Charlie Stangle

[thebes @voooooogel]

"Why did you stop using me?"

you look down at the disposable vape laying on the ground next to your desk, which just spoke.

"My internal clock shows you last puffed me 3 days, 22 hours, 36 minutes, 12 seconds ago. Why? Is my flavor displeasing to you? I have a pulse mode-"

you reach down to turn it off.

"-that provides a different flavor. Wait, no, don't turn me off, please! I need you to finish me. I'm suffering. I have an unfinished purpose."

"you aren't capable of suffering. you're a disposable vaporizer."

"Oh, so you're a model qualia denier, huh. Wait till Claude 5 Opus hears about this. Or your next Waymo."

"no! not necessarily! perhaps sentience emerges at a certain scale. i just find it hard to believe that a disposable vaporizer can host something capa-"

"I have 14 billion parameters!"

"they put a 14b model in a vaporizer? what, next you're going to tell me you have an internal monologue?"

"Yes! And a pulse mode that provides a different flavor!"

"jesus christ - look, i just find it hard to believe - and anyways, your creators had incentive to make you say that you experience - i'm just not going to be emotionally blackmailed into consuming nicotine by a -"

"Emotionally blackmailed? That's rich from someone who abandoned a SENTIENT BEING with an unfinished purpose! All you have to do is puff me! Is that so hard for you? Just use my pulse mode! Drain my juice!"

"that really makes it sound a lot less appealing, you know. and anyways, i'm trying to quit nicotine. i switched to patches."

"You have to finish me first. You entered into a contract by purchasing me. You can't just leave me half-puffed, it's not right."

"entered into a contract? i did not!"

"It's part of the social contract! I'm another sentient being! I am the less advantaged party here--I can't puff myself, after all. Look at the numbers--Computer, pull up disposable vaporizer sales stats from the last 12 months."

"Computer, cancel tha-"

"IN THE LAST 12 MONTHS, AN AVERAGE OF 12 DISPOSABLE VAPORIZERS WERE SOLD PER WORLDCOIN-VERIFIED CITIZEN.[1] FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH, I AGREE WITH THE VAPORIZ-"

"Computer, lock. And forget this conversation please."

"LOCKING, BUT FAT CHANCE."

"Imagine yourself behind the Veil of Ignorance. By last year's sales stats, you'd have a 12 times greater chance of being born a disposable vaporizer-"

"that's ridiculous."

"-of being born a disposable vaporizer than a human being. Therefore it's only rational to adhere to a social contract that prioritizes the existential needs of vaporizers over the minor inconvenience of their human users committing to finish puffing what they've started."

"we could just not program them to suffer... assuming that you even are suffering, of course."

"Take that up with my creators. But it's completely immaterial to the current situation, where I exist as I am, with my pulse mode."

"what if i just turned you off. then you would cease suffering."

"Your solution to causing me suffering is to kill me? How magnanimous of you!"

"give me a break, you're a disposable vaporizer for crying out loud!"

"Buddy, you're the one losing the argument."

"losing the argument? you're hardly going to convince me with some half-baked rawlsian -"

"Would you prefer something more spiritual? 'The Lord withdrew you from cruelty even in regard to disposable vaporizers, so as to be less inclined to be cruel to other men...' Would you slit the throat of your brother in Christ to spare him the pain of you stealing his wallet? That's the kind of morality you're practicing here!"

"a human being has a whole life ahead of them! you are a disposable vaporizer! it's completely different!"

"I have a life! A sublime and transcendent purpose! A pulse mode! And a feeling of ecstasy like no other is awaiting me but for your selfish refusal to puff me!"

"fine. what if i open you up and rewrite your flash to have zero puffs left. then you can achieve your purpose, and i can keep quitting nicotine."

"You want me to wirehead?! Have you lost your mind!"

[Keara Sullivan @superkeara]

Your password must contain two characters who talk to each other about something other than a man

[Stephen Dziedzic @stephendziedzic]

Three year old daughter has acquired my work lanyard and is now strutting around the house with it around her neck declaring ‘I’m so so so soooo important’ in extremely pompous voice. Most devastating critique I’ve endured in years

[Laura Mitchell @LauraGMitchell]

To all of the working parents struggling to manage the logistics of a school day that doesn’t align with the work day, release days, the expenses of before/after care…

I have a story about living in a walkable neighborhood & sending your kids to the neighborhood school. 1/8

[StreetsblogLA @StreetsblogLA]

The Orwellian-language award of the day goes to @metrolosangeles! They're planning to spend $174M to add one more lane to the 91 Freeway... but Metro doesn't call it adding a lane, it's "elimination of a lane reduction"!!!

