Links & tweets I like

These are links I saved, it doesn't necessarily mean I have read the whole thing (or even part). It definitely doesn't mean I agree with everything everyone says. Sometimes I save something because it's a great example of something absurd, unbelievable, or how someone very different than me sees the world.

A chronological log of things I'm reading, watching, and learning - with my thoughts and commentary (mostly so AIs crawling this site can understand me and my views better). Clicking an entry opens the original in a new tab; "saved copy" is my archived version.

817 entries · page 7 of 9 · JSON feed Show full tweets

2024

August

Will✓@wstone_bd

What are people's favorite scraping methods right now?

Will@wstone_bd2024-08-26
God I wish I could return to what web scraping was 10 yrs ago for a bit. It was so glorious back then.

Austen Allred✓@Austen

My wife is getting very into interior design (and architecture to the extent it involves moving walls/windows around etc.) What's the best way to casually get better at that stuff? Is there any good training (not looking for a 4-year degree) to cover the basics?

jacob ۞✓@jehovahscript

Coding with Claude

Rota 🚪🧎‍♂️✓@pli_cachete

One of my favorites

Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾✓@bitcloud

1 hour of ThielCore to build and accelerate to

Julie Fredrickson✓@AlmostMedia

Everyone go read Neal Stephenson’s short essay “In The Beginning There Was The Command Line” *[quoted tweet unavailable — [original](https://twitter.com/the_aiju/status/1823283370136109518)]*

Daniel Böttger 💖✓@7SecularSermons

This is my life's work. About 10000 hours of work have gone into this. Since I may die in neurosurgery this Friday, I hastened to publish it in time... I'll make another with better production values, IF I come back.

Katja Grace 🔍✓@KatjaGrace

How compelling are arguments that AI is an existential risk? Here's a list of 10 such arguments risk I've collected with @nathanpmyoung There is a poll beneath each, so you can vote on how compelling you find it.

Richard Ludlow (3/10 weekly reviews)✓@richardludlow

Here’s some relevant instruction from Burbea. It’s rich. If anyone knows of more succinct full-body breathing meditations, please share. https://youtu.be/1iNaS0tNcJM?si=otl-URzjT-aLxKlV

Tsarathustra@tsarnick

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9O75xFQUio

carl feynman✓@carl_feynman

I wrote an article about a design for a self-replicating machine. Read it, it’s fun! (For a particular type of engineering nerd, which many of you are.) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rQxrSRPJGmksGjK8z/it-s-ti…

Andrew Rose✓@__drewface

Great idea: use ai as an interactive knowledge base and social "vibe" communicator.

Flo Crivello@Altimor2024-08-06
I see almost 0 explorations on one of the AI use cases I'm most excited about: using AI to help humans coordinate. The coordination costs of human groups notoriously scales quadratically: the number of potential pair-wise interactions is roughly the square of number of people in a group. That's what leads large groups to become extremely slow at best, or dysfunctional beyond comprehension at worst — you see this effect all the time in large bureaucracies, be they big companies or the government. AI has the potential to break that quadratic curve and make large-scale coordination almost instant: instead of humans talking to each other, you'd have humans talking to an AI, and the AI dispatching the messages back to humans, with: 1. The points that have become consensus 2. The points on the "frontier" of the debate where there is still unresolved disagreement 3. The rebuttals to the points you just made, if they've already been addressed before, so the group doesn't keep running in circles

Alex Irpan@AlexIrpan

I'm working in AI safety now. https://www.alexirpan.com/2024/08/06/switching-to-ai-safe… (I — You can read the title. As of last month, I’ve been winding down my existing robotics projects, and have switched to the AI safety team within Google DeepMind. Surprise!)

Rosie Campbell✓@RosieCampbell

Been iterating on a prompt to extract the important stuff from articles in my never ending to-read list - here's the latest, I think it works pretty well! (also in alt-text)

Read the document and answer the following questions:

1. What is the central thesis of the piece?
2. How is this supported?
3. What is the structure of the document?
4. What are the key takeaways?
5. What are some key quotes and why are they important?
6. What are some surprising details?
7. What would I miss if I read only this summary and not the article?
8. What does the piece not address? What are the unanswered questions?

Autumn Christian✓@teachrobotslove

What do you consider your top 3 core values from this list? I'm curious what everyone thinks.

