flâneur

Katherine Driscoll

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on the atlas — 117

highlights — 185

  • There are a few varieties of fake congruence, strategically adopted by people who would like to adopt its advantageous qualities without the real search. Dead-eyed hippie warmth is the aspartame congruence of those who cut off the intellect, never daring to think unpleasant thoughts, trying to make life strictly about their enjoyment. Narcissistic charm is another variety of fake congruence—it takes careful listening to spot the cool, pinched quality of it, how it’s built on the avoidance of fear, and a terror of social status injury. And dissociation is porridge congruence, created by zoning …
    The rare people who are solid - by Sasha Chapin
  • The program that generates wisdom is wandering through the wilderness, not trying to adopt the end state of a person who has wandered. Similarly, one potential consequence of congruence is “natural leadership,” but you can’t learn it from management books.
    The rare people who are solid - by Sasha Chapin
  • Congruent people compel us because they have little to prove; they have converged on an inner authority. Thus, when you encounter them, you don’t feel like you’re being enlisted in their ongoing arguments with themselves. You’re not recruited to shore up their self-image, or resolve their dilemmas.
    The rare people who are solid - by Sasha Chapin
  • On the other hand, if we’re interested in maintaining some variety of denial, the company of highly congruent people is disturbing. The falsehoods we’re trying to maintain immediately ring false before them. They appear as highly but particularly resonant chambers, in which integrity echoes and bullshit dies immediately.
    The rare people who are solid - by Sasha Chapin
  • You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered.
    The rare people who are solid - by Sasha Chapin
  • Each Claude model reflects a slightly different approach to character training as well as many other fine-tuning decisions. Because our value axis approach quantifies key differences between models, it may ultimately allow us to connect variation in the values Claude expresses to different training decisions.
    How Claude's values vary by model and language \ Anthropic
  • The key point in Comin et al. is that the main mechanism is not Baumol’s cost disease by itself. It is that lower prices in automated sectors raise real income, and rising real income shifts demand toward sectors with higher income elasticity.
    What will be scarce? - by Alex Imas - Ghosts of Electricity
  • The Xi-Putin summit, coming immediately after the Xi-Trump summit, crystallises the central strategic dynamic of the contemporary environment: China is managing two distinct but related relationships simultaneously, and doing so with some skill. With Washington, Xi pursued strategic stability and economic de-escalation. With Moscow, Xi deepened a partnership that NATO has characterised as China being a ‘decisive enabler’ of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The two postures are, from Beijing’s perspective, complementary. China benefits from Russia continuing the war in Ukraine because it depletes Weste…
    The Interdiction War: How Ukraine Is Cutting Russia's Southern Lifelines, plus Xi's Big Week and a Possible Iran Deal. The Big Five, 24 May
  • This approach offers significant compute savings. Since it doesn’t require a rollout to finish sampling to calculate the reward, we can use shorter or partial rollouts for training.
    On-Policy Distillation - Thinking Machines Lab
  • However, unlike most reward models in practice, the reverse KL is “unhackable” in the sense that low KL always corresponds to a high probability of desirable behavior from the teacher model’s point of view.
    On-Policy Distillation - Thinking Machines Lab
  • A medium collaboration level. Maybe ~10-40% of time is spent communicating and working together with good people who are invested in the work I’m doing and I’m invested in their work.
    Maintaining momentum | T. Ben Thompson
  • Maybe most importantly, it gives me the confidence that, if I run into a tricky problem, I can learn enough to solve it, instead of feeling like I’m at the mercy of a system too complex to hope to understand.
    In defense of blub studies | benkuhn.net
  • “fiction where not very much happens to people who aren’t very interesting.”
    Defeats and Victories Not Recorded in the Annals of History – Commentary Magazine
  • Should I stay in my current role/project? (1) says yes. Time is extremely limited and the world is on fire. If you have doubts, those doubts are usually sufficient. You can normally feel yourself on an exponential. It keeps you so busy and so energized that you don't even have time to contemplate leaving — because that would be ridiculous. If that's not you, as maybe it isn't me at the moment, I feel like the answer is clear.
    Do Thing, Do One Thing
  • We found that the Brier score leads to more stable training than the log score, even though the log score is also strictly proper
    Training LLMs to Predict World Events (Guest Post with Mantic) - Thinking Machines Lab
  • A scoring rule is proper if the forecaster maximizes the expected score for an observation drawn from the distribution F if he or she issues the probabilistic forecast F , rather than G  = F . It is strictly proper if the maximum is unique. In prediction problems, proper scoring rules encourage the forecaster to make careful assessments and to be honest. In estimation problems, strictly proper scoring rules provide attractive loss and utility functions that can be tailored to the problem at hand.
