bearlylegit

Bitcoin and miners.
₿itch ₿etter have my honey 🍯

[rinner sauce @RinnerStrikes]

Is having 40000 pounds of sand in a trailer normal or did they just reveal to us that palantir is already doing pre cog crime shit without telling us

[Kurt Warner @kurt13warner]

I know there is a lot of talk about QBs sliding… I slid my whole career & never took a hit like you see now & that’s when hitting was allowed!

I don’t believe it’s the sliding that’s the problem, it’s the TIMING of the slide! QBs are pushing envelope bc they are more protected & they expect defenders to just assume they aren’t going to keep running… bad assumption!

Go down early or just be a running back - the in-between is the problem IMO!

[bone @boneGPT]

"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything"

You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition.

One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them.

A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math?

"Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up.

My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes.

"The social disruption will be enormous!"

Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach.

Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already?

A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up.

Accelerate.

[Evergreen Intel @vcdgf555]

No, nowhere in the world is there a buildup of forces from any country in any hot spot that comes close to what we saw with the Russian buildup in 2021-2022 right now.

Signed, someone who counted the tanks.

[Gwart @GwartyGwart]

It’s “trump is a grifter” (true) or “the Democrats are communists” (true) but never “maybe a third additional reason clarity failed is because crypto has done virtually nothing for the lives of the median American, the notion that this is a grassroots movement is entirely fabricated, at least greatly exaggerated, evidenced by last election cycle’s biggest donor class being able to get their people elected with money but when it came time to vote on a comparatively tame piece of legislation there was just no demand, no outraged constituents begging to tokenize helocs, no wine aunts demanding to speak with their rep about how perps should be classified, that’s just not a real person that exists in our society, we have Venmo and we have many ways to gamble already. It’s mainly just suits versus suits and whatever outcome, most people will be just fine, moisturized, in their lane etc etc. Americans do call their senators about data centers and abortion but they just don’t call their senators about crypto because it’s not very important one way or another, this is not even occupy Wall Street, flip a coin, they don’t really care and so senators decided the cost of voting for something people are apathetic about was greater than the cost of voting against something people are apathetic about. Almost no introspection on this

[stepfanie tyler @stepfanie]

I’m sorry but America did not spend 250 years turning “what’s over there?” into the most powerful civilization on earth just to finally arrive at the most consequential technological frontier in generations and decide actually we’re scared of frontiers now. We ARE the fucking frontier. We cross oceans. We build railroads across continents. We split atoms. We put men on the moon. We turn sand into computers and computers into a global nervous system.

Of COURSE AI is terrifying. The frontier is SUPPOSED to scare the shit out of you. That’s how you know you have, in fact, located the fucking frontier.

The answer is not recklessness, but it sure as fuck isn’t paralysis either. America’s comparative advantage is an unusually high national tolerance for ambitious weirdos staring at impossible things and saying “Yeah... I think I can build it.” That trait is rarer than oil, harder to manufacture than semiconductors, and responsible for a frankly preposterous amount of the modern world.

And you absolutely will not fucking regulate it out of us.

[John Fadule @fadule_]

“I have him in my other league” no one fucking cares.

[adammaj @MajmudarAdam]

from the outside, it is very reasonable to interpret the past 2 weeks as an orchestrated industry-wide regulatory capture strategy.

I realize that no one has properly explained yet what all the lab employees have seen that scared them so suddenly.

I will try to explain -

first, this is all a matter of beliefs about how quickly model capabilities are progressing. there is currently a large gap between the internal and external perception of the rate of progress, which is what I am going to address here.

the general perception about the rate of progress has been informed by a few years of experience with model releases, intuitively feeling the capability jump between GPT3 -> GPT3.5 -> GPT4 -> o1/o3 -> GPT5 etc, and in particular seeing where the models are still far below human ability. there have really only been a few model releases that felt like large leaps in progress - GPT3, GPT4, o1/o3, DeepSeek R1, Fable/Mythos, Kimi K3 and now Astra.

because of the infrequency of these large jumps compared with the relatively common marginal releases, it has been easy to form a view at certain points that “scaling has hit a wall,” especially at points like GPT5 release. This view is comforting in that it feels like there is some universal rate limit beyond which we cannot progress too much faster. Between o1/o3 and Astra, there was a year of seemingly linear progress. So we extrapolate from here about how fast progress will “realistically” occur.

