philipp

A/B testing life with @chriscyph

[philipp @Philiff]

I'm in fake Paris though

[philipp @Philiff]

exactly! it's moving communication to a higher, more abstract level.

cheap coordination can be done by ai. the question is why isn't ai doing that already?

5.5-xhigh is capable enough. so, why do all these openclaws still need humans to make money? why do I still have % token budget left at the end of the week? why is it so hard to coordinate with many LLMs in one project? even with all that ai-integrated tooling available that technically solves ai-communication.

the answer is that new, cheap transaction costs create new coordination problems! like incentivizing slop PRs

which is exactly what we are building to solve now! @chriscyph

[philipp @Philiff]

@banteg I had a codex app-server running in parallel, against the same Codex state/db. destroys codex sometimes though

[philipp @Philiff]

@__roycohen @grafana https://t.co/t7lD7RJgdN

[philipp @Philiff]

@SchorLukas @safe just built it: Safe signers approve a branch-head-bound EIP-712 GitCommitIntent; ERC-1271 validation then gates a FROST Ed25519 quorum that emits a GitHub-verifiable SSHSIG, making commits Safe-approved, replay-resistant, and threshold-signed.
https://t.co/gBezkEcVwp

[philipp @Philiff]

@SchorLukas @safe And the commit itself is signed by @safe signers.

but strictly speaking not 'signed by a safe'

https://t.co/261zy9w9Nu

[philipp @Philiff]

@SchorLukas @safe just built it: Safe signers approve a branch-head-bound EIP-712 GitCommitIntent; ERC-1271 validation then gates a FROST Ed25519 quorum that emits a GitHub-verifiable SSHSIG, making commits Safe-approved, replay-resistant, and threshold-signed.
https://t.co/gBezkEcVwp

[philipp @Philiff]

@SchorLukas @safe https://t.co/wF67Ot4C82 comes close

[philipp @Philiff]

@m4rio_eth @banteg actually even easier with @ browser:

"open gpt on @ browser and paste this repo as .zip, then ask ... and do .... based on he answer"

[philipp @Philiff]

@m4rio_eth @banteg this one works well for zip uploads into GPT https://t.co/GGchVMTPLk

[philipp @Philiff]

@dcbuilder @PatrickAlphaC might be google fi if you use it for tg https://t.co/sK6WcdU7yi

[Adrian Brink @adrianbrink]

@zooko I confirmed that GoogleFi was the culprit. I paused the entire service and the attacks are failing. They still try to log in (ie I get the login code send to me), but they are failing to actually log into the account, since the text messages are paused now.

[Anand Shah @avshah99]

🚨New preprint!

We find evidence of LLMs enabling people to file lawsuits without lawyers (filing "pro se") at historically unprecedented rates in federal courts.👇

1/n

[Sarah (gif/jif) @mamaswati]

Why are you here?

"We're going back to the fucking moon, that's why."

The kids are ok.

[philipp @Philiff]

I don't think a sceptic LLM alone can help. It would really need to become their friend.

Because most people define their personality (values, believes, world-view) via their friends.

It's why the LLM psychosis happens in the first place.

So they will not want to get their believe challenged by a sceptic LLM. They'll try to justify everything their crank LLM says.

[Yishan @yishan]

What we’re basically going to see happen is that China is going to cure cancer.

If you want a map to all the technological advances you’re going to see in the next 10 years out of China, the formula is “technology now makes it possible to do X, but it’s really hard to do X in the United States.���

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting w @Ada_Palmer about it.

Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance:

Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. This is because paper was still very expensive, and so you had to make this big upfront CAPEX decision to print a batch of 300 copies of a book - say the Bible. But he's in a small landlocked German town where only priests are allowed to read the Bible - so he sells maybe 7 copies. It’s only when this technology ends up in Venice, where you can hand 10 copies to each of 30 ship captains going to 30 different cities, that it starts taking off.

