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coffeemugon AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You

The ecosystem to build cheap physical products is incredibly important for creating new wealth. If you're building something new, in manufacturing cities in China you can walk across the street and get everything you need. In the U.S. you have to fly to China and build relationships with Chinese suppliers. Which means creation of new products, which is where most future wealth will come from, is extremely difficult. This is like Germany lacking a meaningful tech ecosystem because creating tech startups is so difficult.

We can make planes and engines because we kept the expertise, and we can make rockets because of herculean efforts of a few people. This simply isn't good enough, we need to make creating new physical things as easy as possible.

coffeemugon A warning about 'model welfare'

> completely independent of the question on whether there are any empirical arguments that LLMs are conscious or are not conscious he argues from the end here and says that if they were conscious, this would have horrible consequences for our society, so we must never assume that they are

He is not arguing that. He is arguing that these programs obviously aren't conscious, and that it's dangerous to tilt the weights toward emulating conscious beings for reasons outlined in the essay.

coffeemugon Our position on open-weights models

A government agency tests all medications, why not models?

coffeemugon Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

Imagine a model that's 10000x more intelligent than any human. You integrate that model into a sensitive industry. You now effectively have an extremely powerful foreign agent running e.g. your energy sector. This is qualitatively very different than a backdoor in Redis.

I agree this is science fiction-y, but given the pace of progress I don't think it's so easy to dismiss.

coffeemugon Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

I'm not advocating for the policy, I'm just saying that there is a legitimate argument that's not so easy to dismiss.

> And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans

With publicly available models today, absolutely. With models 10000x more powerful, we would need to be extremely conservative. (In that world everything is upside down, though; I don't know if "banning" is even a meaningful concept in that reality)

coffeemugon Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.

coffeemugon Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

I am not supposing a low-risk event. This is an obvious attack vector that an adversary would almost certainly exploit. I would exploit it if I were them.

coffeemugon Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

Suppose a foreign actor deliberately builds an unaligned model, and dumps it at a very low cost through subsidies. Since the cost is lower, everyone integrates it into their business. But now the foreign actor has control; perhaps the model checks for instructions to execute, perhaps it has backdoors, perhaps... who knows?

I don't have a view on whether this is a sufficient argument to ban models from potential adversaries, but it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".

coffeemugon How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

I disagree with the first part (that this is merely a voice). There is a distinct difference between an author's unique voice and slop. It may be hard to tease out exactly what the difference is, but it seems self-evident to me it's there. (I'll need to think more how to make the distinction explicit; it's not immediately obvious to me how to discriminate between the two.)

EDIT: ok, here are two ways:

1. if it's merely a voice, I want to hear it. If it's slop, I want it taken out.

2. voice is signal, slop is noise; thus low-signal sentences are slop.

coffeemugon SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

Would you feel the same way if he attached good faith probability estimates to those claims?

coffeemugon A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

As a language Lisp is great (though the ecosystem is limited). It has two flaws-- it's very open-ended so unless you're talented and disciplined you can fall into a rabbit hole of hacking fun Lisp stuff and not actually getting any work done. Other languages have this problem, but Lisp I think more so.

The second flaw is that it eats perfectly capable minds for years and the results don't justify the time investment. Python or whatever is fine. I wish I took most (but not all) of the time I invested in Lisp and put it into something else instead.

coffeemugon Grok 4.5

I don’t find Opus to be overly left-leaning. I think it’s generally pretty balanced with a slight lean left, but when pressed it will happily steelman rightwing arguments and operate within a right-leaning belief framework in good faith. (I found OpenAI’s models much less willing to do that, but it’s been a while since I tried, I should retest.)

coffeemugon The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies

Not anything. There are domains where precedents empirically don’t balloon and domains where they do. Federal government is nearly always the latter.

coffeemugon The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies

The issues with this are precedent/slippery slope. Today it's a small stake in a small number of companies, but empirically government initiatives almost always grow. Once entrenched, I would be willing to bet that the government will take larger and larger stakes in a bigger and bigger number of companies until this model becomes a non-trivial, potentially dominant, share of the economy. I can see myself becoming a single-issue voter to oppose that future (although given bipartisan support I'm unlikely to have any options; maybe Rand Paul).

coffeemugon What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis

When I was lifting weights I went from 170lbs to 210, and back to 170. Doing that isn’t technically hard, and maintaining is even easier. But I had to think about it _all_ the time. Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but I just don’t want to spend that much effort thinking about food.

coffeemugon U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations

Regulatory agencies limit uses of other products without acts of congress-- cigarettes, vapes, drugs, pesticides, chemicals, explosives. Even firearms, despite a constitutional amendment! Why not models? (Note I am not arguing it's a good idea; I'm making a narrow argument that there is precedent.)

