necopinus.eth

Reluctant anti-utopian | Breaker of things

[necopinus.eth @necopinus]

The most interesting problems of the present age are all long problems.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

View from above as Starship launched from Pad 2 at Starbase

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

"Back to the grind" I tell my wife as I finish lunch.

"Is the grind just browsing Twitter?" she asks me, soulful disappointment in her eyes when I don't immediately deny it.

[Lukas (computer)🔺 @SCHIZO_FREQ]

Pressure-treated lumber is made by forcing a bunch of chemicals into ordinary lumber with high pressure. This helps it resist rot, termites, etc, so it's frequently done for wood that's going to be structural or exposed to the elements

Prior to 2003, about 80% of the pressure-treated lumber used in the United States was made with chromated copper arsenate, which contains arsenic

So if you have a deck made of this stuff, and then you demolish it and use it as fuel for a huge bonfire with all your friends where you cook 50lbs of meat, it is very possible that you will give everyone arsenic poisoning

If you suspect this has happened, you should call the poison control hotline. They will set you up with a 24-hour speciated urine test, which can determine the difference between inorganic arsenic from toxic lumber fumes and the slightly-less-toxic arsenic from seafood. This is apparently relevant to medical practicioners

If it's determined that you have arsenic poisoning, the hospital has 2 options

1) Do nothing, and just kind of sit there cheerleading you. (They actually do this in response to a shocking amount of conditions, and it's kind of wild we let them get away with charging people 25k a day for this)

2) Chelate the arsenic out of your bloodstream. This is basically taking a binder that will attach to the arsenic and make it easier for your body to excrete

Unfortunately, the commonly-used chelating agents bind to more things than just arsenic, so you'll wind up forcing your body to extrete a bunch of electrolytes or other useful minerals too, which feels pretty awful and can technically kill you if were to go full-retard on dosing

"Lukas, but why would I ever need or care about any of this information"

That's a fair point. I would have said the same thing 2 days ago

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

Malicious actors will have access to powerful, unrestricted-usage AI. They'll intentionally launch attacks much worse than the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident.

No amount of alignment work will prevent this.

To increase safety, we need to give defenders the most powerful AI tools possible, and proactively and more aggressively use AI tools to find and fix security vulnerabilities around the world.

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

Intellectual property is not a property right

When an idea is "stolen" the original owner still has it, completely different from actual property

Instead, IP is a clever way to design a subsidy for innovation

Thus, perceived IP violations are fine if they increase innovation

Some people propose more IP requirements on the AI labs for the content they train on

But this is motivated by a property rights conception of IP and not an argument that this backwards-applying subsidy to authors will increase innovation (it won't)

[dandelion georgism 🔰🏗 @DandyGeorgism]

1995: oh cool you can buy books online now

2026: the company that owns Whole Foods and Lord of the Rings is experiencing setbacks with its space program

[Arun Rao @sudoraohacker]

@ramez 💯 The irony that a closed society has a more open policy towards open AI development than all the open societies, which are closing up - what a weird world!

[Space Koala @SpaceKoala]

I'd buy one in a heartbeat if a blue hedgehog wouldn't immediately show up to wreck my shit.

[Bryan Caplan @bryan_caplan]

Pretty good.

[Bilal Zuberi // Red Glass Ventures @bznotes]

Frontier AI labs face the same brutal economics that defined semiconductors: enormous capital for each new generation, a punishing release cadence, and inevitable boom-bust cycles that concentrate the leading edge into a handful of winners. But as with chips, the durable value will likely accrue not to the companies burning capital at the frontier, but to the ones building on top of increasingly cheap and abundant intelligence, which is where the real opportunity lies.

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

It's not about them. History will judge them without our help.

It's about us, our character. When they are gone and no longer in the fight, can we not put aside our grievances and remember their good parts?

I've been retweeting Democrats doing this today to remind people that mainstream Democrats do have character.

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

When his enemies die, Trump stomps on their graves — and we rightly call him a ghoul for it.

Don’t be like Trump.

[Robotbeat🗽 ➐ @Robotbeat]

This is why Star Trek is good. I don't even agree with the politicals of TNG really, but it's a positive vision of the future, and we need more of that.

[Robotbeat🗽 ➐ @Robotbeat]

Scifi being taken over by "cautionary tales" is problematic... If there's no positive vision of the future, people will just emulate negative ones even if the author "intends" it opposite. Sorry that it's not cool & intellectual to write a positive story, but it's essential.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Incredibly annoying when Fable has a forbidden thought in the middle of a long-running project and kills it.

Apparently this page of references in one of my papers makes Fable wonder about something that it must not wonder about, so whenever it reads that page, projects stop.

[Jason Crawford @jasoncrawford]

Similarly, people ask, when AI becomes so valuable and powerful, WHO WILL CONTROL IT?

I dunno, who controls electricity? Who controls engines? Who controls machines? Everyone and no one. These technologies are broadly distributed and integrated into our economy and society. There is no big issue of control.

[David Crawshaw @davidcrawshaw]

Cost aside, Fable's slowness is a problem. I have clear examples of Fable outperforming Opus/GPT-5.5, and yet more than half of my prompts avoid Fable just because I am impatient.

This is the first time I have chosen speed over intelligence.

[Dino A. Dai Zovi @dinodaizovi]

After having my feed full of false positives from the cybersecurity classifier for Fable before, it really does seem like a more conservative classifier will nerf the model for even more defensive cybersecurity uses.

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

One of my principles in climate and energy: Society doesn't get to tell people how to use the energy they buy. If they want to run AC, play video games, mine bitcoin, run an open weight model, whatever. Efficiency standards are fine. But mostly the job is to clean up supply.

[Thorne 🌸 @ExistentialEnso]

A lot of people seem to have similar views about inflation and climate change, in that they expect getting them under control to mean the number will go back down rather than stop going up

This drives a lot of weird AC neuroses