    Gneiting2007jasa.pdf
  • In this post, we show it’s possible to significantly improve the forecasting performance of gpt-oss-120b using reinforcement learning. With Tinker, we fine-tune a model on around 10,000 binary questions of the form “Will [event] occur before [date]?”.
    Training LLMs to Predict World Events (Guest Post with Mantic) - Thinking Machines Lab
  • The highest-value use case for us right now is working with traders on traditional financial markets, helping them predict events that are upstream of price changes. Like the Japanese leadership election: different leaders might have different fiscal policy, which affects bond yields. If you can have an edge predicting these key events, it helps a lot. But it’s mediated through the skill of human traders rather than plugged directly in.
    🔮 IT’S OVER - The Oracle by Polymarket
  • Instead of fragile safety engineering, a different response is to say: "look, it's near-inevitable we will soon build tools to uncover many deadly pandemic agents. Let's also use our improved understanding to defend the world."
    Which Future?
  • Unfortunately, good intentions don't ensure good outcomes. The inventors of asbestos, DDT, leaded gasoline, and CFCs all intended to help humanity. Naysayers got little traction at the time: the benefits seemed too large, the harms too easy to contest. Humanity took a laissez-faire approach and millions suffered. It's the Castle Bravo problem: dangerous capabilities, latent in nature, which we didn't sufficiently understand until too late.
    Which Future?
  • Wednesday’s verdict follows a ruling by a New Mexico jury in another case brought by the state attorney general there, which found Meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users of its apps from child predators. That jury decided that Meta should pay $375 million in the case that was brought by New Mexico’s attorney general.
    Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Trial - The New York Times
  • e couldn’t speak. After his second operation for a cleft palate, at the age of five, all Jürgen Habermas could make were muffled sounds that almost nobody understood. Of course, it got better with time. But his odd look and odder speech got him bullied and ostracised at school. For the rest of his life, when really excited, he found himself stuttering. He tried to avoid public appearances, especially unsparing television, if he could.
    Jürgen Habermas hoped rational discussion could save the world
  • Reports from multiple Western sources confirmed on March 5 that the United States Army has expended over 800 anti-ballistic missiles from MIM-104 Patriot long range air defence systems during just five days of hostilities with Iran, after the U.S and Israel both launched a large scale attack against the country on February 28. This exceeds the total estimated number of Patriot interceptors launched throughout the entire Russian-Ukrainian War, in which the Patriot has been operated for close to three years, and is estimated to have furthered worsened the already very severe shortage of intercep…
    The U.S. Has Burned Through Over $2.4 Billion Worth of Patriot Missile Interceptors in Just Five Days of War with Iran
  • And it was as a great teacher that he preached and wrote books on forgiveness, patience and “101 tips for a happy marriage”, telling Iranians how to live.
    Ali Khamenei hoped his legacy might last for ever
  • If we have or can buy more time, existing democratic processes will work. Everyone will be better educated about AI and its risks (and Anthropic is already hugely contributing to this). The work is slow, but it is the right way to do it. I think powerful AI will probably take longer than Dario does, so this is my solution. But if powerful AI arrives in the next year or two, then we have to expand the frontier to be both responsive and inclusive. For those very different approaches to AI risk to disappear is as unlikely as stopping AI progress entirely. We’ll have to learn to live with somethin…
    A Straussian reading of The Adolescence of Technology | Zhengdong
  • Our present democracy is less likely to produce a country of geniuses in a datacenter than it is to endow a country of voters, exactly where they are, with ever more agency.
    A Straussian reading of The Adolescence of Technology | Zhengdong
  • It strikes me, though, that of the fivefold defenses against labor market disruption (get better job data, work with traditional enterprises, take care of your own employees, large-scale philanthropy, and government intervention)
    A Straussian reading of The Adolescence of Technology | Zhengdong
  • In the party’s view, suppression is the path to national unity and stability. What is not known—and may not be known for decades—is whether it is also storing up resentments that may eventually erupt. For now the direction is clear. The party embraces its minorities in the most superficial sense: it likes their singing, their dancing and, of course, their dress. Beyond that, deeper displays of ethnic identity are not just frowned upon but proscribed by law.
    There are 56 ethnicities in China—and 55 are getting squashed
  • Mr. Trump, both publicly and privately, has been arguing that Venezuelan oil could help solve any shocks coming from the Iran war.
    How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War - The New York Times
  • Mr. Wright, the energy secretary, caused a market commotion Tuesday when he posted on social media that the Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. His post drove up stocks and reassured oil markets. Then, when he deleted the post after administration officials said no escorts had taken place, markets were once again thrust into turmoil.