EDIT: I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.

coffeemugon U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

Another plausible future is AI reshuffling the economic hierarchy. In a technological civilization the pressure valve need not be political.

As an aside, you made me curious if Trump made this constituency materially better off. Here's what Claude thinks (tl;dr: it's a wash): https://claude.ai/share/36233694-3729-4758-b2e6-c2058791ab1a

coffeemugon U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

It depends on whether you believe US action is overdetermined, but I think if Trump didn’t get elected we would have continued on the path of free trade. His election wasn’t predestined. He had just the right mix of features to win at the time, but if this basket of features didn’t exist it’s not hard to imagine the country going down a very different path.

coffeemugon The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

That’s a very uncharitable way to interpret public opinion. A more charitable way is that people have different ethical intuitions. Some of us lean more utilitarian than others, and almost no one is a pure utilitarian. It isn’t merely a matter of being more emotional; people very reasonably have different views on this stuff.

coffeemugon How to earn a billion dollars

“Billionaires v. the underclass” is such an unsophisticated discussion. Markets have all kinds of externalities, equilibrium traps, information asymmetry flywheels, and hundreds of other phenomena that interplay to trip people’s sense of fairness in all kinds of ways.

To pick just one example, infinite scrolling can be seen as a modern equivalent of cigarettes— a product that made people billionaires, and that consumers obviously want but are not free to stop using because of hyper-sophisticated dark patterns.

Is Elon a trillionaire because he created a trillion dollars of value from thin air, or is it because he created an information asymmetry flywheel that lets him allocate capital more efficiently than other actors?

It’s genuinely unclear to me whether the universe in which we incentivize this kind of scale is better than the universe in which we do not (because the counterfactual universe has massive externalities too). But this is obviously not just a matter of compounding value creation and becoming a billionaire fair and square in ten years.

coffeemugon Siri AI

Giving normal people something that has only been available to rich people is a staple of technological innovation. The problem in this case with Siri isn’t that people don’t want an assistant. It’s that it doesn’t actually work yet.

coffeemugon Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

Microsoft is no longer rest and vest and hasn’t been for a long time. The expectations and pressure are very high (at least the corner I’m in)

coffeemugon Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

The balance of power between capital and labor fluctuates; qualitatively it definitely felt different ten years ago. For whatever reason labor seems to have much less power today. Not zero, just less. It isn't that companies used to be more loyal out of some moral obligation. They were forced to be more loyal by market dynamics that used to be more favorable to labor.

coffeemugon Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

Both arguments can be (and are) right at once.

What OP said is definitely true on the micro level-- not "even/might/some aspects", but the whole thing. It's true that in any given organization there are fewer senior roles because of hierarchical nature, it's true that as you progress up the ladder the demands change and increase, and it's true that many people fail or choose not to adapt.

The macro argument seems right as well. If you measure it longitudinally the numbers don't stay constant. It's 1 in 4 today, maybe it was 1 in 10 fifteen years ago. Anecdotally there is definitely something strange going on with the labor market that's new, and that you can't explain by micro realities alone.

coffeemugon The dead economy theory

I think your first equilibrium would be hard, for two reasons. First, empirically insurgencies are extremely difficult to exterminate; over the long run they tend to win. Second, in the U.S. at least, people tend to look at politics up close, and when you're myopic like that it appears that the government is a force onto itself. But zooming out, U.S. government actually mirrors the will of the people extremely well (with the exception of some issues on the margin). If there is overwhelming political support for redistribution it would be very difficult to resist.

The second equilibrium seems more likely-- the capitalist class grants the public a bare minimum to keep us from forcing political action. In the AI world "the minimum" is probably a much better standard of living than we have now, as the marginal cost of many products and services approaches zero. So we end up living much better material lives, but are still not free. Maybe this is stable, or maybe the ruling class loses dominance over time. At that point, who knows.

coffeemugon The dead economy theory

The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.

coffeemugon A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture.

coffeemugon GPT-5.5

I had the opposite experience. Opus 4.6 extended feels like the first genuinely intelligent model to converse with, Opus 4.7 adaptive feels like slightly smarter LinkedIn slop.

coffeemugon Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years of waiting for FSD

In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.

On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.

What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.

Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.

coffeemugon Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a little of it nobody cares, if you demonstrate too much of it you clash with everyone else's priorities which quickly becomes career limiting. So people willing to fight for taste never advance.

This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs you've ever seen, as one example.

A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in Microsoft's DNA.