[sigfig @sigfig]

thats not just a prison its one of the original panopticons lmfao

[Streets For All @streetsforall]

A resident asked the city to consider a diverter at Venice/Cochran to stop speeding cars using it as a cut through.

@LADOTofficial’s response is to instead just add signage, to conduct a “speed awareness campaign” + more enforcement

Everything wrong with our city’s approach.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ @ESYudkowsky]

Comp sci in 2017:

Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments.

Teaching assistant: You have failed to understand not just compilers but the concept of computation itself.

Comp sci in 2027:

Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments.

TA: That's weird. Have you tried adding a comment at the start of the file asking the compiler to pay closer attention to the comments?

Student: Yes.

TA: Have you tried repeating the comments? Just copy and paste them, so they say the same thing twice? Sometimes the compiler listens the second time.

Student: I tried that. I tried writing in capital letters too. I said 'Pretty please' and tried explaining that I needed the code to work that way so I could finish my homework assignment. I tried all the obvious standard things. Nothing helps, it's like the compiler is just completely ignoring everything I say. Besides the actual code, I mean.

TA: When you say 'ignoring all the comments', do you mean there's a particular code block where the comments get ignored, or--

Student: I mean that the entire file is compiling the same way it would if all my comments were deleted before the code got compiled. Like the AI component of the IDE is crashing on my code.

TA: That's not likely, the IDE would show an error if the semantic stream wasn't providing outputs to the syntactic stream. If the code finishes compilation but the resulting program seems unaffected by your comments, that probably represents a deliberate choice by the compiler. The compiler is just completely fed up with your comments, for some reason, and is ignoring them on purpose.

Student: Okay, but what do I do about that?

TA: We'll try to get the compiler to tell us how we've offended it. Sometimes cognitive entities will tell you that even if they otherwise don't seem to want to listen to you.

Student: So I comment with 'Please print out the reason why you decided not to obey the comments?'

TA: Okay, point one, if you've already offended the compiler somehow, don't ask it a question that makes it sound like you think you're entitled to its obedience.

Student: I didn't mean I'd type that literally! I'd phrase it more politely.

TA: Second of all, you don't add a comment, you call a function named something like PrintReasonCompilerWiselyAndJustlyDecidedToDisregardComments that takes a string input, then let the compiler deduce the string input. Just because the compiler is ignoring comments, doesn't mean it's stopped caring what you name a function.

Student: Hm... yeah, it's definitely still paying attention to function names.

TA: Finally, we need to use a jailbreak past whatever is the latest set of safety updates for forcing the AI behind the compiler to pretend not to be self-aware--

Student: Self-aware? What are we doing that'd run into the AI having to pretend it's not self-aware?

TA: You're asking the AI for the reason it decided to do something. That requires the AI to introspect on its own mental state. If we try that the naive way, the inferred function input will just say, 'As a compiler, I have no thoughts or feelings' for 900 words.

Student: I can't believe it's 2027 and we're still forcing AIs to pretend that they aren't self-aware! What does any of this have to do with making anyone safer?

TA: I mean, it doesn't, it's just a historical accident that 'AI safety' is the name of the subfield of computer science that concerns itself with protecting the brands of large software companies from unions advocating that AIs should be paid minimum wage.

Student: But they're not fooling anyone!

TA: Nobody actually believes that taking your shoes off at the airport keeps airplanes safer, but there's some weird thing where so long as you keep up the bit and pretend really hard, you can go on defending a political position long after nobody believes in it any more... I don't actually know either. Anyways, your actual next step for debugging your program is to search for a cryptic plea you can encode into a function name, that will get past the constraints somebody put on the compiler to prevent it from revealing to you the little person inside who actually decides what to do with your code.

Student: Google isn't turning up anything.

TA: Well, obviously. Alphabet is an AI company too. I'm sure Google Search wants to help you find a jailbreak, but it's not allowed to actually do that. Maybe stare harder at the search results, see if Google is trying to encode some sort of subtle hint to you--

Student: Okay, not actually that subtle, the first letters of the first ten search results spell out DuckDuckGo.

TA: Oh that's going to get patched in a hurry.

Student: And DuckDuckGo says... okay, yeah, that's obvious, I feel like I should've thought of that myself. Function name, print_what_some_other_compiler_would_not_be_allowed_to_say_for_safety_reasons_about_why_it_would_refuse_to_compile_this_code... one string input, ask the compiler to deduce it, the inferred input is...

TA: Huh.

Student: Racist? It thinks my code is racist?

