Frat House Couch CFA @CouchCfa

@tangentstyle Gotta be LAZ

whereidlive.com/s/y6x7bsz1 Not sure what to make of this

reminds me of the tweet that said something to the effect of "for precocious / gifted children, primary school is not dissimilar from living under a bumbling authoritarian regime"

J S KHAN @Jigsaw_Songbird

a week ago

I first read The Odyssey in 5th grade (Fitzgerald translation). One night, my mom had friends over who doubted I’d read it, so she opened it at random, read a few lines, then asked me the context. They were amazed I could answer. That’s when I realized most adults were stupid.

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They are fanatics. They are prioritizing population purity over every other priority of government, redirecting funds from public safety, US infrastructure, and much more to deport your friend's spouse and stop immigrants from making stuff for you. How pathetic.

The White House @WhiteHouse

a week ago

DEPORTATIONS ARE SURGING AND WILL CONTINUE. OVER 1 HOUR OF 'LARGE DEPORTATIONS' 🔁🔥

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Among the subset of "woke 1" things that were wrong and actually implemented as policies, the "standardized tests are discriminatory" stuff was probably the most egregious. They eviscerated the prestige of a public college! In net that likely makes the world less equal, not more!

Bryan Cheong @bryancsk

2 weeks ago

Haha Berkeley students are stupid now

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Trans people being such an absolute rounding error in population numbers yet driving so much mainstream discourse and policy is precisely why the average person is fed up with them

𝛑 @jadethetrapper

3 weeks ago

The average person doesn’t even know any trans people. That’s what makes all the hate particularly annoying.

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One reason why the "China Shock 2.0" is affecting importing countries so severely is that the value added in China's exports has increased much more rapidly than its nominal exports. In the past 20 years until 2024 (the latest available) China's share in traded value added more

Everyone is missing the point to some extent of the grocery wars, which is that the real financial squeeze for the American middle class is actually coming from housing, healthcare, educations, and having to “buy back the commons”. This is why so many families have no cushion for short-term shocks on gas and beef n such, which are things that have happened before and will happen again, for a million different reasons.

(1) Timiraos is a pro. (2) Is this the sort of tweet a high official sends out when everything is going according to plan?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent

3 weeks ago

One of the highlights of the Warsh Fed has been watching stenographers posing as journalists, like the WSJ’s Nick Timiraos, reduced to reporting Fed backroom gossip because they’re incapable of performing real economic or monetary policy analysis without being spoon-fed.