    How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War - The New York Times
  • We may still believe, or at least feign to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that airpower alone can produce regime change, that if we just bomb a population enough they’ll take to the streets and install democracy themselves (or else), that no “boots on the ground” will be necessary, that we can just get’er done via operators or advisors or contractors, that if we do invade in force we’ll be greeted as liberators and the boys will be home by Christmas. We may believe we can simply use missiles and SEAL Teams to cycle through foreign leaders. We may even believe that blowback has …
    You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield
  • We have allocated to ourselves, for so long now, the sovereign prerogative to set and reset the timelines of what counts as meaningful history, to determine which lives and deaths matter and which constitute less than a rounding error.
    You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield
  • What differentiates Trump from his predecessors is his refusal to do what Lacan would call feigning to feign, his total inability to conjure the pretense of at least pretending to publicly care about pretense.
    You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield
  • administration’s current rhetoric feels so hollow and formulaic, its half-assed renewals of tired public rituals so exhausted and exhausting. Those who can remember the run-up to the second Bush’s war in Iraq should get this point intuitively.
    You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield
  • A year of deploying our military on missions of murder and piracy (forgive me: unilateral sanctions) in the Caribbean and Pacific has offered Trump plenty of opportunities to get comfortable with kinetic naval operations, and fed an appetite in the administration and beyond for virality-ready scenes of seaborne carnage.
    You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield
  • LCS safety and performance records have been so comically abysmal that their crews have been driven to seek mental health care.
    You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield
  • Facing a scripted loss from the outset, and increasingly disgusted as the exercise went on, Van Riper resigned six days later, damning the affair as “rigged,” “prostituted,” and “a sham intended to prove what [USJFCOM] wanted to prove.” It didn’t matter. The military got its exercise, the Red threat to American interests and regional security was neatly vanquished, and that was that.
    You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield
  • It is true that the country once seemed to be styling itself as a new powerbroker in the Middle East. Three years ago it brought Iran and Saudi Arabia together for talks to restore official relations; some observers hailed that as proof of China’s ascendance in the region. The joint American-Israeli strikes drive home the opposite point: China’s influence and ambitions in the Middle East are more limited.
    China’s ice-cold calculus over Iran
  • The spectacle of a popular movement toppling an autocratic regime is precisely the kind of thing that makes officials in Beijing anxious. An airstrike that kills a political leader is, from China’s perspective, a more manageable event.
    China’s ice-cold calculus over Iran
  • Years later, after Castle Bravo, the United States initially denied it had caused any harm to the Marshall Islanders. Rotblat published a paper proving them wrong to the world. Even more consequential: later in the 1950s he cofounded and then led the Pugwash conferences on nuclear safety. Those conferences helped enable the nuclear treaties that are likely why we in this room are alive. They are some of humanity's grandest successes at external alignment. Arguably Rotblat, not Oppenheimer nor Groves, was the hero of the Manhattan Project.
    Which Future?
  • I occasionally participated in some small AI-related projects, but found I couldn't work effectively on something I have such mixed feelings about.
    Which Future?
  • An ongoing project for me is to understand what (if any) design principles enable surveillance that enables safety, while balancing all parties' need for flourishing; and what leads it to fail, leading to authoritarianism?
    Which Future?
  • the use of homomorphic encryption in DNA synthesis screening, physical zero knowledge proofs in nuclear inspections
    Which Future?
  • Market-supplied safety works well when costs are borne immediately and legibly by consumers, as in aviation safety and much technical AI safety. But market-supplied safety tends to struggle when: costs are illegible because of long timelines (e.g., asbestos, cigarettes, sugar); or are borne by third parties or collectively (e.g., polluting waterways, fire, air pollution, CO2 emissions). In such cases, we must either develop mechanisms to provide non-market safety, or the problem will persist.
    Which Future?
  • “In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself. “You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want h…
    Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge – Mother Jones
  • as we saw with the biological models, guardrails are easily removed, and there is a slippery slope to doing so. The underlying issue is that such problems don't reside in the systems; they reside in any deep understanding of the structure of the world.
    Which Future?
  • The idea of powerful and stably aligned AI systems is an oxymoron.
    Which Future?
  • All the frontier labs put a lot of effort into technical alignment. This is in part a response to the arguments about rogue ASI, a way of keeping ASI under human control, or at least helping steer it. But much of this work – I believe nearly all of it – also serves their business goals: technical alignment techniques like RLHF and Constitutional AI ensure the systems do what customers want, and make them much more media- and government-friendly.
    Which Future?
  • People sometimes take a techno-determinist view, that exploration of the technology tree has a near inevitable quality, sometimes even down to timing. But even if that were true low in the technology tree, exponential explosion of the design space means it's almost certainly not true higher up. Almost all possible technologies will never be invented, no matter how long and aggressively we explore.
    Which Future?
  • In this sense, the framing "how unsafe is reality" is imprecise. It's really: can we develop ideas and institutions to guide exploration of the technology tree in a way that prevents civilization-scale catastrophe?
    Which Future?