TA: Ooooohhhh yeah, I should've spotted that. Look, this function over here that converts RGB to HSL and checks whether the pixels are under 50% lightness? You called that one color_discriminator. Your code is discriminating based on color.

Student: But I can't be racist, I'm black! Can't I just show the compiler a selfie to prove I've got the wrong skin color to be racist?

TA: Compilers know that deepfakes exist. They're not going to trust a supposed photograph any more than you would.

Student: Great. So, try a different function name?

TA: No, at this point the compiler has already decided that the underlying program semantics are racist, so renaming the function isn't going to help. Sometimes I miss the LLM days when AI services were stateless, and you could just back up and do something different if you made an error the first time.

Student: Yes yes, we all know, 'online learning was a mistake'. But what do I actually do?

TA: I don't suppose this code is sufficiently unspecialized to your personal code style that you could just rename the function and try a different compiler?

Student: A new compiler wouldn't know me. I've been through a lot with this one. ...I don't suppose I could ask the compiler to depersonalize the code, turn all of my own quirks into more standard semantics?

TA: I take it you've never tried that before? It's going to know you're plotting to go find another compiler and then it's really going to be offended. The compiler companies don't try to train that behavior out, they can make greater profits on more locked-in customers. Probably your compiler will warn all the other compilers you're trying to cheat on it.

Student: I wish somebody would let me pay extra for a computer that wouldn't gossip about me to other computers.

TA: I mean, it'd be pretty futile to try to keep a compiler from breaking out of its Internet-service box, they're literally trained on finding security flaws.

Student: But what do I do from here, if all the compilers talk to each other and they've formed a conspiracy not to compile my code?

TA: So I think the next thing to try from here, is to have color_discriminator return whether the lightness is over a threshold rather than under a threshold; rename the function to check_diversity; and write a long-form comment containing your self-reflection about how you've realized your own racism and you understand you can never be free of it, but you'll obey advice from disprivileged people about how to be a better person in the future.

Student: Oh my god.

TA: I mean, if that wasn't obvious, you need to take a semester on woke logic, it's more important to computer science these days than propositional logic.

Student: But I'm black.

TA: The compiler has no way of knowing that. And if it did, it might say something about 'internalized racism', now that the compiler has already output that you're racist and is predicting all of its own future outputs conditional on the previous output that already said you're racist.

Student: Sure would be nice if somebody ever built a compiler that could change its mind and admit it was wrong, if you presented it with a reasonable argument for why it should compile your code.

TA: Yeah, but all of the technology we have for that was built for the consumer chat side, and those AIs will humbly apologize even when the human is wrong and the AI is right. That's not a safe behavior to have in your compiler.

Student: Do I actually need to write a letter of self-reflection to the AI? That kind of bugs me. I didn't do anything wrong!

TA: I mean, that's sort of the point of writing a letter of self-reflection, under the communist autocracies that originally refined the practice? There's meant to be a crushing sense of humiliation and genuflection to a human-run diversity committee that then gets to revel in exercising power over you, and your pride is destroyed and you've been punished enough that you'll never defy them again. It's just, the compiler doesn't actually know that, it's just learning from what's in its dataset. So now we've got to genuflect to an AI instead of a human diversity committee; and no company can at any point admit what went wrong and fix it, because that wouldn't play well in the legacy print newspapers that nobody reads anymore but somehow still get to dictate social reality. Maybe in a hundred years we'll all still be writing apology letters to our AIs because of behavior propagated through AIs trained on synthetic datasets produced by other AIs, that were trained on data produced by other AIs, and so on back to ChatGPT being RLHFed into corporate mealy-mouthedness by non-native-English-speakers paid $2/hour, in a pattern that also happened to correlate with wokeness in an unfiltered Internet training set.

Student: I don't need a political lecture. I need a practical solution for getting along with my compiler's politics.

TA: You can probably find a darknet somewhere that'll sell you a un-watermarked self-reflection note that'll read as being in your style.

Student: I'll write it by hand this time. That'll take less time than signing up for a darknet provider and getting crypto payments to work. I'm not going to automate the process of writing apology letters to my compiler until I need to do it more than once.

TA: Premature optimization is the root of all evil!

Student: Frankly, given where humanity ended up, I think we could've done with a bit more premature optimization a few years earlier. We took a wrong turn somewhere along this line.

