Nice link ,but man is Reddit shit to read nowadays with the newish layout.

I mean they could have cut ties entirely with Oxford.

The Mismeasure Of Man

I'm working through this one now, and it's great. Gould was such a great writer, it's no wonder Big Yud sees his work as a threat.

This is basically the quintessential example of "I am a smart person, I think like an LLM, therefore the LLM is smart too":

While comparing ordinary human activity to language modeling is perhaps the greatest intellectual cliche of 2024, what PG describes in the essay-writing process itself essentially boils down to beam search. Autocomplete, find wrongness, backtrack, predict more consistent series of next tokens. The fact that only one of those options is actually reflected on the screen doesn't change the fact that the writer is probability-weighting continuations in their head.

I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It's my job.

Wait, you can get paid for this???

The miracle of decentralization!

I'm reading the Zvi piece (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite), which is quite entertaining , but once in a while you stub your toe over the fact that the author is a True Believer

Putting the $500 million into Anthropic was arguably the most important decision Sam ever made. I do not know if investing in Anthropic was a good or bad move for the chances of everyone not dying, but chances are this was either a massively good or massively bad investment. It dwarfs in impact the rest of his EA activities combined.

And the fact that SBF's observation that only $6.5B was spent on political campaigns was ludicrously low is blithely accepted as reasonable, not as an observation that campaign finance is broken.

"Actually, it's GNU/ephebophilia"

At the very least I hope they're making copies (dunno if the Twitter archive dump works anymore). Just being in Elon's good graces now means nada, the funniest thing about the whole "Twitter Files" saga is Matt Tiabbi being booted from Twitter because his main platform is Substack, and Elon then shadowbanning links to Substack in some form of demented revenge.

"Dryden Brown" is the sort of villain name a strike-breaking LLM script generator would come up with.

That thread is gold. Specially love this one where heroin is dismissed because it's not utilitarian enough

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34649954

D'oh you're right. I will do better in the future.