dizzzmas

working on `?`

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

So I heard the other day some crazy guys from SF are unironically leading the world to its ruin and whatnot

Anyhoo, I made a personal blog in 2026, imagine that

I promise it won't be lame tech stuff only ... despite the first post being about tech stuff

Onwards and upwards!

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani what happened to all the strict and demanding teachers who were doing gatekeeping?

did all of them just conform to the new memes of not allowing failure?

or did they get selected out of the education system?

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

A bigger and dumber question has puzzled me for a long time:

It took those scientists big chunks of their lives to understand and invent this stuff.

And now we're supposed to gobble it up in a few weeks of curriculum.

How can human progress even happen?

How can knowledge that took years to develop be compressed and digested by people in much shorter time without loss of understanding?

And moreover with new things being constantly developed and invented on top.

Each new generation has more to study, more to understand and more to learn than the previous one.

How does this pile of knowledge not collapse under its own weight? Or maybe it does?

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani How did folks like Newton, Euler or even Aristotle study math?

How did they get so good? What did they do?

Too much in modern curriculum is throwing stuff at you as-is. Always felt like some "key" for true understanding was missing.

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@thdxr @GeoffreyHuntley hmm maybe that's why my Go sub disappeared suddenly

had to go and manually resubscribe on the website.

not sure if this was expected. today was also the scheduled billing day I believe, if it matters at all.

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

Big true

Not shutting up about your progress can help you gain momentum and relieve stress

Though, sometimes it helps to go stealth, because it’s easier to experiment with ideas and do dumb shit this way

Takes great degree of self-control though

Will try to share more stuff

[sunil pai @threepointone]

new post: the senior engineer death spiral

https://t.co/xzgU1jVBRh

a friend just started a big job and asked for some advice. so I braindumped a monologue about a super common failure mode I see with engineers and posted it here, hope it helps whoever it can.

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@iamdavidhill hire great designers

go into debt if you have to

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@thdxr Paradoxically grass is what makes tech stuff cool

I remember excitement I had coming home from school & sports like “hell yeah, finally computer time”

Things we want being hard to reach is what kinda makes them cool and valuable

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani how do we know about that? did any of his friends/generals leave notes on that?

or it becomes self-evident when analyzing what he was doing after 40?

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@thdxr pls stop disguising Big Pickle under a different name every few weeks, and making fun of everybody

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani ahaha

At my previous job we had a running gag where my colleagues from London where asking:
- “Where are you now?”
- “In Czechia”
- “Where? Where? In Chechnya?”

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani Wonder if Ukraine is gonna have same kind of ressentiment

If raison d’être is merging with the West, the longer it's delayed the angrier people become

Had a friend pull this totally insane joke recently: "If we strike Berlin with drones, will they finally take us into the EU?"

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani Why would a strongman like Yeltsin and his clan destroy the greatest Russian empire that ever existed.

They must have had some kind of bet on how this could all work out, and then everything went south.

What was that bet?

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@thdxr fearmongering def sucks

but in a second-order effect kind of way the "killing" bit could be real

like social media caused loneliness epidemic - this stuff can hit you like firewater hit the natives

saw a guy become a husk of his former self, using AI for every little thing

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani Should the assumption be this is one of those 100-year conflicts unless something miraculous happens like elites in Russia changing or Ukraine bending the knee?

Got parents losing their minds back in Ukraine on whether they should sell everything and move

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@LewisCTech I think it’s all pendulum swings

In a room of tough guys you stand out by being loud and pressing on emotions

In a room of touchy-feely folks you stand out by being tough and rational

Next pendulum swing will prob make rational calm dudes popular again as drama fatigue sets in

[Yishan @yishan]

Finally our AI leaders (Dario and @Sama) are doing the sane thing. "Pacing the frontier" is exactly the right thing to do: keep moving forward, coordinate the pace, and collaborate on alignment research. It is the right balance.

To the people whose objection goes to "but this hands the lead to China!" - no, YOUR ENTIRE WORLDVIEW IS GROSSLY WRONG - and moreover your ability to correctly perceive the world and predict events will always go awry until you correct it.

Here is the core of your gross error:
- You do not think people in China are actually people.
- You do not understand that Chinese civilization is a peer, if not superior, to your own.

If you actually thought of Chinese people as real people, with equally valid and real desires, dreams, and actual human existence equivalent to your own, you would realize that:

- China is not the Soviet Union, and you'd stop mapping notions of Stalinist authoritarianism onto it
- China's current government is valid and broadly supported by its people because it has improved the quality of their lives and continues to be focused on doing so
- Western values are not universal, as values are culturally influenced and ultimately validated by their consequences; the West has not been doing so well lately on that front, and so
- Your deontological bleating of "but we are free and they are not" is less than worthless: Chinese people most value being free from the actual entity most responsible for their oppression, namely WESTERN COUNTRIES

And so, if you can start to break out of the many layers of your brainwashing, you may further realize that:

If you are a country engaged in a geopolitical race to develop a key technology that:

1) may strongly determine your country's own future sovereignty,
2) one which almost every country agrees that if they don't have it, they will be subject to domination by other countries who do, and
3) your rival is clearly ahead, and
4) people are starting to realize that unrestrained development may lead to significant global danger,

then it should be perfectly logical that your answer to any call to "mutually agree to stop" must start with the player who is ahead agreeing first to slow down.