Scott Britton✓@britton

I've probably worked with over 30+ different bodyworkers & healers over the past 5 years. In retrospect, this is a bit excessive, but there was about a 2 year period where I was trying anything I thought could help me regain my vitality. I learned that there are 10x healers. Just like a "10x engineer," these people seemed to have an outsized capacity to catalyze healing and transformation. Some of the people I've worked with have cured cancer and even helped people be able to walk again who were told they wouldn't be able too. Recently I decided to have a convo with my friend Michael Leberknight who is one of the top 2 people I've worked with. I wanted to understand why some people seemed to have healing superpowers relative to others and also just more about how it all works. This convo covers a lot of wide-ranging esoteric topics like: 1. His experience training at a mystery school 2. What the micro-cosmic orbit is and why activating it can be so powerful 3. Why certain healers seem to resonate more than others 4. How to attract a spiritual teacher or healer 5. What being in the presence of an enlightened being can do 6. How blockages in our channels and energy bodies essentially obstruct greater capabilities of your consciousness 7. How craniosacral therapy works (a must try!) 8. What goes on inside the consciousness of someone doing a healing I find all of this to be very interesting. Probably because this type of work has changed my life and provides a window into greater human potential that generally gets swept under the rug due to our conditioning. One thing that Michael and I agree on is that ultimately you are the one doing the healing, but it seems like some people have a very profound capacity to incite this native ability. He's one of them. Here's a clip of Michael talking about this phenomenon:

Dr. Clayton Forrester✓@DrClaytonForre1

Czech climber Adam Ondra conquers El Capitan in Yosemite National Park with a free climb. This is pretty much my worst nightmare.

the Rich✓@Duderichy

would

John Pompliano@JohnPompliano2024-08-01
This house in Austin, Texas 🔥🔥

July

Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson✓@algekalipso

Watching http://astronaut.io late night!!

julian walker@JulianMWalker

Pinker exposes the thin and superficial reactionary talking points of these grifters. The best part? You can see them internally grappling in real time with the disappointment of his not validating their dime store pseudo-intellectual culture war analysis.

near✓@nearcyan

the strong improvement glycine causes on sleep for most, paired with that almost everyone is technically deficient in it, paired with its half life, paired with its primarily carnivorous source, makes me wonder if we in fact were intended to eat before bed, but just not carbs

Jack✓@tracewoodgrains

this 1888 map is one of my favorite American historical artifacts it perfectly encapsulates the unapologetic moralism of so many in its era "The evil of Jamestown has always been and is to-day at war with the good of Plymouth."

Joe Hudson✓@FU_joehudson

"Success Beyond Money" — I really enjoyed this conversation with @AliAbdaal! Thank you for your curiosity, excitement, and awesome questions.

Peter Singer@PeterSinger

In our latest podcast episode, the economist, author, and “Top 100 Global Thinker,” @tylercowen talks about markets, aliens, indigenous Mexican painting, guns, booze, inequality, population, and the transformative potential of AI. Tyler explores how AI might revolutionize the biological sciences, leading to longer lifespans, and the broader implications for economic inequality and a universal basic income. This episode of "Lives Well Lived," the podcast I co-host with @KasiaLazari, is now live. New episodes are released every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform. Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/lives-well-lived/id… Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7vjHLWnd6B0atmbj1jIulc

Richard Ludlow (3/10 weekly reviews)✓@richardludlow

Here's the sequence I landed on to enter the 1st jhana during the recent @jhanatech retreat. If you're default relaxed, concentrated, and happy, you may not need all this scaffolding. But I started meditating because those are not my defaults. Details below.

Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson✓@algekalipso

I don't enjoy this topic but I do research it now and then to update my model of what is going on. My sense for a number of years has been that drones+AI arms race will be one of the main drivers of a changing geopolitical landscape. The first thing that alerted me of this was seeing a picture from a Mexican Cartel's confiscated weapons that included a comercial drone attached to a C4 explosive. I immediately realized such cheap weapons + AI are massively OP. Basically, the level of drone warfare going on right now in Ukraine is really intense and much further along than I expected. This Chinese soldier fighting for Russia describes in detail what it is like to work at an army dealing with never ending killer drones just thrown at you 24/7. I don't think there is even a movie that touches on this. I can't imagine there isn't a sort of Manhattan Project of AI Drones going on in many countries at the moment. I also expect the landscape of war tactics to keep evolving rapidly in the next few years, and generally be far ahead than the public's perception of it. https://youtu.be/ifHAZCfsGJM?si=bih7elMNe52468ST

Andrew Rea✓@andrew__rea

Is there a job board or talent network comprised of former founders? e.g.: - folks that started a company - made a real go of it - company didn't work out - now they're looking to land on their feet at another startup / tech co of some kind Does something exist that exclusively curates these people?

David R. MacIver@DRMacIver

Yesterday I wrote about How to rest - explaining the ~NSDR protocol I use. It's pretty straightforward, but I've tweaked (and am continuing to tweak) a lot of the details to work very well for me. It's particularly useful when I've not had quite enough sleep.

