NavinF retweeted
just heard someone say "people are more important than the economy" and it occurred to me that some people genuinely believe that others care about the economy because they like numbers going up and not because it drives living standards for the population
NavinF retweeted
seems reasonable to call the decision to not release GPT-2-XL safetyist slop separate from whether it made you an AGI-believer-elect or not in 2019. It was obviously true that the model wasn’t dangerous in any way; even the threats cited at the time were about spam
Dario reveals the people who called his GPT-2 fears "pseudoscience" in 2019 are now all applying for jobs at AI labs
"I personally was super freaked out by [GPT-2]. I looked at it and I said, my God, you just scale this thing up another factor of a million and it'll be better than humans at everything. This is the defining economic and scientific moment of the modern age. We just don't know it yet. This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity."
"Maybe 10% of the people around me had exactly the same reaction, and it was often the smartest ones. 90% of the people around me, because GPT-2's capabilities in any particular area were not that impressive, it could translate languages, summarize a document and write a few lines of code here and there. It was the broadness and the generality."
"But people would look at it and say, in any particular area, that doesn't seem so smart. And so many people just shrugged and they just dismissed it."
"I just look at it and I say it's the same thing over and over again. The limitations of the models, six months from now, the things that seemed hard, they're going to be easy. 12 months from now, the things that seemed impossible, the models are going to be doing them regularly."
"It's everything we saw with GPT-2; we're seeing it over and over again in wider and wider swaths of the world. And the world is gradually finally being convinced."
Daniela Amodei: "I remember at the time there were some very well-respected computer scientists and AI and ML leaders who basically bullied some of the researchers who worked on [GPT-2] on Twitter and were like, this is stupid. We don't know why you guys are even talking, this model is so incapable."
"It was like you were sort of a quack if you believed this was a really significant moment."
Dario: "That's all been memory-holed. All the researchers who were like, oh, this is pseudoscience, it doesn't make sense, all of them are applying for jobs at the LLM companies."
"We never say it out loud to any particular one, but we look at them and they're like, we remember what you were saying in 2019. You have no credibility on this matter."
NavinF retweeted
He wasn’t even mocking him, he just called him "a Chinese dictator" (it’s clear from the video that he had no idea who exactly Mao was), saying the meme in which they had replaced Mao’s face with his had made him laugh. This hyper-sensitivity is kind of pathetic to be honest.
Major brands in China have dropped Kylian Mbappé over a clip in which the French football megastar appeared to mock Mao Zedong, China’s modern founding leader.
vist.ly/5q5xz
NavinF retweeted
It is fascinating that chinese internet users - even ones with VPNs - appear to be completely ignorant of how historical figures are discussed in western democracies
NavinF retweeted
This is the final nail in the coffin for TPOT courtesy likes, it’s finally over
~14 hours ago, 𝕏 updated the algorithm (again).
There are a few new things worth noting:
• New "user debias" model: adjusts engagement based on how "generous" each viewer is
• Likes from people who like everything will start counting less
• Engagement from "picky" users who rarely interact will count more
• Engagement pods and "like for like" groups got weaker
• Some general search improvements
• Media (video and image) are now tracked as their own signals
What still matters most:
• Posting high-quality, original content
• Replies (5x) and quotes (5x) are weighted far above likes (0.5x)
• Shares via DM (5x) and copy link (20x) are the strongest positive signals
• A predicted follow is worth 4x
• Reports, mutes, blocks, and "not interested" are heavily negative
• Posts older than 48 hours drop out of For You
• Posting too much in a row decays your reach
TL;DR: regardless of algo changes, just focus on producing content that is unique to you.
NavinF retweeted
This anecdote specifically is extremely disturbing
This piece by @IvanVendrov is worth reading, particularly if you work at Anthropic nothinghuman.substack.com/p/…
NavinF retweeted
Friendly reminder:
If you really know the Democrats will take the Senate, you can earn a 50% return on your money in one day.
If you really know the Republicans will hold the Senate, you can earn a 200% return on your money in one day.
NavinF retweeted
I was preparing a talk I’d be giving in London and I realized most of my audience would have never ridden in a driverless taxi. That probably goes for most Americans too. And there’s no good reason for this. The tech works great. Self-driving is already superhuman. But legacy interests have kept it banned in most places.
If the AI revolution “only” delivers 5-10% GDP growth, stuff like this will be why: the tech is ready, but rent-seekers prevent it from diffusing.
Updated @Tesla Robotaxi geofence sizes (in square miles):
• Austin: 272
• Houston: 254 (916% increase today)
• Dallas: 81
• Miami: 31
• Orlando: 26
• Tampa: 24
All these areas are fully autonomous/unsupervised robotaxis only.