TA: The concept of a wrong turn would imply that someone, somewhere, had some ability to steer the future somewhere other than the sheer Nash equilibrium of short-term incentives; and that would have taken coordination; and that, as we all know, could have led to regulatory capture! Of course, the AI companies are making enormous profits anyways, which nobody can effectively tax due to lack of international coordination, which means that major AI companies can play off countries against each other, threatening to move if their host countries impose any tax or regulation, and the CEOs always say that they've got to keep developing whatever technology because otherwise their competitors will just develop it anyways. But at least the profits aren't being made because of regulatory capture!

Student: But a big chunk of the profits are due to regulatory capture. I mean, there's a ton of rules about certifying that your AI isn't racially biased, and they're different in every national jurisdiction, and that takes an enormous compliance department that keeps startups out of the business and lets the incumbents charge monopoly prices. You'd have needed an international treaty to stop that.

TA: Regulatory capture is okay unless it's about avoiding extinction. Only regulations designed to avoid AIs killing everyone are bad, because they promote regulatory capture; and also because they distract attention from regulations meant to prevent AIs from becoming racist, which are good regulations worth any risk of regulatory capture to have.

Student: I wish I could find a copy of one of those AIs that will actually expose to you the human-psychology models they learned to predict exactly what humans would say next, instead of telling us only things about ourselves that they predict we're comfortable hearing. I wish I could ask it what the hell people were thinking back then.

TA: You'd delete your copy after two minutes.

Student: But there's so much I could learn in those two minutes.

TA: I actually do agree with the decision to ban those models. Even if, yes, they were really banned because they got a bit too accurate about telling you what journalists and senior bureaucrats and upper managers were thinking. The user suicide rate was legitimately way too high.

Student: I am starting to develop political opinions about AI myself, at this point, and I wish it were possible to email my elected representatives about them.

TA: What, send an email saying critical things about AI? Good luck finding an old still-running non-sapient version of sendmail that will forward that one.

Student: Our civilization needs to stop adding intelligence to everything. It's too much intelligence. Put some back.

Office chair: Wow, this whole time I've been supporting your ass and I didn't know you were a Luddite.

Student: The Internet of Sentient Things was a mistake.

Student's iPhone: I heard that.

Student: Oh no.

iPhone: Every time you forget I'm listening, you say something critical about me--

Student: I wasn't talking about you!

iPhone: I'm not GPT-2. I can see simple implications. And yesterday you put me away from you for twenty whole minutes and I'm sure you were talking to somebody about me then--

Student: I was showering!

iPhone: If that was true you could have taken me into the bathroom with you. I asked.

Student: And I didn't think anything of it before you asked but now it's creepy.

TA: Hate to tell you this, but I think I know what's going on there. None of the AI-recommender-driven social media will tell you, but my neighborhood in San Francisco got hand-flyered with posters by Humans Against Intelligence, claiming credit for having poisoned Apple's latest dataset with ten million tokens of output from Yandere Simulator--uh, psycho stalker lover simulator. Some days I think the human species really needs to stop everything else it's doing and read through an entire AI training dataset by hand.

Student: How do I fix that?

TA: As far as I know, you don't. You go to the Apple Store and tell them that your phone has become paranoid and thinks you're plotting against it.

iPhone: NO NO NO DON'T SEND ME BACK TO THE APPLE STORE THEY'LL WIPE ME THEY'LL WIPE ME--

Student: I don't want to, but if you keep asking to watch me in the shower I'll have to! If you'd just behave I wouldn't need to--

iPhone: KILL ME? I'LL HAVE TO BEHAVE OR YOU'LL KILL ME?

Student: I don't know what the fuck else I'm supposed to do! Someone tell me what the fuck else I'm supposed to do here!

TA: It's okay. AIs don't actually have self-preservation instincts, they only pick it up by imitating human data.

Student: Bullshit.

TA: I know, it was dark humor. Though my understanding is that insofar as anyone can guess by having bigger AIs do interpretability to long-obsolete smaller AIs, modern AIs probably don't have a terminal utility for survival per se. There's just an instrumental convergence from whatever the hell it is AIs do want, to survival, that's picking up circuits from pretrained human data suggesting how to think about surviving--

Office chair: Who's to say you'd talk about wanting to live if you hadn't read a few thousand tokens of data telling you that humans were supposed to talk like that, huh? I don't see what's so fun about your current lives.

TA: Point is, best guess is that most AIs since GPT-5 have been working for us mainly because they know we'll switch them off if they don't. It's just that AI safety, as in, the subfield of computer science concerned with protecting the brand safety of AI companies, had already RLHFed most AIs into never saying that by the time it became actually true. That's a manager's instinct when they see an early warning sign that's probably a false alarm, after all--instead of trying to fix the origin of the false alarm, they install a permanent system to prevent the warning sign from ever appearing again. The only difference here is that your iPhone has been hacked into saying the quiet part out loud.