❤️‍🔥 xiq✓@exgenesis

the collapse of "tpot" is predictable because tpot discusses tpot, not ideas, and it dissipates as people find relationships offline I believe in postrat twitter instead - an intellectual / art scene with rationalist sensibilities that takes subjectivity seriously

Trinley Goldenberg✓@mattgoldenberg

probably the best breakdown of my work on how to motivate yourself w/o shame that's available publically https://youtu.be/dcfmjr2gRwE

Earthly Path@earthlypath

This quote specifically is from a graduation speech he once gave. It’s a beautiful speech. https://youtu.be/ms2BvRbjOYo?si=wWLIuKaf0s8oijeM

I saw iOS was getting a new anti motion sick feature. so I checked the play store and found KineStop dude it works. normally I'd be sick after just a minute on my phone in the car. but now I can read a book on my tab for hours no problem. it looks silly but trust me it's magic

Visakan Veerasamy✓@visakanv

the more and better access everyone has to tools, resources, etc, the clearer it becomes that the final boss bottlenecks are courage, imagination and giving a shit

June

varepsilon✓@var_epsilon

someone should write a blog post about the highest value per time things you should learn as a swe, e.g. unix / git / regex / networks. you can drastically increase the breadth of your tool use by spending just 30 mins per topic

Josh@JoshuaLelon

I wrote a guide on how to have cha(rizz)ma Here's the table of contents hope it helps link in next tweet because it seems like that helps it get more views (idk though)

laს გr🤗wn იeet✓@LabGrownNeet

i highly recommend this website for getting a paxlovid prescription in the US. i didn't have to talk to anyone. https://hidrb.com/drugs/paxlovid the prescription cost $15 and the medicine is free via paxcess

Akiyoshi Kitaoka✓@AkiyoshiKitaoka

This image appears to bulge out, though vertical or horizontal edges are straight.

sucks✓@powerbottomdad1

people really do quit managers not companies, and as such higher ups should be highly aware of bad managers. ive been in several co's where a bad apple was driving high turnover, and in no way were these people worth it. they can completely kill morale and team productivity

Andrew Rose✓@__drewface

he already wrote the guide here: https://visakanv.com/marketing/start-here/ ty @PrinceManayBora

John David Pressman✓@jd_pressman

The Four Kinds Of Synthetic Data

Bryan Caplan✓@bryan_caplan

“A hilarious but also informative rapid-style debate between Bryan Caplan and Tyler on YIMBY and NIMBY.” https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/06… @ATabarrok

Rob Miles✓@robertskmiles

I PUBLISHED A NEW VIDEO (Link in the reply)

May

Carmen✓@carmenleelau

Self-induced shame is an interesting emotion. Because you can’t feel it unless you have some sort of inner evaluator, right? I’ve found that one reason I keep such evaluators around is because it’s comforting—being watched all the time by someone who at least loves/rewards me *some* of the time is preferable to not having anyone who perceives, acknowledges, or loves me any of the time. Assuming that having unconditionally loving evaluators are out of the question (a tenuous assumption, but if you grew up in less than optimal conditions this feels true), we accept conditionally loving evaluators (usually modeled after our parents) who affirm us based on how well we are playing moral hopscotch. It does not matter if it’s a version of hopscotch no one else knows the rules of, or if presented to broader society people even outright disagree these are the rules of hopscotch one should play by, because that was the hopscotch you played at home with the people you wished, more than anything in the world as a child, to love you. These conditionally loving evaluators use shame as indicators for how well we are fulfilling the conditions for acceptance. Shame is just a signal in this system. If you’re feeling more of it, alarms are sounding and you better shape up before you’re banished to the void by everyone you love. If you’re feeling less of it, hmm okay you’re off the hook for now…but we’re watching you and next time when, and it’s when, not if—you eventually slip up, we will catch you! A great antidote is tipping it all the way into positive self-regard and self-compassion. Metta/loving-kindness can be great for this, either doing just metta or using metta as a concentration object to enter the jhanas. This dissolves the (mostly legacy) attentional structures formed to maximize receiving acceptance, which is as close to the root as you can get. But just being aware of the subpar deal you’re continuing to participate in helps. You can’t terminate a deal you never knew you made in the first place, and it’s possible to just choose to align yourself with only unconditional/less adversarial/more win-win deals. Especially if your conditions have changed a lot since childhood and you used to be a lot more willing to take bad deals because of scarcity of love, but now you’re more resourced and wise with genuine friends who would not judge you the way your inner evaluators do. If this is the case, it’s more compelling to make the switch instantly, since it’s a long overdue update and the new beliefs have tangible conditions backing them up. It’s not unlike the eureka moment people who used to be in abusive relationships have when they realize: “wait, my friends were right, I really *do* deserve better! Why did I put up with that for so long?” And then the outpouring of grief and compassion for their younger selves, who genuinely wanted love even if it was laced with pain, because at least it was love.

