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6jbash's Shortform
9mo
13
Maybe social media algorithms don't suck
jbash12h52

Seems like a lot of work and a lot of side effects just to induce it to go way overboard and do a crappy job of showing me something maybe a bit closer to what I want. How about if I just don't visit the site unless I want something specific, and then I use search to find it?

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I have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11
jbash6d20

I don't think the scale carried any actually new information that should have caused anybody to, um, update on anything. "Largely predictable" is the main issue.

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I have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11
jbash7d240

I was a native-born, nth-generation white and white-bread American citizen in the US. My reaction was "Huh. They finally lucked into something impactful. Had to happen sometime.". I was in no way happy about it, but it seemed like any other distant tragedy.

I didn't expect or understand the extreme American reaction, let alone any worldwide reaction, to what seemed to me like just another terrorist attack, largely predictable and differing only in scale from what had happened before.

All of a sudden everybody was saying the World Had Changed, and I was like "In what way?". I tend to attribute the whole mythos around those attacks mostly to the political class (which lives in a weird bubble) and the gullible.

I doubt I was alone, either, but once the tide starts on something like that, it's all you'll hear. The rest (including me) don't waste "ammunition" on trying to convince people it's not as big a deal as they think. Not really a conspiracy, just not fighting on a question that's not that important and will actually lose you points with people.

People were using it, quite successfully, to dismantle the values and institutions they claimed they wanted to protect and strengthen, and policy was more important to talk about.

This is blood-libel sounding stuff and absolutely fodder for anti-Chinese articles, and yet zero Americans have written about this?

I don't think it would quite fit the vibe. The mythos is all about the Ultimate Tragedy Ever. The Whole World was supposed to be Weeping, except for the Literal Demons actually responsible. To make the most extreme possible claim about how Universally Obviously Evil the attack is, you have to avoid broadening your Literal Demons to include the uninvolved.

Also, American anti-Chinese sentiment isn't "blood-libelish", or it doesn't feel that way to me anyway. "The Chinese" are, mostly, perceived as human adversaries acting for comprehensible reasons-- or maybe as a force of nature-- but not as irrationally hateful, or as totally insane apostles of evil for evil's sake. Maybe Chinese people were fully dehumanized in 1955, and definitely in 1915, but not now, I think. It probably helps that in the US there are very widely held, substantive, philsophically consistent political disagreements with the way China is run, as well as real ecomic fear. That means that if you want to make an "anti-China" argument, you don't have to run to ethnic dehumanization right off the bat.

On the other hand, in the US, if you want to be anti-people-who-want-to-reestablish-the-Caliphate, you have to be careful not to offend those of your "allies" who may think the problem with the Caliphate was less about its policies and more about who was running it. Ethnic or religious attacks are in some sense safer, and those lend themselves to more blood-libelish themes. And such attacks are also useful for lumping in people who might not want to reestablish the Caliphate, but might have grievances against you that you'd prefer to ignore.

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[Retracted] Guess I Was Wrong About AIxBio Risks
jbash7d50

Random things...

16 is (roughly) 5 percent of 300, not 0.5 percent.

What happens when you trigger the 20 to 40 percent detection threshold? Do you just get told no and get to try again, with no other consequence? What if you trigger it 10 times?

Your cost and "employer" filters haven't changed. Although it's probably not hard to create a good enough "business" to pass the employer one.

Something just being infectuous (or deadly) doesn't make it a good bioweapon. In fact, even if you have smallpox, you don't have a bioweapon yet. You still have to package and deliver it. And if you want full-on apocalypse cred, you also have to make it a lot worse than the background of naturally occurring pathogens.

Bioweapons are lousy weapons, because they aren't effectively targetable. That may be a big part of your Great Filter.

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What GPT-oss Leaks About OpenAI's Training Data
jbash10d20

I think that better pretraining filtering is useful for mitigating emergent misalignment.

I just read a story about a judge using ChatGPT to (help) decide whether particular language was racially charged. How good is it going to be at that sort of thing if all the racially charged uses of this or that language have been filtered?

More generally, I don't think the kind of "alignment" that you can potentially address with that kind of filtering is important. If you make it impossible to elicit naughty words from something, or even if you manage to make it totally incapable of thinking about some subject, that doesn't mean you've "aligned" it in any useful way. You've made it stupider, not more moral.

As for emergence, if you keep playing whack-a-mole, removing everything you identify as possibly being useful to prime output that could be intentionally misused, you seem to be setting yourself up to get really unpredictable, truly emergent behavior, as opposed to predictable repetition of patterns it's already seen.

... and porn specifically seems to be way, way, way, way, way down any reasonable list of what it'd be important to keep a model from mimicking anyway. I don't think I'd even put it on any such list at all.

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What GPT-oss Leaks About OpenAI's Training Data
jbash10d50

In summary, we have found strong evidence that models in the GPT-5 and GPT-oss family were trained on phrases from adult websites.

Is there some reason that anybody should care about this fact? Especially to the point where you put it in the abstract?

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AI #134: If Anyone Reads It
jbash17d20

Hieu Pham: There will be some people disagreeing this is AGI. I have no words for them. Hats off. Congrats to the team that made this happen.

There are some people who (still!) think the ability to win math contests is "general" intelligence. I have no words for them.

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Daniel Kokotajlo's Shortform
jbash19dΩ020

Excalibur guided artillery shells can get 1m CEP.

The Interwebs seem to indicate that that's only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS. And that's a $70,000 shell, with the cheaper PKG sounding like it's closer to $15,000, and a plain old dumb shell being $3,000. Which seems crazy, but there you are.

Anyway, guiding a ballistic shell while riding it down into the target seems like a pretty different problem from figuring out when to release a bomb.

I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.

... but I don't think a hand grenade is typically an anti-building munition. From the little I know about grenades, it seems like they'll have to fix the roof, but unless you're really lucky, the building's still going to be mostly usable, and, other than hearing loss, anybody inside is going to be OK unless they're in the room directly below where the grenade hits, and maybe even then.

If you're attacking buildings, I suspect you may need a bigger drone.

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Daniel Kokotajlo's Shortform
jbash20dΩ020

It's already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.

Is it generally useful to lob a grenade into a general area, though? Unless that area is pretty densely covered with things you want to hit with a grenade, it seems like you usually just waste a grenade.

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adamzerner's Shortform
jbash20d62

This also has the advantage that you and the child get to know each other, which is a big thing.

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6jbash's Shortform
9mo
13
132Good News, Everyone!
3y
23