I've just received a council tax bill for the house my Son lived in at the time of his death. I told the council that he'd died in May of last year. They've sent a bill to me 17 months later. I've suggested they give him a visit.

RT @Brahmonaut: The best entry on Petrov is in encyclopedia Brittanica which says, “He is survived by his two children, two grandchildren a…

Three things every man asks himself while going through TSA: 1) Is my water bottle empty? 2) Did I leave a gun in my bag? 3) Why is there a member of Boko Haram telling me to remove my belt in the interest of national security?

This man has almost singlehandedly brought El Salvador forward by at least a century, and he did it without LARPing as a Western liberal. He’s doing almost everything we wish to see transpire in the West, and he started from a substantially worse position than any Western nation. The aesthetics, the national mythos, the nod to history and tradition, the beautiful architecture, the brutalizing of criminals, and the orientation of a nation and people back towards that which rests above and beyond man. All of it is what the present hour calls for.

Someone asked if I was ready for the fall and it took me a second to realize they meant autumn and not the total collapse of society.

Zbieram szczękę z podłogi, widywałem w BWA kompozycje strukturalne Salaburskiego, ale to co robi ta dziewczyna to jest kosmos. Tanya Gomelskaya

過ぎ去る日々をパステルで彩る

Here’s a video about capturing a brand new supernova and thousands of galaxies in one shot. The comparison to the last time I captured this area is crazy 😵‍💫 Prints available linked in my bio for just two more days.

This is a great example of how EA fails. Even working within the universalist utilitarian premise: the author calculates that there are 75 hours (270,000 seconds) of insect death per second of human life. But human brains are 1 million to 20 million times larger than insect brains. How does suffering potential/intensity scale with brain size? We have no idea! It could be linear, log, exponential, or something else entirely. It could be based on specific neural structures, it could be about brain mass relative to body mass. We just have absolutely no clue. I imagine the response would be “fine I’ll just vibe a probability distribution over all of these” but that’s just as unknown as the questions themselves, and when numbers are this big, small parameter tweaks will cause huge swings in the final result. Furthermore, what does “matter” mean in this context? We don’t really have a way to meaningfully address insect suffering. Of course there are also far more foundational critiques: morality as a social technology rather than a cosmic fact, the greater potential of humans to spread life throughout the universe, etc etc. Tldr this is both fake and useless. Fake in that, despite some superficial math, it’s really just laundered vibes, and useless in that we couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I think the psychology that drives this is a glee in being counterintuitive. If his own calculation had instead showed that humans housed more utils, I think he would have felt disappointed and bored, and probably not published it. A reflexive preference for the unintuitive is no more rigorous than intuition, and based on an evolutionary argument is probably wrong *more* often, or at least less fit. This “glee in being counterintuitive” is a ubiquitous pathology among EAs. It makes them feel smart, feel like high decouplers. They allocate esteem based on how many weird beliefs/practices someone will espouse, since that indicates rational elevation above our “base” cognitive nature.

"why dont they make movies like this anymore" because akira kurosawa just killed that extra. hes dead. Akira Kurosawa killed over 12,000 people in his career as director. murder was outlawed in japan only in 1981

OpenAI was hacked via the exact library mentioned in the xkcd comic hahahaha The prophecy is fulfilled

