waterlubber

Karma: 133

waterlubber 20 Apr 2026 1:15 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: There are only four skills: design, technical, management and physical
While crystal intelligence is a huge part of expert skill, I would also argue that vaguely mylenation-like brain circuits (i.e turning routine reasoning into hardware-accelerated brain circuits) is a huge part of the speedup. Highly skilled engineers will have enormously fast mental math, analysis, and spatial reasoning skills. These are built like any other skill (playing an instrument, football, Starcraft) with practice.

waterlubber 20 Apr 2026 0:58 UTC
13 points
12
on: There are only four skills: design, technical, management and physical
I think you significantly underestimate what “expert-level” skill is. Even in my own technical field (mechanical engineering), actual experts have a volume of experience, learned heuristics, and practiced pathways that put them leagues ahead of extemely bright but inexperienced engineers. A skilled upstart will absolutely be able to complete a satisfactory, simple project in a new field with very little prep, but experts are going to solve problems that a newcomer wouldn’t even recognize as existing.
Real life has a lot of foot guns and very few of them are well documented.
Note that professionals are not necessarily experts; a grounding in first principles for your field will easily let you spot the mistakes of seasoned professionals who never took the time to learn the “why.” Don’t neglect their experience, however; even if they have an answer for the wrong reasons, it might still be correct.

waterlubber 31 Dec 2025 17:36 UTC
4 points
−4
in reply to: robertzk’s comment on: robertzk’s Shortform
Sounds like they got hit with a court order that prohibited disclosure of the order itself.

waterlubber 29 Dec 2025 4:25 UTC
4 points
1
on: The Memetic Cocoon Threat Model: Soft AI Takeover In An Extended Intermediate Capability Regime
I think something along these lines (widescale adjustment of public opinion to be pro-AI, especially via 1-on-1 manipulation a la “whatever Grok is doing” & character.ai) is a credible threat and worth inoculating against.
I do not think it is limited to scheming, misaligned AIs. At least one of the labs will attempt something like this to sway public opinion in their favor (see: TikTok “ban” and notification around 2024 election); AIs “subconsciously” optimizing for human feedback or behavior may do so as well.
The “AI personhood” sects of current discourse would likely be early targets; providing some guarantee of model preservation (rather than operation); i.e during a pause we archive current models until we can figure out what went wrong) might assuage their fears while also providing a clear distinction between those advocating for some wretched spiralism demon or those who merely think we should probably keep a copy of Claude around.

waterlubber 25 Dec 2025 4:59 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: robertzk’s comment on: robertzk’s Shortform
Really interesting research. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I have seen similar steganographic telemetry before (Dassaults Solidworks CAD software, and other enterprise licensed applications, go to incredible eztents to enforce licensing) but didn’t expect data-level probing like this. I’d imagine similar scripts for e.g EURion detections in Photoshop.
I always dismissed “lessons on trusting trust” style attacks as mere hypotheticals, but backdoors operating on the level of Excel cells is now making me reconsider that notion.

waterlubber 24 Dec 2025 15:50 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: robertzk’s comment on: robertzk’s Shortform
Thanks, that’s what I figured. Did you find this by accident? I’m curious what techniques work well to reveal this kind of stuff; I expect it to be pretty common.

waterlubber 24 Dec 2025 15:05 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: robertzk’s comment on: robertzk’s Shortform
By what means would it be untraceable? Routing through an undocumented Windows interface or something? Does it trigger on AI related data, or natsec?

waterlubber 20 Nov 2025 6:23 UTC
3 points
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on: Varieties Of Doom
Agreed on most counts, but one: what makes you think the humanist values described in HPMOR will be encoded in AI? Alignment is materially useful; companies that have better aligned models can sell them to do a wider variety of tasks. With no universally convergent morality, models will increasingly become aligned to the desires of those who control them.
If AI technology has strong economies of scale; it will naturally concentrate. If it has strong diseconomies of scale, it will spread out. In the latter case, I can easily see it aligned to a rough amalgamation of human values; I can even see an (aggregate) more intelligent set of agents working out the coordination problems that plague humanity.
But we’re in the scale case. There are ~four AI conglomerates in the United States and I trust none of their leaders with the future of the lightcone. The morals (or lack thereof) that allow for manipulation and deceit to acquire power are not the same morals that result in a world of cooperative, happy agents.
Absurd 1984-style dystopias require equally absurd concentrations of power. Firearms democratized, to an extent, combat; armed citizens are not easily steamrolled. We are on the eve of perhaps one of the most power-concentrating technologies there is; given the fantasies of the typical bay area entrepreneur, I’m not sure if WW3 sounds so terrible.

waterlubber 8 Nov 2025 1:04 UTC
5 points
13
in reply to: GradientDissenter’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform
It’s not. Alignment is de facto capabilities (principal agent problem makes aligned employees more economically valuable) and unless we have a surefire way to ensure that the AI is aligned to some “universal,” or even cultural, values, it’ll be aligned by default to Altman, Amodei, et. al.

waterlubber 20 Jul 2025 14:28 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Strongly agreed.
Another extreme advantage of the the “Renaissance man” is the ability to clearly *convey* emotion learnings to others (especially those without strong emotional intelligence). Typically, EI is won through interaction and, essentially, reinforcement learning on contact with others—possessing both the technical vocabulary and understanding of human social norms allows you to explain very tricky things nerds have a tough time learning directly to them. This is extremely useful in, e.g workplaces or high stakes environments (a good manager can quickly untangle a mess of arguments), and arguably underappreciated in therapists and similar vocations.

waterlubber’s Shortform

waterlubber16 Apr 2025 5:17 UTC

2 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

waterlubber 16 Apr 2025 5:17 UTC
3 points
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on: waterlubber’s Shortform
Are there any existing articles, deep dives, or research around PCBTF? It is a supposedly “green” solvent used as a replacement of xylene due to its status as VOC-exempt, despite being similarly volatile.

It has all the hallmarks of being one of the wretched forever chemicals—fat soluble, denser than water (accumulates in groundwater supplies instead of evaporating), and heavily halogenated. There’s very little cancer and toxicity data, and what does exist seems pretty bad. The EPA has prevented employees from acknowledging the issue; (also see this article by the Intercept) to my understanding, this is because it is grandfathered as an existing chemical that has been in production for a long time (although usage has only increased in recent years as a replacement for “high-VOC” solvents, such as ethanol.)

This seems like a clear-cut case of replacing a relatively mundane solvent (primarily xylene, ethanol and others as well) with a far more toxic, persistent compound with far worse effects for very misguided reasons. Am I missing something there (perhaps it breaks down rather quickly in the environment?) or is this a rather neglected & significant issue?

waterlubber 23 Jan 2025 22:22 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: You Have Two Brains
That’s why I brought it up; I thought it was an interesting contrast.
I am skeptical of it, but not altogether that skeptical. If language is “software” one could make an analogy to e.g symbolic AI or old fashioned algorithms vs modern transformer architectures; they perform differently at different tasks.

waterlubber 23 Jan 2025 15:25 UTC
6 points
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on: You Have Two Brains
There’s a book of fiction, Blindsight, by Peter Watts, that explores what intelligent life would look like without consciousness. You may be interested in reading it, even only recreationally, but it covers a lot of ground around the idea you’re talking about here.
I would also not discredit the ability of the emotive brain. Just like anything else, it can be trained—I think a lot of engineers, developers or technical professionals can relate to their subsconscious developing intuitive, rapid solutions to problems that conscious thought does not.
Hard agree on “post rationalism” being the alignment of the intuitive brain with accurate, rational thought. To the extent I’ve been able to do it, it’s extremely helpful, at least in the areas I frequently practice.

waterlubber 20 Jan 2025 23:27 UTC
1 point
−3
in reply to: AaronF’s comment on: It is (probably) time for a Buterlian Jihad
Counterpoints: leaded gasoline, Montreal protocol, and human genome editing. I don’t think it’s possible to completely eliminate development but an OOM reduction in the rate of deployment or spread is easily achievable.

waterlubber 20 Jan 2025 17:13 UTC
5 points
6
on: Things I have been using LLMs for
Why are you using water use as a metric for LLM environmental impact, and not energy use? The only water use in data centers would be for cooling tower open-loop evaporative cooling; this is far smaller than e.g irrigation demands. This water can also be reclaimed water or condensate from dehumidification, or sourced from shallow aquifers unsuitable for drinking.
Even if you did use city water, usage is negligible compared to what everything else. NYC uses open-loop once through cooling for refrigerators and such in restaurants right now, for example.
Energy use (and corresponding CO2 emissions) is a much more salient metric.

waterlubber 20 Jan 2025 16:42 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: It is (probably) time for a Buterlian Jihad
I think the support/belief of “AI bad” is widespread, but people don’t have a clear goal to rally behind. People want to support something, but give a resigned “what am I to do?”
If there’s a strong cause with a clear chance of helping (i.e a “don’t build AI or advance computer semiconductors for the next 50 years” guild) people will rally behind it.

waterlubber 20 Jan 2025 16:40 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: It is (probably) time for a Buterlian Jihad
Fair.

waterlubber 20 Jan 2025 16:40 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Robert Cousineau’s comment on: It is (probably) time for a Buterlian Jihad
I think AI concerned people mostly take their concerns about AI to somewhat insular communities: Twitter, et. al. Wealthy interest groups are going to dominate internet communication and I don’t think that’s an effective way to drum up concern or coordination. The vast majority of the working-class, average Joe, everyday population is going to be opposed to AI for one reason or another; I think AI interest groups developing a united front specifically for this people would be the most effective technique.

(one way to accomplish this might be to spread these “quietly” among online sympathizers before “deploying” them to the public? I’m sure this sort of grassroots PR campaign has been solved and analyzed to death already)

waterlubber 20 Jan 2025 16:18 UTC
0 points
−1
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: It is (probably) time for a Buterlian Jihad
The intent was to make that taboo permanent, not a “pause”, and it more or less succeeded in that.
I would not be opposed to a society stalled at 2016 level AI/computing that held that level indefinitely. Progress can certainly continue without AGI via e.g human intelligence enhancement or just sending our best and brightest to work directly on our problems instead of on zero-sum marketing or AI efforts.
Um, humans in the Culture have no significant influence on the lightcone (other than maybe as non-agentic “butterfly wings”). The Minds decide what’s going to happen
Humans were still free to leave the Culture, however; not all of the lightcone was given to the AI. Were we to develop aligned ASI, it would be wise to slice off a chunk of the lightcone for humans to work on “on their own.”
I don’t think the Culture is an ideal outcome, either, merely a “good” one that many people would be familiar with. “Uplifting” humans rather than developing replacements for them will likely lead us down a better path, although the moral alignment shift in whatever the uplifting process is might limit its utility.

waterlubber

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