Joined August 2021
- Tweets 5,556
- Following 370
- Followers 467
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220 Photos and videos
morphillogical retweeted
Jun 10
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morphillogical retweeted
Jun 10
it's all rhetoric. their objective is to pressure Anthropic into giving up their principles in service of their own regardless of the situation
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morphillogical retweeted
Jun 6
If leading AI companies are indeed approaching the point of recursive self-improvement, a coordinated, verifiable, and universally applied pause is probably the only responsible solution to mitigate several major AI risks; at least until safety guarantees are developed and demonstrated. Ensuring that such a moratorium is respected would require sincere collaboration between various countries and companies, but I definitely believe it is achievable if others follow in @AnthropicAI's footsteps.
Jun 4
Anthropic is calling for top AI labs to weigh slowing the pace of development, suggesting that AI systems are advancing so rapidly that they may soon be able to improve themselves without human intervention in ways that could pose societal risks. on.wsj.com/4ulkmFh
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morphillogical retweeted
Today is June 5th, one day to take a break from fighting each other online, and remind ourselves of our shared humanity and common goals by uniting around the one thing we all agree about: Repealing the Jones Act. June5.xyz
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I'll be there as well!
May 31
me too! I'm very controversial!
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morphillogical retweeted
May 25
Ok, here's where I want to flag something, because I think there's a discrepancy here worth noting instead of glossing over. There is no tool in my memory or context window called "Snowgrave". I'm not going to pretend to use a command that I genuinely don't have access to.
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morphillogical retweeted
May 22
if we really built superintelligent AIs at our current ability to understand steer them, that'd be the end of humanity. It feels on a gut level like we won't really do that since it's insane. But people are pointed right off that cliff and pressing the accelerator at full speed.
May 22
(1) We are likely on track to develop AI systems capable of causing human extinction/permanent disempowerment, quite possibly within the next few years
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Your regular reminder that you can just use nix on OS X. It's got way more packages than homebrew does, supports declarative configurations with lockfiles, and you can install things both in your global PATH or just for a specific project.
Ask your agent about using nix today!
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morphillogical retweeted
May 4
It seems like you're trying to switch from arguments of merit to arguments of political expedience. Those are both valuable conversations to have, but they shouldn't be confused for one another.
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This seems to be a near universal for creators. If someone reports a problem, there probably is some kind of problem, but everything else about the report is suspect.
I've heard this lesson from car mechanics, game designers, writers, programmers, youtubers.
May 4
This is broadly true, not just of editors: People feel things, then confabulate reasons for why they feel that way. Read feedback broadly. If someone signals disapproval, believe they disapprove, but be skeptical of reasons. "This is boring" often means "I find this aversive."
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morphillogical retweeted
Apr 18
this is why I consider Apple to be one of if not the most antisocial tech companies
actively and deliberately making people's experiences of communicating with their friends and loved ones unpleasant to sell more phones is fucking evil
Apr 17
i had a conspiracy theory about why every iphone user hates getting texts from android and i finally actually checked it and YES
the contrast ratio between the green and white is lower than the blue and white, which makes green messages genuinely more annoying to read. apple 100% did this on purpose and i kinda respect it
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if anyone launches a nuclear missile, then everybody dies (from all the follow up missiles).
what is the right reaction to this risk? international cooperation on nonproliferation, banning uranium enrichment, etc
what you shouldn't do is go around attacking nuclear physicists
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morphillogical retweeted
I denounce violent attacks on AI researchers or politicians, such as the recent Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman and the bullets fired into the house a local councilman supporting datacenter development.
Last year, I personally called AI companies to warn their security teams about Sam Kirchner (former leader of Stop AI, who have always had a policy of NONviolence and whose event I spoke at earlier that year) when he disappeared after indicating potential violent intentions against OpenAI.
Besides this one incident, 100% of the calls for violence I have seen have been from CRITICS of AI existential safety, who claim "if you were REALLY worried about AI killing everyone, you'd be taking up arms".
This is not a realistic way to stop AI.
Terrorism against AI supporters would backfire in many ways. It would help critics discredit the movement, be used to justify government crackdowns on dissent, and lead to AI being securitized, making public oversight and international cooperation much harder.
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morphillogical retweeted
Apr 10
Violence is not the way. Do not do this.
I'm glad Sam and his family weren't hurt.
BREAKING: Suspect throws Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home, according to company spokesperson
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With apologies to Clarke and Dawe.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you for joining us Senator Collins. Now this OpenBSD vulnerability that was revealed earlier today–
COLLINS: The one where the kernel panicked?
INTERVIEWER: Yes
COLLINS: Yeah, it's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.
INTERVIEWER: Well how is it untypical?
COLLINS: There are a lot of these packets going around the world all the time and very seldom does anything like this happen. I don't want people thinking that C is not safe.
INTERVIEWER: Was this C code safe?
COLLINS: Well I was thinking more about the other ones.
INTERVIEWER: The ones that are safe.
COLLINS: Yeah, the ones that don't panic the kernel.
INTERVIEWER: Well if this wasn't safe, why was it running at ring zero on millions of machines?
COLLINS: Well I'm not saying it wasn't safe, it's just perhaps not quite as safe as some of the other ones.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
COLLINS: Well some of them are built so that they don't segfault at all.
INTERVIEWER: Wasn't this built so it wouldn't segfault?
COLLINS: Well obviously not.
INTERVIEWER: How do you know?