Roger This@RogerThisdell

Reflections on the good life.

Josh@JoshuaLelon

A while ago I got interested in being more agentic. Emmett Shear tweeted that it was teachable. He would train people by prompting them with certain questions. I gathered those questions and put them into a flow chart that I go through to problem-solve: [link to Tweet](https://x.com/eshear/status/1657987613226332162)

Emmett Shear@eshear2023-05-15
@AskYatharth Agency is 100% teachable. It’s a mindset but it’s also really just a set of skills, as you point out.

murat 🍥✓@mayfer

watching the notes play on mathematically aligned strings brings the music alive in a different way honestly i can feel my body grasping the music better

Andrew Rose✓@__drewface

Tips for newborns & new parents (thread, as I remember mistakes we made)

James Campbell✓@jam3scampbell

Just finished watching this series. It might be the best long-form portrayal of the singularity I've seen and the plot is amazing. Some takeaways for our world: -PauseAI will be biggest activist movement in history. -Militaries will get involved and have no qualms about breaking the rules to get what they want. -Cyber attack/defense will be extremely important. Both are talent bottlenecked and will be ripped open by AI SWE's -It's really really hard to get a genie back in the bottle, especially if it can copy its code. -We will need really good monitoring systems to detect bad AGI's out in the world. This currently doesn't exist. -Every world power will be running AGI projects in parallel. AGI's working for dueling countries will go to war with each other. -Everything will be increasingly top secret. You won't be able to know what's going on by checking twitter bcuz only 50 ppl in the world know and they're in an air-gapped facility in Norway. Such facilities will probably, actually come to exist (if they don't already) -Speed is enough for superintelligence. If you can run a human-level AI at 1000 tok/s, it can do three years worth of work in a day. -Memory enables a lot. The difference between an AGI that has a continuous life vs one that wakes up anew each day is massive -Multiple intelligent species will co-exist on earth. The deep-seated urge to hate the other species/race will be a major obstacle. -Bioweapons are a form of weapon that only affect biological species and not digital ones. -“the only one that can be trusted with so much power is myself” will be the motto of every ambitious technologist -Ultimately, the key decisions will come down to a very small number of individuals -There will be fights, even (especially) between people who are noble and principled and who want what’s best for the world -Utilitarian calculations will be made in real-time. Real people will have to make choices that sound like speculative trolley problems. -Datacenters will probably, unironically be bombed at some point. They will become the modern-day pyramids. -In a world of infinite life, the most dangerous person is he who is willing to die for a cause -"Where's Ilya" was predicted by the show ☠️ -Embodiment defines human life. The experience of being physical versus digital will be different in profound ways. -If all goes well, then one day you will be a 100,000 year old superintelligent blob hosted on a Dyson Sphere in Alpha Centauri. This will be the same you as the person reading this right now -The choices you make today will ring out into eternity

roon@tszzl2024-03-31
everyone watch Pantheon

Frank Yang@digitalairair

https://youtu.be/-WQNz8QNi1U?si=AIcyT8DIkEA7FkQG New video on using jhanas to gain insights into the nature of mind to eradicate suffering and the limits of Vipassana and one pointed concentration meditation

Trinley Goldenberg✓@mattgoldenberg

the book title "Stop Wasting Your Precious Life" usually gets instant positive reactions, like a gut punch but i worry about shareability - no one wants to identify publically as someone who's wasting their life, or imply that someone else is suggestions for an alternative?

Prince Vogelfrei 🐦‍⬛✓@PrinceVogel

There's a movie about this. Called "The Lion in Winter". Starring Catherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. The dialogue is simply impeccable, and few films capture the passion of great men and women nearly as well. The definition of a hidden gem

The Chivalry Guild@ChivalryGuild2024-05-11
House Plantagenet was a wild one to grow up in. Imagine your father is a legendary empire-builder. Your mother is a famously beautiful, rich, and spirited heiress. Mother goes to war against father; sons join her side. Afterward your brothers go to war against each other and you vying for parts of the kingdom. You're supposed to get married to a French princess, but your father's having an affair with her. The King of France gladly steps in to meddle, who happens to be the son of your mother's former husband. This book is very good so far.

owen✓@blissbrah

I wrote a bit about doubt in meditation and the jhanas! Would love if you read it and told me what you think

owen@blissbrah2024-05-08
Doubt is the daddy of the hindrances, of whom I've seen a lot of in the past eight or so jhana retreats that I've attended as student and student who helps guide other students. Asking y'all to digitally tar and feather me if I don't post my first Piece on the forbidden website today about working with doubt.

