"Pessimism of the Algebra, optimism of the Geometry"

it's so beautiful that you can just so clearly see the inspiration for samurai jack up and down in this

Dario Amodei was at a wellness retreat with the Anthropic polycule. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my government contracts over? Dario Amodei was at a wellness retreat.

Relatable. I miss those days, though. It becomes a chauffeur and cash register when they’re older.

Lmao

Type of guy who knows all the different subtleties of RL algorithms but thinks regulation has two settings (do nothing and capriciously nuke a company)

i hope elon doesn't let the money change him

Marco Rubio finding out he has to be the CEO of Anthropic after it gets nationalized

how am I just learning that the word "matrix" literally means womb and it was chosen because it "births determinants"

My favorite such joke:

Reminder that the last 12 months are plausibly the least crazy months of AI for the rest of your life! It's only getting crazier from here ...

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, 'Treatment is simple. Great LLM Claude is online tonight. Go and talk to him. That should pick you up.' Man bursts into tears. Says, 'But doctor…you are Claude'

I am looking for a discussion of the geometric interpretation (using the Thom-Pontryagin construction) of the first few stable homotopy groups of spheres. The notes academicweb.nd.edu/~andyp/no… are really excellent, but they only go up to pi^s_2.

Everyone who's ever built a time machine has regretted it, and used it to go back in time, and prevent themselves from building a time machine. Happens all the time.