If you can realize that both countries are actual real civilizations with real human beings who have actual real lives who have exercised self-determination when it comes to how they are governed, and not One-Dimensional Cardboard Others, this is perfectly logical.

Imagine a scenario where the US and Soviet Union were engaged in a race to build ever more powerful and numerous nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union was clearly ahead.

Then the Soviet Union points out that this risks worldwide nuclear annihilation, and proposes that both countries agree to stop building nuclear weapons and engage in mutual disarmament.

The obvious and logical reaction of the US would be to say, "Yeah, we agree there is a danger, but we'll agree to begin disarming once you've disarmed your own weapons until we're at parity."

Or, you'd try to accelerate your own development until the US reached parity, at which point you'd return to the table and have discussions about mutual disarmament.

Right? You definitely wouldn't agree to stop and disarm when the other guys were AHEAD. Your main danger is that the other guy is ahead, not something bad that lies ahead of them.

The argument in the US is "if we slow down, China will get ahead!"

Guess what, the real people in China see it as, "the US is already ahead! They're asking us to stop?"

The stronger party needs to make the gesture of good faith, if they are genuine.

There is real-life precedent to this!

Back in the day, when the US proposed to China that we engage in mutual nuclear disarmament, China's answer was basically "We will be happy to engage in mutual disarmament once the US first disarms to the same level of warheads that we have!"

For reference: China has ~600 nuclear warheads; the US has ~3,700.

If you are a country that was previously invaded and colonized by 8 countries at once, is surrounded by military bases held by your rival, whose neighbor committed horrific war crimes against your people and remains unrepentant and whose pacifism appears to only be maintained by that same rival occupying it... if you were a real human with a real life and real hopes and dreams, you would reasonably expect a superior rival proposing mutual disarmament to be the one to volunteer to stop first, if not disarm down to your level.

China currently has inferior models, lacks leading-edge chip technology, resorts to distilling US models to train its models. We have yet to see even a single Chinese model that does anything uniquely Chinese besides refusing to answer questions about Tiananmen. [1]

Recognizing that the people "on the other side" are also people means recognizing that they might also care about the same things you do and that they care about their lives and families and civilization and Not Getting Into A War Where Loved Ones Die and aren't going to do the "well a cartoon villain would do the evil thing so that must be what they would do" thing.

That is why your entire worldview is wrong. You think you are a real person and you don't think the other people are real people.

You think your country is filled with real people, and the other country that's much older and has four times as many people isn't filled with real people. So obviously you are not going to be able to form an accurate worldview.

Otherwise quite intelligent and thoughtful people in the US seem to have this blindness (it seems to be bipartisan), and don't really regard China as being a real civilization populated by real people who chose their government and want it to do what it's doing because it's actually good for them.

Here's a common "anti-safety-ist" argument you might've heard:

"The doomers are fearmongering and trying to make everyone scared of AI, just so they can justify a solution where they control everything and keep us from having abundance!"

Sound familiar? Do you believe it?

Then maybe you also believe the true version:

"Our leaders are fearmongering and trying to make everyone scared of China, just so they can justify a solution where they control everything and keep us from having abundance!"

If your reaction is "but no, China actually is... " maybe you want to realize how much you've bought into what you've been told. Maybe you're not aware of how many high-quality Chinese products you could affordably have access to. Do you know what abundance requires? Overcapacity.

The people telling you that are the same leaders who have been shown to lie to you about <oh man, just insert your own personal list>.

Why do you somehow think the one thing they're telling you the truth about is that China is a threat?

It's only a lie they can maintain because you readily believe that Chinese people in China aren't real people, because if you thought they were real people, fellow human beings, you'd realize that those lies could not be true. Chinese people are the most unruly, ungovernable people in the world. Chinese history is basically a history of overthrowing their governments - if they have a government that is popular it is because it is doing quite well for them - though it may seem weird to outsiders because Chinese people are pretty weird.

I know this, of course, because I'm ethnically Chinese and I know actual Chinese people, and at the same time I was raised and educated in the US so I know actual Americans, and everyone is Real People, not cartoon Cold War villains (who, when the Cold War ended, we learned were also real people with hopes and fears and dreams).

There is, overall, strong willingness to work together there - cynically, because working together is how you get rich, and Chinese people just want everyone to get rich; war does not make everyone rich.

But the US should stop being naive and realize that when it comes to AI it has to take the first step in extending the bridge. This announcement and the similar one from OpenAI a couple weeks ago are the right start.

====

[1] Seriously, where's the 5000 years of written training material? Why isn't Qwen quoting Confucian analects or traditional idioms to me when I ask it for advice? Why is it always neoliberal pablum? The US is more dominant in AI than it thinks.

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@thdxr I think the only way it could be possible is by it becoming uncool. With guns it took casualties.

Just like guns are mostly associated with fear and death, these black boxes could be associated with slop and loss of belief in human capabilities

Read it:
https://t.co/KnvpPLqBFv

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani at least pieces of paper were managed and administered by living people, who very rarely, but sometimes could treat you as individual, bypassing formal process

wet dream of modernity seems to be to replace the human factor with computers for broader control

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani Overall the Zeitgeist these days is full of anxiety

Hedgehog in the fog type stuff

I wonder if felt the same way for previous generations - going through the Cold War and the breakup of USSR

[dizzzmas @dizzzmas]

@kamilkazani Trying to predict who the next revolution of the wheel of fortune could bring out on top and making a bet on that?

As an anecdote, recently spoke to 18 y.o. who plans to go into psychology, because of the increasing number of people scarred by the war.