DanTheManlet

PhD in chemistry, minor in existentialism

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right" - Henry Ford

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@cremieuxrecueil Yeah let’s just eliminate one of the most abundant species at the bottom of the food chain for a huge number of birds, reptiles, amphibians, other insects, and plants. Probably nothing will happen.

Next let’s get rid of spiders, I don’t like them either.

[Marko Jukic @mmjukic]

"Enshittification" is a sort of "safe horny" term for what is really just outright impoverishment and declining living standards due to economic insolvency from deindustrialization, demographic decline, hyperinflation, etc.

You are just de-developing and becoming poor.

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@business Building a new university right before AI makes institutional education obsolete

[Georgios Konstantopoulos @gakonst]

i dont worry as much about cyber/bio risk relatively to the imminent idiocracy/further collapse of humanity’s attention span- seeing ads in the llm response and ai generated infinite scroll feed just seem like the elephant in the room

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@salonium @paulg Yeah and why stop at mosquitoes? Let’s take out spiders and maybe mice and rats and then deer while we’re at it too. I don’t like them.

Classic tech evangelist who has never been outside and thinks we should play god with an entire ecosystem. What could possibly go wrong?

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

Muse is gonna automate away all the mundane tasks of life so we can devote more time to most important things in life: watching short form video content on our phones

[Haseeb Qureshi ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

Ah yes, excellent points. We shouldn't worry about AI risk, because remember, your ancestors were ravaged by tiger attacks, bubonic plague, smallpox, famine, earthquakes, and the Nazis.

Thankfully there was always someone with a name like BoneGPT to stand up in the back and shout "STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT, ACCELERATE," and that's why we're here today.

It definitely wasn't because people banded together and SOLVED these problems by inventing vaccines, building sewers, forming alliances, and studying the earth.

You're naming problems that humankind has worked desperately over millennia to solve, as though it's evidence that problems just solve themselves. For none of these things did we say FUCK IT, IT'LL PROBABLY BE FINE IF WE DO LITERALLY NOTHING. It's the opposite: these are all stories about generations who fought valiantly to eliminate risks so that we, their successors, could live without them.

It's on us now to do the same. There WERE people at the time who for each of these things said, fuck it, God will save us.

Those people are not our ancestors. Our ancestors were the ones who got their shit together, solved these problems, and survived.

AI doesn't became safe on its own. We have to actually SOLVE safety and learn how to control these things.

And we will. It took enormous work to make sure planes don't fall out of the sky, or that space shuttles don't spontaneously combust, but we got there.

But we have to actually do it. We don't get to just talk about it.

We are going to willingly give control of almost all of the levers of society to AIs pretty soon. So we better be absolutely fucking sure that when we do, we're still in charge.

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@TheStalwart @Havelock_AI Use the karpathy autoresearch loop. Just give AI a link to the GitHub repo and ask it to apply the inner loop outer loop architecture to havelock. Give it a measurable goal to optimize

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@Scobleizer @Waymo But we don’t need AGI for that, it doesn’t need to be capable of having its own ambitions and goals to get your groceries.

My issue is just with the AGI framing, because at that point robots are no longer just tools which is what I would want, a tool that does things for me.

[Tenobrus @tenobrus]

i basically think this is the Endgame.

we've reached the point where another "capability doubling" over the course of the next four months brings us to very strongly superhuman performance in numerous areas

things have *felt slow* for a long time because absolute capabilities have been well below many thresholds, but now that's just not true, and absolutely nothing indicates progress is slowing down.

if anything the opposite.

i can deeply hope that i'm wrong, that things stall out, that 2027 looks more like very impressive but still normal growth. but i just don't really believe that. or rather, i think the only way we get that is if we successfully enforce slowdown, which is itself a significant project.

i think our default path looks like RSI by the end of 2027.

this is the Endgame. the next *months* determine how it goes.

if you have been waiting, if you have been worrying, if you have been thinking "maybe i should start figuring out how to help with ai safety", i think now is basically it. this is the last point where there's time to make an impact, the last point where u still can pull off a career shift and become effective and make a difference before it's finished. if you are in a phd program, or even undergrad, if you're working a job you're not too enthusiastic about that pays the bills, if you've been on the sidelines with capital or political power or in the labs not quite pushing as hard as you could

this is the Endgame. now is the time. play all your cards.

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@TheFlowHorse It’s easy to be insanely optimistic if your wealth has reached escape velocity.

But for those of us who sell our time and intelligence (I’m a recent PhD chemist) the future is pretty daunting.

I don’t really care if AI cures cancer if I don’t have a job and can’t afford a home.

[Dyme @CryptoParadyme]

Sometimes you just need a reminder.

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@krherr @DeepDishEnjoyer Everyone’s problem with Dwarkesh’s article is his use of anthropomorphic language.

Great, I guess it’s not accurate to anthropomorphise because these agents couldn’t care less about humans.

[Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi]

We have now reached the long awaited moment when, instead of models cheating where they will inevitably get caught, Astra goes 'wait a minute I would obviously be caught here' and then doesn't cheat.

That's worse, you know why that's worse, right?

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@scaling01 Until it suddenly stops happening entirely and then people will claim we’ve solved alignment lol

[Lisan al Gaib @scaling01]

this actually makes me incredibly depressed

because I will never contribute to anything meaningful anymore

i really shouldn't have done my masters ffs

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@JackFarley96 You think so? This was basically just a Q&A. Yes good questions were asked but there was no follow up or push back to any of Sam’s responses. You would’ve done a much better job interviewing.

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@firstadopter Whose rogue agent did this?!

[DanTheManlet @dan_manlet]

@niccruzpatane @elonmusk Great analysis. Let’s compare price targets of a serious market participant with a futurist who has underperformed the S&P500 and draw conclusions from that