NavinF retweeted
>discord gets popular, killing forums
>everyone complains cuz now information is trapped in walled gardens, inaccessible to search engines
>discord says "okay fine, search engines can index public servers"
>everyone complains again for some reason
?????
Discord will soon make public server messages searchable on Google
The feature will be enabled by default for US adults, but users can opt out in their privacy settings
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Missing context: only applies to messages posted after the update, in public channels of discoverable servers.
No private servers or DMs.
Indexed messages won’t show usernames or avatars.
Admins can opt out entire servers; users can opt out their own messages.
discord.com/blog/making-co…
NavinF retweeted
This is rage-inducing. It’s not “child neglect” to let a 14-year-old babysit. Law enforcement also took these kids to their dad, who’s facing battery charges and has an active restraining order against him. How does that make *any* sense?
Bodycam footage shows Florida deputies arresting a mother at an airport after authorities say she left her four children, ages 9, 11, 12 and 14, home alone while traveling to Las Vegas for work.
Irene Miller, 50, was taken into custody Friday as she stepped off a plane. Two days earlier, one of her children had called 911 after a dumbbell fell on her 9-year-old brother's head.
When deputies arrived at the family's Kissimmee home, they found the children without adult supervision and had the injured boy taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released. Miller now faces four counts of child neglect.
NavinF retweeted
Nothing radicalizes me in the pro-AI direction more than headlines like this.
Ban the keyboard this woman types on too!
This is why everything sucks and is too expensive. If journalists who write stories like this get their way, then the AI companies will make sure their chatbots always say "see a doctor" every time you get a tiny scratch.
Talk to me about hacks or alignment. Don't tell me about AI convincing people to do things that are bad for them.
NavinF retweeted
I don't know why Nate Silver has to "live down" predicting a 30% chance Trump would win in 2016. Things with 30% likelihood still happen all the time! 30% of the time in fact!
Listened to Nate Silver on Ezra this morning. One of the least popular things I could do on this website is defend Nate Silver, so challenge accepted.
His "vibes" have been directionally correct in every Election. In 2012, he fought against the polling unskewers making claims that Romney would win based on undersampling of Republicans.
In 2016, his model was famously FAR more bullish on Trump than any others. He was the only modeler who understood the possibility of correlated polling error.
In 2020, he repeatedly emphasized the higher than usual uncertainty due to the pandemic.
In 2022, he fought back against pollsters (NY Times!) basically ignoring their own data to buy into the Red Wave.
In 2024, he said that even though his model was 50/50, his gut said Trump would win.
All in all, a better record than anyone else on Election Twitter.
NavinF retweeted
I'm putting my foot down against the protein slander.
The thermic effect of protein is about 20-30% of the calories from protein. For carbs it's 5-10%
That means if you switch 50g of carbs to protein you'll burn an extra 30-40 calories.
Trust me, that 30-40 calories is not whats hurting your gains. More likely you just weren't training hard enough or eating enough in general.
NavinF retweeted
Your "peers" aren't making this
money at 25. People who are smarter than you, luckier than you, and higher agency than you are
"I didn't make as much as the .001%" is and always has been an idiotic yardstick. There are children to raise, grass to touch and sunshine to feel
We're living in a horrifying, fascinating new era of Silicon Valley where:
1. You can build a startup in 9 months, get acquired (but rly acquihired) by OpenAI, Anthropic, or Cognition, and walk away a multi-millionaire
2. You can join the right company at 22 and become effectively post-economic
And I don't think we've even begun to grapple with the degree to which this is warping an entire generation's relationship with money, ambition, work, and success.
When your peers are making generational wealth before 25, what does a normal career even look like anymore
NavinF retweeted
The way in which some people are invested in "proving" that Pangram is unreliable, to the point that they will even lie through their teeth in order to do so, is truly bizarre at this point.
NavinF retweeted
I just feel like these mostly come down to class differences and the comfort disparity in discretionary spending.
A few years ago our friend wanted to celebrate her birthday by going to see Taylor Swift. We had a new baby. We opened up 4 laptops on Ticketmaster and managed to snag tickets for the final weekend in Vancouver a year away.
We left our kids (including the 16 month old) with my parents and went to Vancouver for 3 days. It was an incredible trip.
Tickets: $350 x 2
Hotel: $100 (split a room)
Flights: $1546
You’re not going to make many new friends as an adult and I really believe that it’s important to continue investing in and strengthening your existing friendships. But I’d be singing a different tune if they wanted to go spend a week skiing in Switzerland for $20K or whatever.
NavinF retweeted
The only recorded time in existence for this bar to potentially receive business in an actual financial compensation for service rendered sense and this happens
I visited the Last Ditch lesbian bar
mamathemagazine.com/the-last…
