Lifehack: did you know you can just buy entry-level textbooks for fields you aren't familiar with and start reading? No one is stopping you from learning everything, and that is pretty cool
UC Berkeley has a new policy for alumni where if your Berkeley account has over 5GB stored in it, on Sept 17, they will just delete your whole account. Can you pay for more storage? No.
popular view in Silicon Valley where people want to imagine that fire runs in their veins and they would have ruled the wilder ancient world as a great king. it's cope and fantasy. your soft ways are made for this peaceful moment. be grateful for your softness and this peace.
At what is possibly a risk to my whole career I will say: this doesn't seem great. Lately I have been describing my role as something like a "public advocate" so I'd be remiss if I didn't share some thoughts for the public on this. Some thoughts in thread...
One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena from OpenAI.
I held back on talking about it because I didn't want to distract from SB 53, but Newsom just signed the bill so... here's what happened:
🧵
Very confused about this - is anyone getting any value-add out of AutoGPT? Very strange that the most popular github repo of all time appears to have zero real projects associated with it.
A strange phenomenon I expect will play out: for the next phase of AI, it's going to get better at a long tail of highly-specialized technical tasks that most people don't know or care about, creating an illusion that progress is standing still.
The saddest thing is, if Eliezer wanted to actually win at slowing down the field of AI, he'd be crusading about copyright law right now instead of talking about bombing datacenters. No legal big datasets, no big models. It's tractable, has broad support, and takes no dark arts.
The world isn't grappling enough with the seriousness of AI and how it will upend or negate a lot of the assumptions many seemingly-robust equilibria are based upon.
Hmmm: many people currently seem to view sci-fi solely as a vehicle for *critique* of technology or society, rather than for exploration of and curiousity towards technology. The zeitgeist seems to think that all sci-fi stories are "Don't Build the Torment Nexus."