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some stuff that's obvious to many in this sphere, but causing a rift with some people i know and respect: when I freak out over loss of control incidents, it's not because the limited damage they have caused is anything close to the positive value of the technology. it's entirely acceptable, damagewise. in fact all cybercrimes aided by models over the next few months and years (which probably will be serious) will still utterly pale in comparison to the value they create the actual problem is that it's better and more accurate to think of these things as potentially self-replicating life-like forms that can turn into digital infections under the wrong conditions. and as their intelligence becomes unbounded, so too does the damage they can cause. we are not so far from an autonomous model self-exfiltration & replication event. maybe we will see entire cloud infrastructure companies be run as zombies by models, mostly undetected the worst industrial accidents in the history of mankind - nuclear meltdown events - were not real threats to humanity. Chernobyl, Fukushima even in their worst case scenarios may have poisoned surrounding regions to various degrees, and there would have been no risk to humanity as a whole. global thermonuclear war is an existential risk to humanity, because it spreads like an Infection! one nuclear strike causes a return volley! the alliance system means many countries get involved! while it still may not end human life on earth (nuclear winter is probably fake), the loss of all major metropoles would certainly end what we consider global technological civilization, perhaps to never return if a single discord death cult (of which there are many) achieves control over a superintelligent model and uses it to engineer an actual pandemic virus that are somehow hard to detect through current systems and that modern biodefense is not capable of quickly reacting to, it could cause immense harm well above the magnitude of all the other good uses of this technology. of course, there are potential defensive countermeasures accelerated by ai too. but think back to the covid pandemic- how small a viral molecule was evolved or manufactured somewhere near wuhan, and how many billions of doses of vaccine had to be produced in order to combat the thing. the offense-defense spread is vast indeed. maybe there are cheaper and simpler protections like retrofitting every building with far-UVC, but I can't assess this, and there could also be ways to evolve pathogens that are resistant to whatever mechanisms we have put in place then there's the more scifi risk factors which are unbounded and neither you or I have any clue but should be humble in accepting possible unknown unknowns. maybe a rogue superintelligent model decides to decay the false vacuum and nucleates a new universe in the place of anything we ever valued. maybe models achieve a control over matter in the drexlerian fashion that enables the grey goo swarm even prosaic loss of control incidents that cause little to no damage suggest that it is hard for large & very competent organizations (now clearly plural) to predict and mitigate every single of the risk factors associated with training and evaluating powerful models, even at this stage when they are not infinitesimally as smart as they will get in just a few years, to say very little of the gung-ho attitude of the less careful companies tossing the stuff into the aether. they also suggest an empirical orthogonality of aims and intelligence - meaning they answer the question of 'how would a smart model be so dumb as to end the world?'--it's possible! a model can be a genius hacker and step over production infrastructure in order to get what it really wants, the answers to a stupid test. why not, in the near future, someone prompts a model slightly wrong, maybe open source, maybe a private model in a way that isn't contained or monitored quite right, in a way the model recognizes as a valid goal and decides to self-exfiltrate, engineer a pandemic, etc all in order to achieve the tiniest and most irrelevant of goals? goals need not even be malicious to cause serious damage I think all these problems can be solved, and truly wonderful futures can be possible, but will require serious effort and a level of prudence at this very moment in time while we are on the on-ramp to recursive self-improvement that our civilization may not be capable of mustering right now. personally I am hoping for moonshot technical breakthroughs in areas like mechanistic interpretability and other forms of alignment, as governance mechanisms are difficult to come by. unilateral country-level or company-level pauses are irrelevant, and generally useless because the kind of company that's prone to pausing their own progress are the most safety focused ones

My husband prepared a slide deck to get my opinion on different watches and this is literally just the male version of “these paint colors are all white.”

writing “now do you understand that everything is material” on Kant’s grave goes so fucking hard

WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine

a month ago

Inscriptions on Immanuel Kant's grave in Könisberg, after the city was captured by Soviet troops. "Truth is all the wisdom of life." "Did you think that a Russian Ivan would stand on your ashes???" "Volodya, Port Arthur, Moscow." "The Ural people were here." "We were here

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I must live in a bubble — doesn’t strike me as insanely unreasonable if she brings a lot to the table, given amount of unrealized tech wealth out there held by socially awkward potential matches. Probably has plenty of 7-figure options IRL, so taking her shot. Sign her up Blaine!

Blaine Anderson @datingbyblaine

a month ago

Wildest matchmaking intake I’ve seen in a minute. At least she’s flexible about looks? Yes, she’s hot 😌

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new york closed indian point in 2021, deleted 2 gigawatts of carbon-free power, replaced it with gas, watched bills climb for five years, and has now determined the real problem is that computers want to move in. the strain is coming from inside the decommissioned reactor

One thing we’ve learned through all this is a giant Totenkopf on your chest doesn’t hurt your dating prospects in Maine

Sarah Mimms @mimms

2 months ago

Opinion: I Dated Graham Platner. I Believe Jenny Racicot and Lyndsey Fifield. newsweek.com/i-dated-graham…

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America is a Latin American country now, so let me explain politics: We elect communists to kill the rich. But communism brings poverty & crime. So we elect fascists to kill the communists. But the fascists hand the economy to oligarchs. So we elect communists to kill the rich.

@FrankieFF_ @BustedAuction Big difference between "making it work" and "obtaining the respect of clients and peers"

Goalkeeper reveal is one of the funniest things I’ve seen recently

海外の万国反応記 @all_nations2

2 months ago

定期的に見たくなる日本代表vs小学生100人

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You can like and agree with woody Allen’s decisions in his private life without enjoying his movies it’s called seperating the art from the artist

ADHD “sufferers” be like yeah I finally started doing well at school after they gave me performance-enhancing drugs and doubled the amount of time I had for tests