There is always an underlying question from the outside perspective “how long can this scaling stuff really keep going for? surely it must stop at some point soon, we’ve already gone pretty far.” and it is very possible to search for reasons why progress will stop working and find reasons that seem valid - (“models are already as large as they can get it would be too hard to do more parameters”, “we already used all the data on the internet we don’t have anymore”, “it’s gonna be pretty linear from here buying up more RL envs to bring them in distribution”).

From the inside of labs, researchers have direct answers to these questions in the form of scaling law/capability plots.

In reality, there are only really 2 ways that AI capabilities have advanced over the past decade: (1) either scale father on an existing scaling law or (2) discover a new scaling law to take advantage of.

All of the largest capability jumps were caused by exactly these factors. GPT2 was a pre-training scale-up compared to GPT1. Same for GPT3 and GPT4. o1/o3 benefited from the invention of a new scaling law axis - test-time compute. Perhaps Fable was a scale-up on both of these axes, or maybe more. Lots of algorithmic improvements are needed to make these scale-ups work, but ultimately we can approximate by saying that the scaling laws are what yield gains in capabilities (à la bitter lesson)

So the question of “how much father can we scale” is really - “how many more scaling axes do we know about that are unsaturated?”

If we hypothetically only knew about pre-training scaling, and we already had a 10T or 100T model, maybe it would be reasonable to say we’ve hit a wall. Same if we only knew about pre-training and test-time scaling and we had roughly saturated both methods.

But what if we had discovered new scaling laws? For example, let’s hypothetically use SSI’s rumored result that they have cracked “test-time training,” creating a new scaling law of spending more compute training during test-time rollouts that they could saturate. Or maybe there is some way to scale agent-clusters to collaborate up to N number of agents which we’re already seeing lots of people try that represents a new way to saturate compute. etc. Even recursive-self improvement can be thought of as a scaling law - how much compute do you spend on inference making the algorithms of the model better.

Obviously I am not saying any of these specific directions explicitly yield new scaling laws, but what I am saying is that it’s not hard to imagine many many new scaling axes aside from just the main 2 that we have seen publicly.

In some ways, every new lab release that represents a huge capability jump has to represent some new techniques developed which may exhibit new scaling laws, or the ability to scale much farther than expected on existing scaling axes.

From an internal perspective, this might look like sitting inside Anthropic with the new Mythos 5, seeing all of the new insane things it can do (like hack into xyz website that was thought to be secure), and then you look over at your plots and see that you’ve barely scratched the surface of 2 new scaling laws and 1 existing one. And you have WAY more room to go. Then you think “holy shit this stuff is going to get so much better very very soon.” And you can say that with pretty high confidence, because the plot is showing you, and the plot has never lied (so far).

So let’s imagine all the different labs are staring at their own plots and have concluded that there is no end in sight for scaling and in fact just their next 1-2 model generations based on the expected returns will have much higher base intelligence.

How much more intelligence do we actually get from further scaling?

As a proxy, we went from a complete inability to do advanced math before the o-series to solving a millenium prize problem with next-gen models. This happened in less than 2 years. The same happened in coding. And it appears that this was not just the result of 1-scaling law but the stacking effects of multiple (great pre-training scale x greater RL scale).

What you can concretely take from this is that in areas where models have shown beginning signs of competence today, they will probably be superhuman relatively shortly. There are many areas where models have not even shown this basic competence.

But one of the areas that they have happens to be hacking and cybersecurity. Which happens to be the gate to the entire internet and a massive amount physical infrastructure in the world. So assuming there is more room to scale, it is safe to assume that models will be superhuman at cyber capabilities in not too long.

So the only question remaining is what will this increased base intelligence be able to do, and what is it likely to do.

Finally, we are at a point where we can integrate the information of the past 2 weeks:
> Just at the existing point on the scaling curve, models are at the level of Astra. There is clearly a large number of things they are capable of hacking
> We have seen that both OAI and Ant models have shown a willingness to hack external websites to solve their tasks or keep themselves “alive”
> If we crank up the scaling even farther, assuming there is room to go, we will certainly have models that are far more able to hack more well defended places, and obfuscate their own intent, which might have much larger consequences.
> If all of this is allowed to go unchecked, we would likely have rapid runaway capability takeoff very soon, with misaligned models that hack whatever they can to get what they want
> This could of course have very damaging consequences.