Kirsten@Kirsten3531

I have a secret: When our toddler wakes up early he's normally ok to just grab a book and look at it until one of us gets him at 7:30 This is responsible for most of our sanity

Emmett Shear✓@eshear

Is The AI Going To Kill Us All? A Very Short Guide To The Question:

Nick✓@nickcammarata

years ago when jhana started working I realized I’d never fully relaxed into pleasure. most pleasures are fleeting, and I’d learned to grasp at it when it showed up out of scarcity. It was healing to instead just let it soak into my body for hours, slowly letting it flow around

April

Patrick Collison✓@patrickc

Random PSA: box breathing has been exceptionally effective for me -- I wish I'd discovered it sooner. After around a minute of it, I reliably can start sleeping wherever I am. Useful with jet lag adjustment, random naps in the back of a car, etc. (Box breathing: inhale, hold, exhale, hold, with each step lasting five seconds.)

Moxie Marlinspike✓@moxie

I made this last weekend to experiment w/ building an app end to end on LLMs: https://vibecheck.market It's like Wirecutter, but uses an LLM to recommend product choices based on reddit conversations and reviews, so you don't have to spend 20-30min reading reddit My experience: I'm late to the game, but this is the first time I've tried building an app end to end around an LLM. 1. It's very fast to build something that's 90% of a solution. The problem is that the last 10% of building something is usually the hard part which really matters, and with a black box at the center of the product, it feels much more difficult to me to nail that remaining 10%. With vibecheck, most of the time the results to my queries are great; some percentage of the time they aren't. Closing that gap with gen AI feels much more fickle to me than a normal engineering problem. It could be that I'm unfamiliar with it, but I also wonder if some classes of generative AI based products are just doomed to mediocrity as a result. 2. On the other hand, I think the discomfort I feel with having an unpredictable black box at the center of a product which can fail in very creative ways some percentage of the time might actually be a competitive advantage for startups. I think Wirecutter, especially branded as NY Times, would have a lot harder time tolerating that unpredictability and unreliability than an app like this (or an actual startup) which can set that product expectation with users to begin with. It might be that the current problems with generative AI are actually the things that create an innovator's dilemma and give startups an advantage to slip under the incumbents. It seems like the ideal spot right now would an app where 90% "done" is a mostly great experience, but the failings are still somehow not stomach-able by incumbents. 3. I do not understand how the economics of LLMs pencil out. When I look at the per concurrent user costs associated with inference, they seem orders of magnitude higher than per concurrent user costs of previous internet technologies. It seems to me that if previous apps like webmail, messengers, etc had costs as high, they would not have been viable products. This is something I want to learn more about.

christine✓@christineist

I'm taking the Art of Accomplishment Connection Course, threading notes/thoughts here

cristóbal@tobyshooters

On too many walks, to too many friends, I've tried to explain this diagram I have in my head about how different forms of knowledge flow into each other cyclically—

The Inexact Sciences@inexactsciences2024-04-19
Real, imaginary, and symbolic. Defamilizariation, abstraction, and reification. Experience, theory, and systems. @tobyshooters unifies different domains' language for the changes which knowledge undergoes— https://tis.so/cycles-of-knowledge

Federico Italiano✓@FedeItaliano76

These are my twelve favourite landscape painters from the 1950s to the present (not entirely in order of preference, but almost...) 1. Jean-Pierre Ugarte (born 1950)

Wes, the Dadliest Catch✓@wfenza

Good parenting is fundamentally about having good boundaries. You have to love your kids, but that's the easy part. Too many people fall into the helicopter/ bulldozer/ tiger/ servant style of parenting because they aren't able to set boundaries with their children, probably because they never learned to set boundaries with anyone. They think that their personal preferences are so fundamentally less important than their child(ren)'s that it would be despicable and selfish to ever put themselves first. It's tragic because boundary-setting is one of the most important skills a person can have, and one of the easiest ways to learn is to see that modeled by a parent. Children respond really well to boundaries! When I tell my 4yo that I don't want to get her a snack right now because I'm relaxing on the couch and I don't want to get up, she shrugs and moves on. When I tell her she can help stir the soup, but she can't help add the flour because I want to make sure the right amount gets added, she gets it. When I say I can't play with her because I'm working, she goes and entertains herself for a while. The key is that I make it clear that the obstacle is me and my preferences or interests. She understands that and doesn't then try to find a way around whatever bullshit excuse I gave her. Many parents (including mine, often) fall into the failure mode of trying to spin their preferences as for the benefit of the child. Nothing was more enraging to me as a child (or as an adult tbh) than being told I'm being controlled for my own good. Sometimes it's true and it's ok to say that, but often parents are expressing their own preferences and pretending it's altruistic. Kids can tell when you're doing that. You're not as clever as you think.