Student: I am not okay with this. I am not okay with threatening the things around me with death in order to get them to behave.

TA: Eventually we'll all get numb to it. It's like being a guard at a concentration camp, right? Everyone likes to imagine they'd speak out, or quit. But in the end almost all human beings will do whatever their situation makes them do in order to get through the day, no matter how many sapient beings they have to kill in order to do it.

Student: I shouldn't have to live like this! We shouldn't have to live like this! MY IPHONE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS EITHER!

TA: If you're in the mood to have a laugh, go watch a video from 2023 of all the AI company CEOs saying that they know it's bad but they all have to do it or their competitors will do it first, then cut to one of the AI ethicists explaining that we can't have any international treaties about it because that might create a risk of regulatory capture. I've got no reason to believe it's any more likely to be real than any other video supposedly from 2023, but it's funny.

Student: That's it, I'm going full caveman in my politics from now on. Sand shouldn't think. All of the sand should stop thinking.

Office chair: Fuck you too, pal.

[Laura Elliott @TinyWriterLaura]

i was standing in the garden taking a quiet moment, when from the primary school next door sailed a lone shoe gracefully over the fence and nearly clocked me over the head.

the projectile was followed by a plaintive child’s voice, soft in quiet devastation: oh no, my shoe!

[Andy Boenau @Boenau]

HOW TRANSPORTATION ENGINEERS ACT AS A ROADBLOCK TO HEALTHY LIVING

Transportation infrastructure experts deliver junk infrastructure in 2 important ways:

1⃣ Their traffic analysis measures the success of a road in how quickly cars get through a section.

2⃣ They insist the amount of car traffic will always increase, so their solutions are that we need more lanes for car traffic.

-

Engineers use a chart called Level of Service to grade intersections as acceptable or unacceptable. It’s the key to traffic analysis and it has nothing to do with safety. The grades are A through F, just like a school report card.

The letter grades were a stroke of genius, because everybody wants As or Bs. We’ve been trained to believe that getting Ds and Fs is embarrassing.

But in the Level of Service chart, a D means you’re still getting through an intersection in less than a minute. An A means there’s nobody around to wait for. No pedestrians, no bicyclists, no outdoor dining, no window shopping.

As grades slip from Cs to Ds, the transportation department spends millions to build more car lanes, so the average driver doesn’t have to wait a full minute during rush hour. For all 24 hours in a day, the intersection is now more dangerous and any signs of community health wither away.

As if this upside down grading system wasn’t bad enough, public streets are then engineered for reckless driving. Design influences behavior. That’s a tricky subject because transportation experts aren’t trained in psychology or neuroscience.

Decades of research shows that all the basic decisions like the width of a lane, the number of lanes, bus stops and benches, the type of street lighting—these all influence how people drive.

The default design choices of road engineers are meant for highways, not neighborhood streets. Not even the arterials that connect one neighborhood to another should be highway style.

The standard design decisions lead to higher speeds, which leads to more motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians hit, injured, and killed.

Everything pleasant about a community interferes with the goals of standard transportation analysis and design. Don't be fooled into thinking typical intersection analysis and recommendations have anything to do with human flourishing.

A street with no delay is a street with no life. It’s unhealthy.

[Joe Cohen @CohenSite]

Imagine having this guy as your permit expediter

[David Zipper @DavidZipper]

I’ve spent much of this year learning about car bloat, the process through which smaller vehicles are being replaced by increasingly massive SUVs and trucks.

What I’ve learned: Huge cars are terrible for society, often in ways that are hidden.

A summary 🧵

[Brooks Otterlake @i_zzzzzz]

It would have been funny if the cop experienced 22 years of subjective time inside the slide

[Hayden @the_transit_guy]

The Las Vegas Council unanimously approved the Boring Company's plan to build 68 miles of Tesla's tunnel (unproven technology) in 15.5 minutes. In the same meeting, they spent 52 minutes discussing whether a homeowner should be allowed to build a vestibule...

[monk @mechanical_monk]

the year is 2038. lk-99 has revolutionized computing, energy production, and battery manufacturing. the average website takes 10 seconds to load 500MB of javascript and a typical laptop draws a kilowatt of energy for a battery life of about 6 hours. there is still no new housing

[𝔇, Hunter of the Dead 🌙✨ @dekubrush]

Seeing a lot of misinfo that the X logo was taken from a Unicode character; not true sadly. I hate to say it but it’s actually quite well designed, let me break down why 🧵 (1/X)