Speaking on behalf of MIRI TGT (not necessarily MIRI overall) We share many of the same concerns, which is why we structured our model agreement (below) the way we did. It invites broad participation, but also features mechanisms to address states which insist on operating outside of the agreement, while prioritizing the national security requirements of the US and China. So to address question 5 upfront, “should [this] be a global agreement?”: Yes! We think the US and China would be a sufficient seed to get broad participation via their network of allies, superpower status, and AI dominance. Now going point by point: “1. Assuming we achieve the desired policy goal through a bilateral US/China agreement, what would be the specific metric or objective we would say needs to be satisfied in advance? Who decides whether we have satisfied them? What if one party believes we have satisfied them but the other does not?” There are two interpretations of this question. Interpretation (1): what metric is used to determine whether the desired policy goal is being achieved? Interpretation (2): what metric is used to determine when a halt is to terminate? I’ve tried to address both below: The policy goal is to forestall the development of superintelligence long enough for other, better solutions to be realized. It is hard to say what these solutions will be in advance, as humanity is nowhere near being able to align a superintelligence. The field doesn’t have a clear path to solving that technical problem. Furthermore, solving alignment isn’t sufficient on its own, and the other thorny problems (such as concentration of power) require similar focused effort which we aren’t seeing on current timelines. The key metric we use to know if that goal is accomplished is the confidence within the leadership of the US and China that no one is advancing the frontier of AI general intelligence capabilities anywhere. This confidence is reflected by the continued willingness of these actors to participate in the agreement, and springs from a combination of restrictions/controls, transparency, verification, and intelligence gathering. It would be great if we can attain this confidence without much constraint on the beneficial uses of AI we already see today, and our agreement aims to preserve these! The agreement is not accomplishing its aims if only one of these key parties has such confidence. We have tried to accommodate the requirements we think that the USG and CCP would have, but also expect that many details would need to be ironed out through an actual negotiation and implementation effort. “2. If the goal is achieved through a bilateral US/China agreement, would we need capital controls to ensure that U.S. investors cannot fund semiconductor fabs, data centers, or AI research labs in countries other than the U.S. and China?” Yes, just like how the U.S. makes it hard for you to fund terrorists or give money to the North Korean military. “3. Would we need to revoke the passports of U.S.-based AI researchers and semiconductor engineers to prevent them leaving America to join AI-related ventures elsewhere? How else would the U.S. and China keep researchers within their borders?” There will be no shortage of technical work for talented researchers under our proposed agreement, and the best approach is for states to modify their incentives (i.e. pay them well) to act in our collective interest, in the style of efforts like the International Science and Technology Center. In 1994, the ISTC kept former Soviet nuclear researchers employed in peaceful work so that they wouldn’t sell their expertise to proliferators. We anticipate that some researchers will emigrate to non-signatories and pursue covert work, in spite of any efforts. The agreement aims to provide the US and China with sufficient confidence that these efforts will fail through a combination of compute denial, detection, and enforcement. The framing of this question seems to imply that some agreements may only aim to address AI development within the US and China, and that such development must not leave those jurisdictions. We agree that is not viable. We cover this in Article XII. “4. How should we grapple with the fact that (2) and (3) are common features of autocratic regimes? “ It doesn’t look like it takes qualitatively different “autocracy” than was required to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Limiting the development and deployment of extraordinarily dangerous technology is a feature of our American system of government which prioritizes the defense of individual life, freedom, and property. Preventing you from refining uranium in your basement and assembling a nuke in your garage is an impingement upon your freedom, but that doesn’t mean society should let you do it, and it doesn’t mean the government needs to become an autocracy to prevent it. So too with superintelligence. We charge our military and Intelligence Community with ensuring the safety and freedom of Americans against all threats. Through careful institutional design and adherence to our constitution we can avoid abuse of the power granted by our agreement. As an aside, we believe that the potential for abuse of our agreement is less than the potential for abuse of AI systems developed and employed by the government without constraint, or the potential for abuse in arrangements where the government is allowed to gatekeep access to powerful AI. Read More: An International Agreement to Prevent the Premature Creation of Artificial Superintelligence techgov.intelligence.org/res…

OK, most responses have been great, but

There was a time when you could see the core structure of the twin towers.... In the early 1970s, New Yorkers witnessed a surreal sight: the skeletal cores of the World Trade Center towers piercing the skyline before their outer walls were completed. The image shows the “core structure” — the massive steel spine that housed elevators, stairwells, and utilities — bathed in the glow of a setting sun. Each tower’s core was a fortress of 47 steel columns, built to bear much of the building’s vertical load. Around it, a perimeter of 59 steel columns on each face created the towers’ distinctive facade. For a brief window during construction, the cores rose high above the city, exposed like the ribs of a colossal machine. Within just a few months, those skeletal frames would vanish behind aluminum cladding and glass, transforming into the iconic Twin Towers. But for those who saw them in this unfinished state, it was a rare glimpse of the engineering heart of what would become two of the most recognizable buildings in the world. #archaeohistories

Spent last night watching the docuseries “9/11: One Day in America,” and I averaged about one cry per ten minutes. I had to do something with my hands, so I drew this based on a frame of the footage. 💙

the art installation "My best gun-branches" by Dutch artist Maarten Brinkman.

The way X removes all posts from someone when they violate the rules is an atrocity: not for them, but for the world. Thousands of posts become inaccessible to billions of people. Chunks of history burned. Imagine all of Voltaire's writings erased each time he was jailed.

Russian officials have biologically evolved to be harder to push out of windows.