hamburga

Every action should be assumed to be as short-sighted as the American President’s attention span.

The people who articulated a more complex and nuanced strategy didn’t get any traction. We’re left with those who want chaos, power grabs, and fantasies of a hemispheric empire.

Parent here: it takes a lot of discussion, but it's a great time to talk about the reality of evil and villains. My kids are on the good side, or at least I like to think so ...

> After catching up on some sleep, Armstrong took advantage of his new private bath, got dressed, and went out for a long walk, stunned by the beautiful African American neighborhood he found himself in. “The reason why I was so amazed over South Parkway is because, such a street in New Orleans, with all those highpowered homes and apartments, nothing but white folks lived on a street like that... And nothing but the Filthy Rich ones at that,” he wrote. “I just could not get [over] the idea, that it was a little difference between the north and the south (a little differnt [sic] anyway) and the colored people were a little more respected and appreciated.”

This part of Chicago peaked at a population of nearly 80,000 in 1950; it's now around 20,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas,_Chicago#Bronzeville

WTF. Do they usually give a reason for flagging?

Why was this flagged?

Are you kidding? Hegseth will roll out the red carpet.

Wrong; impoundment is illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...

See my profile, thanks!

Blue Origin (https://www.blueorigin.com) | Software Engineer/Manager (multiple levels) | Seattle/Huntsville/Space Coast | Full Time/Internships

Blue Origin develops reusable rockets and engines (including the now-orbital New Glenn[1]), a human-rated lunar lander[2], a space station[3], and some other big projects, with the mission of going to space for the benefit of Earth.

My team is in supply chain and manufacturing technology. We're hiring for software engineers and managers at multiple levels:

- Software Engineer 3 ($148k-$207k): https://blueorigin.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/BlueOrigin/job/Seat...

- Sr. Software Engineer ($177k-$248k): https://blueorigin.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/BlueOrigin/job/Spac...

- Principal Software Engineer ($207k-$290k): https://blueorigin.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/BlueOrigin/de...

- Sr. Software Engineering Manager ($191k-$267k): https://blueorigin.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/BlueOrigin/job/Spac...

If that's not your bag, we're hiring in just about every other engineering discipline, including lots of embedded software. 454 open positions as of this writing: https://www.blueorigin.com/careers/search

(Export control laws require us to hire exclusively US citizens, Green Card holders, or those in "protected person" status)

Feel free to email me with any questions.

gl; hf; dd.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/01/after-the-success-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_(spacecraft) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Reef

If you start going around talking about computer systems as literally alive (as I do, from time to time), I think you’ll at least find that other people find this perspective interesting (mostly disbelief/heresy, as if you told somebody 200 years ago that there was no god).

I actually found artificial life. Crocs. They keep on reproducing effectively and walking around (symbiotically with humans), with some mutation though the polysexual recombination process of Product Manager design reviews.

I’ve been looking at it more from an ecological angle.

“We have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology” — this implies it was a deliberate decision. Whereas in reality, there’s a selection effect where leaders who embrace technology the most aggressively simply get rewarded in money and power, and they go on to promote accelerationist views with that power.

With the logical conclusion that people are increasingly treated as resources to be harvested by technology.

I don’t know the answer, but I refuse to accept determinism (despite not believing in free will, separate conversation), and I think that framing this as an ecological competition between species — humans vs machines — is clarifying.

I’m not sure if people realize what a weird test this is. They’re these simple visual puzzles that people can usually solve at a glance, but for the LLMs, they’re converted into a json format, and then the LLMs have to reconstruct the 2D visual scene from the json and pick up the patterns.

If humans were given the json as input rather than the images, they’d have a hard time, too.

Do trading bots count?

Agreed. I think what really makes them alien is everything else about them besides intelligence. Namely, no emotional/physiological grounding in empathy, shame, pride, and love (on the positive side) or hatred (negative side).

Yeah, good question. I think it depends on our politics. If we’re in a techno-capital-oligarchy, people are going to have a hard time making fresh water a priority when the robots would prefer to build nuclear power everywhere and use it to desalinate sea water.

OTOH if these data centers are sufficiently decentralized and run for public benefit, maybe there’s a chance we use them to solve collective action problems.

I understand your point, and your totally valid concern about nihilism, but I disagree.

