fasterik

3 ms·

1.
by fasterik 6d ago
I wouldn't say that information is an upper bound on knowledge because we don't measure knowledge in bits. The number of possible sequences of N bits is 2^N and knowledge involves selecting the sequences that are useful in some wa
2.
by fasterik 6d ago
I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT. There's an undeniabl
3.
by fasterik 6d ago
Note I used the word knowledge, not information. A random string can also contain 1 gigabyte of information. Imagine an alien that matches your abilities across every domain, but has a 10 billion year training period, something many orders
4.
by fasterik 6d ago
I think you're underestimating how much knowledge about the world is encoded in human DNA, especially in the structure of the human brain at birth. It also depends how we count the "operations" used to train a human adult, ev
5.
by fasterik 6d ago
If we're including the training process and not just the final product, why shouldn't we include the billions of years of natural selection encoded in DNA sequences?
6.
by fasterik 6d ago
Intelligence is a word we invent to describe things we see in nature. We don't "discover" intelligence like it's some natural resource. To say we know nothing about it is also a bit strange. Cognitive science has been st
7.
by fasterik 6d ago
Are they denying intelligence, or are they redefining it in such a way that only humans can be intelligent? Can you come up with a definition of intelligence that would apply to crows and ant colonies, which are obviously intelligent to som
8.
by fasterik 7d ago
It's revealing that the author thinks that a podcast is the ideal venue to reason through complex technical issues. The "like" phenomenon is less of a verbal fluency issue and more of a cultural one. You can listen to someone
9.
by fasterik 7d ago
"Burning academia to the ground" is a terrible idea. We need to fix funding and incentives. If funding and research all happen in industry, where are the incentives to do basic research? Your analysis completely ignores the physic
10.
by fasterik 7d ago
Academics themselves rarely frame their research in sensational terms. This happens in press releases and media coverage, which they have little control over. You can see this by comparing the title of the press release to the quotes by the
11.
A Hurricane of Pseudoscience(fasterik.substack.com)
3 points by fasterik 7d ago|0 comments
12.
by fasterik 13d ago
That's simply not true. I've spent hundreds of hours listening to his AMAs and he's remarkably good at taking questions that might be confused or poorly worded and respectfully answering the best interpretation of what the pe
13.
by fasterik 13d ago
It's the AI doomers who have chosen to frame the argument in terms of extinction. Even if they were only claiming that 1% of the world population will be killed in the next 10 years, it would still be an extraordinary claim that hasn&#
14.
by fasterik 13d ago
Of course it would be unacceptable. Honestly, this thread feels like talking to people who have the reading comprehension of a 5th grader.
15.
by fasterik 13d ago
None of those are arguments giving a probability of human extinction before 2036 or any other time. AI Futures has said that some members of their team believe that it's 10-30% at some unspecified point in the future, but there is no j
16.
by fasterik 13d ago
Mindscape is roughly in the top 20 science podcasts (also #3 in physics) and his books regularly make the NYT bestseller list. So he's definitely popular, but perhaps still underrated relative to the quality of his content. His approac
17.
by fasterik 13d ago
None of that has anything to do with the article, and if you thought the message was "this is overhyped bullshit" then you should go back and read it again. As I already pointed out, he isn't saying anything about the probabl
18.
by fasterik 13d ago
Of course. Even in an all-out nuclear war, the probability of human extinction is close to zero.
19.
by fasterik 13d ago
Those books are irresponsible too, but the authors aren't experts on what they're writing about. This 10% claim comes from employees at Anthropic. That's the whole point of the article: expert opinion carries weight, fear is
20.
by fasterik 13d ago
This is an excellent piece. Note that he is not saying that AI doesn't pose a risk. He's saying that it's irresponsible to make sensational, maximalist claims without strong evidence. If someone says that there's a 10%
21.
by fasterik 14d ago
I like Gaben's take on going public. This is a clip from a longer talk he gave which I think is really insightful into many aspects of the economics of software and company culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvS-I
22.
by fasterik 14d ago
You're catastrophizing and misreading the original comment in an uncharitable way.
23.
by fasterik 14d ago
The American Revolution was very much a discussion about power. Of course, it wasn't just a discussion (we had to fight a war to defend the new form of government), but it was driven by the same concerns about the distribution of pow
24.
by fasterik 14d ago
I don't agree that the argument implies nationalization. Regulation would work if it slowed everyone down at the same rate, enough to mitigate the risks. The problem is that you need regulators who know what they're doing and stro
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by fasterik 15d ago
The article is about muscle hypertrophy, not health outcomes. >if you’ve only got an hour a day or whatever for a workout you’re better off spending it all on resistance training. The health benefits of resistance training plateau arou
26.
by fasterik 15d ago
I agree with your analogy, but I don't understand the last part. If I'm working on a hobby project, say a video game, the "tomatoes" I get are the experiences of writing code, playing a level I designed, and sharing it w
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by fasterik 15d ago
I think the rules technically exclude the arXiv as a qualifying outlet. Without limiting any other provision in this Section, a publication lacking any of the following characteristics will be deemed not to be a Qualifying Outlet: i. an ed
28.
by fasterik 15d ago
OpenAI said that at public API prices, the agents they ran would have cost $15M. I don't know what their internal pricing is, but it almost certainly cost more than $1M.
29.
by fasterik 15d ago
I don't think the analogy works because for the past few years Tao has been one of the most vocal advocates of AI in mathematics and has used it extensively in his own research. You can find several of his talks about this on YouTube.
30.
by fasterik 15d ago
It's good to start a conversation, and the number of Fields Medalists behind this certainly lends a lot of weight to it. But I'm not seeing a strong argument for misaligned incentives beyond the specific plagiarism allegations. Th

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