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@dmvaldman

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@nearcyan

Oct 30

on a late night walk rn. entire blocks of people passed out on drugs. guy lighting a crackpipe next to me. people shouting slurs and fighting. some blocks are terrifying while others are simply surreal. how is this city real and how is it the epicenter of tech

and yeah usually i walk west into the deadlands rather than east into The Maw but if you’ve read taleb you realize why

i made it to the other side and

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@nearcyan

Oct 24

almost all gen-z free time goes straight to video games, streaming platforms, and shorts/youtube

1/3rd of gen-z males play video games for >5 hours/day! (source: Jure Grahek, ZBD)

for some reason people in sf continue to drastically misunderstand how consumer time is being allocated as this would require speaking with people outside of our bubble of monoculture

so many simple stats get a "wtf" from people here yet a "no shit" reaction from average zoomers

(my average during much of my adolescence was ~14 hours/day for many years on end. i'm probably closer to ~1-2 now)

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@nearcyan

Mar 30, 2023

when predicting AI's effects, the most common fault I see is to focus on technical predictions over social ones

both paradigms feed into each other in a closely-knit feedback loop; technology does not simply 'progress', rather, people force it to progress with their efforts

this seems obvious!

however, when you ask many AI researchers what the future will hold, their predictions will primarily only be technical

this seems to be as faulty as predicting the effects of covid while ignoring that political factions, movements, and ideologies will form

we can see the beginnings of a few of the salient political factions in AI, and given the scope of what AI will revolutionize, we should expect these to grow and have significant downstream effects on research directions, products shipped, employment choices, etc etc

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@nearcyan

Mar 27, 2023

it may be useful to establish a "proof of humanity" word, which your trusted contacts can ask you for, in case they get a strange and urgent voice or video call from you

this can help assure them they are actually speaking with you, and not a deepfaked/deepcloned version of you

those familiar with cryptography may suggest much more robust and elegant schemas a la TOTP, occasional key rotation and trusted party signing and so on, although it is also nice to have very easy to understand alternatives that everyday people can use as well

it would certainly be nice to have hardware signing for digital content creation and decentralized cryptographic verification, and even tech like zk-snarks could be very useful in helping to prove one's humanity online while not identifying *who* you are specifically

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@nearcyan

Mar 26, 2023

I would strongly prefer if we did not make things like this

the "AI is a super fun party lfg!!!" manic phase we are currently in is not going to last particularly long

"it's not like this is actually going to cause harm lol"

it might not, but have you thought about what the future will look like in 1 or 5 years rather than just next week?

the precedents and ideas you seed now will effect that time period more than you'd prefer to admit

"well whatever, this is inevitable either way. if I don't build it, someone else will"

right, and this is why it's okay to kill people when it conveniences you, because eventually they will die anyway. you're just speeding things up!

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@nearcyan

Feb 19, 2023

so, Microsoft rushed a ship of the most powerful AI model ever exposed to end-users,

having done very little red-teaming or testing,

which was blatantly and aggressively misaligned and manipulative,

and for the openly-stated purpose of forcing competitors to speed up AI 1/N

this is amazingly irresponsible and sets a very bad precedent for the world, and I would greatly appreciate it if we did less of it

this has real world consequences.

it is not a funny game of "lol we made Google scared, haha look at them now!", plus "this will make funny PR!"

gwern's comment provides some wonderful reasoning (as expected) for why this may have happened, which is worth reading in full as well: lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEh…

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