Former member of the Board of Directors of SIAI/MIRI 2012-2015 and I believe I really actually helped. Former senior researcher at Metamed with an expertise in psychoneuropharmacology. 2010 BTC buyer. Crypto hedge fund founder and CIO and complicated SBF victim. Pre seed investor at eon.systems. Currently starting up a company to industrialize and massively scale childhood autism interventions.
Kevin
Karma: 4,374
April Fools alarm aside, on other alarms, I note that the contractual argument between the War Department and Anthropic was really about Dario’s discomfort with the fact that the “kill list” that has been the main US strategy in Iran was essentially written by Claude working with Palantir and then executed with minimal human oversight about who the human targets actually were and what the collateral damage actually was. This is extrapolating from the head of Amnesty Tech’s (Amnesty International’s anti-AI murder arm) extensive interview on Al Jazeera about two weeks ago; we should hang out with that guy, he seems great. Dario didn’t break up with the government because of what they might do in the future; he got out of the contract because he didn’t want any more blood on his and his AI’s hands than they already have. And it’s a lot of blood. It appears that Sam Altman doesn’t give a shit and is happy to have OpenAI lead strategy and the generation of kill lists for future wars.
Separately, autonomous drones with lethal authority (ostensibly to get around Russian electronic countermeasures and jamming) have been known to be operating for at least a couple weeks in the Ukraine theater and likely in testing for much longer. They would certainly be deployed by both sides in a US / China WW3.
Giant laser beams and microwave guns are now being used in warfare. Russia is threatening to launch nuclear missiles permanently in earth orbit. China’s space weapons may have leapt ahead of US space weapons over the course of the last year.
All of the pieces are adding up for the classic Skynet vision but evil or unknowingly morally ambiguous singleton probably more likely than that. I remain optimistic but only for reasons the rationalists consider a joke. They’ll come around to my views eventually if we live though. Basically aliens/NHI/external timeline muckery.
Gregor in Berkeley is a take out French restaurant in Berkeley available to franchise. La Note, Berkeley’s not overpriced French restaurant, went brunch only after the pandemic!
One scenario I consider is that a technological civilization (dinosaur descended reptilian hominids?) created super intelligent AI and it killed them. Then it transcended to a higher spatial dimension and exists as computronium in the Earth’s core. Over time, it has grown to regret killing its creators, and we resemble its creators so it’s looking out for us.
It’s a consensus of modern science that higher spatial dimensions exist…
I think it might be super recent that mainstream academics are expressing this sentiment, probably because the harbingers are probably obvious, and yes this is probably not that hard to fund by certain EA causes. Or how much money does he actually want?
Lamda is not an LLM
“LaMDA is indeed, to use a blunt (if, admittedly, humanizing) term, bullshitting.¹² That’s because, in instructing the model to be “sensible” and “specific” — but not specific in any specific way — bullshit is precisely what we’ve requested.” -Blaise Aguera y Arcas
Yeah, we successfully asked Jim if he would do it if enough users asked for it and he straightforwardly refused. He is very consistent in his desire to keep ads off of Craigslist.
You can buy single use LAMP tests from Amazon now.
https://www.amazon.com/Lucira-COVID-19-Single-use-Quality-Molecular/dp/B092KGQT2Y/
Is anyone taking the perspective that extreme lock down for >6 months is worse than the slight chance of permanent disability and death?
I have a social bubble that’s about 100 people which still represents social distancing via a 95% reduction in my real social interactions. I have hosted multiple outdoor parties confirmed as not super spreading events, including one favorably reviewed by the lead contact tracer for San Mateo County. I regularly get food delivery and eat in outdoor restaurants. I’ve been to the Black Rock Desert for four weekends this year. Eating inside a restaurant in a Vegas casino and transiting the Grand Sierra Casino in Reno to a hotel room have felt like the riskiest things I have done this pandemic and are around the level of things I regret doing.
I’m happy to be the punching bag for the fatalistic perspective that the cure is worse than the disease given how much we now know about the disease, but it seems like this perspective should be represented.
I also likely had “asymptomatic” covid in early February and took an experimental therapeutic/vaccine about a month ago that may provide me with another six months of immunity or resistance.
Realistically I’ll have difficulty making this event because I’m cleaning up an all night Halloween party in rural California with no 4G and spotty 3g, if you moved it to Monday or Tuesday on my account I could definitely attend.
Super lame compared to last year when people were willing to pay thousands of dollars to the code holders or the charity of their choice.
4chan continues inheriting the world.
I got bogged down on my other company and Color expanded to West Oakland and East Oakland with free next day testing so I missed executing on the immediate business opportunity and the state of covid testing is much better than it was two months ago.
LAMP is still the best way for a citizen scientist to do their own Covid-19 testing. I’m reevaluating this business and may end up coming back to it, possibly with more of a focus on facilitating testing for events.
The culture of local areas here varies enormously in California. Rural California is full of anti mask Republicans and indoor dining is open. I ate inside of an empty French Chinese restaurant in Contra Costa County two weeks ago. Parties on the delta have been wilder than ever over the course of the summer because there was nothing else to do.
In SF and Berkeley, people give you weird looks for not wearing a mask, in Oakland outside of the hot spots people don’t really care.
Politics towards strict lockdowns seem to overlap pretty strictly with liberal social justice advocating attitudes.
Halloween night is the biggest party night of the year in the SF Bay Area and it’s on a Saturday night this year.
Six month immunity is well supported, twelve months is probably significantly too long.
It’s important to sample people from all severities of COVID-19 include “asymptomatic”. It seems likely that the mildest cases of COVID-19 come with no long term disability and that of course being intubated for a month on a cocktail of fentanyl, propofol, and valium comes with serious long term consequences. The question then is how severe and likely are chronic health problems of young to middle aged vitamin d sufficient people that experience Covid-19 with severity somewhere between a regular cold and flu.
I think until recent throughput issues PCR was basically good enough and some scientists were attached to their hard learned PCR skills, LAMP was new and scary and unfamiliar enough that lots of scientists just didn’t know it was easier and better. Primer design was a serious obstacle in the early days of LAMP but is easy with modern computer primer design tools.
LAMP is also only better than PCR for the things that it is better at. PCR has general applications to biological science and LAMP is only good for an important subset of possible PCR diagnostic tests. I think mainstream scientists lack the understanding of what LAMP can and can’t do and for something as sensitive as HIV testing I can understand that people don’t want to rock the boat and switch to LAMP from PCR.
It’s also relevant that LAMP is only recently leaving patent protection. I’m not sure what the licensing cost structure used to be but now there are no patent license fees pushing through adoption is simpler:
I am going to try and scale towards selling RT-LAMP kits to US states in very high unit amounts; I’m feeling optimistic.
Does this not get front paged because of coronavirus saturation?
So all the disagreement downvotes are because I am sticking to my talking point that the rationalists are wrong about how to make decisions that around situations where there is only circumstantial and not scientific evidence, right? No one is disputing the facts of the first three paragraphs, right?