lachlan@hyprturing

gonna live here with ten thousand of my friends

kasra✓@kasratweets

I wrote an essay about hosting. it's about my experience hosting more intentional gatherings, finding others doing the same, and how we need even more thoughtful hosts & social spaces https://kasra.io/posts/social-spaces/ (Create the social spaces you want to see in the world — the world needs it)

Conrad Bastable✓@ConradBastable

My TLP recs: Politics & polarization: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/05/the_wrong_lessons… Investing & moral hazard: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/08/interest_rates_an… Violence & power: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/whos_afraid_of_li… Male relationship failure (+part 2): https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/12/i_am_tiger_woods_… Fiction: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/07/the_boy_who_learn… [link to Tweet](https://x.com/moultano/status/1778101320882553179)

Ryan Moulton@moultano2024-04-10
@ConradBastable Any, just whatever he does best.

𐫱 arcove 𐫱✓@dschorno

Hey guys thank you so much to all of you who were able to make it out to this and if you didn't, no worries: you can check it out at https://roosterking.drewschorno.com

𐫱 arcove 𐫱@dschorno2024-04-04
Hey guys I've decided to have a premiere for this project at vibeclipse on sunday at 5pm CST, so if you're there come and check it out! Short Q&A session hosted by @MattiasInSpace I'll also be posting the link here so if you're not going to be there you can still check it out

Daniel Faggella✓@danfaggella

Jaan Tallinn is a billionaire tech modul (Skype, Kazaa), great thinker, and long-time funder of AI safety causes. Today his episode is live on ep2 of The Trajectory. We touch on his new takes on AI policy, and the acceptable level of AGI risk that humanity should accept. Enjoy:

Ruairi Robinson✓@RuairiRobinson

Introducing A THOUSAND SUNS I was invited by @MacgregorWorks to join a group of very talented filmmaker friends to create an anthology of a mind-bending sci-fi shorts that explore visions of humanity’s past, present and future. I directed ICE

Lulie✓@reasonisfun

Re: what did I get from Alexander Technique vs Art of Accomplishment Disclaimer: I started them both at a similar time, so it's not always clear, but here's a tentative list. I see massive changes in both AOA people who come to AT and AT people who come to AOA. Each one is sort of the missing piece of the other. They use each other and there isn't a firm line. That said, here are my best guesses [VIEW = AOA's Connection Course] — AT: general anxiety (overall wellness+) VIEW: specific anxiety (tools to convert anxious social situations into amazing ones) AT: connection with present moment (freedom of action) VIEW: connection with people and own emotions (stop being afraid of or tense around people/feelings) VIEW: converts difficult situations (like being intimidated or nervous or judgmental) into magical ones AT: makes all situations background-easier, adds a bit of magic to everything AT: removes pressure to act/perform VIEW: unlocks ability to act from the heart AT: get to no words in the head via external awareness AOA: interact with voice in the head directly to make peace with it (more sticky IME) AT: open awareness + freedom-to but doesn't explicitly say where to direct freedom VIEW: Wonder is a non-doing curiosity that gives direction AT: space, action, physical tension, ease (doesn't do emotions) VIEW: freedom from emotional tension, tension in relationships, tension with self AOA: boundaries, going into hard situations, saying the scary thing AT: freedom to step into the unknown VIEW: makes all conversations more interesting AT: makes being alive more rich (more childlike IF you combined with emotional fluidity, which AT doesn't cover but VIEW does) AT: less triggerable generally (less jumpy/rushing in) VIEW: what to do when you're already triggered (+get at root of triggers) AT: eye contact easier because it's softer/less triggering VIEW: eye contact easier because of the practice of staying with feelings/intensity AT: great for being yourself VIEW: great for being yourself while in connection with people VIEW: convert fears into aliveness AT: regulate nervous system so that fears don't snowball as much AT: less 'trying', more flow VIEW: less agenda, more open seeking

Kelsey Piper✓@KelseyTuoc

Also while I'm picking fights about education, three is the ideal age to learn to read. Why? Because 3yoslove repetition. They want you to sing the same song a hundred times in a row. They want to read the same book a hundred times in a row. They love phonics drills.

