Still, it merits pointing out that this explicitly isn’t happening because the private sector is clamoring to get some of that EY expertise on nothing the moment he’s available, but because MIRI is for all intents and purposes a gravy train for a small set of mutual acquaintances who occasionally have a board meeting to decide how much they’ll get paid that year.

This is from back when MIRI, then Singularity Institute, was paying him like $120K/y – https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qqhdj3W3vSfB5E9ss/siai-an-examination?commentId=4wo4bD9kkA22K5exH#4wo4bD9kkA22K5exH

OpenAi yearly payroll runs in the billions, so they probably aren’t hurting.

That Almsost AGI is short for Actually Bob and Vicky seems like quite the embarrassment, however.

Apparently you can ask gpt-5.2 to make you a zip of /home/oai and it will just do it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1pmb5n0/i_dug_deeper_into_the_openai_file_dump_its_not/

An important takeaway I think is that instead of Actually Indian it’s more like Actually a series rushed scriptjobs - they seem to be trying hard to not let the llm do technical work itself.

Also, it seems their sandboxing amounts to filtering paths that star with /.

Very good read actually.

Except, from the epilogue:

People are working to resolve [intelligence heritability issue] with new techniques and meta-arguments. As far as I understand, the frontline seems to be stabilizing around the 30-50% range. Sasha Gusev argues for the lower end of that band, but not everyone agrees.

The not-everyone-agrees link is to acx and siskind’s take on the matter, who unfortunately seems to continue to fly under the radar as a disingenuous eugenicist shitweasel with a long-term project of using his platform to sane-wash gutter racists who pretend at doing science.

They made a pro-longtermist video in association with open philanthropy a few years back, The Last Human or something like that, the summary was pretty open about the connection.

I don’t think the shadiness is specific to rationalism, see also that bizarre KG video claiming it’s scientifically impossible to lose weight by exercising that coincided with the height of Ozempic’s hype.

edit: The Last Human came out at 2022, the same year the McAskill book arguing longtermism was published, what a coinkidink.

Hyperstition is such a bad neologism, apparently doubleplus superstition equals self-fullfilling prophecy (transitive)? They don’t even bother to verb it properly… Nick Land got a nonsense word stuck in his head and now there’s a whole subculture of midwit thought leader wannabes parroting that shit.

Additionally he said something to the effect of I don’t blame you for not knowing this, it wasn’t effectively communicated to the media like it’s no big deal, which isn’t really helping to beat the allegations of don’t ask don’t tell policies about SA in rat related orgs.

[SBF’s] psychiatrist, George Lerner, worked in the same office as Scott Alexander IIRC (I’ve lost track of the source, will post later if I can find it).

It was in an ACX blog post, siskind just admitted it out of nowhere. edit: Well ok because he was obviously discussing him, but the possibility of any connections between them wasn’t really on anyone’s radar by then I think.

edit: Got it: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopharmacology-of-the-ftx#footnote-anchor-1-84889532

OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead

I just wanted to point out this tidbit:

Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.

Apparently a fortunate side effect of google supposedly closing the gap is that it’s a great opportunity to give up on agents without looking like complete clowns. And also make Pulse even more vapory.

The kids were using Adobe for Education. This calls itself “the creative resource for K–12 and Higher Education” and it includes the Adobe Express AI image generator.

I feel the extent to which schooling in the USA is of the this arts and crafts class brought to you by Carl’s Jr™ variety is probably understated.

Could be part of its RLHF training, frequent emphasized headers maybe help the prediction engine stay on track for long passages.

/r/SneerClub discusses MIRI financials and how Yud ended up getting paid $600K per year from their cache.

Malo Bourgon, MIRI CEO, makes a cameo in the comments to discuss Ziz’s claims about SA payoffs and how he thinks Yud’s salary (the equivalent of like 150.000 malaria vaccines) is defensible for reasons that definitely exist, but they live in Canada, you can’t see them.

link

article link

Hasn’t it lately become increasingly possible that the files of famous financier and MIRI donor J. Epstein will be finally released to public cognizance?

“not on squeaking terms”

by the way I first saw this in the stubsuck

Apparently genetically engineering ~300 IQ people (or breeding them, if you have time) is the consensus solution on how to subvert the acausal robot god, or at least the best the vast combined intellects of siskind and yud have managed to come up with.

So, using your influence to gradually stretch the overton window to include neonazis and all manner of caliper wielding lunatics in the hope that eugenics and human experimentation become cool again seems like a no-brainer, especially if you are on enough uppers to kill a family of domesticated raccoons at all times.

On a completely unrelated note, adderall abuse can cause cardiovascular damage, including heart issues or stroke, but also mental health conditions like psychosis, depression, anxiety and more.

Sabine Hossenfelder claims she finally got cancelled, kind of - Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy cut ties with Sabine Hossenfelder.

Supposedly the MCMP thought publicly shitting on a paper for clicks on your very popular youtube channel was antideontological. Link goes to reddit post in case you don’t want to give her views.

Here’s the full text:

Fake radical honesty: when a dishonest person self-discloses taboo or undesirable things about themselves, but then omits the worst thing or things. They make themselves look honest and they’re not. This nasty trick ruined my life once. It occurs to me that this ploy may have been used to cover up the miricult scandal (https://archive.is/miricult.com) after a discussion with someone about what happened. A friend said something like that they’d looked into this and the people involved confessed, but only one minor was molested. For some reason this resulted in increased trust. It should not have. Have you seen fake radical honesty anywhere?

For someone not steeped into the lore, why is this important?