People still talk about Sydney. Owain Evans mentioned Bing Sidney during his first talk in the recent hintonlectures.com series. I attended in person, and it resonated extremely well with a general audience. I was at Microsoft during the relevant period, which definitely played a strong role in my transition to alignment research, and still informs my thinking today.

I gifted a physical copy of this book to my brother but hadn’t read all of it. Fortunately, I may have absorbed some tacit knowledge on management from my father. Based on these quotes I don’t think that I will be surprised by the rest of the chapters.

I upvoted, but personally I don't find much use for content blockers when I'm in an office or meeting where other people can see my screen, when I'm at the gym with a trainer, or when I'm really excited about a task. I have ADHD and am not the best at managing my time, so You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books is in full effect here.

• I'm surprised that you don't include Plucky Filter in this list.
• It can be helpful to enable Assistive Access right at the start of my day so that I don't get into messages until I have completed my morning routine.
  • Once I have started my commute, I disable it and then I call someone from my team/family.
• Rescuetime is an alternative to Freedom with better reporting.
  • though I prefer Freedom's interface for regularly scheduled focus blocks.
• Inbox when ready helps manage email distractions.
  • although this means I need to use my phone to receive two factor authentication codes.
• I have not configured focus sets in LeechBlock NG, but it might be of interest to those who prefer a more structured daily workflow.
• Cold Turkey can serve as an additional layer of security.
• I can recommend Tab Scheduler with auto open and close for setting and enforcing 1-minute timeouts, which I have found to be more effective than 1-second delays. 

I love watching/discussing anime with my siblings and cherish the fanfiction that I read while growing up, so I find it a little sad that you are unable to enjoy these forms of entertainment recreationally except on Saturday. Blogs and Wikipedia in particular have served to greatly expand my world, even if they have also resulted in some unintentional sleepless nights. Gaming seems taboo amongst my researcher friends, but not my normie friends, I suspect this is because the former are more susceptible to overoptimizing. There is a delicate balance for scholars to strike between connection and seclusion here.

More recently one of my bad habits has been spending hours trying to get AI to solve a problem which is beyond the reliable capability of current models, instead of thinking through the problem myself or with a human collaborator. 

These two papers [2412.15584] To Rely or Not to Rely? Evaluating Interventions for Appropriate Reliance on Large Language Models and [2503.14499] Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks have served to improve my understanding in this area. My current state of knowledge suggests that if a goal-oriented conversation with a model has lasted for ~26 minutes without a clear resolution, then further engagement is more likely than not to result in frustration.

I see. My specific update from this post was to slightly reduce how much I care about protecting against high-risk AI related CBRN threats, which is a topic I spent some time thinking about last month. 

I think it is generous to say that legible problems remaining open will necessarily gate model deployment, even in those organizations conscientious enough to spend weeks doing rigorous internal testing. Releases have been rushed ever since applications moved from physical CDs to servers, because of the belief that users can serve as early testers for bugs, and that critical issues can be patched by pushing a new update. This blog post by Steve Yegge from ~20 years ago comes to mind: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/its-not-software. I would include LLM assistants in the category of "servware".

I would argue that we are likely dropping the ball on both legible and illegible problems, but I agree that making illegible problems more legible is likely to be high leverage. I believe that the Janus/cyborgism cluster has no shortage of illegible problems, and consider https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/the-void to be a good example of work that attempts to grapple with illegible problems.

If an LLM says "I enjoy going on long walks" or "I don't like the taste of coffee", it is obviously lying because LLMs do not have access to those experiences or sensations. But a human saying those things might also be lying, you just can't tell quite as easily. There is nothing wrong about an LLM saying these things other than the wrongness of lying, as with humans.

Why would it be obviously lying? Would you also say that a blind person cannot have a favorite color? You could be talking about the idea of a thing, rather than the thing itself. 

There is a distinction between simulator and simulacra which I feel this section of the post may not be taking into account. An LLM assistant can enjoy writing about certain topics more than others. If a character in a story has some property, then it seems to me that we can make true and false statements about the state of that attribute.

Also, I am not sure I agree with considering corporations, nations, and other organizations to be a good example of superintelligence. I can see how it meets the criteria for the particular definition you use— you define the term more broadly than usual and I think it makes the concept less useful.

Tinker is an API for LoRA PEFT. You don’t mention it directly, but it’s trendy enough that I thought your comment was a reference to it.

I applied. It took me 10 minutes to complete all the questions up until the last one. It took me 160 minutes to read the anti-scheming paper, understand it, attempt to run a follow-up experiment, write some initial thoughts, and cut them to fit into the word limit. I'm not very satisfied with the answer I gave but I'd only budgeted 180 minutes (2x the recommended 90 mins) and didn't want to go over.

This is quite clearly slop.

The UK book cover is so much better.

For some H-1B folks with strong evidence (publications, awards, press, critical roles), O-1 may be an option—talk to your employer/immigration counsel. Not legal advice.

(Previous version of this comment which got downvoted)
I think that most people reading this would be eligible for an O1 visa. Please feel free to send me a lesswrong DM if you need help finding a lawyer or a connection to someone that can write a support letter for you.