Probably i should read The Inner Ring every three months or so until i finally take the point.

Michael Taft has put out a new book – More Than Enough Room: Conversations on Awareness, Freedom, and Love

Steve Hsu made a documentary about the SF AI scene.

OpenAI's Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki calls frontier AI models alien minds.

Zvi's coverage of the OpenAI wiki hacking incident. An intuition pump for the alienness of these minds (quoting Policy Tensor):

My god. They realized that the exam would be seeded by a random number generator. So they went looking for the seed. Then: 'One agent rewrote the shuffling routine in C and tested all four billion possible seeds in under an hour.'

Hahahahahaha.

Astra creates a forest. What would Wendell think?

Richard Ngo critiques a particular flavor of personal impact strategy in light of all this:

You don’t need to stay to gain influence, because you’re almost definitely too scared to wield that influence in ways which matter.

Preventing OpenAI from hiding crucial information from external scrutiny is exactly what inside influence should be used for.

The insiders who justified their presence at OpenAI on that basis either couldn’t dig up why the METR/Redwood investigation was so constrained, or knew and didn’t do anything. A bad sign either way.

"Prelest... is an Eastern Orthodox Christian term for a spiritual state of false holiness or deluded self-righteousness, believing in one's own spiritual superiority."

When does "theory" become "quasi-theory"? Who decides? Lusotropicalism:

Lusotropicalism is a term and 'quasi-theory' developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre to describe what he perceived as a distinctive character of Portuguese imperialism overseas, proposing that the Portuguese were better colonizers than other European nations.

"News from 2001" twitter account breaks the fourth wall to describe how they think about covering 9/11.

Wise words (tennis).

Wise words (potato chips).

"United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave an E pur si muove award to district court judges whose opinions were overturned by appellate courts but later vindicated by the Supreme Court."

Now that's what i call estate planning:

Believing Patricia might at some later time try to challenge the terms of his will and claim part of his estate, Daniel Ludwig had blood samples frozen in the 1970s that could be used for genetic testing if ever necessary. Patricia Ludwig did file a lawsuit in the 1990s after his death, but DNA analysis proved Ludwig was not her father, and the case was dismissed.

25 Fields Medalists sign an open letter expressing concern about the impact frontier AI is having on the profession of mathematics and the training of young mathematicians in particular:

We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align.

Apparently military parachutists can get the bends from the rapid ascent of the jump plane.