Speaking of which, the printing revolution wasn’t just one single discrete event, just as the computer revolution has been this whole century of going from mainframes -> personal computers -> phones -> social media, each with different and accelerating social impact. Books came first, but they’re slow to print, and made in small batches. The real revolution is pamphlets - much faster, much harder to censor. Pamphlet runners are how you can have Luther's 95 Theses go from Wittenberg to London in 17 days.

So much other wild stuff from this episode. For example, did you know that the largest and best-funded experimental laboratory in 17th century Europe was very likely the Roman one run by inquisitors? Ada jokes that the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review. The focus of the Inquisition is really misunderstood - it was obsessed with catching dangerous new heretics like Lutherans and Calvinists - it only executed one person for doing science.

And this leads Ada to make an observation that I think is really wise: the authorities and censors are always worried about the exact wrong things given 20/20 hindsight. When Inquisition raids an underground bookshop during the French Enlightenment, they don’t mind the Rousseau, Voltaire, and Encyclopédie, but they lose their minds about some Jansenist treatises about the technical nature of the Trinity.

More broadly, a lesson for me from this episode is that it’s just really hard to shape history in the specific way that you want to impact things. One of the most famous medieval scholars is this guy Petrarch. He survives the Black Death in the 1340s, watches his friends die to plague and bandits, and says: our leaders are selfish and terrible, we need to raise them on the Roman classics so they'll act like Cicero. So Europe pours money into finding ancient manuscripts, building libraries, and educating princes on classical virtues. Those princes grow up and fight bigger, nastier wars than ever before with new deadlier technology. And this, combined with greater urbanization and endemic plague, results in European life expectancy decreasing from 35 in the medieval period to 18 during the Renaissance (the period which we in retrospect think of as a golden age but which many people living through it thought of as the continuation of the dark ages that had persisted since the fall of Rome).

Anyways, the libraries Petrarch inspires stick around, the printing press makes them accessible to everyone, and 200 years later a generation of medical students is reading Lucretius and asking "what if there are atoms and that's how diseases work?" which eventually leads to germ theory, vaccines, and a cure for the Black Death (Ada has longer more involved explanation of how cosplaying the Romans results through a series of many steps to the scientific revolution). Petrarch wanted to produce philosopher-kings that shared his values. Instead he created a world that doesn't share his values at all but can cure the disease that destroyed his.

So much other interesting stuff in the full episode - hope you enjoy!

Timestamps:

0:00:00 - How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the Renaissance
0:28:49 - How Florence's weird republic worked
0:38:13 - How the Medicis took over Florence
0:58:12 - Why it was so hard for Gutenberg to make any money off the printing press
1:17:34 - Why the industrial revolution didn't happen in Italy
1:23:02 - The slow diffusion of paper through Europe
1:41:21 - The Inquisition accidentally invented peer review

Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.

[philipp @Philiff]

@QwQiao the left will pivot to anti-ai in 2027

[philipp @Philiff]

are we close to ai becoming conscious? it's a physical possibility. so what specific observation would force me to admit ai is conscious?

I think it's 1) seeing motivation/desire in the output and/or 2) some architecture which could generate that.

right now I see neither. but only 'i created a religion' blog posts without any follow up. and also no coherency loop in the architecture.

[philipp @Philiff]

the key to understanding the mind is that the mind doesn’t access physical reality directly; instead it compresses it into a usable model: "that’s a tree; don’t let it fall on my head" instead of seeing all the atoms etc

once you accept that, you can see how your lived experience (also from meditation) doesn't reveal the real physical world. it shows how the mind builds its model!

consciousness is part of that system of mind. it's the live layer that registers that the system is currently perceiving, focusing a spotlight of attention: "this is what’s happening to me right now"

it creates model coherence: resolve contradictions, competing interpretations ("face or shadow"), coordinate goals!

and that's what we feel as this special "bubble of nowness"!

[philipp @Philiff]

Just built an out-of-the-box encrypted chat for codex + claude https://t.co/IHlWEFWyN3 on top of takopi and matrix