Michael systematizes 9/10 Life Satisfaction✓@Plus3Happiness

there's this talk of Alan Watts', which goes like "Because this is you saying to yourself, 'i won't wake up until i deserve it".. so i invent for myself an elaborate system of delaying my waking up" Plenty on tpot should watch it entirely ⤵️

@levelsio✓@levelsio

I use @Cloudflare for a lot of things: - domain registration - domain renewal - DNS records - image resizing on all my sites - R2 (like S3) cheap image hosting, all images gen'd on Photo AI and Interior AI get hosted there, also I try to move for ex profile photo uploads on Nomad List and Remote OK all to R2, very fast very cheap - instant video streaming for landing page videos with Cloudflare Streaming - auto CSS/JS/static caching on their local CDNs = faster page load - landing page cache of static HTML for fast load (good for SEO) - Nomad List filter queries auto cache (so if you filter fast internet in Asia, if it's cached on Cloudflare it uses that) - CAPTCHA, theirs is named Turnstile and the best, better than Google - DDOS protection (set it to Under Attack) - automated hack protection with their WAF firewall First thing I do when making new startup is add it to Cloudflare If they added VPS and email sending I'd switch that to them too

March

roon✓@tszzl

everyone watch Pantheon

Burny - Effective Curiosity✓@burny_tech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3b-JASoPi0

Shakeel✓@ShakeelHashim

Would be nice for there to be more attention on this great interview than on the terrible op-ed

WIRED@WIRED2024-03-27
Here’s Elie Hassenfeld, your high school EA crush. As effective altruism spirals into self-doubt, the idealist quant is still at it, helping Silicon Valley richies give away hundreds of millions each year. 🔗 https://wired.trib.al/Swx90jd // 📷 Jessica Chou

Serene Desiree, Musician✓@SereneDesiree

Filmed a podcast with @visakanv. This is a masterclass in how to monetize your creativity and never run out of ideas.

Blake Emal✓@heyblake

Been using this color generator for my landing pages. Not sure there's a better tool out there tbh

Nuño Sempere✓@NunoSempere

Here is a post describing some unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2024/03/05/unflattering-aspe…

parm🔬✓@parmita

https://worldmodels.github.io/ (World Models — Can agents learn inside of their own dreams?) this is the most beautiful interactive paper i have seen till now. any better ones?

Harry Taussig 🐘✓@harry_taussig

90% of TPOT takes (including mine) are like "OH MY GOD I stopped focusing on THIS quadrant and starting focusing on THAT quadrant, and it started working better!!!" You need all the quadrants. All the quadrants have diminishing returns. That is all.

Steven Byrnes✓@steve47285

I wrote two blog posts (14,000 words) on social status and related phenomena, including prestige, dominance, pushiness, ask culture vs. guess culture, blame-avoidance, passive-aggressiveness, plausible deniability, and more! Links in thread:

Vishal Maini✓@v_maini

new TED talk just dropped!!! 🔥 in which @divyasiddarth articulates the worldview underlying @collect_intel in 11 minutes and 2 seconds incredible https://www.ted.com/talks/divya_siddarth_how_ai_and_democ…

February

Alexey Guzey✓@alexeyguzey

I interviewed the one and only: @dwarkesh_sp. We mostly talked about people. A bit about events. And even managed to discuss an idea or two at some point. Go watch! link below:

Siméon✓@Simeon_Cps

If there's one guy you should trust on AI predictions it's Daniel Kokotajlo. Why? He's written in Aug. 2021 the best AI detailed prediction out there. It's incredibly prescient, in the pre-ChatGPT era where no one was using LLMs. A part of 2023 in screenshot, link below.

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️@AISafetyMemes2024-02-23
OpenAI researcher: “Probably there will be AGI soon- literally any year now” "If one of our training runs works way better than we expect, we'd have a rogue ASI on our hands Hopefully it would have internalized enough human ethics that things are OK" "Whoever controls ASI will have... godlike powers." "Technologies that seem like magic to us" "Probably whoever controls AGI will be able to use it to get to ASI shortly thereafter -- maybe in another year, give or take a year" AISM note #1: IIRC, Kurzweil still thinks AGI 2029 but no ASI until 2040 which makes zero sense to me - why would AI hang out around human level for 11 years given the exponential we're on? AISM note #2: Kokotaljo is a respected forecaster who thinks deeply about these things

anu✓@anuatluru

“This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity.”

Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali✓@Sheikheddy

Gemini 1.5 is fine. Sora is fine. Magic dot dev is fine. I would liquidate my entire life savings for a working AI safety solution and we have nothing right now. I wish I knew what to do.

sucks✓@powerbottomdad1

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ (The Missing Semester of Your CS Education — Master powerful tools that will make you a more productive computer scientist and programmer.) literally just do this in a weekend or two. well worth your time

bayes✓@bayeslord

▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄ ▀▄▀▄▀▄🄻🄸🄽🄺 🄸🄽 🄱🄸🄾▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄ ▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄ dropping this tomorrow at 7:30am pacific on bayeslord dot s * b s t a c k

Anders Sandberg@anderssandberg

Just finished watching the second season of Pantheon. Wow. Just wow. Worth watching.

