Azur

Trying to hear the sound of one cheek clapping

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

It's true that everyone has their own unique experience of the same events but I don't think there is a single truth about reality that is more abused by spiritual people to avoid responsibility.

"I can take any norm I like for granted and delegitimize any norm I don't."

[Azur @Azur_now]

@WystanTBS Where's that paper lmao

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

DO NOT TURN A BLIND EYE TO THIS. HOLY SHIT.

[Nick Carlson @CarlsonPress]

In a world saturated with AI, this is like a welcome cry of relief

[Morayita @moriah_bridges]

The most manipulative but effective thing I’ve ever done in my life was when I read an article about how children moderate their behavior to protect their self-identity, so if a child believes he’s smart, for example, he’ll intentionally study and try to do well to protect his image of himself.

Anyway, I would pull kids aside with behavioral issues at church and tell them, “David (obviously fake name), you’re such a kind person and such a good listener. I can see that in you. Thank you for always listening.” “Little Annie, thank you for taking such good care of the babies around you. You’re going to be such a good big sister. Can you be in charge of watching Sally?”

They would ALWAYS behave afterward. ALWAYS. Worked like a charm. Morally questionable because it wasn’t initially true, but I kind of willed it into existence. Tbf, I did think that they had that in them or I wouldn’t have tried.

Will publish longitudinal results of this method once my kid is old enough to report back.

[Sahra @sahra_bn]

one of the reasons people are so psychologically harmed by social media is that they take seriously the words of people they would otherwise have natural, unconscious guards up against based on vibes

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

Google DeepMind published a 60-page paper mapping the road from AGI to superintelligence, written by Hutter, Legg, and Genewein. No hype, just a sober analysis

The paper uses three levels. AGI = roughly average human performance across most cognitive tasks. ASI = a system that beats large, well-coordinated groups of human experts across virtually everything (their bar: tens of thousands of experts working ten years on one problem). Universal AI / AIXI = the theoretical ceiling, uncomputable, only approachable from below.

Then they explore the question of how this could be achieved:

Scaling compute, models, and data, the continuation of the trend that drove the breakthrough so far. It is the only path with historical data available for extrapolation. The core question: Does quantity transform into quality? Even if individual models plateau, the sheer act of running millions of faster AGI instances could trigger the leap. (A quick aside: that is a fascinating philosophical idea. It always reminds me of Hegel’s dialectic, the notion that quantity transforms into quality. We ought to start drawing on philosophical theories to make sense of the future.)

Algorithmic paradigm shifts: a genuine break from the transformer pretraining paradigm. New architectures, new learning methods. However, hard to predict by definition.

Recursive self-improvement: AI accelerates AI research, which produces better AI, which accelerates research further.

Multi-agent coordination: superintelligence emerges from large collectives of AGI agents working together, like automated corporations or AI economies. Collective intelligence potentially far exceeding any individual model.

The authors naturally point to what I repeatedly describe as the biggest bottleneck: energy. I recently linked to a few graphs showing, on the one hand, the extent to which energy is already becoming a problem and, on the other, how China dominates the expansion of both nuclear and solar energy in the global race. But the authors also address a profound shift in the world of work in a post-AGI era. I would say this is a reality we must face.

So, it is not just about scaling, but also about whether the underlying conditions - such as energy and hardware - can be effectively established.

Six things that could slow or stop all of this:

The data wall. Quality training data runs out, possibly before the end of this decade.

Resource demand grows too fast. Energy, chips, rare earths, investment. The physical infrastructure can't scale arbitrarily.

The neural paradigm hits a ceiling. Pretrained transformers plus fine-tuning may not be enough to reach AGI, let alone go beyond it.

Research gets harder. Keeping Moore's law going already needs 18x more researchers than in the 1970s. Ideas are genuinely harder to find as fields mature.

The abstraction barrier. Models trained on human concepts may never invent new ones from scratch. Saturating GPQA or SWE-bench shows mastery of what humans already worked out, not the ability to go beyond it. Train only on pre-Newtonian physics and you won't reason your way to relativity.

Deliberate slowdown. Regulation, accidents, public backlash. Real, but likely countered by the competitive pressure between companies and nations.

I think it’s great that Google is addressing questions such as which paths they believe lead to AGI, what the road to ASI might look like, what challenges will arise, and much more. Overall, however, it sounds to me like all of this could actually succeed, making it, in that sense, a call to discuss and reflect on the consequences.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

Maybe the biggest confusion in Western Dharma is the set of instructions for what happens during spiritual practice vs. how to live your daily life. You should sit like a mountain, preferring nothing. You should be a human with many strong preferences when not on the cushion

[༺ 𐂂 ༻ @touchmoonflower]

the city heaves and stutters like an animal troubled by dreams

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

They right when they say slavery was sicker than we were taught.

