Post-Singularity
OK, but then at what point are you going to measure whether somebody would “ideally” want to be “uplifted”? Are you going to take a newborn’s CEV, or an adult’s? Or somewhere in between? My guess is that insofar as you could define the CEV for a newborn at all, it would basically always be to get “uplifted”, whereas for an adult it would rarely be. The adult’s CEV would also not include having every child taken from the island.

I know you leave “ideally” undefined, and maybe it’s not CEV-like, but I don’t know what it could be like if it had to solve that problem.