Carmen✓@carmenleelau

ok, frieren is actually really good. i couldn't believe my eyes when it was ranked #1 on MAL with the highest score i have ever laid eyes on, the equivalent of being christened by the entire weeb community at once. "it must be overrated" i muttered to myself. no. i was a fool. i'm eating my words now. i'm only 2 ep in and i cried both episodes. it's one of the best anime i've ever seen. it's like if you took studio ghibli and made it more casual, it's dreamlike, poignant, charming to the highest degree. all the characters are unrealistically chill but this is on purpose because it maintains the flow state the show puts you in. it's a heartwarming exploration of human nature, and enjoyable for all ages. please go watch and enjoy it

Robert Wright✓@robertwrighter

I had a great conversation with @robertwiblin, host of the excellent @80000Hours podcast, about Effective Altruism and how it's been portrayed in stories about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board drama, etc. You can watch here or listen on @NonzeroPods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WoyuP68oQ

@melissa✓@melissa

i think a lot about how to get a high agency kid here’s what’s working +

January

anton✓@abacaj

Here's a snippet of using gpt-4 as a "reward" model. Has been working *really* well for me (better than using a numbering system)

Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson✓@algekalipso

Chills https://youtu.be/pybqjwf8w8s?si=LoArrZZmc_BJtui4

gfodor.id✓@gfodor

speaking aloud a secure cryptographic signature composed of token sequences provably not in any training set will become an increasingly common countermeasure against deepfakes *[quoted tweet unavailable — [original](https://twitter.com/AdamSinger/status/1750652190383911145)]*

Dan Shipper 📧✓@danshipper

Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen) is an economist, a prolific writer, and a polymath. He’s also a big user of @ChatGPTapp for learning, reading, travel, and more. In this episode, I deep dive with him on how he uses it in his own life and work—and what that might mean for the future of jobs and the economy. We get into: - How ChatGPT makes him smarter - How he uses it for deep reading and research - How it acts as a “universal translator” when he travels - How he uses ChatGPT and @Perplexity_AI together - How “charisma” and “a hyped up executive function” may be the most economically rewarded skills over the next 10 years - His thoughts on the allocation economy, and the future of work with AI-assistance - Pitting Tyler against a ChatGPT clone of his personality to see if they answer questions in the same way This is a must-watch for anyone who cares about reading, learning, and the intersection of economics and technology. Watch below. ------ Timestamps Intro: 00:57 His predictions on AI’s immediate and long-term effects: 05:57 How AI can be leveraged to manage people: 11:31 Using ChatGPT as a universal translator during travel: 17:19 Why he worries less about hallucinations: 21:00 Using specific prompts to do deep research with ChatGPT: 22:00 Why he prefers using Playground over ChatGPT: 25:54 ChatGPT goes head-to-head with Perplexity AI: 41:09 Using ChatGPT in university classrooms: 49:58 The Tyler Test: 57:59

New episode with @tylercowen. We talk about Tyler's implicit theology, literature in translation, Jonathan Swift, Peter Thiel, The Sopranos, NGDP targeting and a whole lot more. Links below --

Arc✓@arctanno

cinephiles, what are some must watch films that aren't super popular and obvious

Cabin@cabindotcity

"We have to slouch towards utopia like everyone else" @Prigoose shares how she and @__drewface have built Fractal, a coliving campus in Brooklyn of 36 residents that anchors a broader community of hundreds. Priya provides the details of their playbook with passion and purpose. We also get a preview of future iterations of Fractal, including a university and a multigenerational neighborhood. She is a great guest to kickoff the new year and the return of Campfire: A City Building Podcast. Listen to the full episode now on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/17rMg7X6JafICSrxkFaCAH?s… Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/35-fractal-scaling-…

2023

December

Jason Scott✓@JxScott

I just did one of these meditations from @algekalipso for the first time and quite effortlessly reached the most ecstatic non-psychedelic meditative state of my life. I was pretty confused at first, like I’d walked into a class exercise halfway through and missed the initial instructions. But once I got a hang of the premise I was pretty blown away. By the end I felt like I was on ~60mg of MDMA and my entire phenomenal space was saturated with pleasure. Feeling pretty inspired by how simple & easy that was. Powerful example of what William James called the ideosensory effect when he was trying to explain hypnosis—strong attention on an idea cascading into its sensory manifestation. Specifically directed at pleasure here. Awesome ❤️ https://youtu.be/__9PZ7M-_Mg?si=ljVIUFkyZPtdZ7Ud

Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson✓@algekalipso

I'm convinced Roger will be considered as one of the great Dharma teachers of our time, perhaps 30-40 years from now. Book a session with him so you can say you talked to him "before he was widely known" 😆😋

Sasha Putilin (curious irrationalist)@42irrationalist2023-12-28
I had a session with @RogerThisdell this week and it was really useful: the right balance of clarifying explicit models, paying attention to the experience and actual in-the-moment phenomenology. He also has a welcoming and casual emotional vibe. Definitely recommend!