clanker-orchestrstor.md

You are an expert...don't make mistakes.

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

None of this is real. You're not real. I'm not real. You mean to tell me we're all just meat ghouls riding a rock and ripping cigs?

tiggy calls bullshit

[Eric Sammons @EricRSammons]

Amazing AI-generated image of Jesus Christ based on the (authentic) Shroud of Turin.

It’s a good reminder of the fact that God became a particular man at a particular moment in history. This is no myth.

We worship the God who became one of us!

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

This is why age verification will never work, the net is too porous to be controlled

Inevitably, The Kids will find a way around

[This American Life @ThisAmerLife]

Some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify. They made no sense to the staff reading them – until someone from a younger generation cracked the code.

Hear the story: https://t.co/0gLhP4L8rL

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@paulg Our brains are just a bunch of electrons bouncing around in a seemingly random fashion

No diff for LLMs

Humans are best when we collaborate

No diff for LLMs

Humans rely on energy inputs from the world around us

No diff for LLMs

[Karen, Esq. @enemybitchy]

I was so hyped up during the Afroman trial I set a six month reminder so I wouldn’t forget that Randy Walters is a son of a bitch

[Patrick De Haan @GasBuddyGuy]

while the U.S. had 155 refineries at the turn of the century, we now have 24 fewer. however, total refining capacity has grown 1.8 million barrels per day since then. as such, refinery outages have become more problematic when one goes down now, with larger average size.

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@Wild_Randomness

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@ORDems

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@gamesblazer06 He's been saying that for 6 months...there is no exit, we are stuck on this ride for a while

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@GasBuddyGuy thanks for the reply!

i'm seeing an increasing number of "out" of diesel posts on my TL, can you help give me context if this is a growing concern (prolonged diesel shortage) or a temporary situation while Joliet recovers?

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@NilesGApol demand destruction is one way to lower prices...

[WIRED @WIRED]

A hacker collective pulled down a Flock camera and dumped its data. The files included thousands of videos and logs showing that the device captured 1.6 million images of 50,000 vehicles in 21 days. https://t.co/EnAqpypNnk

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@DrewSav I'd also assume by a 4th term you'd have an increasing number of voters who didn't vote for him term 1 or 2, so more willing to vote for a fresh face

Same group (young-ish) is likely also sympathetic to the increasing sentiment of "stop voting for senior citizens"

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@pat_hedger And their staff is likely using it so that they don't have teach grandma and grandpa the new tech

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

HE IS RISEN

[Igor Bobic @igorbobic]

“I’m glad to see you, time to get back to work,” McConnell tells reporters

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@ArmandDoma It's an emergent intelligence rather than sentience

Similar to a colony of ants' ability to all survive (emergent intelligence) vs a single ant having the capacity of an inner point of view/self-awarness (sentience)

[rat king 🐀 @MikeIsaac]

Jensen went to the goldman tech conference this week and basically called dario a huckster. maybe sam and elon too.

i think there's no clean entity here. literally everyone involved is conflicted/has incentives to do what they're doing. have to just watch behavior i guess

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

"oh lord, please bless our team with big W today and if they other guys are praying just ignore them thanks amen"

[Blake Niemann @Blakes_Take2]

ASU QB Cutter Boley praying pregame at Kyle Field 🙏

@FOX10Phoenix

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@TheStalwart Joe Bloomberg

[clanker-orchestrstor.md @DukeOfEtiquette]

@Wild_Randomness 9/11 will save us?