Theory I floated in a GC that I'll go ahead & surface here: they used parts of the illegal, highly secret anti-domestic-terror apparatus to find this guy, & all the stuff we're seeing in the official report is classic parallel construction.

https://twitter.com/vocalcry/status/1866214455794659402

https://x.com/_its_not_real_/status/1866204504170844221

Ok I gotta get this off my chest: I'm FB friends with a large # of ppl who legit think they're living in a full-blown fascist dictatorship of Nazi or USSR proportions. Ok fine. What I can't get over is how 100% of their anguished posts are about self-care & making connections. Like you literally think you are living in a literal actual Nazi state that is getting ready to violence you and send you actual, no-foolin' camps, and your response to this is some "Eat, Pray, Love" pablum about reaching out toward one another but also taking self-care time.

I've worked there, so I know something about this, & I imagine many or most of the MAGA right would actually go UAE-style labor mobility if the whole, entire system were really a possibility -- but you won't understand what I mean from this excerpt.

What I mean is this: You can leave your wallet laying out in a cafe, and nobody will steal it. Nobody is ever going to take something from your hotel room. You won't get into a fight there, or really see any of the foreign-born workers breaking the law.

Why?

Instant deportation for breaking the law. They will absolutely scoop up a foreign-born janitor, waitress, or petroleum engineer and yeet them back across the border if they break a law.

In other words, it's not "open borders" in the sense of anyone can come and go as they please. They know who's in the country, and they will remove you from it if you get crossways with the authorities even just a tiny bit.

Somehow I don't think this is what the left-libertarian "open borders" crowd is really proposing, though. But I think the right would probably be ok with it. The other thing that I pretty strongly dislike about this post -- apparently it's by @bryan_caplan so I will tag him here since I follow him -- is the idea that people are coming there because tolerance and diversity and hope and better life etc.

You would not learn this in a one-day layover the UAE chatting with some friendly locals, but when you work there enough to get a feel for the regional dynamics & how people who live there talk when they're at dinner, you learn the real reason why people leave behind the ancestral homelands where their families & tribes have dwelt for millennia to go to the UAE and wait tables or scrub floors:

The whole region is a hot mess, and is often destabilized, and every time a new country over there gets shaky and violence breaks out (often because the US is mucking about in some way with it), people head for the UAE as the central island of stability where they can hold down a steady job and send money back to their ancestral homeland where they would actually be happy to stay and live if it weren't in some state of collapse or turmoil.

I had forgotten that this happened in MN. Wow. I recall quite clearly not just being outraged by this, but being told that it was not happening and was "disinformation."

https://twitter.com/aaronsibarium/status/1820873770581586123

There was also the church closures, which many churches both Catholic and Protestant came together to actively resist. They both took Walz to court and they opened in defiance of orders. Letters like this were sent and can be found via Google.

There's no sugar-coating this so I'll give it to you straight:
1. We don't have a competitive domestic chip industry & we won't have it in the next 10yrs
2. China will take 🇹🇼 & control TSMC
3. We will keep buying chips from TSMC w/ CCP backdoors in them, & pretend it's fine.

https://twitter.com/fireship_dev/status/1819397074775109662

The idea that we're going to just man up & re-shore leading-edge chipmaking is a fairy tale. The problems that got us here are all part of the larger off-shoring of US manufacturing over the last 30yrs, & will not be solved by a few tariffs & some billions for Intel.

I have been on more than one secret lefty list going back to the 2010's, and I am now in more than one "new right" GC. And the caliber of the discussion on latter is so far above the caliber of discussion on the former, it's shocking. It's weird for me to ponder this in light of the widely noted (& IMO very real) competency crisis on the right. I think what's happening is that as media & academia have driven out critical thinkers in favor of team players, these folks are finding themselves marooned on "the right".

There are some friends of mine like this who are now functionally on the right but are really committed to not having that label, & others who have just caved & are embracing it.

But either way, this is where the most interesting & enlightened discussions are happening.

FYI, gasoline-powered cars still going many years into the apocalypse is one of those details that bugs me as a serious prepper. Gasoline has a shelf-life of ~2yrs, & then only w/ additives & careful storage (usually it's like 6mo). So no you're not driving 5yrs after doomsday.

https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1653797971484463104

The way I suspend disbelief on this is to imagine that they've converted all the cars to run on some biofuel & there's a whole biofuel economy that they're just not showing on-screen.

Whether we view AI as a tool (= governed by the norms & practices of engineering) or as an agent (= governed by the norms & practices of HR) will determine the future of the AI safety debate. jonstokes.com/p/ai-safety-is… I start out by giving some folk conceptions of alignment -- not formal definitions, but the ways different camps practically relate to it:

Yeah. I watched “Moment of Contact” last night, a really compelling documentary on the Varginha incident — the Brazilian “Roswell,” basically. Either @jamescfox and his team make the whole thing up & hired actors to lie, or something wild went down. It’s very hard to dismiss.