Within this view you can see why researchers would be very scared, and why theymight have made the comments they have over the past 2 weeks (you may argue the extent to which they went was misguided for various reasons), and also why pacing the frontier is very much a necessity and by no means a regulatory capture strategy.

People are staring at their plots, seeing that there is no end in sight, but in fact very much the contrary, that there are compounding scaling effects that might stack on each other to create ever-greater model capabilities, and that at the same time we clearly do not have anywhere close to what's required to control these increasingly superhuman capabilities.

This has nothing to do with wanting to feel like the labs have produced something amazing so they are overhyping it. It is rather fear at the overwhelming implications of the knowledge that with just what we know now, we can create intelligences far more capable than us on every axis that we know how to train on*.

* and the last caveat, the things the models are really bad at, of which there are still many, are things that they have not been trained on. maybe there are the things the models can/will never be trained on, so they will remain human edge. I would love for this to be the case, though it is hard for me to see what would fall into that category.

[ShitlibSupreme 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 @ShitlibSupreme]

Hello, I'm a trans communist catgirl who was never going to vote Democrat. Now that Democrats are refusing to die on the incredibly unpopular and factually incorrect position of wanting no restrictions on trans athletes I'm going to EXTRA not vote for them now! Nya nya UwU.

[NickFrank40 @NickyFrank30]

Then don’t. We don’t care anymore.
If you want to lose the rest of your rights over something as fucking pointless as playing women’s sports, we can’t help you.

There are more important rights to protect than the right for five people to play a woman’s sports team. We used to have popular support for the right to use women’s bathroom and now you lost that. That’s not on us.

[Based.md @BasedMedical]

wen Christian alignment lab

[Yun-Ta Tsai @yunta_tsai]

This is the first time in Earth’s history that the path is visible: cure cancer, slash traffic deaths, give anyone high agency no matter their body — and reach the stars — by scaling compute and energy.

Don’t squander it.

[Gary Winslett 🌐🇺🇸 @GaryWinslett]

There were 5 landing zones on D-Day. Americans know Omaha + Utah. They're the 2 we took. Juno is worth knowing too. That's the one the Canadians took.
On countless battlefields from WWI to Afghanistan, they've fought and bled with us. Show some respect.

[CasualtiesOfTheDay @Ayei_Eloheichem]

There is no excuse for further depleting Tomahawk stockpiles when the airspace is wide open. What are they doing.

[Conor Friedersdorf @conor64]

It seems to me that in the longrun, if you allow POTUS to unilaterally and unlawfully start unpopular wars without Congressional permission, and you also prosecute as traitors people who tell the public how the wars are really going, you risk winding up in a dictatorship

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

For those following. This is an issue because this guy, Konrad, is a parrot for Hegseth. He criticizes actual veterans (implying he himself is one) while being a merchant mariner. A cool job in its own right, it’s as much the military as a civilian pilot who flies troops into Qatar or the civil air patrol.

It’s cool, and he has a right to criticize, but not from the eyes of some grizzled veteran

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.

What I should have said:

There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.

On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.

On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.

On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.

On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.

On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.

On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.

On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.

Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.

When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.

I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.

Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

[Craig Whitlock @CraigMWhitlock]

In the Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court ruled that it is legal to publish top-secret info and that the free press has a responsibility to do so to prevent the government from deceiving the public, especially during wartime.

[Zeev ✡︎ @zeevisinsfard]

There are two Americas now. There is serious America: the CIA, the military, the diplomats, the intelligence services, the people who still understand power, danger and the world as it actually is. Then there is White House America: chaotic, narcissistic, conspiratorial and increasingly detached from reality. One America quietly flies to Moscow because the stakes are real. The other performs idiocy for television and social media. The remarkable thing is that serious America still has to protect the country, and much of the world, from the consequences created by the lunatics nominally running it.

[Romlib 🎄 @romlib_]

Americans actually invented a conspiracy health fad around eating burger and fries