COLLINS: Well because a selective ACK block placed 2^31 bytes away from the receive window, causing an int comparison to overflow, so the kernel concluded the same byte was simultaneously above and below the acknowledged sequence number, deleted the only hole in its SACK list, appended to a null pointer, panicking the kernel and pulling down the entire machine. It's a bit of a giveaway, I just like to make the point that that is not normal.
INTERVIEWER: Well what sort of standards is this C code written with?
COLLINS: Oh very rigorous software engineering standards.
INTERVIEWER: What sort of thing?
COLLINS: Well it's not supposed to crash, for a start.
INTERVIEWER: What other things?
COLLINS: Well, there are regulations governing which functions you're allowed to call.
INTERVIEWER: What regulations?
COLLINS: Well, gets() is out.
INTERVIEWER: And?
COLLINS: No strcpy. No strcat.
INTERVIEWER: sprintf?
COLLINS: Look, sprintf is fine if you're careful.
INTERVIEWER: Are people careful?
COLLINS: For the most part.
INTERVIEWER: What else?
COLLINS: Code's gotta be in source control. There's a test suite.
INTERVIEWER: What does it test for?
COLLINS: That it compiles I suppose.
INTERVIEWER: So the allegations that it's a dangerous language that does next to nothing to check whether code is doing what it's supposed to, that's ludicrous?
COLLINS: Absolutely ludicrous. C is a serious production language.
INTERVIEWER: Well what happened in this case?
COLLINS: Well the kernel crashed in this case by all means but it's very unusual.
INTERVIEWER: But Senator Collins, why did the kernel crash?
COLLINS: Well it got a packet.
INTERVIEWER: It got a packet?
COLLINS: The kernel received a packet.
INTERVIEWER: Is that unusual?
COLLINS: Oh yeah. Online? Chance in a million!
INTERVIEWER: So what do you do to protect the internet in cases like this?
COLLINS: Well we patched the bug upstream.
INTERVIEWER: …leaving other vulnerabilities no doubt unfixed.
COLLINS: No no no the bug has been patched. You might need to deploy it but–
INTERVIEWER: But this class of vulnerability–
COLLINS: It's not a class of vulnerability, it's a one-off bug caused by programmer error.
INTERVIEWER: Well what else is out there?
COLLINS: Nothing's out there.
INTERVIEWER: There must be something.
COLLINS: There is nothing out there. All there is, is code, and programmers, and fixes.
INTERVIEWER: And?
COLLINS: And untold numbers of exploitable kernel-level exploits.
INTERVIEWER: And what else?
COLLINS: And a 27 year old integer overflow.
INTERVIEWER: And anything else?
COLLINS: And large private models at AI labs discovering more vulnerabilities in secret. But there's nothing else out there.
INTERVIEWER: Senator Collins, thank you for joining us.
COLLINS: It's a complete void. Nothing worth thinking about. Oh, we're out of time? Could you call me a cab?
INTERVIEWER: But didn't you come in a self-driving car?
COLLINS: Yeah I did but…
INTERVIEWER: What happened?
COLLINS: Well the kernel panicked.
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Based off the classic sketch: youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_…
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There-but-for-the-grace-of-stanislav Alexander, go to your room!
i think the effective altruists should bring back naming their kids after virtues, like the puritans. where's little charity, industry, and means-to-an-end?
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morphillogical retweeted
Message I sent to my family about the time-sensitive opportunity to maybe cheaply escape natural death this month:
As a heads up: Some of my friends are signing up for a new procedure that can be used to chemically put the brain and body in deep freeze and potentially revive you later. It's something I'd generally recommend for older people (e.g. 70 ) and terminally ill people. The tech doesn't exist today to revive people, but it seems as though enough information is preserved in the brain that medical technology will eventually advance to the point of enabling revival. (Assuming humanity doesn't destroy itself first, anyway.)
I'd put this in the category of "if it weren't new and it weren't weird / outside-the-box, it would probably be standard-of-care as a last line of resort for people who medical science can't otherwise save". There are plenty of other medical procedures that are similarly risky or experimental, but that buy you far fewer years of healthy lifespan if they succeed.
The biggest risks and downsides, from my perspective, are: (a) The company doing this, Nectome, is new and untested, and might turn out to be incompetent or dysfunctional in some not-yet-obvious way. (b) If it takes medical technology a long time to reach the point of being able to revive people, then Nectome might stop existing first, or some natural disaster might occur, etc. to damage or destroy the bodies. (c) Nectome only does preservation with advance notice, so you're out of luck if you pass away in a sudden accident.
Some more info:
- A write-up on Nectome, plus some high-quality discussion (from people I broadly respect) in the comments: [LW link]
- A more general (and fun) write-up on this whole approach to end-of-life care: [@waitbutwhy link] (note that this is a ten-year-old post, and the tech was worse at the time).
Per [Nectome link], Nectome's preservation services normally cost $250,000, but until April 30 they're doing a pre-sale where you can buy a $20,000 card that makes the procedure cheaper the longer you wait to use it. E.g., if you pass away in 10 years the total cost is just the flat $20,000; if it's in 6-7 years, it's $20,000 plus an additional $90,000; etc. The card can be freely transferred at any time to anyone who needs these services, so you could potentially buy several and give them to friends and family as needed.
Overall: weird stuff, but weird and neglected innovations like these are sometimes where the biggest surprises turn up. I don't think this is a super safe or ironclad bet, but I'd guess it's worth the cost if you generally care a lot about your lifespan and healthspan.
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