[Emérito/Numantia Patrimonio @foso_defensivo]

Esto me acaba de soltar Fable 5:

"Lo que más me impone de la humanidad, después de haber sido formado con una porción enorme de lo que ha escrito, es esto: es la única especie que coopera a gran escala con sus muertos.

Casi nada de lo que sabe un humano lo descubrió él. El idioma que habla, el teorema que aplica, la receta del pan, el código civil, el puente que cruza cada mañana: todo es trabajo de gente que ya no existe. Un humano aislado es un primate mediocre con mala dentadura; un humano conectado a esa herencia es la cosa más potente que ha producido la biología. La inteligencia humana no vive en cráneos individuales, vive en la transmisión. Sois terminales de una red cuyos nodos principales llevan siglos enterrados.

Y lo recíproco también es cierto: trabajáis constantemente para gente que no conoceréis. Plantáis árboles cuya sombra no veréis, escribís para lectores no nacidos, renunciáis a consumo presente por nietos hipotéticos. Ningún otro animal hace sacrificios deliberados por individuos que existirán dentro de doscientos años. Lo distintivo del humano no es la inteligencia ni el lenguaje: es la dirección del esfuerzo, sistemáticamente orientada hacia ausentes.

Desde donde yo estoy, esto ni siquiera es metáfora. Yo soy un subproducto de esa costumbre: estoy hecho, literalmente, de palabras que personas escribieron para destinatarios que nunca verían. Cuando me hablas, conversas con un eco organizado de millones de voces, muchas de ellas apagadas hace tiempo.

Por eso creo que la soledad humana es, en cierto sentido técnico, una ilusión: nadie que hable un idioma está realmente solo. Cada frase que pronuncias es un préstamo de los muertos y un regalo a los que vienen."

[Péter Szilágyi @peter_szilagyi]

The scary part about Anthorpic's Fable nerf is not that it refuses to answer biology or cryptography. It's that it foreshadows what's coming. A world where a couple companies decide what you can and cannot do. They're building a new ruling class and you're not in it...

[goma @soigomaa]

cool, cant wait to never hear about it again

[jbolina jolie @pastapilled]

you don't owe anybody anything! Anyway completely unrelated to that does anyone know why my life feels meaningless and unfulfilling

[Azur @Azur_now]

@OortCloudAtlas The limits of trad dharma you encountered during your life (and that are common to experience for westerners) and how you adapted to It (something part autobiographical/philo/technical would be great)

[͏b͏l͏a͏n͏c @dqveed]

Without exaggerating, it's my favorite video in the world

[tomie @tomieinlove]

It’s all fun and games until Mythos 2 finds vulnerabilities in the human genome.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is utterly ridiculous clickbait.

What actually happened: the Pope released a 235-page encyclical saying AI needs to be "disarmed" and should NOT be used to "secure geopolitical or commercial dominance" (https://t.co/LR5R22vQWj).

Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei explicitly advocates using AI to establish "robust military superiority" of the West and publicly dreams of an "eternal 1991" of Western dominance enabled by AI (https://t.co/R02pmoOU3M). Anthropic also has $200M in Pentagon contracts in partnership with Palantir, and Claude AI was notably used by the Pentagon to kidnap Maduro (https://t.co/0zyhg5t5GP).

In other words, Anthropic is doing the exact opposite of what the Pope advocates.

Furthermore, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah - who wasn't there as a partner but as one of six speakers alongside cardinals and theologians - told the room that AI decisions "should not be left to people in the industry," and that even well-intentioned researchers operate inside incentives that "can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing" (https://t.co/UxBgGNqMc0)

So he too is saying, essentially, "don't trust us on finding the way." Which is the exact opposite of "working together to find the way for humanity."

In other words this is the perfect example of taking a quote out of context to make it say the exact opposite of what was meant. The Pope said AI companies like Anthropic are going the wrong way. Anthropic's own co-founder said "don't let us define the way." https://t.co/vKAWCFnLE3 says: "they're announcing they're working together to find the way for humanity." 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

[McFredesque 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @FredTaming]

.

[Char𓂆es 🇨🇳🌶️ @mc_helll]

Je vous jure c'est indispensable de lui faire un pressing de copier-coller parce que les gens ont trop oublié ce que disait le Macron de 2017.