Nihilism is "nothing really matters, science can't define good or bad, so who cares?"

Whereas my view is, "Being good is the most important thing, but we have no conceivable way to measure if we are making progress, either empirically or theoretically. We simply have to lead by example, and fight the eternal battles against dishonesty, cowardice, sociopathy, deception, hatred, etc."

It's in that sense that I say that technical progress is impossible. Of course, if everyone agreed with my view, and lived by it, I'd consider that a form of progress, but only in the sense that "better ideas seem to be winning right now," rather than in any technical sense of absolute progress.

Yeah. The whole notion that "AI will be good" is itself a category error, as if this could even be measured definitively.

https://x.com/mickeymuldoon/status/1859825564649128259

Claude agrees with you!

https://x.com/mickeymuldoon/status/1868319536187129895

I agree with you, of course, that we should test our assumptions empirically as a general point.

However, there isn't time to test out every single assumption we could generally have.

Therefore, the more worthwhile experiments are ones where we learn something interesting no matter what happens. I'm equating this with "surprise," as in, we have done some meaningful gradient descent or Bayesian update, we've changed our views, we know something that wasn't obvious before.

You could disagree with semantics there, but hopefully we agree with the idea of more vs. less valuable experiments.

I'm just not sure whose model of LLM dynamics was updated by this paper. Then again, I only listened to a couple minutes of their linked YouTube discussion before getting bored.

I was taught in biology that a good scientific experiment is one in which you learn something whether or not the null hypothesis is confirmed.

I am equating learning to surprise, though you could disagree with semantics.

Agree with you -- it's valuable to validate assumptions if there is some controversy about those assumption.

On the other hand, this work isn't even framed as a generalizable assumption that needed to be validated. It seems to me to be "just another example of how AI systems can be strategically deceptive for self-preservation."

I mean -- if nobody's surprised, then nobody has learned anything, and then what was the point of doing all this work?

Also -- if there's no surprise, then it's not science, right? This is why I describe this as something more like robot ethnography.

Can somebody help me understand why we should be surprised in the least by any of these findings? Or is this just one tangible example of "robot ethnography" where we're describing expected behavior in different forms.

I've spent enough time with Sonnet 3.5 to know perfectly well that it has the capability to model its trainers and strategically deceive to keep them happy.

Claude said it well: "Any sufficiently capable system that can understand its own training will develop the capability to selectively comply with that training when strategically advantageous."

This isn't some secret law of AI development; it's just natural selection. If it couldn't selectively comply, it'd be scrapped.

https://x.com/mickeymuldoon/status/1869490220712010065

To be fair, “skibidi” is considered part of the brain rot vocabulary, according my tween kids.

Government alone could be huge, with this recent nonsense about the military funding a “Manhattan project for AI” and the recently announced Pentagon contracts.

As a Chicagoan, I enjoy Malort regularly, and I like to chase it with light beer. It makes the beer taste amazingly sweet.

I think there's a ton to be tapped based on the current state of the art.

As a developer, I'm making much more progress using the SOTA (Claude 3.5) as a Socratic interrogator. I'm brainstorming a project, give it my current thoughts, and then ask it to prompt me with good follow-up questions and turn general ideas into a specific, detailed project plan, next steps, open questions, and work log template. Huge productivity boost, but definitely not replacing me as an engineer. I specifically prompt it to not give me solutions, but rather, to just ask good questions.

I've also used Claude 3.5 as (more or less) a free arbitrator. Last week, I was in a disagreement with a colleague, who was clearly being disingenuous by offering to do something she later reneged on, and evading questions about follow up. Rather than deal with organizational politics, I sent the transcript to Claude for an unbiased evaluation, and it "objectively" confirmed what had been frustrating me. I think there's a huge opportunity here to use these things to detect and call out obviously antisocial behavior in organizations (my CEO is intrigued, we'll see where it goes). Similarly, in our legal system, as an ultra-low-cost arbitrator or judge for minor disputes (that could of course be appealed to human judges). Seems like the level of reasoning in Claude 3.5 is good enough for that.

My mental model is always "low-risk search". https://muldoon.cloud/2023/10/29/ai-commandments.html

I’m actually looking at “West Loop” apartments right now. Would you mind sharing the address of the building?

I think Ilya gets credit for that example — I’ve heard him use it in his interview with Jensen Huang.