If you want to know who survives AI, look at what happened to Hollywood in the 1970s. Movie Studios used to enforce tight “shooting ratios”; usually 5:1, maybe 10:1 TOPS. As in, for every 5 feet of film shot, at least 1 foot had to end up in the final cut (35mm was expensive!) In the 70s, there was a rapid elimination of production constraints. Improvements in film cost and camera portability made the old studio rules…obsolete. Why not take multiple angles, roll simultaneously? Set could have 3, 5, even 10 cameras rolling at once. Shooting ratios *exploded*, 50:1, even 100:1 (Apocalypse Now)! Of course, it also *radically* changed the workflow. Editing use to be the quiet, thankless job in the studio years (30s-50s). Suddenly, they became the most important people on the totem pole! How do you find the masterpiece hiding in the (literal miles) of film? A ton of the footage was…trash, of course. But as each individual camera because *less* important, it opened up directors to take on significantly higher risks. Now, don’t get me wrong. Insane shooting ratios were still *kinda* a niche in the 70s. More traditional directors stuck with only slightly inflated shooting ratios (15:1, 30:1 common); it was the more experimental pioneers (Coppola, Scorsese, etc) that hit the big 100:1 numbers. The huge ratios were still crazy. Until they weren’t. You can probably guess what happened in the early 2000s. Digital cameras reduced the cost of individual footage to a complete non-constraint. Effectively free, don’t even cut on set, just keep the camera rolling. Suddenly…*EVERYONE* starts shooting 100:1. Entire new forms of content get created, like Reality TV, where ratios can hit 500:1! Massive shift of human labor to the editing side. I’d say, we’re currently in the “1970s Hollywood” of AI. It can be easy (and cheap!) to produce things (code, tools, etc), but YOU have to be the ruthless editor. It’s the “miles of film” problem all over again. Hollywood solved it by throwing massively more resources on the editing side, and editing became a “constantly talking with the director about vision/direction” job, instead of a “hide in the back office and do your work” job. It’s a hunch, but I’d bet that filmmakers closer to the experimental 1970s “ratio explosion” directors handled the later 2000s digital shift *much* better, because the underlying principles were the same. They’d certainly be ahead of the curve predicting it, and (hopefully) were less surprised when the digital ratios did hit. I’m not saying AI is exactly the same problem. But it’s a good idea to look at parallels in history where rapid elimination of constraints changed an industry, and how that industry handled it 5, 10, even 50 years later! When something starts to get cheap…helps to imagine what would happen when it’s free!

Postman Pat in Japanese. Very relaxing...

We are making Markdown files work natively across Google Drive and Docs. You can now preview .md files in Drive, open them in Docs, edit them, comment on them, and collaborate without converting the file into a Google Doc!

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

Humans beings weren't meant to endure this much two factor authentication.

Latest #openaddresses from local government: Torridge District Council, in the South West of England, has released its Council Tax address list as open data owenboswarva.com/blog/post-a… (no download yet) #FOI #UKhousing #proptech #localgov #opendata

Claude Code just shipped mods... I made one that connects you to a multiplayer Doom server while Claude is busy. Every other player in the match is a person waiting for their Claude to finish.

The rationalists, who attended The Curve, did not resolve AI’s biggest questions. The EAs, carrying on the work, failed similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to attend The Curve.

arXiv just announced a limit of two papers per submitter per calendar month. But what it needs to do is economize on moderation—not on scholarship. As a market-design scholar and arXiv contributor of almost 20 years, I think this policy confuses the two. 🧵

Honored to announce my first LessWrong post. It's a weird one, and it may be jarring initially, but I truly believe it is worth a dedicated close-read. It is written in the form of an LLM CoT, but is entirely authored by me. Link: lesswrong.com/posts/vzKWsEsk…

This @TheEconomist cover story on effective altruism was interesting and IMO way more accurate (including in its critiques) than most other reporting you will read on EA these days. A couple quibbles: -I think calling EA the “the century’s big idea” is, uh, premature to say the least. But I do appreciate the acknowledgement and curiosity about how EA was so early to pandemic risks and the promise and perils of AI. -They imply that EA started off with “charitable roots” but then got weird over time, whereas I think EA has always made space for pretty weird ideas (e.g., here’s @DylanMatt in 2014: vox.com/2014/4/23/5643418/th…). And EA still puts far more money and attention than almost any other community into the kind of evidence-backed global health giving the Economist praises. -Some of the purported wild EA views they critique are just standard topics of academic philosophy debate (e.g., cambridge.org/core/journals/…). -They attribute the EA interest in AI safety to longtermism, but I think it’s been clear for years that AI safety concerns are justifiable based on potential impacts this decade, not to mention this century (x.com/albrgr/status/15595748…). But I think they correctly gesture towards the IMO best critique of EA ideas, which is their totalizingness. My former colleague Holden wrote a great post about this in 2022: forum.effectivealtruism.org/… I wrote a long thread grappling with this critique a few years ago (x.com/albrgr/status/15327261…). I think part of what makes EA distinctive as a community relative to the underlying academic moral philosophy is the orientation around pragmatism - Giving What We Can took off decades after Singer had articulated the underlying case because “give until the marginal giving would entail as much suffering for you as benefit for the other person” was a much worse pitch than “give 10%.” But the community doesn’t always reflect that healthy moderation, and trying to grapple with the vertiginous stakes of increasingly near-term risks from AI really can run a risk of crowding out other sources of value. At CG, our response to this has been worldview diversification (coefficientgiving.org/resear…), spreading our giving across very different views of what matters, rather than going all-in on one. Worldview diversification leaves plenty of hard questions (how do you allocate the pie across very different types of moral good?) but helps cut off some of the ways maximizing can be perilous. It’s one reason global health and wellbeing – which @TheEconomist didn’t give the space it deserved – has gotten most of our funding since 2014.

Attention arXiv authors. Because of the exponential increase in submissions, arXiv is limiting the number of papers that a person can submit each month to two. 1/

Web crawlers /[•]\ #js x #css

Beautiful example of a desire line in the wild.

Mechanical Turk is permanently closing, today. AI is just way better and cheaper. Tick, Tock!

I CALLED IT. It's happening y'all. The singapore gov has launched a pilot programme for a gov-run dating service. Looks like the pilot is currently restricted to just government workers for now.

huh!!!

Why isn’t “Upping my p(doom)” on Spotify 😒

If I set my location to “write” then I assume Claude can teleport me at will: