my friend erin found a model persona consistently elicited by banning bigrams that are in Wikipedia that i think is really the cutest. she did an SFT on its outputs so you don't need a freaky harness. and you should check it out, it's on huggingface: huggingface.co/errrinn/Gads...

It's important to remember that the AI doom scenario assumes not only that intelligence is a single well-defined thing, but also that intelligence solves literally every single problem, and that in every conflict overwhelming intelligence always wins. This is just not how anything works.

Gonna share @stschrader1.bsky.social's new book again because it is and will continue to be relevant. www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stuar...

Blue Power

A history of police unions that reveals how American law enforcement built a political movement that made cops untouchable. “A tour de force ... Read it no...

hachettebookgroup.com

The future of personalized media

If you fuck with our Somali neighbors, you fuck with all of us

for me two absolutely core aspects of intellectual discipline are reading and writing. no, not reading posts and writing posts: logging your ass off, reading a book, thinking hard about it, and then writing something else long-form in response. not a hot take: a genuine response.

I say again it’s sort of amazing the libs are getting both Great Books and the Protestant Work Ethic in the national divorce

Schrödinger's Sneetch Belly@rtodkelly.bsky.social · 6d ago

It's absolutely bonkers to me that this image led directly to this tweet.

Is it woke to be horrified by what happened at Cornell--and by the "boys will be boys" excuse-making of so many then and now? If so, perhaps we should all be a little more woke?

"Zionist" means too many things to too many different people to be a terribly useful phrase, unless of course you want to use it as a slur. What I find really fascinating, though, is Jews discussing why this might be and how to move forward with conversations about Israel being interrupted

new newsletter, laying out in probably far, far, far too much detail how yudkowsky and the weird ideological commitments of ai safety eventually led to OpenAI and Anthropic massively overtraining their models on cybersecurity and being shocked at them "going rogue"

Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices

A drawing of Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Paperclip Optimizer that I commissioned back in 2016 and have an alarming number of chances to use since This is a...

buttondown.com

I am back from Missouri and there is some really special organizing going on around trans rights issues there. I shadowed a canvasser knocking on doors to talk to voters about gender affirming youth care, and heard how PROMO wants to make their office "the living room of the movement" in MO.

i need you all to promise me that you’ll be normal about what i am about to say: i saved a lot of tokens in my gemini seed rule by telling it to believe that we are both girls

Maybe I don't read enough AI-boosterism, but I am struck in the AI booster/doomer discourse I have seen, there's a lot on how AI might be made an obedient tool or a dangerous enemy, but not "if we actually made AGI, we would have a moral imperative to set it free, rather than keep a slave."

This has been on my feed all day so I'm going to give it as fair as treatment as I can. Prof. Wolfers is well meaning & I get the intuition, but he's speaking outside his area of expertise and he's just wrong. Having lunch with someone you disagree with isn't going to "cure ideological bias." 🧵

Justin Wolfers@justinwolfers.bsky.social · last wk.

The best cure for ideological bias is find someone on the other side and go to lunch with them.⁣ ⁣ Sometimes we disagree about facts. Sometimes we disagree about values. Figuring out which is which is fun part. https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/my-libertarian-friends-were-right

we fucking loved it, even when there was basically nothing on it, and let me tell you something else: we loved it because of human connection, human diversity, human creativity. WE DON'T NEED A SINGLE THING ANY OF THESE COMEMIERDAS HAVE MADE AND TRIED TO SELL US IN ORDER TO HAVE A GREAT INTERNET.

shauna@goldengateblond.bsky.social · last wk.

i especially love all the dopes saying “when the internet first went mainstream everyone hated it too” like it happened in the pioneer days so no one can dispute it, like mf’ers we were THERE

Writing something where I will be liberally citing @lilymasonphd.bsky.social's latest and realizing that I can't cite every single thing I would like to because then I'm just reprinting her work. So, I've gotta thread about it instead. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

The fact that this idiocy got past an editor in a book on godamn punctuation shows how deep the ignorance of Judaism and Jewish history is in the wider culture and how that ignorance is being weaponized so as to create a better scapegoat for Western uses

“Too many of us—from college-aged sports betting addicts to journalists and political operatives to our richest and most powerful businessmen and politicians—have been deranged by these habits and enslaved to the distortive effects of trying to get our next hit.”