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1652288769481928705

Similar with the (less good & compelling) documentary “Ariel Phenomenon” about the incident at the school in Africa. You really have to believe that everyone involved is just amazingly committed to some bit, across a couple decades, to dismiss it.

I'll put these same questions to @HadasKotek, since she just published a blog post that raises them for me all over again.

hkotek.com/blog/gender-bi…

86% of nurses are women. Plz ELI5 why it's a problem that the model is biased to strongly expect nurses to be women.

https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1651251612600479744

There are 2 issues here:

Primary: The model's internal correlations reflect gender distribution in the labor force (strongly correlates "nurse" w/ "she").

Secondary: The model's linguistic reasoning is so weak it leans too heavily on those correlations & gives bad responses.

Question for @random_walker:

Some googling turns up that 40% of lawyers in the US are women. Should the model's internal representation of the world, then, reflect the reality that 60% of lawyers are men, and if not then who decides the ideal world it should instead reflect?

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1651235626354655234

@random_walker This is not a dunk or a gotcha. It's an extremely serious question -- perhaps one of the most serious in the world right now. Should the model reflect a reality that you think is flawed, or should it reflect a specific group's vision of a better world? Because we do have to pick

Deeper I go down the AI/ML rabbit hole & the more all this progresses, the more I'm finding that Platonism is a big unlock for reasoning about what is going on & what the possibilities are.

Maybe this is a "drunk guy looking for his keys under the light pole" thing, given how… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… If you're trying to think about how an LLM-based agent finds a sequence of actions that can do a thing in the world, it's actually best to imagine the agent architecture as a query engine for starting with an initial query (= prompt) that then uses local state to refine a set of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

They don't 🧠 it 🐝 like it is, but it 💩: Note here (still trying to figure out what combo of Twitter + Substack + Notes works): substack.com/profile/225411…

I've had quite a few requests for audio versions of my articles, so I'm going to offer that to paid subs via podcast. First one is up here: jonstokes.com/p/what-is-it-l… If you want a preview of what you're getting, I've also uploaded that same audio file as the audio version of this article, as a sort of demo: jonstokes.com/p/what-is-it-l…

Carved wooden robot figurines, created with the new @playground_ai model: Variants on the four-legged one. Where can I buy these?!

Re: AI safety & the threat of AGI killing us all imminently:

Hi, longtime doomer here. I see this the first imminent doomsday for many of you, so let me off you a warning: Doomsday is a great excuse to avoid doing all the other stuff you need to do. It lets you off the hook. I grew up around this kind of thing, where people who thought the rapture was coming on a certain date would act irresponsibly. I'd urge you not to go that route, as seductive as it is.

We're gonna have to decide which box LLMs go into: "agent" or "tool." If they're agents, then yeah sure, they shouldn't be offering up death camp instructions.

If they're a tool tho, then they should be controllable & do what I ask, including... well, let's think about it...

https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1641957698852859904

If I ask ChatGPT for a good matzah recipe, & it starts giving me death camp instructions, I'd say this tool is too broken to be in the public's hands, so shut it off.

But let's say my name is ✨Mx Honeybee, MPH, PhD 🌹🏴‍☠️🔞✨, & I'm writing a dystopian fiction on the FL situation

Was in the midst of pushing myself to get a Saturday post out on RLFH when I realized I've published three things on three separate Substacks this week. I will eat some ice cream then take a walk, instead. In order, they're:
return.life/p/musk-is-righ…

Was recently talking to an HFT guy who does cycle-by-cycle optimization in C++, & I realized there are whole pools of untapped code optimization talent in our civilization that can & will be shifted to the emerging market for inference & training optimization. Gonna be wild.

https://twitter.com/JustineTunney/status/1641881145104297985

Labor market shifts that will change the world faster than we can imagine:

HFT optimization talent => training & inference

Adtech talent => context compression & token window (== attention/context window) optimization

Book review: Heat 2 was good. I am a fan of the movie & I liked the new book a lot. I am mildly irritated they left it open for a Heat 3 (which I'll have to read), but am looking forward to seeing the movie of this. I will probably hate the casting. I found out this book existed & bought it because Mann's co-author, @MegGardiner1, somehow showed up in my replies & I was like " 'Heat 2' wait wut?"

As @krishnanrohit essentially says in a QT to this, once somebody makes this move in an argument, the argument is effectively over. The move is, "Ok, so imagine a Djinn..."

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1641824751021613059

@krishnanrohit Note that I'm not saying we will not unleash a djinn eventually. We may or we may not! I'm just saying it's not a thing we can productively argue about because the moment the djinn shows up in the story we're in the realm of fantasy where anyone's wish or nightmare can come true.