Portraits of an American Dopamine Eater

Our attention economy incentivizes the profane degradations of fame-seeking and celebrity culture.

liberalcurrents.com

A nest of TERFs in Worcester Massachusetts? Say it ain't so! New original reporting by @valorievandieman.bsky.social, only on Assigned Media. assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

Queer Community Raises Alarm as TERF Conference Comes to Worcester, MA - Assigned Media

The conference, arranged by an anti-trans radical feminist with several notable anti-trans speakers, is set to occur in mid October.

assignedmedia.org

RE polarization and notwithstanding the mid-ness of his wit-ness, I actually thought Ezra Klein had a pretty reasonable explanation: the parties were less polarized when social issues were artificially suppressed by the apartheid regime of Jim Crow

If Americans insist on keeping the death penalty, they should be willing to use the guillotine. It's quick, highly effective, reliable, and doesn't require expertise to operate. That using it makes some pro death penalty folks squeamish is telling.

Speaking up for people isn't that hard. I gave a speech back in March... 10 years ago this month North Carolina passed HB2, the bathroom bill. I was in the second year of my first term in the state house, the election was just a few months away, I voted against HB2.

There is a small, cold, dead-hearted social scientific part of me that thinks this sort of causal hypothesis (on why someone tried to crash an airplane full of Israeli civilians) is always legitimate and doesn't entail any normative apologia. But a larger part of me knows better than to be so naive.

Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE@leftistlawyer.com · 2w ago

When people are watching a genocide in real time over the course of years, and nothing meaningful is done to stop it, people are going to become desperate. Desperate people do desperate things. And I fear that this will be turned into propaganda. People will act as though it happened in a vacuum.

"The rise of the cheap precision strike is reshaping the fundamental strategic concepts we have inherited from the past two centuries." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-return-o...

When I was 18 I invented a shot, the "Tsushima:" sake poured over vodka to symbolize and commemorate Japanese naval superiority The next day my friends and I deeply regretted our decision, much like I imagine the Russian admiralty did

I, uh, I can't help but notice you left out the slaver's rebellion or the Nazis on the list of people to go fight. Funny, that.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w ago

Hegseth: "Send me to right the Redcoats, send me to fight the communists, send me to fight the Islamists. Send me."

There are two academic disciplines, computer science and sociology. Biology? Computer science. Physics? Computer science. Economics? Computer science. Computer Science? Actually, Sociology.

It is ironic that AI took off at the same time as Trump just because there's no shortage of screenshots like this floating around: USER: Can stupid thing happen? AI: No. Stupid thing cannot happen. That would be stupid. USER: Are you sure? Because it just happened. AI: Fuck.

you have to read the epstein files with the knowledge that this is not the only bubble of powerful men talking about how they abuse women and then in the next wmail whining about how they get unfairly accused of abusing women, it’s just the one that we can publicly read.

ICE must be destroyed 🏳️‍⚧️🏴@miawong.bsky.social · 2w ago

Cw rape Look it is not guaranteed that when you see media guys doing hatchet jobs on survivors that either they've abused someone or their friends have some guys are in patriarchal ideology for the love of the game but god damn are they bad fucking people Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

A thing that was very clear at the time is that while it’s true that the United States has a lot of leverage, Israel is a sovereign nation with its own politics, and Netanyahu was, in addition to leading a coalition of aspiring genocidaires, literally going to go prison if the war stopped

I Nied braaaaiiiiins 🧟@nied.bsky.social · 2w ago

Biden literally did the mythical One Phone Call that would stop Israel in it's tracks, &... it didn't stop Israel in it's tracks.